Response to The Argument article by jamalrob
http://articles.thephilosophyforum.com/posts/the-argument-for-indirect-realism/
It's a very well written criticism of indirect realism, addressing various arguments which attempt to show that we're aware of intermediate mental ideas instead of the external objects themselves.
Despite demonstrating the flaws in those arguments, I still think indirect realism presents a significant challenge. More broadly, the ancient problem of perception mentioned in the article remains a problem.
Let's approach this a different way. First, perception itself cannot be the external objects, unless one wishes to endorse idealism. Perception is a mental activity, and it produces mental experiences. The senses generate electrical impulses which feed into the various regions of the brain which then integrate those into a perceptual experience, or at least when we're conscious of our senses.
An external table isn't an electrical impulse. It's also not the image on our retina, the sensation of our skin touching it, or the final integration. The table is an external object in the real world because it is separate from us and our perceiving it. Unless again one wishes to argue for idealism.
To quote The Partially Examined Life regarding direct perception, "It's not like green grass gets into the brain". So then the issue for direct realism is to explain how a mental experience of perception is being directly aware of external objects, instead of the mental experience. To repeat, the object isn't inside our heads when we perceive. Rather, we have an experience of the object which is generated by our perceptual aparatus.
Jamalrob deals with hallucinations and illusions. But there is another kind of experience where we have similar experiences to perception, and that is dreams. In our dreams, we have experiences of seeing and hearing what seem to be external objects, and sometimes experiences from the other senses. I have felt the heat of a dream fire and the shaking of a dream earthquake. Luckily, there was no fire or shaking upon awaking.
This begs the question of how perceptual experiences are fundamental different. If I can be aware of seeing a dream tree, what difference in awareness is there between that and seeing a real tree? Is it because the stimulus is external to the body for the latter? Is direct awareness just one of the proper causal chain? But indirect realists agree with the causal chain as well. That's why they're indirect and not idealists.
Jamalrob does deal with a similar argument involving direct neural stimulation which can produce an experience similar to perception, like with hallucinations (or dreams, memories, imagination). Would this mean then that Neo in the Matrix never had a perception until he took the red pill and woke up? Are BIVs incapable of ever having a perception? What about Boltzman brains?
The big question is what exactly does it mean to be "directly aware" of the objects of perception, given what we know about how perception works? And if direct realism can be successfully argued for, does that mean the skepticism mentioned above is defeated and the problem of perception was never really a problem?
It's a very well written criticism of indirect realism, addressing various arguments which attempt to show that we're aware of intermediate mental ideas instead of the external objects themselves.
Despite demonstrating the flaws in those arguments, I still think indirect realism presents a significant challenge. More broadly, the ancient problem of perception mentioned in the article remains a problem.
Let's approach this a different way. First, perception itself cannot be the external objects, unless one wishes to endorse idealism. Perception is a mental activity, and it produces mental experiences. The senses generate electrical impulses which feed into the various regions of the brain which then integrate those into a perceptual experience, or at least when we're conscious of our senses.
An external table isn't an electrical impulse. It's also not the image on our retina, the sensation of our skin touching it, or the final integration. The table is an external object in the real world because it is separate from us and our perceiving it. Unless again one wishes to argue for idealism.
To quote The Partially Examined Life regarding direct perception, "It's not like green grass gets into the brain". So then the issue for direct realism is to explain how a mental experience of perception is being directly aware of external objects, instead of the mental experience. To repeat, the object isn't inside our heads when we perceive. Rather, we have an experience of the object which is generated by our perceptual aparatus.
Jamalrob deals with hallucinations and illusions. But there is another kind of experience where we have similar experiences to perception, and that is dreams. In our dreams, we have experiences of seeing and hearing what seem to be external objects, and sometimes experiences from the other senses. I have felt the heat of a dream fire and the shaking of a dream earthquake. Luckily, there was no fire or shaking upon awaking.
This begs the question of how perceptual experiences are fundamental different. If I can be aware of seeing a dream tree, what difference in awareness is there between that and seeing a real tree? Is it because the stimulus is external to the body for the latter? Is direct awareness just one of the proper causal chain? But indirect realists agree with the causal chain as well. That's why they're indirect and not idealists.
Jamalrob does deal with a similar argument involving direct neural stimulation which can produce an experience similar to perception, like with hallucinations (or dreams, memories, imagination). Would this mean then that Neo in the Matrix never had a perception until he took the red pill and woke up? Are BIVs incapable of ever having a perception? What about Boltzman brains?
The big question is what exactly does it mean to be "directly aware" of the objects of perception, given what we know about how perception works? And if direct realism can be successfully argued for, does that mean the skepticism mentioned above is defeated and the problem of perception was never really a problem?
Comments (229)
Quoting Marchesk
I think Hume said something along the lines of, "they differ in intention".... and I think I can agree with that. Dreams, illusion etc don't seem to be that detailed, vivid... or they seem to be 'lower resolution' if you will. I can try to imagine a face of someone I haven't seen or a while, but the imagination is never as accurate as the 'direct' perception.
So while our brain does seem to play a vital role in the construction of a perception, and is able to create images without direct(!) sensory input, it does seem to be doing a better job when it gets direct input.
And I mean, to me this is enough, I don't need a hundred procent certainty. It seems reasonable enough to assume that the more clear picture is a better representation of reality, then the worse images (It doesn't seem all that likely that the brain would be better at producing higher resolution images without the sensory imput).
But there are other reasons too. Dreams, illusions etc often don't fit into our overall picture of the world. Our system of beliefs gets tested and refined to our perceptions of the world as we go through life... and solidify more and more the more experiences we have. One outlier perception, dream imagine or illusion usually isn't enough to change ones beliefs.
EDIT: And maybe to drive the last point home some more, if we expereince those outlier images, what we tend to do is test them against the world... we try to repeat the experience to see if it was indeed real. And perceptions of the world seem to be a better source of repeatable experiences than dreams and illusions.
Quoting Marchesk
I assume you mean something along these lines:
ambient light - object - reflected light - eye lens - retina - electrochemical reactions - nerve signals - brain activity.
Or in the case of a mirage:
ambient light - reflecting effect of heated air - eye lens - retina - electrochemical reactions - nerve signals - brain activity.
Or in the case of a BiV:
mad scientist - infernal equipment - electrochemical reactions - nerve signals - brain activity.
Def: "I" = electrochemical reactions - nerve signals - brain activity.
Def: "see" = reflected light - eye lens - retina.
{Interlude} I dream of the mad scientist giving the brain the sensation of rubbing its eyes with its hands in disbelief at the hallucination it is being made to see. {End}
What is the argument though? We agree that seeing is remote sensing. A blind man uses a stick for remote sensing. He feels the curb 'through' the unfeeling stick. I feel the same curb through the unfeeling ambient light. Do you want to say that the sense of touch is indirect? When I shake your hand, I do not directly feel your hand, I only feel sensations in my hand? Well I can sort of make sense of that, but really- why bother? And sure, I don't need actual pins and needles to feel pins and needles...
Quoting unenlightened
It's questioning whether or not 2 provides direct information about 1.
Ok. What work is 'direct' doing here? We agree that there is causal connection roughly as crudely indicated above whereby information is transformed and filtered such that I know where the curb is and do not trip over it. Information is provided, and the aboutness is guaranteed by the appropriateness of behaviour - not tripping. And what of the blind man? He gets equivalent verifiably reliable information about the curb. Is his sensing direct or indirect? What's the difference?
Using Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities, apples have the shape we see them to have even when not being seen, and so shape-experience provides us with direct information about the apple, whereas it doesn't have the taste we taste it to have when not being eaten, and so taste-experience only provides us with indirect information about the apple.
I know from the taste of an apple that something about it elicits in me a sweet experience, but that doesn't really tell me anything about what the apple is like when I'm not eating it. That's indirect information. Whereas I know from the look of an apple that it's round, and that tells me what it's like when I'm not looking at it. That's direct information.
The question, then, is the extent to which experience provides us with information about the perception-independent nature of the world. Perhaps the taste of an apple is perception-independent, and so that apples are sweet is an objective fact, even if they're not being eaten and even if some people mistakenly taste them to be sour. Or perhaps the shape of an apple isn't perception-independent, and so that apples are round is not an objective fact, and those who see them to be a different shape aren't wrong in seeing them so.
The shape-experience is two-dimensional. You can't see the other side of the apple, only the side facing you. So shape-experience can't be a primary. The world is not located relative to your eyes, yet that is how the world appears.
Doesn't "bent" straws in water indicate that our shape-experience isn't primary?
I don't understand the point of "indirect" or "direct" when we can still use present states-of-affairs to understand states-of-affairs that happened billions of years ago (microwave background radiation and the expansion of space informs us about the Big Bang). The time between such events may simply be a product of how our minds process change relative to its own changing states.
Yeah the problem is that this sentence doesn't even make sense to begin with. What would it mean to have a taste when not tasted? The property 'sweet' only makes sense in relation to a sense-organ that can taste it. That doesn't imply that that sense-organ causes that property to appear in the apple though, just that you need a taste-sensitive sense organ to be able to detect that property of the apple.
Quoting Michael
I don't see the difference. Tasting an apple also tells you what it tastes like when you are not tasting it?
Ask the people who claim that things have a look even when not being seen.
Yeah sorry, I know you were just presenting a view, not necessarily advocating it. I was tackling the idea, not the man :-).
People like me. I typically buy a pack of four apples that all look similar. And the one I have on Monday, also tastes similar to the one I have on Tuesday. So I tend to think that Tuesday's apple was tasty on Monday, even though I did not taste it. This idea that apples remain apples when the fridge door is shut seems to work for the shape, the colour and the taste. It's not that I have any evidence that the toys or the fruit don't come to life when the kids aren't looking, like in Toy Story, it just seems more parsimonious to assume not. It saves me worrying about which of the apples is going to be tasty today.
I don't need to believe that red paint already has the property of being purple to believe that when I mix it with blue paint it will turn people, so why do you need to believe that the apple already has the property of being tasty to believe that when you put it in your mouth it will be tasty?
Taste is a property produced by chemicals in the apple stimulating nerves in the tongue rather than an independent property of the apple or an independent property of the tongue (or perhaps more accurately, a property of the experience that arises by the brain activity caused by those chemicals stimulating those nerves). What's not parsimonious about that?
Nor do I. But I do need to believe that red paint has the property of turning purple when mixed with blue paint. It sounds like you think that too.
Which is just to say that I know what happens when red and blue paint mix. And I know what happens when I look at and eat apples. But the epistemological problem of perception is related to what this tells us about apples when we aren't seeing and eating them. If the extent of our knowledge is counterfactual; apples are such that they would look like this were we to see them and would taste like this were we to eat them then we're not in a position to say that experience provides us with information about the factual properties of apples when not being seen or eaten.
I think that very much depends on the person. Some people have very detailed imaginations and some have very vivid dreams. I have rather poor visualization, but my dreams are visually richer. Some people can compose music in their heads, and some have very detailed memories.
There are two potential traps here when arguing this stuff. One is to assume everyone else has the same experience (limited visualization of the non-artist for example), and the other is to focus only on vision. Which could be misleading, since vision is very much a remote sense, unlike taste or touch.
The argument is that if perception is indirect, skepticism is more of a worry, because we have to infer the nature of external objects on the assumption that perception is indeed indirect and not something else entirely. So the status of knowledge and the nature of the world we experience are potentially at stake.
Direct realism would tend to avoid those issues. But only if we actually do have direct perception.
Do you think what you are dreaming of is equally real as what you perceive? And if not, why not?
I don't think perceptions are the main worry for knowledge, but rather what we infer from them. Reason, biases, preconceptions etc... all have held knowledge back more than the senses. That is, unless you want to argue that what science has achieved can't be deemed knowledge because it has to assume that our perceptions tell us something of reality without justification. But then, what would constitute knowledge? Nothing right, if knowledge is possible at all, than it is only because we perceive part of reality through perceptions.
So in the end we are presented with a choice between no knowledge at all, or assuming that our senses do tell us something of reality and try to work from there. Seems like an easy enough decision to make.
Only because you're thinking in terms of how the apple will look and taste for you as a human being. Being tasty is something animals with taste buds perceive. And that can vary quite a bit. It's not a property of the apple. The color is probably also a property of perception, since it's really photons of certain wavelength bouncing off molecular surfaces. And the colors seen can vary as well. Normal sighted humans have tetrachromatic vision, but there are other kinds.
And why would the narrow range of visible EM be colored? What about X-Rays and microwaves?
I believe ancient Indian philosophy was also aware of the issues around perception. Indian idealism has long been a focus in that tradition.
Quoting Marchesk
I hear you. But I don't believe you. Present me with these perceptions you have that there are perceptions. Personally, i don't have perceptions, I see things.
[i]The true world — attainable for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man; he lives in it, he is it. (The oldest form of the idea, relatively sensible, simple, and persuasive. A circumlocution for the sentence, "I, Plato, am the truth.")
The true world — unattainable for now, but promised for the sage, the pious, the virtuous man ("for the sinner who repents"). (Progress of the idea: it becomes more subtle, insidious, incomprehensible — it becomes female, it becomes Christian.)
The true world — unattainable, indemonstrable, unpromisable; but the very thought of it — a consolation, an obligation, an imperative. (At bottom, the old sun, but seen through mist and skepticism. The idea has become elusive, pale, Nordic, Königsbergian.)
The true world — unattainable? At any rate, unattained. And being unattained, also unknown. Consequently, not consoling, redeeming, or obligating: how could something unknown obligate us? (Gray morning. The first yawn of reason. The cockcrow of positivism.)
The "true" world — an idea which is no longer good for anything, not even obligating — an idea which has become useless and superfluous — consequently, a refuted idea: let us abolish it! (Bright day; breakfast; return of bon sens and cheerfulness; Plato's embarrassed blush; pandemonium of all free spirits.)
The true world — we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one. (Noon; moment of the briefest shadow; end of the longest error; high point of humanity; INCIPIT ZARATHUSTRA.)[/i]
Are you sure you read the article? :lol:
I did. So you think the perception is the object? The neural activity produces the object? That can't be right.
Direct realism must mean it produces an awareness of the object via the perceptual experience. But in what sense is it "direct"?
Suppose we categorize perception like this ...
the experience ? the experienced (non-identity, self versus other)
the experience = the experienced (self-identity, dreams, hallucinations, etc)
So, we perceive whatever else by interaction, not by becoming the perceived, whereas dreams, hallucinations, etc, are parts of us when occurring.
When we experience, say, love, it's not an experience of something extra-self, whereas (non-imaginary) loved ones are, and can be interactees.
If I chat with my neighbor, then I'm not chatting with my experiences, rather I'm interacting with my neighbor, and my experiences are my end of it, are contingent thereupon.
Then, by this sort of thing ...
hallucination is mistaking ? for =
subjective idealism (solipsism) is mistaking = for ?
[sub]Also ... Phantom pain, Synesthesia, Sleep paralysis, Introspection illusion, Refraction
[/sub]
1. It corrects refracted images so that the stick in water looked straight.
2. It occasionally receives video transmissions of objects otherwise out of sight.
Both of theses result in perceptions. Are they direct?
What if I hack the implant and refract straight light and send the wrong video? What is the nature of the resulting perceptions?
That is a good approach. The crux of the matter turns on whether the experience of the other is what we're aware of, or whether that experience is the awareness of the other. The interaction happens regardless.
It's also possible that the answer is a mix of both and it just depends. For example, I hear what sounds like footsteps late at night in an old building where I thought I was alone. Turns out it was just the building settling.
So I do have a perception of the building making noises, but my experience of footsteps was inaccurate. Of course that's an auditory illusion, but it does illustrate a mixed state. I can't be directly aware of footsteps if there are none, but I am aware of perceiving a sound.
For example, such ideas as perspective have evolved in human appreciation of the world and are encapsulated in the general range of information stored in a modern mind, presumably this helps tune the perceptions we experience. After all, the act of representing the world in drawings (a behaviour) is fundamentally different now than it was in say the year 1200. We also see this in the way that youngsters represent perspective (often denoting the world in a flatter geometry) - they have to learn the enactment of perspectival perception into the act of drawing.
The problem seems to be something of a Cartesian interpretation of perception - that we are actually seeing the world in some kind of direct form. Even though the writer wants to dismiss the idea we see mental images, the argument seems constructed along the lines that some kind of image or representation is nonetheless "seen". That is, as he observes, we "see" in the first sense we are actually perceiving an external object, which is why he dismisses the experience of scotoma as mere appeance.
For myself, I think the fact of the matter is that we must always experience an internal arrangement. How can it be otherwise? Sensory impressions are utilised by the brain to construct information about the world and to match that information with stored information in order to better predict both likely external events and appropriate responses. Even the first person perspective itself must be similarly constructed and integrated with the perceptual information. Put another way, the "I" that observes the external world is part of the act of perception. It isn't objective, but is entirely subjective and dependent upon a whole bunch of stored cues and contexts for validity.
If I knew what the author might actually mean by the term "direct realism" I might be able to better grasp his argument, but I confess it isn't clear to me. I am not even sure I totally agree with the idea of indirect realism and the implication there is an internal representation for me to perceive. Rather, it seems to me that the world of experience (hallucinations etc included) are states of process only. The brain does stuff and I "experience" that. It is impossible for me to have direct experience of the world because experience itself is not objective - it just is what it is for my brain to be a particular way. Any direct correspondence between the way the world looks to me and how it really is must be largely fortuitous and the result of evolutionary processes. That is, the way the world looks and works to us reflects the way our brains make use of information, not the other way round.
Here is an illustration of direct realism from the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hs-jJMTjHoo. The thing to note is that there are two depictions of the furniture. One is the external object being seen, and the other is inside the dude's head, which is the perception. This is supposed to be direct awareness.
However, the two depictions cannot be the same thing. External objects like chairs, tables and lamps don't get into the brain, on pain of death. Rather, a perception is formed as the result of seeing. So the direct realist needs to explain how that perception formed in the mind is a direct awareness of the external world, even though the perception is not and cannot be the the external object(s) being seen.
Some direct realist might be tempted to deny the perception depicted in the head and say there's just the dude seeing the furniture. But that's an impossibility given how perception works. The senses are stimulated by various things in the environment which the brain makes sense of, resulting in the experience we have of interacting with the world.
I'd really like people to see how untrue this is.
I am not in my brain, looking at neural activity.
I do not see as a result of a process leading to neural activity.
The result of neural activity can only be more neural activity or output as muscle stimulation. The result of neural activity is, say, not tripping over the curb.
There is a category error of mixing person talk and mechanism talk. How a person sees can be explained in terms of optics and electrochemical processes, but these processes do not result in seeing they are what seeing is.
What you are doing is breaking down the process of seeing into its constituent processes, and then adding back seeing as an extra process at the end. This creates the illusion of distance and indirectness, but it is an invalid move. Seeing is the whole process, not the result of the process. You do the same thing at the other end, adding back the 'look' as a property of the thing that bears no relation to the 'sight' at the other end. I think I'll leave it at that; there is no end to the objections that can be raised, but they all function the same way, and I don't think I can put it much more clearly than this.
The reason to think you do is because of all the other experiences which aren't perceptions, but sometimes can be mistaken for perception. A dream of seeing a tree isn't the process of seeing a tree, but it is the experience. Same with a hallucination, visualization, memory or neural stimulation.
You could have your eyes removed and still dream of seeing a tree. But if your visual cortex were cut out, you would lose the ability to have any mental images. So that pinpoints where the experience takes place. Most likely, the other experiences similar to perception are using the same neural circuitry to generate the imagery, or sound, etc.
One interesting article I read about schizophrenia suggested that it's a result of the brain losing the ability to flag the correct sources of experience. So a person starts mistaking their random thoughts for a perception of external voices.
Even granting this over singling out the neural activity, the end result of the entire process is still an experience. The experience is not the thing being experienced. So the direct realist needs to explain that the experience is a direct awareness. I just don't know exactly what that means.
The other elephant lurking in the room is consciousness and the hard problem. External objects are described in objective terms, but our perceptual experience includes subjective qualities. I might see a blue shade of color and feel calmed, but whatever surface has that shade does not have any calming property, nor does the reflected light. That's entirely an animal response. However, it didn't stop people in the past (or even some today) from thinking objects had those kinds of properties.
No. Category error. Experiences are things happening to people. They are not 'the result of neural activity'. No one is experiencing neural activity or the results of neural activity. There is no one in anyone's brain. People have experiences and do things, brains are neurally active. But you cannot add one to the other, and have neural activity that results in an experience because they are different categories of thought. You end up, if neural activity results in experience, having to posit an experiencer of the experience - a homunculus in the brain, reading the neurones. Don't do it.
Think about this some more, because it's the key to what I think is your misunderstanding.
Of course, I deny the furniture in the head: there's just the dude seeing the furniture.
Crucially, this is not in any way incompatible with this description: "The senses are stimulated by various things in the environment which the brain makes sense of, resulting in the experience we have of interacting with the world."
Taking "brain makes sense of" as a metaphor or shorthand, that's a reasonable, if impoverished, description of what goes on when we see furniture. But we still see room furniture, not head furniture.
So neuroscience should just give up. If someone has a serious brain lesion and it's affecting their experience of colour the neuroscientist should throw up their hands and say "can't help you there, I just deal with neural activity and your experiences are not the result of neural activitie I'm afraid. I shall just leave that occipital lesion exactly as it is"
So we would need a direct perception of perception?
Or is the question what is knowledge? How do you know what you know is about what you know?
You're confusing awareness with interpretation. You have to be first aware of something in order to interpret it. You are aware of sounds but it isn't until you integrate the sounds with the awareness of your knowledge about those types of sounds and what causes them, that you categorize the sound.
Just as you can hear someone speaking another language you don't understand what they're saying. Because you lack experience in interpreting those sounds as anything other than someone speaking based on your knowledge of sounds coming from people's mouth means dungeon is speaking.
If the two were not separate processes it seems to me that there wouldn't be experiences of not knowing what a sound is caused by between hearing the sound and categorizing it.
No, the external object. I'm asking how a perceptual experience is direct awareness of the external world.
I find that this kind of talk misses the point. When I paint a person I'm painting a person, not painting paint, and when I write about a battle I'm writing about a battle, not writing about words. So when I see an apple I'm seeing an apple, not seeing an experience. But that doesn't address the epistemological problem of perception. What is the relationship between the paint and the person? What is the relationship between the words and the battle? What is the relationship between experience and the apple? What does it mean for the former in each case to be about the latter in each case, and to what extent is any information given in the former a product of that medium rather than a true, independent, property of its subject?
I brought up blindsight earlier. The body responds to external stimuli in a manner that lacks conscious awareness. What the direct/indirect realist wants to know is the extent to which visual percepts (that thing that's missing in cases of blindsight) "resembles" the external world object that is said to be the object of perception. Simply saying that the external world object is the object of perception or that experience just is the stimulus-response event (one or both of which you and unenlightened seem to be saying) doesn't address this question at all.
Well sure. There are a bunch of processes we're not aware of in conscious experience unless something goes wrong or we can't identify what we're experiencing.
What I was referring to is that your post seemed to be saying that we would need to know the nature of perception in order to understand the relationship between our awareness of objects in the objects themselves.
Why would these processes be noticed only when they go wrong.
Ok. So, we need to know the nature of perception. How do we do that - directly, indirectly? Does it matter? Is the indirect vs. direct distinction meaningful? I mean, if we can know about the Big Bang billions of years later, which is about as indirect as you can get, then what is the distinction between them when it comes to knowing about the object or event in question?
Quoting Marchesk
Right, so what we have here is a causal process, where an interaction of various things over time creates an effect later in something else, that then becomes part of the causal process to create more novel effects.
If the process were "hacked", it seems to me that I would eventually notice that - over time as some of my experiences would eventually lead me to interpret that something has gone wrong with my neural implant and I go see the surgeon who implanted it, just as we notice things gone wrong with our hearing or sight and we go see the appropriate doctor.
I don't say it. Any of it. So my not addressing the question takes another form.
Quoting Isaac
You may think so, I disagree.
I said this:
Respond to what I say, or not, but please don't invent my saying things. In particular I don't talk about 'perception'. It is too wooly.
The feeling is about that relationship. This is why it is so difficult to distinguish between the two when we talk about our sensations. It's not that the sensation is only about one or the other. It is about both. You can know about the state of both via the feeling - that the campfire has a higher temperature than your body. So, trying to say that some experience is only about the experiencer or the experienced is nonsensical. It is about both. The sensation is an objectification of that relationship.
I am sitting on a chair. The chair is made of 4 legs, some cross-pieces, a seat, a back, and wood.
The chair is indeed made of wood.
The chair is indeed made of all those pieces.
Pieces of wood - fine; pieces and wood - no, because it leads to the notion that wood is another piece.
Experience is not another process that is the result of brain activity, and wood is not another piece of the chair..
Right, so your claim seems to be that the entire process 'just is' the experience (otherwise experience might be the result of neural activity).
But that flies in the face of modern neuroscience (hence my questioning if you thought the whole venture misguided.
Not all neural activity results in what is reported as an 'experience'. So some neural activity must consist of something outside of experience. People do, however, report something they call an 'experience' consequent to some of this non-experience neural activity. Not only that, but the same non-experience neural activity seems to consistently result in the same neural activity reported as being an 'experience'.
So your idea that experience is not the result of neural activity is absent of a satisfactory explanation for this otherwise astonishing coincidence where some non-experience neural activity consistently seems to preceded what's called an 'experience'. And @Michael has taken pains to point out the evidence demonstrating this.
If you want to take 'experience' out of the field of neuroscience altogether, then we're simply back at the idea that neuroscience cannot help at all because you've robbed it of its means of communicating its results.
Quoting Michael
Quoting unenlightened
I seem to have gotten that right?
Quoting unenlightened
I know you don't, which is why I'm saying that you're missing the point. That's why I brought up blindsight. There's the stimulus and the body responding to it, but there's something missing; the conscious awareness. It's this conscious awareness aspect of the experience that we're discussing here. What is the relationship between this aspect of experience and the object of perception? Is it just a side-effect (whether necessary or incidental) of the brain activity caused by external world stimulation, or do its qualities resemble in some sense the properties of the external world stimulus?
So is the visual quality of experience that's missing in patients with blindsight a property of the apple that they can't see or is it a product of experience that they don't have?
Just to be clear... a picture in the head?
That's the question that's being asked. Is that thing that's missing for people with blindsight something that happens "in the head" of the rest of us or is it a property of the external world object?
So, what's missing for them has to be a picture in the head if it's anything in the head?
This is such a mashup of confusion I don't know where to begin to try and disentangle it. What is a conscious awareness aspect of experience? What is an object of perception? We haven't even managed to discover how a blind man detects the curb with a stick, never mind all this complexity. The curb is the object of perception of the blind man's stick????, and it is the same curb that I see, and that we don't trip on. What are we both responding to? the curb. And yet our experiences are very different. Are we aware of our experiences?
Am I aware that I am seeing the curb or having a visual perception as of curb or however you want to put it? Maybe, maybe not. I'm pretty sure I often adapt to curbs without being aware of seeing them; we walking professionals can do stuff like that on auto-pilot. Doe this have implications for the nature of seeing? I doubt it.
Now will you maybe address the issue of category error?
It's the thing that's missing for people with blindsight and for robots designed to respond appropriately to stimulation, the nature of which is the topic of this discussion. The indirect realist will say that it's a mental phenomenon, a product of brain activity, and a representation of the external world, whereas the direct realist will say that it's a property of the external world itself.
Quoting unenlightened
I don't think there's a category error, just different people using the word "experience" in different ways. You seem to be using the term "experience" to describe the entire chain of events of the apple reflecting light into our eyes, our eyes sending signals to the brain, and the brain responding in kind, giving rise to conscious awareness (that thing that's missing for people with blindsight and for robots designed to respond appropriately to simulation), whereas others are using the word "experience" just to refer to that conscious awareness. But arguing over what is or isn't the proper referent of the word "experience" doesn't address the epistemological problem of perception that the direct and indirect realist are trying to answer.
The problem is the extent to which our senses provide us with information about the perception-independent properties of the world. If I see that the apple is red and taste that it is sweet, does it then follow that redness and sweetness are properties inherent in the apple, or are they instead properties inherent in my body's response to the apple's stimulation? The direct realist will say the former - that the colour red is a property of the apple - whereas the indirect realist will say the latter - that the sweet taste is a property of conscious awareness, and merely representative of some property of the apple (e.g. that it contains sucrose).
Simply saying that "experiences are things happening to people" doesn't address this epistemological problem at all, not even as an attempt to explain the problem away.
The epistemological problem is a dead end. It's not like there is an other way than via the senses that we can access this real world to verify if our senses are telling us something of that world. So there is no way to 'address' it, other than just assuming that our senses do tell us something about it and getting on with our lives... or not.
So much for philosophy then.
It's not just a one word problem.
Quoting Michael
It's not intended to explain anything except the category of the term. Thus one talks of people having experiences of various sorts, but one does not generally talk of fingers having experiences. For example I might say "I experienced a painful splinter in my finger", whereas I would not say "my finger experienced a painful splinter", or "my brain experienced a painful splinter". Similarly "I thought I saw a pussy cat" not "My neurones thought they saw a pussy cat, or my eyes thought they saw a pussy cat.
What this means is that once you use terms that fragment the person into parts, such as that the blindman's fingers detect the pressure changes of the stick as it encounters the kerb stone and the sensor nerves transmit the information to the brain... you cannot then add back in the experience as another part of this process.
Whenever there is an experience, necessarily, someone has the experience. So if neurones produce experience, someone has to be experiencing the experience that the neurones produce. And there is no such homunculus. It cannot either be the person the neurones are part of, because that person has no knowledge experience or awareness of their neurones. This is the tangle that results from the category error.
Philosophy is about examining our assumptions, yes, and getting by with as few unjustified assumptions as possible... but sometimes there is no way forward, and this is one of them I'd argue. Well, you could veer off into all kinds of metaphysical speculation, but I prefer not to. I assume that my senses tell me something about the world, because it think it will make for a better live... and that's it essentially.
I don't understand how this relates to the distinction between direct and indirect realism and the epistemological problem of perception. You seem to be discussing the notion of identity (that the self is not separate from experience?). That's a different question.
The indirect realists do as well and so do the idealists. It's only the skeptics who think our senses aren't telling us something about the world. The indirect realists would say we have to infer the knowledge instead of getting it directly. Which does raise the possibility of being wrong. And humans have been plenty wrong about the world over time.
This video was posted in the, "Is Daniel Dennett a Zombie" thread. Right around the 10:30 minute mark he starts talking about color representation and brain states. They begin a discussion using the example of perceiving a blue door. That would tie into this discussion.
So Dennett is some kind of representationalist regarding consciousness. At other times, he sounds like a direct realist. I've never heard or read him say anything about this particular debate (direct versus indirect). Regardless, how does a direct realist handle consciousness?
Dennett does go on to say that color and consciousness are real, they just aren't what we thought they were.
Yeah, but we were not wrong because we trusted our senses... but because we inferred things from them, that we had no real justification to infer.
There's no need for example to assume flat earth from the surface we see being mostly flat... because a circle with a big radius also looks flat from the perspective of a smaller being. Both flat earth and spherical earth fit that observational data, but we just assumed that it had to be flat for a time (for understandable reasons, but that is not the fault of the senses).
There is no way to verify what we perceive, with some other real world data... like I said earlier in the thread, we only started to make scientific progress when we started to take observations seriously.
I'm a generally a sceptic (not of the absolute kind), not because I don't trust the senses, but because I generally don't trust what people make of them... because of biases, preconceptions, dogma's and generally because there is no guarantee that the world is knowable, in the sense that we always should be able to derive general abstract principles from particulars. I think the reliability of sensory information is the least of the worries of a sceptic, but maybe that's just me.
We say a record player produces the sound made by the record (yet the player's plastic cover actually plays no part in producing the sound), we say the tree grows toward the light (yet it's roots are not photophilic), we say a house needs a good paint (yet we don't intend to paint every single part of the house), we say a car is a red car (yet clearly some parts of it are black).
So what exactly is the problem with saying that a person has an experience, in general, and then on more detailed specific analysis, isolating which parts of the person are actually playng a role in the having of that experience and which parts seem disjunct from it?
Either we cannot sayQuoting unenlightened
How do you know there is no such 'homunculus'? If there is a part of the brain responsible for conscious awareness then that is the part whose activity constitutes what we think of as 'someone' (in terms of an entity having an experience). We don't say that 'I' experience my kidneys filtering blood. No signals get sent from them to the parts of my brain responsible for conscious experience so 'I' do not experience it. Yet it clearly takes place in my body, so 'I' (in terms of an entity having an experience), must be something different from my kidneys. An arm might 'belong' to that entity, but not constitute that entity. It makes perfect sense to be able to talk about 'a person' in more than one different way depending on the subject matter at hand.
If I invite 'you' round for a cup of tea, I expect the whole of you, not just the parts of your body responsible for conscious experience, but if I'm a neuroscientist investigating the effects of neurons on reported experience, why can't I talk about parts of the brain which seem constituent of that experience and other parts which don't. Why shackle language that way? It's not as if the neuroscientist is going to get confused and start inviting parts of people's brains round for tea. Apparently they're quite clever, I think they can handle different meanings in different contexts.
The 3D model or visual field is the map, not the territory. And the difference between the 3D model and the territory is a bit like a cartoon. Much of the details are removed. We don't see the individual atoms or cells that make up our bodies. We don't see all the lifeforms living on the skin. We see a very simplified model.
Also, our visual field uses color-experience to represent reflected electromagnetic radiation. However, our 3D model does not represent it one-to-one. The checker shadow illusion is a great example of this, so is the dress meme that some people saw as blue and others saw as gold.
A properly working visual field, illusions, and dreams are all experiences generated by the brain. As far as most of us believe, one of them represents the outside world. But it cannot be proved. The brain in the vat hypothesis is unfalsifiable.
First, "we see room furniture, not head furniture" might not address the point you're interested in here, but it addresses Marchesk's point that what we know of the mechanisms of perception make it impossible that we see only room furniture and not head furniture.
Otherwise, maybe I'm not even interested in the question of how what we see "resembles" the external world. In fact I don't really know what that means. Or rather, I think it's a bad question.
[quote=Wittgenstein, On Certainty]214. What prevents me from supposing that this table either vanishes or alters its shape and colour when on one is observing it, and then when someone looks at it again changes back to its old condition? — “But who is going to suppose such a thing?” — one would feel like saying.
215. Here we see that the idea of 'agreement with reality’ does not have any clear application.[/quote]
Asking how much our perception resembles reality, or gives us information about it, is akin in this context to asking, "what do tables look like, independently of how they look".
The question as to how much the appearance of things is a product of the perceptual medium presumes the possibility of appearance without perception. What you call a medium is what I call the stuff and processes and behaviours that constitute perception.
Answering the question as to how much information we get about things through perception more charitably, I might say things like... quite a lot, it depends, often as much as we need, etc. I don't think this has much to do with the big problem that you see. We don't get much information about the shape of a building without walking around to the back.
But to get to what you're interested in and state my positive position more explicitly: we always perceive under an aspect. We perceive affordances, what is relevant. Perception is a coupling with the environment in ways that depend on perceiver and environment. This might be a form of correlationism and so not as realist as you'd expect, but in the same way that Kant didn't think of himself as an idealist, neither do I.
This is only true in a very self-centred sense though. To ask the extent to which our perception resembles reality does not dissolve to a question about tables when we're not looking at them the moment we start to have concern for other people. What about the schizophrenic? When he sees the table is a monster coming to devour him, should we help? Is that what the table really is, or has he made some mistake? Now the question of whether our senses deliver us information about how the table 'really' is becomes crucially important, we need to know whether to treat the man's illness or help him beat off the ravenous table with a stick.
Next, the question of how we can help. Where, in his brain, is he getting the idea that the table is a monster coming to devour him. Are his eyes broken, is his occiptal cortex broken, his frontal lobes? If we stop at simply saying it doesn't matter, the table just is what it is, we've failed to help the man.
I'll just say that a person does not see an image of an object in their brain, because it is dark in there and their eyes point the other way. This not to say that there may not be all sorts of magic going on in there, but what one sees is what is in front of one's eyes, not what is behind them. Shall I make a pantomime of it?
The question would be in what sense is correlationiism a "direct awareness"? It sounds like the correlation is generating an experience of a table that is not what the table is like at all, since physical objects don't look, sound, smell, taste or feel like anything. They lack those properties, since those are affordances of perceiving.
Maybe an alternative would be to propose that perception is a direct awareness of a relationship to an object. That would allow for doing science without skepticism. But it wouldn't be what direct realists are arguing, which is a sophisticated form of stating a naive view of reality. The table looks like a table.
On the other hand, if by direct you mean to perceive something as it is beyond possible experience, yeah, that's not a road that I go down. I want to say that's incoherent.
No, it is a relationship to an object, one that constitutes perceptual awareness.
Sure, however, I think that's what the direct realist is trying to say. The world basically looks the way it looks to us, once you account for lighting conditions, angles, and all the stuff we can't see.
I can't post images so I'll have to link to the whole document Here, but what I want to ask you is about the model of perception on page 18. Note the suppressive feedback within the Hippocampus and between the Striatum and the Ventral Tegmental Area (marked VTA). These are measured, confirmed events.
If perception is of the object, not the mental event, then on what are these suppressive feedback loops acting prior to our awareness (in either prefrontal lobe)? It can't be the actual object (that's outside the brain), but they're acting on something, and it's that something we become aware of an later act on. So, if you want to have a direct realist model, what would you refer to that something as?
Right, but what sort of realist was Kant? He thought there was an external reality of some kind, but we can't say anything positive about it, thus terming it the noumena.
Most realisms try to establish a connection between human thoughts, words, perceptions and the "furniture" of the world. The realist is saying that our minds carve up the world more or less at nature's joints. Get rid of the joints and for all the Kantian knows, reality could be the equivalent of a BIV, or some mystical godlike thing, or a damn sphere.
That's not what people mean when they say that the object of perception is in the head, and I'm sure you know that, so this is an obvious strawman. The claim is that the properties present in perception are properties of the mental phenomena that emerge from brain activity and not properties of the external world stimulus. My words are not the things they talk about, the paint is not the person being painted, and my conscious awareness is not the thing being seen.
Your approach is akin to arguing that I'm wrong to say that I read words because I'm actually reading about the battle of Trafalgar. It completely misses the substance of the claim.
No, that's not what he says. External reality is the stuff we see in everyday life, the empirically real. The noumenal is that which can only be thought, not known in experience. His philosophy is much more subtle than this direct-indirect realist-idealist stuff.
If the object of perception is in my head, how do I see it? simple question How do I see what is in my head? If you don't mean that what do you mean that isn't an abuse of language?
There is even a picture that literally shows a head with an image in it that purports extraordinarily to be a direct realists idea of what is happening. And it is as you realise completely ridiculous to suppose that anything whatsoever in the head can be seen. So what's the indirect theory?
So the categories of thought which organize the sense impressions into the empirical are mirroring the world outside the mind?
The same way you see a tree in a dream. It's a mental image. The difference being the causal chain that produced the mental image.
I have never, ever to my knowledge dreamed of a tree in my head, or any other object in my head. As I never experience anything being in my head, it doesn't feature in my dreams. I do not have images in my head because I cannot see in my head, even in my dreams.And anyway it is foolish to base a theory of vision on fantasies. Try again.
Yes, it could be considered an abuse of language because language didn't develop to properly explain the true nature of perception, it developed according to the naive view that the properties present in the experience, like a red colour, are properties inherent in external world objects.
And that's why I try to explain that arguing over whether we see external world objects or see something "in the head" misses the point, just as would be arguing over whether we read words or read about the battle of Trafalgar. What we want to know is if the properties present in the experience (a red colour, a sweet taste, a round shape) are perception-independent properties that external world objects have (the naive view) or if they're properties of the mental phenomena (again; the thing that's missing from patients with blindsight and machines designed to respond appropriately to stimulation) that emerge from certain kinds of brain activity (the representational view).
So trying to counter with just "I can't see anything in my head because it's dark" is meaningless deflection.
Where do you suppose the dream is taking place?
Quoting unenlightened
So perception is unlike all our other experiences? Some people think dreams are a form of hallucination.
Yes. That would be a category error. You don't have to explain that to me.
Quoting Marchesk
And that question is another category error. It's a dream; it doesn't take place at all. It happens in the magical land of unicorns.
Exactly this. So for example we say the sky is blue without taking into account what that actually entails, because it's pragmatic to say skies are blue, not scientific or philosophical.
But you have an experience of seeing a tree in your dream. That experience is like the experience of perceiving a tree. If the first is a mental image, why isn't the second experience?
No. bite my bullet first. Dreams do not happen anywhere; they are not real. If I dream of a tree I have not seen or experienced a tree; there is no tree, it was just a dream. Start being strict with your language, and everything indirect will disappear, because it is all a series of category errors, and literalised metaphors.
It's not about being 'strict' with language, it's about using it in a particular way. You're trying to enforce a use of 'see' where it is not normally so restricted and you've not yet provided any argument as to why. I can guarantee that most people, when describing a dream, would quite happily say "I saw a tree", and everyone to whom they're speaking would understand them. If you want to claim that usage is confused or leads to problems you'll have to show what those problems are. And you'll have to be able to defend them pretty robustly. Trying to restrict normal language use (for whatever reason) is no trivial undertaking.
Yes it is very common. One talks of seeing 'with the minds eye', and you can feel free to talk like that, but do try to remember that the mind does not have a literal eye, and there are not images in heads. You can talk however you like, but if you make category errors you will fall into folly and indirect realism is a very venerable folly, that has deluded philosophers for a long time, so I recommend folks to pay close attention to it so as to see where their thoughts are going astray. If you want to carry on though, then carry on.
Earlier i was accused of focussing on the word 'experience', and now it is the word' seeing'. People are heavily invested and don't want to 'see' things differently. "See" what I did there?
I couldn't agree more. What I'm enquiring about is this list of follies. What problems arise from speaking this way? I've listed a few problems I think arise from not speaking this way, I was hoping you could provide a few problems which arise from speaking the way you recommend against.
This whole thread does that. And a deal of it happens in question form - "where is experience?" and so on. But I don't want to go all through it again. It might be instructive to make a list, but I think I've annoyed myself and everyone else enough already.
I'm not seeing the problem with such a question, apart from you (and others of your opinion) declaring it to be. By 'problem' here I'm meaning something like a failure to grasp some otherwise useful concept, a sense of confusion or distress resulting from the language use, an actual failure in prediction or potential for such failures. Something like that. But obviously if the discussion is annoying you there's no good cause to continue.
(A) Perception is an active relationship between a body and its environment.
(B) Perception results from an active relationship between a body and its environment.
In a context outside this debate, we would maybe be able to agree that (A) and (B) are saying much the same thing. If people are really disagreeing over whether humans can see tables, that is extremely silly, and direct realists shouldn't be throwing "are you saying you can't see the table?" gotchas at indirect realists.
(B) admits of a minor modification that substantially changes the metaphysical intiutions associated with it.
(B1) A perception results from an instance of an active relationship between a body and its environment.
(A) and (B1) look compatible to me; (A) states that perception is a dynamic process between a body and its environment, (B1) splits the process into process components; minimally, distinct events of perception.
I think a direct realist and an indirect realist individuate perceptions very differently when arguing in this context. For a direct realist, it seems to me a perceptual event is an instance of the relationship between one's body and one's environment, for an indirect realist a perceptual event results from an instance of the relationship between one's body and one's environment.
Let's just grant that perception is model based, so what we're seeing is a subset of all the possible aspects of the environment, and we're seeing it in terms of our affordances - or in terms of proposed interventions for goals in other vocabulary (@Isaac Friston even approves of Gibson's theory of perception, which is a form of direct realism, so it's no so clear cut that indirect realism is the only way to be consistent with neuroscience). Our perceptions are samples from a model.
But that model itself is a direct relationship between our body and our environment; it is the medium of perception, and perception itself is a mediation of body and world. The samples from it are instances of a (filtered; yes, partial, yes; incomplete, yes; flawed, yes; predictive/inferential, yes) direct relation. (that model doesn't really care whether a state is internal or external to the body, it deals with both because predictive models of the effects of our actions are concerned with that which is external to our body but are still part of our perceptual events and even phenomenal content!)
Discussions like this on the forum rarely get off the ground because we individuate instances of perception differently, and people with intuitions that perception is model based have a habit of concluding that the representational varieties of indirect realism are the only way forward; even when the representation/modelling that constitutes perception itself is a direct relationship between body and environment
What would constitute indirect for a direct realist? Going back to the neural implant, let's say when you close your eyes the implant receives radio signals from a camera mounted on a robot moving about some environment. The implant translates that to electrical signals the brain can interpret as images, and the result is a visual perception of what the robot camera is recording.
The reason for brining that up is to ask whether any possible process of perception could be indirect for a direct realist. Because if the answer is none, then the direct realist is playing a word game.
The reason for the "venerable folly" of indirect realism is because illusions and hallucinations raise the possibility that perception isn't what we naively take it to be. Of course you can say that "seeing" used properly means only veridical perception. But that doesn't address the issue.
The possibility that perception is something other than direct awareness needs to be dealt with. Insisting on using language correctly won't make the issue go away because, as Michael pointed out, the language is based on a naive realist understanding, which could be mistaken.
But this is not true. Humans have known about these experiences since the earliest times, and we know about them individually from an early age.
Indirect realism is much more historically specific, and has its roots in specific ways of thinking about what it means to perceive, what it means to be a person at all.
It doesn't follow from illusions and hallucinations.
Great post. I guess my angle is to ask why exactly some people have the indirect realist intuitions. I mean, it's not just like ice cream. It's cultural.
I can't answer for direct realism generally. But I would say that an indirect instance of active perception would have its percept as an output of the process of active perception; as if the process of perception produces phenomenal and mental content associated with perceptions; in a diagram, perceptual relation[math]\rightarrow[/math]phenomenal and mental content of perception. The associated intuition is a sequential ordering of perception to perceptual content (related to post-hoc thematisation/schematisation as @jamalrob channeled photographer with in another thread)
Conversely, I would say that a direct instance of active perception would have its percept as a component of the process of active perception; as if the phenomenal and mental content associated with perception is a part of the perceptual modelling relation between body and environment; in a diagram, phenomenal and mental content of perception [math]\subset[/math] perceptual relation. The associated intuition is that perceptual content (the phenomenal/mental stuff) occurs within a relational event of perception.
That's one possible category mistake.
The problem of perception in general goes back to ancient philosophy, and it's not limited to the Greeks.
They Cyreneacs used the skeptical arguments around perceptual relativity to say that we can only know the sensory impression and not the external cause. Therefore for them, the proper linguistic use was "I am sweetened" instead of "The honey is sweet". Or "I am whitened" instead of "The table is white".
Indirect versus direct realism may be historically specific, like the current debate over consciousness, but the wider problem of perception is not. As soon as people started asking philosophical questions, perception became an issue. Or maybe because of issues with perception people started asking those kinds of questions.
I don't think this distinction properly addresses what it is that direct and indirect realists are trying to say. They are trying to argue that we either can or can't trust that things are (independently) as we see them to be (that's the epistemological problem of perception). Whatever it is that the direct realist means by seeing something directly, it follows that if perception is direct then if we see something to be red then it follows that it has the (independent) property of being red. And so if something seen to be red doesn't have the (independent) property of being red then perception isn't direct.
That's why I think that your approach (and unenlightened's approach, and jamalrob's approach) seem to sidestep the substance of the disagreement. We want to know if the properties present in experience (a red colour, a sweet taste, a round shape) are (independent) properties of external world objects or if they're properties only of the experience (whatever it is that experience is). Does experience show us the "true" (read: independent) nature of the world.
There seems to be a strong temptation on this forum to think that if only the terms can be used the proper way, the philosophical issue goes away. I take it that's Wittgenstein's shadow cast large over these sorts of disagreements.
However, the nature of perception has persisted as an in issue in philosophy across many time periods, cultures and languages, so it probably can't be resolved by just figuring out proper linguistic use, since it's a problem of perception, not language.
What's wrong with the relational approach, that you and Marchesk might both be familiar with from other posts of mine, about colour realism and other things? Fire engines are red because they have properties that produce the experience of red in human beings, i.e., in perceivers that sense those properties in particular ways. Again, I think this shows how odd the question you're asking actually is.
Perceivers always have a perspective, in a general sense. That's what perceiving is.
Don't give in to the thought: in that case we can't say that fire engines really are red. Reject it. Banish it forever.
The red I see is not by itself a property of the apple. Granted.
Nevertheless; the red I see is not independent of the properties of the apple.
The properties of the apple inform my perceptions of it. But they do not fully determine my perceptions of it. The perceptual content I have is part of a modelling relationship between myself and the apple, so the perceptual content is independent of neither; even though the apple properties are not existentially dependent upon my perception.
My expectations of what the apple properties are are dependent upon previous experience and the apple, though! If my perception of the apple is accurate, my perception of the apple is informative of its properties, and so its properties are not (statistically) independent of my perceptual content and actions regarding it. How my perception works in general is not dependent upon the apple's properties.
I meant to ask you when you made this distinction before; what do you see as the relationship between the apple properties and the red I see?
You can if you care about which properties are real (mind-independent), and which ones are created by the perceiver. Isn't that what science tries to do? How can we say the fire engine is really red if we know visible light is only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and if we had eyes that could see other parts, it might not look red?
Part of the ancient skeptical argument was noting that animal senses differ from our own. So no, we can't just say the world is how it appears to us, since it can appear differently to other animals.
Anyway, I care about what's real, to the extent we can know.
The relational approach answers all this. Red things are red, but only to certain perceivers. I don't think you understand my mockery of the question about whether or not the things really are red.
Therefore, when we perceive a red fire engine, the redness is not a direct awareness of the object, since objects have no color.
I dunno, maybe fdrake can explain things better.
Quoting jamalrob
Red things being red only to certain perceivers is the same thing as what the ancient skeptics were saying. Honey isn't sweet, it's only sweet to tasters. Sweetness isn't a property of the honey, it's a property of tasting. "I am sweetened".
The surface of the apple reflects light at a certain wavelength, that light stimulates the eyes, the eyes send a signal to the brain, the visual cortex of the brain is activated, and we have an experience that we describe as "seeing a red apple". So I suppose I would say that the relationship is simply causal (a term I've seen elsewhere on the topic is "causal covariance").
What is the difference between your example of an implant and hearing someone speaking on the phone? Hearing them in person still requires air molecules as the medium for their voice to travel. We still hear their voice, and understand what they say. So again, what is being lost to say that indirect vs direct are somehow different? If hearing them in person is more direct than hearing them on the phone and hearing them on the phone is more indirect than hearing them in person, then we are simply talking about degrees of indirectness/directness. It would be the amount of causal steps it took to get to your awareness of it that we would talk about how direct and how indirect our knowledge of something is. How many steps qualify the process to be direct vs indirect? Does the process take more than one step? Are the steps themselves products of our mind?
Quoting fdrake
Glad to see someone taking my point that the words we are discussing need to be defined, seriously. Everyone is talking past each other because we haven't defined "perception", "experience" "awareness", "consciousness", "indirect vs. direct", etc. No wonder the thread has become what it has - total confusion.
If the goal here is to find some level of agreement, then we need to define what it is that we are talking about, or else we will always disagree, as disagreeing is the result of talking past each other.
It's probably a bit of both. The state of the environment is a priori to our perceptions of it. So while our perceptions can be about the relationship between our body and the environment, I would say that the part of our perception that is about the environment is delayed as it takes time for someone's voice to reach our ears and time for our minds to interpret that a voice is being heard and what the voice is saying. But the actual process of the mind is in real-time - what it is about isn't.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Exactly! Our senses don't lie. Our interpretations of what we observe are the problem. A bent straw in water is exactly what you are suppose to see given that we see light, not objects. We infer objects from the information in light. The problem occurs if you think that you see objects.
Seeing the Earth as flat vs round is seeing the Earth from different perspectives. It seems to me that when you place yourself apart from the thing you are talking about that you attain some real sense of the real shape of the world. It is only when you go out in space - separating yourself from the Earth that you see it's true shape. This is the distinction between subjective views and objective ones.
I think this is equivocation. The fire engine "being red" in the sense of "having properties that produce the experience of red in human beings when seen" isn't the same thing as being red in the context of a visual experience, just as "having properties that produce the experience of sweetness in human beings when eaten" isn't the same thing as being sweet in the context of a taste experience, and just as "having properties that produce pleasure in human beings when pressed against one's genitals" isn't the same thing as pleasure in the context of an orgasm.
The inverted spectrum hypothesis is proof enough of this. Two different people with different bodies can have a different kind of experience when responding to the same stimulus. One person sees it as red, the other as orange. Given the coherency of this, what is meant by "red" and "orange" isn't what is meant by "having a surface that reflects light at a wavelength of X nm". We can agree on the nature of the light reflected by the apple but still disagree on its colour. And it's not just a hypothesis. Tetrachromacy, or the infamous black-blue/white-gold dress, are practical examples of that.
Our brains could have evolved to correct for that, if it had been advantageous enough. Our brains do corrections for lighting conditions, and of course sometimes our brains get angles, lighting or motion wrong. Thus the various visual illusions.
The image on the retina is 2D, so the brain has to be making some inferences about depth as it produces the perception.
There is probably a spectrum of terms that vary gradually in how much we can conventionally say, "this looks/sounds/tastes X to me" as opposed to "this is X"
It seems to me that in order to say that the brain gets stuff "wrong" is implying that you know what is "right". How did you know what is right or wrong if not using your brain - directly or indirectly?
I would be willing to bet that this thread was started because you didn't understand Jamalrob's usage of certain terms - particularly the distinction being made between "direct" and "indirect". Others have been displaying a similar reaction to his article.
It is because the words haven't been clearly defined. Jamalrob's usage isn't the same as other's usage, or understanding. Jamalrob is not getting at how they think of things and how they think of things isn't getting at Jamalrob's usage. When words are used ambiguously nothing can every been found to be agreed on because the symbols themselves haven't been provided a concrete meaning to them for the purpose of this discussion.
Wouldn't that be true for both direct and indirect realists? So when most people see red, that means they have a direct awareness of the object's reflectivity?
Part of the problem is that every time I've seen direct realism introduced, it's stated as seeing objects as they are instead of some mental representation. If we see objects as they are, then knowledge is not a problem.
I'm not sure where the "active relation with the environment" fits in with direct realism's certainty versus indirect's reliance on inference.
Usually in context of illusions, you investigate further. If you walk five miles through the hot desert to the oasis and it isn't there, then you know your brain tricked you.
I can agree with that. What do you think I should disagree with in it?
I still don't understand this distinction between "you" and "your brain". How is it that the brain tricks something else that you identify as "you"? What is this "you" in relation to "your brain"?
Is "tricking" really the appropriate word? How about "misinterpreted" based on experiences presently stored in memory? "Learning" and "programming" might be other appropriate words to use when it comes to acclimating oneself with the correct interpretation.
The epistemological problem of perception is the question over whether or not things are (independently) as we see them to be, not over whether or not things are seen to be as they are seen to be. That fire engines are red to most people has no bearing on the disagreement between direct and indirect realism, and no side of the aisle will deny that perception occurs when people are in an active relation with their environment.
Nothing. I just think that your description of the difference between direct and indirect realism here isn't right, given the problem that the direct and indirect realist are trying to address; are the properties present in experience the properties of external world objects?
Perhaps what the salient parts of the disagreement are depend on what camp you're in? A difference that looks different from both sides.
Its advocates are in favour of direct more than indirect, but not in some "things are red in themselves" kind of way. That's a caricature of indirect realism's critics.
Unless they happen to be color realists. Thomas Reid was one if I recall correctly.
EDIT: Ah, you edited to give an example. In that case, can you find a relevant quotation?
Quoting Color (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
Which raises the question of what exactly the direct realists are defending. If it isn't a direct awareness of the object itself, but rather a relation or process, then ...? Presumably they're defending something of consequence different from what the indirect realists are defending.
And that would likely relate to not having a veil of perception between us and the world.
Would you say this characterises direct realism:
(Direct realism) The properties of perceptual content of a perceptual event are identical with those of what the perceptual event is directed towards..
?
And this indirect realism:
(Indirect Realism) The properties of perceptual content of a perceptual event are not-identical with those of what the perceptual event is directed towards.
?
I don't think that external world properties manifest themselves in experience in this way. I only think that external world properties are causally covariant with the character of one's experience. Sugar doesn't manifest itself in taste-experience; it only elicits a sweet taste (for me, at least).
Aight, I'll try and write a post in those terms then.
Yes, good point, and a good example: was the article even committed to or advocating some positive doctrine called direct or naive realism? I gathered not.
Can't we be questioning mental representations altogether?
I was hoping so.
Quoting Marchesk
Maybe the colors of external objects and color perception are both color in some realist sense, but different types. The colors of objects are just as classical physics claims, a reflection or emission of radiating additive or 'superpositioned' electromagnetic wavelengths that stimulates our eyes in a particular way. Color perception, a particular category of qualia, might be the additive or 'superpositioned' resonance of systems of particles such as entangled electrons, rendered into functional mechanisms within the organic brain. In nature, all color might result from additive superpositions, distinguished by the fact that the particles involved radiate, vibrate, entangle, generally move in different ways: photons, electrons, atoms, molecules and so on. How the kind of thinking we experience as 'association-making', which is regarded as 'inferential' when either translated into linguistic form or conceived as a temporal sequence, fits into the picture is an interesting question, but the issue of perception vs. world can probably be thoroughly resolved at this stage of materialist science by hypothetical thought experiment.
What do you see the opposition between direct and indirect realism as? I offered this as @Michael's:
Quoting fdrake
And Michael broadly agreed.
Quoting Michael
You gathered pretty much right. The article is mostly demolition, not construction. On the other hand, if perception is not generally indirect in any significant sense, or is at least not indirect in the sense that Hume and Russell and others have used, then I guess it's direct. In some sense.
Quoting bongo fury
Yes please. I only gestured towards that in the article when I mentioned the significance of the debate for cognitive science: computationalism vs embodied/enactivism/connectionism/dynamical systems and all that.
Not crucially important, but Friston approves of Gibson's theory of perception as it pertains to affordances, but he disagrees with the extent (contrast Gibson's "Ecological Approach to Visual Perception" and Friston's opus with regards to the role of Shannon-type information). The point I was actually disputing was that "an 'experience' cannot be a result of neural activity", that it must be either the whole thing or not in that category at all. I don't think current neuroscience supports that notion as there is definitely work done in non-experience parts of the brain which modify the inputs from sensory corticies prior to our concious awareness of the output from those corticies. As such I don't think it can be at all right to say that experience does not result from neural activity. It is fairly certain that what we experience is the output of several neural corticies, none of which directly transfer (unmodified) the content of their input.
How that all relates to direct/indirect realism I'm not sure, I'll wait to read your modified post before responding, but I just wanted to clarify that I was disputing a much more specific claim.
:up:
It's my guess that people whose intuitions (on the forum) align with direct realism see the distinction between direct realism and indirect realism much differently from how the indirect realists see it.
Ultimately I think it depends on what metaphysical intuitions regarding perception we have. We (forum direct and indirect realists) definitely disagree about something, and we definitely disagree about the substantive content of the debate.
Quoting Isaac
I think the shift from "perception" to "experience" in your post is a key point in the discussion. If our "experience" results from the neural circuitry and bodily comportments and self modelling that constitutes perception, experience is then conceived as an "output" of perception; whereas my intuition is a perceptual experience [hide=*](which I'm guessing we're imbuing with phenomenal and mental content since we're talking about experiences)[/hide] is a component part of perception.
I tried highlighting this here:
Quoting fdrake
But my account above doesn't seem to be how our forum indirect realists see the distinction between the two. Which seems closer to:
Quoting fdrake
Also @unenlightened.
Beautifully put.
Point taken. I'd be interested to read his argument.
I think you're right here, and again, looking at the active inference stuff, I think that's quite well supported (for those unfamiliar with the idea the diagram on page 19 of the paper I cited earlier gives a nice plain idea of the model). In most respects this is the notion I was arguing in favour of, that our experience is one part of a process, that it receives inputs, suppresses and filters them, and then modifies the environment.
I think that last part is a component of perception that is too often ignored, we do not perceive objects in a one way process. What we later describe as our 'perception' of an object is actually hundreds of sequential images, each one designed to supply just that information which minimises variance from the model developed from the previous one. It's an interactive process which develops over time but we don't experience it that way, we experience it as 'seeing the apple' a single object we can recall the image of, not a hundred different images.
Anyway, I suppose I would have thought, in my naivety, that the very fact that the aspect of perception we actually experience is filtered, summarised and condensed, would make it de facto indirect. If not, then I'm lost as to what indirect might be referring to. Have I missed the point, or is this exactly what you're trying to get at by saying that the two sides seem to disagree about what the problem is?
:up: Didn't miss the point at all.
Allow me to jump in here. Let me use the word perspective to encompass all of this, meaning just the way perception works, given that perception is of things and is not the things themselves. We perceive from a point of view, and in a certain way, as you describe. We cannot perceive otherwise, so what is the asserted or possible non-perspectival perception to oppose your "indirect" to? It looks like Russell's argument that because the light reflected from a rectangular table-top projects a non-rectangular patch on to the retina, perception must be indirect. But would anyone demand that to be direct, the table-top would have to project a rectangular shape on to the retina? Is there actually a naive position that is somehow corrected by the idea that perception happens from a perspective and in a certain way?
The default common sense view of almost everyone going about their daily life, and everyday language would be that naive realist position. The world is (usually) at it appears to us.
But both agree that the real world (transcendental) is a bit different than how it appears to us.
Maybe not dogs, but birds and insects do, since they can see colors we can't. As for dogs, there is smell and those big ears they have.
Coming from the guy who's been making the same arguments for at least 5 years. :wink:
I deleted that part, as it's a bit unfair. But some people do take perceptual relativity seriously.
I seem to recall @Marchesk being a direct realist at one point. I'm sure I remember us arguing about it a long time ago.
I guess that means I've been making the same arguments for years as well.
Quoting jamalrob
At some point in the distant past, the idealists corrupted my mind, so as a compromise I started arguing for indirect perception.
IMO, your argument works better if you jettison the indirect/direct distinction as mistaken by both camps, which I think you've been saying in a way.
If the direct realist is committed to defending naive realism, then yes. On of my biggest difficulties with this debate over the years is the meaning of "direct realist". When I go read about it on SEP or watch a YT video discussing it, the understanding seems to be a defense of the naive view. But on here, it's very nuanced relational stuff, where I'm no longer sure what is direct or sometimes even real about it.
I think, I hope, i don't have to be claiming that the blind man's world is made of stick vibrations. Merely that the world he detects is the world, and not a representation of the world.
I think this is perhaps the crux of the problem, and the point that @fdrake was working towards. If the direct realist is going to say "we don't literally mean 'direct' as in the images on the retina are the same as the objects in the world", then the indirect realist objection is somewhat undermined. But it works the other way too as the indirect realist can say "we don't mean 'indirect' as in there's literally no relation between the perceived objects and those in the real world" and so the direct realist objection is undermined.
But to have a perception of an object which is modified in some way (and even fabricated to some extent) from the real-world source of the sensations which precipitated the perception, is most definitely 'indirect'.
There is (without a shadow of doubt now) some other influence on the image/conception we consciously have of the object other than the sensations we originally received from it. Our prior knowledge influences the image we create and our prior knowledge is not restricted to being about 'that object'. It might be about others like it, or even unrelated to the object at all.
That is, as far as I can tell, basically the definition of indirect - took a route with significant nodes, didn't go from A straight to B, had some turning points along the way...
So what exactly is the distinction the indirect realist is supposed to be making that the direct realist wants to deny? That's what I'm still not getting here?
If someone took up the kerb and replaced it with a pile of books of similar size and shape, the blind man's conception of the object he detected would be indistinguishable from the concrete kerb. His prior expectations have influenced his conception of the world. He expects there to be a kerb there, he's received no signals to the contrary so he conceives of a kerb there. If you asked him to 'read' the object at his feet he would not proceed to do so, he would simply presume you were mad. So how can he be detecting 'the world'? He has a concrete kerb where a pile of books is.
You might argue that his model is still derived from 'the world', but that would just be straw-manning the indirect realist argument. No one is saying that perception is not initiated by signals from the outside world.
If "the world he detects is the world, and not a representation of the world" what would the counterfactual be. Take your claim to be false, what would be the case to show that it was false? What would a 'representation of the world' be like that differs so much from how things in minds actually are?
Quoting Isaac
As it happens, I think you underestimate the subtly of what a stick user can detect, and the vibration of stick on book, stick on concrete, and stick on stone are very different. But I am short sighted and cannot read signs in the distance, but that doesn't mean that I am seeing a badly drawn picture, just seeing badly. Obviously even a shortsighted person detects at a distance beyond the reach of a stick, but not as far as the edge of the universe.
I make the same claim of the world I detect through the more extensive and complex vibrations that my eyes are sensitive to. And that that world is the same world a bat navigates by the vibrations of echo-location.
Quoting Isaac
Well if the blind man or the bat could pass through barriers that I could not or vice versa, that would be evidence that we were detecting different worlds, possibly.
Quoting Isaac
Then what is the argument? Because at least some of the time, that is exactly the argument; that we cannot tell the difference between a dream and reality. Look back and see that discussion at some length.
Is the blind man's perception direct or not? Is it direct if he uses his hands with no stick? This is where I want an answer. Is touch direct perception? At what length of stick or fingernail does it become indirect?
What in general intervenes between world and experiencer to make experience indirect? The usual answer, so far, is that it is a model, image or representation. And the question then is how that representation is perceived. If I do not directly perceive the world, do I directly perceive the representation, or do I merely perceive a representation of the representation? Why is it less problematic to perceive a representation of the world than to perceive the world?
That may well be the case, but it would only stand as a counter argument if you're suggesting that it would be literally impossible to pull of such a ruse. That the stick was so subtle as to be able to detect any and all changes. If not, then all you've done is shown that I chose a bad example.
Quoting unenlightened
Who said anything about detecting different worlds? Detecting a representation of the world is not the same as detecting a different world. All its saying is that the concept or image that you have is not a faithful copy of the world, it is modified by factors unrelated to the current state of affairs.
Quoting unenlightened
Schizophrenics cannot tell the difference. Unless you're excluding them from 'we' then there is such a case. Which means examining how we make such distinctions is a worthwhile endeavour.
Quoting unenlightened
At the point where the data is not faithfully translated. My eyes, ears, fingers, the blind man's stick, all just send signals to the relevant cortices of the brain - filtered, but direct. We are completely unaware of their doing so, we have no concious connection to that process. Within those cortices the signals are combined with backward-acting signals from parts of the brain completely unconnected to the data received from the object. This combination of two (or more data streams initiates action (still without any concious awareness) - it might be a tilt of the head, a shifting of the gaze, a move of the fingers. This provides more information (filtered by the expectations from the backward-acting neural connections), which is in turn subject to modifications by parts of the brain unconnected from the actual object. Finally after what might be several hundred iterations of this process we gain a concious image or concept of the object (we can name it, imagine interactions with it etc).
The process has several hundred opportunities for information not related to the object being sensed to alter the final concept we become conciously aware of (the one we name, plan with, talk about etc). How is that not 'indirect'?
Quoting unenlightened
Hopefully I've answered that question above.
Quoting unenlightened
With the part of the brain responsible for receiving signals from the various sensory cortices. If you're really interested in the heirachical brain model I can go into it, but I sense perhaps not.
Quoting unenlightened
No, you directly form your concept of the image from the various cortices involved in the analysis one level below. In the sequence A>B>C>D, D does not receive signals direct from A, but it does from C. It's not a complicated system, we don't throw our hands in the air and say "well if D does not receive direct signals from A then I suppose nothing receives direct signals from anything".
Quoting unenlightened
It's not about how problematic it is. There is a point prior to our becoming aware of the properties of an object where data unrelated to that object (in the world outside our minds) can alter the data we originally received from it. That's basically as close to a certainty as we're going to get in neuroscience at the moment, it's not really up for debate at the moment. So if the object we all talk about, plan with, name, recall, etc is formed from both signals from the actual object and signals from elsewhere in our brain unrelated to the object, then our model of the object must be indirect. It is not directly related to the object but related to both the object and our prior expectations of it. It is an amalgamation of the two, and so not a direct representation.
I think you go wrong here. What exactly is modified? Taking you at your word, you mean the perception is modified. I don't know what this means. The perception is the result of, or is constituted by, modifications of light, electrical impulses, and so on, but that doesn't say anything about a modification of perception or experience as such. Is there a raw, unmodified perception?
I address this in the "Sensation" section of the article:
http://articles.thephilosophyforum.com/posts/the-argument-for-indirect-realism/#sensation
By the way, I think my argument here works even if what you meant was that the source is modified in the process of perception, and that the perception is somehow a modification of the object.
It means the perception is not a faithful mirror of the object, and therefore can't be direct. If we're not aware of objects as they are, then we don't have direct awareness.
I get the point, but I think it's not a good one. There is no mirroring going on. Why would you expect direct perception to produce faithful reflections? That's so far from my position I'm not sure how to address it.
That's the basic position of direct realism. And why are direct realists at pains to defend directness? Because of epistemological concerns that indirect realism raises.
BecauseQuoting jamalrob
Because you're not a direct realist. I don't know why you defend it.
I think the article is quite clear that I'm attacking indirect realism more than advocating direct realism. Indirect realism is a way of thinking about things that does a horrible injustice to the way we perceive the world. Direct realism is better, almost by default.
From what I recall of similar arguments in the past, the conversation always faltered over the meaning of "direct" and "realism". It would inevitably run aground on semantic disputes.
Maybe Harry was right and we should have tried to agree on the definition of terms first. My bad since I started this thread.
I mistook your critique of indirect realism as a defense of direct realism, even though you briefly mentioned some correlationist stuff at the end. So if I understand you correctly, within a correlationist understanding of the empirical world, we do have direct awareness. But it's a relational one, because that's how perception works.
There isn't a veil of perception hiding us from the world, there is just the empirical world we all live in. The transcendental stuff outside of humans is another matter, and we can't use perceptual talk to reference it.
So now you're making the argument you just told me was a straw man.
Pass.
The data from the sensory organs relating to the object as it is in the world.
Quoting jamalrob
I think, for the sake of clarity, it's best if we all stick to 'perception' as encompassing the entire process, so no, I don't mean the perception is modified. I mean the perception constitutes an amalgamation of two (or more) data sources, only one of which is the actual object in the world.
Quoting jamalrob
Yes, but it is also the result of prior expectation which may well have absolutely nothing to do with the object under consideration.
Let me try an example. Say I'm looking at a table which is larger than my field of vision. I only glance at it. To anyone who inspects it closely, it is brown with a grey border. The table I see (the one I describe to others, plan to eat off, recall later etc) is completely brown, even at the edges. This browness is not a property of the table in the real world. It's a property of previous tables of similar sorts. My vision at the periphery does not register colour, my brief glance wasn't enough to take in the edges. But the table I have in mind (the one I describe to others, plan to eat off, recall later etc) does not just have no edges, or blank edges. It very clearly has brown edges. It has the edges I was expecting to see, not the ones generated by the wavelength of light from the actual table.
We can call this a 'direct' representation of the table (just a mistaken one), but if we do I'm not sure what 'indirect' would mean in this context.
I see. Possibly the solution is to focus on some practical consequence of either view, some behavioural reflection of the different beliefs.
How so? The assertion is only tangential, I was trying to show how it's important in some fields to get a grasp of the effect different stages in the perception process have on our final concious image of an object/scene. If it's straw-manning your position then you can either explain how or we can just drop the entire angle. It's got nothing to do with the rest of my post, which you've not yet responded to.
If that sort of argument works, then the debate is rendered moot. There's still a realist question of what objects are independent of perception, but they aren't like perceptions.
That's pretty much it, yes, but I want to say that this as a pretty strong realism. The talk of transcendental stuff could be misleading.
However, currently I don't know what my position is regarding realism vs correlationsim, given that there is some obvious conflict there.
Aye I think that's roughly where I stand.
I was too focused on arguing against naive realism to realize that before. Hmmm, I might be convinced by your approach.
Really? That didn't come across at all from what I read (not your fault, I'm not well versed in all of the philosophical background).
If that's the case I think we probably agree. I'm in favour of what I think is called 'model-dependent realism'. The idea that there is a real world out there, but the objects in it and their properties are dependent on our models of them. Basically, as I've discussed at length here some time ago, I don't think there's support for even so much as drawing a line to mark the end of one object and the beginning of the next in the world 'out there'.
So how an object looks, tastes, feels only applies to perception. There's no such thing as what an object looks like without someone seeing it. Sums up how I see things too. Only I'd add that the very delineation of one object from another falls into the same realm.
Funny how difficult it can be sometimes to see common ground. Thanks @Marchesk for pointing the way.
I'm interested now if you think there's anything I've said here which doesn't fit into that view, or is my error only in mistaking your position.
I think Michael has also supported this version of realism in past discussions, but I'm not sure I understand. How are real objects dependent on our models of them without it being anti-realist?
The way I see it, this is just a truism. Maybe you're interpreting it more strongly. I'm not saying the cup in the cupboard doesn't look like anything because nobody can see it.
And no photographing. No creation of internal representations from which further on or later on to extract information. Just learning to respond appropriately to stimuli.
What complicates, and creates the big myth of internal words and pictures, is skills of specifically conscious responding, which entail the skill of (less consciously) choosing among external words and pictures to point at the stimuli, and the skill of self-stimulating to choose external words and pictures to represent past or non-present stimuli. (Source, kind of, here and here.)
Calling even the most expert practice of such skills a 'photographic memory' would be misleading. Just because an embodied brain can remember perfectly well doesn't mean that it, like a camera or a pre-connectionist symbolic computer, creates or stores any internal symbols.
Any meaningful controversy about directness or realism or informativeness of representation needs lifting out of the head: it can be about actual words and pictures, instead of mythical mental ones.
It's to do with what 'an object' is defined as. Imagine the world consists of just an heterogeneous soup. That's all there is, one object. Any object we define out of that soup is determined entirely by the arbitrary line we draw distinguish it. So whether something is black, or whether it's black-and-white depends entirely on where we draw the line around it. All of its properties depend on what we determine 'it' to be.
Does my reply to Marchesk help any?
So Parmenides, but a soup instead of a sphere. It's weird how philosophy eventually circles back around to its roots, in modern drab. Or maybe Thales? Soup is watery.
Do you know what the proper interpretation of Kant's view on this matter? Did he think the environment was structured in a way related to the manifold and how the perceiver categorizes it?
Yeah, I meant arbitrary relative to the world. @fdrake has made the same point to me before and he's right, I tend to ignore (in my simplification) the interaction caused by the fact that part of 'the world' is our thinking about it. So yes, I am guilty of perhaps focusing too heavily on arbitrariness.
What I mean by it is that we should be mindful of the effect our reification of objects has on their properties. It's important, I think, in issues like perception, physiological sensation issues, even the dreaded 'free will' debate (what is it that is free and free from what).
Off the top of my head, yes, so long as we're not talking about the environment as it is beyond a possible perception. I could try to work out a better answer but I don't want to go down that rabbit-hole right now.
You never eat the same soup twice.
But this is nothing new. I've said as much several times on this forum - that to ask what something looks like independent of looking is nonsensical. However, I don't see a problem for the indirect realist if we are to ask if how something looks is how something is. How something looks is a relationship between the looker and what is being looked upon. Take away the looker, then what is the object like?
Thinking that things are exactly how they appear is a problem because the information in the sensation about the object is mixed up with the information about the looker. Separating the two as if the sensation is information about only one or the other is the problem. Thinking that how things appear is a model of the relationship between the system looking and what is being looked at isn't. As a matter of fact it fits with quantum theory in that incorporating an additional "looker", or measuring device, changes the outcome of the double slit experiment.
Yes Heraclitus...
I think ultimately the point is to collapse the whole real world/apparent world distinction. Since the 'real world' or the thing in-itself is an unintelligible concept, the concept of an apparent (that is there only in contrast to that real world) also becomes meaningless... and you left only with the one world we perceive.
Kant -> (Schopenhauer) -> Nietzsche
Think about this scenario: Say "you" are remote controlling a robot on Mars that transmits it's video feed and information about the chemical composition of the rocks it "sniffs" to Earth. Where is the you in this process? It seems to me that "you" needs to be defined before we can determine what is direct or indirect and if the distinction really matters when it comes to knowledge.
But it reminds you of the ideal soup, which you can directly perceive if you just leave the cave of your manifold impressions for the unrefracted light of pure reason.
What do we mean with 'how things are'?
:-)
Is "how things are" always a view from somewhere? What about a view from everywhere?
Why do we have multiple different types of senses? Is it to know different things about the object or event in question, or is there some level of fault tolerance involved which would be a means of minimizing unfounded assumptions - if we'd only interpret the various forms of sensations driven by our multitude of different senses as such.
Is the redness of the apple, the sweet taste, and the firmness of it's shape informing you that the apple is ripe? How does ripeness appear to different senses? Is the world less complex than we actually see it? Are we confusing the various forms that sensations from different senses take as different information about the object, when the difference has to do with the senses themselves, not the object being sensed? Different types of sensors can give you the same information in different forms, it depends on the type of sensor used. If the forms consistently occur together, then it is likely that they are providing fault tolerant information, not different information about the object.
Yeah that is at least the conclusion that Nietzsche for example drew from it... that if the true world, or how things really are, is an incoherent notion, what you are left with is perspectives. Everything is a allways viewed from a perspective.
Because what would a view from everywhere mean? That you view all perspectives at once maybe, i.e. a table from all sides, the molecules it is made out of, the protons and electrons and the wavefunction etc etc. ?
It think we see at least parts of the only world we have access to with our senses. And maybe you can learn more about it by looking at it from different perspectives. But the fact that there are other possible perspectives still, doesn't render the perspective we do have false or obsolete.... certainly not for our purposes.
What about the perspective itself? From where is it viewed to say that there is a "how things are" for a perspective? It creates an infinite regress of needing perspectives as the structure for the subsequent perspectives (the infinite regress of homonculi).
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
Well, that was what I was saying when it comes to viewing the same thing with different senses. How something tastes as to how it appears is different, but is the difference a result of the difference in the senses, or different properties of the object? When we disagree, is our disagreement about the nature of the the thing, or the nature of our view of it?
Problem is that if it's an incoherent notion, then science is undermined when it comes to things like evolution and our origins. How did we come to exist if there is no way the world is? It didn't begin with us.
I don't quite understand how get to the that infinite regress. But yes, you can be correct or wrong from a giving perspective, i'd say... which is to say, it doesn't have to lead to something like epistemological nihilism or relativism, or something like that.
Quoting Harry Hindu
It depends obviously, sometimes a difference will be due to having a different view on it, and you can be both 'correct' from a given perspective... but you can also, like I said, definitely be wrong about something.
This is what is often misunderstood about perspectivism. It's not the same as relativism or subjectivism, in the sense that every point of view is subjective and therefor equally valid or as correct as the next. It's just the acknowledgement that things are viewed from a certain perspective and that different perspectives are possible. And eventhough knowledge is allways partial in that sense, it nevertheless is 'objective' or 'about the nature of the thing', for lack of better words.
It's not a question of ontology, I don't think, but of epistemology. The world exists without me, you or anybody observing it. But the notion of finding out how things really are outside any perspective is unintelligible I think.
We cannot determine where this input comes with 100% certainty. That is, unfalsifiable concepts like the brain in the vat, such as The Matrix type of scenario cannot be ruled out with test/experiment.
However, something is generating input that creates a very detailed model that we can navigate. I think most of us go about our day believing it's a 3D model of an outside physical world that all of us are navigating. Fair enough, we have no reason to behave otherwise.
But if it is a simulation, then... well something would have had to construct it and generate a very rich world regardless. In the end whether there are 3D dimensions, 11 dimensions (M-Theory), or 2 dimensions (The Holographic Principle), we're engaging in a rich and complex environment.
I understand the reasons for thinking that, but it does undermine evolution, cosmology, geology as explanations for how the world as it appears to us now came to be that way.
We can still do the science, but it becomes an appearance as well. It appears to us that we evolved, but the reality could be something else entirely. It would be like if God created the universe six thousands years ago to appear as though it was billions of years old, evolution occurred and what not. Or the simulation was programmed to make it appear that way. In that case, dinosaurs never existed. Their fossils are an appearance to us.
Scientific explanations become part of the appearance, but they don't say anything about the underlying reality. So we have no confidence that we actually evolved or that there was a Big Bang. It only looks like that empirically.
I think, and this is most probably a move you won't like, ultimately that I don't really care about the underlying reality. Truth serves a function, or at least it should in my view, to better inform us about how to live our lives.
The example I tend to give, is that generally we are not even remotely interested in knowing how much individual straws there are in a heap of straws. It's just not something that could help us in attaining any of our goals.... Likewise, what purpose other than truth for truth sake, does the positing of this underlying reality serve? If that reality would have an effect on our actions, then we would find out, and adjust our views accordingly, because it matters in that case. But an underlying reality that we can't sense, that has no effect whatsoever our action or goals, that we have no way of knowing more about and that is not even a coherent notion to begin with... what's the point?
Just to give an example where it could matter, creationists could use that to dismiss evolution as merely an appearance. The underlying reality was created by God 6K years ago. Why God made it look like evolution occurred? Mysterious ways and testing the faithful. Or Satan did it. I don't know. They will think of something.
Yes sure, and that is usually the point of positing an underlying reality beyond the senses. Not that they really care about the truth... but that they want a justification for holding onto their preconceived beliefs and moral views.
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I asked "what about perspectives?" - meaning, is there a how things are for perspectives? If there is, then how things are isn't an incoherent notion. How things are for your perspective relative to my perspective is a real difference, unless you are actually part of me when I read your posts (solipsism). If all that exists are perspectives, then we need to redefine "perspectives", as we commonly understand today that perspectives are of other things. If you are saying that they aren't, rather that perspectives are the only real feature of the universe - the only thing that there is a "how things are", then it really isn't a perspective that we are talking about are we?
Where is your perspective relative to mine? In answering this question would you not be describing "how things are" between our two perspectives?
Is there a your perspective relative to mine? If there are no other perspectives other than my own, then my "perspective" is really the universe itself, and there are no perspectives.
So, are you and Marchesk and Jamalrob parts of me when I read your(my) posts? Are we now understanding why the "you" needs to be defined in order to proceed forward on this topic?
Quoting ChatteringMonkey
I don't understand how someone could be wrong or right about anything if all there are are perspectives.
So it seems to me that the disagreement between direct and indirect realists is regarding the type of relation between perception and the environmental object it regards, and the properties of this relation. I think it is crucial to keep in mind that there can be more than one type of relation between a body and the objects in its environment.
The overall framework I'm going to adopt for this is one of active perception; roughly stated: active perception is an account of perception in which perception is goal oriented and part of every perceptual feature is a proposed collection of environmental interventions which are in accord with those goals. To put super special emphasis on this; the goals and environmental interventions are part of perception, and our perceptual features are laced with (summaries of) them. For those coming from a phenomenological perspective, the goals and environmental interventions might fruitfully be thought of as Gibson's affordances or Heidegger's for-the-sake-of-which. For those coming from a more analytic perspective, such goals and environmental interventions may fruitfully be thought of as a kind of theory-ladened-ness of perceptual features concerning theories of practical activity and environmental development given our interventions within it.
A key term there which I've not talked about is perceptual feature. Roughly what that is is a salient element of an instance of perception; an object under a viewpoint relative to a task in an environment, the shifting weight of a hammer prompting counterbalancing muscle contractions along the arm to ensure the nail is hit, the duck or the rabbit in the duckrabbit. Generally, they might fruitfully be thought of as a goal-oriented model or representation of something in the environment. In visual terms, they are like pictures insofar as they represent environmental features, but they are unlike pictures insofar as they promote and are part of activities; they are not just corpuscles of propositional content, they are saturated with normatively informed expectations of environmental development relative to our tasks.
In these terms then, the distinction between direct and indirect realism that I wrote for Michael and he approved of:
(Direct realism (content) ) The properties of perceptual content of a perceptual event are identical with those of what the perceptual event is directed towards.
(Indirect Realism (content) ) The properties of perceptual content of a perceptual event are not-identical with those of what the perceptual event is directed towards.
Can be recast to:
(Direct realism (feature) ) The properties of a perceptual feature of a perceptual event are identical with those of what the perceptual event is directed towards.
(Indirect Realism (feature) ) The properties of a perceptual feature of a perceptual event are not-identical with those of what the perceptual event is directed towards.
But notice that perceptual content is construed as merely descriptive; is the red of the perceptual feature I have of the apple the same as the colour properties of the apple? We would not be able to answer questions of identity and non-identity of properties regarding all facets of the perceptual feature simply because there is no (to use Lockean terms) primary quality of the apple that could be identical to my desire to eat it.
There is, however, still the question of whether the descriptive content of a perceptual feature is identical with some primary quality of the apple. This doesn't make too much sense for the reasons @jamalrob and @Marchesk discussed:
Quoting Marchesk
But there are still relevant questions like; what qualities of the apple promote the generation of the (descriptive component) of my perceptual features of it? And in that space of questions, it seems fine to talk about red and rods and cones and of a relationship of representation/summary/codification between the perceptual features I have of the apple and of the apple's properties.
We can also talk about the argument from hallucination in those terms; specifically what is being short circuited or bracketed in asking the question is that the descriptive content of my perceptual features can be present (through some bodily process) without the environmental and sensorimotor conditions that generate the perceptual feature in normal circumstances. The argument seeks to change the conditions of environmental exposure (by removing them) without changing the descriptive component of what perceptual feature is being generated.
But notice first that that argument removes two vital components of active perception;
Active accounts of perception have exploratory and goal-directed environmental interventions as part of the perception itself. In that regard, hallucinations, or the argument from dreaming, are effectively not forms of perception because two necessary components of perception have been denied of it. Only the relation or absence of relation of descriptive content remains.
I think that the realists here would find the above paragraph very cononsonant with their direct realist intuitions. But why? I think the intuitions that forum direct realists have regarding directness regard the character of relation between perceptual feature and what it regards. Recall that environmental interventions really do change things in the environment; the underlying intuition is that our perceptual features when including the exploratory/goal-oriented component are in direct causal contact with the environment. Causal contact persists even while making representational/inferential mistakes; in any instance of perception our sensorimotor systems are in direct causal contact with the environment, be that contact more or less adequate for our purposes The inferential summary that our perceptual features are leverage sensory and interventional exploration of our environment; eg moving one's head to change the field of view. Because of this, for the causal covariance of a typical instance perception to be ensured, our sensorimotor systems must be in direct causal contact with the environment..
Specifically for Isaac: the interventions we enact are not causally separated from environmental hidden states, even if the inferential summary of environmental properties are. When there is a successful modelling relationship between a perceptual feature and what it regards; or an intervention and our overall model of the causal structure of our environment; the overall perceptual state we're in, and its perceptual features, are indeed informative of our environmental objects. But informational dependence in that sense is not the same thing as saying the properties of the apple in total are existentially dependent upon our perceptions of it.
For indirect realists; the proof of indirectness is inferential representation.
For direct realists; the proof of directness is causal contact.
This is as expected; our perceptions are difference sensitive, and exploratory interventions make environmental and bodily differences to change the environment and the generated inferential summary we have of it through the collage of our perceptual features in an event of perception.
Sounds like you can't really have one without the other. Every cause or effect is inferred.
I alluded to this in an earlier post, but I don't think this is so much about 'what exist' as it is about 'how things are'... It's a question about knowledge rather then existence. Everything is viewed from a perspective, not everything "is" a perspective. So then there is no need for an infinite regress, right?
There is no 'how things (really) are' if everything is viewed from a perspective, because the word perspective implies that we don't have a view on 'the whole thing', whatever that would mean.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Yes, again the misunderstanding is probably due to it not being about perspectives being all there is, but about viewing things from a certain perspective.
It's a question about the existence of knowledge and perspectives - their nature, especially as they relate to what they are about.
A perspectivist would probably say that 'natures' and 'essences' are also incoherent notions, like 'how thing really are' is.
So then, if it's a question about natures, then that is your answer.
Don't know why you ask me that question. I thought my point was clear from the first post I made addressing one of yours :
Because we seem to have come to the answer to that question.
What we mean is "how do things (like perspectives and knowledge) exist"?
Could you clarify that question, because I don't get it as it is formulated... How do perspectives and knowledge exist seems like an odd question to ask, because they don't, if we take existence to mean what it generally means, material or physical existence.
Well, then I guess we're opening a can of worms because I see the material/physical vs mental/experiential dichotomy as a false one.
Now that I think about it, maybe this might help without diverging too much.
What exists is what has causal power, or is part of a causal relationship.
Excellent. This really cannot be emphasised enough.
Quoting fdrake
OK, so where in this system do priors from past models come in. Some of our perceptual features are delivered by other areas of the brain, often quite unrelated to the object of the perceptual event, occasionally not even sensory data at all. For example the brown table with grey edges I used in one of my earlier posts. One perceptual feature being collected into the summary is the prior model of {tables of that sort} which presents them as being all brown. In our summary we have an all brown table. We've misrepresented the grey edges because our expectation that they would be brown was a stronger model than the weak data that we might have caught a glimpse of a grey edge on this one. But that part of the summary, that perceptual feature, is not identical to the object the perceptual event is directed towards, it's identical to a summary model of previous similar objects.
So what do we say of this input? Is it still 'directed' toward the object of the perception event (on that it is certainly a prediction of it, not a prediction of something else)? I could go with that, but it seems to be stretching the use of 'direct' when compared to your definition of 'indirect'.
Quoting fdrake
I think this is a good move as it removes what might otherwise be a distracting tangent.
Quoting fdrake
You know what I'm going to say to this. Your use of 'typical' may be applicable to philosophical positions (and I accept that's the name of the forum so consider this off-topic) but Ramachandran's work (nor people like Anil Seth or Peggy Series following him) is not leading to the conclusion that the processes in these atypical cases are themselves atypical. The atypical case reveals a step in the typical process which, in the healthy subject, is merely passed over unnoticed.
Quoting fdrake
I agree, but the environmental hidden states causing our interventions are not limited to properties of the object of the perception event.
Quoting fdrake
Again, I'd agree with this, but highlight again the extent to which priors are affected by factors outside of the current perceptual event. I think you can make a very convincing argument that our environment in general must directly inform our models of it, that we see 'the world' as it really is (in the sense that properties of the world are the only source of data for our models) no matter how far outside of some particular model's markov blanket such properties are. But... This does not necessarily translate to any given perceptual event.
Quoting fdrake
If this is true then both are indeed the case. The disagreement seems to be misguided in those terms.
Perhaps what might be necessary is to posit some implications of either position which would be different if the alternative view were taken. I suspect your position is not as representative of the broad swathe of direct realist positions you include at the top of the post, but I may be wrong. Such an exercise might draw out some of those differences.
I rewrote some of the original post to be, I hope, clearer.