Direct realism about perception
To perceive something is to be in unmediated contact with it. I take that to be a conceptual truth that all involved in this debate will agree on.
With that in mind, a 'direct realist' is someone who holds that we are sometimes perceive the mind external world. That is, when I look at the ship I am directly aware of the ship itself. Thus, I perceive the ship.
This is as opposed to indirect realists who hold that we are only directly aware - and so only perceiving - mental states of our own, rather than the world out there.
I think most contemporary philosophers will want to describe themselves as direct realists of one sort or another. But having read some of their views and overviews of their views, it seems to me that most of those who call themselves direct realists are not really direct realists at all.
The point they typically make at first is to note that when we have a visual sensation of a ship, it is not the visual sensation that we perceive, but the ship itself by means of it. The mistake they accuse indirect realists of making is to confuse a 'vehicle' of awareness with an 'object' of awareness. Fair enough: that does seem to be the mistake the indirect realists are making (one of them, anyway).
What they then do is point out that the visual experiences have 'content' - that they are 'about' a ship or 'represent' there to be a ship. And they then think that this is somehow enough to secure the direct contact with the ship needed for that experience to constitute a perception of the ship.
That's where I get puzzled. Fair enough that the indirect realists are making a mistake. But it seems to me that these direct realists are making one too. As in order to secure direct contact with the mind-external ship, the experience would surely have literally to contain the ship. It's not enough that it's 'about' a ship. A note about a ship is about a ship, but it can't thereby be a means by which we perceive a ship. A thought about a ship is about a ship, but again one can't perceive a ship by thinking about a ship. So it won't help at all to make a view 'direct' just to focus on the way in which a sensation is 'about' or 'of' a ship. The sensation would have to include the ship itself.
Some direct realists acknowledge that in order to perceive a ship the perceptual relation needs to put us in direct contact with the ship - so acknowledge that the ship itself must be included in our perceptual experience. But they insist that the ship itself is somehow a constituent of the experience.
But I can make no sense of that idea. An experience is mental, so how can it include an actual ship? It's like proposing that the number 5 has a door in it - it just makes no sense.
So I think that currently direct realists are either guilty of being indirect realists in disguise (if they admit that experiences do not contain actual ships and such like but are mediators between us and ships), or they have an incoherent view (that mental experiences can somehow incorporate ships, even though a ship is a thing and a mental experience is a state of a thing).
I think that direct realism 'proper' would have to be the view that perceptual relations have 2 and only 2 relata: the perceiver and the perceived. That is, no mental experience features as a relata within it (for then you automatically get indirect realism). That doesn't mean that there is no mental experience associated with perception - for clearly there is, as there's something it is like to perceive a ship - but that the experience is 'of' the perceptual relation, rather than a constituent part of it. It might even be the case that it is invariably the case that there is an experience of the relation whenever the relation obtains. The point would be that to experience perceiving and perceiving are distinct nevertheless
I am interested in hearing any objections to this 'proper' form of direct realism - perhaps it is not coherent or perhaps it has unacceptable implications. (I am not interested in defending indirect realism - my interest is in investigating the viability of direct realism so only mentioned indirect realism because I think other forms of direct realism collapse into it).
With that in mind, a 'direct realist' is someone who holds that we are sometimes perceive the mind external world. That is, when I look at the ship I am directly aware of the ship itself. Thus, I perceive the ship.
This is as opposed to indirect realists who hold that we are only directly aware - and so only perceiving - mental states of our own, rather than the world out there.
I think most contemporary philosophers will want to describe themselves as direct realists of one sort or another. But having read some of their views and overviews of their views, it seems to me that most of those who call themselves direct realists are not really direct realists at all.
The point they typically make at first is to note that when we have a visual sensation of a ship, it is not the visual sensation that we perceive, but the ship itself by means of it. The mistake they accuse indirect realists of making is to confuse a 'vehicle' of awareness with an 'object' of awareness. Fair enough: that does seem to be the mistake the indirect realists are making (one of them, anyway).
What they then do is point out that the visual experiences have 'content' - that they are 'about' a ship or 'represent' there to be a ship. And they then think that this is somehow enough to secure the direct contact with the ship needed for that experience to constitute a perception of the ship.
That's where I get puzzled. Fair enough that the indirect realists are making a mistake. But it seems to me that these direct realists are making one too. As in order to secure direct contact with the mind-external ship, the experience would surely have literally to contain the ship. It's not enough that it's 'about' a ship. A note about a ship is about a ship, but it can't thereby be a means by which we perceive a ship. A thought about a ship is about a ship, but again one can't perceive a ship by thinking about a ship. So it won't help at all to make a view 'direct' just to focus on the way in which a sensation is 'about' or 'of' a ship. The sensation would have to include the ship itself.
Some direct realists acknowledge that in order to perceive a ship the perceptual relation needs to put us in direct contact with the ship - so acknowledge that the ship itself must be included in our perceptual experience. But they insist that the ship itself is somehow a constituent of the experience.
But I can make no sense of that idea. An experience is mental, so how can it include an actual ship? It's like proposing that the number 5 has a door in it - it just makes no sense.
So I think that currently direct realists are either guilty of being indirect realists in disguise (if they admit that experiences do not contain actual ships and such like but are mediators between us and ships), or they have an incoherent view (that mental experiences can somehow incorporate ships, even though a ship is a thing and a mental experience is a state of a thing).
I think that direct realism 'proper' would have to be the view that perceptual relations have 2 and only 2 relata: the perceiver and the perceived. That is, no mental experience features as a relata within it (for then you automatically get indirect realism). That doesn't mean that there is no mental experience associated with perception - for clearly there is, as there's something it is like to perceive a ship - but that the experience is 'of' the perceptual relation, rather than a constituent part of it. It might even be the case that it is invariably the case that there is an experience of the relation whenever the relation obtains. The point would be that to experience perceiving and perceiving are distinct nevertheless
I am interested in hearing any objections to this 'proper' form of direct realism - perhaps it is not coherent or perhaps it has unacceptable implications. (I am not interested in defending indirect realism - my interest is in investigating the viability of direct realism so only mentioned indirect realism because I think other forms of direct realism collapse into it).
Comments (1282)
No.
When I listen to music, I'm not in any way directed at a distal object, which I then bracket or background. The phenomenal music itself is the "object". The way the music sounds, it's specific phenomenal qualities, constitutes the musical experience.
When the observer hears the chime, that the chime presents as something is a consequence of the brain's organization of experience. Environmental sounds are " of something" because they are environmental, and the brain "tags" them as such. Environmental cues don't arise on their own, and it is important for survival to identify their origins. This is distinguished from internal experiences, such as imaginationary imagery, which are not of anything at all. They might conceptually represent objects, but they do not point to actual distal objects.
So, it does not seem that phenomenal experience is intrinsically object directed. It is only so when it is specifically an environmental cue. But there are phenomenal experiences such as music and imaginations that are not environment cues. These latter seem phenomenal on their own, without pointing to an object. And so, if phenomenal experience is able to float free of an object, it cannot be a secondary derivative of an object directed perceptual event, as you want to say.
Quoting Ludwig V
Right. I've been considering exactly this is recent days - I think there's a profound difference between, say, glancing quickly, and having the incoming data run-together because it was received so fast (and you see, for instance, a blur that indicates a situation which doesn't persist once your eyes are trained on the object/s) - which I think you're describing (or, this type of 'error') and one where your mind functionally cannot distinguish between the object and a suggestion about it. That famous image with colour lines, but is black-and-white is a good example. Even if we're going to admit "redness" is inherent in an object somehow, that example shows us that our experience of redness does not rely on an object outside of us to obtain, but on our internal interpretive processes. I am sorry if this isn't directly on point, but it seems clear to me "error" comes in different kinds, and the one I mean (related to the latter example) cannot be adjudicated by further looking at the object: It can change from red to grey as I see fit, in some sense. I am not bound by the object to see it as a certain colour in that case.
Quoting Ludwig V
Right, right. Ok fair enough to further sharpen - I think this, for me, is a fairly smoking gun concession. That isn't "the Sun" besides the idealized use of "the Sun" which we tend to use. Which leads me to something from another exchange:
Quoting Banno
This is 100% semantic and doesn't touch the problem. I think its possible your description of hte Sun there lands us in the same position: If that, to you, is 'direct awareness' I don't understand the claim. It is not "the object" in any sense - it is light ferried across one AU, bringing with it information about the Sun. We call this 'seeing the sun' because its easier and better for "getting on with it".
We don't argue about whether "watching the game" on recording is direct awareness of the game, or the recording (well, it seems to me we dont?). I don't quite see a difference here.
Quoting Ludwig V
Ok, ok, fair enough. I definitely overstated my repsonse, so sorry about that. This seems fine to me.
Do you disagree with me? It shouldn’t matter, in any case. Light is mind-independent, a “distal object”. It is through the direct connection of the light reflecting off other objects that we can see the object. None of this implies sense-data or other mental objects either.
That this is being missed is odd to me. Is it the case that you accept the facts and prefer to call them a description of Direct Realism (i.e that it doesn't amount to a "sense data" story)? That's fine, I just want to be clear.
Are you saying light is sense-data?
Why isn't the light an object that requires a data medium between it and your eyes?
Cool.
I think i'm answering both here:
The light itself is not sense data - the electrical impulses your eyes send to your brain is. This explains why light does not need a medium. It literally, physically, enters the eye. There is where the 'magic' happens.
What is the light? Brightness?
What is smell? Molecules in your nose receptors? Does the scent of the flower live in the molecule?
Does it make sense to speak of anything that causes the magic except to say it causes the magic?
So, what is the flower, the light, or the molecule I speak of? Let's say it's "really" a cat. Does that mean a flower is a cat? How can we know it's "really" a cat if I see flower, and how can I know you see a cat when I see a flower?
How is it that we in fact speak easily of flowers all the time yet I have no idea what we're talking about here.
The point here is that meaning isn't dictated by cause. It's by use.
Photons which react to/arrange themselves in light of (heheh) the objects they bounce off until they hit our eyes, as I understand. But I don't know. I've not seen any photons in any sense we could be using here (from memory, anyway).
Quoting Hanover
No. It's an experience (that may or may not be termed a brainstate).
Quoting Hanover
Um, no. That is my point and the fundamental problem DRist face, from my perspective: that hte answer to this unequivocally no.
Quoting Hanover
I don't quite know what you're getting at so I'll just clarify that when i said 'magic' i was referring to the technical process of light being transmuted to an electrical signal which travels to the brain, where it is essentially arranged and constructed into an experience. So, I'm not sure what this question does..
Quoting Hanover
You have fallen back onto the semantic argument, entirely missing the one being made here. What words we use are irrelevant to the question at hand, although it is quite important we at least think we're talking about hte same thing - and we aren't here.
If you want to call a flower a cat, that's fine. That doesn't change the ontological status of the object to which you refer, or our epistemic relationship to it. I think i adequately answered the conclusory question: You can't. We can simply compare our notes and see what works. That appears to be what actually happens, and how science runs.
Quoting Hanover
Because we're trying not to idealize. I have been over this. I am beginning to think that this argument is so thin that two of the better posters can't quite wrap themselves around it adequately.
Quoting Hanover
Which has precisely nothing to do with whether we are directly aware of objects or not.
Semantics references meaning. The words chosen, syntax. Are we not asking what I mean when I say "apple"? You say no. I say yes.
You ask "what causes the sense data that causes my brain to swirl so I end up with an apple qualia."
You want to know what the stuff is, but you can't provide it any attribute because attributes are qualia. So you just say stuff is what causes stuff. The photon can't be brightness per your view, nor can the molecule have scent. That would be direct realism.
Quoting AmadeusD
No, that's not it at all. The emperor wears clothes.
Quoting AmadeusD
It has to do with your misunderstanding of what is meant by direct realism and the philosophical irrelevance of the indirect realism you propose.
You act as if science answers metaphysics. Then is physics and metaphysics the same thing?
Your desire to subtract semantics from "apple" literally makes the term meaningless. How do we proceed from there? How can I see an apple if it means nothing to ask that question?
Yes, and I have likewise admitted several times that there are different senses of "direct" in play. My concern is not to deny that there are multiple senses in play, but to argue that any adequate theory of perception ought to explain normativity, error, and objecthood, and that refusal to address those issues looks less like a theory of perception and more like quietism or eliminativism.
Quoting Michael
As I have explained previously, qualia do not meet the criteria required to play the role of the object of perception. This doesn’t mean they don’t exist; it means they are features of perceptual acts rather than entities that can ground correctness, error, or public objecthood. Treating them as objects simply relocates the problem rather than solving it.
I don't deny that the information carried by the light remains continuous between the two intervals. I’m claiming that perceptual fulfillment is not exhausted by information carriage. In the first interval, the perceptual act is fulfilled because the apple exists at the time of perception; in the second, it is not, because the object no longer exists then. That difference is normative, not optical. Light can carry accurate information about what was the case, but veridical perception concerns what is the case when the act occurs. Conflating those is exactly what makes the object seem dispensable in the perceptual story.
I think this rests on an overly narrow notion of object-directedness. Bracketing interest in a distal cause does not amount to the absence of an object altogether. When I listen to music, I am still directed at something: sounds unfolding in time, with rhythm, pitch, and structure. Suspending concern with instruments or sources does not turn the experience into a free-floating phenomenal item.
Likewise, appealing to “brain tagging” doesn’t explain intentionality; it redescribes it at a subpersonal level. The question is not why organisms care about environmental cues, but why experiences are given as of something at all—why questions like “what is it?” arise from within experience itself.
Finally, imagination doesn’t show phenomenology without intentionality. Imagining is paradigmatically an experience as of something—just not something presently existing. In that case the object is "irreal", not absent altogether.
So I don’t see any case here of phenomenology genuinely floating free of object-directedness. What these examples show is that object-directedness can be attenuated, abstracted, or bracketed—not that it is optional or derivative. That is why I continue to think these cases presuppose, rather than undermine, an object-involving perceptual structure.
But you said “That's exactly what it implies: that the Light is a data medium between the object and your eyes. That would be data derived from your sensual apparati (not a real word lol) - sense data”.
Yeah, sense-data is a mental thing. Light isn’t. Do you get it now?
What you are directed at is phenomenal experience unfolding in time. The rhythm, pitch, and structure are features of the phenomena, not a distal object. There are numerous candidates for distal object: speakers, player, band/creator, cd/lp/mp3 file. All of these are components of our causal understanding of the phenomena, but none of them somehow supersede the phenomena.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Not necessarily. I can imagine the sound of chiming, without imagining any specific distal object (wind chime, door bell, phone, mp3 clip) realizing it. I can imagine the phenomenal experience of redness, and I "see" red in my minds eye, not attached to any object at all.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
What does this mean, "arise from experience itself". When I hear a chime, I might wonder, what is making the noise. But by no means is this wonderment somehow embedded within the phenomenal experience of chiming itself. It is something extra: given this experience, this chiming, I am led to wonder, "what made it"?
***
You want to argue that phenomenal experience is derivative of what is primary in the perceptual act: object direction. If it is derivative, then this disqualifies the phenomenal as intermediary between subject and object. I have presented several counterarguments.
* Phenomena with unknown object (chiming). The object must be explicitly inferred from the phenomena
* Phenomena where distal object is secondary: music
* Phenomena where distal object is unreal or absent: imagination
But what positive arguments do you have that the phenomenal is derivative? Earlier, when we were discussing ammonia, you claimed that the mental act "I am smelling something sharp and pungent" was introspective, and therefore secondary and derivative. But this is not introspection, it is articulation. Given the phenomenal experience, "pungent and sharp" translates it into words. That is secondary. But the phenomenal experience, the sensation that we might later describe as "pungent and sharp" is not, it cannot be. It is that which we describe, and that which we wonder about the cause.
If I am missing the main arguments please forgive me, feel free to quote yourself from our or other discussions.
No, indirect realism says that we do not have direct perception of the tennis when watching it on the screen; that we only have indirect perception of it. Most direct realists accept this too, claiming that in this scenario we only have direct perception of the screen.
You need to stop pretending that the words "direct" and "indirect" don't play an essential role in this discussion. This argument that "we see tennis, even if on TV; therefore direct realism is true" is ridiculous.
Quoting Banno
This is getting quite tiresome. I have said so many times that I am seeing an apple, even after it has been disintegrated. The relevant philosophical issue is that this does not quality as direct perception of an apple because no apple is a constituent of the experience, given that it has been disintegrated.
Can you please just take your time to read the actual words I'm writing.
While I (think) fully understand why you're asking, no, not in this context unless you're arguing that you cannot use your perceptual experience to align your dictionary with mine - if that's the case, much more to be said But i didn't take that to be the case. Presuming we both know we're talking about the extremely similar experience as between us which can be gleaned from casting ones eyes toward an object (of a kind) which causes the experience we term 'seeing an apple'. I understand a lot of that will sound superfluous to you, but even on a DRist theory, this works as far as I can tell. You just think much of it is redundant. So far, so fair.
Quoting Hanover
I did not ask this. I offer an opportunity clarify, but I'll not respond because I'm bound to say something to doesn't make sense because I don't get it.
Quoting Hanover
I don't know what you're talking about here. I've not discussed this at all. What the object is which causes my apple experience isn't particularly interesting to me(in this thread, anyway).
Quoting Hanover
Correct. And I answered in the negative when you asked if it was. So i'm a bit lost...
Quoting Hanover
Well, an abject failure to adequately grasp the argument is in play. From both you and Banno it seems. So I'm going to maintain that suspicion for now.
Quoting Hanover
While I get that this might be frustrating, you seem to be suggesting that metaphysics can violate physics and be valid. I don't agree.
Quoting Hanover
Again, nowhere did I do this. I have explained, categorically, what hte meaning of Apple is to me on IRist grounds. I return to my suspicion.
Quoting NOS4A2
The quoted is true (on my view, of course). THe response isn't apt. We are not directly aware of light. We are aware that it is the only consistent conjunct to our visual apparatus even engaging with the world around ust. We call that light, because that works. We also call it "photons" when talking in some other way. You have gone to far in my view. The semantic puddle grows larger.
So yes, I get it and you haven't adequately addressed what I'm saying. You still want the light to be what you are aware instead of the (seems above, anyway) admitted sense data.
That comment of mine was directed at NOS4A2, not you. He does say that we only have direct visual perception of light.
Quoting Ludwig V
The apple doesn't exist during the second ten seconds and so cannot be a constituent of the experience, and so the conclusion is false. Therefore, one of the premises is false. Given that I agree with P1a, my conclusion is that P2a is false.
Yes, and this is indirect perception of the object reflecting the light even according to your account of direct perception.
Quoting NOS4A2
I'm not saying it does. Again, these are two distinct claims:
1. We do not have direct visual perception of apples, only indirect visual perception of apples
2. We have direct visual perception of mental phenomena
Your brand of "direct" realism agrees with (1) even if it doesn't agree with (2). I am simply pointing out that direct realism as almost everyone else understands it doesn't agree with (1).
Good point @NOS4A2 add that clarification to my recent reply. It is extremely succinct, thank you Michael.
I'll rephrase the two claims:
1. The constituents of first-person phenomenal experience are distal objects and their properties
2. The constituents of first-person phenomenal experience are qualia/sense data
Naive realism claims that (1) is true, minimal indirect realism claims that (1) is false, and the sense datum theory claims that (2) is true.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I don't think it's necessarily quietism or eliminativism; rather it's only trying to answer a simpler question, and that is: what are the constituents of first-person phenomenal experience?
And the way scientists say we see things is the way indirect realists say we see things, in contrast to naive realists who say that distal objects and their properties are literal constituents of first-person phenomenal experience.
Quoting Hanover
That metaphysical question is a question for materialists, idealists, and dualists — not for indirect realists. Indirect realism is concerned with the nature of perception, not with the nature of apples.
I'm not clear what "it" refers to in "it is not 'the object' in any sense". These examples scramble our intuitions - our common sense. The problem is that there is a slippery slope here. Under normal circumstances, we have no hesitation about saying that we see the computer screen on which we are typing. And yet, there is a time lag between light leaving the screen and it arriving at our eyes. But when we find cases where the time lag is longer, we don't quite know what to say. Nothing wrong with that.
Let's add in the phenomenon of nova stars, which are stars that explode in a brilliant flash, easily seen on earth, even though the phenomenon is light years away. So far that the star has usually disappeared by the time we see it.
So, what is it that we see - the computer screen, the sun, the exploding star? If I allow that we don't see the star, I'll need to admit we don't see the sun and we don't see the computer screen. I prefer to work the other way. I insist that we see the computer screen, the sun and the exploding star. I accept it's a choice, but that's the point. There's no right way to go here.
I don't think that we normally see light, except as reflected or emitted from things - and even then, what we see is the objects from which the light is reflected or emitted. So I was most uncomfortable when I needed to describe what travels from the sun to the earth. Information?, an image? I don't know the right term. But I need to be clear that I see the sun, just as I see the computer screen on which I am writing. Light is the medium that enables me to see, not something that I see in its own right.
Quoting AmadeusD
There's a lot in here. I agree that there are many different sources of error. I would hate to have to create a taxonomy. However, there is one key point here and that is the concept of interpretation. Many errors are errors of interpretation and so do not require positing any kind of intermediary object. That's what is left out of this debate.
Quoting AmadeusD
I'm not sure about that. I agree most people will happily say that they are watching the game under all those conditions. But I think most people will differentiate between watching the game live and watching a recording. They will likely not talk of "direct" or "indirect", but still...
Quoting Michael
So the experience of an apple in the first ten seconds was not an experience of an apple. H'm.
I say, "I see an apple." There are two questions that can be asked: (1) what is the apple, and (2) what does it mean to say "I see an apple." The problem arises when these two questions get conflated. They get conflated when someone says "Apple means having an experience of an apple." That ties meaning either to (a) the apple itself or (b) the experience you have of the apple. Considering you cannot tell me (a) what the apple itself is without referring to some sort of perceptual state (i.e. it is round, weighs 3 ounces, is red, etc.), and (b) you cannot open your mind and show me your perception, telling me the "apple" is (a) or (b) offers me nothing. You'll also note that (a) and (b) are metaphysical questions, not physical questions. As in, I want to know what the apple itself is if that's what you're using to tie it to meaning.
What I have is use and a community of users of the word apple, and from that we speak of apples. Meaning is use, not meaning is the thing or the experience. How do we use the term "apple"? Through
correction (“no, that’s not an apple”), mistake, teaching, rule-following. That's what I mean by "apple."
This does not deny (1) that there are real apples in the world, (2) that you don't have an experience of an apple, (3) that photons and neurons don't act certain ways. It doesn't speak of that at all. My discussion is about grammar, meaning how words are used, not metaphysics or private sensations.
When you say "I saw an apple" if you start to delve into what is the apple "really" and what part of your sensation was the apple and what wasn't, or if there even was an apple "out there," you've lost your way. You're talking in unanswerable and incohrent circles.
As in, tell me what the apple looks like without telling me how things look because subjective qualities aren't part of the apple. That makes no sense. So, what do I see? I see an apple, but I mean "apple" like we use the term "apple," not by assigning it meaning from metaphysics.
So, you're an indirect realist, then tell me which part of the apple you see if part of the apple really. If none, for fear of being labeled an direct realist as to that part of the apple, then why posit the apple "out there" at all. What explanatory power does it have to say it is the stuff that causes stuff when we can't know anything about the stuff.
That's not what I said. I'll start again from the top.
[quote=Martin 2004]On [the naive realist] conception of experience, when one is veridically perceiving the objects of perception are constituents of the experiential episode. The given event could not have occurred without these entities existing and being constituents of it in turn, one could not have had such a kind of event without there being relevant candidate objects of perception to be apprehended. So, even if those objects are implicated in the causes of the experience, they also figure non-causally as essential constituents of it... Mere presence of a candidate object will not be sufficient for the perceiving of it, that is true, but its absence is sufficient for the non-occurrence of such an event. The connection here is [one] of a constitutive or essential condition of a kind of event.[/quote]
The important points to take from this are:
P1. If I have direct perception of an object then that object is a constituent of the experience
P2. If an object is a constituent of the experience then that object exists
I then continue this with the following:
Let's assume that I live in a world in which the air is thick and light has mass and travels at a slow 1m/s. An apple is placed 10m in front of me at 10:00:00. It is disintegrated at 10:00:20. Given the speed of the light and the distance of the apple I see an apple for 20 seconds between 10:00:10 and 10:00:30.
P3. If the apple is a constituent of the experience during the first 10 seconds then it is a constituent of the experience during the second 10 seconds
P4. The apple does not exist during the second 10 seconds
C1. Therefore, the apple is not a constituent of the experience during the second 10 seconds
C2. Therefore, the apple is not a constituent of the experience during the first 10 seconds
C3. Therefore, I do not have direct perception of the apple during the first 10 seconds
P5. If I do not have direct perception of the apple during the first 10 seconds when the light travels at 1m/s then I do not have direct perception of the apple during the first 10 seconds when the light travels at 299,792,458m/s
C4. Therefore, I do not have direct perception of the apple during the first 10 seconds when the light travels at 299,792,458m/s
The experience during the first 10 seconds (and the second 10 seconds) is still the experience of an apple; it just isn't the direct perception of an apple.
Sure, but it isn’t indirect perception of the mind-independent world. So you agree with direct perception of the mind-independent world, which is contrary to indirect realism.
But I haven’t used the concept of sense-datum at all, so nothing is straddled.
It's indirect visual perception of apples and trees and everything other than light, which is a very significant asterisk to your "direct visual perception of a mind-independent world".
Quoting NOS4A2
It straddles the line because traditional direct realism rejects (1) and (2), you accept (1) and reject (2), and the sense datum theory accepts (1) and (2). I would even say that if you accept (1) then you are an indirect realist with respect to seeing apples even if you're not a sense datum theorist with respect to seeing apples.
1. We do not have direct visual perception of apples, only indirect visual perception of apples
2. We have direct visual perception of mental phenomena
Quoting NOS4A2
I didn't say I agree with you.
Quite so. And it's not what was argued. The indirect realist makes the ridiculous claim that even when you are at the Rod Laver Arena, you do not see the tennis, but an image of the tennis. That we do not have "direct" perception of the tennis when watching it on the screen, or in the front row.
I am sorry if it was unclear - even on re-reading I can't see ambiguity.
The "it" is the image the said light provides you with. It isn't the object, one AU away from Earth, as it is. It is highly mediated, and actually isn't an object, but an experience (on my view, obviously).
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes. I have been over this several times now: idealization. I am unsure how much more lifting I can do on this exact matter.
Quoting Ludwig V
As far as I can tell, they behave exactly the same way - but the proximity gives less room for discussing any kind of 'error' in DR terms, whereas accepting that the light has gone through x space and time can leave open, prima facie, reason to think maybe something has gotten in that process and altered what's received (speculatively. That's not even in the IR position per se). I think the intuition most people feel is that the distance is merely a niggle on the farside of their metaphysical grapevine, but is slightly closer(i.e a more perceptible niggle) for the Sun example vs a computer screen a foot away. That is, unless one is discussing these things lol.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yeah, nice. That's largely the crux of why the initial account doesn't work for me. Hopefully there's some common ground to come.. .
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, and in practical terms, that's fine. There are many things we idealize in this way. The concept of "perfection" is an example. Its incoherent really, but we use it to describe many things without noting that we're not really calling x perfect. I don't think there's appreciable difference between that and our examples other than psychology.
Quoting Ludwig V
I'm unsure this is hte correct conclusion, but i massively appreciate your clarifications. I understand where we're askance, I think.
For me, we can simply alter the language (this is the semantic part!!) to actually reflect what happens. I've previously suggested these terms I think, even to you (I am not mentally reviewing htem for consistency right now, so feel free)
To look at: cast one's eyes toward an object (this doesn't require that we know what we're doing)
To see: To have a first-person phenomenal experience of that object (i guess.. whatever object).
I actually use these, most of the time because they far better capture what I'm trying to say at various times. I've responded to some objections to this thus:
"[i]I have my objections, but the position, i take it, is that the mediation is not manipulative or deceptive so gives a 'direct' indication of that object one has cast their eyes too.
I don't quite have an issue with this other than calling it direct.[/i]"
So, I think you have actually in a previous thread hit on something that speaks to me quite loudly. You said something like: indirect and direct at not apt for a discussion of perception.
I now take that to boil down to the "choice" issue above, meaning it does boil down to semantics. I see the attraction, but I still maintain metaphysics is trying to violate physics there and so its extremely uncomfortable and misleading to me. When I take the DR position to heart, I cannot make sense of what we empirically know about perception.
Quoting Ludwig V
I don't quite know what you mean here - interpretation meaning the psychological reaction to the (let's call it, for my benefit) image presented in the mind? Or interpretation being what your eyes/brain does with the light? I can understand the former and not the latter just so clarifying. On thebasis it's the former, I think it's left out becuase its like saying a blindfold has much to do with perceptual directness. It's not the same question. Yes, we can misinterpret things we see, but whether this is the apparatus "malfunctioning" in a DRist way, or whether that's evidence of the mediation required to support an IR position seems jury's out to me. So, I can get on with that. Not the latter, though, as that would directly contravene the concept of DR as I understand.
Quoting Ludwig V
Ok, good and I think I agree, but I doubt people will do this unless asked about it. At any rate, yes, good - I am simply extending this to all time-lag (using your early time) type experiences. The Sun is a good once because while its "immediate" in the sense of it not being recorded, it is eight minutes ago when you get it (the image, the Sun, the light, whatever you'd like to call it). The recording is data while results in light traveling to your eyes with x,y,z properties and presents you with the game which was played, let's say for fun, eight minutes ago. Same for the Sun.
Quoting Hanover
I'm not taking you that way - but very appreciate any elucidations! Onward..
Quoting Hanover
Yes, I think probably for disparate reasons, I agree!
Quoting Hanover
This is confused ( to me), and possibly misleading(your a's and b's dont align so it's hard to respond directly). The phrase would not be "Apple is..." (again, to me. If you're referring to some third party arguing something I wouldn't, i prefer to not take that up).
The phrase would be "Seeing an Apple is...". That leaves an ability to describe that experience in terms of shape, weight, colour and all the rest without trouble and call that "the apple" meaning "the apple I see" or "the apple in my experience". But it leaves out the commitment that the Apple is either nowhere, or included in the experience. Now, I can see an objectin being that this intimates all of our experiences of what we want to call the same apple, are in fact, not hte same apple. I bite this bullet. They are caused by the same apple. I see no issue but discomfort/trying to idealize this into every-day language which I have no issue with either. But it is idealizing this concept (again, and always, in my view).
I agree, saying anything about "the apple" is meaningless if you mean to say anything about the actual object, out there in the world (other than what it causes in your perception - you could say "to the best of my knowledge, it causes *insert apt description based on experience*). We, in my view, do not have a word for it - just the concept - ding-en-sich.
I think can, and just did tell you (a.) I just don't think you want what I'm offering and you've given your reasons. My response is that the experience of *i know not what* is "the apple" I want to talk about. I don't talk about the other possible 'object', because I have no access to it. This seems totally coherent to me. You want to give a name to the cause, which I don't try to do and lean toward it not being reasonable to attempt. I tihnk we're at cross purposes in this moment.
Quoting Hanover
Well, it has to be something - otherwise words would not have any meaning whatsoever - it's either tied to something we're describing in our experience, or outside our experience (logically - otherwise its describing nothing). I chose the former for many reasons. Use has no utility unless we know what we're doing. Which is, i content, describing our experience and for ease, or maybe just efficiency, we don't bother mentioning that its an experience of something. Which is wild, because we do use that phrase constantly to describe "my experience of going to the DMV" or whatever.
I find no discomfort it this epistemic gap. I am content to be motivated, moved and lead by what appears in my experience and not feel any need to look beyond it for that which, I contend, caused it. It's extremely interesting to me, and in places like TRP I will do so - but day-to-day and in general use, I wouldn't. I would say "I see an apple". It should be sufficiently clear that the semantics do nothing for the disagreement I'm seeing other than to clarify what each of us is trying to say. Your "the Apple" is not the same as mine, in this thread. But whether IR or DR, in general use they amount to the same thing but the commitment is silent (i.e you will say the same thing, and it will be meaningful, whether you take IR or DR on board). I think that does what the Searle types want to do right back to them and solves the problem with words. THe problem was the claim that the problem is with the words. Hahahaha.
Quoting Hanover
If you say so. I think its pretty interesting to talk of these things - but one would not do this if they wanted the apple from the other side of the table. The above should speak to how this can be on either conception. I, personally, will, in passing, consider those things when I speak.
Quoting Hanover
Yep, and that's fine (although wholly incomplete, nothing turns on what's missing imo). It does not mean our use faithfully represents what's going on in the world or that could suggest it does beyond intuition. It rarely, if ever, does in practice. I do not know why this is so uncomfortable as a concept, when use dictates this type of idealization with plenty of words we routinely use. I guess I understand it, but don't know why. I get no discomfort from the concept that I can never access the world as-it-is. Why would i? It doesn't come up for me(joke, to be clear).
Quoting Hanover
What does this have to do with truth? DR has no explanatory power to me. None. It explains how people get away with ignoring the empirical in service of a metaphysical commitment. If IR is the case, DRist will be saying exactly the same things. Their theory does nothing but reduce what there is to explain - without explanation. Which is why i would simply return to what I have just now gone back and bolded.
Quoting Banno
That is a fair charge, but the problem I see is you've said nothing that makes this ridiculous or what makes it ridiculous, other than that you're incredulous - which is fine and understandable as it violates intuition. But yeah, you do not see "the tennis" tout court, no. I don't think that's coherent, its just practical. As such, I think you are playing hide the ball with the term "the tennis" treated at length above under "the Apple". The semantics need work, but are not the problem.
Not in my view. It just means that there are other things between us and the apple. We perceive those too, and in fact much of what exists in our periphery to some degree or another.
What I cannot perceive is an image of an apple, a sense-datum of light, or a representation of my own periphery. I don’t believe you can either.
We have direct visual perception of much of our periphery, which sometimes includes apples. I can get so direct about it that I can consume the apple. This is possible because I’m not an eye in Cartesian space and apples are not floating about in a void one minute and ultra-slowy light in the next. All i’ve straddled were the absurdities of these scenarios. It is still the case that I believe we have direct perception of the mind-independent world. I also still deny that we have direct visual perception of mental phenomena.
I still have a few questions, I'm afraid.
1. You seem to leave open the question whether the experience during the first ten seonds is an indirect perception of an apple. It looks as if you are relcutant to say that. Why not?
2. If P4 is false, and the apple continues to exist for the entire 30 seconds of the experiment, does the experiment not become a case of direct perception?
Quoting Michael
Don't you need to say that we have direct visual perception of one's own mental phenomena?
I don't leave it open? C3 literally says "I do not have direct perception of the apple during the first 10 seconds".
Quoting Ludwig V
No, because as per C3 I do not have direct perception of the apple during the first 10 seconds, even though the apple exists during the first 10 seconds.
Quoting Ludwig V
For the purpose of this argument I'm only interested in proving that (1) is true. It's entirely possible that (2) is false, e.g. if we only have direct visual perception of light.
Except you have been arguing that the following proposition is true:
1. I have direct perception of X if and only if my sense organs are in direct physical contact with X
Given that my visual sense organs (i.e. my eyes) are not in direct physical contact with apples it therefore follows that I do not have direct visual perception of apples.
So now you're contradicting yourself. If we have direct visual perception of apples then (1) is false and you need to provide a better explanation of what it means to have direct visual perception of apples.
No, the claim is that we do not directly see the tennis. We still indirectly see the tennis, much like when watching it on TV.
And it's not ridiculous.
Quoting AmadeusD
I suppose I have to call it an image. In one way, that's what we see if/when it gets into our eyes. In another way, of course, it is nothing of the sort - I see the sun. The language seems quite happy to accommodate both IR and DR without hesitation.
Quoting AmadeusD
Quoting AmadeusD
That is p.21 of this thread - dated Jan 14/15. I think this is what you were referring to. I take the point. The difficulty is that listening to the recording is like listening to your wife, but there are important differences as well. It would be foolish to equate the two.
But doesn't it follow that we should not equate the light streaming from the sun with a recording either?
Quoting AmadeusD
Yes. It seems odd that people actually deal with this problem without seeming to feel that it is at all difficult. The light arriving on earth shows us the sun as of eight minutes ago. So what? That still seems to simplest solution to me.
Quoting AmadeusD
I expect I did. But trying to shift the framework of a discussion that's already in progress is not a popular move. "Direct" and "indirect" need to be defined in each context that they are used. In this context they are never defined in a proper way that makes sense. But they could be. But that would give sense to both DR and IR. But IR wants to claim the whole territory. (I'm less sure about DR on that front.)
Quoting AmadeusD
Yes. It seems to me that a good summary is that everybody seems to be agreed what the story is. What they disagree about is how to tell it. I keep wanting to ask why it matters so much whether you tell the story this way or that way. People seem very sure that it does matter, but I don't really understand why.
Quoting AmadeusD
Well, one way to get at my point is to think about the claim that it look as if the sun is going round the earth, even though in fact the earth is going round the sun. But if you think about, our visual experience of the phenomena is perfectly compatible with both stories. It all depends on your presuppositions. In one case, the presupposition is that the earth is stationary, in the other, the presupposition is that the sun is stationary.
Mistakes and disagreements are very often not the result of seeing different objects, but of seeing the same objects differently.
Compare puzzle pictures.
It's not a sovereign cure for all our ills. But it would help, I think, if it were more widely recognized.
Quoting AmadeusD
Our expectations, unsurprisingly, are based on common sense experiences that do not include a noticeable delay. So we are flummoxed when we encounter this new and un-thought-of phenomenon.
Yet we cope well with the delay in sound. No-one doubts that we hear the starting gun even though we only hear it some time after the race has started.
I have been arguing that we have direct perception of the mind-independent world, of which apples and light are constituents. You cannot evade this fact, nor can you support your own beliefs at the same time. You have not put forward a single argument in defense of your thesis, and have consistently avoided any and all questions regarding it.
Your argument rested on the premise that we have direct perception of X if and only if our sense organs are in direct physical contact with X, but if this is true then we only have direct visual perception of light, and so either a) we do not have visual perception of apples or b) we only have indirect visual perception of apples.
You're contradicting yourself in denying the consequences of your premise, and so your argument fails.
I completely agree that when we turn our attention to the phenomenal quality of the experience, the distal-object-qua-causal-source is bracketed to the background. But I don’t think this eliminates the object-directedness of experience as such, of which more below.
Quoting hypericin
I likewise agree that when we imagine a chiming sound or a patch of redness, these can be imagined as “unattached” to any distal object in the environment.
Quoting hypericin
Agreed. The explicit question “what is it?” is not embedded in phenomenal character itself, but is a further moment in the overall structure of perception.
Quoting hypericin
First, I want to make it clear that I’m not claiming that phenomenal experience is derivative in the sense of being unreal, reflectively constructed, or temporally distinct from the act of perception. I fully acknowledge that phenomenal qualities are features of first-order perceptual episodes. What I deny is only that they are first-order with regard to their epistemic or intentional role.
In my view, perception is an intrinsically normative and intentional act. It is characterized by a “directedness” or “aboutness” that purports to present its object as thus-and-so, in a way that is answerable to correction. Perception is something that can be mistaken, revised, and confirmed or disconfirmed, so any theory that purports to explain perception must not render these characteristics unintelligible.
By contrast, phenomenal qualities as such (redness-as-seen, chiming-as-heard, pungency-as-smelled) are not themselves propositional or truth-apt. They do not purport, on their own, to settle what is the case. Whereas perceptual objects exhibit conditions of identity, persistence, and modality that are necessary to underwrite error and correction, phenomenal qualities, taken in abstraction, do not. So to treat phenomenal character as the intermediary object of direct perception is, I would argue, a category mistake.
This doesn’t mean that phenomenal qualities cannot be explicitly thematized within consciousness. We can turn our attention to them specifically, and even make claims about them. When we say “the redness of that apple is very intense,” we are making a claim about the redness itself, but doing this doesn’t alter the adjectival role that redness played in the original perceptual episode.
Similarly, when we imagine a red-patch in abstraction from any particular distal object, the redness-as-such is not the object of imagination. Rather, the redness is presented as-of something—in this case, a bounded phenomenal field (a “patch”) with minimal criteria of identity and persistence. It is the patch-of-red that is the intentional object, not the pure phenomenal quality of redness in isolation.
So phenomenal qualities cannot function as objects standing between subject and world because they do not exhibit the characteristics required to play that epistemic role. Phenomenal qualities are the manner in which an object—actual, imagined, abstract, or indeterminate—is given. Shifts in attention, aesthetic focus, or meditative bracketing only modify the intentional object; but they do not abolish the "object-directedness" of intentionality or invert the priority of the object within intentionality itself.
I would just agree, but I think you went wrong prior to this statement:
Quoting Ludwig V
I agree. But the way I'm seeing things, the former is how things actually are, and the latter is intuition without analysis in the way "vulgar" was used in 18th/19thC philosophy. That's why I say that use isn't problematic, it just isn't all that relevant to us here.
Quoting Ludwig V
The difference seems to be that the light from the Sun has been in contact with the Sun. The light in the recording (of the game, just to clear away the wife's voice thing) does the same job for you. But the light never reflected off the ball field (or whereever). It was generated by a machine, which was interpreting electrical signals transmuted from light which did touch the ball field. So the difference doesn't have anything to do with your experience - they function the same in each example. If you watched the game on a five-minute delay (common, even for "live" broadcasts) you would be seeing something older when you looked at the window at the Sun. This does not sit well with the idea that the Sun is the direct one, and not the other. But I reject both, so that's cool.
Quoting Ludwig V
"So what?" is definitely the simplest, easiest and least analytical conclusion. I also think it's true - so what? I don't care that my perception of hte Sun is indirect. This can cut both ways.
Quoting Ludwig V
I don't really understand what you could mean by this. Plenty of definitions are flying about and we seem to be operating from stable definitions? Direct perception is the concept that first-personal experience is constituted by objects in the world.
IR is that this experience is constituted by mental images derived from sense data.
These both make sense and can be discussed. Could you say more about the issue you see?
Quoting Ludwig V
Oh yes. If it wasn't as clear as I thought, this was one central tenet of that long reply. The stories we tell don't answer anything, which is why relying on semantics or word use to sort this particular issue out to me is quite unattractive. Possibly dysfunctional.
Quoting Ludwig V
I certainly agree with this, but I do think you're giving less weight to the fact that people often actually do see literally different things. How we adjudicate about that sort of thing is always quite interesting, but I've had several experiences where someone I know to be totally sane remembers something completely different to me (a species of animal, for instance, as between a dog and a flightless bird, in one example I can recall). These are disagreements of interpretation - they are differing representations. Again, whether that's a malfunction is a jury issue and they're not back, to me.
Quoting Ludwig V
I would respond the same way as when you mentioned the genral response to visual stimuli. That we don't usually think about it isn't all that interesting. People often do bring this up when timing thunder strikes.
If you like. then it is the indirect realist who introduces "direct" and "indirect", and who is going to haver to explain their use.
The point about the "direct realist" being a straw man.
And back to Austin's account of seeing things directly and indirectly.
And again, when you sit in the front row of the Rod Laver Arena, you are not seeing some mental phantasm of the tennis.
Quoting Banno
Lol. Okay bud.
That some of us refuse to come to the table about words doesn't reduce the level of disagreement to words.
How would you characterize the view of your opponent?
No, I'm joking. I've outlined it, to no objection several times in the thread: That real-world objects are constituents of first-person phenomenal experience as such.
There's no definitional problems here until you start thinking that meaning is defined by use in situations where use and meaning are either various, or have come apart. Recent responses to Hanover and Ludwig V elucidate. "the Apple" and how it functions is not in question. But the other guys seem to want that to be the question. It's a tough go..
I agree with Hanover that if the question is supposed to be metaphysics, it isn't resolvable.
I agree with Banno, that indirect realists do claim to know the truth about the world by way of their senses.
I agree with Michael that indirect realism is undeniable if we accept contemporary science.
Who else?
Fair enough—if the only question you’re trying to answer is “what are the constituents of first-person phenomenal experience?”, then I agree that you can bracket normativity, objecthood, and error as further issues.
But then we should be clear that this is no longer (or not yet) a theory of perception in the philosophically relevant sense. It’s a theory of phenomenal constituency.
The traditional dispute about realism in perception is not exhausted by what constitutes experience, but by how perceptual experience is of mind-independent objects at all, how it can succeed or fail, and what grounds the distinction between veridical perception and illusion/hallucination.
My point is that phenomenal constituency underdetermines all of that. So even if you settle the “constituents” question, you haven’t yet settled whether perception is world-directed or mediated by inner objects. You’ve only described what experience contains (if anything), not what it is answerable to.
Baloney.
...as bait? Maybe. Oily, so it'll attract something...
catfish
I agree with Banno, except that straw man (IRists explicitly reject that we know the truth about the world, and instead respect that we know nothing of it besides its triggering tendency to our percepts), and concluding that what he says supports DR.
I also agree with Hanover, and have again, made it explicitly clear that it isn't metaphysics unless you want semantic commitment to override physics. That would be a metaphysical commitment, conceptually.
I agree with Michael about most of what he's said.
That is why it is not a definitional issue. It is one of wilfully ignoring the question in service of either comfort, or really shining Austin's shoes (its the latter - and i am Joking).
X is the mind-independent world. Contact with it is constant and immediate. One cannot disprove that with false analogies, formal hocus-pocus, and imagining off into strange worlds. You have no argument; there is no justification for your position; and it comes from a limited view which seeks to limit itself further by pretending something mediates his contact with the world immediately outside himself.
You don't even know what you're saying, let alone what the dispute is. You think your intuitions are arguments and deal with complex empirical issues that humans are not disposed to solve. Craziness.
Right. It's a strawman that indirect realists deny that we know truths about the world. That's what you mean, right?
I'm confused then. They're both realists.
Here: Quoting Banno
OK. Now I ask you whether you think that we have indirect perception of the apple during the first 10 seconds.
Quoting Michael
You misunderstand me. I'm proposing a variant of your thought experiment in which the apple continues to exist for the entire 30 seconds of the experiment. In that variant, it seems that you might be committed to saying that we have direct perception of the apple.
Here 's a variant of your argument, making a different assumption about the fate of the apple.
P4a. The apple exists during the second 10 seconds
C1a. Therefore, the apple is a constituent of the experience during the second 10 seconds
C2a. Therefore, the apple is a constituent of the experience during the first 10 seconds
C3a. Therefore, I do have direct perception of the apple during the first 10 seconds
I think, on that different assumption, C3a follows.
Quoting Michael
That's compatible with our having direct visual perception of other people's mental phenomena. I don't believe you mean that. I think you mean to say that we have direct visual perception
of our own mental phenomena.
Quoting AmadeusD
Is that where you think I've gone wrong?
The question is whether you want to say that the vulgar account of the matter is just a different account for different purposes in a different context or that it is wrong. I understand IR to be saying that DR is wrong.
There is also the question how far a theoretical stance is appropriate in philosophy. I have severe doubts about that. But even if it is ok, the vulgar stance takes account of things that the theoretical stance neglects - that we are not simply observers in the world but agents in it and part of it. I'm not sure how, exactly, that plays into the argument, but I am sure it should be important to philosophy.
Quoting AmadeusD
H'm. One difference is that the recording can be replayed many times and places. The light arriving from the sun cannot be replayed at all. Putting it another way, being there makes a difference, in a sort of "what it is like to be a bat" way.
Quoting AmadeusD
If the difference between IR and DR doesn't make any difference, why are we so bothered about it?
Quoting AmadeusD
Well, that helps me a lot. I don't understand what it would mean to say that first-person experience is constituted by anything, never mind objects in the world and the reification of mental images seems to me to be a mistake. [/quote]
Quoting AmadeusD
That's right. For me, the scientific story is a partial analysis of how perception (DR) works. So what do you think we can appeal to?
You believe you can’t see the real world. Bizarre.
You're committing an association fallacy.
As apparently I need to be even more explicit:
P1. We have direct perception of X iff our sense organs are in direct physical contact with X
C1. Therefore, we have direct visual perception of apples iff our visual sense organs are in direct physical contact with apples
P2. Our visual sense organs are not in direct physical contact with apples
C2. Therefore, we do not have direct visual perception of apples
Either C2 is true or P1 is false. You can't avoid this.
Yes. Given that I have perception of the apple during the first 10 seconds but don't have direct perception of the apple during the first 10 seconds it follows that I have indirect perception of the apple during the first 10 seconds.
I figured this was quite clearly implied when I said: "The experience during the first 10 seconds ... is still the experience of an apple; it just isn't the direct perception of an apple."
Quoting Ludwig V
What premises are you deriving C1a from?
But see also P5 and C4 of my argument. In that scenario we see an apple be disintegrated almost in real time, just as we would in real life. The apple exists for almost the full 20 seconds we see it (take a fraction of a millisecond, given that the speed of light isn't infinity) but it still follows that we do not have direct perception of it.
It's very relevant, and drives the epistemological problem of perception. The worry is that if distal objects and their properties are not constituents of first-person phenomenal experience then the mind-independent nature of the world might be very different to how things appear to us, e.g. things might be coloured differently, or not coloured at all (à la Locke's secondary qualities). In the more extreme case we might be unable to deny transcendental idealism, with distal objects being noumena.
We've been around the block a few times now in this discussion, so I'd like to switch gears for a moment. You've repeatedly appealed to science as providing evidence that the world is very different from how it appears to us. My question is: if all empirical evidence ultimately comes through perception (including scientific observation and instrument readings), in what sense can science correct perception without presupposing that perception is already world-directed and normatively answerable to reality?
Who says it's not? It's entirely possible that all these are true:
1. Distal objects and their properties are not constituents of first-person phenomenal experience
2. Qualia/sense data are the constituents of first-person phenomenal experience
3. Colours as ordinarily understood are qualia/sense data, not mind-independent properties of a distal object's surface
4. The mind-independent nature of the world is very different to how things appear to us
5. Perception is "world-directed and normatively answerable to reality"
Admittedly I still don't quite understand what (5) is supposed to mean, but prima facie (and consistent with our previous arguments), I don't see any inconsistencies with the above. (1) - (4) suffices as indirect realism, as I understand it, and is the scientific view of perception.
Thank you for the clarification.
Quoting Michael
Yes. It was always obvious that the 1 m/s was a stalking horse, because it was obvious that the actual time lapse doesn't make any difference. That's why I'm not questioning it.
Quoting Michael
Your argument is modus tollens. This argument is modus ponens from similar assumptions, but assuming that the apple is not disintegrated. It seems to me just obvious that on that assumption, direct perception follows. In short, I don't see how you can generalize from the specific case in which the apple disappears.
Quoting Banno
I don't think "directly" as "without intermediaries" works. It could point to some version of the Aristotelian account of perception, but that's not a promising road to go down. We posit a subject and an object separated by space. There must be a connection or relationship between the two. That's the peg on which "indirect" hangs. The idea that the object of perception must be a constituent of the experience might be regarded as a model of what perception without intermediaries looks like. But it seems to me to be a weak point.
Quoting Banno
I think the idea is that introspection provides the model for "direct" and so justifies "indirect" for the alternative. I think it's the reification of "experience", "perception" &c., that is the key issue.
Quoting Banno
Yes, but while we may want to call causal mediation a direct connection, others may have a different model. That could be a stalemate position, unless there is an actual refutation available.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
There's something wrong with that presupposition. Perception and evidence do not come in a single harmonious system. Different perceptions can conflict, bits of evidence can point to different conclusions. We have to sort through them and make decisions. Sometimes we choose one perception or piece of evidence over another. Sometimes we reject our theories and develop new ways to interpret perceptions. That's what "world-directed" and normatively answerable to reality mean.
Basically (5) is just another way of saying that if perception were not capable of providing knowledge of distal objects and their properties then the whole notion of being correct or incorrect about such objects (whether through science or any other practice) becomes unintelligible. So the acceptance of (5) would seem to be at odds with any interpretation of (1) - (4) that would rule out the ability of perception to provide us with knowledge of distal objects and their properties.
So the question is: in your framework, what would the acceptance of (5) really amount to given that your interpretation of (1) - (4) apparently rules it out from the start?
C2 doesn't follow.
That's not what's claimed? The claim is that the world might be very different to how it appears — and I think science has proven that it is.
Science doesn't require that we have direct perception of atoms for us to have knowledge of atoms.
No, but it's hard to understand how knowledge of atoms can get off the ground unless perception can underwrite the correctness of the practices through which that knowledge is obtained.
I don't deny any of this.
Oh dear!
But the fact remains that your argument depends on P4 - the apple does not exist during the second 10 seconds. So if we change or even just delete that premiss, your conclusion does not follow. Without that premiss, you cannot assert C1 or C2 or C3.
Quoting Michael
That's quite apart from the problem with P3. I can see no reason why the apple cannot be a constituent of the experience during the first 10 seconds and not a constituent of the experience during the second 10 seconds.
I guess I misunderstood you. Sorry.
No worries.
Well, yes, that's how all arguments work?
Quoting Ludwig V
So now you reject P3? Here you said "I would then point out that the relationship of the apple to the light signal during the first 10 seconds and the second 10 seconds is identical. You have no ground for distinguishing between the two."
It seems to me that you're moving the goalposts and contradicting yourself, and so this rejection of P3 is an ad hoc rationalization to avoid the conclusion, which seems rather dishonest.
Indirect realism doesn't say that it doesn't?
You're reading something into indirect realism that I just don't understand. The people wearing the visors all have indirect perception of the wider world but can still do science just as well as we can.
On your view, how is this possible? What enables these people to get any epistemic purchase on distal objects such that their claims about such objects can be correct or incorrect?
The same thing that enables the people with bionic eyes to do this? Unless you can point out exactly what the problem is I don't know how I can answer the question.
The fundamental difference seems to be how to schematically model perception. You (from my perspective) strip the mental object of its object like characteristics, retaining only bare phenomenality, and inappropriately assign those objective characteristics to the distal object itself. I (from your perspective) inappropriately reify phenomenal qualities, which are relations to distal objects, not objects in themselves, into pseudo objects standing between subject and object.
Indirect realism:
Subject -----> mental object (with phenomenal qualities) ------> distal object
Direct realism:
Subject ---- (phenomenal qualities) ----> distal object
Do you agree with this picture?
I am referring to the problem of perception. I'm simply asking for your positive account of how people come into possession of knowledge of distal objects.
By them causally affecting our bodies, or causally affecting energies that causally affect our bodies, and then our bodies causally affecting our minds.
Isn't this exactly what you think too? You just call this "direct" perception because our experiences are "answerable" to distal objects and I call this "indirect" perception because distal objects are not "constituents" of experience.
I just want to clarify that I am not assuming that phenomenal qualities belong to the distal object. For instance, I wouldn't say that the redness belongs to the distal apple. My claim is that, in the case of perception, they are the manner in which the distal object is presented to us. They are presented as-of the distal object, but whether they inhere in the distal object is a further metaphysical question, distinct from the phenomenological point at issue here.
Quoting hypericin
Yes, more-or-less.
Quoting hypericin
If I were to draw it, I'd put it like this:
IR:
Subject ? object of awareness (mental item) ? distal object
DR:
Subject ? distal object (given-as / appearing-as)
The contested step, for me, is precisely the move from “appearing-as” to a distinct “object of awareness” with object-like characteristics.
And of course this is meant to characterize perception specifically. I agree that other intentional acts (memory, imagination, etc.) do not require a distal object in the same way.
I think this is the crux of our disagreement.
I agree with the causal story. But that story is not yet an account of knowledge. It tells us how experiences are produced, not how they are about distal objects or how they can be correct or incorrect.
If your “positive account” is just causal mediation, then I would argue you will be forced to distinguish veridical perception from systematic illusion by appealing to further causal facts. But epistemic correctness cannot be reduced to causal etiology.
So no, this is not merely a terminological dispute. The question is whether causal relations alone are sufficient to ground intentionality and normativity. I don’t think they are.
I think the crux of the disagreement is that I don't think there is a disagreement, as I have been trying to explain since page 1. We both agree with the causal story, we both agree that naive realism is false — i.e. that distal objects are not constituents of experience — and we both agree that we have knowledge of the distal objects that cause our experiences.
So other than me calling this "indirect" perception and you calling this "direct" perception, what exactly are we disagreeing about?
, I hope you haven't conceded this - that we never see apples, or taste oysters, or hear birdsong.
No worries—I’m not conceding that we don’t see apples. Personally, I reject the whole “constituents of experience” framing. From my perspective this framing results in an illicit reification of "experience". Apples are what we see; phenomenal character is how they are given. Treating phenomenal character as an intermediary object is exactly the indirect realist move I’m resisting.
It seems we disagree over whether the causal story is sufficient to cash out intentionality and epistemic normativity sufficient for an adequate theory of perception—i.e. perception as world-directed and answerable to correctness/error.
Nice.
To my eye the mistake is to treat "phenomenal character" as an item, to quantify were quantification is illicit. To suppose that there exists a phenomenal character, it has such-and-such properties, it stands in relations to neural states, and so on, a whole ontology mushrooming from a grammatical slip.
“Phenomenal character” isn’t a thing over and above our perceptual and behavioural capacities, but a mode of description. We abstract from how someone sees, reacts, discriminates, reports, and then pretend the abstraction names an inner object. That’s exactly the move Wittgenstein warns against: turning an adjective or an adverbial construction into a noun and then asking what sort of thing the noun refers to.
Yes—this is exactly my worry. Once we treat “phenomenal character” as a constituent or item in an inner realm, we’ve already built the indirect realist ontology into the starting point. The grammar invites reification.
For the indirect realist, does the “mental image of an apple” refer to an apple, a neuron state, or some mental substance, or all three at the same time?
I think any realist would say the term “apple” refers to apple.
What say you?
So the point becomes one of pedagogy - how to have Michael or Amadeus understand their mistake. But his involves a change away from thinking of private mental states, a habit ingrained since before Descartes. Our comments get interpreted through that window.
There might be a place here for a discussion of pedagogic method.
I do occasionally see apples. When I do so, there is invariably an apple. I can also imagine an apple, or perhaps I might hallucinate an apple, and such cases would be noteworthy, given a different grammar, precisely because there is no apple.
Perhaps—but I suspect that in this context it would come off as condescension rather than sincerity. These “picture change” issues are hard to address in a debate format without sounding like one is talking down.
I was kind of prodding what you would think a Kripkean analysis of the debate would reveal?
But phenomenal character is not the right intermediary.
Your key argument has been that phenomenal character as-such is insufficiently object like to serve as intermediary between subject and distal object (DO). But it is not quite phenomenal character that does the intermediating. Rather, the brain-modeled object (BMO), which has phenomenal qualities as attributes, plays this role. The BMO is the object as it appears to you, including but not limited to it's phenomenal qualities.
That there is a BMO, distinct from the DO, seems clear:
BMO: has colors, tastes, feels
DO: has no such qualities
BMO: may be inaccurate or erroneous
DO: has no capacity for inaccuracy
BMO: has no casual properties
DO: has position, mass, volume
BMO: may be imagined independently of DO
DO: resists imagination
BMO: alters or disappears with changes in the subject
DO: indifferent to changes in the subject
BMO: There is one for every observer aware of the DO
DO: There is only ever one.
I see three responses: there is no such thing as BMOs. BMOs are the same as DOs. BMOs are also insufficiently object like to serve as intermediary. None of these seem appealing. Do you agree with one or more, and/or is there a fourth response I'm missing?
Damn complicated.
My guess would be he would go the “natural kind” direction. And that natural kind terms would refer directly to things in the world, not to descriptions or mental contents; basically, world-involving from the start, not mediated by sense-data.
However, his argument against mind-brain identity can make one pause. He seems to find talk of first person private phenomenon intelligible, that pain is privately, directly, and essentially felt. But this is not necessary identical with neuron’s firing. So could he not argue that talk of private, direct awareness of mental images of apples be intelligible but not necessary identical with neuron firing. But what about the mental image of the apple and the apple, do they not refer to the same kind in every possible world (including the actual world)?
Not a refutation, so much as a rejection of any advantage.
Intersting offshoot.
Since I think the argument is valid, in its way, I would say that I'm looking for the limitations and weaknesses of your argument. If I were inclined to get personal, I might think that you are now avoiding replying to me and draw my own conclusions from that. I'll leave you alone now. You're quite safe.
The fourth option is that BMOs belong to the causal implementation of intentionality rather than being the objects of intentionality. They enable us to see, but they are not what is seen.
For me, it comes down to whether normativity is reducible to causation. I don’t think it is. The causal/functional story that explains how perception is possible underdetermines the normative question of what perception is of. Otherwise we’d be forced to say that we see neural models (or retinal stimulations), rather than the world those processes disclose. To me, that seems like a clear category mistake.
I'm not saying that the causal story is sufficient to cash out intentionality and epistemic normativity. I'm saying that distal objects and their properties are not constituents of first-person phenomenal experience, and so perception is not direct in the way that naive realists say it is, and that because of this the epistemic worry that distal objects and their properties might be nothing like how things appear to us, with some of their supposed properties in fact being Locke's secondary qualities (e.g. colour), is warranted — and that physics, physiology, neuroscience, and psychology confirm all of this.
Yes, and many sense organs can touch apples. But indirect realism says we cannot directly perceive the mind-independent world. That includes light and apples. That’s the issue and you cannot avoid it.
Except they are seen. Not in the sense of perceiving a distal object, but in the subjective sense. An example of the "casual implementation of intentionality" is the refraction of light through the lens of the eye. This is part of the casual story, but we are unconscious of it. You are lumping such processes with what we are very explicitly conscious of, a category mistake.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Not "rather than". Perception is mediated by neural modelss, such that we see the world by way of the experience of neural models. Just as we see the subject by way of seeing the photograph. Not "we only see brain objects".
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Normativity is another question. Given the nature of perception, how is normativity possible? This doesn't seem particularly problematic in IR: normativity is correspondence between BMO and DO. Epistemic problems exist, but they are real, not artifacts of IR. Radical scepticism cannot be ruled out. Whereas DR faces the familiar problem of error cases.
Are you arguing that normativity can only be satisfactorily explained in DR?
But our eyes don't, which is why you must accept that we do not have direct visual perception of apples; that either we only have indirect visual perception of apples or we don't have visual perception of apples at all.
Perception isn’t just visual. Do you agree or disagree?
Yes, but I'm specifically talking about visual perception. But if you want me to be explicit, then according to your theory of perception, our perception of apples for the five main modalities are:
1. Sight: indirect
2. Hearing: indirect
3. Smell: indirect
4. Taste: direct
5. Touch: direct
So according to your theory, we only have direct perception of apples when it comes to taste and touch; but when it comes to sight, hearing, and smell, our perception of apples is only indirect.
So if you consider visual perception indirect because there is distance and other objects between apples and the eye, how do you describe perception where there is no distance nor other objects between the sense organ and the apple?
This isn't my claim. This is the consequence of your claim. I am simply pushing you to acknowledge this.
According to your theory of perception we do not have direct visual perception of apples.
So your so-called "direct realism" is very different to what is ordinarily understood by the term.
Again, perception isn’t limited to the visual, as you’ve conceded. Yet you keep limiting it to the visual. While I’ve long conceded that I cannot visually perceive apples (or anything) without light, you refuse to address whether I can still perceive apples without light. The answer to that question is “yes”.
Yes, because it's important. This is the proposition under consideration:
1. We have direct visual perception of apples
According to most direct realists, (1) is true. According to you, (1) is false.
If (1) is false then one of these is true:
2. We do not have visual perception of apples
3. We only have indirect visual perception of apples
Therefore, according to you, either (2) or (3) is true.
I believe we have indirect visual perception of apples through the direct visual perception of light. This shouldn’t matter because the problem of perception is whether we can directly perceive the mind-independent world or directly perceive some mind-dependent intermediary. So why are we trying to keep discussion away from the problem?
Of course it matters. If we don't have direct visual perception of apples then our ordinary understanding of perception is wrong, and there is an epistemological problem of perception. Having the direct object of visual perception be light rather than sense data is a problem for the sense datum theorist, but having it be light rather than apples is a problem for the traditional direct realist.
You're committing an association fallacy if you think that having the direct object of perception be just any mind-independent thing suffices as a solution to the problems of perception.
Then let’s try a different object of perception: the light that has bounced off an apple. How does one indirectly perceive the light bouncing off an apple?
By light being causally responsible for but not a constituent of the first-person phenomenal experience that emerges from neural activity in the visual cortex.
I don’t know what a “constituent of the first-person phenomenal experience” is, and whether light it one or not. Can I have an example for the sake of comparison?
An example of first-person phenomenal experience? It's what occurs when the visual cortex is active, whether dreaming, hallucinating, or having ordinary waking experiences, and what doesn't occur when the visual cortex isn't active, whether in deep sleep, having one's eyes closed, or suffering from cortical blindness.
An example of a constituent of that experience to be more precise. I’d like to avoid equivocating between “experience” as an occurrence or state of the human body, and “experience” as a space in which things occur.
My understanding is that you think the causal/scientific story undercuts naïve realism, and that this is enough to settle the question of whether distal objects are the direct objects of perception.
But it seems to me you’re using “indirect realism” in a purely negative sense: i.e. as simply the rejection of naïve realism. If that’s the definition, then of course anyone who rejects naïve realism is an “indirect realist” by stipulation.
My point is that this doesn’t amount to a positive account of perception. Traditionally, the indirect realist framework is not merely the denial of naïve realism, but a substantive picture on which what is directly given are inner items (sense-data/representations/qualia) and distal objects are known only indirectly by inference. That is exactly what I reject.
So the disagreement isn’t over whether naïve realism is false; it’s whether rejecting naïve realism commits us to the kind of intermediary ontology required by a positive account of indirect realism.
I think your reply is clarifying, and I agree that we’re getting down to the core of the disagreement.
First, I’m not lumping refraction through the lens with what we are conscious of. Of course we are conscious of phenomenal character (color, sound, etc.) in a way we are not conscious of lens refraction. The question is whether being conscious of phenomenal character entails being conscious of a brain-modeled object as an object.
I don’t think it does. The phenomenal character is a feature of the act’s presentation of its object; it does not follow that it is itself an object of awareness with its own identity conditions.
Your photograph analogy is helpful, but I think it quietly shifts the issue. A photograph is itself a public object that can be inspected, re-identified, and treated as the intentional terminus of an act. But the “BMO” you’re positing is not something we can inspect in that way. If we were literally aware of BMOs as objects, then we should be able to distinguish (even in principle) “what the BMO is like” from “what the distal object is like.” But phenomenologically we don’t encounter two objects—an inner one and an outer one—we encounter one object as appearing.
On normativity: I don’t think “correspondence between BMO and DO” is yet an explanation. It presupposes the very normative notions at issue: accuracy, reference, aboutness, and correctness conditions. Saying “normativity is correspondence” is like saying “truth is correspondence”: it redescribes the target rather than explaining how such correspondence is possible or intelligible for a subject.
Moreover, IR doesn’t actually avoid the “error cases” problem—it relocates it. In IR the error is still an error about the DO, and the question remains: how does a subject ever get beyond the BMO to determine whether correspondence obtains? If you say “further BMOs,” you get regress; if you say “inference,” you’ve invoked normativity again.
So yes, I am arguing that DR gives a more satisfying account of normativity—not because it magically eliminates skepticism, but because it treats perceptual normativity as internal to world-directed experience itself, rather than as a relation between an inner object and an outer object that must somehow be bridged.
DR has to explain misperception. But IR has to explain something deeper: how any DO-directed normativity can arise at all if awareness terminates in a BMO. That’s the step I still don’t see made coherent.
There's the negative thesis that distal objects and their properties are not the constituents of first-person phenomenal experience and there's the positive thesis that the constituents of first-person phenomenal experience — those things that the naive realist wrongly believes to be distal objects and their properties — are in fact sense data/qualia/mental phenomena. Then there's the plausible epistemic worry that if distal objects and their properties are not the constituents of first-person phenomenal experience then the world might be radically different to how it appears to us.
Nothing about this prima facie entails that perceptions are not "world-directed" or "answerable to correctness/error".
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Consider what you said before:
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
During this second interval I don't know that the apple has been disintegrated. I still believe that there is an intact red apple 10m in front of me because I am still having the first-person phenomenal experience described as "seeing a red apple 10m in front of me". I am inferring the existence of an intact red apple 10m in front of me from the fact that I am having the "appropriate" experience. The belief just happens to be wrong given that the apple was disintegrated. This same inference from the same kind of first-person phenomenal experience also happens during the first interval, before the apple was disintegrated, and just happens to be right given that the apple hasn't yet been disintegrated.
I agree that during the second interval I will judge that the apple is still there, and that this judgment will be false. But it doesn’t follow that the perceptual episode itself is an inference from an inner object.
What the apple case shows is simply that perceptual consciousness can retain the same sensory character even when its fulfillment condition fails. That is perfectly compatible with the apple having been the object of perception in the first interval and no longer being so in the second.
Your conclusion follows only if we assume from the outset that perception is always “experience + inference to a distal cause.” But that is precisely the indirect realist picture in dispute. On my view, the inference/judgment is a further act that can be correct or incorrect, whereas perception itself is world-directed and can succeed or fail in being fulfilled by what is there.
So the scenario establishes fallibility, not that the apple is always only inferred. Otherwise every case of perceptual error would prove that perception is never direct, which seems like an obvious non sequitur.
Oh, so the observer is unaware of the ten-second delay?
Then that's the problem. The causal and epistemic stories differ.
Yes, exactly! The causal latency introduces a temporal offset. If the subject is unaware of the offset, their judgment can be mistaken, but that doesn’t show the object perceived is an inner intermediary. In my book, it shows only that perceptual knowledge is fallible and requires correct interpretation of causal conditions.
If the object perceived is not the distal object, and it is not an inner intermediary, then what is it?
I don't understand what this means, or how it relates to what I am saying or to indirect realism. I am saying that during the second interval I see shapes and colours and depths and sizes — described as "seeing an intact red apple 10m in front of me" — and that these are visual properties of the qualia/sense-data/mental phenomena, not of some distal object in the environment — given that there is no appropriate distal object in the environment — and that in seeing these shapes and colours and depths and sizes I infer the existence of an intact red apple 10m in front of me — and I am saying that this is exactly what happens even before the apple has been disintegrated.
That's fair. I'll come back to this when I've got some clearer ideas.
It is assumed the thing has been at 10m for sufficient time, re: >/= 10s, given the velocity stipulation, otherwise its appearance to sensibility wouldn’t have occurred in the first place, hence no perception at all is possible related to it.
….at 1m/s it will take 10s for the thing 10m away to be perceived, call the time of some event describing the primary condition of the thing to be perceived, t0;
….at t0 + 5s, there occurs an event for which there is a change in the primary condition of the thing, call it t1;
….at t1 neither the primary nor the secondary condition of the thing has made an appearance, nor even that there is a thing at all, hence there is no possible judgement to be made relative to it;
….given d=rt, @10s the t0 thing in its primary condition makes its appearance to sensibility, which is called perception, call it t2;
….at t2, the t1 change in the thing to its secondary condition has endured 5s, and given consistent d=rt, its appearance to sensibility is still 5s away from making its appearance, from which there remains to sensibility only the primary condition of the thing relative to t2, as its perception;
….the change in the condition of the thing perceived at t2 manifests as its own distinct appearance at t1 plus 10s, call it t4, fully 15s after the event at t0;
….without the change in the condition of the thing that appears, there is no ground for change in the judgement of the perception obtained from the event at t0, from which follows necessarily that for the 10s duration between t1 and t4, whatever the condition of the thing at t0 will remain the ground for which judgement regarding the thing is made. Nothing at all can be said with respect to that which never makes its appearance insofar as it relates to experience, while anything at all can be said with respect to mere inference, which regards only the possibility of experience without relation to an appearance.
No, there is no perception of whatever the event at t1 such that judgements relative to the event at t0, in this case an intact thing known as an apple, is superseded by judgements conditioned by different perceptions.
It is absurd to say the judgement related to the only perception there is, re: the thing at t0, is false, insofar as there is nothing at all at t2 /= 10s of t1, which is just to say the disintegrated apple didn’t disintegrate, in contradiction with the certainty of its relative appearance.
On what possible ground could one say, at any time before t2, the condition of the apple wasn’t precisely as it appeared? By the same token, on what ground can one possible say he didn’t have the antecedent perception of an intact apple, even after having subsequently perceived an entirely different appearance he already knows is the very same apple, destroyed?
I’m sure I can’t figure out what problem there can be, at least regarding this apple gedankenexperiment, and therefrom, direct realism relative to perception in general.
Let’s quickly disambiguate the word “perception.” At minimum we need to distinguish (i) the sensory episode (experience), (ii) the act of grasping/identifying what is going on (understanding), and (iii) the commitment that something is the case (judgment).
In the apple scenario, the content of experience and understanding can remain continuous even after the apple disintegrates, because the light still carries information from the earlier state of the world. In that sense, the intentional object is the distal apple as it existed at the time the light was emitted (the apple-at-t0, not the apple-at-t1).
If the observer is unaware of the time lag and judges “there is an apple over there right now,” then that judgment is false, because there is no longer any distal object that satisfies it.
On this analysis, nothing requires treating the intentional object as an internal intermediary.
As far as I can tell, you are saying that during the second interval you take the shapes/colours/etc. to be properties of qualia, and then you infer the the existence of the apple from them. That's exactly the step I’m rejecting.
Which part do you reject? Colours and shapes as qualia or that I continue to believe that there is an intact red apple 10m in front of me because I continue to see an intact red apple 10m in front of me?
Sorry, I'm not entirely sure what you're saying here. Is there a question? I'll present the argument in full, starting with the naive view of perception:
[quote=Martin 2004]On [the naive realist] conception of experience, when one is veridically perceiving the objects of perception are constituents of the experiential episode. The given event could not have occurred without these entities existing and being constituents of it in turn, one could not have had such a kind of event without there being relevant candidate objects of perception to be apprehended. So, even if those objects are implicated in the causes of the experience, they also figure non-causally as essential constituents of it... Mere presence of a candidate object will not be sufficient for the perceiving of it, that is true, but its absence is sufficient for the non-occurrence of such an event. The connection here is [one] of a constitutive or essential condition of a kind of event.[/quote]
The important points to take from this are:
P1. If I have direct perception of an object then that object is a constituent of the experience
P2. If an object is a constituent of the experience then that object exists
P3. That an object exists does not entail that it is a constituent of the experience
I then consider this thought experiment:
P4. An apple is placed 10m in front of me
P5. The light it reflects travels at 1m/s
P6. The apple is disintegrated after 5 seconds
C1. Therefore, I see an apple for 5 seconds starting 5 seconds after the apple has been disintegrated
C2. Therefore, the apple does not exist during the 5 seconds in which I see an apple
C3. Therefore, the apple is not a constituent of the experience during the 5 seconds in which I see an apple
C4. Therefore, I do not have direct perception of the apple during the 5 seconds in which I see an apple
This then continues with:
P7. If the apple is not a constituent of the experience during the 5 seconds in which I see an apple when the light travels at 1m/s then it is not a constituent of the experience during the 5 seconds in which I see an apple when the light travels at 299,792,458 m/s
C5. Therefore, the apple is not a constituent of the experience during the 5 seconds in which I see an apple when the light travels at 299,792,458 m/s
C6. Therefore, I do not have direct perception of the apple during the 5 seconds in which I see an apple when the light travels at 299,792,458 m/s
The description of “naive” ought to be afforded to the phenomenologist on these grounds. It is tantamount to self-diagnosis. He builds an entire philosophical edifice upon unreliable evidence: hallucinations, dreams, and the limited periphery afforded by his own biology. It’s why Michael and Amadeus require analogies from what they can see in order to describe what they cannot.
Thought experiments are a legitimate philosophical tool. They can show that a prima facie reasonable theory doesn’t actually work.
For example, you say that the direct object of visual perception is light, but then what if I don't have eyes, only a cortical visual prosthesis? I say that if the technology is sufficiently advanced then a) the visual experience of someone with a cortical visual prosthesis is indistinguishable from the visual experience of someone with eyes, that b) the direct object of perception for someone with a cortical visual prosthesis is the direct object of perception for someone with eyes, that c) the direct object of perception for someone with a cortical visual prosthesis is not light, and so that d) the direct object of perception for someone with eyes is not light.
It doesn't matter that we do have eyes and don't have sufficiently advanced cortical visual prostheses. The thought experiment is a reasonable rebuttal, and so your options are to either deny (b) or to deny (c). A denial of (c) seems untenable given your theory of perception and so a denial of (b) may be your only option, but this implies that you accept that the direct object of perception for someone with a cortical visual prosthesis is neither the apple nor light, and so should hopefully give you a better understanding of what indirect realists mean.
It’s fine to be skeptical of the senses and for the reasons you outline, but it is unprincipled and inconsistent to refuse that same level of skepticism towards so-called phenomenal experience. Then again we don’t really require thought experiments about impossible worlds in order to maintain the unreliability of first-person accounts of their own experiences, whereas that is exactly what is required to doubt the senses.
Perhaps the only route for a realist conclusion that I could find is the Inference to the Best Explanation. But then they have to explain why inference, feelings, and intuition is more reliable than the senses. This ought to be the second order of business.
Perhaps a third order of business is to ask the indirect realist to use language consistent with his theory, for instance that instead of saying he sees an apple, he ought to maintain that he sees a sense-data of an apple.
Until then their thought experiments about the real world should be disregarded, at least until they can prove they are not idealists in disguise.
:cool: :up:
You're implying that direct realism avoids scepticism, but that simply begs the question. It's entirely possible that both of these are true:
1. If we are bipedal organisms with eyes and if there are apples that reflect light into our eyes then we have direct perception of apples and/or light
2. We are brains in a vat and a cortical visual prosthesis causes us to have "false" experiences of us being bipedal organisms with eyes living in a world with apples
(1) being true does not make (2) less likely, and so (2) is no less a problem for direct realists than it is for indirect realists. If direct realists can just assume that (2) is false then so can indirect realists.
Quoting NOS4A2
There's no "instead of". This is like saying that if I watch a football match on TV then instead of saying that I watched a football match I ought say that I watched moving images on a TV screen.
BMOs are not objects in the everyday sense, so I don't think objecthood is the appropriate condition. Rather, I think the question is whether the BMO satisfies the requirements of an epistemic intermediary between the subject and object.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
It is true that the analogy does this. But this is not the thrust of the analogy. The photograph is meant to show that having an intermediary does not mean that "you only see the intermediary". We still see the subject, because the photograph discloses the subject, and there is an appropriate casual connection between subject and photograph.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Exactly, phenomenologically we encounter one object. This is the illusion IR aims to dispel. We already agree that phenomenological features of the object as it appears do not inhere in the distal object. But this is a contradiction: if there is only one object, that object must support all the features it presents as having.
P1: In perception, one object appears phenomenologically
P2: This object as it appears has qualitative features, like redness
P3: Distal objects do not support qualitative features like redness
C1: Therefore, the object as it appears (the BMO), cannot be the distal object.
P4: Distal objects are the target objects of perception.
C2: The object as it appears (BMO) must be intermediate between subject and distal object
You want to say that qualitative features are relations. That might be a valid metaphysical perspective. But this is not how they appear to us, phenomenologically. Phenomenologically, they are properties of the object as seen. The object as seen, the BMO, is object-like, has qualitative features, and cannot be the distal object.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Normativity is obviously a significant topic, and it is not fair to ask the IRist to solve it. Rather, we need to demonstrate that IR is consistent with normativity. Broadly, correspondence grounds truth, and failure of correspondence error. It is possible for the subject to establish this correspondence, or lack, because the DO and BMO are casually connected, and therefore epistemically connected. The subject does not live in a walled garden of BMOs.
Most of the time, the model of the world given to us is good enough, and we take it for granted that the BMO corresponds with the DO, at least in the relevant ways. When inconsistencies arise, within the BMO, between BMOs, or between BMOs and our prior understandings, we need to use reason and evidenc to determine what world and self conditions could lead to the constradictions we observe.
The actual conditions and mechanisms of how this works is beyond this topic, and I don't claim to have definitive answers.
It isn’t possible that 2 is true unless one already assumes the premises of indirect realism. Moreover, it is rational to assume that things are the way they seem unless and until one has specific reasons for doubting them. That bar has yet to be reached in this discussion. It seems perceivers are not brains and there appears to be no vat.
Philosophy is a little different than sports, I’m afraid, and requires a little more precision.
No it doesn't.
Quoting NOS4A2
Which is also true for the indirect realist.
Quoting NOS4A2
Then I'll respond a different way: you should use language consistent with your theory; for instance, instead of saying that you see an apple you ought maintain that you see light.
Yes it does. One has to assume he is a brain and little more. One has to assume that senses are little more than inputs. These assumptions regarding the identity of the perceiver and his relationship with other objects defines how and what he perceives.
I already have. I have explicitly stated that I can see mostly everything in my periphery: my own nose, light, apples, foreground, background. Everyone of those is a sense-datum, though, and so have the same properties according to indirect realism.
The possibility of (2) only depends on the possibility of a brain living in a vat and the possibility of a cortical visual prosthesis being able to stimulate the visual cortex in the same way that an eye's neurotransmitters do. I don't have to assume anything about what I am. (2) is no less a problem for direct realists than it is for indirect realists.
Quoting NOS4A2
You said this: "I believe we have indirect visual perception of apples through the direct visual perception of light."
Indirect realists say this: "I believe we have indirect visual perception of apples through the direct visual perception of sense-data".
If you're still allowed to say "I see apples" then so is the indirect realist. If the indirect realist is only allowed to say "I see sense-data" then you're only allowed to say "I see light".
None of those are possible unless he first believes he can survive as a disembodied brain, which is a huge leap.
Of course you’re allowed to say what you want. I just find it odd, or telling, that indirect realists never include their neologisms in the noun position of their own propositions.
But this just sounds like the standard IR picture: we experience sensations (i), on the basis of these we perform cognitive operations (ii) to arrive at judgements about the world (iii).
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
So then does DR entail a metaphysical commitment to eternalism? IR implies no such commitment, the BMO simply does not match the DO. Whereas, if there are not two objects, then perception in this case seems to involve time travel.
As I understand it, the apple argument is just a weaker form of the argument from hallucination. Weaker, because you can still say that the distal object is in the past. Whereas in hallucination there is no distal object at all. So then the DRist has to bend over backwards to say that hallucination and vertidical perception are fundamentally different process, in spite of the fact that the object as it appears can be (in principle) precisely identical in both cases.
Fair enough—but if the BMO is not an object of awareness in any ordinary sense, then I don’t see in what sense it is an epistemic intermediary rather than merely a causal implementation. “Epistemic intermediary” suggests something like: that which provides the subject’s evidence as such. But that is exactly what is at issue.
Quoting hypericin
I agree that mediation does not imply “we only see the intermediary.” But the photograph analogy is still misleading because a photograph is itself an inspectable object that can become the intentional terminus (we can notice glare, cropping, pixelation, etc.). In perception we do not encounter an “image” in that way. We encounter one world-directed presentation. So positing a BMO as an epistemic intermediary is not phenomenologically innocent—it adds a second object that is not given as such.
Quoting hypericin
But notice what you’ve done here: you’re now committed to the claim that phenomenology is systematically misleading about its own intentional structure. That’s not impossible, but it’s a much stronger thesis than “we sometimes misperceive,” and it’s not a neutral starting point either.
More importantly: you treat the “one object appears” datum as forcing a choice between DO and BMO. But there is a third option you keep overlooking: the bearer of phenomenal character is not an object at all, but the perceptual act/episode.
“Redness-as-seen” can be a property of seeing, not a property of an inner object. That dissolves the alleged contradiction without requiring a BMO.
Quoting hypericin
P3 is doing all the work, but it’s not a phenomenological datum. It’s a metaphysical thesis. If you grant P3, IR follows. But that just means the argument is question-begging: it builds the conclusion into the premises by stripping DOs of sensible qualities in advance.
A direct realist can deny P3 in several ways without saying “redness is microphysical”: e.g., redness is dispositional/relational, or a way the apple manifests itself under normal conditions. None of that forces the postulation of an epistemic intermediary object.
Quoting hypericin
But this again assumes what needs to be argued. “Object as seen” is not automatically “an inner object.” It can just mean: the distal object under a mode of presentation. You are sliding from “the object as experienced” to “there exists an additional object, distinct from the distal one, that is experienced.” That inference is precisely what I’m resisting.
Quoting hypericin
I’m not demanding that IR “solve normativity” in full generality. But I do think IR inherits a structural difficulty: if the BMO is the immediate object of awareness, then the DO becomes something like a theoretical cause posited behind experience. In that case, “correspondence” risks becoming something asserted from the outside rather than something intelligible from within the first-person epistemic situation.
You say we can establish correspondence because DO and BMO are causally connected—but causal connection is not yet epistemic access. The normative question is not “how do I get from an inner item to an outer item?” but “how does my experience come with conditions of correctness at all?” On my view, the perceptual act is already world-directed in its intentionality, so normativity is a question about the success-conditions of an act that is constitutively oriented toward the world. On your view, normativity looks more like a bridge between two ontologically distinct items (BMO and DO), and it’s that bridge that remains obscure.
Quoting hypericin
It only sounds like IR if one assumes that “experience” is itself an object (a BMO) rather than a conscious act with a certain phenomenal character. My whole point is that the mediation here is in the operations (experiencing, understanding, judging), not in an intermediary object.
Quoting hypericin
No. “Seeing a past state of affairs” doesn’t require eternalism any more than memory or astronomy requires eternalism. All it requires is that the past was real and causally efficacious. Saying “the intentional object is the apple-at-t0” is not time travel; it’s just temporal indexing.
And note: IR has the exact same temporal situation. The BMO is also causally generated by the apple-at-t0, not by the apple-at-t1. So temporal lag cannot be a differential argument for IR over DR—it affects both views equally.
Quoting hypericin
Here I think you’re assuming a controversial principle: that if two experiences are introspectively indistinguishable, they must share the same intentional object or structure. But that doesn’t follow. Two acts can be phenomenally identical while differing in their fulfillment conditions—just as a forged key can feel identical to a real key while failing to open the door. Phenomenology alone does not settle whether the act is fulfilled by the world or empty.
So yes: hallucination and veridical perception can be phenomenally indistinguishable while still differing in whether they are world-fulfilled. That isn’t “bending over backwards”; it’s simply recognizing that phenomenology underdetermines ontology.
=========
Finally, I don’t deny that “the brain models the world” in the subpersonal, cognitive-scientific sense. But that’s a mechanistic explanatory posit. The philosophical question is whether such modeling constitutes the intentional object of awareness at the personal level. The inference from “there are subpersonal models” to “what I am directly aware of is a modeled object” is not forced, and I don’t think your argument establishes it without smuggling IR into P3 at the outset.
On Martin:
I’m fine with the naive realist’s position that the senses are that by which we are directly and immediately aware of things, but deny such direct awareness is necessarily as those things really are.
He talks of things in general, whereas you talk of specific named things. His things are real existents and belong to Nature, directly corresponding to perception; your apple is a valid cognition related to some real existent thing and belongs only to an intelligence, directly corresponding to experience, and for which perception is presupposed. They are not the same.
P1: No. For any perception, its representation is the constituent of experience;
P2: No. For any constituent representation contained in an experience, the existence of the object represented, is given necessarily;
P3: No. That an object exists and causes representation from which an experience follows, proves that the object itself does not entail experience. The object does entail, not the constituency of, but the necessary, albeit empirical, condition for, experience.
People are wont to assert sensation is itself an experience. It isn’t; it is a feeling, in that experience presupposes logical function while mere sensation does not, from which follows they cannot be considered synonymous. The proper empirical constituent of experience is that representation called phenomenon. Without the affiliated logical function connected with it, nothing more can be said.
—————-
For you to carry on with a further exposition implies I’ve misunderstood what I was responding to. Be that as it may….
On your argument:
C1: You’ll see an apple 10s after the time light reflects from it, for whatever the duration of that reflection, determinable by t=d/r.
C2: The light from the destroyed apple takes its own 10s to be received, so the initial reflection sustains for 10s from the 5s change-of-state reflection.
To say an apple doesn’t exist when I see an apple is self-contradictory.
Sorry, I don’t know what to do with C3.
————-
So there is this thing in logic, that a condition is true iff its negation is also true. Consider the reverse: take the destroyed apple you see, back through time, to the re-assembly of it, to its whole. With the given parameters, that should take 10s, from which it is only for 5s that you will see the apple as a whole. Is there not a duration of 15s of light, not perceived but projected, by which two distinct conditions of a singular thing, is perceivable?
I suppose the concession must be made, insofar as science demands it, that the truth of the existence of a thing is not certified by immediate perception alone. But it remains a necessary condition that all that is perceived and from which experience is possible, must either exist or have existed. I don’t know how the experiment alters that necessity.
Anyway, I’ve reached the limit for defending myself, so I’ll quit here.
Do you not recognise your hypocrisy? If it's not odd or telling that you say "I see an apple" instead of "I see light" then it's not odd or telling that an indirect realist says "I see an apple" instead of "I see sense data".
You're refusing to hold yourself to the same standard that you demand of indirect realists.
Quoting NOS4A2
Then not a brain in a vat but a body in a vat, à la the Matrix. The indirect realist no more has to prove that this isn't the case than the direct realist does. Both just assume that we're not and proceed from there.
As an aside, this is why I think my example with the apple is actually a stronger argument than the argument from hallucination. Direct realists often do argue that veridical perceptions and hallucinations are fundamentally different (disjunctivism), but this counterargument doesn't seem to work against my example. Having to resort to the claim that we have direct perception of a distal object that no longer exists is much less convincing, and seems to be grasping at straws.
Is there a difference between these two claims?
1. At t[sub]1[/sub] the intentional object of perception is the apple-at-t[sub]0[/sub]
2. At t[sub]1[/sub] I have direct perception of the apple-at-t[sub]0[/sub]?
Because I would say that (2) makes no sense. I agree with the naive realist that I cannot have direct perception of something that doesn't exist, and the apple-at-t[sub]0[/sub] doesn't exist at t[sub]1[/sub].
What I reject is the move from "the sensory character persists" to "therefore what I was aware of all along were qualia, and the apple was only ever inferred."
Let me take your two options in turn.
(1) Colours and shapes as qualia. I reject this characterization as the baseline description of what's going on. You're treating it as obvious that when I see a red apple, what I'm really aware of are inner qualitative items that happen to be red and round. But that redescription is precisely what's at issue. On my view, in the first interval, the redness and roundness I'm aware of are properties of the apple as it shows up for me from this vantage point. They are appearances of the apple, not freestanding inner objects that I then project outward. This is what I mean by distinguishing the object-as-intended from the object tout court: the apple-as-seen-from-here is not a second entity (a quale) but the apple itself given under a particular profile.
(2) That you continue to believe there's an apple because you continue to see one. I don't reject that description — I just reject your analysis of it. Yes, during the second interval, my experience retains the character of "seeing a red apple 10m away," and yes, I form the (false) judgment that the apple is still there. But what this shows is that perceptual consciousness has an intentional structure that can be empty in the sense of lacking fulfillment by a presently existing object — it intends an object that is no longer there to fulfill it. It does not show that what I'm aware of in both intervals is a quale from which I infer the apple.
The difference matters because your picture requires a general ontological claim: that in every case of perception, the immediate objects are inner items. My picture requires only that perception is an intentional act that is normally fulfilled by its object and sometimes isn't. The disintegrated-apple case is a case of unfulfilled intention — analogous to a thought about a nonexistent object — not evidence that the object was never part of the perceptual situation in the first place.
So to answer your fork directly: I reject the inference step, and I reject the redescription of appearances as qualia. What I accept is that experience can persist when its object doesn't, and that this makes perception fallible. Fallibility is not indirect realism.
Yes, there is a difference, and it's important.
(1) is a claim about the intentional structure of the perceptual act: what the act is directed toward, what it presents-as. At t1, my perceptual consciousness still has the character of presenting an apple at a certain location. The act intends the apple (as it was at t0). This is a phenomenological description of the act's directedness.
(2) is a claim about perceptual success — that I am in genuine epistemic contact with something that exists. And I agree with you: (2) is false during the second interval. I do not have successful perception of the apple at t1, because the apple no longer exists.
But here's the crucial point: I don't need (2) to be true in order to be a direct realist. Direct realism is the thesis that when perception succeeds, it is the distal object itself — not a mental intermediary — that is the object of awareness. It is not the thesis that perception always succeeds, or that it cannot present-as-there something that isn't there.
The distinction between (1) and (2) maps onto a familiar intentionality point: I can think about Sherlock Holmes without Sherlock Holmes existing. That doesn't mean my thought is "really" about an inner mental item from which I infer Holmes. It means the intentional act is directed toward Holmes and is unfulfilled — there's nothing in the world that satisfies it. Likewise, at t1 my perceptual act intends the apple and is unfulfilled. What it doesn't do is redirect onto a quale that serves as a proxy for the apple.
So your argument works against naïve realism, which holds that perception is always successfully world-involving. It doesn't work against the view I'm defending, which distinguishes the directedness of the act from the existence of its fulfilling object.
But this argument does not survive any casual intermediary at all, since everything casual takes some amount of time. For IR to be substantive I think it needs some plausible notion of directness to contrast with. Here effectively no relationship beyond physical collisions can be direct.
Which reaffirms what I have been saying since page 1.
Indirect realism is concerned with phenomenology, and which things in the world we have direct perception of. You're concerned with intentionality, which is prima facie consistent with indirect realism. Again, see Semantic Direct Realism.
The fleshed out argument is here.
What does this even mean? Are you saying that these properties are properties that inhere in distal objects, but only when you exist and look at them from a certain vantage point? Because that strikes me as being absurd. I would say that this redness and roundness are subjective qualities of your first-person phenomenal experience, much like non-visual qualities involved in hearing, smell, taste, and touch, but which (erroneously) seem to be properties that inhere in distal objects (explaining why naive colour realism is believed by some).
All I see is a grammatical trick with your wording. The "apple as it shows up for me from this vantage point" just is a mental phenomenon caused by looking at the apple, but which (erroneously) seems to be the apple itself (hence intentionality being "world-directed"). It's what still exists and is seen even after the apple is disintegrated.
It might be clearer to talk of properties about which we agree. Extensionally, what counts is that agreement - that you and I and Michael all agree that the apple is one of the things that is red.
1. Regarding Semantic Direct Realism
You keep pointing me toward Semantic Direct Realism as though my position reduces to it, but it doesn't. Semantic Direct Realism says perception is intentionally directed at distal objects but that what is phenomenally present are still inner items — it concedes the phenomenological ground to indirect realism and salvages "directness" only at the level of content or reference. That's not my view. I'm saying the phenomenology itself is of the apple — that the qualitative character of perceptual experience is not a property of an inner item but the way the object shows up. So the disagreement between us is phenomenological, not merely semantic. Please stop trying to shunt me into a position I've explicitly rejected.
2. Regarding "what does this even mean?"
You ask whether I'm saying that redness inheres in distal objects "only when you exist and look at them from a certain vantage point," and you call this absurd. But I think the absurdity is in your paraphrase, not in my claim. I'm not saying the apple gains a new intrinsic property when I look at it. I'm saying that redness characterizes the perceptual situation — the apple-as-perceived — which is neither a mind-independent property of the apple (naïve realism) nor a property of an inner mental object (indirect realism). It is a relational phenomenon: it involves the apple, the perceiver, and the conditions of perception. This is no more mysterious than saying that "being to the left of" is a real relation without being an intrinsic property of either relatum. Colour is how the apple presents itself given the kind of perceivers we are, the lighting conditions, and so on. That's a substantive ontological claim, not a grammatical trick.
3. Regarding "the apple as it shows up for me just is a mental phenomenon"
This is precisely the move I keep challenging and you keep reasserting. You say the apple-as-it-shows-up-for-me "just is a mental phenomenon caused by looking at the apple." But that identification is not self-evident — it's the indirect realist thesis stated as though it were an uncontroversial gloss. I'm saying that the apple-as-it-shows-up-for-me is the apple under a perceptual profile, not a numerically distinct mental entity that resembles or represents the apple. When I see the apple from the left side, what I see is the apple — its left-side profile. When I walk around and see it from the right, I see the same apple under a different profile. At no point do I need to posit an inner object that mediates between me and the apple.
You'll respond: "But after the apple is disintegrated, the 'profile' persists — so it can't be of the apple." And I've already addressed this. The perceptual act retains its intentional character — its directedness toward the apple — but it is no longer fulfilled. The profile is now empty in the sense that what it presents is no longer there. That's perceptual failure, not evidence that the profile was always a self-standing mental entity.
============
So the question back to you is: what is your positive reason for identifying the appearance with a mental particular, other than the assumption that if perception can fail, appearances must be inner objects? Because the destroyed-apple case doesn't establish that identification — it only establishes fallibility, which my view already accommodates.
In fact I argued that we perceive the light directly, described how it is possible, and can describe the properties of this real-world medium. I don’t recall anyone doing the same with sense-data.
I can prove the matrix is a piece of fiction by the fact that someone imagined it and wrote it as a script for a fantasy movie.
The anatomy and physiology of vision preclude what you're describing. The eyes work much like a camera. The film is vitamin A.
The positive reason is that after disintegration there is still the appearance of an apple even though there is no apple, and so either a) the appearance is the mental phenomena or b) the appearance is some third thing, distinct from both the apple and the mental phenomena. Occam's razor and no positive evidence for b) is reason enough to assert a).
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I don't say that. I say that the profile is of an apple but is not the direct perception of an apple — whether before or after disintegration. Direct perception, as the term means in the context of the dispute between traditional direct (naive) and indirect realists, is not concerned with intentionality but with which things are constituents of first-person phenomenal experience, and the epistemological consequences thereof.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
We can see colours even without apples or light, e.g. if we're dreaming, hallucinating, or synesthetes listening to music with our eyes closed. What are these colours if not qualia?
But as for the "grammatical trick", what is the difference between these two claims?
1. Colour is how the apple presents itself given the kind of perceivers we are, the lighting conditions, and so on
2. Apples reflect light into our eyes which release glutamate which stimulate neural activity in the visual cortex from which colour qualia emerge
Do (1) and (2) mean the same thing, or is it logically possible for (2) to be true but (1) to be false?
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I'm confused. This is what you said early in the discussion:
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
And here you explicitly say "experience is not object-presentation".
What is precluded and how is it precluded?
Interesting point of contention. This is not a neutral starting point, it is a conclusion. That phenomenology should mislead in general should not be surprising. But I don't think phenomenology is misleading about its intentional structure. Intention is the same, the distal object. Phenomenology misleads about form, not content. It presents form, qualitative features, as features of the content. When in reality, they are descriptors. Map, not territory.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Good, lets focus on P3:
Distal objects do not support qualitative features like redness.
And your take:
"... redness is dispositional/relational, or a way the apple manifests itself under normal conditions. "
"Relational" seems passive (i.e. "to the left of"), while "way the apple manifests itself under normal conditions." makes it sound like the apple is the active agent in the relationship. But the apple has no more requirements in fulfilling this perceptual relationship than it does in fulfilling "to the left of". It just has to sit there. The viewer is doing all the work: they have to fulfill extraordinary biological requirements for the relationship to manifest.
Lets call perception a "unipolar relational process". "Process" because it is an active, ongoing, effortful relationship, not a passive one. "Unipolar" because one side of the relationship is doing all the processing.
Consider this scenario: There is a live TV broadcast of an apple. A camera continuously captures the apple's image, and the signal is transmitted to the broadcaster, which then sends the signal to the TV. Call this entire complex, of Camera/Broadcaster/TV the "Viewing System" (VS). These two elements, VS and apple, form a unipolar relational process.
You want to say: the image of the apple on the screen is not an object. It is an event, the way the apple disposes itself to VS. I mostly agree. But I would flip the agency: the image of the apple is the way VS presents the apple.
You want to say: the VS is "intentionally directed" at the apple. Not at the image on the screen. I agree. The apple is what the image is of. Not the pixels.
Yet: I say, P3 holds. The apple does not support the image on the screen. The apple is passive. The image on the screen is an active construction of VS. The fact that the apple on the screen looks like the apple in real life is not only contingent, it is the result of very effortful, difficult and precise engineering. VS could present the apple any which way: distorted, with inverted colors, or with infinite possible other transformations, which could leave the apple unintelligible to a human viewer. None of these transformations belong to the apple, they belong to VS. VS is doing them.
The light which emerges from VS is not the same as light reflecting off the apple. While the light is still of the apple, it is also mediated by VS.
You're right to flag this, and I want to address it directly rather than paper over it. Over the course of this discussion I've been drawing on two different philosophical frameworks — one that locates directness at the level of judgment and intentional reference, and another that gives a richer account of the phenomenology of perception. I don't think these are contradictory, but I have shifted emphasis between them, and I owe you a clearer statement of how they fit together.
Here's the unified picture: perception has both a phenomenological dimension and an epistemic dimension. Phenomenologically, perceptual experience presents the object itself under profiles — not an inner item that merely represents the object. Epistemically, the justification of perceptual judgments doesn't rest on the phenomenology alone but on the whole cognitional structure of experience, understanding, and judgment. So when I said earlier that directness isn't a matter of phenomenal presence, I was rejecting the idea that epistemic directness is secured by phenomenology alone. When I said more recently that the phenomenology is of the apple, I was making a phenomenological claim about what experience presents, not an epistemic claim about what justifies our judgments. These are distinct questions, and I should have been clearer about which one I was addressing at each point.
Quoting Michael
You say that after disintegration, either the appearance is (a) the mental phenomenon emerging from neural activity or (b) some mysterious third thing, and Occam's razor favors (a). But this is a false dichotomy. My view is not (b). The appearance is the phenomenal character of the intentional act — its mode of presentation — which at t1 is unfulfilled by any distal object. That's not a third entity; it's a feature of the act itself. You don't need to posit an extra object; you need to recognize that perceptual acts are individuated by their norms of fulfillment, not by introspective character alone. An unfulfilled perceptual act and a fulfilled one differ in kind — not because of some external add-on, but because fulfillment is constitutive of the act-type, just as a kept promise and a broken promise aren't the same act that merely differs in external outcome. We individuate normative acts by their success conditions, not merely by how they feel from the inside. Occam's razor, if anything, favors this over the postulation of qualia as a distinct ontological category of mental particulars.
Quoting Michael
This is a real challenge and I don't want to dismiss it. But notice that you can only classify the dream experience as apple-like or red-like by borrowing those descriptions from veridical perception. The hallucinatory case is not self-standing — it inherits its intentional description from the successful case. So treating hallucination as revealing the true nature of all perception reverses the correct explanatory order. It's like analyzing genuine currency by starting from counterfeits: the counterfeit is only intelligible as a counterfeit of something. Dreams and hallucinations are cases where the neural mechanisms that normally subserve world-directed perception are activated endogenously. The intentional structure — the presenting-as — is preserved, but it is unfulfilled by any distal object. This doesn't show that in veridical perception the colours are also qualia; it shows that the neural substrate can generate experiential acts that have the form of object-presentation without an object. The question is whether we redescribe all perception in terms of the non-veridical case or understand the non-veridical case as a deficient mode of the normal one. I think the latter is more principled.
Quoting Michael
You ask whether "colour is how the apple presents itself given the kind of perceivers we are" and "neural activity in the visual cortex from which colour qualia emerge" mean the same thing. No, they don't, and yes, it is logically possible for (2) to be true and (1) false. But it's also logically possible for (2)'s causal story to be true while its ontological gloss — the claim that what emerges are "qualia" as inner mental particulars — is false. I accept the neuroscience. I reject the philosophical interpretation you're attaching to it. The causal chain from apple to retina to cortex can be fully described without concluding that what I'm aware of at the end of the chain is a quale rather than the apple-as-presented. That's the inference I keep challenging.
But let me put the question back to you: suppose I grant you qualia as a label for the sensory character of experience. What do they explain that intentional content, causal enabling conditions, and norms of fulfillment don't already explain? If "qualia" is just your name for what I'm calling the mode of presentation, then we agree on the phenomenon and disagree only about its ontological description — and you need to show why "inner mental particular" is a better description. If qualia are supposed to be genuine intermediaries doing explanatory work, tell me what that work is.
Finally, you've said before that the causal story isn't sufficient for intentionality and normativity. I agree. But if perceptual experience is wholly inner, then your judgments about the world are operating on inner items. What anchors their content to distal objects rather than to the qualia themselves? If the answer is "the causal relation," then causation alone doesn't determine content — causal relations underdetermine intentional content unless some normative constraint is already in play. If the answer is "inference," then what makes the inference truth-tracking rather than merely adaptive? This is the question I keep pressing, and I don't think the indirect realist framework has a very good answer to it.
This is a helpful distinction, but I want to press on it. You say qualitative features are "descriptors" — but descriptors of what? If they describe the apple (accurately or inaccurately), then they are ways the apple is presented to the subject, i.e., modes of presentation of the distal object. That's my view. If they describe nothing external — if they are purely system-internal features with no presentational function — then the intentional directedness you've already conceded becomes mysterious. You can't have descriptors that are "of the apple" in their intentional direction but belong entirely to the system in their qualitative character without explaining how those two aspects are unified in a single conscious experience. I think they're unified because qualitative character just is the way the act presents its object. You think they're unified by... correspondence? Causal connection? That's the gap I keep pointing to.
Quoting hypericin
I actually agree with much of this. Perception is indeed asymmetric — the subject's biological system is doing the heavy lifting. But "the subject's system is doing all the work" doesn't entail "therefore the product of that work is an intermediary entity." It could equally mean: the subject's system is doing all the work of disclosing the apple. The activity is the system's; what the activity achieves is a presentation of the world. These are not competing claims.
Consider: in understanding a sentence, the listener does all the cognitive work — parsing syntax, activating semantic associations, resolving ambiguities. The sentence just sits there (or the sound waves just arrive). Understanding is a "unipolar process" in your sense. But we don't conclude that the listener is therefore aware of an intermediary "meaning-object" that stands between them and what the speaker said. The listener's active processing constitutes their grasp of the speaker's meaning. The processing is the medium, not an intermediary object.
Quoting hypericin
The TV analogy is vivid and I think it's doing a lot of your argumentative work, so I want to engage with it carefully.
You're right that the viewing system actively constructs a presentation, and that the apple is passive in this process. You're right that the system could present the apple in infinitely many ways — distorted, inverted, unintelligible. I grant all of this.
But the analogy has a crucial structural feature that perception lacks: the TV has a screen. There is a spatially distinct surface where the image is literally inscribed, and this surface can itself become an object of inspection — you can notice the pixels, the refresh rate, the bezel. This is what makes it natural to say "there is an image, and it is an intermediary between you and the apple."
The brain has no screen. There is no inner surface where a presentation is displayed for an inner viewer. And if you posit one, you face the homunculus regress: who watches the brain's display? The TV analogy works precisely because there is a viewer external to the system (the person sitting on the couch). In perception, there is no such external viewer — the system's activity is the awareness. There's no gap between "the system presents" and "the subject sees."
This is why I keep insisting that the constructive activity of the perceptual system produces an act of awareness, not an object of awareness. The system's active presentation of the apple is the subject's seeing of the apple. These are not two things — a presentation and then a seeing of the presentation — they are one event described at two levels (subpersonal mechanism, personal-level experience).
Quoting hypericin
Agreed — the transformations belong to the system. But "belonging to the system" is ambiguous between two readings:
(a) They are features of an intermediary object that the system constructs and the subject inspects.
(b) They are features of the system's activity of presenting the apple to the subject.
On reading (a), you get IR: the subject is immediately aware of the constructed object. On reading (b), you get my view: the subject is immediately aware of the apple, but the way it is aware — the qualitative character of the awareness — is shaped by the system's processing. The apple is what is seen; the "transformations" characterize the seeing.
Your own concessions push toward (b). You've agreed that the intentional target is the apple, not the image. You've agreed the image is an event, not an object. You've agreed the system is doing all the work. What remains of IR, once all these concessions are made? It seems like the only thing left is the TV screen — the idea that there must be some surface or entity on which the presentation is inscribed. But that's the very thing that perception, unlike television, doesn't have.
Quoting hypericin
Of course — and I've never denied causal mediation. The question was never "is perception causally mediated?" (obviously yes) but "does causal mediation entail an epistemic intermediary object?" I've been arguing it doesn't, and I think your own developing picture — active system, passive apple, constructive processing, intentional directedness at the apple — is actually more naturally at home in a direct realist framework than in IR. What you've described is a system whose activity constitutes awareness of the world, not a system that constructs inner objects for a subject to inspect.
I can't quite understand what hte prior line has (directly) to do with this question, but to answer it: Yeah. It is not tenable in the face of the empirical facts, and the word 'direct'. It is inapt, and those objects aren't constituent of experience. So, it's wrong to say "DR" is right in any sense. The 'vulgar' ways of talking are heuristic/pragmatic/easier to parse but that doesn't make them right. They can just be wrong, but helpful.
Quoting Ludwig V
I quite disagree. In what way does "I see an apple" incorporate any version of our role in the generation of our experience? I agree it's important, and to me, plays directly into reading the empirical story as-it-is and finding no issues with it, on IR lines.
Quoting Ludwig V
This can be true but I'm unsure it touches the fundamental issue in question: If this is the case, the actual function viz a viz light-eye-experience doesn't change but there is definitely something to be said for first-person phenomenal quality with no delay in the stream of consciousness. I'll have to think some more on that though; thank you!
Quoting Ludwig V
It makes no difference to our experience. It makes a difference in this conversation. What I was saying there is simply that it doesn't make me uncomfortable that I am not literally seeing the sun when I 'look' at it.
Quoting Ludwig V
Then what would experience be of? If the objects you witness aren't part of your experience, and yet there are also no images in your mind that could be part of your experiences, where are you getting them? Here, image can simply mean "the image" of hte apple when you cast your eyes to it; it need not be mediated. I just want some story that doens't require an apple to be in your experience.
Quoting Ludwig V
I don't even understand how that could be the case. To me, it's a full analysis of what actually happens when we cast our eyes about us. I refuse, on grounds of consistency/incoherence, to call it Direct. There's nothing further needed imo. It's just slightly uncomfortable for those of us who require that the apple is in our eye.
It seems to me undeniable (and it's almost in explicit terms) from this Banno post, that "Direct Realism" is just a wussy position to take in the face of reality. Sure, it may not 'mean much' in the grander scale of our lives, but its theoretically the exact same "Ahh, I don't like that, but I can't argue with it so I'll call it something else".
Quoting NOS4A2
I repeat the quote you've quoted I guess. Your repetition doesn't seem so bizarre now. I don't think you've actually understood the question, so I'll just leave it here.
But look what counterfeits reveal: money cannot just be physical form, physical form can remain exactly constant, while moneyness is present or absent. And, moneyness can be present without physical form in digital money. Physical form is therefore not moneyness, physical form must be something else in addition to moneyness.
Just as, the distal object cannot be qualia. Qualia can remain exactly constant, while the distal object is present or absent. And, the distal object can be present without qualia, if there are no capable observers. Qualia is therefore not the distal object, qualia must be something else in addition to the distal object.
The money analogy actually makes my point. What distinguishes genuine currency from counterfeits isn't some hidden "moneyness" substance inside genuine bills — it's that genuine bills stand in the right institutional and normative relations. We don't posit an inner "money-quale" that counterfeits lack. Likewise, what distinguishes veridical perception from hallucination isn't an additional inner entity (a quale) that somehow connects to the world — it's that the perceptual act stands in the right fulfillment relation to its object. Your version of the analogy smuggles in exactly the reification I'm challenging: you treat the difference between genuine and counterfeit as evidence for a hidden inner ingredient, when in fact it's evidence for a relational, normative distinction — which is what I've been arguing all along.
I'm not saying that you're not aware of the apple-as-presented; I'm saying that the apple-as-presented is a mental phenomenon and not an apple, with "qualia" being its particular (mind-dependent) qualities, i.e. phenomenal character such as the colour red.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Yes, which is a mental phenomenon. Intentional acts and phenomenal character aren't something the apple is, has, or does, aren't something light is, has, or does, aren't something eyes are, have, or do, and (maybe) aren't something the brain is, has, or does; they are the mental phenomena that emerge from neural activity.
I'm sorry, but I just don't know how to continue with this discussion. I know it's an unfair accusation, but I cannot understand your position as being anything other than indirect realism rebranded to sound like direct realism.
I think we've actually located the precise point of disagreement, which is progress even if neither of us has convinced the other.
I take it that you hold that if phenomenal character is a mental phenomenon (not a property of apples, light, or eyes), then it must be something the subject is aware of as an object—an intermediary. I hold that it can be a feature of the subject's awareness of the world without being itself an object of that awareness. The warmth of an embrace is a real feature of the embracing — it's not a property of the other person's body, and it's not a third entity between the two people. It characterizes the act, not an intermediary.
Whether that distinction is genuine or merely verbal is, I think, the question that separates us. I appreciate the exchange in any case — I think it's sharpened my understanding of where the real fault line lies between us.
is that Michael's insistence on the mooted "apple-as-present", the view that there are two things here, the apple and the apple-as-presented? That instead we have one thing, the apple, and seeing the apple.
Visual data is processed in the occipital lobe at the back of the brain. There's no light back there.
The analogy is clarifying.
All this processing does something, it produces something: an intermediary meaning, though "object" is problematic. This intermediary meaning is called an "interpretation". And precisely like perception: the subject has indirect access to the meaning of words, via direct access to their own interpretation. Interpretation is not an object, and the intentional target is meaning, not interpretation. But It is naive to claim that we can directly access meaning, all access to meaning must traverse interpretation.
And note: any analysis that leaves out interpretation struggles to handle error. With interpretation as part of the analysis, error is simply misinterpretation.
. Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Yes, I agree, there is no physical screen, no spatially distinct object that can be independently examined. But the physical screen is not what is important. The images on the screen are. These images represent by analogy what I call the brain-modeled-object, the object-as-seen, the qualitative object. Note that the image of the apple is not an object, it is an event; just as we agreed moments of perception are events, not objects. And this event is how the VS presents the apple, it fulfills the relation between VS and apple. Yet, the image of the apple is an epistemically mediated presentation of the apple.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I think there is a viewer in perception: what I called the conscious subset of the brain. But this is a can of worms, so let's just omit the viewer. Even without a viewer, the TV image is still epistemically mediated. A viewer does not make this so, mediation doesn't happen only conditionally on a viewer watching the physical screen. The relationship between image and apple, passing through a transformative system such as the VS, constitutes the mediation.
One dis-analogy: in perception, to appear is to be apprehended. There is no "absent viewer" case. Either there is always a viewer, or there never is. But the VS analogy shows there is no necessary viewer for epistemic mediation.
The point of the example of the VS is to constrain you. I'm assuming that we agree with my claim above, that the image processesed by VS, presented on the TV, is epistemically mediated. If you thought the TV somehow "directly" presented the apple, we would need to discuss what "indirect" could even mean. And so, for a claim you make about perception's "directness" to have any strength, it cannot apply to the VS.
Here, (b) seems reasonable enough for VS: the transformations of the VS are features of the system's activity of presenting the apple. Yet, we agree (I assume) that VS introduces epistemic mediation. So you need to explain why (b) does not apply to VS, or concede that (b) is irrelevant: it applies to a system that clearly involves epistemic mediation.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
No, I don't agree this is quite the question. I do agree that casual meditation alone does not entail an epistemic intermediary object. The question as I see it is "do the structures of perception entail epistemic mediation between subject and object?"
Your move on the interpretation analogy is well-taken, and I want to engage with it honestly. You're right that interpretation mediates our access to meaning. But notice: when I misinterpret a sentence, the error is a failure of my act of understanding, not a mismatch between two objects (my meaning-representation and the speaker's meaning-representation). I don't first accurately apprehend an inner "meaning-object" and then compare it to the speaker's intended meaning. I simply understand wrongly. The mediation is operational — it passes through the activity of understanding — not objectual. That's exactly my claim about perception: error is a failure of the perceptual act, not a mismatch between an accurately apprehended BMO and an inferred DO.
On the TV: you say that even without a viewer, the TV image is epistemically mediated. But I think the reason we call it mediated is precisely that the image on the screen is a self-standing entity — it has pixel values, luminance, contrast ratios that can be characterized completely independently of any viewer. It exists as a physical particular whether or not anyone is watching. That's what makes it an intermediary: it's a thing with its own properties, interposed between apple and viewer.
You've acknowledged that perception lacks this feature: "to appear is to be apprehended." But I don't think you've registered how much this concession costs. If the perceptual presentation doesn't exist independently of the subject's awareness — if there is no presentation without apprehension — then the presentation is not a self-standing entity interposed between subject and world. It's not a thing that mediates; it's the character of the subject's awareness of the world. And that is the act/object distinction I keep drawing.
So when you ask me to explain why (b) doesn't apply to the VS: it [I]does[/I] apply to the VS. But the VS is mediated because of an additional feature — the screen image is an independently existing particular. Remove that feature (as perception does), and (b) describes direct presentation: the system's activity constitutes the subject's awareness of the apple, rather than producing an intermediary entity that the subject then apprehends.
Your reformulated question — "do the structures of perception entail epistemic mediation between subject and object?" — is the right question. My answer is: the structures of perception entail [I]operational[/I] mediation (the system actively processes), but not [I]objective[/i] mediation (the system does not produce an intermediary entity that the subject is aware of). These come apart, and the TV analogy obscures this because TVs happen to involve both.
I find computational metaphors for mind to be trivial, so I do not believe there is anything like data or processing going on in there. But that’s a different topic.
The light hits the eyes. That’s the direct contact between perceiver and perceived. Anything that occurs beyond that threshold is necessarily talk about the perceiver, not the object of perception. We can describe perceivers in well enough detail already, but what we’re after here is what he perceives.
Light hits the skin on the back of your hand as well. Is that also perception?
Quoting NOS4A2
You're free to think whatever you like. March to your own drum.
Have you never felt the sun on your skin? You might need to get out more.
The sun is 90 million miles away, so no.
Well, there are photosensitive molecules in your skin and elsewhere if you ever feel checking it out.
That's how exposure to sun triggers melanin production in your skin. I've already got so much melanin it doesn't do much for me.
Yes. Five physiological devices, each modality unlike the other, by which the external becomes internal.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Then what of sensation?
Good question. I don’t deny that sensation is real, or that the external “becomes internal” through the activity of the sensory system. The question is what role sensation plays in the structure of cognition.
On my view, sensation belongs to the level of experience—the conscious flow that provides data for further operations of understanding and judgment. But sensation is not ordinarily given as an object we inspect in its own right; it is the medium through which the world is given. I don’t first attend to sensations and then infer an apple; rather, the apple is presented in and through the sensory manifold (even if that presentation can later be analyzed or thematized).
This is roughly analogous to Kant’s point that intuitions without concepts are blind: sensory content doesn’t yet constitute cognition of an object until it is synthesized. Where I would part ways with Kant is on whether that synthesis delivers only “appearance” or a perspectival disclosure of the thing itself. But the structural point stands: sensation is a moment within cognition, not an intermediary entity that cognition takes as its terminus.
The thesis under duress here is perception, and the relative directness of it, given the title of the thread. The structure of cognition is something other than that. But to respond to the supposed question, the role sensation plays relative to the structure of cognition, is that it doesn’t have one. Relative to the systemic procedure of cognition, whatever its structure may be, its role would be the empirical ground for its object.
I’m satisfied with your agreement sensation is an intermediary entity the subject is aware of through the activity of the sensory system, even if not that which we inspect in its own right.
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I guess my point was….how does the entity we do not inspect in its own right earn the name “apple”? How does anything at all, given its mere sensation, obtain particular identifying nomenclature? This relates, because if it is the case no naming arises from the structure of perception, and all structures of cognition are that from which naming does arise, then all naming is direct relative to cognition, from which follows necessarily, all talk of apple at the systemic point of sensation, is illegitimate.
Now I can say, I certainly do first attend to sensation, insofar as it is for all practical purposes impossible to ignore, then infer an apple, upon furtherance of the systemic procedure by which naming arises. The apple is not presented in and through the sensory manifold, insofar as at that point, it isn’t an apple. It is no more than a thing, as Martin proposed in the clip Micheal posted on page….whatever.
40 pages of infinitesimal critical analysis, which is good, but with an implicit carelessness which defeats it, insofar as it should have been dialectically obligatory to distinguish and separate direct/indirect and real/valid under completely different systemic conditions then have been touched on so far in this thread.
With sufficiently explanatory distinction, then, that perception is only of the real, and the real is directly given to it, irrespective of knowledge or experience, should have been incontestable, hardly worth 40 pages, the indirectly real being something else entirely, for which you at least, have given the clue.
It was all fun to read and think about, though, so there is that.
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Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Agreed, sensation is not an intermediary entity cognition takes, but disagreed it is a moment within it. I rather think sensation is a moment, an intermediary entity, within sensibility, which relates the directly real in perception to the indirectly representational in phenomena.
Interpretation and error
You are missing the dyadic structure of error. For there to be error, there must be at minimum that which is wrong, and a standard of correctness. If there is only one thing, there is no room for that one thing to be wrong. This is why I think DR struggles with error: it lacks an intermediate object/event/process which is allowed to be wrong, and therefore distinct from the DO.
So yes, there is interpretation and correct meaning. But the epistemic problem in meaning (as in perception) is that the subject has no direct access to meaning. All they know directly is interpretation. They cannot "apprehend an inner 'meaning-object' and then compare it to the speaker's intended meaning." The intended meaning is not at hand. And so error must be inferred: does the interpretation make sense? Is it consistent with what the speaker has said before? Does it contradict other things I know? Erroneous perception involves this same process.
"I simply understand wrongly", "Error is a failure of the perceptual act" feels very hand-wavy to me. Do you agree that error requires a dyad? If so how does DR provide for that?
The meaning of epistemic mediation
I was struggling with this too. For a while I thought as you did, that epistemic mediation meant passing through a distinct physical object. But this doesn't really work. I don't call what I see through a window epistemically mediated. This is only causally mediated, even though the window is a separate physical object that can be examined and interacted with.
I now have a much better definition:
Epistemic mediation is satisfied iff causal mediation introduces multiple realizability.
When you have epistemic mediation, the object you indirectly see might be as it appears. Or it might be something else entirely. The "live" image of the apple might be an authentic apple. Or, it might have been filmed last year. Or, it could be a computer simulation, not an apple at all.
Epistemic mediation introduces an additional possibility of doubt, such that the information it provides may not be what it appears to be. Whereas, causal mediation does no such thing. The apple is just as likely to be an apple whether or not you place it behind a window.
It is this introduction of doubt, not that a viewer watches a physical screen, that makes VS epistemically mediating.
I think there's more agreement between us than the terminological differences might suggest, so let me try to locate the genuine point of divergence.
I'm happy to grant that at the level of raw sensation, there is no "apple" — there is, as you say, no more than a "something", not yet identified or named. The apple as a particular object of knowledge arises only through further operations: understanding what kind of thing it is, and judging that it is indeed so. That much is central to my account as well. I would say that experience (sensation) provides the data, understanding grasps intelligibility in that data, and judgment affirms whether that grasp is correct. No one of these levels alone constitutes knowledge of an apple.
Where I'd gently push back is on the separation of sensibility from cognition as distinct faculties or systems. On my account, sensation is not housed in a separate faculty that mediates between the real and cognition. It is the first level of the cognitional process itself. This doesn't deny functional distinctions between sensing and understanding; it denies that sensation constitutes a self-contained representational realm that cognition must then "bridge."
In my view, experience, understanding, and judgment are dynamically related operations within a single conscious subject — not separate systems handing data from one to the next. The same subject who senses is the one who understands and judges, and the object is progressively disclosed through those operations. The name "apple" is a conceptual determination of what is already given as a unified "something" in experience.
This matters for the direct/indirect question, because if sensation belongs to a separate mediating faculty — sensibility — then there is structural room for an intermediary: the phenomenon as something distinct from the thing itself. But if sensation is already the first moment of a unified cognitional act directed at the world, then the structural room for such an intermediary narrows considerably — the burden shifts to showing why one is still needed. Instead of a relay between systems, my view visages a single process of coming to know the real at progressively higher levels of determination.
So when you say sensation is "a moment within sensibility, which relates the directly real in perception to the indirectly representational in phenomena" — I'd want to ask whether that relay step is doing necessary work, or whether it's an artifact of the faculty model. In my view, there is no point at which the directly real gets converted into a representation that acts as the direct object of awareness. There is only a subject whose conscious operations progressively determine what is given in experience. I would say it like this: the real is not first given and then re-represented; it is given, then understood and then affirmed.
Your point about distinguishing direct/indirect under different systemic conditions is well-taken. I think the distinction you're drawing between "the real as directly given in perception" and "the indirectly representational in phenomena" is genuinely important — it's just that I'd locate the transition differently than Kant does.
1. Regarding the dyadic structure of error:
I agree that error requires a dyad — something that is wrong and a standard of correctness. You assert that the dyad must consist of two entities (BMO and DO), but you haven't argued for that; you've assumed it. That's precisely what I'm challenging.
I would argue that the dyad can be: act-as-performed vs. act-as-correct.
When I make an error in reasoning — say, I commit a fallacy — the two terms are: my inference as I actually drew it, and the valid inference I should have drawn given the premises. I don't need an intermediary "logic-object" to ground this dyad. The standard of correctness is provided by the logical relations themselves, and my act falls short of that standard.
The same structure applies to perception. The two terms are: (1) the perceptual act as it was performed, and (2) the perceptual act as it would have been performed under proper conditions given the actual state of the world. When I see a white wall as pink under red lighting, the error is not that I have an accurate BMO ("pink-wall object") that fails to match the DO (white wall). The error is that my act of perceiving was performed under conditions — red lighting — that prevented it from disclosing the wall as it is.
The standard of correctness here is not a purely internal ideal; it is fixed by the stable properties of the wall and the lawful conditions under which those properties are disclosed (e.g., normal illumination). So the dyad is act and norm, not inner object and outer object.
More generally: error arises when we judge beyond what our evidential conditions warrant — when we affirm "it is so" without the relevant conditions being fulfilled. The dyad is normative, not ontological.
2. Regarding the definition of epistemic mediation:
Your multiple realizability criterion is creative, and I agree it's an improvement over your earlier formulations. But I see three difficulties:
First, multiple realizability is a feature of the system's causal powers, not of the subject's awareness. The mere fact that a system could have produced the same output from a different source doesn't entail that the subject is therefore aware of an intermediary. Possible deception is not the same thing as an intermediary object of awareness.
Second, this criterion applies to perception itself, since hallucination shows that the visual system can produce similar outputs without a distal object. But that just repackages the argument from hallucination as a definition. And my response remains: phenomenal indistinguishability doesn't entail sameness of intentional structure, any more than a real key and a perfect forgery being indistinguishable entails the same relation to the lock.
Third, this definition proves too much. Memory is multiply realizable (I could be confabulating). Linguistic understanding is multiply realizable (I could be misinterpreting). Reasoning is multiply realizable (I could commit a fallacy). If the bare possibility that the same cognitive output could have been produced by a different source is sufficient for "epistemic mediation," then all cognition is indirect, and the direct/indirect distinction loses its contrast and does no philosophical work.
I suspect this difficulty in finding a stable definition of "epistemic mediation" is not accidental. It may reflect the fact that the direct/indirect distinction, as traditionally drawn, doesn't track a real structural difference in cognition — only a difference in how much processing is involved, which is a matter of degree, not kind.
So I'll put the question directly: on your definition, what would count as direct cognition?
I don't know what you mean by "aware of as an object".
I will just say that I am aware of phenomenal character, like a red colour or a sweet taste, that this phenomenal character is a mental phenomenon, not a mind-independent property of apples or sugar, and that awareness of apples and sugar is mediated by awareness of these phenomenal characters — certainly in the counterfactual sense that I cannot be aware of apples and sugar without being aware of these phenomenal characters.
This view is a response to the naive view that phenomenal character isn't a mental phenomenon but the mind-independent nature of apples and sugar which are literal constituents of the experience.
Well said. I, on the other hand, would un-relate experience from sensation, leaving sensation itself as a member of your levels. Experience then becomes the terminus of cognition you spoke of last time.
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Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I think they can be distinct faculties within one system, from which it can be argued sensation does mediate between the real and cognition, because, while we are conscious of sensation, we are not the least conscious of its objects, and furthermore, we regain conscious awareness of such objects, from a metaphysical point of view only upon understanding, and from a physical point of view only from what the brain tells us about it. From the physical fact that the peripheral nervous system is dark to us, follows the non-contradictory metaphysical justification for phenomena.
I suspect you’re familiar with the principle paraphrased as understanding cannot intuit and intuition cannot think. This is no different in principle from the fact the brain cannot sense and the senses cannot recognize.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
It being your account, then I agree. Cognition doesn’t bridge the self-contained representational realm of sensation; but rather incorporates it into its own self-contained realm of representations.
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Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Yes, you’re not alone. Me, being of the mindset I am, put experience at the end, thus, while certainly contained with a single conscious subject and probably in one form or another in conscious subjects in general, not related to dynamic operators at all. It’s the ends, that to which the dynamics advance, much as perception is that from which it begins, all else simply the means.
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Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I don’t know what re-represented means. I can relate the presented of the real to appearance, but even in doing that, appearance isn’t what’s represented downstream, and the real that is given is a thing and not a representation.
Are you suggesting there’s nothing going on between the given and understanding? If the real is external to the body and understanding is internal in the body, then how is it that the real is what is understood? The real is given, yes. But the real that is given can’t be what is understood and affirmed. You know this must be true; I mean….there’s just no room up there for real basketballs and dinner forks.
I may have said enough on this sub-topic, regarding being unaware of the peripheral nervous system. It is at least non-contradictory to attribute to this part of the overall system some logical metaphysical prescriptions, but it is explanatorily catastrophic to bypass it completely by going from the real as given, which is always necessary, to the understanding and judgement of it. In effect, then, if it is the case understanding and judgement is directed to something that is not the real, and if not directed to representation, then it is directed to nothing at all, in which case there is nothing to understand or affirm, and experience becomes impossible.
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Quoting Esse Quam Videri
That’s fine, you can put it wherever you think it fits. I’m more interested in what you think the transition entails then where it may be located.
Anyway….good talk.
Fair enough. I'll address this briefly and then we can leave it at that if you wish.
In my view, the transition from sensation to knowledge is not a passage from one realm (sensibility) to another (understanding), but an enrichment of the subject's relation to what is given. The same conscious subject who senses also inquires, understands, and judges — and these are not operations performed on different objects, but successive operations on the same presentation leading to a progressive refinement of the given.
When I sense, I am presented with a patterned manifold — colors, shapes, resistances — that is not yet understood. I don't know what it is. But the manifold is not understood to be a representation of the real; it is the real as disclosed by the senses. The transition to understanding occurs when I ask "what is it?" and insight grasps an intelligible unity in the data — that's an apple. The transition to judgment occurs when I ask "is it really so?" and marshal the evidence: the data sufficiently support the identification.
What's crucial is that understanding and judgment don't take a different object than sensation. They take the same given and determine it further. The intelligibility that understanding grasps is the intelligibility of the sensed data. The judgment affirms that this intelligibility belongs to what is given, not to some downstream substitute for it. Knowing the real doesn't require containing it — it requires correctly understanding and affirming what is given
Where I diverge most fully with Kant is metaphysically: I take the world to be intrinsically intelligible in its own right, thereby enabling the mind to grasp this intelligibility in the act of insight/understanding, though always perspectivally, fallibly and subject to the embodied conditions of the particular knower.
Enrichment, yes; made possible at the minimum by whatever the experienced sensation is, even if judgement of the sensation remains uncertain.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
They can be, for the same subject can perform inquires, understandings and judgements when there is nothing given from sensation, which makes explicit the objects on which the operations are performed are very different. Even those operations performed on past sensations, which we call the content of consciousness, are not the same kind of object as were the things first sensed which gave us the content. Or, just call it memory if you wish.
I think it necessary system functionality has different aspects, which implies different outcomes for its aspects, which we can call different objects. The objects of intuition are phenomena; the objects of understanding are conceptions; the objects of judgements are cognitions, the objects of cognitions are experiences, the objects of reason are principles; the object of will is volition, and so on.
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Quoting Esse Quam Videri
But sensation is in the sensory apparatuses. The content of the apparatuses is not what is transported on the nerves to the brain. The product of them is, but the product is very different from the content and the product doesn’t change, which further determination implies. So understanding and judgements must take, must concern themselves with, objects different than the objects of sensation.
One of the manifold of objects of tactile sensation is an itch. Neither understanding not judgement takes an itch and determines it further; they take the phenomenon represented by an itch, determine its cause (understanding) on the one hand, and affirm or deny the validity of that cause (judgment) on the other.
I agree with further determinations, though. One can say an itch is caused by a bug without contradicting himself, but he cannot say this itch is only caused by a bug when it is equally non-contradictory to say it is possibly caused by a wayward hair. Hence the benefit of a variety of sensory devices: got an itch, think bug (judge possible bug causality), see spider web (judge dismissal of bug, judge necessary web causality). Swipe web rather than slap bug. Life goes on.
We can leave it anywhere anytime. I think we’re pretty much disassociated on the finer points, and the common points aren’t interesting anyway.
The error dyad and perception
We've been talking about various kinds of cognition. What are the two poles of the dyad, with cognition? I think they are:
1. The outcome of the cognitive act.
2. The intentional target of the cognitive act.
The aim of any cognitive act is to match 1 and 2. Error is a mismatch.
Breaking down the examples we've been discussing into 1 --> 2
Communication: interpretation -- >meaning
Reasoning: conclusion --> correct conclusion
Memory: recalled event --> actual event
You have broken down perception this way:
Perception: perceptual act --> "correct" perceptual act
This doesn't match the other examples, and is not right. As DRists love saying: the intentional target of perception is not a perceptual act.
So what is the intentional target of perception? I was saying it was the DO, but now I think that's not quite right. I think the target is the state of the world.
Perception: Perceptual act --> world state
In your wall example, the cognitive product is the perception, or the perceptual act as you prefer, of the pink wall. The intentional targetis the state of the wall's color. The wall's color is a fact, not a perception, and can be expressed as words: "the wall is white".
Note that this is IR: the perceptual act discloses world state without being world state, and therefore intermediates between subject and world state.
Critically: unlike the other examples, the two terms of the perception dyad are not of like type. Interpretation is meaning, logical results are conclusions, memories resemble their targets. But perceptual acts are not facts about world states.
This is why perception is a stronger, more interesting indirection than the other examples, leading to what I think was your strongest objection.
objection 3: "this definition proves too much"
It is true that all of these cognitive acts are indirect by my definition. It shouldn't be surprising that indirection is structurally pervasive in cognition. Yet, perception stands out. We don't have 40 page threads discussing whether reasoning is indirect! I think the reason perception stands out is the disjunction I mentioned: the terms of the dyad are not of like type. This disjunction enables a stronger form of epistemic mediation:
Strong Epistemic Mediation:
Casual meditation introducing radical multiple realizability, such that at least two possible realizers share no properties whatsoever.
This works for perception, a hallucination of an apple shares no properties with an organic apple. It also works for the VS: a computer simulation shares no properties with an organic apple. But it doesn't work for the three other types of cognition. Either perception or technology that mimics it's structure is needed.
Objection 1: a observed intermediary isn't entailed
Multiple realization requires an intermediary of some kind. If the mediator transforms the input, the transformation must exist in some form, it must be housed somehow, separate from the input. This doesn't have to be an intermediate object; it could be a signal emerging from the mediator. To be aware of the mediator, the subject must at least be aware of this signal. If they are, they are aware of an intermediary.
Objection 2: this criterion applies to perception itself
Yes. If I am right about the nature of epistemic mediation, it follows (not definitionally, but as a consequence) that perception introduces epistemic mediation, and therefore IR is true.
Right — phenomenal character is necessary for awareness of the apple. But necessity (or counterfactual dependence) is not mediation. I can’t see the apple without my eyes, but my eyes aren’t what I see. Phenomenal character is what my awareness of the apple consists in — the mode of perceiving — not a second object I perceive on my way to the apple.
Quoting Mww
Agreed. Seems like we're running up against divergent starting points and background assumptions.
On the dyad:
You've reformulated my position as "perceptual act ? correct perceptual act" and then objected that the intentional target of perception isn't a perceptual act. But that wasn't my claim. My dyad is: the act as performed, measured against a normative standard fixed by the world — the wall's stable reflectance properties, normal illumination conditions, etc. The second term isn't "another perceptual act"; it's the worldly conditions that determine what a successful perceptual act would disclose. So the dyad is act vs. world-anchored norm, not act vs. act.
You then propose your own dyad: perceptual act ? world-state. And you say this is IR, because "the perceptual act discloses world-state without being world-state, and therefore intermediates between subject and world-state."
But look at what you've done. You've defined "intermediation" as: any cognitive act that discloses its target without being identical to its target. On that definition, every cognitive act is an intermediary — understanding intermediates between subject and meaning, memory intermediates between subject and past event, reasoning intermediates between subject and logical truth. You've made "indirect" trivially true of all cognition, which is exactly my objection.
The question was never whether the perceptual act is identical to the world-state. Obviously it isn't — an act of seeing a white wall is not the same thing as the wall's being white. The question is whether the act interposes an object between subject and world, or whether it constitutes the subject's openness to the world. You keep sliding from "the act is not identical to its target" to "therefore the act produces an intermediary entity." That inference is what I deny.
On "unlike types":
You claim perception is special because the two terms of the dyad are of unlike type — perceptual acts are not facts about world-states — whereas in other cases the terms are of like type. But I don't think this holds.
An interpretation is a mental act. The speaker's intended meaning is not a mental act of the listener — it's what the speaker meant, which is normatively fixed by their communicative intentions and the conventions of language. A recalled event is a present mental episode. The actual past event is a concrete historical occurrence that no longer exists. In both cases, the cognitive act and its target are of fundamentally unlike type — one is a present mental episode, the other is something in the world (a meaning, a past event, a logical relation) that the act aims to disclose.
You make these look "like" each other by using loose language: interpretation "is" meaning, memory "resembles" its target. But by that same loose standard, a perceptual act "is" a disclosure of world-state — just possibly an inaccurate one. If you tighten the standard, all the dyads involve unlike types. If you loosen it, none of them do — including perception.
On strong epistemic mediation:
You propose that perception involves “radical” multiple realizability—two possible realizers that share no properties whatsoever. A hallucinated apple and a real apple, you say, share no properties. But that’s overstated: hallucination and veridical perception share plenty of relevant properties (phenomenal character, inferential role, behavioral upshot). The difference is in fulfillment by the world, not in a total lack of shared properties. And in any case, the same kind of “radical” gap shows up wherever cognition can go wrong: a confabulated memory vs an actual past event, a delusional interpretation vs a speaker’s intended meaning, a fallacious inference vs a valid entailment. If your criterion tracks the mere possibility of empty vs fulfilled acts, it will generalize across cognition, not isolate perception as uniquely indirect.
On your response to my first objection:
You say: multiple realization requires an intermediary, the transformation must be "housed somehow," the subject must be aware of a "signal," and therefore the subject is aware of an intermediary.
But this just reasserts the conclusion. That the system transforms its input doesn't entail that the subject is aware of the transformation as an entity. I am causally mediated by my optic nerve, my visual cortex, and countless neural processes — these transformations are "housed" in my nervous system But I am not aware of my optic nerve. The processing occurs; I am not aware of the processing. I am aware of the world through the processing. You need an argument that the subject's awareness takes the transformation as its object, and you haven't provided one — you've simply inferred it from the existence of the transformation.
This is, at bottom, the same inference I've been resisting throughout: from "the system processes" to "the subject is aware of something processed." The first is a claim about subpersonal mechanism. The second is a claim about personal-level awareness. They are not the same claim, and the second does not follow from the first.
I'm not saying that the colour red is an object, just as I wouldn't say that my headache is an object. I'm saying that I see the colour red, that the colour red is a mental phenomenon, and that seeing the colour red (usually) mediates seeing 700nm light and/or a surface that reflects 700nm light.
You might say that "the colour red is what my awareness of 700nm light and/or a surface that reflects 700nm light consists in", but notice that there's no "X is what my awareness of the colour red (or a headache) consists in". That's why my perception of the colour red (or a headache) is direct/unmediated/immediate in a way that my perception of 700nm light and/or a surface that reflects 700nm light isn't. This sense of direct/unmediated/immediate perception is the sense that the naive realist claims about our perception of apples — that there is no "X is what my awareness of apples consists in", only apples as literal constituents of first-person experience — and is the view that the indirect realist is opposing.
Apologies for my long silence. I needed to reflect and find some clarity. All quotations are from the message in the "reply to" link.
So we agree that the apple isn't part of our experience. It's not much, but it is something. Suppose I understand seeing something as relationship between the subject who sees and an object which is seen. Then the demand that the apple be in my eye is a misunderstanding of what "see" means. I think that is down to thinking of introspection as, in some way, a paradigm of how the senses work. In that case, perception and hearing are suspect, just because they work at a distance from their objects. For me, it is introspection that is suspect, just because it cannot be wrong and therefore cannot be right. I think the model of perception (as involving a subject and an object that is distinct from the subject) collapses in introspection. Hence I regard "I am in pain" as not a proposition like "I see an apple"'. I go with Wittgenstein in thinking of it as an expression, not a statement.
A picture of an apple is not an apple. "Picture" and "apple" are distinct objects. We can say that a picture of an apple contains an image of an apple. That's what the concept of an image is for - to articulate the way in which the picture is a picture of an apple. So it is not follow from the fact that I perceive an apple that there is an actual apple in my mind; in the case of perception, of course, there isn't an image of an apple - only apple-appropriate behaviour. But that's sufficient. If the experience is thought of as some sort of copy or model, it is needles reduplication.
Well, there are grounds for calling the scientific story "indirect" and grounds for call it "direct". I think the relationship is more complicated than that. "I see an apple" has what is called "success logic". It is only true I do see an apple. It is like "I won the race", that is, it is about outcomes, not processes. The running of the race stands to the winning of the race in the same logical relationship is the scientific story stands to "I see an apple".
When I said it was partial, I only meant that we do not yet understand the complete process, because our understanding of the brain is as yet, in its infancy. I wasn't suggesting that it would always be partial. But note, the scientific story has no place for the experience of seeing an apple - though it may well find correlates in the way that it has found correlates to the experience of pain.
Just to be clear, I don't think "I see an apple" is anywhere near being any kind of theory. It is where theory might start, but only as the question - no particular answer is implied. See above on success logic. It follows, I think, as @Banno suggests, or at least, as I interpret him as suggestng, "Direct realism" as a theory of perception is coined as a reaction to indirect realism.
Yes, sure. Good stuff.
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, I think so. But suspect doesn't mean unreliable, I don't think. IT does mean liable to error, though I couldn't tell you what that would consist in particularly. I just find that gap non-worrying.
Quoting Ludwig V
Ok, i understand this and i think it has some serious force. Let's see where it goes..
Quoting Ludwig V
Yes, i'd say so. I think, and this is "think", I've not delved - that both are expressions of one's current phenomenal experience. Although, this could just be semantic: I often prefer to say "I look at" an object and then discuss what I see as part of my introspective (i guess?) phenomenal experience.
Quoting Ludwig V
Do you mean concepts?
Quoting Ludwig V
Can you say more about this? If what you mean is that the experience causes the appropriate behaviour for when one looks toward that object, I have a lot of questions lol. If it just means that teh senses behave apple-appropriate when looking toward one, that makes total sense to me and is a clever wee statement imo.
Quoting Ludwig V
Is this (and hte prior) suggesting that the model of use of "I see" should simply be when your experience tells you such? If so, I have no issue with that but it allows for hallucinations to be caught under the same banner as what the DRist would call direct awareness (or, i think better: veridical perception). That seems a bit of a shot-in-the-foot. But if this is something the DRist bites on, that's cool - It makes things tricky for my position for sure.
Quoting Ludwig V
Ah, okay, sorry. I definitely took more from that than I should have.
Quoting Ludwig V
I disagree in a significant, but also probably a bit pedantic sense: that is the required end-point of the story and the only one we knew in advance. I do agree that theres something like this:
1. Reflection
2. Reception
3. Transmutation
4. ????????
5. Phenomenal experience
though, so that's fair to point out, I accept it.
Quoting Ludwig V
I more-or-less agree with this take, and as you'll have noted, very much respect Banno's approach over most comers - but it boils down to a semantic argument that misses the disagreement at hand imo. He thinks otherwise, and onward we go :P
Appreciate it!
Agreement
I apologize I misrepresented you, though I think you will see the ambiguity of you go back over what you wrote.
So we agree that the perceptual dyad is:
Perceptual act --> fact/world state/world-anchored norm
I will treat these as equivalent unless you think they need distinguishing.
I also agree that the formulation "the perceptual act discloses world-state without being world-state, and therefore intermediates between subject and world-state" is not a knock down argument. I was just pointing out that the structure resembles a standard IR formulation. I will stick to my current thesis for now, that "the structures of perception introduce (strong) epistemic mediation between the subject and distal object, where SEM is proposed as casual meditation that introduces radical multiple realizability."
Like and unlike types
It is not through loose language that the types of the dyads of interpretation and memory are alike. An interpretation is a meaning. A recalled memory of an experience is an experience.
One way to see this is through reversibility:
Communication:
The intentional target of an act of interpretation is a meaning consistent with the norms and context of the communication. Even if you are trying to match what is in the speakers head, the targeted ideal is a meaning matching the speakers meaning, not the literal content of the speakers mind.
interpretation --> intended meaning
"I saw the man with the telescope".
A: I saw the man through the telescope.
B: I saw the man holding the telescope.
It could be the listener interpreted A, but B was intended. Or the listener interpreted B, but A was intended.
Memory:
The intentional target of the act of recall is not a world event. It is a past experience. When you recall the pink wall, a re-experience of the pink wall correctly realizes the memory. Not a white wall. Memories can be of any past experience: thoughts, feelings, ideas, not just things that happen in the world.
Re-experience --> past experience
Recollection of wife's grocery instruction:
A: "Make sure to buy eggs"
B: "Make sure to buy Eggo waffles"
It could be you recalled A, but she said B. Or, you recalled B, but she said A.
This doesn't work for perception. The intentional target of perception is not a perception, it is a fact (or rather, a manifold of facts). And so you cannot reverse the perception of a red wall with the fact there is a white wall.
Another way to see this is to see that interpretation and recall are mental-->mental operations. You can put someone in a sensory deprivation tank and they can still recall and interpret all day. Only perception reaches out into the world, creating a mental-physical type disjunction.
Also note that the general indirection of cognition is not trivial. It is the structural reason why any cognition is never certain. The subject never knows whether the two terms of the dyad match.
Radical multiple realization
Strictly speaking you are right, it is impossible for two realizers to share zero properties. At the bare minimum, they must share the property of realizing in the same way. And so this is the minimal property that two realizers share. Phenomenal character, inferential role, behavioral upshot are properties of the realized, not the realizer, and so they are logically downstream of the minimal shared property.
Whereas, there is only one realizer of memories, and interpretation: the mind. It might properly realize these, or is might not. But there is not nearly the scope of possible realizers.
Objection 1 revisited
The logic is clear:
* Perception involves multiple realization
* The subject is aware of the realized, not the realizer, per hallucination
* Multiple realization must involve a transformation
* The subject is therefore aware of a transformation
I never arguued that the subject takes the transformation as it's object. The world is the object, the transformation meditates it's apprehension.
Perhaps "suspect" is the wrong word. If you mean that you are not bothered by the fact that we sometimes "see" (and "hear") things wrongly, neither am I. We can notice the mistakes and put them right.
Perhaps it would be better to say that because seeing and hearing work at a distance, there are questions that can be asked (and hopefully answered) that do not apply to the results of introspection. I'm inclined to say that it is being at a distance that creates the room for error - and, in my book, truth.
(Qualification - In one way, smell arguably also works at a distance. But, unlike seeing and hearing, it does not directly give us any information about distance or direction, and is dependent on actual molecules of the substance smelt entering the nose. So I'm treating it as like touch, etc.)
Quoting AmadeusD
I wouldn't disagree with the first sentence.
I'm not sure what you mean by the remark that this could be just semantic. Could you explain and especially why being semantic is not relevant.
Quoting AmadeusD
This was about the idea that my experience of an apple must contain an apple.
Quoting Ludwig V
If a picture can be a picture of an apple without containing an apple, then I don't see why an actual apple must be part of the experience of seeing an apple. Of course, that depends on the idea that an experience is a kind of picture. If that's not the case, the argument lapses.
Quoting AmadeusD
Yes. I did mean the first. There is certainly more to be said.
Quoting AmadeusD
No, I don't think that is pedantic. People often assume that the output of the system is an image or an experience or something. But that doesn't help at all. We can avoid the metaphysical arguments about what those things are if we stick to the obvious and say that the output of the sensory system is knowledge of the external world. Then we need to explain what effect that knowledge has on us. In combination with our needs and desires it initiates our actions and it guides them when they are under way. It's only a gesture towards a beginning, but it at least tells us something worth knowing.
Quoting AmadeusD
Roughly, yes.
Quoting AmadeusD
I've worried a lot about hallucinations. I think my answer is roughly this. (This is the first time I have ever tried to articulate this, so it is provisonal. (My reference for hallucinations is the scene in Shakespeare's play when Macbeth hallucinates a dagger in front of him. It saves thinking.)
There is no dagger, so Macbeth does not see a dagger. But he thinks he sees a dagger. This is a puzzle. I think the answer has to lie in the fact that we can imagine things - not necessarily by conjuring up images in our heads, but sometimes in that way. People seem to vary in this. Some people have very weak visual imaginations (aphantasia) and some people much stronger ones. Often this process is under voluntary control - we decide what we will "see" and we create it (day-dreaming). But this is not always the case, as in night-time dreaming. Hallucinating is a process like dreaming - think of it as partial dreaming, in which an involuntary imagining is superimposed on reality.
So there's no shot-in-the-foot, just a graceful admission that imagining things is part of life. The philosophical argument is not about that. It is about the claim that everything that we see is an imagining. That's false. "Imagining" would lose its meaning if it were true.
Quoting AmadeusD
There is a complication here, though I don't know how relevant it is. But it might bear on the meaning of "direct" and "indirect". I'm trying to avoid talking about that issue and I'm not sure how relevant people would think it is.
1 If we take introspection as our model of direct perception, we need to be aware that pain and similar sensations are just as dependent on physical machinery as seeing and hearing. We have specialized pain receptors and nerves for pain, heat and cold, body position and so on. So, if introspection is direct perception, it is not because there is no physical machinery involved. The difference between direct and indirect is just the boundaries of the physical body.
2 When I am in pain, that non-truth-functional event becomes a normal truth-functional event when it is recognized by other people. But I can see it in that way too, and so it becomes possible for me to assess right and wrong in the same way that they do. So I can know that my pain is a phantom pain in the same way that everyone else does. Separating these two points of view is very tricky.
I was quite nervous about my post. I'm very glad you thought it worth something.
Neat move. But I think the problem is that you are blurring constitutive and meditative relationships. Batter and frosting is what my cake consists of, but it does not meditate between me and the cake. EQV, and direct realism on general, is claiming that sensations are constitutive, not meditative.
is right. You’re treating “whatever my awareness consists in” as an intermediary by definition, but that is exactly the point under dispute.
On like and unlike types:
Your reversibility argument is interesting, so let me engage with it directly.
You say that in memory, the act and target are of like type: a recalled experience targets a past experience. And in interpretation, an interpretation targets a meaning. But in perception, the act and target are of unlike type: a perceptual act targets a world-state.
I think you're applying an asymmetric standard. When you say "a recalled experience is an experience targeting an experience," you're characterizing both terms at a high level of abstraction — they're both "experiential." But a present act of remembering is not the same kind of thing as a past lived experience. One is occurring now, the other no longer exists. One is reconstructive, the other was original. If I recall the pink wall, my present memory-act is not the past seeing — it's a present mental event that aims at something beyond itself, namely a determinate past episode that may or may not have occurred as recalled. That's structurally identical to what you say about perception: a present act aiming at something beyond itself.
You make memory and interpretation look "like-typed" by abstracting both terms to "mental." But by the same logic, I can make perception look "like-typed" by abstracting both terms to "disclosure" — the perceptual act is a disclosure, and the world-state is what the act purports to disclose. The abstraction level determines the result, not the underlying structure. So your "like-type" claim is not a structural insight into cognition; it's an artifact of shifting the grain of description mid-argument.
Even if I grant that the intentional target of memory is a past experience rather than a past event, the present act of remembering is still not identical to that past experience — so the dyad remains unlike-typed in exactly the way you say perception is.
Your sensory deprivation point — that memory and interpretation can proceed without concurrent world-contact — is true but cuts in my favor. Perception's constitutive involvement with the world is exactly what makes it a case of direct openness to reality. It's not a defect that introduces a special epistemic gap; it's the feature that grounds the epistemic contact the other cognitive acts lack.
On radical multiple realizability:
You've conceded that two realizers can't literally share zero properties, and that phenomenal character, inferential role, and behavioral upshot belong to the realized, not the realizer. So "radical" multiple realizability amounts to: the realizers differ in their physical-causal origins. But this is true of memory as well. A memory can be produced by faithful encoding, reconstructive inference, external suggestion, confabulation, or neurological malfunction. These causal pathways share no properties other than terminating in the same neural system — which is exactly the minimal shared property you identified for perception (realizing in the same way). You say "there is only one realizer of memories: the mind." But the mind is not one causal pathway — it's a system capable of generating the same output through radically different processes. "The mind" is doing the same work here as "the brain" does in the perception case. The distinction you're drawing is between where the causal chain starts (world vs. mind), not between the structures of realization.
On objection 1 revisited:
Your argument is:
This doesn't follow. From (1) and (2), you can conclude that the subject is aware of the product of a transformative process. But being aware of a product is not the same as being aware of it as mediated or as a transformation. A transformation can be a necessary causal condition for awareness without being an intentional term within awareness.
Consider translation: when I read Homer in English, my access to Homer is certainly "transformed" by the translator's activity. But it doesn't follow that I'm directly aware of an intermediary "translation-object" and only indirectly aware of Homer. The transformation is operational, not objectual. The translator's work is a necessary condition for my reading, but Homer — not the translation as such — is what I engage with.
You then say: "the world is the object, the transformation mediates its apprehension." But this is a restatement of IR, not an argument for it. I agree the perceptual system transforms its input. I agree the subject is aware of the result. I deny that the result is an intermediary entity standing between the subject and the world. It can equally be the subject's achieved awareness of the world — awareness that is world-directed in its intentionality even though it was produced by a transformative process.
And note something interesting about your own premises. You say "the subject is aware of the realized, not the realizer, per hallucination." In hallucination, the realizer is just the neural system. But in veridical perception, the realizer includes the world — the apple's reflectance properties, the ambient light, the entire causal chain from object to retina. If the subject is aware of what is realized by this process, and this process constitutively involves the world, then the subject is aware of something whose realization is worldly. That is direct realism.
The hallucination case is the one where the world drops out of the realization — it's the failure case. You're treating the failure case as the paradigm and then asking how the world gets back in. I'm treating the success case as the paradigm and noting that the failure case is precisely a failure — a perceptual act that lacks the world-involvement that would make it veridical.
You appear to accept that colours are mental phenomena and that seeing different colours is how we see different wavelengths of light and/or surfaces that reflect different wavelengths of light. I don't understand what else you think it would mean for mental phenomena to be an intermediary. This just is what I understand indirect realism to be, in contrast to the naive view that colours are not mental phenomena but mind-independent properties of distal objects which are more-than-causally constituents of first-person phenomenal experience.
I think we directly perceive the distal object as colored and shaped. You seem to think we directly perceive colors and shapes (as mental phenomena) and then infer the distal object as their cause. That’s the substantive disagreement.
Given that you agreed that naive color realism is false, I don't even know what you mean by saying "we directly perceive the distal object as colored". Once again, I think it's simply the case that you and I mean different things by the phrase "direct perception".
So I'm going to not use the words "direct", "indirect", or "intermediary" at all.
Group A believes that distal objects are constituents of first-person phenomenal experience such that the qualities of this first-person phenomenal experience are the mind-independent properties of these distal objects.
Group B believes that distal objects are only causally responsible for first-person phenomenal experience, that these distal objects and this first-person phenomenal experience are ontologically separate, and that at least some of the qualities (e.g. colour) of this first-person phenomenal experience are not the sort of things that can be mind-independent properties of these distal objects.
I am a member of Group B, and Group B is supported by our scientific understanding of physics, physiology, neuroscience, and psychology.
Nothing else is relevant to my position on the topic of perception.
Group B is not a single position. It contains at least two very different interpretations:
B1 (your view): phenomenal qualities are inner mental items (qualia/sense-data) and perception of distal objects is mediated by direct awareness of these inner items.
B2 (my view): phenomenal qualities are modes of disclosure of the distal object. They are neither mind-independent intrinsic properties nor intermediary objects, but relational properties that obtain in virtue of the interaction between perceiver, object, and environment.
I see two different ways of talking about the exact same physical, physiological, and mental facts. These two different ways of talking about it create the illusion of a disagreement where there is none. A rejection of A (naive realism) in favour of B — however you choose to "interpret" B — amounts to indirect realism as I understand it.
Whereas I see two mutually incompatible accounts of perception that both happen to reject naive realism — one reifying phenomenal character into an inner intermediary, and one treating it as a mode of disclosure.
I think your statement and mine sum up the disagreement between us quite well. I don't think we're going to get any further clarity on this.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
The problem is I agree with this. Qualia are modes of disclosure, and (in perception) exist in virtue of a relationship between observer and observed. This alone does not distinguish from A.
But as I pointed out earlier, this is a one sided relationship, where the brain is working furiously, burning calories to instantiate the relationship, while the distal object just sits there. Qualia don't need distal objects, per hallucination, imagination and dreaming. Whereas without brains, there are no qualia. Qualia are features of brains, that instantiate (in perception) in relation to distal objects.
Do you disagree with any of the above?
I agree: the brain does all the metabolic work. I agree: without brains, no qualia. I agree: qualia can occur endogenously — hallucination, dreaming, imagination. I agree: the distal object "just sits there." I agree: qualia exist in virtue of a relationship between observer and observed, and that this relationship is asymmetric.
Where I disagree is with the inference from all of the above to "qualia are features of brains." Qualia are features of conscious acts (modes of disclosure) that brains enable.
The question between us, then, is not whether the brain is necessary for qualia (obviously yes), or whether the brain is doing the causal work (obviously yes), but whether "enabled by the brain" entails "an inner item interposed between subject and world." I've been arguing throughout that it doesn't — that causal dependence on a system is not the same as epistemic mediation by an inner object of awareness.
Type conflict and type coercion:
I think I am applying the same standard to all three operations: interpretation, memory, and perception. All three are acts. All three have outcomes. And all three have goals: what the outcome should be. The latter two are the terms of our dyad.
I think we are in agreement on the outcome: Focusing on the goal: What is the goal of interpretation? To produce a meaning consistent with intent, context, and norms. Or, to produce a meaning reflecting the meaning in the speakers head. Not to take the meaning out of the speaker's head, and somehow put it in our own. That is not possible. Success is when the first term of the dyad matches the second: when the interpretation produced reflects the appropriate norms, or the speaker's meaning. Note that under your interpretation, the terms of the dyad could never match, as the goal cannot be fulfilled.
What is the goal of memory? To produce an experience matching an experience that happened in the past. Not to somehow transpose a past experience into the present. That is not possible. Success is when the terms of the dyad match: the actual remembered experience matches the past experience. Again, under your interpretation the dyad could never match.
What is the goal of perception? To produce a relevant fact about the world that tracks the world's built in normative properties. What is the outcome? A perception. However you define it, a perception certainly is not a fact. There must be an additional operation: a type coercion, taking a perception, and producing a fact about the world. Only then can the dyad be matched.
This type coercion is what you call "inference". It is the mental operation whereby facts are derived from perception. It introduces the danger you are likely familiar with: there is no guarantee that the outcome is really a fact about the world at all. It might be derived from a hallucination, not a world tracking perception. This result is not just false, it is nonsense.
Note that this is not a concern with interpretation or memory at all. Good or bad, the result of interpretation must be an interpretation. True or false, a recall event must be an experience. There is no room for it to be otherwise. The "type coercion" which only features in perception is the root of radical multiple realizability, and thus strong epistemic mediation.
A curious analogy
The part of your response I found most surprising was the translation analogy. Either you made a mistake, or we have a major disagreement about what "direct" means. It is hard for me to imagine the perspective whereby a translation provides direct access to to Homer. The translation is exactly what we have direct access to, it is exactly through this "translation-object" that we access Homer. This is a striking example of one of the mistakes that run throughout your writing: the equation of intentional target and directness.
What indirect realism is not
IR does not say: "qualia are the intentional target of perception". IR is perfectly content with the distal object as the intentional target. Although importantly, qualia may be the target as well. Intention is orthogonal to directness, intention may target what is direct or indirect.
Just as, we usually intentionally focus on the action TV images portray, not the flickering 2d images as such. We usually focus on Homers meaning, not the qualities of the translation.
IR does not say: "the subject only sees qualia." Seeing is a relationship between subject and object whereby the subject sees the object through the experience of qualia. By experiencing qualia, the subject can see something that qualia themselves are not: the distal object.
Just as, we really do see the subject of a photograph, by seeing the photograph. We really do experience Homer's meanings by reading his translation.
IR does say: The relationship between experience and object is characterized by epistemic mediation, whereby experience meditates epistemic access to the object.
Epistemic mediation: a better definition
I think this gives a more intuitive picture of what epistemic mediation actually is:
Epistemic mediation is a special type of casual relationship between what is at hand and what is not, whereby what is at hand grants epistemic access to what is not.
The photograph and its subject are casually related in such a way that the photograph, at hand, grants epistemic access to the subject, not at hand. Homer and his translation are casually related in such a way that his translation, at hand, grants epistemic access to what is not at hand, Homer. And experience, the IRist claims, are casually related such that experience, at hand, grants epistemic access to distal objects, not at hand.
Do you agree with this definition?
It's an epistemic intermediary because my intellect cannot reach out beyond my body to grasp the mind-independent nature of distal objects. The phenomenal character of first-person experience is the only non-inferential "information" accessible to me. That's an unavoidable consequence of B over A.
And I'm not entirely sure what you mean by reifying phenomenal character. If you think that I think that phenomenal character is some material object with extension and mass, and that I'm a homunculus looking at and touching this phenomenal character as a Cartesian theatre, then you are clearly misunderstanding me.
1) On "type coercion" and inference
Your framing is interesting, but it assumes what needs to be argued. You say perception produces a perception, but its goal is a world-fact, so there must be an additional operation that "coerces" perception into a fact.
But this already presupposes that perceptual experience arrives typed as non-worldly — as a free-floating inner item that must be interpreted into world-directed content. On the phenomenology I'm defending, perceptual experience is not merely an inner episode that later gets coerced into a world-fact. It already purports to disclose the world, albeit defeasibly and corrigibly. Judgment is not a type-conversion from perception into fact; it is the normative ratification of what perception already presents.
So yes, judgment introduces explicit commitment. But the world-directedness is not added by inference; it is intrinsic to the perceptual act.
2) On "matching" in interpretation and memory
You suggest that on my view the dyad in interpretation or memory could never "match," because we can't literally transpose the speaker's meaning or the past experience into the present.
But matching does not require numerical identity, or even identity of ontological type. Interpretation succeeds when it grasps the same meaning — repeatable content, not the same mental token. Memory succeeds when it recalls what occurred, not when it recreates the past episode as numerically the same experience.
You say interpretation can match its target because both are meanings. But a perception can also match its target in the relevant sense: it can accurately disclose a state of affairs. "Matching" in every case means getting it right — grasping what is the case. That doesn't require the cognitive act and its target to be of the same ontological type. A measurement can be correct without the act of measuring being the same kind of thing as the quantity measured. No one treats a measurement as an intermediary object between the scientist and the measured quantity — it's a successful cognitive achievement.
3) On translation and "directness"
You say it's obvious that in translation we have direct access to the translation-object and only indirect access to Homer. But that presupposes that "direct" means "physically at hand."
On my usage, "direct" is intentional: what is directly grasped is what the act is of. When I read Homer in English, I am indeed reading English words. But what I understand through those words is Homer's meaning. The words are the vehicle of understanding, not its terminus. Similarly, neural activity is the vehicle of perception, not its terminus. In both cases, there is a causal and semantic vehicle that I operate through rather than an intermediary that I am aware of.
This is exactly the distinction I'm drawing in perception: the enabling vehicle is not automatically an epistemic intermediary object.
4) On your clarification of what IR is and isn't
I want to highlight something important. You now say that IR does not say qualia are the intentional target of perception — the distal object is the target. IR does not say the subject only sees qualia — the subject sees the distal object through qualia. Qualia are the medium through which seeing occurs.
But notice: the intentional target is the distal object, the subject sees the distal object, and qualia are the medium through which this seeing occurs. That is precisely what I have been calling operational mediation — the system's activity constitutes the subject's awareness of the world, and phenomenal character is the mode of that awareness. You are describing my view and labeling it IR.
So I'll ask directly: what is the substantive difference between your position and mine? If it is that you prefer the word "indirect" for any cognition that proceeds through a vehicle or medium, then the disagreement is terminological rather than philosophical.
5) On your definition of epistemic mediation
You propose: epistemic mediation is a causal relationship whereby what is at hand grants epistemic access to what is not at hand.
I agree with this as a definition of operational mediation. But if you mean it as a definition of indirect realism, it applies to all cognition — memory, reasoning, interpretation, perception alike — and the distinctive IR thesis drops out. "Experience grants epistemic access to the world" is just another way of saying perception is intentional. It doesn't yet establish that experience is an intermediary object.
You've now offered several definitions of epistemic mediation over the course of our exchange — physical intermediary, multiple realizability, radical multiple realizability, and now "what is at hand granting access to what is not." In each case, the definition has turned out to be either too broad (applying to all cognition, making IR trivially true) or question-begging (presupposing that the vehicle of awareness is an object of awareness). I don't think that pattern is accidental.
The real question remains: does the vehicle of perceptual access become an object of awareness? That is the step that separates IR from DR, and it is the step that has not been established.
This is the core of our disagreement, and I think it's worth flagging that it's a metaphor, not an argument. It pictures the mind as an enclosed space and knowing as a kind of reaching. The entire "intentionality" tradition, from Brentano onward, challenges exactly this picture: to be conscious is already to be directed beyond oneself. The question "how does the mind get outside itself?" presupposes a separation that intentionality denies.
On reification: I don't think you're imagining a Cartesian theatre, per se. But when you say phenomenal character is "the only non-inferential information accessible to me," you're treating it as something to be accessed — an item the intellect has contact with. I'm saying it's not an item accessed but the accessing itself — the mode in which the world shows up. That's the distinction I mean by reification, and it doesn't require homunculi.
As explained before, I'm not concerned with intentionality; I'm concerned with distal objects and their properties not being constituents of first-person experience, and so with phenomenal qualities being mental phenomena and epistemic intermediaries. Describing these phenomenal qualities — whether colours, smells, tastes, or pains — as being "the mode in which the world shows up" doesn't make what I'm saying any less true. If anything, this phrasing is vacuous; nothing more than the truism that this is what the world causes me to experience.
Yes, we have now restated our divergence (once again): you see a vacuous terminological dispute, I see a substantive metaphysical disagreement. I think this is as far as we're going to get.
This then is the core disagreement. I believe your usage diverges totally from the larger debate.
So yes, I'm in full agreement that, by your usage, perception is "direct". But your usage is vacuous: by it, everything is direct, even our contact with Homer.
In your mind, is it possible to be indirectly aware of anything at all?
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Obviously we are aware of perceptual awareness, and obviously we can intentionally target it. To me, that is what matters. That under some definitions it is not an "object" I afford zero significance.
I don't think my view has trouble accommodating indirect awareness. I am indirectly aware of a crime scene through eyewitness testimony; indirectly aware of what’s behind me through a mirror; indirectly aware of a distant galaxy through a telescope photograph.
In each case, there is a distinct intermediary that I am aware of, and through which I form beliefs about something further. The intermediary can be identified, inspected, and evaluated on its own terms. That is what makes the access indirect.
Perception is not like this. In ordinary perception there is no independently characterizable intermediary that I am aware of and through which I infer the world. The phenomenal character of the perceptual act is not something I first inspect and then use to reach the world — it is my awareness of the world. That’s the distinction, and it isn’t vacuous. It separates cases with a genuine epistemic intermediary from cases where the cognitive act just is the subject's engagement with its target.
And yes, I agree that contact with Homer through translation has the structure of indirectness on my account. You are aware of the English text as a distinct, inspectable intermediary, and you access Homer’s meaning through it. You can evaluate the translation on its own terms, compare translations, notice the translator’s choices, etc.
On your second point: you say “obviously we are aware of perceptual awareness, and obviously we can intentionally target it.” I agree — but that’s introspection, and it’s a distinct cognitive act. “I can attend to my seeing” is not the same as “in every act of seeing I am aware of an intermediary.” The possibility of introspection doesn’t entail that perception is always mediated by an object of introspective awareness.
So you have dropped intentionality as a criterion, and are back to what I was advocating for when I suggested a photograph as a model for the IR claim. But note the difficulties this creates. Just as intentionality is too broad a criterion, making everything direct, intermediating object is too broad, making everything indirect:
* Seeing through glass is indirect
* Wearing glasses renders vision indirect, as it introduces visible distortions and spots
* Smoke and fog make all seeing indirect
Moreover, you have to make some very counterintuitive claims in order to make perception, but not seeing through glass, "direct":
* Awareness of the red of a stop sign is "introspection"
* Awareness of the sound of a chime is "introspection"
* Awareness of the smell of ammonia is "introspection"
Even listening to music, which doesn't have a real distal object at all: "introspection"
I don't agree. I don't think there is any introspective cognitive act between hearing a chime and being aware of the sound of a chime. What is your evidence of this intermediary?
But, you are making an even stronger (and stranger) claim: that awareness is first of the object itself, and only secondarily, via introspection, of the sensation. Forget phenomenology, how does this even work on a systems level? How does awareness of the object come first, when the sensation is exactly what reveals it?
How would you answer a TV junkie who makes your argument for a TV? "I'm directly aware of the action on the TV, not the TV. The physical TV is the enablement of my awareness of the action. The TV is how the action presents itself to me. Awareness of the TV itself is possible, but only secondarily, as an act of introspection. It itself is not an independent object of perception."
I guess that some reality junkies would make the same arguments for reality should not be surprising.
:meh:
That's a strange thing to say. My reply would be that your actions in the world contradict this.
I think you’re running together causal intermediacy with epistemic/intentional intermediacy.
1) Glass/fog/glasses don’t make perception “indirect” in the IR sense.
They are conditions that modulate how the same world-directed act succeeds or fails. They don’t introduce a distinct intentional terminus that I am aware of and only through which I access the world. Most of the time I don’t see “the glass” at all; I see the street through it. If the glass becomes salient (dirty, scratched), then it can become the object—but that’s a shift in what my attention takes as its target, not proof that the glass was always the immediate object.
That’s the difference from a TV or photograph: there the image is itself a public, inspectable object that can stably function as the terminus of awareness (pixels, screen, frame, resolution). That’s what makes “indirect” natural there.
2) I’m not claiming awareness of qualia requires a separate introspective act.
You’re right: there isn’t an extra act “between” hearing a chime and being aware of the chime’s sound. The phenomenal character is simply how the chime is heard. What I deny is that the phenomenal character is thereby a second object the hearing terminates on.
So: redness-as-seen, chiming-as-heard, pungency-as-smelled are not “introspected objects” in the first instance. They are features of the perceiving—the mode in which the distal thing is present. We can thematize them reflectively (“listen to the timbre,” “attend to the hue”), but that’s a change of stance, not the baseline structure.
3) “How can awareness of the object come first if sensation reveals it?”
Because “sensation” here is not a freestanding item that gets noticed first and then interpreted into an object. It is the vehicle of disclosure, not an inner object of disclosure. The system-level story is: neural/sensory processing enables an act whose intentional terminus is the world. That’s not mysterious unless we assume in advance that whatever enables awareness must itself be what awareness is of.
4) The TV junkie case actually helps distinguish the views.
A TV viewer is directly aware of an image/sound presentation and only through that indirectly aware of the event (which might be live, recorded, simulated, edited). Here “epistemic mediation” makes sense because there is a stable intermediary object (the audiovisual display) that can be inspected independently of the event.
In ordinary perception there is no analogous intermediary object “on display” for an inner observer. The neural processes are enabling conditions, not presented items. That’s exactly the step you keep asserting but haven’t shown: that because processing occurs, the subject is therefore aware of a processed intermediary.
So I’m not saying “everything is direct because it’s intentional,” and I’m not saying “everything is indirect because something is between.” I’m saying: indirect realism requires a distinct object of awareness interposed between subject and world—and your glass/fog cases don’t supply that, while TV/photos do.
On your view, what is the intermediary object of awareness in ordinary perception, analogous to the TV screen image—something we can in principle re-identify and inspect as the terminus of awareness? If your answer is “the experience itself,” then you owe an account of why experience isn’t just the act’s manner of disclosing the world.
I'd lay the blame at the many misconceptions in "...the mind-independent nature of distal objects".
I've never seen anyone do anythign remote closely to what Michael describes. One who's never left their room, but wears VR could be said to appear that way. This just, again, as always, misses the issue entirely. I suspect it's just not interesting to the likes of yourself, Essa and Banno - but then, why continue contributing?
When Banno claims he has, it makes no sense. He just claims it. Onward we go..
Actions don't demonstrate confidence in mind-independence, as if you couldn't act without sorting that out first. :lol:
Could you perhaps try to say something I can respond to, if you're going to?
I might have been responding to the wrong thing. I thought you were talking about mentally verifying mind-independence. Michael said we can't do that. Someone else commented that our actions demonstrate that we're doing it, which is absurd.
I agree.
You know my answer is experience itself.
Your account seems to hinge on what appears to be a very thin distinction: the experience itself is not an "object of awareness", it is the "perceptual act's manner of disclosing the world". But there is a problem: I agree. I see nothing problematic in that phrasing.
At the same time, the image is the TV's manner of disclosing the "action". And, the TV image is an"object of awareness". There is nothing contradictory in these two descriptions.
Experience is an object of awareness, and perception's manner of disclosing the world. Where is the contradiction?
I'm not saying there is a contradiction, I'm saying that no good reason has been given for treating "experience" itself as the object of perception, whereas there are good reasons for not treating it as such (e.g. it has no criteria of identity, persistence, affordance or counterfactuality).
It seems like the discussion is starting to loop now. Perhaps we've hit bedrock.
I'd like to clarify that this isn't what I said. I said that my intellect cannot reach out beyond my body to grasp the mind-independent nature of distal objects. Cognition is either reducible to or emerges from neural activity in the brain, and the only information accessible to it is information present in the brain.
I'm not an idealist. I believe that there is a mind-independent world and that the information accessible to me suffices to justify this belief. I just recognise that distal objects and their properties are only causally responsible for and not also constituents of first-person phenomenal experience, and so that this phenomenal experience is an epistemic intermediary.
Cool. A lot of the wording you're using could stand some clarification, like what you mean by intellect and information. There's a sense of information that has to do with variations in the sensory input to your brain. Strictly speaking, your intellect doesn't have access to that. It has access to a model that's been updated based on that information.
The model isn't built out of data coming from the outside world. Kant explains in the Transcendental Aesthetic why it can't be. The basic building blocks of the model aren't things you learn at any point. They're embedded in your cognition. But among the features of the model are things like space and time, and therefore the very idea of information, whether it's sensory data or information in the form of facts, obtaining states of affairs, or however you put it.
One of the posters had stated that your activities indicate that your intellect does reach out beyond your body to grasp the mind-independent nature of distal objects. I guess I don't know what that means or how it relates to what your said.
Quoting Michael
Mind-independence is an idea that plays a part in a very abstract realm of pure ideas. It ties into your base-line worldview. This is beyond basic perception and navigation of the world. If your mind was a corporation, the part that thinks about mind-independence is the board of directors. They aren't involved in everyday decisions, and if things that you do directly contradict their adopted outlines, they can't really do anything about it. Plus, they're asleep most of the time. They only wake up when you start getting philosophical. Then they brush their teeth, wash their faces, and act like they know what they're doing.
I gotta say….all that follows from what you said there, fits my mindset, and I have no qualms calling myself an idealist. Certain brand thereof perhaps, but still….
Maybe it’s like the mattress ad on tv: they want their product to be known as a “restorative sleep provider”, but it’s just a damn mattress after all.
You still haven't explained why " object of perception" is necessary. Why doesn't, for instance "perceptual intermediary" suffice?
If it is established that qualia
* Is apprehensible
* Is logically prior to apprehension of the object
* Is the sole constituent of experience, such that were it removed from experience, nothing would remain
This seems sufficient to establish qualia as a perceptual intermediary. Why do we need these extra object criteria?
Do the images on the VS meet the criteria identity, persistence, affordance or counterfactuality? Keep in mind, it is not the housing, not the electronics, not the physical pixels that are the intermediary. These are the intermediary's implementation. It is the images themselves that intermediate.
If the images do not meet these criteria, yet they intermediate between the viewer and the subject, then these object criteria are irrelevant.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I think some looping is inevitable. I actually don't think we have quite hit bedrock yet. But if you think it is getting repetitive, or you have just had enough, I certainly understand. It's been a hell of a discussion, either way.
This was something that was discussed at length earlier in the thread. The TLDR is that, on my view, perception is an intrinsically normative and publicly assessable act that is not fully reducible to causal analysis. In order for perception to be publicly assessable, whatever plays the role of "the object of perception" must satisfy criteria of re-identification and intersubjective reference that qualia, as such, cannot satisfy.
Quoting hypericin
I apologize if I have given the impression that I would accept the three of these claims. While I would accept the first with qualifications, I would not accept the other two. Those two claims are basically the whole indirect realist picture. If you assume them, then of course “qualia as intermediary” follows — but that’s exactly what’s at issue.
Quoting hypericin
The images absolutely do have criteria of identity and persistence. They can be re-identified across frames, inspected for artifacts, compared with other feeds, paused, replayed, etc. That’s precisely why they can function as intermediaries. They have a determinate structure independent of the distal apple.
If you deny that the VS image has any such identity conditions, then it’s hard to see what could even count as “the same image” across time, and the analogy stops doing the work you want it to do.
So yes: I insist on “object-like” criteria because without them “intermediary” becomes too thin to do the necessary philosophical work. “Apprehensible” is not enough; what matters is whether awareness terminates in something that can be specified and tracked as distinct from the distal object. That’s what happens in VS. It’s not what happens in ordinary perception.
Quoting hypericin
After 42 pages I think I'm getting a little burnt out on the topic, but I agree it's been a great discussion.
I'm curious, doesn't this rule out subjective idealism a priori? Or is it only the case that if subjective idealism is false then "perception is an intrinsically normative and publicly assessable act"?
I don't think so. Take George Berkeley as an example. He's the paradigmatic subjective idealist, but he would not deny that perception is normative and publicly assessable. He might push back on the notion that perception is intrinsically normative since he ultimately grounds his system in God's coordinating actions. But I'm not ruling that out by fiat. If someone wants to argue that the normativity of perception is reducible, eliminable, grounded in God's will, etc. then I'm happy to have that discussion.
To keep it simple, it's subjective idealism without God. Minds — including qualia — are the only things which exist. Rather than mental phenomena emerging from neural activity there's just mental phenomena.
Is perception possible? If so, how can it be "normative and publicly assessable"? What are the "objects" of perception?
As for Berkeley, from here:
I would think that your interpretation of perception must rule out (2) by definition.
On godless subjective idealism: I think perception becomes very difficult to sustain without some ground for normativity — whether that's mind-independent objects, divine coordination, or transcendental structure. If all that exists is minds and qualia, with no external standard, then the distinction between veridical perception and hallucination collapses — both are just qualia occurring in a mind. Error becomes unintelligible, because there's nothing to get right or wrong about. Incoherence among qualia only generates a norm if there's a reason to expect coherence, and without something beyond qualia to ground that expectation, there isn't one.
So yes: I think godless subjective idealism can't sustain the normativity of perception. But I don't think that's a problem for my starting point — I think it's a problem for that view.
On Berkeley's (2): yes, my account does reject "we perceive only ideas," but not by definitional fiat. It rejects it by argument — the argument that what functions as the object of perceptual cognition must satisfy conditions (re-identifiability, public accessibility, stability) that ideas-as-such don't satisfy. Berkeley himself recognized this, which is why he needed God to ensure that ideas meet the criteria of objecthood. Without God, premise (2) leaves perception without a proper object.
And I'd note that Berkeley's argument turns on an equivocation on "perceive." In (1), "perceive" means ordinary world-directed awareness. In (2), it means "have ideas." The conclusion only follows if both premises use the word in the same sense. My framework is, among other things, an insistence on not letting that equivocation pass.
Okay, but it doesn't follow that these people don't see, hear, feel, taste, and smell things, or that the things they see, hear, feel, taste, and smell aren't qualia/sense-data/ideas/etc.
The introduction of material objects doesn't make the above sense of perception disappear. You've just introduced additional components to perception. So we have:
1. Perception of qualia
2. Normativity of perception
3. Perception with "proper" objects (whatever that means)
If subjective idealism is true then only (1) is true, but if subjective idealism is false then (1) is still true. Unless you want to argue that (1) is true if and only if material objects don't exist?
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Then we have:
(1) We perceive[sub]1[/sub] ordinary objects (houses, mountains, etc.)
(2) We perceive[sub]2[/sub] ideas
As above, the introduction of material objects does not make (2) false. I think the issue is that you are misinterpreting the indirect realist's claim that we perceive[sub]2[/sub] qualia as the claim that we perceive[sub]1[/sub] qualia, and so you are guilty of the very same equivocation you insist on not letting pass.
The indirect realist claims that perception[sub]2[/sub] is direct perception — because the thing perceived is a constituent of the experience, and because it does not depend on perception[sub]1[/sub] — and that perception[sub]1[/sub] is indirect perception — because the thing perceived is not a constituent of the experience, and because it depends on perception[sub]2[/sub].
I’m much less certain about this than you seem to be.
What does it even mean to say that we could perceive anything in a world where nothing meets the criteria of objecthood? Perception is not just “having qualitative episodes occur,” but encountering something as one and the same across time, as re-identifiable, as having boundaries, as affording possible interactions, as persisting through counterfactual variation (“it would still be there if I turned my head,” etc.).
If none of that structure is available — if there is no persistence, no re-identification, no affordances, no counterfactual stability — then we aren’t left with perception of “qualia-objects.” We’re left with William James’ “blooming, buzzing confusion”: a morass of bare qualitative occurrences with no intelligible structure whatsoever
And in that case, I don’t see how it makes sense to say that one sees, hears, tastes, touches, or smells something at all. The very grammar of perceiving “something” presupposes criteria of identity and difference that this view has dissolved.
At that point, “perception” becomes just a misleading label for sheer occurrence — and the distinction between veridical perception and hallucination collapses along with it.
The synesthete sees colours when listening to music, the schizophrenic hears voices, and I feel a pain in my head the morning after drinking too much.
I can imagine John living in a subjective idealist world and having a first-person phenomenal experience that is introspectively indistinguishable from Jane's veridical perception in the real world. I don't see much sense in saying that John doesn't see or hear or feel anything. I think you're talking past the indirect realist if you define "John perceives something" in such a way that it's false if subjective idealism is true.
If one sifts through the menagerie of mental entities proposed by the Indirect Realist one finds that all of them are indistinguishable from the indirect realist himself. Each “constituent of experience” is internal to the body, or else it would be independent of it, foreign, and public. That’s why the “what” in the question “who perceives what” is undoubtedly some portion of the body or the activity of organs. So when Michael speaks about “green” we are left to believe that he is really speaking about Michael, a constituent of his body, and not about chlorophyll or apples. In this, the perceiver is both the perceiver and the object of perception at the same time.
But I would argue that the “who” is also left unexplained. If he identifies as the entire organism he would have to concede that there is in fact no barrier or veil or even any room for an intermediary between himself and the “distal object”, which is the entire environment exterior to the body. He himself exists in that domain, embedded in it, and he too is a “distal object” to other perceivers. In order for his theory to make sense, he needs to be somehow smaller than the body, and live somewhere below the surface area of the skin, away from the senses, so that he can continue to perceive the activity of those organs in some untold and unexplained manner.
My point is, some species of dualism is required to support indirect realism, and indirect realism is just the logical consequence of dualism. I think this is why the brain in the vat resonates for some people. They identify as the brain, while the rest can be abstracted away and traded with any “life-sustaining substance”, and so see it as possible.
Most of what you say isn't exclusive to indirect realism. Direct realists who aren't eliminative materialists and who believe that we have headaches and direct visual perception of the Moon also believe in mental entities of some kind. They just disagree that these mental entities are the (only) direct objects of perception.
Your position on the matter is orthogonal to the traditional dispute, and is a position that even most direct realists will disagree with.
Again, what does it mean to “hear voices,” “see colors,” or “feel pain” in a world where nothing exhibits identity, persistence, affordance, or counterfactual stability? Such a world would be an unstructured muddle incapable of supporting intentionality of any kind — because there would be nothing determinate enough to count as something heard, something seen, or something felt.
Berkeley saw this and appealed to God to guarantee the stability of experience. Hume appealed to habits of association. Kant appealed to transcendental synthesis. Different metaphysics, same structural insight: something must supply conditions of determinacy/objecthood if perception is to get off the ground at all. Without that, “perception” collapses into mere qualitative flicker with no possibility of intelligible aboutness.
Are you suggesting that we know through introspection that subjective idealism is false; that if subjective idealism were true then we wouldn't have the first-person phenomenal experiences (or intellects) that we have? I don't think that's correct. I think it's possible that John lives in a world that is introspectively indistinguishable from ours but in which subjective idealism is true, with phrases like "hearing voices", "seeing colours", and "feeling pain" describing the exact same first-personal phenomenal experiences that they describe in our world. I don't see why the existence of material brains or bodies or apples is necessary a priori.
Somewhat related are Boltzmann brains. Not only is it seemingly possible, but it's seemingly likely that during the lifetime of the universe there will be brain-like structures floating in the void of space experiencing exactly what you and I are experiencing and thinking exactly what you and I are thinking. It might seem implausible, and it might eventually be shown to be incompatible with physics, but it's not the sort of thing that can be refuted by the kinds of arguments you're making.
You might want to say that I only hear voices, see colours, and feel pain if subjective idealism is false and I am not a Boltzmann brain (else I only think I do, or is thinking also impossible?), but then we're clearly just talking past each other, because I see no problem in using such phrases to describe what does happen in these scenarios.
Nope. I'm suggesting that insofar as someone posits a world in which nothing exhibits identity, persistence or modal stability, then perception as we know it is impossible.
Quoting Michael
Sure -- but this is still a world in which apples and boats satisfy the normative criteria of objectivity, and qualia don't.
Quoting Michael
It's not and I'm not arguing that it is. Even if we grant that there are no material brains, bodies or apples, it still doesn't follow that qualia are the direct objects of perception. That's just not how perceptual contents are structured. It's not: "I see red and infer an apple", it's: "I see a red apple".
If we assume subjective idealism then the apple is ultimately just "mind stuff", but this "mind stuff" isn't reducible to qualia. The phenomenology of perceiving an apple includes structured content -- unity, identity, difference, persistence, relationality, modality, temporality, blends of presence and absence, etc. -- that can't be cashed out in purely qualitative terms. The question of whether (or to what degree) this structured object is best understood as nothing more than the content of individual minds is yet a further question.
I agree that the “problem of perception” is partially a problem of identity (who the subject is supposed to be). If the indirect realist says the immediate object is always something internal (sense-data, qualia, BMO, etc.), then the distinction between the perceiver and the percieved starts to become problematic. If both are just “brain-stuff,” the view risks collapsing into a kind of self-perception model unless the subject is tacitly shrunk into an "inner witness".
And that’s exactly why brain-in-a-vat intuitions resonate: they presuppose that “I” could be detached from the embodied organism and reduced to a conscious subset receiving internal deliverances. Even if one avoids explicit Cartesian dualism, the functional structure starts to look dualistic: an inner arena of appearances vs. an outer arena of causes. The direct realist impulse, by contrast, is to resist that shrinkage and treat perception as an embodied act of disclosure of the world, rather than the inspection of inner items.
Then you're just splitting hairs over the meaning of the term "qualia". There's a reason I started the discussion by using the term "mental phenomena". It's a bit more inclusive.
If subjective idealism is true then we have direct perception of "mind stuff". The indirect realist claims that we also have direct perception of this "mind stuff" if subjective idealism is false. The introduction of mind-independent material objects as being causally responsible for this "mind stuff" doesn't make a difference — unless naive realism is true and these mind-independent material objects become constituents of first-person phenomenal experience.
I don't think it's hair splitting to contest your claim that qualia are the direct objects of perception, or to press the point that determinate objecthood is necessary for reference.
But it sounds like what you really mean is that all perceptual content — not just qualitative feel, but also structural features like unity, identity, persistence, relationality, and modality — is ultimately “mental stuff.” If so, a few questions arise:
(1) How can the normativity and public assessability of perception be explained if all perceptual content is inherently private?
(2) What explanatory work does the hypothesis that all perceptual content is “mental stuff” actually do that cannot be done otherwise?
(3) What reason is there to think that the “structural” contents of perception (identity, unity, relationality, modality, etc.) cannot in principle be explained as the mind grasping the structure of mind-independent reality?
Until those questions are answered, I don’t see why indirect realism should be regarded as obligatory rather than optional — or why it should be preferred over a direct realist account that treats perception as fallible but world-disclosing.
I have always found this whole debate somewhat ridiculous. It has always seemed to me to be nothing more than arguing about terminology. We can say, without going in to any detail, that the visual environment stimulates the visual cortex such as to form a visual image, in some way analogous to how an image is formed on a photographic emulsion or digital sensor.
Then it may be said that the visual image just is the seeing of the environment?that's one way of talking about it. Or it may be said that the visual image is what is seen? and that's another way of talking about it. The latter way of talking, though, is more inherently dualistic because it invokes an homunculus that does the seeing, whereas in the former way of talking it is simply the sentient body that sees the environment.
So, we have two different ways of conceptualizing what is going on and no way of determining that one is true and the other false. Personally I prefer the "direct" description on the grounds of parsimony and a distaste for dualism. What I don't see any point in is arguing about it, because such arguments never pass the point of talking past one another. As far as I have read it, this whole thread has been an altogether wasteful and pointless exercise in each side talking past the other.
Yep, I mean this is how most people I know feel about philosophical debate in general. And to be honest, I often feel this way myself (especially after 43 pages). Personally, I still find it interesting and entertaining to engage in discussions like this because I like to explore and understand the nuances. But at the end of the day, I do think it's mostly an exercise in cost-benefit analysis in an attempt to build a philosophical outlook that one feels at home in. That's not to say that I don't stand by my opinions, but I don't really expect the debate to come to a tidy resolution either.
I see why @Michael was talking about the "multi-user VR goggles" case. It seems like your view precludes acknowledging the clear representationalism of the user-facing visualizations in this scenario. I'll try to take a look and see where this thread went.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Ok, I agree here.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I didn't mean to imply you would accept these. I proposed these to show that the IR claim doesn't require a notion of qualia as objects to be fulfilled. And it sounds like you agree that if these claims are true, qualia are intermediaries.
Looking at these two claims you don't accept again:
1 Qualia are logically prior to apprehension of the object
2 Qualia the sole constituent of experience, such that were it removed from experience, nothing would remain
If qualia are "how the distal object presents itself to the subject": Doesn't 1 have to be true? If qualia are how the distal object presents itself, the distal object cannot present itself without qualia. Yet, qualia can be experienced without a distal object. The perception of qualia has no precondition, but the perception of distal objects require qualia.
And, doesn't 2 have to be true, following from 1? If qualia are necessary for object apprehension, the removal of qualia from experience removes any perception of the object as well. Leaving, nothing.
In other words, aren't you already committed to qualia as an intermediary? Just not qualia as an intermediating "object"?
I actually fully acknowledge the representationalism of the user-facing visualizations in Michael’s VR goggle-scenario. Likewise, I fully acknowledge that the brain creates similar models/representations as part of its operations. My claim is that perception cannot be fully accounted for at this level of analysis.
For me, this is really a question of reductionism. There are many “levels” at which one might try analyze “perception”:
@Michael seems to think that the question “what is the object of perception?” is settled by causal/functional analysis at levels 7 - 10.
I disagree. I think that at that level of analysis the question is left completely underdetermined. I think the question can only be settled at levels 11 - 13.
And while levels 11 - 13 are realized by the levels below them, they are not reducible to them. Yes, perception is mediated by levels 7 - 10, but this is causal mediation, not epistemic mediation.
It is only at levels 11 - 13 where epistemic normativity arises. This is where things like truth, reference, intentionaltiy and justification are found. The question “what is the object of perception?” is answered here, not at the levels below.
Michael will say that I’m just “changing the subject” by insisting that the question be answered at these levels. But historically, this is precisely where the debate took place.
If one actually takes the time to explore the work of the pre-modern realists - Aristotle, Aquinas, Scotus, Suarez, the Conimbricenses - none of them denied that perception was causally mediated, nor that the intellect works with “internal models” (e.g. “form”, “phantasm”, “formal sign”, “idea”, etc.). But for them, these aren’t what you see, they are what you see with (or, perhaps, how you see). This is in direct contrast with the indirect realism of Locke and Descartes (and their progeny) who maintained that we only ever see the idea itself. The external world must be inferred.
Even a naive-color realist like Aquinas would not have denied the modern scientific analysis at levels 7 - 10. He probably would have tempered his color realism a bit, but he would have had no problem with the idea that the brain generates models of its environment.
And that’s because, for someone like Aquinas, the directness of perception simply is not decided by whether distal objects are coloured, or whether perception is causally mediated. For Aquinas, perception is direct because the external thing itself is the intentional object of the sensory act, while the internal models are merely the causal means by which that object is made present to the perceiver.
So the idea that the debate between IR and DR is “just about colour realism” or is “settled by modern science” is not only historically inaccurate, but fundamentally misguided. Not only does it mislocate the debate, but it doesn’t even address how many of the most sophisticated pre-modern direct realists actually cashed out “directness”.
Quoting hypericin
No. When we perceive an object such as an apple we are presented with an apple – not with “apple + qualia”. The presentation of the apple has a qualitative aspect to it, but the qualitative aspect is not itself explicitly thematized or objectified independently of the apple within ordinary perception.
Quoting hypericin
The fact that perception of distal objects probably requires qualia does not entail that qualia are what we perceive. Perception of distal objects requires all kinds of things: light, sense organs, neural circuitry, computation of edge maps, contour maps, motion vectors, depth maps, color gradients, etc., etc., but none of these is what is perceived.
As discussed above, this kind of mistake results from trying to decide the question “what is the object of perception?” at the wrong level of analysis.
Quoting hypericin
This doesn’t follow. That qualia are required for object apprehension does not entail that object apprehension is exhausted by qualia. There is more to the presentation of an object than just the qualitative aspect.
There are also things like identity, persistence, relationality, modality, presence, absence, temporality, locatedness, etc, etc. that all contribute to what we apprehend as an “object”.
This was Kant’s insight (though he wasn’t the first to see it): objects are not presented to us as bundles of qualia, they have a robust intelligible structure that is not reducible to bare sensation.
Quoting hypericin
Yes, but the fact that something mediates perception is not sufficient to establish it as the object of perception. Again, all kinds of things mediate perception that we wouldn’t try to identify as the object of perception (light, sense organs, neural circuitry, etc., etc.)
You and I seem quite capable of having a conversation and talking about world affairs, the colour of the dress, and headaches without ever having direct perception of the same things given that we've never met in person. The same would be true even if I was raised alone in a room by people on monitors, or if we all wore those visors. So rather than asking me to explain how this is possible, I think the burden is on you to explain why it wouldn't be.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
The "explanatory work" is that it's entailed by our understanding of physics, physiology, neuroscience, and psychology, hence indirect realism being the scientific view of perception.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
The mind "grasping" the structure of mind-independent reality is a really vague claim. What exactly do you mean by it? Does my mind "grasp" the fact that quarks are fundamental particles with color charge and spin? To an extent perhaps, but I'm no physicist. Regardless, none of us has direct perception of quarks.
And I'm not saying that we cannot in principle do whatever it is. I'm saying that whatever it is only in practice achieved indirectly. These same "structural" contents occur even if subjective idealism true, even if we're Boltzmann brains, even if we're dreaming, even if we're hallucinating, and even if light is slow and the apple was disintegrated five seconds ago. So these mind-independent objects are not necessary (except to whatever extent they're causally necessary).
Taking your points in order:
Quoting Michael
The burden-shifting move here doesn't quite work. The question isn't whether we can talk about the world — of course we can coordinate linguistically even under highly degraded conditions. The question is what grounds the normativity of that coordination. When I say the dress is blue and you say it's gold, we treat that as a genuine disagreement about how the dress is, not merely a discrepancy between two private mental states. But if all perceptual content is inherently private, then there's nothing we're both directed toward that could make one of us right and the other wrong. You'd need to reconstruct normativity from scratch out of private representations plus some coordination mechanism — and every attempt to do that either smuggles in a shared world or collapses into mere behavioral agreement with no genuine correctness conditions.
Your monitor-room scenario actually illustrates the problem. The person raised in that room could still make true or false claims about what's on the monitors. But could they make true or false claims about the world beyond the monitors? Only if you grant that their cognitive operations are in some way answerable to how things actually are — and that answerability is precisely what I mean by the mind being directed toward mind-independent reality. If you deny that, you lose the normative dimension entirely.
Quoting Michael
This conflates two very different claims. Physics, physiology, and neuroscience tell us that perception is causally mediated — that there's a complex causal chain from object to experience. No one disputes that. But causal mediation doesn't entail that what we are aware of in perception is a mental intermediary rather than the world itself. That's a further philosophical inference, and it's precisely the one I'm questioning.
Consider: the fact that I see the tree by means of light waves, retinal stimulation, and neural processing doesn't by itself tell me whether I'm aware of the tree or aware of a mental representation of the tree. The causal story is equally compatible with a view on which the whole causal apparatus is the means by which the world itself becomes present to a knower. Treating "indirectness of causal mechanism" as equivalent to "indirectness of awareness" is a non sequitur, and one that the sciences themselves don't actually commit to — it's a philosophical gloss on the science, not a deliverable of the science.
Quoting Michael
By the mind "grasping" the structure of mind-independent reality, I mean something fairly precise: that in acts of understanding, we identify intelligible patterns (relations, unities, regularities, dependencies) that hold in reality itself, not just in our representations. When a physicist understands color charge, they aren't just manipulating symbols — they've grasped something about how quarks actually behave, and that grasp is confirmed (or disconfirmed) by whether the predictions it generates pan out. The fact that none of us perceives quarks directly is beside the point; the structure of reality is grasped through inquiry which is mediated by direct perception the world. It's success conditions are set by how things are, not by how they appear.
Now, you say these "structural contents" would be present even under subjective idealism, Boltzmann brain scenarios, dreaming, and so on. This is just the classical skeptical move, and it proves far too much. By the same reasoning, you could say that no belief is justified, since any belief is compatible with a skeptical scenario. The force of skeptical possibilities depends entirely on whether we have positive reasons to take them seriously, and in the normal case we don't. More importantly, the fact that something could in principle be produced without the object doesn't show that in the actual case it is produced without the object. My visual experience of the apple could in principle be produced by a demon, but the relevant question is whether, in the normal case, the best explanation of the experience's specific content, its systematic revisability, and its integration with successful action is that it puts me in contact with an actual apple.
The slow-light scenario is instructive here. Yes, if light has a travel time, then the object might have changed by the time I see it. But this is a limitation on perceptual currency, not evidence that I'm perceiving a mental object rather than a physical one. When I look at a star and see it as it was eight years ago, I'm still seeing the star — I'm just seeing it as it was, not as it is. Temporal lag doesn't convert direct awareness of objects into awareness of mental intermediaries.
This highlights the precise problem with your approach. Both of these are true in this scenario:
1. Their mind is "directed" towards the world beyond the monitors
2. They do not have direct perception of the world beyond the monitors
So even if our minds are "directed" towards a mind-independent world it does not follow that we have direct perception of it. The former is a red herring.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
It's not a case of either/or. We need to distinguish between direct awareness and indirect awareness. We can be indirectly aware of the world without being directly aware it.
So the question is; does our perceptual awareness of the world qualify as direct perception? Again, like with the monitor above, that our minds are "directed" towards the world does not entail that we have direct perception of it. More is required, and as I've argued before, this "more" concerns the constituents of first-person phenomenal experience. Modern science has firmly established that distal objects are not constituents of first-person phenomenal experience — hence the fall of naive realism — and so that we do not have direct perception of them.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I haven't said that they only hold in our representations; I have only said that they do hold in our representations. A common argument you seem to make is that a) the direct objects of perception have structure, that b) mental phenomena can't have structure, and so that c) the direct objects of perception can't be mental phenomena. I reject (b); they can and they do.
So as you don't like to say that we have direct perception of qualia, I will instead say that we have direct perception of structured mental phenomena with (mind-dependent) qualitative properties and which erroneously seem to be distal objects — hence the allure of naive realism, and why our minds are "directed" towards a putative mind-independent world. And in the case that subjective idealism is false and we are not Boltzmann brains, this direct perception mediates indirect perception of appropriate distal causes (with structures which might "mirror" in some sense the structure of the mental phenomena — given their causal role — hence representational realism).
Quoting Michael
You're right that in the monitor scenario, the person's mind is directed toward the world beyond the monitors without having direct perception of it. But the analogy breaks down at the decisive point. In the monitor case, we can independently specify both the monitors and the world beyond them — we can walk around the room, inspect the cameras, trace the causal chain, and verify that the monitors are intermediaries. The distinction between "what's on the screen" and "what's out there" is itself something we establish through further acts of perception and inquiry.
But in the perceptual case as you describe it, no such independent access is even in principle available. The "mental phenomena" you posit as the direct objects of perception are not something we discover between ourselves and the world the way we discover monitors between a person and an outside scene. They're postulated precisely because of a prior philosophical commitment — that the causal mediation of perception entails an intermediary object of awareness. The monitor analogy presupposes the very framework of direct perceptual access to a mind-independent world (we see the room, the monitors, the cameras) in order to motivate the claim that such access is never available. That's self-undermining.
Quoting Michael
You say we need to distinguish between direct and indirect awareness, and that modern science has "firmly established" that distal objects are not constituents of first-person phenomenal experience. But this is where I think you're moving too quickly from a scientific claim to a philosophical one. What science establishes is the causal story — photons, retinal transduction, neural processing. What science does not establish is a claim about the object of awareness. The claim that the direct object of awareness must be a "constituent" of experience in some quasi-mereological sense — that the apple must somehow be part of my experience in order for me to perceive it — is not a scientific finding. It's a philosophical assumption about what perception requires, and it's precisely the assumption I'm questioning.
On a different account of perception, awareness isn't a relation between a subject and an internal constituent but an act by which the subject is related to what is other than itself. The distal object doesn't need to be a "constituent" of experience; it needs to be what the experience is of, in a way that is specified by the intelligible content of the act. The demand that the object be a constituent is what generates the intermediary in the first place, and it's not obvious why we should accept that demand.
Quoting Michael
You say you reject my premise (b) — that mental phenomena can't have structure — and insist they can and do. I actually agree that mental phenomena have structure; that was never my claim. My claim is about the explanatory order. You're proposing that we start with structured mental phenomena that "erroneously seem to be distal objects," and that in favorable cases these mediate indirect perception of distal causes whose structure "mirrors" the structure of the mental phenomena. But this picture raises a serious question: what accounts for the structural mirroring?
On your view, the structural correspondence between mental phenomena and distal causes is something we discover after the fact — a happy coincidence or an evolved correlation that we posit to explain the reliability of our representations. But on the view I'm advancing, the structural correspondence isn't a coincidence requiring explanation; it's constitutive of what it means to understand. When an act of understanding grasps an intelligible pattern, the identity of the pattern grasped and the pattern in reality isn't a "mirroring" between two numerically distinct structures — it's one and the same intelligibility, accessed through different modes (being in reality, and being understood by a mind). The physicist's understanding of color charge and the actual behavior of quarks aren't two structurally similar items; the understanding is the intelligibility of the quark behavior as received in the mode of cognition.
This matters because your "mirroring" picture leaves you with an unbridgeable explanatory gap: how do you ever get from "my mental phenomena have this structure" to "the world has this structure" without already presupposing the cognitive access you're trying to explain? If all you ever directly perceive are structured mental phenomena, then the claim that distal causes have a mirroring structure is itself something you can only ever arrive at through those same mental phenomena — which means it's either circular or it requires some mode of cognitive access to reality that isn't reducible to perceiving mental intermediaries. And that mode of access is exactly what I've been pointing to all along.
Well "direct visual perception" carried as a metaphor and neuro-biological process that exhibits noticeable mentally storable events may come to know itself as phenomena, qualia and sense data from categorization as recognised patterns of meta data if it be chemical potentials or something like chemical electrical charges that consciousness as a mental event can perceive. Conceiving of it as neuro-biological but also as a plasticity of awareness and ordering reflects on some aspects of brain topographic specialism being able to relate with some degree of conscious reflection like a machine knowing its different parts are working at different times but then develops a patterning memory which becomes a repository of significance over time.
On the monitor
The crux of my point was that these are non sequiturs:
A1. Our minds are "directed" towards X
A2. Therefore, we have direct perception of X
B1. Our cognitive operations are “answerable” to X
B2. Therefore, we have direct perception of X
This is shown to be so when X is “the world beyond the monitor”.
So direct perception must be explained in some terms other than A1 or B1.
On the science of perception
We're just going around in circles meaning different things by "direct perception". Given what naive and indirect realists mean by "direct perception", indirect realism is the scientific view of perception. As above, it’s not about A1 or B1. It’s about phenomenology and the ontological separation between experience (and its qualities) and distal objects (and their properties). That’s all it means for our experience of distal objects to be indirect.
On the structural "mirroring"
It's "accounted for" by the fact that distal objects and their properties are (usually) causally responsible for first-person phenomenal experience, and if the cause changes then the effect often changes. The colour I see is determined by the wavelength of the light (and my biology), so when the wavelength changes to a sufficient degree the colour I see changes. But differences in biology can entail that a greater degree of change in the wavelength is “hidden” because it does not affect a change in the colour seen, hence this colour being an epistemic intermediary.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
In your breakdown of levels of analysis, which number(s) do you think the brain's models fall under? I, and I assume most IRists, believe that these models are the objects of phenomenology. And so they straddle 7-10, in their third person, causal description, and 11, in their first person experience.
.
Either these models are the objects of perception of level 11, and so IR is true. Or, I'm not sure what you think these models are doing, and why you believe they exist.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
None of these other requirements (many of which sound more at home in computer graphics than neurology?) are themselves perceived. But qualia are.
Qualia are perceived, and are required to perceive distal objects. But distal objects are not required to perceive qualia. Therefore, the perception of qualia is logically prior to the perception of distal objects.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
I'm granting that there is more to the presentation of the object than qualia. But, because qualia are logically prior to the perception of distal objects, if qualia were removed, so would all these other features of the perception of objects.
Quoting Esse Quam Videri
Scientific understanding is never identical with what it attempts to grasp, it is always an approximation. This is why science never ends, it is constantly being revised. And there is seldom a single universal understanding. 100 different physicists might have 100 different understandings of color charge, at various degrees of accuracy. Some may be entirely wrong. Only numerical distinctness between reality and understanding can support this diversity.
And the same is true of perception. A 100 different subjects, perhaps comprising of several different species, might have 100 different perspectives on an object. Each of these no doubt captures some structural features of the object; if perception does not provide mind independent information, it does no good, and would not have been selected for. But it is nonsensical to imagine that any of them discloses the entirety of the distal object. Necessarily, each is only a window onto partial features of the object. And none are perfect, none are free of error. Evolution favors good enough, not perfection. Each perspective may be wrong, in different ways. Again, this is only possible with numerical non-identify between perspective and object.
I have decided to move the discussion over to the new site in consideration of the fact that this site will be made read-only as of 2/26.
The new thread can be found here. Thanks.
Alright, although I was hoping to take the move as a good point to end the discussion. It's gone on long enough for me.
Understood. I'm fine with bringing it to a close as well. If you're ready to be done, then I can either try to delete the thread on the new site, or you can provide one final reply to which I will not respond.
I see that you are not yet a member of the new site. I will hold off on posting a reply until you join, unless you would also like to bring the discussion to a close, in which case I will not post a reply your last post.
I joined. Let's continue, though indeed the discussion is getting long in the tooth.