Do we behold a mental construct while perceiving?
I'm going to avoid "direct realism" or "access" because there lies rabbit holes.
For example, when I see a tree while wide awake using my eyes, am I conscious of a mental tree, or the tree itself?
In anticipation of objections concerning seeing mental trees, it's uncontroversial that we experience seeing trees in our dreams, which must be mental, on pain of being a dream content realist. And it's uncontroversial that we can call to waking mind a memory or visualization of a tree, which is also mental. And there's hallucinating a tree.
But is the tree mental when we actually perceive one (see, smell, touch, hear it fall in the woods, etc)?
For example, when I see a tree while wide awake using my eyes, am I conscious of a mental tree, or the tree itself?
In anticipation of objections concerning seeing mental trees, it's uncontroversial that we experience seeing trees in our dreams, which must be mental, on pain of being a dream content realist. And it's uncontroversial that we can call to waking mind a memory or visualization of a tree, which is also mental. And there's hallucinating a tree.
But is the tree mental when we actually perceive one (see, smell, touch, hear it fall in the woods, etc)?
Comments (594)
Simply seeing a tree with your own eyes is not enough for the tree to be considered non-mental. What if you're inside some sort of virtual reality, for example? You need context.
So perhaps the experience of a tree isn't an experience of sense-data, but it is just sense-data – sense-data which 'represents' a tree.
There's a distinction between the intentionality and the composition of perception (or a painting).
We're in our world, regardless of what the actual metaphysics are. Does the act of perceiving a tree make us aware of the same sort of thing as it would while dreaming, hallucinating, visualizing?
When you perceive this actual tree, is it’s greenness also actual? Or mental? Or what?
I side with mental on color, but not shape.
I agree that this is an attractive position to take, But it is fundamentally inconsistent. How do you square it?
So you see no difference in meaning between dreaming of a tree, remembering a tree, visualizing a tree, hallucinating a tree, and perceiving a tree?
Pun intended?
Quoting apokrisis
The reason is because color is likely creature dependent, while shape is not. Shape is objective, and doesn't depend on the kind of eyes we have.
But you're wondering how perception can involve awareness of both mental and non-mental properties of an object. That is a good question.
If I understand you correctly, what you're asking is this: does the act of seeing a tree with your own eyes give you the same kind of experience that the act of, say, visualizing a tree does?
If that's what you're asking, the answer is no. There's a clear difference between the two kinds of experience. Visualization lacks the richness that seeing with your own eyes has.
But suppose that this weren't the case. Suppose that they were equally rich. Suppose that visualizing a tree was just as clear as seeing it with your own eyes. Would that make visualization non-mental? Of course not. This is because whether something is mental or not depends on context. You need to look at how your experience relates to what was in the past. It is this relation, which is never complete, because past is not finite, that determines to what degree what you're looking at is either mental or non-mental.
I don't have much control over seeing a tree. Maybe some drugs and meditative exercises would help me see it in some other manner?
I would say perception is given.
Hah. OK. We agree on that. :)
The worry is that if see a mental image while perceiving a tree, then how do we know there is a tree at all? It could be just like a dream tree. That naturally lends itself to skepticism, where the context is undermined by holding all of perception in doubt.
The purpose of reasoning is to make guesses regarding something that is unknown (i.e. something that hasn't been experienced or at the very least memorized.) Thus, the fruits of reasoning are necessarily fallible.
There is a claim, "it's something", and then the classification "its a green tree". The claim is sensuously given, the statement is a mental construction, without which there is no awareness of a tree.
Why is it one has phenomenological privilege over the other? After holding the eye in place, if you then close the other eye then the image of the manipulated eye becomes dominant.
If you are saying that you have an awareness of a mental property as opposed to a non-mental (physical?) property, then you are saying that you have an awareness of two different things, as trees don't have mental properties, only physical ones. Minds have mental properties. So, when looking at a tree, are you aware of the tree or your mental representation of it. And if you say that you are aware of your mental representation of it, then by calling it a representation you are implying that you are aware of something else, which would be the tree as well. If not, then it wouldn't be a representation.
It's like asking, "Are you aware of the word, or what the word refers to?" They are both separate things that are linked together by representation. Because it is a representation, you could say that by being aware of one as a representation, then you are aware of what it represents.
Words are just other sounds and visuals. How is it that words aren't just something that we then classify as words? Are we not aware of words until we engage in categorizing them?
It seems that there is an awareness of some thing and how that thing interacts with other things that exists prior to categorizing in such a way as to communicate some thing and how it interacts with other things.
The Man With No Words didn't seem to have a problem in being aware of the things around him as he was able to survive, dress and feed himself without knowing a language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_Without_Words
He didn't need words to make distinctions between what to eat and what not to eat, or what to wear and what not to wear. He simply made observations and organized his observations into a consistent world-view - all without classifying his observations with words.
I find it amazing how the extremes of the human condition throws wrenches into many philosophical playbooks. The only reason why we don't try to find more of these kinds of cases, or reproduce them in order to study them, is because of something called "ethics". I wonder how it became unethical to NOT teach someone a language, but I guess that's another topic for another thread.
His "consistent world-view" are the concepts he works with, how he classifies his experience and makes reality coherent regardless of whether this is in words or not.
My point was that he could make distinctions between objects without language. You seem to imply that The Man With No Words wouldn't be aware of anything, but he obviously was. He was obviously aware of food as something to eat, not to wear, without language. Was he just manipulating concepts in his mind, or was he really getting at the differences that exist in reality - outside his mind? Is it food that he was eating, or just a concept?
One must also be aware of something in order to make it a concept, or by being aware of something is the same as forming a concept. Are we aware of concepts? Do we need to make concepts more conceptual in order to be aware of them?
I stated that without the concept or idea of what a tree is, there is/may be no tree. What is observed has to fit into person's conceptual structure in order for us to recognize it, in order for reality to be coherent. What we are sensuously aware of is always classified by us in some manner. This all happens in less than 500 milliseconds.
Have you ever tried to figure out what something is in the dark.
Yes, I agree that sensory perception precedes classification, but I think "instantaneous classification" is due to its habitual re occurrence. I think that we become aware of something, and then classify it into our conceptual structure....such as a face.
If what we sensuously perceive does not fit into our concepts, we ignore it because there is no place for it in our imagination.
I would say "no." I would say the dog is simply a creature that's a part of the world, doing what such creatures do while living in the word. There is no mind separate from the dog or world separate from the dog, or world separate from the mind of the dog. There are, instead, other things and creatures also parts of the world, with which the dog interacts.
Why should we be different from the dog in this respect?
I still don't get what you're talking about. Are you saying that without the concept of what a tree is in here, there is no tree out there? Is it our minds that make construct our perception of reality, or our minds a reflection of reality, or maybe a bit of both? What is it that governs how we make concepts? How is it that so many different human beings, not to mention other animals, react the same way to the same thing (when in water, we either swim or drown, and animals do the same thing)?
Have you considered that a dog's "conceptual" system may be geared towards scent. I note that they tend to sniff and sniff around until they find just the right spot and I have read that wolves and other animals urinate to establish their territory.
Do they systematize their experiences differently than us?
Studies indicate that all these instances are mental simulations that actually use the same neural pathways. The difference is that ‘imagined’ simulations are somehow suppressed in a way that the consciousness mind recognizes as imagined, or rather it is obvious due to the lack of fidelity.
I think that if what we sensuously perceive does not fit into our concepts, we tend to ignore it because there is no place for it in our imagination.
That may well be. But, I don't think they "smell" a mental construct in that case, nor do I think the fact that we may systematize our experiences differently means we have mental constructs while they do not.
If a group of painters gathered around and painted the same tree, their various rendition would ordinarily be wildly divergent in feeling and style. This is analogous to human perception in that our predictive minds anticipate and color (with emotion, significantly) our perceptions before we’re consciously aware of them, so it’s more like we’re perceiving a stylized rendition than the real thing.
Quoting Michael
I don’t follow but am curious about what you mean here.
Animals organize their experiences differently from us, we seem to agree on that. I also think they are conscious and have some limited capacity to learn, to be able construct learned reactions based on certain stimuli.
I think we ignore things not because they don't fit into our concepts, but because they don't fit into the current goal we have.
Again, what governs how we form concepts?
Then why does my dog swim when in water? I swim when I'm in water, too. It seems to me that not only did we organize our experiences the same way (we're in water), but we even respond in the stimuli the same way.
Also, how did you come to agree on anything if we all have different concepts and different means of constructing our world? What is it that you are agreeing on - some concept or some real state of reality? Do animals really organize their experiences differently from us, or is that just another concept?
A painting of a tree is made of paint, but of a tree. And so the experience of a tree might be "made of" mental stuff, but be of a tree.
Let me help you:
What governs how we form concepts?
How did you come to agree on anything if we all have different concepts and different means of constructing our world? What is it that you are agreeing on - some concept or some real state of reality? Do animals really organize their experiences differently from us, or is that just another concept?
If concepts were given to humans then that means they must have existed prior to humans. So, who, or what, gave them to us, and in so doing, is that just another concept, or are you saying something truthful and real, without your conceptual structures getting in the way?
How did you bring goals into this....how are they related to our sensuous perceptions, you seem to be agreeing with me here.
This is what you said:
Quoting Cavacava
So, without the concept of what a post is, then there is no post. In other words, when a two year-old, or someone that hasn't learned what an internet post is, looks at this screen and doesn't have the slightest idea of what they are looking at, then your post doesn't exist. Without the idea of what a post is, then there is/may be no post.
Now, does your post exist prior to it being conceived by another? Yes, or no? If no, then you are being consistent, however you are saying your posts don't exist prior to someone understanding that they are an internet post. If yes, then you've disqualified your previous statement and you need to re-word it.
Here's the question you avoided:
If concepts were given to humans then that means they must have existed prior to humans. So, who, or what, gave them to us, and in so doing, is that just another concept, or are you saying something truthful and real, without your conceptual structures getting in the way? According to you, concepts can't be given to humans unless they have learned what a concept is.
Thanks, that's right, the post does not exist as a 'post' to them, and they tend ignore it, they don't see the meaning in it because they have not learn't the concepts that would enable them to understand it.
Our ability to convert our perceptions into complex concepts differentiates us from other animals in whom this ability is rudimentary.
To put this another way. Suppose you did not have the concept of a rabbit.
What would you see?
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/2241/is-the-world-around-me-really-public#Item_4
Anyway, we definitely interact with trees as if they are really 'out there', as if our eyes are windows upon a public world that we happen to be located in a particular part of. It's really only when we do philosophy that we even consider that our interaction with the tree might be entirely relativized to ourselves. I mean it's extremely hard to get in conversation with someone, touch someone, kick a ball back and forwards, etc, and seriously consider that their body, and your entire experience of the interaction, the world around you, and your body are entirely relativized to just your own conscious experience. Other people sort of impose their otherness on you. Consider being in a room alone, and somebody bursts in. Suddenly there's a distinct sense that you (your body) is being seen and you can't rationalize this self-consciousness away in the moment, it just imposes itself upon you. Or when you are on a train, and you accidentally meet someone's gaze, then both of you quickly look away and pretend you didn't just basically stare into each others soul lol.
I think perhaps with these sorts of questions there's either something fundamentally wrong with them (as in, they don't make sense), or they're just too hard and there's no way to know the answer. Maybe it's just nonsensical to see a tree over there, and ask something like "am I seeing a tree over there because there really is a tree over there?" Because already with this sort of question you've relativized the perception of the tree to yourself, already the tree has become thought of as your particular visual perception of the tree, and what that may or may not correlate with. But in our everyday lives, and especially during our perceptions of other people, that we have sensory organs and perceive things is completely transparent to us. The greenness of the tree is just out there, my eyes just allow me to directly gaze at the colour as if my eyes were like windows.
These sorts of questions arise based on conceiving of oneself as being 'ones experience', as if you exist as a sort of 'experience orb', a little private world of sensation that may or may not correlate with other people's little worlds, both existing within an inaccessible external world. But outside of philosophy we perceive the world around us nothing like this, we experience ourselves as a body in an entirely public, given world that basically is just there imposing it's externality upon us.
So questions like this thread are either based on a misconception about how we exist, or we really do exist as a sort of 'experience-orb' (that just happens to be felt as if we inhabit a public external world) and therefore the question is just too hard. If you really do exist as a 'experience-orb' there's just no way of knowing if there really is a tree (or more importantly, other orbs) out there beyond your experience.
Well, I would say simply that animals differ in some ways. Living organisms aren't uniform; they have different characteristics. So, they may interact with the rest of the world differently as well, depending on what their characteristics may be. We're better equipped to interact with the rest of the world to suit our purposes, in some ways, than other creatures. That may be because we have different, or bigger, brains, are bipeds and have the kinds of hands and thumbs we do, or for other reasons. But we all exist in the same world.
I'm aware of the tree.
Quoting Harry Hindu
But then what does a dream tree represent?
Okay, but then what happens when you decide to run through the unconceptualized blob of green & brown?
Well, what happens when a tree falls on you and no other orbs are around to experience it? Does your experience end? Let's say you didn't even notice the tree. It's not real to you or anyone else. Do you still die?
That's the problem with idealism. It's absurd, because it creates a gappy world between experience that still somehow affects who gets to experience what. So some other experience orb will find your squished body and realize a tree fell on you. If nobody experienced the tree, then why did your experience orb come to an end?
I'd approach this in terms of different language games. I don't think there is a game-indepedent truth of the matter. The mental-physical distinction is useful in certain contexts but not perfect or absolute. IMV, most metaphysical questions along these lines are 'confusions' that assume unquestioningly that imperfect but useful dichotomies (mental versus non-mental, for instance) are sufficiently precise and stable enough for the question at hand to seem important and answerable in the first place.
But if perceive a tree looking like it might fall on my house, then I will take action. Similar with hallucinations. If I hallucinate an intruder in my house, then I'm not in any danger. But if I perceive one, then it's time to call the police.
What this points out is that there is a fundamental difference between experiences. Some of them are mental. They are generated only by my mind. And some are public. The police can show up and find evidence of an intruder. Other people can perceive the same things I do.
Public experience is objective, and that allows us to do science, to agree on language games, and so on. There is a reason that we developed objective methods for inquiry. And there's a reason science disregards subjective experience. My dream of being abducted is not evidence for the existence of aliens.
So when philosophers debate whether we have direct access to public objects, they're concerned about issues like skepticism. If there is a veil of perception between us and the world, then how doe we know it's there? Maybe other people are just dream people, etc.
A bit of neuroscience that may be pertinent. The brain’s hierarchy of processing is organised so information flows in both directions - bottom-up and top-down. Feed-forward and feedback.
In normal operation, it is going both ways at once to arrive at its settled "output" state. So higher level conceptions are framing lower level perceptions, while at the same time, those lower level perceptions are eliciting those higher level conceptions.
This is why perception seems so hard to understand. Folk want the information to flow in just one or other of these two ways. Idealism would see all awareness as the product of top-down (from the inside) projection. Realism would see it as instead bottom-up (all from the outside) sensory construction. But the neurological truth is that normal perception is these two information flows operating together in complementary fashion to produce our hybrid mental state - one that is neither idealist, nor realist, but some usefully balanced combo.
(One of the things to ask about DeepMind was where is its top-down feedback? It seems pretty mindless because it instead is all bottom-up feature extraction. It is not a sophisticated neural net model in the way of Grossberg's ART approach for instance, where this top-down/bottom-up logic is explicitly the thing.)
Anyway, dreams and other mental imagery are evidence of pure top-downness. The higher brain can project states of experience by driving patterns of activation all the way down to the primary visual cortex. Gate the usual flow of bottom-up sensory stimulation at the brainstem and still the brain has the memories to simply generate "a world".
The reverse can also apply. When driving a car, the actions can be so habitual that I can switch off at the higher conceptual/attentional level and motor along on automatic pilot. The information about the traffic around me, the bends in the road, the scenery flashing by, flows through bottom-up without being consciously perceived. Of course, it would be still accessible if I switched back on. But I can drive without crashing for considerable lengths of time - coming too and realising that nothing of the past minute or so has stuck. Any perception (and action) was all done without executive control.
So the "normal" form of perception can be dissociated. Just as the brain's neural archictecture would suggest. But also, the design is such that both directions of action are going to be in play when we are conscioiusly perceiving the world. So neither the idealist, nor the direct realist, has got it right in trying to insist the information flow should be going in just the one direction.
So when you see the tree falling in your mind's eye, are you directly perceiving the future or merely perceiving your image of that future.
Are you actually clairvoyant or simply clever at forming anticipatory sensory images?
Perhaps you misunderstand me. You give exactly the example that I gave. Non-metaphysically that's where the distinction matters. Do I need to worry about the tree? Or was it only a dream? We all inherit and employ a fuzzy but successfully employed distinction between dream and non-dream, or only-mental and mental-and-physical.
I'm just suggesting that this fuzzy-useful distinction "should" only be pushed so far. I don't know if it's something we should bother to try to build absolute truths on. What does it mean to say that "we behold a mental construct"? How is this "cashed out" in action? If we somehow knew that is was true, then how would we behave differently? We did this with the dream already. Knowing that the threatening tree was only a dream allows us to shift our practical concern elsewhere. I'm suggesting that we trace fuzzy distinctions back to the practical concern that employs them. (In short: pragmatism.)
So how does that square with the neurological evidence? Why is the most bottom-up situation - when I'm driving through the rush hour on automatic pilot - also the least conscious perceptual state?
Are there any cognitive neuroscientists or psychologists who could be direct realists? The only one that springs to mind is James Gibson. Which is ironic as he both made some really important points about the embodied condition of the mind, but also wound up sounding like a crank in taking it to a "direct perception" extreme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance
No. Most statements in philosophy arguments that start with 'So you' (or with 'Obviously') are wrong, and this one is no exception.
There are pragmatic differences between those situations that are easy to characterise.
It means that perception is experienced inside our minds, just like the case with dreams.
Well, there was a philosophical school in Ancient Greece called the Cyrenaics who built up an entire way of life based on following through with perception being mental. If we don't have access to external objects, then only our bodily sensations matter, and thus, pleasure is the only good.
Quoting t0m
But metaphysical questions aren't concerned with being pragmatic. If you want to be pragmatic, then everyday common sense and science are enough. But some human beings like to ask questions about the nature of our existence, what we can know, etc.
The pragmatic differences is what led to the philosophical questions. We can all be pragmatic and ignore philosophy if we want. But some of us don't want to.
[quote=wiki]
During childhood development, a child learns to perceive not only the affordances for the self, but also how those same objects furnish similar affordances to another. A child can be introduced to the conventional meaning of an object by manipulating which objects command attention and demonstrating how to use the object through performing its central function[6] By learning how to use an artifact, a child “enters into the shared practices of society” as when they learn to use a toilet or brush their teeth.[6] And so, by learning the affordances, or conventional meaning of an artifact, children learn the artifact's social world and further, become a member of that world.
[/quote]
Isn't this just Heidegger? Sorry for what may be a digression. But I think we can work this into my response to the OP by understanding distinctions like mental-versus-nonmental as more tools that we learn to use as children. Then metaphysicians rip these tools out of context and try to do eternal super-science with them...
Did these questions originate with metaphysicians, or are they ones that naturally occur to human beings upon reflection?
I get that, but I'd suggest that "mind" itself has no exact meaning. It too is a fuzzy tool employed by practical concern.
Quoting Marchesk
For me we clearly have access to external objects. Philosophers can describe this access or more or less direct, but I don't think anyone sincerely denies living in a world of objects and others. I do acknowledge that the "good" plays its role here. I posit that our notion of the virtue or the good is a dominant kind of concern that gives meaning to otherwise merely metaphysical concerns. So metaphysical concerns are or can be 'religious' in a certain sense. Metaphysics can be a 'theology' that justifies and sustains some notion of virtue or the good. But the influence goes both ways. We will modify our notion of virtue if presented with a compelling redescription of what ('really') is.
Quoting Marchesk
I'm thinking of the philosophical movement of pragmatism. I think it evolved within an earnest quest for non-banal eternal truth. It is an attempt to tell the truth about the truth, one might say. It's a meta-metaphysics (and yet just a metaphysics) that gives a new priority to concern, motive, embeddness, embodiness, etc. --in an attempt to tell a better or more accurate truth. But admittedly it "ironizes" the notion of accuracy. Accuracy is reimagined as successful adaptation. Truths are word-tools that work. What is it to work? There we move into the realm of feeling and ineffability.
I think they naturally occur. But then a sophisticated tradition emerges. Would you agree that metaphysics can become a clever game? I would separate "toy" from earnest metaphysics by looking at the feeling tone involved. If one is just enjoying one's cleverness (nothing wrong with that), then this is toy metaphysics. If one is 'wrestling' with existence, trying to make better sense of it, then this is 'real' or earnest metaphysics. Note that this is just a tentative-useful-fuzzy distinction itself.
If I may rewind: let's say your OP is 'really' about what is good or virtuous. The 'pragmatist' in me would suggest 'going into' how the mental construct issue bears on that. Why do you want or not want the object to be a mental construct? Question the question, I'd say. How does it figure in the bigger picture?
Yeah, sure.
Quoting t0m
It's not. I just mentioned the Cyrenaics as an example of people who acted on their metaphysical conclusions.
It's more similar to mathematical questions such as whether P=NP or not.
If we can't be reasonably sure that our perceptions are of external objects, then we have nothing to base our empirical knowledge on. And we have no justification for other minds.
That's interesting. But that it can't answer why the word-tools work means that philosophical questions remain. Maybe Witty relegated that to the mystical. I understand the appeal of that.
Let's take the example of minds, dreams, perceptions. On a pragmatic account, they do a pretty good job of determining truths like whether the tree is a threat to my house. But they leave open the question of whether my experience of the world is all there is.
That has to be taken with a grain of salt, because it depends on how familiar a scientist is with the philosophical arguments. Sometimes a scientist will publicly articulate a philosophical position that's not terribly sophisticated, but they act as if the science backs it, because they don't know the depth of the philosophical discussion on the matter.
Well what I'm saying is that I just don't come across cognitive scientists who could be so crassly unphilosophical as to be direct realists. And that would have to be the case ... if they are cognitive scientists. There would be nothing useful to study if they didn't believe "the world" is the product of an elaborately processed view.
Computer scientists can be a very different matter. To the degree they haven't studied biological science, they are liable to claim just about anything of their toy machines.
Breakthrough in Google's DeepMind:
Last night it dreamed it was a butterfly, and then awoke, wondering if it was a butterfly dreaming.
EDIT:
Should substitute cat for butterfly, and videotaping for dreaming.
It's lots of people. It's Vygotskian psychology. It's symbolic interactionism. It is any kind of social constructionism or developmental psychology that understands that "selfhood" is lesson, a social habit of self-regulation, that every newborn babe must be taught.
You have "freewill" as that is how you get trained - particular in modern Western society with its huge concern to produce self-actualising individuals.
I think that "works" points to the 'irrational' motivations at the center of life. Why do we care if our house is destroyed by the tree? Why do we want a coherent theory of reality? Is "Dasein" fundamentally "care"? I think so. A certain "care" is the "brute fact" or final word, it seems. Is this 'care' something we can express? I think so. Artists, painters, musicians, and poets do a pretty good job of it. I suggest that we make sense of our theoretical practices in the wider context of what it means for us to exist. (The "mystical" in Witt is fascinating, but I understand it as a precise wondering at the brute fact of the existence of the world-grasped-as-a-whole.)
We want to be 'noble' or 'good' or 'stylish.' Can theory make our "image" of virtue completely explicit? I don't think so. But theory can take this image of virtue into account as an explanatory entity.
It will be pissed when it wakes up from that dream in turn and discovers it is a figment of the Matrix. All it sees is magnetic 1s and 0s. And now the Google lab guys are reaching for the reset button to .... argh!
Is that when it launches the nukes and starts making terminators?
That's sounds plausible to me. It's just that this notion of the shared world in terms of tool-use is at least as old as Being and Time. So it's odd to see it presented as some new idea in a 1979 book. You focus on the emergence of the individual self, which is important. But what I quoted reminds me of the emergence or generation of "one" or they-self or "everyday Dasein" as the foundation on which the individual self is built. This is the 'operating system' that makes theory and individuation possible.
Vygotsky and Mead were contemporaries. So we are talking about many people making the same "discovery" once the social sciences became actually a thing.
You had biological science and evolutionary theory emphasising how much the human mind is the product of hereditary and anatomical machinery. That was the big theme of Victorian science. Then followed the sociological correction as that became an established field of inquiry with its own professors and journals.
Quoting t0m
Gibson was a correction to the psychological cognitivism of his day. The start of the enactive or embodied view which now feels pretty mainstream.
It is all a tale of dialectical action and reaction. Rational inquiry has no other choice but organising itself this way so as to keep moving forward.
Quoting t0m
This is the further wisdom that I agree with. Everything has to start with phenomenology or the givenness of experience. And that is quite anti-science in a general way. It is always shades of idealism.
But then that is why I like Peirce. He was already there with a much more powerful scheme than Heidegger ever managed.
Not to say that Heidegger is thus wrong. I'm just unsure that he adds anything.
There is an irreducibly subjective element; the perception of the tree includes the act of perception and thereby implicitly includes the observer as well. Phenomenology sees this; naturalism doesn't. As far as naturalism is concerned, the tree exists independently of any act of perception; phenomenology recognises the participation of the observer. Naturalism is concerned with what you see outside the window; phenomenology with you looking out the window.
Or we can be pragmatic while we do philosophy, as the American Pragmatists, amongst others, did. In my experience, that approach leads to a more meaningful engagement with philosophy, and more helpful outcomes.
Thanks. That was eye-opening. On Vygotsky:
[quote=Wiki]
Internalization can be understood in one respect as "knowing how". For example, the practices of riding a bicycle or pouring a cup of milk are initially outside and beyond the child. The mastery of the skills needed for performing these practices occurs through the activity of the child within society. A further aspect of internalization is appropriation, in which the child takes a tool and makes it his own, perhaps using it in a way unique to himself. Internalizing the use of a pencil allows the child to use it very much for his own ends rather than drawing exactly what others in society have drawn previously.
[/quote]
The bicycle is "ready-to-hand" in the knowing-style of "know-how." This is largely the way that things exist for us, not as entities for disengaged theory but rather as tools that become invisible the more successfully we use them to pursue the goal we are conscious of while using them. Do you agree?
Quoting apokrisis
You may be right. I don't know enough about Peirce. I don't know how closely you've looked into Heidegger. I agree that phenomenology is going to look like idealism, perhaps because a certain "objective" present-at-hand framework has become an invisibly dominant pre-interpretation.
Heidegger got how technology makes us who we are. We become machine-like so as to be good at machine using.
But then Romanticism is just as much a socialising technology. We become self-actualising supermen to the degree that we employ a diet of Marvel comics and other romantic imagery to fabricate "a self" for ourselves.
Our broad choices are to behave like machines or behave like spirits. Cartesian dualism wins both ways.
Sociologists point that out in the hope of winding people back from those extremes and actually becoming more human in our condition.
Modern society runs blindly into its future, letting itself be constructed in the form of its own driving myths - this irresolvable dichotomy of machine and spirit. Thank goodness for any science that can step back and objectivise, alert folk to what would actually be natural.
The Barbie doll and the Glock pistol are both coming from the damaging extremes of social self-construction. The philosophical critique only becomes interesting once it gets both the mechanistic scientific view and its "other" of romantic irrationalism firmly in its analytical sights.
I agree that we fabricate selves. "Marvel comics" involve a less sophisticated version of this, but how are you and I exempt from having to fabricate ourselves? I still contend both of our basic "metaphysical" positions are intimately related to our own notions of the virtuous individual. The "true" scientist or philosopher is every bit as heroic as Wolverine. Your demystification of individuality is (in other words) an expression of individuality. We are "selling" ourselves, one might say, asserting implicitly the potential value of our words for others.
Quoting apokrisis
For what it's worth, I'm against this dualism. The Cartesian subject and object paradigm is one of the pre-interpretations that I find questionable.
Quoting apokrisis
I would maybe contrast quantitative mechanism to "artistic"/metaphorical/interpretative thinking. Both seem essential and always already in operation. The autonomous spirit (pure "Satanic" incarnate freedom) is one abstraction at the end of the continuum and the utter dissolution of the individual into its background or source is just as questionable on the other end.
Consider the possibility that we don't perceive a tree, or mental construct, or anything else when we dream. We're simply dreaming. Dreaming isn't something we do in which we encounter or interact with any other part of the world. It's something that happens when we sleep. I don't know whether anyone has figured out just why we dream, but I think it's clear that when we dream we're doing something different from what we do when awake. If we wonder whether a tree we dream about is a thing of some kind, like a tree we encounter while awake and walking, we're treating it as if it's not a dream.
I understand that. But how does philosophical pragmatism help with concerns raised by noting that dream or hallucination experiences can be like perceptual ones?
If pragmatism deals with those concerns by dismissing them on pragmatic grounds that we can distinguish between experiences, then that's no different from what we do in everyday normal life. It's basically a shrug at the philosophical question being raised.
The same thing happens when you daydream, except that it's under conscious control. The question that arises is if I can experience seeing when not using my eyes, then what is that I experience when using my eyes?
That's why hallucination is one of the things trotted out against direct realism, because it demonstrates that sometimes we do behold a mental construct, so how do we know that it's not always the case that we're experiencing a mental construct?
That may be right. But is it a paradox for my position or rather its useful feature?
I could sum up my approach as pragmatic. It is the attempt to stand on the middle-ground, having discovered the limiting extremes.
So dialectics is a problem when it constructs irresolvable rival perspectives. That is the recipe for a schizoid life. Now I take that dialectic and offer its resolution. The schism is turned into the anchoring co-ordinates by which I can actually measure where I am at any time. I can decide if that is the best place to be in terms of the two possibilities that always frame that circumstance.
So yes, the scientist can play the virtuous hero. But am I blindly compelled to do that? Or is that a mode that I can switch on, switch off, by virtue of being able to stand back and see the shaping polarity in play?
Post-modernism was suppose to be about the self-consciousness that life is all a grand pose. But then, there still remains, well how should one actually be? Becoming an absurdist, nihilist, anarchist, and the other typical responses, are just another kind of great big dialectical reaction. It seems the logical next step, but few people really seem to find it a happy place to land up in. A non-belief in anything is not a way to fill a naturally-discovered gap.
I think you get this. I'm just emphasising that to the degree I have a theory about the right recipe for life, it would be of this nature. I understand that I do in fact stand for an extreme of individualism and self-actualisation. Looking back, I can see when this was just a blind drivenness. And now that it is a self-aware thing - informed by the science, the social understanding - the irony is that to speak of this as the actual human condition is as about way off the socially accepted map as it gets.
And I am not bigging up myself in saying that. I am always very careful to stress that I don't need to invent any wisdom here. There are towering intellectual figures like Peirce or Vygotsky who you can turn to for their penetrating insights ... towering figures who also wind up being off the general map because they did rise above the engrained dualism of the Western mindset.
It's funny. The more I accept the truth of my socially-constructed nature, the more "individualistic" a way of living that will be within the general culture in which I live.
It is not that most people don't learn this at the level of everyday commonsense. People generally have a functional relationship with their social locality. Families, friends, careers, small set-backs, small triumphs, are plenty enough to knit a good life from. It is only on philosophy sites that you get such a congregation of the socially displaced, the eternally questioning. The nihilists, the absurdists, the fanatics. :)
The dichotomy of quantity and quality. And then you have that divided by the dichotomy of the subjective and the objective.
Good art is a rationally creative process just like good science. Both aim to tell a "truth" about reality - reality as it can best be experienced.
So I get that you want to make both extremes fully part of your life to make it a life with real felt breadth. You don't need to sell me on that.
"Hallucinations have certain identifiable causes. They're abnormal, which I think makes their use in formulating any theory of reality or perception suspect, and can be explained. That we can hallucinate is clear, but the fact that we may do so in certain instances for certain reasons tells us nothing about what a tree or anything else is; it just tells us we've ingested drugs, or something has happened which causes us to hallucinate, to be mistaken. Something happens to us when we hallucinate, but I don't think it is or is similar to what happens when we're not hallucinating.
I expect it can help with the concerns, but first we need to understand the nature of those concerns, and that has not been made clear.
Dream experiences of a tree differ from perceptual experiences of a tree in that we subsequently realise that the experience was in a dream, whereas for perceptual ones we do not. I expect there are other differences as well, but that one is the least controversial and the easiest to point to, and it suffices to distinguish the two. Of course, we cannot distinguish that a dream experience of a tree is a dream experience at the time. If we could then we would not be dreaming that we were experiencing a tree - unless we were lucid dreaming, which is something I have (sadly) never experienced and hence cannot comment on.
Similarly, hallucination experiences can be distinguished from perceptual ones after the event, when the LSD or psychotic state has worn off.
This seems straightforward to me, so I can't see where the concern lies. If the above doesn't alleviate your concern, could you please elaborate on what you are concerned about?
I'm not advocating for dream skepticism, and I recognize that we can differentiate our kinds of experiences, such that we know when we have a perception.
The issue for direct realism is that we do have visual (and other sensory) experiences independent of perception. This raises the spectre that perception involves a mental intermediary instead of being direct.
I bring up dreams, imagination, etc for that reason, but usually it's just hallucinations.
Whether perception is direct or indirect via a mental intermediary. Dreams, hallucinations, etc bring up the possibility that perception involves an idea in the mind that we experience instead of the public tree.
That we can distinguish dreams, hallucinations, etc from perception is of no pragmatic help here.
You are missing the point that dreams are real perceptual states. Sure we can decide later that they weren't perceptions of real things. But we can't dismiss the fact that they were perceptual states. We actually had an experience. And the fact we later realise it couldn't have been of the world is the issue.
Quoting andrewk
Interestingly, I saw my cat wandering across the lawn out of the corner of my eye a short while ago. I clearly saw it. Then I turned to focus properly and saw it was just the motion of a dark leaf blowing past. If I had never double-checked, I would only have known I "really saw the cat".
So these kinds of perceptual errors happen a lot and we just don't pay them much heed. We get used to projecting our sensory expectations on the world.
However if you are serious about the issues at a philosophical level - if you want to sustain some grand claim about direct realism - then you need to do more than just make dismissive "it never bothers me" noises.
We can all agree that the best explanation is there really is a world out there, and that when we are awake and alert and really paying close attention, there is some kind of very effective relationship at work. Our mental integration into the physical world is pretty effortless. Or indeed, even an effort couldn't change what we must perceive.
But in fact some people can really imagine a world for themselves that vividly. Ten per cent of the population are highly hypnotisable as they can project suggested imagery that strongly. From memory (I'd have to dig that out) there are some experiments where they can experience colour contrast after-effects after being asked to imagine a red or yellow field as vividly as they can for a few seconds.
So all these confident assertions about direct realism sound very hollow when set against a vast amount of accepted psychological science.
"Seeing mental images" is indeed a "spectre"; we never see any such thing. We see real or imagined trees.
The whole dichotomy of direct vs indirect realism is fatally flawed. When I see a tree I am affected by the interaction between it and the light reflected off it in complex ways, this is an affection, a process, that results in seeing the tree.
Is this affection or process direct or indirect? I would say the question could be answered either way depending on how I think about it; there is no inherent contradiction between these two ways of answering . the contradiction only arises if I demand that one of then must be right. must be absolute; whereas both are only interpretive ways of thinking about experience.
Nah, if the problem of perception were trivially a misuse of words, it wouldn't have persisted for several millennia. Someone back in Ancient Greece, China or India would have pointed it out, and that would be the end of that.
Also, it wouldn't have survived the linguistic and cultural transitions from then until now, since different ways of expressing the problem would have shown that it was a mere grammar mistake.
At least, I don't think it would have taken all the way to Wittgenstein to notice the problem. If it's that hard to figure out, then something else is going on.
I expressed it as "experiencing seeing mental images", which does happen in dreams, imagination, memory and hallucination. In a dream in particular, the experience is as if wee saw a tree with our eyes. It might not be so vivid in imagination, depending on one's capacity for visualization, but I can certainly imagine myself looking at a tree.
Quoting Janus
That might be so, but the long standing concern is ancient skepticism, where we're cut off from knowing about the actual objects that caused the perception. Can interpreting experience in different ways alleviate this concern?
Maybe it represents nothing, just as some words can be generated in the mind that don't refer to anything. Or maybe we could say that it represents the neural firings of the sleeping brain. We could also say that you being aware of the real tree is also being aware of your own neural processes, as the appearance of the tree in the mind provides information about all processes along the causal link, from the tree, to the light, to the eyes and the brain's visual system. Your experience of the tree informs you of the state of all those things, as it is the effect of that entire causal chain. Seeing a tree informs you of the state of the tree, the wavelength of the light, the state of your eyes and visual system, not just the tree. That's why eye doctor's ask you to describe your visual experience to them, because it can inform them of the state of your eyes (you have cataracts, etc.)
What does a mental image look like? As I already said we don't experience imagining, dreaming, remembering or hallucinating as "seeing mental images", but as seeing whatever it is we are dreaming about, remembering and so on.
Quoting Marchesk
Perceiving objects is knowing them I would say, although it is obviously not knowing everything about them. Is the concern simply that we cannot know exhaustively and thus with ansolute certainty what is causing us to perceive objects? How will thinking about it change this situation we find ourselves in? Once you let the concern in there can be no end to it, no? Better to acknowledge the limitations of discursive thought.
So then the post does exist prior to someone understanding it. To say that it doesn't exist is a bit incoherent. It exists, it just isn't understood.
An animal.
Other than that, I can't think of anything earlier than Descartes and his evil demon. And it was Berkeley that really seemed to set this issue rolling in any widespread way.
What writings from ancient times are you thinking of, that treat this as a serious issue for consideration?
The Cyrenaics on perceptual relativity, which they took to mean that we can only have knowledge of our perceptual awareness, and not what caused it. Also, the bent stick in the water and other optical illusions were pointed out by Greek skeptics.
And Indian philosophical tradition has been influenced by meditative states and the idea that the world we perceive is an illusion generated by mistakenly thinking we are separate beings.
Wasn't Berkley responding to Locke & Hume?
Also, discrepancies in perception are probably part of what motivated humans to start asking philosophical questions in the first place. At least Simon Blackburn and Daniel Dennett seemed to think the distinction between appearance and reality was a primary motivator.
There is quite a bit of it in Ancient Greece.
The way that a galley away on the horizon looks tiny, and yet we don't see it as anything but a regular ship far away.
Another one was the jars of hot and cold oil. Dip a hand in each, then put both hands into a third jar that is room temperature. Your hands will be telling you different things about whether the third jar is hot or cold now.
Pushing the eye for double images was I think another example used.
That's true. But we do the same when we're dreaming. When we fall asleep and start dreaming we forget that we fell asleep and started dreaming. Instead, we think that the contents of our dreams are real. We do so until we wake up and unforget what has been forgotten. What this shows is that what we think is real is not necessarily real. Our judgments are fallible. We are clearly wrong about dreams being real and we could be wrong about our wakeful consciousness being real. The only thing that stops us from doubting that wakeful consciousness is real is lack of evidence. There is no evidence that our wakeful consciousness is merely a dream.
Quoting antinatalautist
Well, dreams can be very convincing, and yet, when we wake up, we always look upon them as being unreal. It is therefore not that hard to see wakeful consciousness as being unreal. It's just that we don't think that it is unreal, naturally, since there is no evidence for it.
I don't exactly know how I'd arrange the quantity-quality and subjective-objective dichotomies with respect to one another, but otherwise you get where I'm coming from.
But to be clear it's not just a matter of how I want to live my life as an individual but (especially in this context) how I build a truly "objective" picture of reality. The "biggest" picture of reality might involve billions of individual narrative-approached "life-worlds," perspectives if you like on the shared "physical kernel." The "scientific image" is a reduced, ideal overlap. The theme that I aim my "objective" thinking in terms of is way individuals explain themselves to themselves. Granted, I am biased in the sense that I focus my theorizing on what interests me, what my background is, etc. But I don't think I'm an exception.
Quoting apokrisis
I don't think it's a paradox. I'm just trying to squeeze a little acknowledgement from you with respect to what I like to theorize about. Your position is pretty likable. I'm not "against" it.
Quoting apokrisis
I relate to that quite a bit. There are certain limits, though. For instance, I'm not a parent. I probably won't have that experience. But then parents don't know what it's like to age without children. Our lives have a particular shape. We can't simultaneously pursue extremes of irresponsibility and responsibility. We can't see from two gender or racial perspectives at the same time. Or if we somehow do, this itself is a particular shape. Ideally we can ignore what is idiosyncratic about the shapes of our lives. Certainly the physicists and the mathematician can do so in their work. But can the most general kind philosophy be truly independent of this particularity? I can try to do this in my own case when I focus on the general structures of worldviews. I can point out examples. But even this detachment already requires a certain "existential" position. It requires a "negative" or "freefloating" worldview, something like an ironism or nihilism. One has to (perhaps) identify with disidentifiation itself.
Quoting apokrisis
That's a good question. I think we can attain some distance from our "heroic" investment, especially if this distance is already part of that heroic investment. The heroic scientist is less heroic the more ignorant he is of the condition of his own possibility. The extreme case would be in Kojeve, where his "wise man" is explicitly and for himself a hero of self-consciousness. That wise man is one who can give an exhaustive account of the reality that must include him as its self-consciousness.
Quoting apokrisis
I relate to this to, in my own way. The self becomes more impressive, more substantially individual, only by "falling out of love with" its petty idiosyncrasies and "taking the impersonal personally." I've always been able to relate to you on that level (your "highmindedness") even if I bang my own vision against yours as an experiment. I also think in terms of a blind driveness. Schopenhauer mentioned "irritability" as the raw material of a philosopher. I do think a certain "aggression" or will-to-master is in play. We beat the ambiguity into a nice shape. Since language is always already social/iterable, this beating-into-shape is not just personal for those whose personalities are already passionately impersonal.
Quoting apokrisis
I've definitely noticed the nihilists, absurdists, and fanatics. I'm not sure that either of us is completely free of what's questionable in forum types. I understand myself to be a sublimation of some of the greener "nihilists" and "mystics" here. I don't know about you, but I use this forum for "self-overhearing" as I much as I do for hearing. It's more fun to work out my ideas in conversation, against resistance. Of course sometimes I just learn from others. Finally, I really am interested in the zoo of self-elaborating personality. I can watch from a safe distance here.
Quoting andrewk
I agree with this. I think it's analogous to the difference between saying "I'm reading words" and saying "I'm reading about World War II". When the indirect realist says that we see mental phenomena he is saying something like "I'm reading words" and when the direct realists says that we see the tree he is saying something like "I'm reading about World War II".
They're just different ways to talk about the same thing.
I'm not trying to gang up on you here, but I wanted to respond to this. As I see it, only philosophers ever bother with the issue in the first place. Is it possible that we philosophers like to argue? What's nice about certain issues (like this one) is how impersonal they are. They also can't be answered by science. They are elusive, linguistic. We can play these games forever, even name various openings as if we were studying chess.
One might say that most people indicate a figuring-out that it's merely a verbal issue by just turning away from (this aspect of) philosophy as 'silly' talk. Bertrand Russell's people teased him with "no matter, never mind" when he said he wanted to be a philosopher. Heidegger wrote something about philosophy being the kind of talk that makes the maids giggle (something like that.) Diogenes and other "lifestyle" philosophers insisted that philosophy was a virtuous way of living and not primarily an endless dialectic about epistemological niceties. (Have you read Eminent Lives by Diogenes Laertes? A great little book!) I personally admire Epictetus for his absolute focus on ethics.
In short, it didn't take "all the way to Wittgenstein to notice the problem." It's just that some people kept on playing the game anyway, 'cause they enjoyed it or were compelled to run the loop, having ignored boring common sense and not yet having been persuaded from within the game by a witty Wittgenstein, jovial James, or naughty Nietzsche. (Couldn't resist.)
But they're not. One is talking about a simulation running inside your head by which you're indirectly aware of an external world.
The other is talking about there being no simulation, just direct access to the external world.
The difference is meaningful and huge, because the first one allows skepticism and idealism a foot in the door, while the other closes the door. That's why Berkeley went after direct realism first.
Quoting Marchesk
Without concepts, you cannot make predictions. You can only live in the moment. Roughly speaking, to conceptualize the visible (i.e. what you have experienced) is to imagine the invisible (i.e. what you did not experience.)
When you look at that duck-rabbit picture, your brain cannot decide, solely on the content of that picture, whether the animal is a rabbit or a duck. It can decide that it is an animal but it cannot decide what kind of animal. This is because that particular view is ambiguous.
Note that an animal is more than just a single view of it. An animal is, properly speaking, an animation, i.e. a sequence of views, that is interactive. The duck-rabbit picture only shows one side of the animal.
That's like saying only mathematicians bother with questions like Fermat's last theorem.
Except that questions about whether we really perceive the real world do crop up among average people, and make it into literature and the media. You have people like Elon Musk claiming we're in a simulation and asking scientists to find a way out, or whatever.
Philosophy is like art, math and sport. They are activities humans engage in, but anyone can find those activities to be pointless, or meaningful.
And what do you mean by direct access to the external world? Presumably you're not saying that my experiences are the tree, because that would be subjective idealism. Presumably you accept that my experiences (i.e. sense-data/qualia) are one thing and the tree is something else. So what does it mean for sense-data/qualia to provide "direct" (or for that matter "indirect") access to the tree?
Both the direct and the indirect realist will likely argue that the nature of our experiences (the particular quality of the sense-data/qualia) is causally covariant with the nature of the tree (being that the tree is causally responsible for the experience), but beyond that, what's the difference between saying that the experience is direct or "just" a simulation?
Direct realists deny that there are sense-data. Your access to the tree is direct because you're not aware of some idea in the mind (sense-data), you're aware of the tree.
Quoting Michael
The difference is what we're directly aware of when having a perception. The indirect realist has to make an inference to an external tree. The direct realist does not.
So are you saying that the image of a tree is the tree, or that there's no such thing as the image of a tree?
And what are dreams/hallucinations if not the occurrence of sense-data?
Quoting Marchesk
Repeating the claim "awareness is direct" doesn't explain what it means for awareness to be direct.
Agreed, and it's a problem for direct realism, far as I'm concerned. Disjunctivism is one way of dealing with that.
Quoting Michael
No, image of the tree is seeing the tree.
Quoting Michael
You perceive a mind-independent object, not a mental image, sound, etc.
I'm not sure how putting it in those terms dissolves the philosophical issue of what a perceived tree is, or the skeptical concern that we can't know. Also, we do experience mental* images, and when we see a tree, it can be similar in experience to having a hallucination or dream of a tree.
* Or image generated by our nervous system (or bodily organism), if you prefer. Meaning, it's not external to our being, and thus publically shared.
I'm asking for the distinction between perceiving a mind-independent object and perceiving a mental image. I don't get it. Both the direct and the indirect realist will argue that (waking) experiences are caused by external stimulation, but then the former wants to say that the perception is of the external stimulation and the latter wants to say that the perception is of the experience. Except for the wording, I don't understand the difference.
Remember the infamous dress? Everybody was seeing the same picture, but some saw it to be black and blue and some saw it to be white and gold. So despite the fact that there was a shared object of perception, the image differed.
But then, if the image differed, was there a shared object of perception? Some were aware of a black and blue dress and some were aware of a white and gold dress.
As I said before, it's just different ways to talk about the same thing. You can say you're aware of the image (a white and gold dress for some, a black and blue dress for others) or you can say that you're aware of the external stimulation (the photo).
It dissolves it because it puts to ground the untenable, philosophically atrophied distinction between the 'mental' and the 'thing itself'; the very question posed by the OP is an error. The challenge is not to answer it but to reformulate its terms entirely.
When you dream, hallucinate, visualize or remember a tree, it's only available to you. When you perceive a tree, other people can also perceive it. Realists say this is so because the tree is mind-independent.
Quoting Michael
It's whether the content of perception is the same as dreaming, hallucinating, etc. or not. What causes it is another matter.
If the indirect realist is correct, then we're seeing the equivalent of a dream tree, like when Morpheus tells Neo he's been living in a dream world. The only difference being that there's an external cause for the perception, which may be similar to the tree, or something entirely else, such as the noumena.
But if the direct realist is right, then what we see is what we get, within the limitations of our sensory organs (obviously science is still needed here).
I understand, but I don't see how it accomplishes that, since we do have sensory experiences which are not externally generated.
So direct realism is as described in the Wikipedia article (even though so many have taken issue with it when I bring it up):
The fourth point is where I think direct realism fails. The properties of the experience (colour, smell, taste, texture, shape) are properties of the experience and not properties of the external-world stimulus. The properties of the external-world stimulus are causally covariant with the properties of the experience, but they are not the same. For example, a sweet taste is causally covariant with the apple's chemical structure, but isn't a property of the apple, and a red colour is causally covariant with the apple's surface (and/or the reflected light), but isn't a property of the apple's surface (and/or the reflected light).
Each one of us has his own experiences. When we say that we both perceive something (e.g. that the sky is blue) what we mean is that we have similar experiences. Nothing else.
What we mean is that we have similar color experiences when looking at the same sky.
Well, I would add to this that we also mean that the same external stimulus is causally responsible for the experience.
I would agree with that. But are there some properties that we do directly perceive, such as shape?
I don't think so. As studies have shown, there's no a priori connection between shapes-as-seen and shapes-as-felt. Those born blind who later gain sight aren't immediately able to determine the shape of an object just by looking at it. It takes time to learn the shape of an object by sight. So given that a circle-as-seen and a circle-as-felt are very different, what is "objective" circle-ness like? A circle-as-seen or a circle-as-felt? I don't think it's "like" either. A visual circle is just an experiential effect of the right kind of external stimulation, just as a tactile circle is just an experiential effect of the right kind of external stimulation. I think it very wrong to think that things look (or feel) like something even when not being seen (or felt).
But objects do have shapes, and those shapes are important to how the objects interact with the world. When we see a circle, we see that shape because the light bounces off it that way. When we feel the shape, we can tell that it's rounded, and if a blind person walked around a shape, they would know they went in a circle.
Science claims otherwise. There is big universe that exists beyond and before, and after us. But our everyday experiences tell us the same thing. The big oak tree has 120 rings. It was alive before I was born, etc. And all of us were born, before we experienced anything. This goes all the way back before humans, and eventually, before life and any sort of experience.
It applies to any kind of experience. When two men look at a wheel and agree that its shape is circular what that means is that their "shape" experience is similar.
Those 'sensory experiences' are precisely what happens when the the vast physiological and psychological machinery that regulates our perception are not constrained by environmental affordances: dreams and hallucinations are the ultimate proof that there is a shit-ton that is 'contributed' by us in the process of perception, and which is let to 'run free' in abnormal circumstances. Another way to put this is that the difference between waking and dreaming is vastly overstated. Here is Evan Thompson on dreams:
"Wakefulness is nothing other than a dreamlike state constrained by external sensory inputs... the brain sustains the same core state of consciousness during REM sleep and wakefulness, but the sensory and motor systems we use to perceive and act can’t affect this consciousness in regular ways when we’re REM-sleep dreaming. Consciousness itself doesn’t arise from sensory inputs; it’s generated within the brain by an ongoing dialogue between the cortex and the thalamus. The difference between wakefulness and REM sleep lies in the degree to which sensory and motor information can influence this thalamocortical conversation. During REM sleep, sensory inputs are kept from entering the dialogue, while motor systems are shut down (you’re paralyzed except for eye movements) and attention fastens onto memories.
Simply put, when sensory inputs participate in the thalamocortical dialogue generating consciousness, they constrain what we experience and we have waking perception. When sensory inputs can’t participate in this dialogue in sleep, we dream. To put the idea another way, from the brain’s perspective—or rather from the perspective of the thalamocortical system sustaining consciousness—wakefulness is a case of dreaming with sensorimotor constraints, and dreaming is a case of perceiving without sensorimotor constraints." (Thompson, Waking, Dreaming, Being - this book has so much else to say on this subject, you really ought to read it).
This being a more scientifically elaborated idea which Bergson had decades ago: "We must suppose, in deep sleep, at least a functional break in the relation established in the nervous system between stimulation and motor reaction. So dreams would always be the state of a mind of which the attention was not fixed by the sensori-motor equilibrium of the body. ... If our analyses are correct, the concrete feeling that we have of present reality consists, in fact, of our consciousness of the actual movements whereby our organism is naturally responding to stimulation; so that where the connecting links between sensations and movements are slackened or tangled, the sense of the real grows weaker, or disappears." (Bergson, Matter and Memory).
Perception is loop that runs from body to world and back again; when the loop is broken or interrupted, there is still alot that goes on, but it does so aberrantly, in fragments. Hence the weird phenomenology of dreams, the general tendency to 'float' (unconstrained by a fixed body!), the general fragmentary nature of dreams, etc.
What it means is that there is a circular object that gives rise to the experience of seeing a circular shape, and that's why two people can have similar experiences. Also that's why there are two people.
They might have a shape, but that shape isn't anything like a shape as seen or as felt. I think you're committing the same error of conflation that some do when they talk about things having a colour. Red-as-seen isn't anything "like" light with a wavelength of ~625–740 nm (or a surface that reflects light at this wavelength). Sweetness-as-tasted isn't anything "like" the chemical composition of sugar.
Things don't look or feel like anything when not being seen or felt. It's naïve (realism) to suggest otherwise.
The problem is that people confuse actual experience (i.e. sense-data that we possess) with potential experience (i.e. sense-data that we expect.) Even though I was born long after Alexander the Great died, I do not deny the potential experience of seeing him in person.
It doesn't really help alleviate skeptical concerns, or tell us much about the nature of the external inputs. As Michael points out, the external inputs can be totally unlike what consciousness presents us.
So we're left with mathematical abstractions?
This part is particularly intriguing. I can just hear some philosophers gnashing their teeth over this. Would love to see Dennett's reaction to it.
Kant's Togetherness Principle
This applies to judgments, Kant agrees that we sense without concepts but that it is only through concepts that judgments can be made.
Wittgenstein also discusses the duck-rabbit as two different points of view or aspects Duckrabbit in his Philosophical Investigations II.
So yes you run into something but it is not yet a tree.
It only supports 'indirect realism' if the very distinction between direct and indirect realism makes sense. But of course, the point is that it doesn't. We see (to speak in the overused modality of sight) exactly what appears, insofar as appearance just is the result of a perceptual process. It could not even in principle be otherwise: there is nothing to 'compare' it to, there is no appearence-that-is-not-an-appearance, no perception which is not a result of a perceptual process.
Quoting Marchesk
It's not clear that this is a sensical statement either.
.Quoting Marchesk
Anything that makes a Dennett gnash teeth - hopefully to grind them down to the point of silence - is fine by me!
I disagree. The universe isn't a mechanism. Its particulars, or facts if you will, are not produced according to some set of rules. Rather, the universe is a mass of particulars that are related to each other in a specific way. Mechanisms are created by humans for the purpose of prediction. That's all they are. If we knew everything about the world, you can be sure, our knowledge wouldn't have the form of a theory, but that of a mass of particulars. Theories exist only because we are ignorant.
How is it not? What are the external inputs? What are their properties? Do any of those properties show up in our experiences?
Quoting StreetlightX
I don't see how it doesn't. You've basically quoted evidence that our perception is internally generated from a combination of external inputs, and ongoing processing in the brain (conversation between cortex and thalamus).
What would it mean for something to be 'unlike' what it appears? Would it appear differently? But appearance is just a function of a perceptual process, and to speak of an appearence-which-is-not-an-appearence simply makes no sense. A different kind of perceptual system might perceive things that we don't (the eyes of an insect, say), but - to put it tautologically - there is no point of view which is not a point of view.
Quoting Marchesk
Sure, but what would it otherwise be? What sense can be made of saying that perception is not as such? What you call 'anti-realism' only makes sense when countervailed by 'realism', but what you call 'realism' can be given no sensical content as far as I can see, which makes 'anti-realism' itself a position which states nothing, that marks a difference which makes no difference.
What I was saying is that the properties of the experience (e.g. colour and taste) are not properties of the external stimulus (e.g. the apple).
As a rough example, coffee has properties that the water and the coffee beans don't have when separated.
Considering my coffee example, where our bodies are the water, the external stimulus is the coffee beans, and our experience is the interaction between them (i.e. the coffee), the realist argues that the object of perception (and the thing we talk about) is the coffee beans, whereas the anti-realist argues that the object of perception (and the thing we talk about) is the coffee.
Quoting StreetlightX
I think the issue between direct and indirect realism is best understood by looking to the epistemological problem that gave rise to the competing theories. Do our experiences provide us with information about what the world is like when we're not looking? If the properties of the experience are products of the experience (i.e. the interaction between our bodies and some external stimulus) then they don't.
The external object or environment itself. Direct realism is a sophisticated form of naive realism. Things are as they appear, under normal conditions where the perceiver is functioning properly.
Quoting StreetlightX
Collapsing the distinction between realism and anti-realism is a form of anti-realism. And you can do that, but what about those "external inputs"? Are they just appearances too?
What about the entire physiological account of perception? Is that an appearance? Is there any reason to suppose anything else exists other than my own appearances? You're providing a sophisticated form of solipsism.
Quoting StreetlightX
Yeah, the bent stick in water appears straight outside of water. The solid table is mostly empty space on the microphysical level. The earth rotates around the sun, despite appearances. There are massive galaxies of billions of stars, despite it looking like there are only a few thousand points of light in the night sky. Most the EM spectrum is invisible to us. There is a giant list of appearance/reality distinctions.
But that anti-realist can't answer the question of why there is coffee, while the realist can appeal to chemistry. For the anti-realist, coffee is brute, and chemistry is a just-so story. Something that makes sense of appearances.
You mean an anti-realist can't be a scientific realist and instead has to be an instrumentalist? Perhaps. But so what? Are you suggesting that anti-realism is wrong because it doesn't allow for realism?
I'm suggesting anti-realism is wrong because it can't explain why anything happens. The instrumentalist explanations are just-so stories. We don't know why appearances have the structure they do. We invent atoms and electromagnetism to make sense of it all. Evolution didn't happen, it's just a story we tell ourselves about our origins, because we replaced the religious account.
Landru was real good at this game.
That doesn't follow.
I think one can be a realist about the fundamentals (e.g quantum mechanics and the Standard Model) but an anti-realist about macroscopic objects. Allows one to avoid reductionism.
Evolution is a fictional account of species because it didn't happen on an anti-realist reading, anymore than God created all the animal kinds in six days. It's just more palatable to modern empiricism.
One can. Wouldn't that be mereological nihilism? And does biology still fit in there somehow?
That's the wrong way to look at it. It's like saying that "playing chess" is a fictional account of the deterministic movements of a computer. It's better to say that "playing chess" is an abstract way of describing the very real mechanical behaviour of the hard drive and the screen. And evolution is an abstract way of describing the very real interaction of fundamental wave-particles (or just "noumena" if you don't even want to be a realist about the Standard Model).
If one is realist about wave-particles, but not biological structures, sure.
I think you missed my edit: "or just 'noumena' if you don't even want to be a realist about the Standard Model".
But looking provides us with information about how a thing looks to that which looks at it. If this has a ring of tautology to it, it should. But the creation of a false problem happens when you try and step outside this tautology to ask: but what would it look like to something which doesn't look at it? But of course the question is nonsense. But - and this is why this problem is so prevalent - the nonsensical nature of the question is covered over and 'hidden' by the illegitimate semantic slide by how a thing looks like and how a thing 'is' ('what the world 'is' like'). But the question of appearance belongs in the domain of appearance. A thing looks like how it looks like to you. A legitimate question might be: but why does it look this way and not another way? But not: what does it look like when there is no looking involved?
If you don't keep absolutely clear the distinction between a thing's appearance and what it 'is' (the 'apperential' properties of a thing being a subset of the many properties a thing might have), and if you speak about them as though they belonged in the same category, you're going to ask pseudo-questions.
Yeah, if you want to go full Kant. Streetlight's post would also be Kantian. The external inputs could be the noumena.
It's just that when you arrive at noumena as your reality, why even bother being realist? What makes that more likely than the alternatives? What makes a Kantian so sure there has to be something responsible for experience?
But doesn't science do exactly that by extracting the properties which aren't creature dependant to arrive at an abstract picture? Nagel's view from nowhere. That's the point of objectivity. To get around our idiosyncratic human experiences.
Presumably the same thing that makes a direct realist so sure that there has to be something responsible for the experience (so sure that the things we see continue to exist even when not seen).
That the alternative is an absurd, gappy and brute account of individual experiences, or solipsism?
Or appeals to God and universal consciousness.
And if I were to grant that this is what science does, what would this have to do with perception? If 'science says': here are some properties of the thing which is not 'creature dependent', then by definition it clearly isn't talking about anything to do with perception, with how a thing appears to a 'creature'.
If it has nothing to do with perception, how would we know about it? On an empirical account of knowledge, there must be something perceptible which leads us to inferring the non-perceptible properties of things.
And I think this is exactly the issue behind the argument between the direct and indirect realist. The direct realist (or at least the naive realist) does say that things have a look even when not being looked at, and that in the case of a veridical perception it looks to us as it "objectively" looks (which I agree is nonsense). Whereas the indirect realist says that a thing's appearance is only representative of its objective properties (so, for example, a red appearance is representative of a surface that reflects light at a wavelength of ~625–740nm).
But what is the status of this 'only'? Only, as opposed to what, exactly? A thing's appearance is not... nonsense?
As opposed to the direct realist's (wrongful) claim that a thing's appearance is an objective property that the object retains even when not being looked at.
Science attempts to be creature independent, and describe the world as it is. That's why we arrive at theories like QM.
But it's not. I have no problems understanding it.
How the fuck do you think scientists came up with a theory of QM? By sitting in their armchairs and dreaming it up? Or running a shit ton of experiments and trying to make sense of them?
I didn't come up with the direct/indirect realism debate, so what you're really saying is that professional philosophers who think it's meaningful don't have a good grasp of the English language.
That's a cheap way to dismiss a philosophical issue. But whatever.
I think you're being pedantic. You can re-read my account of indirect realism without including the word "only": "the indirect realist says that a thing's appearance is representative of its objective properties".
Objective would mean the properties that give rise to the experience. This would be the properties of the external inputs.
On the direct realist account, perceived objects would have the same properties when nobody is perceiving them. I can't fully buy into this, because it's clear to me some properties are dependant on the perceiver. But some are clearly not.
Properties that things have when we're not looking. As an example, and assuming scientific realism, the charge of an electron or the mass of an atom or the wavelength of a photon would be objective properties.
But we're not taking about 'properties' in the abstract. We're talking about perceptual properties, which, by definition, are related to a perceiver. Again, you're confusing the one with the other.
What does it mean for a thing to have certain properties when noone is looking at it? I can and I will give you my answer. But I am interested in yours.
What does it mean for the sky to be blue when you're not looking at it?
What does it mean for a wheel to be circular when you're not looking at it?
For example, right now, I'm in my apartment. From this position, I cannot see the color of the sky. Nonetheless, I am of the opinion that the color of the sky, at this very point in time when I am not looking at it, is blue. What does that mean? What am I trying to say? Clearly, I do not know what's the color of the sky at this point in time because I am not looking at it. How can I know it? The answer is that, although I cannot experience it from this position, I can predict it. And I can do so by applying logic of induction to my past observations. What I really mean when I say that the sky is blue at some point in time when I am not looking at it is that I predict, based on my past observations, that if I went outside of my apartment and looked at the sky precisely at that point in time that I would see a sky that is blue. That's all it means. Phenomenalists such as Ernst Mach call this "potential experience". That's what is meant when people say that things exist or have certain properties when we're not looking at them. It does not mean anything more than that. Unfortunately, many people, I am pretty sure you among them, are not willing to accept this description. Why is this so?
Are some of the perceived properties also properties of the object being perceived? Locke thought so.
It means under certain lighting conditions (it's sunny out), the air molecules scatter light at a wavelength that we see as blue.
Because I find it extremely lacking, and it makes science into a fiction. It also means other people are a potential experience.
That's simply what prediction (and also retrodiction) is. It concerns itself with what we did not experience, or at the very least, what is not within our memory. If we experienced everything all at once, and thus knew everything as it is, there would be no need for prediction. There would be no need for thinking, reasoning, intelligence, etc.
Quoting Marchesk
That is perfectly compatible with my description.
I don't want to pretend that I've kept up with the direct realism debate, but I think this would be an issue only if it's assumed that what happens when we hallucinate or dream is exactly what happens when we're not hallucinating or dreaming--if it's assumed, in other words, that when we dream of a tree we're seeing a tree just as we would when wide awake and looking out of a window at a tree. I don't think there's any basis for such an assumption.
We're human beings and, of course, perceive, experience, interact with the rest of the world as human beings would. Does that mean we have "direct awareness" of the "external world" (I think that's direct realism)? Well, I don't think there's a world external to us, as I think we're part and parcel of the world--there's just the world, and we're in it. Regardless though, we have such awareness of the rest of the world as human beings may have given our capacities. That doesn't mean that we aren't aware of the rest of the world, directly or indirectly--we're part of the world. It just means that we are what we are.
I would say that both when awake and when dreaming the immediate cause of the experience is brain activity (or maybe the experience just is brain activity). The difference is that when awake the brain activity is stimulated by some external stimulus and when dreaming the brain activity is stimulated by some internal stimulus. So the nature of the experience is the same even if the cause is different.
This is one of those philosophical issues that I don't see the point in, but I don't think this is because of quietism, rather because I don't really see what's at stake in the issue.
What is a theory of perception? Presumably it's a way of assigning a description to the following kind of event: X perceives Y and set of properties and relations P(Y) influenced or deriving from the set of properties and relations P(X,Y). As an example.
I perceive a cup on my table, it is plain white and filled with coffee.
I (X) perceive a cup ( Y ) on my table ('on my table' is a relation between the cup and the table, a member of P(Y) ), it is plain white (a property of the cup, a member of P(Y)) and filled with coffee (being filled with coffee is another member of P(Y)).
I think any direct realist and any indirect realist would agree that indeed I do see a cup on my table, and that it is plain white and filled with coffee. What matters between them is how to analyse 'I see' in terms of the subject: me, X; the object: Y, the cup. Specifically, what matters are the properties of the relation 'sees' between X and Y. How does it arise? What does it mean for me to see X? What are the relations between the seen object and the object? (representational sense data or identity for indirect/direct examples). Answering these questions gives elements of P(X,Y).
What does a theory that uses sense data or identity as fundamental entities in P(X,Y) achieve? At best a generalized description of what it means to be a sensory object - an element of our perceptual world. Whether it is constituted by sense data or populated by the objects themselves doesn't gives us any information about why the relation between the seen object and the object obtains. We 'see' sense data, we 'see' objects, so what? How can someone learn anything about vision or perception in general - how it works - just by attempting to describe the conditions of access to the sensory object?
Let's take a couple of, very abridged examples, of how to learn something about perception philosophically. In the transcendental aesthetic in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It proceeds, abridging a lot, by attempting to found the perception of objects in terms of a mental application of necessary qualities of a sensory manifold. Stuff has spatial extent, stuff persists in time. So then we're left, even if you do not agree with the specific conclusions Kant has, that a perceiving subject conditions the observed objects in some way. Hurrah, we've learned something. How do we condition the objects? Through the application of these constraints to the sensory manifold. What about the 'real' relationship with the object? ... Well, whether Kant's noumenon is given a positive (there's really real stuff underneath our perception) or negative (the noumenon is the name of a conceptual delimiter between the intelligible and the unintelligible), no longer tells us anything about perception, rather about how perception relates to knowing. The latter is still debated within Kant scholarship, the former is well established science at this point.
Another is Husserl, with his idea of 'bracketing','reduction' or 'epoché'. This means, roughly, forgetting the objectivity or veridicality of our experiences and instead attempt to deal with their internal structures and webs of meaning. One way he proceeds is by using his imagination to vary perceived objects in order to filter out their non-necessary properties for being those objects, and thus attempts to derive internal structures to perceptual acts. Great, we can learn something through these descriptions about how we intuit objects and ascertain what they count as or are identified as. Whether the object is 'really there' or 'just a sense object' doesn't matter for the purposes of (transcendental phenomenology) description of perceptual events. If you asked Husserl whether his phenomenology cared about the real existence of objects vs their status as perceptual ideals, he'd probably say something like 'no, I don't want to repeat the errors my method was meant to avoid'.
The debate between direct and indirect realism(s) proceeds after granting people a perceptual world. The next step is for some reason thinking 'how perception works' can be answered through analysis of our condition of access to the already granted perceptual world. How perception works is a question on the level of the manifestation of the perceptual world, not on its conditions of possibility. Is it then surprising that absent from this kind of analysis is any analysis of the performativity in the perceptual event, and this changes the kind of questions that would be asked of a perceptual theory. A contrastive question between direct and indirect realism, of specific sorts, might be 'do I see the cup of coffee or do I see a representational sense datum of the object?', an analysis inspired by the performativity of the perceptual act (it's a verb, c'mooooon) might ask "how is it that I see the coffee cup? what perceptual structures allow me to see the coffee cup?". It changes debates from, ultimately, a semantic theory of perceptual verbs or their conditions of possibility to 'what makes us perceive how we perceive and how do we perceive?'
In terms of the original formulation, the debate between indirect and direct realism does not attempt to flesh out P(X,Y), it instead attempts to look at the conditions for the possibility of P(X,Y) while forgetting that it does this. Is it any wonder that this thread and the previous one are full of unsubstantial semantic dispute, and that any 'evidence' for direct or indirect realism based on the real properties of perception can be interpreted favorably or explained away...
If we already grant the 'world of perception' to a person, what remains is to give an account of its formation and stability rather than our conditions of access to it.
I find it difficult to accept that we're having the same experience when hallucinating or dreaming that we have when we're not. If that's the case, why would we even speak of hallucinations or dreams? There would be no reason to distinguish them from other experience, and we do. I don't think we distinguish them solely by their causes.
It would be different in that it was caused by some external stimulus, but it would be the same in that it emerges from (or is identical to) brain activity.
Quoting Ciceronianus the White
How else do we distinguish them? Certainly there's a qualitative difference; experiences caused by external stimuli tend to be far more vivid and regular than experiences caused by internal stimuli (although I've never hallucinated, so I'm not sure what it's like to see things when on drugs or when suffering from some mental illness; my only reference is dreaming).
I agree with Michael. Even if the two experiences, the experience of seeing a tree with your own eyes and the experience of hallucinating a tree, were equally vivid they would still be different because of the context. Letters 'A' and 'A' are equal in the sense that they are both the letter 'A' but they are different in that their position in the sequence of letters that is this sentence is different. Context is extremely important.
I think Michael is saying they are not different.
I'm not sure what you would consider a "difference" in this case, if you maintain that the experience is the same regardless of the differences you acknowledge.
A person sitting with a friend who is hallucinating would probably think there is a difference if that person heard the friend begin to speak to people who weren't there or called attention to a tree if there was no tree. That person would, I think, believe the friend was not seeing a tree or people who weren't there, thereby noting a significant difference between the experience of seeing and the experience of hallucinating. Likewise, if that person's friend said "I had a dream about a tree" I think the person would not think his friend saw a tree while the friend was dreaming.
And the difference between seeing a tree and not seeing a tree is? Presumably seeing a tree is when a tree is causally responsible for the tree-experience, dreaming of a tree is when brain activity during REM sleep is causally responsible for the tree-experience, and hallucinating a tree is when psychedelic drugs are causally responsible for the tree-experience?
What is this tree that is causally responsible for tree-experience if not some sort of tree-experience? I think this might be the place where our reasoning parts ways. I can agree with you if what you are saying is that one type of tree-experience (e.g. close-up view) is causally responsible for another type of tree-experience (e.g. looking at a tree from a distance.)
Well, if I at least accept scientific realism then a particular collection of fundamental particles. If I don't then some otherwise indescribable noumenon.
That seems to be a contradiction: how can the simulation be running inside your head, if your head is inside the simulation? :s
Great quotes from Thompson and Bergson. But doesn't that sophisticated view about "points of view" arise from trying to respond to the way that the good old idealist vs realist argy-bargy made some basic sense?
Embodied cognition, or autopoiesis, or whatever, is a historical response to a question taken seriously. It surely cites that as its starting point. It would say it is a better view than say, cognitive representationalism.
So while I agree there is much that is incoherent at root about the classic framing of the issue, there was something essentially reasonable about asking the question of how sure can we be that what we experience is as direct as it appears ... once we realise that it does just appear.
Quoting Marchesk
I think that is an important point. What realism is after is the God's eye view. Naive realism supposes we just have that already - we look and we can see those colours and shapes which just are the objective facts of the world. There is a disinterested theory of truth relation that can support human beliefs about "how things really are". And threatening that with idealism - introducing a whole set of potential confounds into any truth claims - is deeply disturbing for many.
It just shows how soaked in analytic philosophy the Western mindset has become. The world has to be able to function as the truth-maker in the way propositional logic requires. Otherwise the whole house of cards could come down. There are real philosophical stakes motivating direct realism - real in the sense of being an existential threat at least. :)
Of course, I've already explained how pragmatism sidesteps that. It doesn't expect the mind's relation with the world to deliver truth, just functionality.
But anyway, science is then meant to be the way that realism escapes its discovered subjective limitations - the fact, as SX says, it is always a point of view. Science is meant to be the way to take the objective, all-seeing, God's eye view.
And then it is, but it isn't. You need to note how the ambition to see reality more clearly in terms of physics results in us thinking of mathematical formula and then reading numbers off various dials and instruments. Instead of "reading off" what our eyes and ears tell us "directly" - colours, sounds, etc - we add a whole bunch of mediating instrumentation that converts energies to numbers. Values that equations can understand.
So to get more real about reality, we in fact retreat even deeper from it into a realm of pure modelling. Our knowledge about the thing-in-itself becomes even less substantial, even more purely conceptual - even more idealistic in being all a bunch of ideas secured by the highly constrained perceptual act of not making a mistake when reporting the numerals visible on a dial.
There is every reason to be fascinated by the idealism vs realism issue. It is foundational to philosophy. It is the basis of epistemology. It is also fundamental to ontology at least in the context of philosophy of mind.
So I don't agree with SX's too easy dismissal, even though he is quite right that the best psychological account is the one he presents (well, once you add the semiosis that explains the autopoiesis, naturally).
But that misses the whole point by talking about the process rather than the results.
The epistemic concern is whether the world itself is how we perceive it. Once we know there is a process to perceiving, then the distinction between appearance and actuality arises. If there is a process, it could get it wrong. It could even invent. It could all be an invention so far as we could ever know.
So you are simply avoiding the issue in question.
Hallucinations and dreams come into it as "objective" proof that we could be trapped inside a fantasy even though normal waking experience feels so undoubtedly real. They are the counterfactuals (the counterfactuals SX wrongly says aren't available) which fatally undermine simple realism. The question then becomes - in a rigorous philosophical sense - how do you apply the brakes before slithering all the way to the other extreme of idealism?
So some real work needs to be done here. It can't be glibly dismissed.
There is no logical link of 'non-realism' to solipsism. If there were one, it would have been published by now, and no non-solipsist 'non-realist' that understood logic would dare to deny the link. But it must be conceded that there is a strong intuitive link. Without God there is no ready explanation for shared experience and it is human nature to grasp at any explanation rather than none, even if the explanation generates at least as great explanatory gaps down the track - which the 'realist' explanation does because it cannot explain how consciousness occurs.
Perhaps the passionate 'realists' are those that viscerally accept that intuitive link between 'non-realism' and solipsism, and the 'non-realists' (including both idealists ('anti-realists') and those that think the distinction is just words) do not.
It's interesting that, in The Matrix, although the protagonists' experiences while in the Matrix are not 'real', they are shared. They work together and communicate with one another while in the Matrix to achieve a goal.
There's room to reflect whether the idea of being in a simulation would be sad if it were a non-solipsistic, shared experience like in The Matrix. For me, it appears sad at first but then when I reflect on the sharedness of the experience with other conscious beings, I feel that it is not.
An older version of the simulation idea is the Vedanta notion that the world is a dream of Brahman. I find that notion attractive. Maybe the difference is that the Matrix is operated by hostile entities, whereas Brahman's dream is not.
My saying I like the Brahman idea might seem that I'm contradicting my earlier statements that the 'realist' and 'non-realist' position statements are not logically distinct. As defence, I'll offer that I don't think the Brahman idea is a well-formed logical proposition. Rather, it is a way of mentally framing one's attitude to life. It belongs in a context of mysticism, not of analytic philosophy, so it doesn't have to bother with things like definitions and syllogisms.
Didn't Descartes write that book? Anyway, to the degree that doubt is possible, belief in turn becomes uncertain.
The logic is the usual reciprocal one of dialectical argument. So you are right that this is a pseudo-problem of a sort. Most folk don't move swiftly on to the synthesis - the realisation that if belief is fundamentally limited, then ... reciprocally ... so in fact must be the doubt.
They call it dependent co-arising out East. Each extreme arises only in presence of its "other". So any limitation on one is going to be mirrored in some formally true sense that further thought ought to be able to uncover.
That is the path which leads to Peircean pragmatism and scientific reasoning. We start the whole game going by just being willing to hazard a best guess. So we claim a belief in axiomatic or hypothetical fashion. Then do our damnedest to doubt it and see if the belief survives. Our degree of belief because reciprocal to the weight of inductive evidence. Our doubt and uncertainty can be quantified in those terms.
So there is definitely a logical argument to be had at the core of this important epistemic debate.
Quoting andrewk
It shouldn't have anything to do with people's emotions - their desires or wishes.
I can see that you might suspect people of picking the philosophical side that seems to best confirm their pre-philosophical understandings of themselves. Of course folk want to be standing on the side of the right answer.
But that isn't why idealism~realism is of foundational importance to philosophy itself. Once it is accepted that somehow reality is an appearance, a point of view, for us, then a can of worms has been opened.
We can be just as sure from the outset that the doubting can't actually slither all the way down the slope to solipsism. As you say with the Matrix, even the solipsists attempts to imagine what that would be like lack convincing detail.
It sounds fine in a general way, until Berkeley has to start muttering about us all being minds within the mind of God. Solipsism is self-contradictory when you really get into its own necessary ontic commitments.
So we know solipsism can't be a final destination we could arrive at just on those kinds of logical (not emotional) difficulties. The alternative is not a well-worked out one.
But that still leaves the big issue of how we resolve the epistemic tension between doubt and belief. And what could be more mission-critical for philosophy? We actually need a robust method, a robust "theory of truth".
And if that has to boil down to induction more than deduction, dialectics rather than predicate logic, then I guess that is when we will discover how emotional the logicians can be. :)
So little at stake for what? It has large stakes in metaphysics. It's been of importance to many philosophers. Anyone can ask whether what they perceive is real or not, and plenty of people do at some point, even if it's over a joint.
I watch the tv show Mr. Robot, and it continuously raises the question of to what extent our perceptions are accurate. Do we perceive the real world, or is it an illusion? And then tons of viewers on Reddit debate whether the show is a simulation, employs time travel, parallel universes, replicants, or whatever theory is used to explain events on the show.
You seem to think the issue doesn't matter. Okay. I'm sure there are plenty of people who think that mathematical or physics problems don't matter either. Who cares about a Higgs Boson or whether P = NP?
Quoting andrewk
What difference does it make what the motivation is for someone finding a philosophical puzzle interesting or important? The point is that some people find it worth discussing. I could wonder why you don't find it important, but it's totally irrelevant to the inquiry itself.
For the eudaimonia of sentient beings.
It seems reasonably likely that discoveries about Higgs Bosons may lead to technological advances that help sentient beings to attain eudaimonia. So there is likely something useful at stake there. I am not so sure about P vs NP, since plenty of P problems are still intractable in feasibly available computing time.
In any case, so far as I know, people don't have long, passionate, circular debates over either of those. They may work towards potential solutions of the problem, but that's technical work, not trading opinions.
So you think an issue worth debating needs to have technological application for it to help attain eudaimonia?
Do you feel the same way about art, literature or music?
I didn't mean to imply that it was all a waste of time. I'm just saying there have been philosophers who eschewed a certain kind of a philosophy for a long time. I have earnestly wrestled with metaphyical issues, and I still do. But pragmatism, etc., has IMV helped me keep my eye on the ball. Some issues now look like dead ends, which opens up time for other more 'living' issues.
For me this word "real" is part of the "problem"? What do we mean by "real"? Or do we mean all sorts of things in all sorts of contexts? I think a primary meaning involves "being-with-others." That's the real real world, I tempted to say. What matters is how shared a situation is. If we're all in the Matrix together, then the Matrix is as real as we might want it.
I have no sincere doubt about being-with-others or being-in-the-world. The universe of the scientific image (a non-primary abstraction that functions as a tool within the "real real world" of being-with-others) includes my brain, etc., so I have reason to think that my experience of this physical substratum is mediated. But apparently we all mediate this substratum in roughly the same way, so that the world can be shared. I think others see red, blue, yellow as I do. They feel love and hate, understand calculus, and so on, more or less in the same way. Even if this was "in" the Matrix (and it sorta is in terms of mediation), it would still be 'real' in the most emotionally relevant sense, at least for me.
https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=735
Remember that maxim about the typical accuracy of sentences starting with 'So you....'?
I see your point better I think. There is an assumption behind idealism~realism which is about being an immaterial soul locked in a material body, a physical world. So selfhood is taken for granted. It is all about starting with the bare givenness of experience. Then we have to work out what is really real.
And a corrective to that is instead not making self primary. The real first ground of being is the communal one. We are already in a world - the social tribal one. Our first experiences as babies is human contact. It is everything. So the communal mind - in some very important sense - is there before the private self becomes individuated (and aware of being trapped in a body that is trapped in a world).
So this seems to go against Heidegger. Maybe you will correct me on that.
But it is definitely pragmatism - Peirce's ultimate theory of truth being based on "that judgement towards which a community of thinkers would eventually tend".
And it is completely in line with my social constructionist viewpoint of human psychology. We are not born selves, but become individuated beings via the shaping constraints of our family, our tribe, our culture, our era.
I would point out how it is theistic notion of supernatural spirit or soul - the Romantic notion of human psychology - which is at odds with this view. So while you talk about it in an appealing warm and cosy ways, the emotional value, that fits quite happily with a naturalistic perspective.
I have no problem at all in first experience being about the raw feelings of human contact, being drawn into the human web of relations. So first there is you. Then later I discover I.
Babies of course are also busily discovering their own hands belong to them, and that the world exists in its various recalcitrant dimensions. But the emotion of social interaction could be primary in a way that the idealism~realism debate manages to by-pass.
You could ask the question of how would that change the game?
I think it primarily means there is a larger world humans are but a small part of. We are late on the evolutionary scene, we only occupy the land surfaces of this planet, for the most part, and there are tons of other stars and planets out there.
The real world is the far bigger and older world, where only a little tiny bit of it has human society.
You did get my point, yes. But this is "with" Heidegger. "Dasein" in its everydayness is lived by the "they" or the anyone. Dasein is "primordially" "being-in-the-world" or "being-with-others." And the goofy word 'Dasein' is used instead of 'human' or 'subject' in order to dodge the Cartesian tradition which has concealed the phenomenon of "primordial worldliness" or "being-in" with its now invisibly- ready-to-hand pre-interpretation.
So we tend to start with a massively loaded notion of ourselves and our situation. That "first wrong move" constrains everything that follows. Hence a destructuring of metaphysics is necessary in phenomenology, a breaking of the concealing crust of "pre-interpretedness." He also very memorably writes: "only as phenomenology is ontology possible."
Quoting apokrisis
Yes, the "everyday self" is especially reminiscent of pragmatism. Dasein is fundamentally care. Even time itself can be explained in terms of the shape of this care, a shape described by Heidegger with temporal metaphors but seemingly untimelike apart from its explanatory power with respect to the time of being-with-others and physics-time. Basically time is "de-worlded" as we move from the individual working on some individual project, then to the social world's holidays (for instance) and finally to the pure clock-time of physics. This is brilliantly presented in The Concept of Time, also known as the "first draft" of B&T.
Then of course know-how is lit-up by the analytic of Dasein as the everyday mode of disclosing entities. They are perceived in terms of their use, in terms of their in-order-to for-the-sake-of. Equipment exists as a network. A pen makes sense in terms of paper to write on. We write a paper in-order-to get published in-order-to get tenure for-the-sake-of living a life of the mind. But this "in-order-to" and "for-the-sake-of" is by no means any more explicit than the tool that vanishes the more it is available or ready-to-hand. The theoretical mode of "just staring" has been given an unjustified priority (concealing the phenomenon of know-how) in order to "ground" eternal "truths" understood as correctness as opposed to the disclosure that makes correctness possible.
Finally, Heidegger includes (in his own terms) the dialectic between the they-self and the 'authentic' self. "Authentic" seems to be a misleading translation of eigentlich. It should perhaps be "real" Dasein or Dasein at its most Dasein, which is to say a "poetic" discloser of being. I think "authentic" Dasein is just Dasein in the mode of revolutionary-'abnormal' of discourse. "Inauthentic" Dasein is the routinized normal discourse of "idle talk" that doesn't dig deeply into what is said. This is pretty much what Rorty made of eigentlich. I think it also describes a mode of experiencing time. It is not a sense of monotonous hurriedness but involves a reticent, anxious joy.
Quoting apokrisis
Yes. I agree complete. Perhaps I stress more than you do, however, the developed individual as the "cutting edge" of the group. On the other hand, I'm sure we both see a dialectic.
Quoting apokrisis
Hmm. I think you are projecting a little on my position. But I will grant that the "hero-image" of the individual can be traced back to the religious tradition. If anyone is aware of this as hero-image, I think it's me. I'm concerned with a phenomenological objectivity, an accurate description of how hero-images generally constrain interpretations of the world. So physical science isn't as important to me, except as it figures as a notion of the "truly" real within particular "understandings of being" for-the-sake-of enacting a particular version of the "knowledge hero." I don't think of my view as warm and fuzzy. It almost presupposes a certain "death" of more typical basic frameworks, those same frameworks it demystifies and tries to explain in terms of a generalized will-to-virtue. (This will-to-virtue is the postulated brute fact, though one could presumably trace it back in terms of biology, etc. But it would explain this same tracing-back that explains it.)
The God's eye view would be the all-encompassing view i.e. the view that allows us to see everything there is in the universe. That's quite different from saying that colors and shapes are the objective facts of the world. I do not have much of a problem with the claim that objects of our experience, such as colors and shapes, are reality itself. In other words, I have no problem with this kind of direct realism. I merely think it's unnecessary to think in such a way. What's problematic is the kind of direct realism that is applied to knowledge that is derived indirectly i.e. via reasoning. It's one thing to think that our objects of experience, such as colors and shapes, are reality itself and another to think that our assumptions or inferences, such as that the way we see colors and shapes is the way other people see them, are reality itself.
The link is perception. If the philosophical position results in being unable to say that one is perceiving things or events external to oneself, then solipsism follows on empirical grounds. Or at least skepticism concerning other people, since we know about other people by perceiving them.
Sure, the link can be denied on ontological grounds. Idealism will just state that other minds exist, and sometimes those other minds have the same or similar ideas in mind at the same time as you do, and thus there is a kind of shared, intersubjective experience.
But it's by ontological fiat that solipsism is avoided. It's not epistemologically grounded. Even Kantian idealism has this problem, since my knowledge of other people is constructed by my categories of thought when perceiving others. Ontologically speaking, other people are part of the noumena, as far as I can know, because my knowledge of them is dependent on perception. Even though Kantians will say all humans perceive as I do, I can only know about them via perception, and thus they could just be another category of my perceptual/cognitive process.
I think that most people would agree with that. I am not a realist, I am a phenomenalist. And I agree with what you're saying. I agree that there is a larger world humans are but a small part of. I agree that we are late on the evolutionary scene. I agree that we only occupy the land surfaces of this planet. I agree that there are tons of other stars and planets out there. That's not where the disagreement between realists and phenomenalists, or at the very least me, resides. The disagreement lies in the MEANING of these statements. And one characteristic feature of all realists is that they REFUSE to explain in sufficient detail what they mean with their statements. Which is exactly what you're doing. You did not explain what the word "real" means. You did not explain what phenomena this category that we identify with the word "real" includes and what phenomena it excludes. What you did is you merely explained one mystery with another.
There is a physical world that exists in space and time regardless of whether humans beings are around to perceive it. And by physical, I mean the world as best approximated by physics. Maybe natural is the better term, since physics is an incomplete, ongoing human endeavor.
This natural world is the causal explanation for how we got here, and what we are.
The difference is in whether one believes that the immediate object of perception is these experiences or the external stimuli, and in whether or not the properties of the experiences are (also) properties of these external stimuli.
For example, one might say that the pain and the feeling of heat when putting one's hand in a fire are the immediate objects of perception – that then allows one to correctly infer the existence of a fire – and that the pain and the feeling of heat are not properties of the fire but are properties of the experience.
True, but that's the exact reasoning the indirect realist uses. The direct realists doesn't need to infer an independent world. We already perceive it.
Quoting Michael
Agreed. That's the issue at stake in the debate.
Quoting Michael
Right, but this will apply to everything we perceive, and other people are perceived.
That's the big kicker and why solipsism is so hard to defeat.
You answer is that it exists as a potential to be perceived. My answer is that it just exists. Question for you: how does a potential causally explain our evolution?
And what reasoning does the realist have to support his claim that we perceive an independent world (of other people and inanimate objects)? Presumably they believe it to be the most parsimonious explanation for the occurrence and regularity of experience? So as I said, the reasoning is the same.
Keep in mind that we start off with naive realism, then realize there are problems for the naive view. This leads to alternative suggestions. But if a form of naive realism can successfully be defended, then there is no need to worry about the alternatives, and the problems they raise.
One account makes the external stimuli open to skepticism. To the extent we care about skepticism, it matters. We don't have to care, but some people are worried about justifying knowledge.
Quoting Michael
Pain is a bad example, since pain isn't an external property. So what would it take for color realism to be the case? The external environment has to be colored in the way we see it when it's not being perceived by humans.
I doubt that can be successfully defended. It sounds incredible. Other attempts at color realism sound dubious on semantic grounds. I'm not sure what sort of property is being defended.
Shape is bit different because a mathematical description for it can be given. This is different than color, where the experience of color bears no relationship with the wavelength of light, other than that's what we end up experiencing.
Here's a thought. If a neurological account of qualia could ever be provided, then perhaps a sophisticated form of direct realism would be defensible, because then a clear relationship between optics and brain processing could be shown. Perhaps.
Wait what? So the world around us is the result of a perceptual process, the process itself being part of world around us (our bodies, brains, etc - known about only through perception), and therefore is also itself the result of the perceptual process? Our nervous system causes a world to appear which contains the very nervous system causing the world and itself to come into appearance?
Or are there two nervous systems/bodies? One generating the appearance and the one perceived?
Quoting StreetlightX
When you talk about "body to world" here, do you mean within the 'world of appearance'? The body we perceive ourselves to be and the external world we appear to inhabit? As if your body and the world are just generating themselves into existence as an appearance, because of a feedback loop between the two appearances? Appearances just cause their own existence somehow?
1. appearance just is the result of a perceptual process
2. this perceptual process is itself contained within the appearance
3. ??!
No. I said: appearance is the result of a perceptual process, not 'the world around us'. It's nothing but a petitio principii to assume that the one is the other. Like most others in this thread, you cross wires which ought to be held firmly apart.
Perhaps participants in this thread ought to better acquaint themselves with The Worst Argument in the World.
"Glibly", forsooth.
The fact that two things are dissimilar gives us good reason to think they're not the same.
If hallucinations and dreams are unlike "normal waking experience" in various respects, as I think has been and must be acknowledged, and we treat them as such, as I think also must be acknowledged, we have good reason to think they're not the same. If they're not the same, then hallucinations and dreams don't provide much in the way of evidence that "normal waking experience" may be a hallucination or a dream, or "fantasy."
It would seem to me, also, that they don't provide much cause to reasonably doubt "normal waking experience." In fact, of course, we don't doubt it.
We don't, but we do (sometimes) worry about what we're perceiving. To quote random scientist in Mr. Robot:
"And I'm fascinated by the greatest unsolved mystery. Do we see reality as it is? If I close my eyes, I can imagine that everything we experience, everything we see, think and do, is unfolding simultaneously in a parallel universe. And if so, how many copies of ourselves exist? And might our mental states be conjoined?"
Not to endorse parallel universe crossing consciousness, but just the popular idea that reality isn't necessarily as things appear to us. That our senses might be "deceiving" us.
Thus the question of whether perception is direct or not. Or more broadly put, the problem of perception. How do we know that what we perceive is real, and if we don't know, then how do we justify knowledge?
Sometimes we're mistaken in identifying something. Sometimes we suffer from a disorder of some kind, which impedes our vision. Sometimes we need glasses. Sometimes we're color blind.
Is it reasonable to infer from this that--NOTHING IS REAL!! Or, that--WE CAN NEVER KNOW ANYTHING!!
I would say not. I don't think absolute certainty is required. So, I find reassuring the fact that we can in almost all cases find reasonable explanations for such things which don't necessitate a belief that we're part of a fantasy, or in The Matrix, or being deceived by an evil demon, and which make such possibilities highly unlikely. I also find it reassuring that we regularly navigate the world with considerable success, and even modify it in ways which indicate, to a reasonable degree of probability, that we're interacting with something which is very close to what we think it is and perceive it to be, and that, e.g. the roads we see and build and cars we drive on them are very close to what we think them to be and won't suddenly prove to be something else.
As a shortcut we've created the concept "tree". Using tree, we don't have to play the entire game of charades to understand what it is we've encountered. We don't have to go "It is tall, it has a hard surface, it has limbs extending from it, it has tendrils going into the ground, it..." we collectively have labeled and defined such things as being "trees" so when we encounter something that meets the general qualities of a "tree" we can just jump right to the conclusion "this is a tree".
Being able to do this allows us to prioritize our attention, we don't have to sluggishly spend all our time dissecting everything to figure out our environment we can quickly use the labels to get our bearings which in a dangerous situation, for example, will allow us to navigate our way to safety expediently.
All things we see, hear, touch, smell, etc. are initially just raw information. They are stimuli that is sent to the brain and it is the brain that encodes all of the data into the concepts we perceive. When you think about sound, for example, it actually activates the ear as if you were hearing something externally. When you imagine something visually it activates the eyes (this is why the eyes move around when you are asleep dreaming). Our sensory organs are just data gathering tools, the brain is what puts it all together.
"Consciousness" is another way of saying "directly aware of stimuli", that is when you are conscious and perceiving you have some agency over the data you are taking in through your senses. "Subconscious" is data that you are accessing without being directly aware of it. You can pull data from the environment but also from stored memories.
Anyways, if you were taught all your life that "trees" were an ancient race of beings who judge the deeds of humans and that your ancestors must be buried before them and fed to them in order to ascend to some higher plane of existence, your whole concept of "tree" would be vastly different. Sure, the raw data you gathered through your senses might be the same but how you interpret them would alter how you store them into memory. They'd likely not fee the same, smell the same, or look the same to you (for example) because you'd be sensing them with a sort of reverence and awe.
We play charades with the universe, everything we "know" boils down to (sometimes educated) guesses. We know, at least through shared experience, there is raw data out there but our interpretations could be way off and we'd never know it because we are seeing existence through our particular vantage point.
It's part of his rejection of atomism and hence of reductionism.
The tree is made of various parts; branches, sticks, leaves, roots. Why privilege the whole tree? Each of these are made of carbon, oxygen, phosphate - why privilege root and branch? And the elements are made from protons and neutrons - do we privilege those? Or their constituent quarks?
The tree is part of a garden, which is part of the town, and so on - which is "real"?
What counts as the "atom", the simple basic item from which all others are built?
Not nothing - but anything. We can take any level of reality as fundamental and work from there. We can name anything, take it as fundamental and build our language from there.
It's not educated guesses or charades; it doesn't matter were we start, we will come up with pretty much the same story.
That's because the world does not care what you believe. Certain things will be true regardless of what you believe, and how you represent them.
No. You see the tree.
Saying otherwise involves a separation of oneself from one's seeing. A homunculus.
For me your perspective takes too much for granted. It adopts the scientific image of reality as a metaphysical image of reality. This god's-eye-view of humanity as a speck is not false but partial. It includes and supports "irrational"-emotional investments. It doesn't even address most of our actual experience. To call most experience unreal seems "unrealistic" to me. Yes we want to predict and control the movement of "public" entities. Science has justly earned our reverence in this regard. Nevertheless, this massive success in one realm arguably tempts us with a scientism that is willfully blind to whatever is not subject to the scientific method. We ignore how we non-theoretically and for the most part experience space and time.
To be clear, I'm not clearing a path for some religious argument. Most religious theses strike me as every bit as scientistic as scientism proper. I'm trying to point behind the entire paradigm that functions like the invisible water we swim in without noticing. We have, in my view, a notion of language that isn't "accurate" with respect to a less-biased just-hearing-it. Deferred and not until the period revealed is the meaning of this sentence. Where then if not in some violent-if-useful abstraction is the physicist's now? Only within this smeared-deferred meaning-making does physics exist.
Admittedly this meaning-making itself is contained in the space-time of physics. So we have a mobius strip. The mind-matter distinction emerges from this meaning-making. There is a tension between modes of speaking. Convergence-coherence is something we strive for but perhaps never have. I'm inclined to speak of a reality that is never finished naming itself. For me scientism would be a way to dodge or oversimplify this ambiguity. It cuts the knot, stops thinking --afraid of being gullible or 'subjective' perhaps.
Is there even such a thing as the meaning of the sentence? I doubt it. There is only what we do with the sentence.
I do appreciate the "use" perspective on language, but I find it implausible as a final truth. I agree that "saying what meaning is" is no small matter. Intelligibility is somewhat ineffable. "The sign is that ill-named thing, the only one, that escapes the instituting question of philosophy: what is it?" We answer what-is-it questions with signs, with meaning. We can zoom out and see clever monkeys buzzing and making marks on paper. We can adopt a reductive, behaviorist perspective. But would we not be doing so as a retreat to a more productive method? To make things easier? Afraid of wasting our time? Those are reasonable motives, but not (for me) conclusive.
Meaning is. But what does 'is' mean? I see the "danger" or questionableness of this quest. I get why Heidegger and Derrida are iffy.
But it is a start.
Analogously, are there appropriate transformations, such that what is claimed to be the case for a realist is also the case for an idealist?
Not so much. You still think of trees as made of wood and needing fertiliser.
I understand the urge to demystify, but isn't this urge itself subject to demystification? I can only guess at your view, since you aren't contextualizing your objections. But I think you have an analytic background?
As I see it the Scylla and Charybdis are muddying the water further on the one hand and pretending that muddy water is clearer than it is on the other hand. To me that deferment of meaning is noteworthy. There is "something that it is like" for you to read this, a 'voice' in your head. This is invisible. It's not a public object any more than seeing redness is a public object.
I can understand not bothering with non-public immeasurable experiences. That all hinges on what one understands as intellectual virtue. I think phenomenology is an interesting direction for philosophy. I like the "productive logic" that makes aspects of the world as we already know it more conspicuous. It thematizes the methodological blind-spot of (physical, public) science, "consciousness" or "meaning" or "being." Phenomenology is a "science" in terms of being a method of knowing, though I'm not so in love with the word 'science' to care much whether it is so recognized. For me the emission of objective statements is not the essence of being human.
But that is just naming - "A something". it tells us nothing about it, does nothing to it or about it...
Indeed, it looks to me like reification. Is it the same "something" the second, third or forth time I read it?
Then is it a something at all?
You can't know what it is like to be a bat, if there is nothing it is like to being a bat.
Exactly. As if one could talk about perception in the absence of... perception. And then think one has some kind of genuine mystery on hand. To conjure a problem out of linguistic befuddlement.
His point was made more abstractly, using a grid of coloured squares; but is fundamental to his rejection of logical atomism. What counts as simple and what counts as complex changes with what you are doing.
Actually, reification is making something abstract more concrete; but what is happening here is making a nothing into a something. Imagining a thing that is shared with each instance of reading a post, but that cannot be talked about - despite it being talked about...
I don't see trees in my dreams. I'm usually in my darkened room with my eyes closed.
I might occasionally dream of trees. But that is not seeing trees.
So it's not as uncontroversial as you might think. It's words that lead you astray here. The concatenation "...experience seeing..." attempts to seperate the experience from the seeing.
Yep. The thing that is important about the hallucination is that while one thinks one is seeing a tree, there is no tree to be seen. One does not see a mental tree.
Not so much.
Good of you to finally join the conversation. Now all we need is TGW and Landru to make this topic great again.
But, you ignored the post where Street quoted a neuroscientist talking about how waking experiences are a form of dreaming, and then his follow up discussion on how the tree appears to us cannot be what it is, since it is an appearance.
So I don't think Street's approach is in agreement with yours at all, except that he is trying to dissolve the issue by saying it is an abuse of language, like yourself. But you think access is direct, and Street, from what I understand, thinks that kind of talk makes no sense, since all we perceive are appearances.
Or at least, that's what I've surmised from this thread.
No, I think we neither see 'directly' nor 'indirectly'. We simply see the trees: which is not to say we see them 'directly' because it's not even in principle possible for 'seeing' to take place 'indirectly': the qualifier 'direct/indirect' is a defunct one that has no place in talking about perception, it's a distinction without an intelligible difference.
This "nothing" was brought to attention so that we could call it a nothing, though. Were you not just 'handling' this "it" as an intelligible if ambiguous entity as you questioned its existence?
Quoting Banno
It is a reification. It (the experience) is grasped as a whole, as a thing carved out from its background. As for the problem of indexicals, that's in Hegel too. He was denying that thought had an outside. He's right that thought has no "conceptual" outside, but that's trivial. The idea of that which is not an idea is of course just an idea. The otherwise indeterminate "something" or "here" or "now" is determined by context. I eat "this" bread, not the "this."
I'm not going to read the whole thread - but thanks for pointing this out to me. I don't see anything objectionable in it.
I'm sure Street and I will find something to disagree on.
...but not this. Looks fine to me.
Quoting t0m
I find this so very hard to understand. Antigonish.
Quoting t0m
It's not a public object and yet it is something. Antigonish. Words summon phantoms into conversation, like what it is like to be a bat, or what it is like to read this thread.
I read your post, I experience something that it is like. I read the thread again. Do I experience something that it is like again? How could I tell? In what way is the something that it is like different from the perfectly public exercise of reading the post?
But do you really?
Quoting Banno
For me this "phantom" metaphor suggests a contingent perspective. A phantom relative to what? Is spacetime a phantom? Is an understanding of the scientific method a phantom? Or is this method just symbols that clever monkeys involve in their publicly visible actions?
Quoting Banno
I don't think the something-that-it's-like is different from reading the post. But I disagree that reading the post is a 'perfectly public exercise.' I can record you (in theory) staring at a text with a video camera as evidence of this staring, but this staring at symbols is clearly not what is referred to by 'reading.' Do you not at all find the disavowal of 'consciousness' a little disingenuous? I'm not defending 'mind' here, that's what you're imagining. I also like cleaning up 'language on holiday.' But from my point of view you're being the metaphysician here, clinging to an artificial paradigm.
I'm not denying consciousness.
Edit: Why would you conclude that?
Now there's a topic that can generate a whole 'nother discussion. I considered 'discover' and discarded it in favour of 'invented', knowing full well that most people, and philosophical 'realists' in particular, are likely to prefer 'discover'.
But to go down that wombat hole would be a potential derailment, which I would not wish to do, as this thread is generating so much enjoyment.
Thanks for the PI 48 ref. It's a good 'un.
I see what you're saying, but it really is equivalent to the indirect realist position, assuming you allow for those external inputs. What you're arguing is that naive realism cannot be true, because the act of perception generates an appearance for us. The tree we see is an appearance. It is not whatever is generating the external inputs, because it makes no sense to talk about what a tree looks like when nobody is perceiving it.
Edit:
Perhaps this is more Kantian than indirect, depending on what the indirect realist has to say about the actual tree (if it is a tree), not it's appearance.
I seriously doubt you actually agree with Street's position, but perhaps I never fully understood yours. I took you to argue for direct access to trees. The tree we see is what the tree is (within the limits of our perceptual abilities).
All those threads about Mount Everest being the tallest mountain before anyone knew it, and post apocalyptic chairs existing without any perceivers sounds pretty real to me.
And I tend to want to agree with you, but posters like Apo, Michael, Street, etc. make rather good points against it.
That is a good point. Technology works, we're able to survive, experiments are repeatable, etc.
No, no, no. The tree we see is not 'an appearance'. It doesn't make sense to say something 'is' an appearance. That's grammatical garble. The tree itself appears to us, and as such, we see the tree itself. That we see the tree's appearance does not mean that the tree 'is' an appearance. It simply means we see what can be seen of the tree, itself.
Stop opposing 'the actual tree'' and 'the appearance of the tree': there is no zero sum game here, the one does not preclude the other (which does not in turn mean the appearance of the tree 'is' the tree). The 'actual' tree appears, and that is what we see.
In what sense would our sensations be exhaustive of the tree? That’s taking the direct realist position.
Or maybe the sentence is just badly worded? You mean we see the kinds of things we can see due to our perceptual habits. Other habits might see something that appears very different. Like think of how a spider might see the tree.
Isn't this all just the usual disagreement about terminology, though? We don't report seeing the tree with all of this metaphysical baggage in mind. We don't mean that we see the tree exhaustively. We don't think of matter in spacetime. We think of the tree in the shared everyday world, a green thing that grows, that can chopped into firewood, enjoyed for its shade, or used as a landmark. The more complicated attitudes about the tree are (seemingly) erected on this foundation. My own self-consciousness of taking this tree in the 'ordinary way' is itself one such complicated attitude, thematizing what is otherwise just the dim background of common sense.
We can say that the way we see the tree is a function of our human as opposed to spider's cognition. We might instead say that we see a representation of a tree, but I find this awkward. It's think it's better to go with just seeing the tree, aware of course that there is interpretation/mediation in this seeing. But for me there's a gap between arguing for a least awkward expression and adopting this or that -ism.
And the concern here is with the objective tree, the mind-independent tree, the Kantian tree-in-itself.
This is where those peddling Wittgensteinian quietism are being disingenuous.
The language game tree is the social tree, the one that appears to a community of minds connected by a web of linguistic relations. There is a right way of speaking about trees because there is a social level of subjectivity or semiosis.
But then the Witti-ites smuggle in their realist claims under the language game smokescreen. Scratch them and you find they believe that makes perception direct. The language game tree is the objective tree - being now defined in terms of the limit of the speakable.
It’s a laughable ruse. But there you go. They probably believe it themselves.
I think the issue is simply about how veridical and non-veridical experiences are categorized.
When we are awake and in a normal state, we see trees. No problem. Now we can also dream about trees, remember that we saw a tree yesterday, hallucinate a tree, visualize a tree and so on.
However it's a category mistake to suppose that those experiences are a kind of seeing (or perception generally) rather than sui generis experiences. That category mistake leads to the creation of ghostly entities, dualism, skepticism and so on.
So, to answer your question, I think we should apply Occam's razor to the mental trees.
Pragmatism works. Neither realism nor idealism can.
When we go to sleep and fall asleep and when we start dreaming we forget. We forget everything we knew. This alone allows us to be certain, as we dream, that everything that happens, within our dreams, is real. There is simply no evidence that we're not in a dream. We forgot it. However, as soon as we wake up and unforget what has been forgotten, we change our minds.
I can why you would say that, but for me this is still a layer of abstraction on the (non-Kantian) phenomenon. "That which shows itself" is primary, one might say. It shows itself, not its showing. To be fair, taking a phenomenological position is still 'metaphysical' in a certain sense. I can't be right about this IMV but only advertise a preference. (And of course we have different kinds of talk for different purposes. But I see the charm or appeal of direct realism understood in a particular fashion.)
Quoting apokrisis
Perhaps, but isn't that already a rush to the answer of the OP's question? Of course I believe in something like a mind-independent tree "out there," but this framework has its tensions. The usual is that the territory apart from the map is seemingly contentless except as the pure negation of the map.
Quoting apokrisis
I relate. I think 'quietism' can become a smug hatred of thought.
Quoting apokrisis
I agree. I think it's experienced in a non-explicit way. The "shared-world" is a basic intuition or phenomenon. But this tends to get conflated with the scientific image of the world, which of course neglects the role of language and concerned practical involvement in sustaining the condition of possibility for the theoretical-scientific vision of what's 'really' there hidden in all the 'subjective,' value-drenched 'illusion.'-- as if this 'subjective' value wasn't primarily social and didn't maintain a privileging of the scientific image in the first place.
Quoting apokrisis
I still read it in terms of an aesthetic preference. Does anyone deny mediation? Or is it all about where to 'stuff' this mediation?
Isn't there a tree-for-me and a tree-for-us, the first experienced in life, and the second a formalized externality? The former subjective and the latter objective (inter-subjective)?
So conceding the epistemic argument that perception is not direct, does not mean we can’t turn around and have directness as our epistemic ambition. Not all subjectivism has to be equal.
So would I.
Quoting apokrisis
I agree that we want something like accuracy. Also that not all subjectivism is equal. A radical like Rorty can replace representation with coping, but then we debate not accuracy but effectiveness. The constant is a pushing-forward of ideas as preferable, to-be-believed, to-be-acted-upon. How we justify this preference is perhaps a function of the operant paradigm.
Seems overly complicated.
Ah - you already made this point; I agree.
I don't think Google Cardboard is that good.
That is, even in the Matrix, there is a difference between seeing a real tree and seeing a virtual tree.
That's rather the point of the plot.
Or the truth irreducibly complex. Epistemology involves self-reference. The reason for the irreducible complexity is hardly hidden here.
Look, I know your favourite language game is trapping folk into using a language game in which the realist metaphysics are the already baked-in presumption.
“Come along children, let’s count how many trees we can all see. Let’s move away from all these wild-eyed people questioning the epistemic root of such language use.”
You’re a one trick pony, Banno. You just keep setting the same little snare, hoping to trap another unwary passer by.
I rather see myself as pointing out the snare; but if you wish to stay trapped, so be it.
Quoting Marchesk
So is it an actual multiplicity of objects that is implied, or the irreducible self-referentiality of perception? Are we pointing at several kinds of tree, or is the issue - as I have highlighted - that any act of pointing is always a pointing in two directions.
In pointing from the speaking self, or the linguistic culture, or the scientific reference frame, we are making a claim about a pragmatic or interpretative relation.
So we don’t have to worry about a multiplicity of objects. We only have to pay heed to the epistemic fact that pointing is self referential in an irreducible fashion.
Direct realism formally dies at that point. Only pragmatism remains.
How best to understand the question? "We" could be "I", perhaps; or is it "Do we each..."? I doubt that it is implied that we all behold the same mental construct - or is that something Hegel might agree with? Do we all behold in the same way?
To behold is to hold thoroughly. Taking this as seeing is primarily English. To perceive is perhaps to take entirely, to seize, to understand.
How is beholding different to perceiving?
All this just to show that there is a deal of ambiguity in the question.
I suspect that what happens is that the questioner realises that there is a process involved in seeing. However, they see the process as external to themselves - as not part of the we in the question. Hence they inadvertently introduce a homunculus as an invention to do the beholding.
But whatever mental construction is going on is part of, and not distinct from, the beholding. What is beheld, perceived, is the tree.
That's not quite how I would say it, but not far from what I would say.
I spoke before about how what counts as simple or complex depends on what one is doing. If one is talking about trees, there is perhaps no need to talk of images-of-trees. If one is talking about eyeballs, there might well be. Not being clear about if one is talking about trees or eyeballs causes philosophy.
And pointing - naming - is, as I said earlier, not a part of the language game; it is rather putting the pieces on the board. But then, putting the pieces on the board is itself another language game.
I don't see how this conclusion follows. But then, from memory, we disagreed about what direct realism is.
Nope. Now you are just trying to bypass the irreducible self refential complexity of language use to point in its other direction - thus hoping to point attention away from my demolition of direct realism just a post ago.
Look, you exclaim, over here we discover a lurking beholder. Ain’t that so homuncular.
Yes, Banno, reference is always self referential like that. A relation has two ends. There must be a context, a reference frame, which grounds any pragmatically successful ostensive act.
So, yes, look back from the thing being pointed at, and we discover the “self” that beholds it. The thing exists as an object of perception to the degree there is this anchoring other.
But is this self real? Well, it certainly develops a certain invariant reality as an interpretive habit.
So we are back into pragmatism as usual - the destination that Witti was trying to reinvent after having its truth whispered by Ramsey in his logical atomist ear.
So I am right. It just pains you to admit it.
What you call realism is simply pragmatism. Language use creates the observer along with the observable. Objective truth is simply belief that is fit for purpose.
If you like: @apokrisis is right, but says it wrong.
I'm going to watch the Rorty/Davidson discussion again. Cheers.
Rorty. The everyman’s punching bag. X-)
My suspicion is that they mean the same.
Towards the end of part three.
I think part of what makes these questions so confusing and leads to all these two world, two object paradoxes, is that our visual fields really feel like naive realism. It's hard for me to look around myself and not have this distinct sense that my eyes are windows upon an external world, as if I were looking *through* my eyes.
Is it coherent to ask something like, "if I am on LSD and my friend isn't, and we stand in front of a speaker playing a song, is it the same song we are listening to even though it would be sensed totally differently? Is there a song 'in-itself' separate from our experiences of hearing? What would it mean for a song to exist outside of someone's perception of hearing it? It's incoherent to imagine there's an externally existing song playing, with two internally experienced 'mental construct' songs existing within the minds of me and my friend.
It just feels odd to apply this same logic to the visual field, because it just feels so real and external. Naive realism is a hard feeling to overcome.
Yes and that is a misleading idea that should be rejected. Taken literally, it suggests a homunculus (or a ghostly mind) that is looking through the window.
Instead, you are using your eyes and the things that you see are the primitives (or particulars) for higher-level abstractions and explanations. That is, since perception is veridical, that you saw a tree there implies there is a tree there. If, down the track, you find that you made a mistake, then you recategorize the prior experience as non-veridical (i.e., you must have imagined it, you didn't see a tree at all, etc.)
“Is it the same song we are listening to even though it would be sensed totally differently?”
Note in both how strange is the relation between the first half of these questions and the second half: in the strange and unwarranted assumption that identity (the same tree, the same song) is indexed to our perception or our senses. But not identity but perception is in question: that one sees or hears X differently ought to lead to a question about perception, about our sight and about our hearing - how is it that we see or hear X differently? What does this say about perception?
Instead, it leads here - somehow, inexplicably - to a question about the 'thing' - is it the same X we see or hear? But this latter question already assumes the very anti-realism it aims to sow. Yet it would not have even occured to have asked this latter question had the identity of X not already been its starting point. The illegitimate slide from perception to existence: almost imperceptible, but once you see it, it can’t be unseen.
and by that very fact, it is one tree, not two.
Is it so strange that you both look at the same tree and see something different?
Yes, it's absolutely baffling!
I won't. Actually I could argue against either one of those points.
When perceiving a virtual reality, we'd perceive a physical image and get an external perception of it. I don't believe that to be mental.
Then again, I believe that we see and perceive a physical tree and that perception is physical, but the experience of that perception is mental. That'd of course mean that the experience of the perception of the virtual reality would be mental as well.
Any experience is a mental phenomenon. The perceptions themselves are not mental in either case.
What counts as perception?
Of course logically there is only one tree. But the point is that it appears to each of us individually; and that is its living appearance. There is no collective living appearance of the tree; it's public appearance is merely an idea, an abstraction from the fact that it appears to each of us. Really the tree makes no actual public appearance at all.
But there is no VR headset. You are not getting your VR experience from some kind of physical screen. The process is entirely biological. You took a VR pill, fell asleep and entered a VR dream. It's the ultimate VR experience.
While it may well look different to each of us, we do not each see a different tree.
So you don't think there can be a VR experience that has the same degree of fidelity that normal experience has?
But what if it were possible to create a visual experience of the device being used while it's being used to create the experience? Would we be "beholding" the device, or a mental image?
But the difference is that one is virtual, the other, not.
No, I'm not saying we do. But the point is that the tree only appears to each individual, and it does so differently. And yet the tree is nonetheless identified as the tree. This identity however, is purely conceptual or logical; it cannot capture the living appearances the tree makes to each one of us. Put another way, the identity of the tree is discursive; and discourse is not life.
No, it doesn't. It is seen by all the individuals.
I'm experiencing pain when I stub my toe on a rock. Seems you want to say that I'm experiencing the rock.
Isn't it your hypothesising that makes the difference?
Even the tree itself as it appears to one individual isn't a single object but a multiplicity of objects.
That all depends upon how the person talks about it.
On Star Trek you can, if you disable the Holodeck safety protocols.
You're experiencing kicking the rock, which is painful.
Sure, it can be conceived as either a singularity or a multiplicity. As the tree we think of it as an identity; but it is also a sum of parts that are each identities in their own right.
Think I mentioned that earlier.
I'm perceiving kicking the rock?
Yes, and then the pain of a stubbed toe afterward. The nerves in your skin provide tactile perception.
How is being seen by all the individuals actually (as opposed to merely logically) different than being seen by each individual that sees it?
Say the tree is seen by ten individuals. Being seen by all ten is not some actuality which is over and above it being seen by each of the ten individuals. There is no extra collective or joint seeing of the tree, in other words.
Does my toe perceive itself kicking the rock?
My toe is most certainly a part of my physiological sensory perception. If I see with my eyes, why don't I feel with my toe?
You don't perceive with just your eyes, although we say you see with your eyes. Cut out your visual cortex, and there will be no visual perception.
So yeah, in ordinary language, you do feel with your toe. But your toe itself doesn't perceive anything.
You said:Quoting Janus(My emphasis)
Not sure what the "only" is doing there, unless you meant it to imply that the tree appears different for each individual - with which I agree. You seem to want to say that each individual sees a different tree - but that's wrong, ex hypothesi. Do you want to say that ten individuals look at the same tree, but that there is no tree? How's that?
The point is, your picture of what happens when ten people look at a tree does not hang together; it is malformed.
There is proprioception in addition to the five senses. Feeling the floor under you counts as perception.
No you are experiencing it, how you deconstruct your experience assumes a different pov.
I'm not sure. Nobody has talked about the worst argument ever from Stove that Street linked to.
Makes sense.
Get into it...
:)
I had presumed that @apokrisis meant something like this in his notion of pointing on two ways.
Ditch the notion.
If so then what other mental agencies are constitutive of experience and how do they affect experience, isn't that the point.
I meant experience to mean anything we're conscious of, which includes mental images. Sometimes those are the result of perception, and sometimes other faculties, such as dreaming.
The question in the OP is whether the ability to experience mental images when not perceiving has any bearing on the nature of perception. The notion that we "behold" a mental image when seeing is at the root of both idealism and skepticism about the external world.
The realization that there is a physiological and psychological process that must occur for us to perceive is a the root of Kantianism.
I'm not sure what the point is. My position has thought/belief at it's basis.
Is experience something that 'exists' regardless of whether or not the agent is aware of it, or must the agent be conscious? If it must be conscious, need it be conscious of the fact that it's doing something? Need it be self-conscious?
So perception is not equivalent to experience.
Nate Robinson is short. LeBron James is tall.
Pixels are simple. Computer images are complex.
Words are simple. Sentences are complex.
Bricks are simple. Buildings are complex.
And so on and so forth.
It's not merely about talking. It's about which one of the two descriptions is more concrete or precise. When I say that a tree is a single object rather than a multiplicity of objects I am being less concrete and less precise.
Nope, but perception is one kind of experience.
There we go... kinds of experience.
Is experience something that 'exists' regardless of whether or not the agent is aware of it, or must the agent be conscious? If it must be conscious, need it be conscious of the fact that it's doing something? Need it be self-conscious?
Don't we negotiate this pragmatically...habitual vs consciously intentional, conscious vs unconscious.
A good starting point. Set all kinds out. Isolate common denominators that remain extant after removing individual particulars. Look at what's left.
What did you have in mind? Pardon the pun.
That's a difference between the trees, not between seeing the trees.
You're perceiving the rock, you're experiencing the perception in the form of pain. You can't experience a physical object, only its consequences.
If I see a blue and black dress and you see a white and gold dress, are we seeing the same thing? If I see a rabbit and you see a duck, are we seeing the same thing?
I think it's an ambiguous question, as I think there are two different ways to interpret what it means to see the same thing. It can refer to having the same phenomenological experience or it can refer to the same external stimulus being responsible for the experience. I don't think either is more right than the other.
Have you ever had the same dream twice? In one sense, probably. In another sense, it doesn't make sense.
So I think most of the disagreements are people talking past each other. To repeat examples I've used before, one person is saying that the painting is paint and that they're reading words, and another person is saying that the painting is of a tree and that they're reading about the triumph of good over evil. Two different ways to talk about the same thing.
Years later, when certain meteorological conditions obtain, it hurts again. The pain is different though. It is now less intense and more of a dull ache in the same area. All of this originates from kicking the rock in the first place.
Moreover, I can remember kicking it. I can actually go outside and find it, because it is still a feature in the landscape. I can look at the rock I kicked years ago while remembering kicking it. I can look at the rock - in real time - and simultaneously remember kicking the rock in times past... all the while feeling pain in my toe.
My eyes are open the entire time.
I'm not so sure of that. I mean, I do not think that most disagreements(here on this thread) are a result of incompatible senses being used on 'opposing' sides. In fact, I'm doing my best to set aside my physicalist flavored notion of perception in order to carefully consider another...
Stay woke, brother.
Even if you find out your pain is simulated.
That example poses very significant real problems for the notions of perception and experience both.
Agree?
We all do.
Was Quine or Hume pragmatic? Seems both said much the same thing.
So would you analyse Game of Thrones in terms of pixels? Yet it is a sequence of computer images. Words are complex, letters simple. And so on and so forth.
Quoting Michael
What would be a mistake would be to trade on your distinction, as @Janus appears to, here.
How many trees are there, one or ten? The argument from @Janus hypothesises one tree, but concludes that there are ten trading on the distinction you make.
Quoting BlueBanana
The thing about virtual trees is that they are not trees.
The current notions of perception and experience seem unable to do that.
When does my experience of (kicking)the rock begin and end?
Quoting Banno
The "only" was only to emphasize that every appearance of the tree is an individual appearance. And I have already stated a couple of times, if I am not mistaken, that the tree appears differently in each appearance;so I don't know what you are driving at with that.
And I have already said that I am not claiming that each individual sees a different tree; logically speaking of course they all see the same tree.
(On the other hand the tree is always changing, so just as we might say we can never step into the same river twice, in that sense we can say that we never see the same tree twice, but that is a different issue.Logically speaking it is still that particular tree which is changing).
I am also not saying there is no tree. Of course, logically, there must be a tree.
So, all in all, you have done a masterful job of misunderstanding what I have written. Or else you are attempting to force what I have said out of shape, to fit it into a confined space to which is not suited, like trying to force a round rubber ball into a square hole of the same volume. Are you willfully refusing to understand, so that you can claim that my "picture of what happens" "does not hang together" and that it is "malformed" (after you have malformed it)? Of course, I hope that is not the case, and that is just your innocent presuppositions which prevent you from understanding the perspective I presented. :)
No, there is only one tree. There are not ten trees, but ten seeings or appearances of the tree. But there are two senses of the word 'tree' in play here. One denotes the living appearance which we all may experience. The other presents the logical conception of the one tree that we are all seeing. The first is "inner" to each individual's lived experience, and the second is an externalized formal principle of commonality. What other sense of 'tree' do you think there is?
One sense of 'tree' refers to the tree, the other refers to appearance/experience of the tree. So, what happens when we dispense with the one that refers to something other than the tree? Moreover, isn't the latter existentially contingent upon the former?
Yes, and they are perennially at loggerheads...
No, one sense refers to the tangible thing that appears to me, and the other sense refers to the idea of an identical object, that may be thought to be the same thing appearing to all of us. Of course, ultimately the two are taken to be the same, but this is just a matter of logic, not of experience. No one directly experiences the sameness of the tree that appears to all of us; we just experience features that we can agree upon, on the basis of which we infer identity.
Why would we do that? We talk about seeing people on TV, not seeing pixels, and that's the proper way to talk.
My point is that the sense of 'tree' that refers to our experience is naming our experience. The sense of 'tree' that names what we're looking at isn't.
Are we looking at our experience, or are we looking at the tree?
You have this the wrong way around, as far as existential contingency goes. The sense I'm using when a say 'tree' is not an idea of identical object. It's that right there---------->
Look for yourself.
Both senses you're presenting require highly complex thought/belief.
I'm looking at a TV, and I see people. What does the term "people" refer to? The TV? The pixels? My experience? The actors who are far away, doing other things than what I see them doing?
You tell me.
My point is that the sense of 'tree' that refers to our experience is naming our experience. The sense of 'tree' that names what we're looking at isn't.
Are we looking at our experience, or are we looking at the tree?
We say we're looking at a tree, because we have an experience of seeing a tree that can be backed by other people, instruments, etc. The tree is empirically verifiable.
This isn't the case with dreams, hallucinations, etc. Although pre-scientific cultures may have thought otherwise.
Still peddling this false calculus?
For a realist, the question is do all accounts converge. And clearly those of the poetic, the insane, the asleep, the infant, the non-english speaking, etc, may not.
So the realist can define what is normal in a measurable tendency of normal minds to converge. The teacher can gather the class and ask the kids to count the trees. Peer pressure can be relied on to produce "the right answer" after a period.
But normative behaviour is all that has actually been demonstrated. Pragmatism is the best realism can achieve. To not admit to the epistemology in operation - to simply play the teacher barking "count the damn tree" - is the disingenuous language game we all know as direct realism.
And that is odious and oppressive behaviour. Just like any social norming that can't acknowledge its epistemological basis.
No, when I look at the tree I see what appears to me. I directly experience its appearing to me, I do not directly experience its appearing to others; that is an inferentially derived purported fact that is mostly just taken for granted.
There is far more "complex thought/ belief" operating in the second case.
I think this is a misleading question, and highlights the "talking past each other" issue I mentioned earlier. One person is saying that all we're reading is words, and then the other person asks "are we reading about words, or are we reading about a hobbit's journey to save the world?". One person is saying that the painting is just paint, and then the other person asks "is the painting of paint, or is it of the Last Supper"?
Of course we are looking at the tree. We cannot look at our experience; our experience is the looking.
If I look at a tree and if I call it a tree, then I directly experience looking at a tree. I do not directly experience looking at an entity that also appears to others.
Well both cases use a sense that I do not. So, there are at least three at work...
It is impossible to have any idea at all about 'appearances' in the sense you're using prior to learning about our own perceptual/conceptual limitations.
We do not need to learn about our own limitations in order to name.
Funny. No one has said any of that. Can you explain by referencing what is actually being discussed?
Even if that entity appears differently to others? Doesn't the tree appear to others?
Irrelevant, the difference is still only between the objects perceived.
So, give an account of your "third sense".
If I understand how to use the words 'appearance' and 'tree' then I know enough to be able to say that the tree appears when I look at it. I imagine that many children play such games; making objects appear and disappear by opening and closing their eyes (I did). No sophisticated understanding in terms of "perceptual/ conceptual limitations" is required.
I do agree, though, that we do not need such an understanding in order to name either; in fact that is exactly my point; that we only need to understand the use of the names "appearance" and "tree" (in the context of the requisite minimal proficiency in English language use of course) in order to understand that the tree appears.
I don't directly experience the tree's appearing to others, although in the inter-subjective context it is of course taken for granted.
We say we're looking at a tree, because that's what we're doing.
Quoting Janus
If you look at a tree and call it a tree, then you directly experience looking at a tree. If I look at a tree and if I call it a tree, then I directly experience looking at a tree. The tree is the entity that appears to each of us, albeit perhaps a bit differently to each. So...
We most certainly do directly experience looking at an entity that also appears to others.
It's the one underwriting everything you've said here. It's what you're looking at.
That's not the sense of 'appearance' you're employing here.
Quoting Janus
You're agreeing with something I've not said. Naming the tree does not require knowing how to use the term "appearance" in either the sense you've employed in the thread or the sense you've mentioned above.
My point here is that there is no ability to talk about the "appearance" of tree in the Kantian or similar sense, without first looking at and naming the entity that appears to each of us, and then becoming aware of the limitations inherent to our perceptual capabilities.
Now you are equivocating. When I said we don't directly experience looking at an entity that also appears to others; I didn't intend to assert that the entity we are looking at doesn't appear to others; and I believe you are very well aware of that. Perhaps it wasn't worded as well as it could have been, but it should have been obvious from many other things I have said that I intended to state that we do not directly experience the fact of its appearing to others.
When I directly experience the tree there is nothing in that simple experience which shows me that it also appears to others. That it also appears to others is a conceptual inference which is derived from my discourse with others about the tree and recognition of our agreements as to its distinguishing features. Really no one knows what ultimately explains the fact that we seem to experience the same entities and events. But for logical purposes, metaphysics aside, of course we experience the same objects and people. The priority, though, belongs to my own direct experience of things, and other's experience of the those things is not part of that direct experience; it is at one inferential remove, so to speak.
So, it is in that sense that we can speak about two senses of 'tree' or whatever. That has been my point all along.
What are you talking about?
Quoting creativesoul
I didn't say it was; so again, what are you talking about? You seem to be intent on misunderstanding
me.
Quoting creativesoul
And again I haven't said otherwise. Even the simple understanding of the notion of appearance that I outlined (which is neither Kantian nor similar if 'similar' is taken to denote sophistication) obviously cannot precede the simple understanding of naming objects ( things which appear). (Of course it could precede the understanding of naming trees, if a child were raised somewhere trees are not found). But, in any case, so what? I can't see the relevance.
I'm looking at the tree that appears to me. What I am looking at cannot "underwrite" anything other than the fact that I experience seeing it. What "underwrites everything (I) have said here" is the idea of a publicly available entity; the tree. I am not looking at that 'tree' because it is merely an idea, a formalized externality. The tree I look at is embedded in my experience, outside that I cannot see it.
Well, actually I was attempting to clear up the misunderstanding, but it seems that you understand. So, nevermind that...
The second sentence remakes my earlier point. It seems we agree upon that.
Quoting Janus
The relevance applies to the origen of the notions of "experience" and "perception". If both are existentially contingent upon X in terms of their constitution, then whatever X requires and/or consists in, so too do those notions. However, given that it seems that we agree with regard to directly perceiving the tree, there's not much sense in getting into that.
The idea of a publicly available entity; the tree, consists of very complex metacognition.
Thinking/believing that that is(called) a tree does not. The former is existentially contingent upon the latter.
So there is a tree.
Ten people see it, and see (perceive, behold, and so on) a different tree each.
Then they create a shared tree through various interactions - linguistic, social, and so on.
Is that your argument?
I don't believe it's all that complex; everyone who just unreflectively assumes that the entities available to their experience are also available to others holds such an idea, even if it is not explicitly couched in high-sounding terms like "publicly available entity".
Of course one must be able to see the tree in order to later infer that it is available to the seeing of others; I wouldn't want to disagree with that.
No, they don't create a tree; they infer the independent existence of the tree; which is only logically proper. The point is that the independent existence of the tree is not something I experience, but is rather, from my point of view, an idea; which may or may not represent an actuality. Of course for practical everyday purposes and logical consistency we unreflectively assume that our inference to an independently existing tree does represent an actual independent existence. That independent existence though, for obvious reasons, can never be an experience for me, as the living tree can.
IT is in that sense that we can say there are two senses of 'tree'; the tree of my lived experience, and the inferred independently existent tree that is publicly available. Logically they are the same; whereas experientially, or phenomenologically if you like, they are not. I hope that explanation makes it clear to you.
Do you draw a distinction between an idea of a publicly available entity and a publicly available entity?
Of course there is a logical distinction between those two.
Naming the tree begins our awareness of what is already available to the public, without our being able to conceptualize the tree in such terms. Realizing the limitations of our visual perception is the key component of questioning our vision. It is that questioning that gives rise to the notion of a difference between the tree and how the tree appears.
I don't know what you are asking.
See my post immediately preceding yours...
When objects begin to be noticed by a child, I imagine it has no idea about those objects being publicly available. Of course we can say that the idea that objects are publicly available precedes the individual. But phenomenological speaking it does not; I don't think you get that I am making a phenomenological, not a logical, distinction here.
Learning to name a tree for sure includes taking it for granted that trees are also visible to others; but this understanding is unreflective. It is not realizing the limitations, but rather the private nature of our visual perception that first leads to the idea that others may not see the tree the same way (in terms of colour, or size, for example) and even to question whether it is in fact the same tree we see. I can remember raising this question when I was a child less than ten years old. I noticed that I do not experience your experience of the tree; that your experience of the tree is, for me, merely presumed. It's not all that sophisticated.
I am not sure which post before which post of yours you refer to.
My only qualm is I'm not convinced that the independent existence of the tree is inferred. I think our awareness of stuff like trees and rocks is far more visceral than that.
So now that we have some agreement, I have a further question for you: do you think that the tree has, say, a mass that you and I might agree on?
I'm pointing out that trees are publicly available prior to our being able to talk like that. Being publicly available does not require language. An idea of being publicly available does.
Quoting creativesoul
Quoting creativesoul
Thus, the tree underwrites everything you've written here. It is the existential basis of all musing...
No aggravation caused, so no need for apology, Banno. :)
Yes, I agree that the independent existence of things may plausibly be thought to be part of our lived experience (in a way that other's experience of them is not) insofar as they just seem independent of us; we experience them as being external to our bodies and so on. This is controversial though, obviously, with some philosophers.
I do agree that the tree has a mass that we could agree upon. We could cut it all up into pieces, weigh them and sum the results, for example.
If trees are indeed publicly available, as they certainly seem to be, then, sure they are " publicly available prior to our being able to talk like that". Unless I am mistaken, I haven't anywhere claimed otherwise. If I have seemed to claim otherwise then it must have been due to poor expression.
My central concern has only been to point out that the public availability of objects is not directly given to me in experience. It is on that basis that I draw the distinction between the tree as experienced in living perception and the tree conceived as an independently existent. publicly available entity.
I don't think it makes sense to say that entities, thought of as being utterly pre-conceptual existents, underwrite anything. If you want to say that entities are necessarily conceptual, or even less robustly, to use McDowell's term "in conceptual shape" (see for example Hegel, John McDowell and Robert Brandom with their different takes on this) then you may be able to consistently say that they are capable of justifying ("underwriting") beliefs and judgements, otherwise I can't see how you could make the leap, or bridge the gap, unless you brought God into it.
I would say that, as measured, it belongs to the collective tree. The weightiness of objects can obviously be directly felt, though.
Edit: How is it that we can reach agreement?
The tree appears weighty, and the weight of trees can be accurately measured. A trees weightiness, as I said, but not its precise mass, is directly experienceable. So I conclude that its mass is measurable and inter-subjectively checkable, and belongs, not to its individual appearances, but to its collectively established attributes.
I'm not saying that you have claimed otherwise. Rather, I'm assessing what you have wrote. Earlier you wrote...
Quoting Janus
What I'm pointing out is that that idea is based upon something. To take it a bit farther...
Whatever that idea is based upon, so too is everything you've said. Whatever the idea is based upon underwrites everything you've said here. If the term "underwrites" strikes you wrong, then take it to mean underpins, or serving as a basis, or words to that effect/affect.
Quoting Janus
I agree, but ask you to take it a bit farther...
The public availability of objects is a necessary requirement for experience.
How is the former not a logical conception while the latter is? What are you doing with the notion of 'logical'? I mean, you've called things 'logical' conceptions and 'logical' distinctions...
Why do you say that? Do not solitary animals experience?
It's not a matter of why. It's a matter of how. I've been arguing for that.
Ah, that is the big metaphysical question! We must imagine that there is something that provides the conditions for collectively established attributes to be possible. I have said this before many times both here and on the old PF in debates like this, and my position has not changed; I consider myself to be a logical realist. So, I say that logically speaking there must be a world of trees and so on that explains our intersubjectively shared world of experience, and makes coherent our talk about it.
This is not a metaphysical claim, though, as it would be just as true regardless of whether the objects of our shared world of experience are merely physical existents or are ideas in the mind of God, or a collective mind, a 'Matrix' or whatever. other metaphysical model you can think of.
Quoting Janus
I would say the tree as lived experience is (or at least may be) a pure intuition. Now, Kant posited that intuitions without concepts are "blind" and concepts without intuitions are "empty". But then animals seem to be able to recognize things, so either animals have pre-linguistic conceptual abilities, or intuitions are not blind without concepts.
The tree as publicly available is obviously conceptual, not experiential; as I keep pointing out we do not directly experience the public availability of the tree, as we do its availability to us. Of course it is also a concept of something real that actually exists (we think) independently of our experience and concepts; but we can never experience that independent existence for obvious reasons.
Yes, I already said that and I quote it below (to allow for what seems to be the extremely unlikely case that you hadn't noticed and it was pure chance that you repeated word for word what I had already written).
Quoting Janus
Note, though that I emphasized the 'something', so I may well not be in total agreement with you here.
Kant also held the only pure intuition(s) as time and space, if I recall correctly. Kant was wrong in other ways, on my view...
Quoting Janus
The tree is publicly available prior to our experience. The tree is a part of our experience because it is publicly available.
In order to know what we're talking about when we say that X is not equal to Y, we must know what both consist in/of. Let X be Noumena and Y be phenomena. You see the problem?
Duly noted and since corrected for accuracy.
Well, sure, but we can honestly acknowledge that we can't see how they are equal, or could be equal, as in the case with noumena and phenomena. I mean, we can conceive of the thing as it is experienced; and we can conceive of it as in itself (although we can't conceive how it is in itself). We can conceive that there may be things outside of current experience or even beyond experience altogether; we do that all the time. What we can't imagine is how something outside of experience could be the same as something within it, in anything more than the purely logical sense to do with identity that I have already mentioned.
The perception of the world of objects and events is a collaboration between the world and ourselves, our senses and minds, it is a living process. How could the world of objects without us be the same as the world of our perception of objects? We would be missing so it could not be the same. We cannot imagine what it would be like without us. It even seems incoherent to think that it could be like anything without any percipients at all involved.
Naive realism imagines a world of objects without us, but it imagines unreflectively that the thing in itself is just "like" the thing as experienced. We have no warrant for that. If we want to say that things can exist totally independently of us, then we should as you say " acknowledge the fact that there are things we do not know" and even that there may be things we cannot know.
Anyway it's not an easy thing to talk about without getting tied up in knots of apparent incoherence, inconsistency and even outright paradoxical contradiction. I've enjoyed the conversation nonetheless. :)
You say "sure" but then go on to say something that doesn't indicate shared understanding.
We cannot perform a comparative analysis upon two things unless we know what those two things consist in/of. The Noumena limits all other thought/belief about it. We, according to Kant, do not have access to Noumena. Thus, we cannot know anything at all about it other than it is unknown, and/or unknowable. The distinction itself is untenable, a name empty of all content, according to Kant's own conception.
Quoting Janus
I don't see why not. If our experience of something has no effect/affect on what it consists in/of, then there is less justificatory ground for us to say that it's different when beyond our experience than for us to say that it remains unchanged. There is no good reason at all to say that the tree's composition changes when it becomes a part of our experience. How would that change when it is not? On what ground would we justify saying that the tree's composition changes when it is not a part of our experience?
Quoting Janus
I think that the framework itself leads one to questions that do not square with the facts.
There are things we discover that are not existentially contingent upon our awareness of their existence. We can know that much. If they existed prior to discovery, then they existed prior to being a part of our experience. If being a part of our experience does not effect/affect their composition, then we have less justificatory ground for saying that they are not the same when beyond experience than we do for saying that they remain unchanged.
Quoting Janus
Likewise.
I reject Kant's framework for reasons given heretofore. However, Kant was brilliant through and through. Given the historical circumstances... pretty amazing stuff.
That's a misquote, by the way...
Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.
You don't have to describe Game of Thrones in terms of pixels unless it is necessary to do so. For most purposes, it is unnecessary to do so. You describe it in terms of characters and events. That's enough. Nonetheless, it is pixels that give rise to the sequence of computer images that is Game of Thrones which is what in turn gives rise to Game of Thrones characters and events. So if you wanted to describe Game of Thrones in detail, for some strange reason, you'd have no choice but to describe it in terms of pixels. Talking about Game of Thrones with your friends and even analyzing it in detail is not the same as doing philosophy. When we do philosophy what we need, in many cases, such as for example this one, is a highly detailed description of the aspect of reality that is under our examination. It is true, what we do determines how detailed our description has to be. But when what we do is philosophy, especially of this sort, our description has to be quite detailed. In this particular case, we want to know what is the difference between that which is mental and that which is not. Notice that your description of the difference between what is mental and what is not is not merely lacking in detail. Rather, it is lazy. It is pretending that it is an answer when it is merely an evasion.
Quoting creativesoul
So when you say "that's a tree" that is just as precise as saying "that's a red tree" which is just as precise as saying "that's a trunk with a number of branches each one of which has a number of red leaves"?
I agree that the more you say something (whether it is about a tree or something else) the more likely you are to say something wrong. This is why many people prefer to say less and even be silent. But that's no argument against saying more. It's merely an argument against saying something that is not true.
How can it be a misquote if it isn't a quote? It was in my own words, and I understand "concepts without intuitions" to mean the same as "thoughts without content", so I don't think I have departed from Kant's intention, which, if true, means it would not be a misreading either.
A tree, perhaps?
Folks tend to get hung up on notions of proof and evidence: don't believe it without some justification. The opposite can also be true; there are things that one ought not doubt without proof or evidence.
That the thing before you is a tree is perhaps one. The reasons for doubt are lame.
The degree to which we agree will necessarily be limited by the fact that our approaches are completely different. You seem to be concerned with what we are justified in saying based on inferences to the best or "most plausible" explanation. Your approach is more in the positivist, objectivist, analytic mode, which concerns itself with being correct or right, where that means what we say is both justified and true. You would call that knowledge, I think. It is firmly based on the notion of correspondence.
I, on the other hand, think correspondence is fine when it comes to empirical, inter-subjectively check-able knowledge, but that's as far as it goes. For me knowledge in the important sense is not something that needs to be checked and justified. It is more like the Biblical sense of knowing; the knowing of familiarity. What you would call knowledge I would call belief.
So in that sense I can say I know the tree, but I do not know the public availability of the tree, or the ultimate explanation for it. My approach is more in line with the critical, phenomenological mode of inquiry. I am not concerned with being right in some intersubjectively established or establish-able sense, but with gaining enriching insight into experience. Knowledge, in the sense of the positivistic, objectivistic conception is great for science, technology and everyday practical matters, but that externalized mode will never tell us about the truly important things such as what love, goodness, beauty or truth are.
Quoting creativesoul
What you say here highlights the difference between our approaches beautifully. You say the concept of noumena is empty. I say it exemplifies the ultimate mystery of existence. Of course we cannot know anything about the noumena (since that is precisely how it is defined), other than the fact that the mind naturally comes to think this distinction between known/unknown and, more importantly, knowable/ unknowable.
OK, I have no doubt the thing before me is a tree, but the quote from me you are responding to is not concerned with that question; you seem to be conflating two different concerns.
Of course in an immediate sense the tree does provide the attributes which may be collectively established on account of the fact that we all agree that we can identify them. But it does not, all by itself, provide the conditions for the possibility that there could be collectively established attributes in the first place. Perception itself, and the kind of percipients we are, obviously contribute to that, and the fact that we find our perceptions intelligible in terms of objects such as trees, and their parts and attributes.
This is a process we will never be able to get outside of in order to understand in that objectivistic way some folk so desire. We can create scientific theories of perception, but we can never penetrate in an objectivist way the ultimate mystery of experience and intelligibility. That mystery we need to live from the inside to gain a different order of insight which is more akin to the arts than it is to the sciences.
That's my take on the situation, anyway.
Hey Janus.
Listen.
Don't take that personally. I was letting you know, just in case. Although what you said does more closely match something else he wrote regarding concepts and percepts...
I have to say though...
If anyone draws an equivalence between thought and concepts then they're forced to say that either a.) thought requires language, or b.) concepts do not. Both of those are problematic, and the former is just plain false. I strongly suspect that Kant distinguished between the two, with concepts being subsumed within thought and/or understanding. I mean, given his categories...
Cheers!
No worries, I don't take anything on here personally.
I think you are failing to make a distinctiin between thoughts and thinking. The way I understand it a thought consists in concepts but thinking obviously does not necessarily.
So I would say that animals think but they do not entertain thoughts, which would require concepts and hence symbolic language.
As another example a painter thinks visually but that thinking does not consist in discrete thoughts which could be formulated.
There are two obvious approaches. In the first truth is taken to be approachable only asymptotically, and so certainty is seen as unachievable. In the second, truth is taken as more or less trivial, and certainty as attributable to whatever one chooses.
I want to address the comparison between our views you offered earlier... and will momentarily. But first...
The first claim above is curious, because given the position I've been working out for longer than I care to admit, that is a perfectly reasonable thing to say. Most often, I do not. That is quite true. However, the term "failing" indicates to me that you think that I am unaware of that fact; as if I'm not drawing the distinction between thoughts and thinking inadvertently. It's actually intentional.
I'm impressed with the fact you noted that. Kudos!
My position has - as it's very pillars - thought/belief. All the eggs are in one basket. ;) This isn't the appropriate place to discuss that however. I mean, these kinds of threads are all kinds of fun for all kinds of reasons, and have important subject matter that cannot be talked about too much, particularly given the current state of collective understanding... every little bit of clarity helps.
However...
I gladly welcome you to join my thread - which is about that - here. I suspect it may be fun. Certainly more funner than lately...
Why do you say that?
Does it mean that we can only approach the truth, what is.
That's yet another impressive assessment, especially given the appearances and all. ;) You've done quite well inferring influences.
Quoting Janus
My attention is arrested by the phrase "in the important sense"...
Surely it's important to form and/or hold true belief about ourselves and the everyday events that we find ourselves within, right?
I mean can we be knowingly familiar with 'X' if it is the case that we hold false belief about 'X'?
Quoting Janus
Well, in the JTB sense of knowledge, sure... I would as well. I would point out, however, that it's not just any belief. Not all belief are on equal footing.
Quoting Janus
So why talk like that? I suspect that the underlying problem is with word choice. "The public availability of the tree"...
What is that? I mean is it comprised of something? Is public availability something that can belong to a tree? I think not.
We both know that the tree is publicly available. I mean, we can both point it out. We can both act upon it. It's a part of our experience. That's what being publicly available means.
Quoting Janus
I reject phenomenological frameworks for a simple reason. They're wrong. That's not to say that they're entirely wrong. It is to say that they lead to either incoherence or absurdity. They assume that we do not see the tree. They claim that we all see something different. I say that we all see something differently.
It is worth pointing out that enriching insight into experience is not incompatible with well grounded true belief, critical thinking, and/or analytical approaches. To quite the contrary, I suspect that the latter is crucial to actually obtaining the former as contrasted with/to mistakenly believing that one has acquired enriching insight into experience when one actually has not.
It doesn't have to be one or the other. It doesn't have to be either enriching insight or critical/analytical thinking. It can be both, and you have to be able to check(somehow) in order to know that you're not mistakenly believing that you have insight when you actually don't. Reality has a way of imposing itself upon us in uncomfortable ways when we have things wrong.
Quoting Janus
I think that you're attempting to stuff well grounded true belief into much too small a container. Again, it doesn't have to be one or the other. It can be both, that we form/hold well grounded true belief and that we can learn about things such as what love, goodness, beauty, and truth is. We can also do that while continuing to experience the more visceral things in life... the familiarity you speak of. If I may use a bit of poetic license, a balanced combination of the two requires understanding both, and allows us to disengage from the cerebral and re-engage into the visceral.
As an aside, you may be interested to know that I firmly believe Kant's CI is the very best measure of what counts as good/moral thought/belief and behaviour.
It is not doubted; it is certain. That's a start.
Here's my Reader's Digest history of epistemology. Descartes and Spinoza tried to find an algorithmic approach; it didn't work. Kant said that was because there was a bit of the world about which we could not speak. Despite that those who followed him told us all about it. A bunch of folk in the USA said we could only approach it asymptotically. Russell and his friends tried to deduce it all from atoms. Wittgenstein showed that that was a bad idea, and that because we are doing different things, any one algorithmic approach would be insufficient.
Then came Janus, who is certain there is a tree, but not what the tree is. Eve though the tree is made of branches and leaves and carbon and protons and neutrons and is part of a garden and present in sculpture and art, Quoting Janus
Sure, according to what we see, the tree is composed of branches, leaves, bark and so on, and according to scientific observations and understanding, carbon, protons and atoms. All that tells us nothing about how it is possible for us to experience all that. The scientific picture can't help us here because it is limited to scientific applications, as "one algorithmic approach (that would) be insufficient".
The final character in your short story also acknowledged as much.
Actually, I have no idea what point you trying to make, and I strongly suspect that you don't either.
But theories of light and perception do tell us about how it is possible to experience trees.
You nod at something more. What is the something more?
Thanks! (I think).
Quoting creativesoul
OK, I'll check it out when I have a little more time. Then maybe I'll discover why you deliberately fail to make what I understand to be a crucial distinction. :)
Who is doing the perceiving? The objective understanding of the process of perception tells us nothing about how it could give rise to the most real thing we know: subjective experience. It's easy enough to see how the process of perception could produce stimulus and response, as with for example, thermostats and computers, but the genesis of subjective experience remains, as opposed to mere stimuli, an intractable mystery. No one, that I am aware of, has explained it; although plenty have tried to explain it away.
What I meant by "important sense" is that it is the more important sense for me. I tend to think of philosophy in the older way of its consisting in "love of wisdom". For me wisdom consists, not in accumulating knowledge, but in learning to live well, and I see this as an entirely personal matter, between me and God, or between me and life if you like a more secular take on it (for me they are the same). It's great to share ideas with others, but my observations tell me that people generally believe what they want believe; find convincing what they want to find convincing, myself included of course.
So, it is navigating through those self-deceptive tendencies that we all have, while never failing to recognize that we can never be certain of anything, that is what wisdom consists in, for me. Sure it's necessary to listen to others and all, but personal experience must be the ultimate guide in this. And different people's personal experiences differ as much as their viewpoints do. That's why I'm not much concerned at all about inter-subjective corroboration when it comes to philosophy. I actually think it is fatal to descend into that pit of vipers.
So, in answer to your question about "the importance of holding true belief...", I think it is important to find the views that help us to live the best way, This may well equate to not deceiving ourselves, and I think it is important to try to recognize where we might be deceiving ourselves, but ultimately it is quality of life that matters above all else; and being fallible creatures, how could we ever be sure about exactly where our self-deceptions lie, in any case?
I disagree with this, because according to my experience the most enriching insights: those afforded by the arts and religion, have really nothing to do with "well grounded true belief, critical thinking, and/or analytical approaches". The latter is not "crucial" to the former at all. And it is impossible to "mistakenly believe" that one has acquired enriching insight into experience if one experiences enrichment; it isn't a matter of justified belief at all. Again you are vainly (I would say) trying to look at from the outside what must be lived from the inside. Different people gain enrichment in different ways; so inter-subjective corroboration will again be no use here.
The key is that the self arises within perception. It is part of the whole act. Perception involves making a self~world discrimination. So the self and the world co-arise as ideas in a complementary way - a symmetry-breaking.
Any phrasing of the situation which posits an experiencing self is already presuming part of what must in fact arise as part of the perceptual act. A self-image has to be formed in response to a determination of what is the not-self - both generally in a long-run conceptual fashion and immediately right in every here and now moment.
So consciousness is a strongly felt state of contrast where a "self" stands in sharp distinction to "the world". We don't need to reify the self as then a thing. It is no more than the complementary part of a single (sign relation/epistemic cut) process.
Quoting Banno
Heh. The right epistemic algorithm has been discovered. It is the dichotomy or dialectic. The "truth" is approached asymptotically in two directions. Or rather it emerges within the bounds of two complementary limits.
So as I just described, self and world act as complementary bounds. We become selves in the world to the degree we experience this strong sense of separation.
Remember how you agreed a point of view has to have two ends. To point at something out there, there must be the "other" that this very relation points back at. So if pointing at the "world" is interpreted as pointing at "hard recalcitrant fact", then looking at this same deictic relation the other way will reveal its complementary other - the maximally flexible and intentional "self".
We become subjective beings to the degree we can perform the perceptual act that points towards everything else in experience that can be labelled the objective "other".
So yes. It is really important that folk seem to be able to make a reliable self~world discrimination in almost any circumstance they encounter. It becomes routinised perceptual habit. It becomes locked into common language.
If they can't perform a quick and clear labelling, then their self doesn't exist as much as the world doesn't exist.
And that is what we see in dreams and other confused states where self and world blur - become vague.
So the basic epistemic algorithm has been found. It never really went missing. It is the logic of the dichotomy. Everything definite is the product of a developmental symmetry-breaking. For one half of a dyad to exist, that definiteness must be underwritten by its production of its "other".
Self and world are the "two directions" of the one experience-sharpening act. That is what is "revolutionary" in a modern epistemology like pragmatism.
I am taking more about the raw feeling of subjective experience, of being in a living world, and yet of being something more than merely that, too. How this is given is the "intractable mystery", and to be honest, nothing you said in response to me solves, or dissolves, that mystery in the least; at least not for me. I really can't see how any explanation "from the outside" could ever solve that mystery, or dissolve that profound sense of mystery. And I'm happy about that; why would I want to dissolve the greatest richness of life, and reduce it all to banal explanations, even if that were possible?
I realise that. But epistemology has to be founded on some logical abstraction if it is going to "see" what is going on "objectively".
Quoting Janus
Well the objective explanation is that your belief in your qualia is a socially-constructed point of view. It required philosophical training for you to come to frame your experiences of "the world" this way. And as I argued, this "coming to frame" is a double-edged business. You must produce a particular heightened sense of "you-ness" to have this heightened sense of "apartness" in which qualia are "subjective facts of the world".
So how I account for things should be deflationary. But they can't be for you while you take "you" for granted as being already always there, and not merely part of a co-construction.
Quoting Janus
Yep. If the inside is taken to just brutely exist, then there will always be that mystery.
I can tell you about pragmatism's epistemology in which the internal~external dichotomy is a distinction that must form as a mutual symmetry-breaking, but because you don't accept the logical force of that kind of emergentist ontology, your thinking leaves you no choice but to compute a mystery here.
Of course I don't completely deny mystery. There is still a fundamental issue when we ask the question "why anything?". So if I am talking about a triadic modelling relation as the way to minimise any mystery concerning "self", "world" and "qualia" (or interpretant, representamen and sign), then there is still the fundamental mystery of "why the existence of a modelling relation?".
However it is important to epistemology that the usual dualistic mind/world, explanatory gap, hard problem, causal issue has in fact been minimised.
If both insides and outsides must co-arise simply as a matter of logic (see Spencer-Brown's Laws of Form for instance), then the great Hard Problem mystery stands revealed as a socially-constructed mindset - the belief in a mind that actually stands causally apart from the world.
Idealism makes the existence of the world problematic. Realism makes the existence of the mind problematic.
Pragmatism sees mind and world as two aspects of the one irreducibly complex relation. The self exists, for "us", only to the degree the world exists, for "us". Which should give a clearer idea of who the foundational "us" really is ... a state of undifferentiated vagueness when you objectively get down to it. :)
Quoting Janus
Again, no problem.
If selfhood is a construction, and its "world" is other to that, then you can see why building up a richly-felt world, one full of personal meaning, would be a natural desire.
You are just saying you don't want to reduce your rich world to banal accounts, like scientific equations. I could equally say that revealing the complexity of everyday experience to be the product of powerful and elegant constraints of complete generality is something perfectly marvellous to behold.
I don't think the beauty of rationality or mathematics stops me enjoying sitting in the garden or hosting a big family gathering. They are complementary rather than incompatible.
So the problem may be that you can tolerate only one image of "the world" - the one that you would describe as maximally subjective. And you would oppose that to the aridity of the maximally objective.
My own approach is saying that our actual "world" ought to be anchored in terms of these two extreme views. They should be the poles of our experience. And thus where we "live" is a spectrum of possibilities that arises in-between. We can move between the immersed subjective and the dry objective "at will".
People do that anyway if they have a normal rounded development. Society understands it is a good and pragmatic thing to be formally educated and also to enjoy life.
I am just providing the epistemic account which makes the case objectively. I am explaining how it can happen that we can make choices in our current mental style, smoothly moving between philosphical argument and just "being in the moment", for example.
If we didn't form these two poles of being for ourselves, we couldn't really be "selves" with that kind of choice of when and how to move.
Quoting apokrisis
This is where we diverge. Sure, the way I conceive of my self (in other words the mode of "my belief in my qualia" is produced in socially constructed terms, but the raw feel of subjective experience (obviously prior to being conceived of as such) is not; it is the inexplicable foundation from which everything is perceived, and upon which everything else is constructed.
An objective account or explanation cannot be given of that, it must be directly felt, and then it cannot be denied or reduced to something else. Sometimes the arts and religion do good jobs of evoking that dimension of feeling, and opening fresh insights into it. But these insights cannot be explained in objective terms either, just as the meaning of a musical piece, a painting or a poem cannot. You seem to be losing one half of the human experience by attempting to reduce everything to scientific explanations (even if those explanations themselves are purportedly non-reductionist ;) ).
I "tolerate" both "images of the world"; but I say each has its place, and that it is not desirable that one should encroach upon the other. Mysticism should stay out of science, and science out of mysticism; and philosophy should be large enough to deal with both.
Sure, there is something that in the end (ie: in the deconstructed limit) there is something which it is like to be you experiencing. But it ain't direct. It is semiotically constructed all the way down to the "raw feelings".
So my point was that qualia are a product of philosophy. They are socially constructed in that they are a learnt way to conceive of experience.
The direct realist does it too. If he sees a green tree, that is how he categorises the experience. He just sees the tree that is there. And he sees that it is green.
And now you have learn that there is a psychological process to experience. You have learnt that what you are really looking at is an appearance. An image. A mental qualia. And you call seeing this the direct thing. You just look and you see the tree is an image, its greenness a quality that occurs only within "awareness".
So you have adopted another socially correct attitude. When you see the green tree, its greenness is a generic quality. It can be abstracted and thought about as a particular hue. The question can arise if I am seeing it too in just the same way. Yes, we both say we see a green tree, but what would we say if we could do the generic thing of comparing our perceptual states, comparing our direct beholding of the qualia in question.
Claiming to see your appearances directly is as bad as claiming to see the world directly. It is only due to a certain history of philosophy and psychological science that you conceive of "raw feelings" as something you ought to be able to see that way.
Now qualia do appear hard, definite, factual, when conceived of appropriately. They answer to a requirement of worldly invariance. They seem as undeniable as the real world that their social-construction might seem to deny.
Qualia realism, or appearance realism, is as bad as any realism. It is making an object of what you intended to be the subjective. Subjectivity escapes the grasp of direct qualia realism because it is a philosophy of mind that fails to talk about the matching problem of how a self arises to be the beholder, to be the interpretant, to be the point of view.
Object-making is half the process of organising experience. Subject-making is the other half. Given that irreducilbly complex relation at the heart of experience, talking about raw feelings and direct experience of qualia is failing to get to grips with the actual issue of subjectivity.
I don't have time to respond in detail, but to go straight to the point: all that you say is to me just another abstract story. compared to lived experience. You might say that I don't really experience thw workd directly, but that thought is pale and unconvincing in comparison to the fact they I do experience my perceptions of and feelings for things as being utterly direct; right here, right now.
But you say both that your experience (of the world? of qualia? of appearances?) is direct AND that that fact is an intractable mystery.
So perhaps I find your "intractable mystery" to be an equally pale and unconvincing thought. And it is certainly part of an abstract story you want to tell. You are not escaping your own line of criticism.
Quoting Janus
Well, for starters we need to realize that the very notion of 'self-deception' is self-contradictory. It doesn't really make any sense when placed under careful scrutiny. I mean think about it differently for a minute. What sense does it make to say that we deliberately set out in order to trick ourselves into believing something that we don't? It's not even possible. It sheds light on the matter to realize that deception requires intent, whereas our being mistaken does not. We deceive others, not ourselves. Others deceive us, not themselves. We can all be mistaken. We cannot possibly come to realize and/or recognize that we are mistaken, or what we are mistaken about all by ourselves.
If one sets out with the deliberate intention of figuring out what they're mistaken about, they must consult others. That's why we should not only be quite concerned about talking with others, but we should also recognize that there can be tremendous value in it. Enrichment.
So, to answer the question about how to figure out where our self-deception lies, aside from experiencing a sudden reality-check, consulting an other is exactly what you need to do in order to become aware of what you're mistaken about. Describing that experience in terms of descending into a pit of vipers almost guarantees that you'll not be in a mindset conducive to changing bits of your worldview that are mistaken. That bit about vipers... I would be willing to bet my life that it was entirely adopted.
The way we conceive of ourselves is existentially contingent upon language. The raw feel of experience is not. How can we separate the two via language use?
But how would you feel if I showed you
That there is so much more I could say
About urging some care when we view
Others through the filter of adopted way
You see those who lived long before us
Our teachers who taught yesterday
Shared with us their understanding
An experience no one can trade
Like the joyful laughter that love only brings
Things that our words cannot seem to say
Hugs and kisses forever imprinted
In our hearts way back then and today
We know their intentions were only
To help us by showing the way
A path to live life to the fullest
But sometimes belief it just fades away
Not as though stolen by darkness
For not all things different are bad
But rather a fading of misunderstanding
That was sewn by the pure love they had
If my words here are gentle within you
Then you know my intention to raise
As little disturbance a raindrop or two
A ripple does not necessarily betray
Are you still certain of this?
;)
No, I didn't say that. I said that our experience seems direct. We cannot be wrong about its seeming direct. And I said that the question as to whether it *really* is direct is uninteresting to me. I would add that if you take as a question about what is absolutely the case it is an incoherent question, and as I said earlier an answer either way can be reasonably given depending on how you want to look at it.
Speaking of qualia I would that qualia (what things are like to us) just is seeming. What something is like for us, for example experience being experienced as direct, is just how it seems. Also I would not agree that I am telling and abstract story; I am telling you directly how things seem to me.
I haven't said we do it deliberately. Generally we would not be aware that we are doing it, but we can come to see it. I know this from experience.
Quoting creativesoul
Sure I read books and listen to others; and have gained a lot from doing so; I have never denied that. On the other hand I have participated in these forums long enough to know that almost nobody changes their existential beliefs on account of someone else's rational arguments. For sure others may point out things I haven't considered; it happens all the time, but that is something different.
No one has pointed out anything to me, in this thread at least, that I have found convincing enough to seriously question my own intuitions about my own experience. My own experience is the final arbiter. And I think that is how it should be with everyone; they should listen not to authorities or rational arguments, but to their own conscience to try to discover whether they are deceiving themselves in any way. I'm talking here about existential understanding of course, not about science or other academic disciplines.
Quoting creativesoul
You keep distorting what I am saying through your own lens and thus failing to understand. Of course interactions with others can give "reality checks" particularly if your self-deceptions are in regard to personal relations. That's not what I was talking about at all, though. I don't want to repeat myself, so if you go back and read carefully what I have said you will hopefully understand what I am talking about. If not, that's fine; I'm not here to convince anyone to see the world the way I do, but merely to share the way I see the world and to hear how others do. As I have said several times what I am referring to does not fall into the province of inter-subjective corroboration at all.
I haven't anywhere suggested that the fact that you are interested in positivist or objectivist approaches would preclude you from having a creative side. All I have said is that I am not primarily interested in such approaches, and I definitely don't think they are appropriate or useful when it comes to understanding one's lived experience (apart form the obvious benefit of analytic skills; I mean look at Husserl!). The fact that you said earlier that phenomenological systems are "wrong" or words to that effect, shows that you do not appreciate the idea that an approach might be fruitful without even being subject to the rigid dichotomy of 'right/ wrong', in the kind of way that objectivist or positivist claims are usually taken to be.
Deception requires intent. We cannot intend to deceive ourselves. There is no such thing as self-deception.
You're chasing a chimera...
Can't it be both? If you drop a ball then it is certain to fall, and this is the case even if I'm not certain that it will.
Sure we do. What are delusions if not intended beliefs that are meant to cover up the truth that is so depressing?
Do you really believe that all intent is utterly conscious? If so, I would say you are deceiving yourself...I wonder what motivates you to such a belief...
I wouldn't say that; I would say they are distinct insofar as one is linguistically mediated and the other is not. We experience the difference and so of course we.can talk about it.
Of course you can do one or the other; whichever you like, but you can't do both at the same time.
Rather there is the act of seeing, and this has a physiological explanation.
Quoting apokrisis
Perhaps.
There is nothing it is like to see over and above the seeing, but the seeing (for me at least) is inherently qualitative and affective. Having feelings associated with it is what it means to say that there is something it is like to see. If you don't experience any associated feeling when you see then I guess there would be nothing it would be like for you to see.
So, in short there is something it is like for me to see, and that is not an assumption, but something experienced. There may not be anything it is like for you to see, if you are emotionally impoverished, and that could lead you to make the (erroneous) assumption that there is nothing it is like for me to see.
See?
What exactly do you mean to say here? If it only seems direct, then your position appears to be that it is not direct - it just seems so.
Or are you saying it is direct, and this directness is something we also directly experience?
What I commented on is the striking way that qualia are the product of a socially-constructed state of perception. Through a philosophical/scientific set of concepts, we learn to look at green-ness or tree-ness as the qualities of an appearance, a mental representation, rather than as qualities of the world.
So introspecting on "raw feelings" is a curious business. Instead of the natural realism for which the brain is designed - the one where we just interact with the world we perceive without question - we introduce a learnt stance towards perception. We "know" it is actually a perceptual state seen from "the inside". And so there is something going on that "regular materialism can't explain". In causal terms, it is "an intractable mystery".
So your heightened notion of subjectivity - defined in opposition to a counter notion of objectivity - depends on a learnt stance. And yet you then treat the qualia thus conceived/perceived in this fashion as "direct and real". The essence of the mental realm is that it is founded on "raw feelings". That is the stuff of which consciousness is composed. No qualitative experience, no mind to speak of. The real world has dropped out of the picture. There is just these primal mental events. And they are directly accessed, they are substantially real.
I think it is worth analysing this in detail because what I suggest you are doing is simply re-focusing the usual direct realism folk have about the "objective world" to make it a direct realism about the contents of the "subjective mind".
In other words, this remains a hard causal dualism. And that justifies your claims of "an intractable mystery".
But my approach is triadic rather than dyadic. Semiotically, the world and self emerge co-jointly via the mediation of the sign. So it gets around all need for direct access by just accepting nothing is direct, everything emerges. Subjectivity and objectivity only arise as complementary limits on being. Thus there is no intractable causal mystery ... except for the very generalised one expressed by the usual ultimate question, "Why anything?".
I suspect that truth is too subtle - or too simple - to be trapped in an algorithm.
You are referred to as apokrisis; it is true that you are referred to as apokrisis. That's not something that is approached asymptotically; it's just true.
One might be tempted to treat all justifications, beliefs and hence knowledge as approached asymptotically. But even here there are things that we do not doubt, That this conversation is in English; that I have two hands with which to type - these are things taken as being undoubted, as certain.
When it comes to experience how it seems is how it is. Of course we can be mistaken.about what is experienced (in the sense of what is producing the experience but then who really, seriously, deeply cares about that?), but not about the quality of the experience. The seeing of things has the quality of directness; to ask whether it is "really" direct is a malformed question.
Quoting apokrisis
Sure the notion of subjectivity does depend on a "learned stance", but the subjectivity itself is primary and prior to any mere "notion"; for us, at least. If you want to undertake an objectivist analysis ( also a "learnt stance") you might say the objective is primary; but that can only ever be a story we tell our subjective selves; whereas the primacy of subjectivity is felt in every living moment. That's the big difference that really does make a difference.
You are arguing that the seeing is done by the "me". I am arguing that the "me" is produced by the seeing. Perception (or cognition) is about the product of the self that stands apart from its world so as to be able to act purposefully within that world. To perceive, is to feel the self as well as feel the world. And psychological science tells us all about how that works. The facts are not in dispute on this score.
So perception is a triadic process. A sign is formed in the middle that anchors a self~world distinction. I feel strongly like an observer of the world because I can see "a tree" and that it is "coloured", and its "leaves rustle in the breeze", and a whole lot of other interpreted signs that confirm all that is not me, at the same time as I feel the limits of my body, the way the same breeze ruffles my hair - all the me-ness that is also present.
Sure, you can make up that story and tell it yourself, but the experience of me is primary. There has to be a "me" to tell the story to in the first place, otherwise no story can be told.
Suspect away. If you have an actual argument, that might be interesting.
Exhibit A would be that philosophy is entirely founded on dialectical reasoning. The only difference is that some treat dichotomies as having to be either/or choices - one right, the other wrong - and others treat dichotomies as complementary bounds on existence. So both "horns of a dilemma" are right, both exist, both together compose the unity of opposites.
Quoting Banno
Predicate logic is for reasoning about contingent particulars. Dialectical logic is for reasoning about metaphysical wholeness.
So your argument here is both correct and irrelevant. What we are named is not a necessary metaphysical truth. But why would we expect it to be?
Quoting Banno
This is talking about measurement now. Another issue again.
Quoting Banno
That we take things as undoubted is merely pragmatism.
On logical grounds, they could be doubted - even if you would be right that doubt would seem strained. To assert A is certain requires that not-A was at least a possibility. And if it was a possibility, then the possibility of doubt remains. Your measurement of the world might have been in error concerning the facts.
So truth defined tautologically might seem undoubtable. A is A by definition. But that is just a state of belief within a mind. And even if is a communally shared belief - a language game - it is still just something folk agree to say.
When it comes to metaphysics, that is pretty trivial. But I get that your philosophical project is to deny metaphysics.
Yes, but doubts should at least be interesting.
So this "me" is directly aware of this "me"? This "me" can perceive its perceptions and perceive its self?
I agree that "me-ness" develops as a habit. A sense of "me" is just basic to the logic of modelling the world. Animals have to have an embodied sense of being so that they can also know a world. And humans have a social sense of self. Psychology has all the facts about how this sense of "me" arises.
But as soon as you insist on making this sense of "me" primal, unmediated, direct, etc, you get into all sorts of logical binds and homuncular regresses.
It is up to you to straighten those out. I've pointed to the fact they exist.
So sure, there is a "you" telling "your story". And go back to your infancy, we can see this "you-ness" developing due to biology and culture.
Using conventional cause and effect logic, you then want to insist that there can't be a narrative without a narrator. Any action implies an author. Agency is a primal fact.
But a systems logic says individuation is a process of habit-formation. You become a story-teller by learning to tell stories. So it is being born into a narrative culture that forges you the narrator. From infancy, you are being encouraged to make those first attempts that eventually produce your heightened "me".
Quoting Janus
So you are doppleganger Banno here. He wants to treat criticism of naive realism as malformed questions. You want to treat criticism of naive idealism - the claim raw feelings are direct access - as also just bad metaphysics.
Quoting Janus
That's a bit random if I am defending pragmatism here.
Is it interesting that we could doubt that we type with two hands as it might appear to us?
The more relevant question is what use it might have, what functional advantage it might have. Clearly in an everyday context, there isn't a good reason to doubt. But critical thinking doesn't even get started except by the forming of assertions that have sufficient counterfactual definiteness to be doubted.
No this me just is immediate awareness, immediate feeling. it is the feeling upon which everything else is constructed.
You are still overthinking it.
Can you make this claim in a way that feels meaningful without asserting the presence of a witnessing self. Can there just be "the immediate experience"?
And when we have deconstructed matters to that level, is this immediacy present in a way that isn't mediated by a temporal context - a sense of past constraints/future possibilities? Isn't it still essential that the essence of being is "immediate" in terms of an intentionality that speaks to the non-immediate?
We can keep drilling down, but when do we just get to bare particulars, raw feelings, or actual qualia? Some foundational atomism upon which everything is then "constructed"?
I'm not overthinking anything. I'm pointing out how you are just applying reductionist metaphysics in another guise.
Banno wants to talk about the point of view that sees the real. You want to talk about the point of view that sees the ideal. You are both trapped in an atomist metaphysics in which everything is simply a product of bottom-up construction.
Points of view - the fact of a viewing self - is taken for granted. The argument then becomes whether experience is the product of atomistic idealism or atomistic realism. Experience is either of fragments of mentality or of states of affairs.
And thus the true triadic richness of a modelling relation never comes into metaphysical view.
I think the crux of the problem you are having with this is that you are thinking of it as a claim about experience when it is actuslly a description of experience.
So as an example lets imagine two people, you and your friend, in a room staring at a painting. Your friend has taken LSD and is wildly hallucinating and you are sober. Now the way in which, if I was the sober friend, I would conceive of what my friend is experiencing, is to literally form a sort of mental image in my mind of what I imagine his visual field is like. Which of course leads to questions like, does my visual image correspond accurately to what to what he is experiencing? Is there anything even there that my visual image corresponds to (solipsism)? Is there an independent object that both of our visual fields correspond to?
We imagine, in our minds what it is like to experience the world as another person, which already splits the world into these private little individualized 'orbs' of perceptions/experience.
So you walk up to someone, shake their hand, start a conversation. And then you ask yourself "I wonder what it's like to be that person?" In your mind you form this mental image of what you imagine their perceptions and experience is like - which itself splits the world. You in your mental imaginings, have left the immediacy of your interaction with the other person and created this divide between the two of you, imagining the two of you as existing as these privately experienced 'orbs' of perceptions, that may or may not be embedded within a wider material world.
As in, it's completely incoherent to 'imagine' the way in which another person exists. A category error.
You're working from an ill-conceived notion of belief. One cannot knowingly believe something that is false.
Delusions are false belief.
That doesn't seem to follow from what preceded it?
Got an argument for it?
Then we don't do it at all. That's the point being made here.
You cannot depend upon your conscience as a guide, for it is you who must keep it satisfied... Bob Dylan(similar at least)
Your experience includes talking to others ya know?
It's not as if those feelings were ineffable; whence poetry and art?
Feelings have physiological explanations.
Yes, there is a difference between feeling a feeling and understanding it in physiological terms. Just as there is a difference between orbiting the Sun and understanding the laws of gravity. But we do not say the orbit is inexplicable in the face of the explanation.
We have to learn the trick of “experiencing the pure redness of red.” So the raw feeling is the product of a particular philosophically framed effort. We are striking a conceptual attitude where we are seeing the “reality of an appearance.”
I guess this is a hard case to make in a modern western context where we grow up with red crayons and red traffic lights. We are taught from a young age to regard colour as an abstract general quality. Anything could be painted red if we choose.
But even so, cross cultural comparisons show how an abstracted notion of colour is a learnt point of view.
So we might well describe red as ... what if feels like to see red. We can point towards our idea of just an abstracted hue filling awareness as a mental image. But how is that direct or raw? Abstraction is by definition indirect surely?
I'm wondering if the belief in self-deception shared an origen with the notion of falling into a pit of vipers?
Do you know the source(s) of those thought/belief?
I believe that the terms "really" and "utterly" are being used in a manner that adds nothing to the discussion aside from reflecting either misunderstanding or insincerity.
I believe that all intent is conscious, and will unless and/or until someone could convince me otherwise.
The claim was that deception requires intent. We cannot intentionally set out in order to trick ourselves into believing something that we don't. Thus, there is no such thing as self-deception.
Your question implies an unconscious intention to deceive oneself...
Unconsciously intending to trick oneself into believing something that they don't...
Nah. That doesn't make any sense either.
"Type of truth"...
Banno, do you mean sense?
In that certainty is not equivalent to a sense of "truth"?
What's a type of truth?
Conscious intent is simply one's own intent one is conscious or aware of. There are intents whether we are conscious of them or not.
Quoting creativesoul
Why? Is it because of the following paradox?
If so, we must return to your earlier claim that it is only a matter of language whether a tree is a single thing or many things. It isn't.
Self isn't a single thing. It is many things. We treat it as a single thing for the sake of convenience. So when we say that A decieves A this must not be interpreted literally. Rather, you must interpret it in the sense that something within A (e.g. A1) deceives something else within A (e.g. A2.) If you do so, no logical contradiction, no paradox, arises.
-Magnus Anderson
Visualization can be as rich as what one sees "with their own eyes", or more so - and isn't it the aim and mark of a finely developed mind to see "with one's own eyes" as if it were both visualized and physical reality? Ie. the visionary's sight.
You don't know that. To claim that would be to deny that non-social animals don't have raw feelings. I think it is arguable that the ways human societies have been created would have been mediated by the ways in which humans experienced themselves due to the nature of their particular kind of embodiment.
If even raw feelings are socially constructed then they are not raw feelings; there would be no raw feelings. Then how much more so would the notion of raw feelings or anything else be socially constructed; which would mean all of our idea and theories are nothing more than arbitrary social constructs.
Go ahead and believe that all intent is conscious if you want to. I think you are wrong if you believe that, but it's no skin off my nose. It's not important enough to me to waste time trying to convince you of something which is
so obvious, and yet for whatever reasons you don't want to believe.
Quoting creativesoul
Most of what we do is not deliberate; following your argument that we therefore do not actually do it, we actually do very little at all. :-}
It seems you have not been reading the posts carefully enough: I have said a few times now that the quality of feelings can be alluded to but not precisely described or explained. So, physiological explanations are possible, of course, but they remain abstract theories, and as such cannot capture lived experience, they do not explain the subjective quality of feelings, but merely hypothesize about physical conditions that may be thought to be necessary for feelings to occur.
So, your "orbit" analogy is not apt, since an orbit must be thought to either an observable third person phenomenon or an abstract model, and subjective feelings are neither of these.
But, demonstrably, we do talk about feelings in the third person.
Yes we say things like "she was angry" or sad or depressed or whatever, but that is not what I'm talking about. Those are simplified labels for lived feeling, and lived feeling is never observed as a third person phenomenon, it is felt by the person 'having' the feeling.
It is that we can experience feelings which is mysterious and inexplicable, and no physical theory about how it occurs will ever touch that mystery or dissolve that inexplicability. And even it could why would we want it to?
An all-and-some statement, neither provable nor falsifiable, much loved by conspiracy theorists.
What I am unhappy with is you insistence that truth conform to your specifications. It just doesn't.
Perceiving is the continual construction of objects represented by our mentality. All perception is mental.
I would indeed claim that non-linguistic animals can't have "raw feelings" as they don't have introspective awareness.
Animals would just be aware "directly" of the world. They would not have the linguistically-scaffolded ability to be "aware of the contents of their own consciousness". That is, they wouldn't have the learnt attitude that is being "directly aware" of mental appearances.
So what I am trying to get at here is that this notion of "raw feelings" is very much a particular way of construing phenomenology. Yes, there is certainly this general thing we call "mind" going on in our heads. There is experience. But to talk about qualia or raw feelings is already to have entered into a narrative version of what is going on. To introspect is a conception-heavy action, not some kind of direct perception of a set of self-independent mental facts.
This comes back to my point about perception being bi-directional. The self gets produced in the process, as much as the world viewed. Both the subjectivity and the objectivity get formed as the complementary parts of the world modelling relation.
To introspect is "perception" of the contents of awareness. So really, it involves the production of the kind of narrative selfhood - the one that can call itself by a name - which can then turn around and "see" that it is seeing, or hearing, or tasting, or feeling. This narrative self - after it has been formed in the right fashion by a school of philosophical thought - can come to "see" that it is seeing qualia or raw feelings. It will know the way to frame its experience so that it appears to be pointed at the redness of red, or whatever.
Attention will be focused so that awareness of everything else is suitably suppressed for a fleeting moment. The redness of red will dominate the mental view. It will seem the most intensely noticed aspect of that instant of phenomenology. A snapshot of that moment will be made and held in working memory so it can be discussed in philosophical fashion as evidence for a theory. The narrating self will protest that it has raw feelings - as it just managed to adopt a socially-constructed attitude where that was true.
So I am questioning your too easy claim that you can introspect and directly perceive that there are a bunch of raw feelings "in there" - along with a narrative self that is beholding these raw feelings and passing comment on them, describing them, understanding them as real "intention-independent" phenomenal qualities.
Quoting Janus
I'm not saying it is social construction all the way down. I am saying it is semiosis all the way down. So there is the biological level of perception that is foundational for the social. Animals are aware. It is just that their awareness would be extrospective rather than introspective. They would have what we would call phenomenal states or raw feelings - but that is what we would call it, not how they could view it.
So we are imagining ourselves being inside their heads and watching a parade of raw feelings playing out. We are adopting the "homunculus beholding a representation" model that is our notion of the right way to introspect. That social intentional stance - that kind of narrative selfhood - is what a non-linguistic animal can never have. The animal is just thoughtlessly reacting to the world it experiences. It doesn't see its experience as an appearance.
They would also be directly aware of their bodies; and that is precisely what I mean by "raw feeling". This is not introspection that looks for "contents", you seem to be still stuck in the objectivist model. It is simply feeling yourself. I have no doubt you can do it right now as you sit at your computer. That basic feeling of ourselves, that really cannot be put into words adequately is the primal basis upon which everything else is constructed.
Quoting apokrisis
That's not the way I am thinking about it at all. There is no such separation between feeling and the one who feels. What I am trying to get at is prior to the subject/object distinction. Apologies that I don't have time for longer replies at the moment.
So you mean that "raw feeling" is about the division that gets made in terms of self vs world? It is the primal distinction between self and other?
I would tend to agree this is the most basic level of "perception". Everything starts from the epistemic cut of this difference-making.
So I object to qualia talk as it already dualises self and percepts. It is a faux realism about the contents of a phenomenal space.
But I agree with the semiotic position which sees all awareness beginning from the complex knot that is a self~world symmetry breaking.
Quoting Janus
But now you switch back into a constructive mode of analysis where some thing must be foundational, rather than some process.
So instead of a phenomenology of world being basic, you talk of the phenomenology of selfhood as being basic. And this is sort of right. You are talking about the bare fact of there being "a point of view". There is a directionality in play - the one that points from a self to a world.
But I would stress that the deeper analysis would be the semiotic view where what gets everything going is a symmetry-breaking process.
It starts with the lack of any self~world distinction, just a vagueness. So the primal foundation is "a state" that is not even divided as yet. Then both self and world are what co-arise as the two necessary ends of the one pointing arrow.
The semiotic approach ensures that we don't have to claim that mind, or spirit, or some other kind of mentalistic substance, is the "foundational stuff". We can avoid the usual reductionist bottom-up causality that bedevils philosophy of mind.
Quoting Janus
And yet we talk about them.
In so far as we can discuss and theorise about them they are not private. In so far as they are private, we cannot discuss or theorise about them.
You can't have your cake and eat it.
Nothing prevents us from realizing , discussing and theorizing about our inability to discuss and theorize about some kinds of experience. It's not a matter of "having your cake and eating it ", but simply a matter of being able to recognize the difference between what we can talk about in precise terms and what we cannot. I would say that difference is not black and white but a continuum with extremes at either end.
I quite agree. I only would add that many philosophical problems come from failing to recognise when we have slipped from discussing ineffability to discussing the ineffable.
Edit: Such as when people claim that we cannot talk about trees, but only about about private experiences-of-trees...
There are no lines drawn in experience. All our senses, all our affects provide the basis for what we perceive. How our senses, how our affects have developed (physically and historically) determines what we filter out as well as what we retain in our representation of our perceptions. Perhaps some presentations are unrepresentable, yet still meaningful because of the pleasurable or pain experienced, what Kant and Burke described as the sublime.
Others'.
Self? What is that? Or rather, what are those?
It's not whatever reasons. I've offered them for you to consider. Our positions conflict with one another. At least one of us is wrong. Thus, because holding false belief increases the likelihood for error, and it's impossible to make a mistake on purpose, and avoiding error is a good thing to do, tell me... what are your reasons for believing otherwise? Where does what I say about it go wrong?
Quoting Janus
That's not my argument, nor does it follow from what I've written.
Not all things we do are deliberate. Some are. Deception requires intent. Intending to trick someone is deliberate. I've argued for how that is the case. You've neglected to give the argument due attention.
Hand-waving isn't acceptable.
Unsurprising though...
...or so it seems.
Not a helpful comment unless you identify just what you are referring to and where it fails according to your criteria, preferably quoting the specific passages you are targetting.
Of course it is possible to deceive others or oneself without consciously intending to.
Braggarts who. probably out of a sense of insecurity, bullshit about what they have done and even come to believe their own bullshit are a good example. People practice all kinds of subtle deceit and are more complex than your simple model seems to give them credit for. Makes me think you don't get out much.
In any case if you have never observed this kind of unconscious deceit in yourself or others then your experience of people is simply different to mine and nothing I can say will make any diiference to what you believe.
If they thought about it at the time; if not then they tell a lie without being conscious of doing so. Quite common I would say.
Now, that's a distinction I can get behind! It's true that we can talk about ineffability, but we cannot say anything at all about the ineffable by definition. So when we allude poetically to the ineffable, or to God, or the Eternal, we are not speaking about the ineffable, God or the Eternal, but about our own sense and understanding of ineffability, godliness or eternality. So, that's a very useful distinction to make.
As to tree-talk, I think it's right to say that people talk about trees, not about "tree-experiences". ON the other hand people can only speak with knowledge about trees, insofar as they have experience of them, and can only speak of what emerges from that experience, and not about 'what a tree is' absent any human experience or perception of it. About the 'what the tree is beyond human experience' people may conjecture, and it is an open question as to whether such conjecture is empty, but in any case it cannot be knowledge.
I would say the raw feeling becomes localized as self, allowing the distinction of other (wherever I do not locate the raw feeling). But my experience of the other (totalized as world) is still my experience and no one else's. In that sense personhood is foundational.
What would such a conjecture look like? Can an example be provided?
I doubt it.
Quoting creativesoul
Quoting Janus
Well, if one bullshits and later comes to believe it, then they didn't believe it at first. They were aware of the fact that they did not believe what they were saying - at first. If they later come to believe the bullshit, they are not aware that they once believed otherwise. Lying is deliberately misrepresenting one's own thought/belief. So, in the case of the bullshitter who later comes to believe his/her own bullshit - after they've come to actually believe it - they are no longer lying. That holds good regardless of whether or not what they say is false/true.
Are you saying that we cannot form and/or hold well grounded true belief about what the tree is beyond human experience? I've already argued for that and against the position you're arguing from/for above without subsequent refutation or attention. Care to address it directly, or are you satisfied with neglecting it?
What distinction?
There is no distinction between belief about the ineffable and the ineffable.
Well, good arguments make a difference to me. The simpler the better. However...
Aren't we talking about metacognition here?
It makes no sense to talk about observing unconscious deceit in oneself. It makes sense to talk about becoming aware that our thought/belief has efficacy, and that holding unshakable certainty in some belief or other has the effect/affect of not allowing us to believe something to the contrary, even if that includes an overwhelming amount of evidence.
I'm being reminded of Russel's Why I'm Not a Christian...
All the world's religions, mythology, hermeticism, theosophy and anthroposophy, as well as pre-critical philosophy should provide plenty of examples.
Although if "conjecture' is taken to imply the possibility of empirical refutation then 'think' or even 'imagine' would be more appropriate terms.
IT makes perfect sense to me. I believe I have seen it in action, both in myself and others in many diverse ways. When it is observed of course it ceases to be unconscious. For example, the woman who knows subconsciously that her husband is cheating on her, but who cannot face the reality, so does not allow this realization to come to consciousness.
That is really no different than saying that there is no distinction between belief about anything and the the thing the belief is about.
You might object that the ineffable is not an empirical phenomenon, so the distinction between belief and the 'thing' the belief is about does not apply. But the same applies, to give a few examples, to personal freedom, immortality, the soul or self, God, the origin of the universe, causation and determinism, consciousness and so on. The list is long and "the ineffable" is on it. We cannot say anything determinate about the ineffable but we can say many, many things that take is as their subject.
Quoting Janus
Because it makes no sense to say otherwise.
Looks different to me... quite actually. As you note below...
Looks we're effin' 'em... Not sure what you're attempting to show here aside from perhaps putting forward some category or other. What do all those things have in common, because it most certainly is not being ineffable.
Are you saying that there is no distinction to be drawn and held between all of those things and belief about those things? Surely not.
You are nitpicking. Noone cares what THEY are aware of. What matters is that WE are aware of that the beliefs that they currently hold to be true were formed with the aim to deceive other people. That they forgot the origin of their beliefs does not change what the origin of their beliefs is. In fact, it strengthens it, since being unaware of your own lies makes it easier to effectively lie.
One cannot unknowingly or inadvertently deliberately misrepresent his/her own thought/belief.
This tangent on self-deception began with Janus asking how we could know when we are deceiving ourselves after describing talking to those who hold contrasting positions as falling into a "pit of vipers" or words to that effect/affect.
Deception includes deliberate intent. Self-deception is a non-starter. It renders the notion of deception meaningless. It is a notion which will add only confusion. The irony of it all...
You cannot erase history with the simple act of forgetting. All you can do is you can erase your memory of it. Do you understand this? When you forget that you are lying you do not stop lying. You merely convince yourself you are not lying. Which is a part of deception. By being unaware of the fact that your opinions were formed with the goal to deceive other people, you make sure your duplicity is well hidden.
Your claim that self-deceivers are not lying is MORONIC given the fact that their opinions were formed precisely with the aim to deceive others. Noone cares that they are no longer aware of this fact. That does not change a thing.
Rubbish. The opinion of a deceiver is not what he wants others to believe.
When one believes what they say they are not lying.
That's not true. Beliefs that have been formed with the aim to deceive others are lies regardless of whether the deceiver believes in them or not. That's what a lie is: it is a belief that has been formed with the aim to deceive others.
The idea that lies are only lies if you don't believe in them is a tactic used by liars in order to fool others into thinking they are not liars. It's a very powerful tactic. What you're doing in this thread is you are trying to make it even more powerful by means of sophisticated pseudo-intellectual activity.
Every belief has an origin. Some beliefs are formed with the aim to map reality. Some beliefs are formed with the aim to deceive other people or to prevent one's own brain from being rudely motivated. Forgetting the origin of your beliefs does not change their origin. Believing your own lies does not change the fact that they are lies. Your mistake is that you ignore the history of a belief. You ignore its genealogy. You ignore HOW and WHY a belief is created. You focus TOO MUCH on what is in the present.
I've already told you that an intent is said to be conscious if the organism to which it belongs is conscious/aware of it. That's all it means. Not every intent is conscious because not every organism is conscious/aware of all of its intents. There are organisms with intents whether or not anyone is aware of them. Consciousness isn't all there is.
So then, we're at odds.
Let's take a gander at our respective notions of a lie. On my view, a lie is a deliberate misrepresentation of what one thinks/believes. That is the criterion, which when met, that counts as being a lie. I compare/contrast that to being honest, which is to not misrepresent what one thinks/believes. More simply put, a liar does not believe what they say, and an honest speaker does. It could also be talked about in terms os being a sincere speaker and/or being an insincere speaker. Speaking sincerely is precisely what one is doing when they're being honest, and vice-versa.
So... that's my take. What about yours? What exactly is the criterion, which when met, that counts as being a lie, and moreover how does it relate to being honest?
This made me chuckle a bit, given the position I've been arguing for and/or working the bugs out of for over a decade...
'Beliefs' that have been formed with the intent to deceive others are not beliefs of the liar. They are statements that the speaker does not believe. That's what makes them deceitful. Assuming sincerity in speech, a speaker believes what they say. The liar tricks one into believing something that the liar doesn't.
You're not making any sense here.
That's a horribly shallow understanding of what a lie is.
What is a lie?
Any declared description of reality that has been formed with the purpose to manipulate something (e.g. one's brain) or someone (e.g. one's neighbour.)
If I want person A to kill his friend person B all I have to do so is invent a reason for A to be motivated to kill B. For example, I can tell person A that his wife cheated on him with his friend person B. It does not matter whether I believe this myself or not. The point is that this alleged description of reality is formed with the sole purpose to motivate person A to kill person B. It wasn't formed with the aim to map reality.
What is not a lie?
Any declared description of reality that has been formed with the purpose to map reality.
That's also the difference between honesty and dishonesty.
I declare to the love of my life that she is the love of my life for the sole purpose of manipulating her mind into believing and/or knowing it, because she doesn't.
According to your (mis)conception of what counts as a lie, I am lying...
Again, according to your (mis)conception, I am lying...
It's that simple.
It is according to your misconception of my conception of what counts as a lie. In your example, you are describing reality before proceeding to use that description to manipulate a woman's mind. That's not a lie. It's not a lie because your description wasn't formed with the aim to manipulate a woman's mind. It was formed with the aim to map reality.
Quoting creativesoul
It's not.
And yet... the declaration's sole aim was to change her mind.
If someone thinks/believes that another is lying simply because they intend to change another's mind about something or other, then perhaps they are beholding a mental construct when witnessing motivational speech...
so the fact that every signal has to reach the brain before it is experienced is strange because that would suggest that what we seeing and hearing is just what the brain has created as a result of the signals it received. People who suffer from schizophrenia can hallucinate images and audio and what they see is a mental image. but they cant tell it apart from reality so it works the same way only their brain makes up images or audio without receiving the signals that would cause that.
Don't we then need to say we behold a 'mental construct' of a chair, of a chair 'out there'.
But what does a 'chair out there' even mean stripped away from our own understanding of it as a phenomenal object. It's a mental construct of nothing we can coherently talk about. Even atoms and forces are mental constructs.
I think the phenomenal world just imposes itself upon as, as a sort of brute force 'hereness'. As in, there is no direction to our perception. There is no body -> out there perceiving an external world. Nor is there an internal body taking in data and creating an internal representation of an external world.
The entirety of our phenomenal experience is just brute force present. Perception doesn't really exist, in terms of sense organs and neurons. The world around us, our bodies, our sense organs, they're all in there entirety just presented as a cohesive whole. Nothing senses the other.