I have never seen it referenced by either side of the debate
Darkness is briefly mentioned in the colour entry on the IEP when discussing dispositionalism. It seems to suggest that unlike naive colour realism (primitivism or non-reductive realism), dispositionalism better deals with darkness.
Is the "real" colour of the apple the colour it appears to have in the dark, or the colour it appears to have in the light? The usual idea is that its "real" colour is the colour it appears to have in the light, but perhaps that itself is illusory. In the same way that a red light can give the false impression that the object being lit up is red, perhaps white light can give the false impression that the object being lit up is whatever colour it appears to be.
Jack CumminsNovember 12, 2020 at 14:47#4710440 likes
Reply to David Cleo
I am quite interested to know the angle you are coming from as your discussion point for the thread was brief. Is it in relation to the philosophy of art. I am also finding it interesting that your thread on darkness is currently sitting next to my one on the human shadow. Perhaps a shadowy darkness is hovering over us today.
But I do art work myself and do battle with issues of shadow and colour. I often choose to draw in black and white, and if anything get carried away and end up making art that is too dark. For this reason, I have even experimented in drawing in white to curb my gothic inclinations.
I do frequently draw in a pointilist way and I find that the play of light. Luminescence is extremely important and the colour spectrum can achieve certain pictorial representations limited by black and white.
But getting back to your question, perhaps light and darkness sits outside of the naiive realist colour palette.
David CleoNovember 12, 2020 at 14:48#4710450 likes
Reply to Harry Hindu If I'm thinking about this correctly then I'm meaning, what is it that gives the darkness it's black colour for the naive realist from an objective stand point, if the blackness doesn't have physical properties to intrinsically accommodate the colour like objective material objects would.
David CleoNovember 12, 2020 at 14:49#4710460 likes
Thanks for all the answers.
David CleoNovember 12, 2020 at 14:52#4710470 likes
Reply to Jack Cummins No it isn't related to the philosophy of art, thanks for your response though.
Jack CumminsNovember 12, 2020 at 15:02#4710490 likes
Reply to David Cleo
I would be glad to know what the question was related to if not the philosophy of art. I am not being critical, but just curious to know where you are you coming from, metaphorical or otherwise?
CiceronianusNovember 12, 2020 at 16:21#4710640 likes
Why wouldn't a "naive realist" (a phrase which strikes me as an oxymoron) simply say it's dark when there's little or no light? What more of an explanation of darkness would be required?
David CleoNovember 12, 2020 at 16:51#4710670 likes
Reply to Ciceronianus the White I guess what I'm getting at is, what objective quality would give the lack of light (darkness) it's black colour? I can understand objects holding colour, but what would make this immaterial 'nothing' (darkness), be the colour black objectively in this theory. If this explanation is simply not required for this theory to still be logically coherent then please let me know.
Take care to notice that seeing black and not seeing are two very different things. Blind people don't see black. Phenomenologically, blackness is a color quality in itself.
Another thing to be aware of here is that in terms of the information you have, when you see black, you know that you are definitely NOT detecting photons from that location. If you are blind, you lack this knowledge. This is probably why you don't have a sense of blackness when blind or trying to see via your hand or the back of your head. Where there is no information, there are no qualities at all.
David CleoNovember 12, 2020 at 17:50#4710770 likes
Reply to petrichor Thank you but I'm not sure you understood my question. This musing is strictly in context with the naive realist theory.
It's relevant. Whatever the theory, whether naive realist or whatever, it must take into account and explain the difference between seeing black and not seeing.
I suppose the naive realist would have to try to say that blackness is truly what a lack of light looks like, in itself. You are truly seeing that there is no light. But I am not sure this really makes sense. If you experience only and directly the things out there themselves, I don't know how you could really experience an absence of something. It seems to me that if what you experience is directly just objects themselves (light in this case), if something is there, you'd see it, but if nothing is there, you wouldn't see anything, not even blackness. You would likely only experience what is present, not any kind of absence. And blackness is an indication of a known negative.
Personally, I think naive realism is wrong. Perhaps our seeing of black is one of the many challenges it faces.
David CleoNovember 12, 2020 at 19:07#4710890 likes
Reply to petrichor Ok so you do! Great answer. Perhaps it is, I was just surprised that it was something I've not seen as being a significant argument against it by any of its detractors, so I was naturally intrigued. Then again, maybe it does hold an explanation; I would be incredibly surprised if there wasn't due to the amount of reflection on the topic, and also due to the simple fact that this is something so blatantly obvious to consider as we spend half of our life's in darkness! I have seen some objectivist theories reference shadows, so maybe it's not as significant as I think. Thanks for your input.
Harry HinduNovember 13, 2020 at 02:51#4711750 likes
If I'm thinking about this correctly then I'm meaning, what is it that gives the darkness it's black colour for the naive realist from an objective stand point, if the blackness doesn't have physical properties to intrinsically accommodate the colour like objective material objects would.
Hmm. I'm not sure I understand the difference between naive (direct) realism and indirect realism. Is your mind not part of the world, and you have direct access to the contents of your mind? What do you mean by naive realism? Would another person experience the same thing I experience if they were me? Or maybe I should ask if I have the same experience everytime when there is no light, then does that not say something objective about the relationship between me and some amount of light in the world? If so, does not that mean that my experiences are objective? If we can predict what someone experiences given that they are a human in an environment without any light, does that make what they experience objective?
Maybe like this: the apple is red but I just can't see it.
What does it mean for the apple to be red when there is no visible light reflecting off it? For that matter. What does it mean for the apple to be red when nobody is looking at it?
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Why wouldn't a "naive realist" (a phrase which strikes me as an oxymoron) sim
Naive realist means an unreflective assumption that the world is pretty much as it appears to us humans. A direct realist would be aware of the various critiques of naive realism, armed with counter arguments in favor of the world looking at least somewhat as it appears to us, without there being some sort of mental intermediary.
TheMadFoolNovember 14, 2020 at 10:43#4715770 likes
Hi Harry Hindu. There's something that I want to run by you. It's got to do with the "color" black. I don't how to put this into the right words but I'll give it my best shot. I know there are more colors in existence than I can name so I'll stick to the so-called primary colors - last I checked these colors in the right combination can produce all other colors. So, for the purpose of this discussion, assume the primary triplet of red, blue, and green are all colors.
Anyway, Let's put the colors together in a cute little set, like so: colors = {red, green, blue, black}. Prima facie, it all seems fine. We aren't saying anything out of the ordinary here, right?
A little bit of highschool physics brought to bear on the set and the "color" black sticks out like a sore thumb - unlike the rest of the colors in the set which are reflected light, black isn't, black is the absence of all reflected light. In simpler terms, for all colors except black there are photons emanating from the colors that strike our retina. Isn't this a fundamental difference in property? Doesn't it mean black, in being so unique, isn't a color or if one doesn't take kindly to such a proposal, that black needs its own subcategory under the rubric of colors?
What say you?
Harry HinduNovember 14, 2020 at 12:59#4715850 likes
A little bit of highschool physics brought to bear on the set and the "color" black sticks out like a sore thumb - unlike the rest of the colors in the set which are reflected light, black isn't, black is the absence of all reflected light. In simpler terms, for all colors except black there are photons emanating from the colors that strike our retina. Isn't this a fundamental difference in property? Doesn't it mean black, in being so unique, isn't a color or if one doesn't take kindly to such a proposal, that black needs its own subcategory under the rubric of colors?
What say you?
What I say is that if the existence of colors is not dependent upon the existence of light in the environment, rather colors always occur when there is an eye-brain system, then colors are a product of some state of an eye-brain system, and not necessarily a product of light.
As I have mentioned before in other threads, we cannot sever the part of our experience that is about the world from how the world relates to the body. Every experience is both about the world and about the body. In other words, we cannot experience the world as it is independent of our observations of it. Our observations always include a bit of information about ourselves. This is why the eye doctor is able to get at the state of your eye-brain system by asking you to report the contents of you mind when observing an eye chart. The doctor isn't concerned about the state of the chart. That is constant. The variable is the patient and their visual experiences, and that is what the doctor is getting at. Does this mean that our experiences are objective in that they can be talked about, predicted and tested?
TheMadFoolNovember 14, 2020 at 13:02#4715860 likes
Naive realist means an unreflective assumption that the world is pretty much as it appears to us humans. A direct realist would be aware of the various critiques of naive realism, armed with counter arguments in favor of the world looking at least somewhat as it appears to us, without there being some sort of mental intermediary.
Short and sweet. Just the kinda thing I was looking for. Thanks a million.
Is it fair to say then that the naive realist would simply conclude that color (black needs special treatment - I'll get to that in a while) is a feature of reality and that it's a property of objects and their interactions with light?
Coming to the "color" black, my intuition is that this comes close to a category mistake. Perhaps "misnomer" is the more apt word but put that aside for the moment and consider the fact that an important distinction exists between black and all other colors: all colors except black are perceived as photons hitting our retina; black is the absence of photons. This, to me, means that black is either not a color or, if one is not sympathetic to such a point of view, that it needs a category of its own in the color domain. The former option seems the most reasonable one to me.
Anyway, darkness is basically black but this comes from a person who's taken the time to analyze the matter seriously enough. It appears that the darkness = black identity is not an obvious one. Why else are there two words viz. "dark" and "black" and why is it that they aren't interchanageable? "It becomes dark around sevenish" is easier on the tongue and ear than "it becomes black around sevenish" and "the box is black" feels more natural than "the box is dark". This feeling of appropriateness of the words "black" and "dark" suggests that our ancestors, those who first coined these words, failed to make the connection between darkness and blackness and made a distinction where there's no difference. Just a theory, unsubstantiated, take it with a grain of salt.
And here's where it gets interesting in my humble opinion. I mentioned in the paragraph above that the darkness-blackness distinction is one without a difference. If so, the false distinction is all mental, exclusively mind and has nothing to do with the external world. In other words, the mind is capable of creating certain conceptual frameworks for reality that aren't true per se but also not completely false. But wait, it gets better (I think!?) To understand that the darkness-blackness distinction is a mistake takes logic, something all mental, all mind.
In essence, I don't believe that reality is, in any way, untruthful or that it possesses mechanisms to distort its impressions on our senses. I believe it's What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG).
The same can't be said of the mind as the case of the blackness-darkness distinction without a difference proves. The mind seems capable of, for some odd reason, distorting reality, imposing its own agenda as it were on reality. All in all, if you ever get fooled by reality, you know whom to blame.
TheMadFoolNovember 14, 2020 at 13:49#4715880 likes
What I say is that if the existence of colors is not dependent upon the existence of light in the environment, rather colors always occur when there is an eye-brain system, then colors are a product of some state of an eye-brain system, and not necessarily a product of light
Our observations always include a bit of information about ourselves. This is why the eye doctor is able to get at the state of your eye-brain system by asking you to report the contents of you mind when observing an eye chart.
I share your sentiments on the issue. The mind seems to have an agenda, probably because of it's driven to comprehend, make sense of, the sense-data (is this correct usage?) and this manifests as "...a bit of information about ourselves." in the picture of reality that the minds constructs from the sense-data. This is all conjecture of course so put on your skeptical hat. It probably sounds ridiculous and downright funny but kindly indulge me.
An eye-chart, to my reckoning, is sense-data poor in the sense it has very little variation, has minimal complexity, and doesn't/fails to activate parts of the mind dedicated toward detecting certain specific patterns in the visual data. On the other hand, a more natural setting, outdoors or a city perhaps, and also those times when shown an optical illusion, that which I refered to as the mind's agenda, becomes more apparent, more visible. Mind you, I'm not disagreeing with you here. I'm simply contemplating scenarios in which that you referred to as "...a bit of information about ourselves" can be isolated, magnified, or both to make their study feasible.
unenlightenedNovember 14, 2020 at 15:17#4715990 likes
"What's your argument?", says this naive realist. "Are you claiming that because I cannot see in the dark, things are not various colours?" We have various devices much loved by astronomers and other detectives that can 'translate' infra red and other EMR frequencies undetectable to our eyes (google microwave background for example). Such things are necessarily rendered in 'false colour' to make them visible. They are not really the colour they are presented as. Red apples, though, are not generally rendered in false colour, because there is a little light in the fridge that shows them up in their true colours - more or less.
I say 'more or less' because Mummy always insisted on taking more important things, like clothes, to a window before she bought them, to check how they looked in daylight, shop lighting being somewhat deceptive.
Mummy always insisted on taking more important things, like clothes, to a window before she bought them, to check how they looked in daylight, shop lighting being somewhat deceptive.
:up:
bongo furyNovember 14, 2020 at 23:34#4717180 likes
I say 'more or less' because Mummy always insisted on taking more important things, like clothes, to a window before she bought them, to check how they looked in daylight, shop lighting being somewhat deceptive.
:ok:
You have to play on a violin to see what sounds it makes. And you have to let the light play on a dress to see what colours it makes.
A musical pitch is an equivalence class of sound events.
A visual colour is an equivalence class of illumination events.
unenlightenedNovember 15, 2020 at 08:35#4717900 likes
You have to play a violin to see what sounds it makes. And you have to let the light play on a dress to see what colours it makes.
Indeed. stuff is coloured in relation to light and eyes. But to say that one sees by means of light and using one's eyes, is not to say one sees indirectly, simply to explain what seeing is.
Because there's no color quale intermediary/representation we're aware of instead?
Yes. If there was an intermediary representation, presumably in my brain, I wouldn't be able to see it, because 1. it's behind my eyes, and 2. it's pitch black in there.
bongo furyNovember 15, 2020 at 09:11#4717970 likes
... Namely, an ordering or classification of illumination events. Which isn't something specially suggestive of either direct nor indirect... which are more germane to internal-picture philosophies.
Reply to unenlightened So what happens when your visual cortex is stimulated directly, and you have a red visual experience? It is, after all, dark in the brain as you noted.
unenlightenedNovember 15, 2020 at 13:41#4718260 likes
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?unenlightened So what happens when your visual cortex is stimulated directly, and you have a red visual experience? It is, after all, dark in the brain as you noted.
We realists call that 'an illusion'. It's not a real red visual cortex, the way a red apple is a real red apple. This is a very useful distinction for a philosopher, that allows us to admit the possibility of error. Sometimes, one might mistake a stick insect for a stick, or a mirage for an oasis, or a bang on the head for a red glow in the sky.
Reply to unenlightened But it does show where red originates. It doesn't travel from the apple into the head, riding along photons and electrons.
unenlightenedNovember 15, 2020 at 18:21#4718650 likes
Reply to Marchesk Is that a real head you're talking about, or an indirect impression as of a head? This is the problem I think you have, that I say there are red apples and I can see them, and you want to deny that using real heads, photons and cerebral cortexes. But I don't see how you can get to the reality of all these exotic materials when you cannot even find a red apple when it's pointed out to you.
An inference from what? Experiences in your head lead you to infer that the things you experience as outside your head are experiences in your head?
Where else would the experiences be? They're not out there in the objects. They're not on our eyeballs, ears or skin. We have good empirical reasons to think the brain is responsible. That's why dreams, illusions and other experiences are possible. The flow of sensory information comes into the brain, not the other way around.
But yes, it does require an inference to a physical world responsible for our having a body that perceives the world. However, metaphysically speaking, there are alternatives. It's just the physical one fits science best.
My problem with it is the implicit assumption that the apple is red the way it looks red to the perceiver. In my view, the awareness of red is added by the perceiver.
unenlightenedNovember 16, 2020 at 10:48#4720590 likes
My problem with it is the implicit assumption that the apple is red the way it looks red to the perceiver. In my view, the awareness of red is added by the perceiver.
If you were colourblind, then you as a perceiver would not be adding red to the apple - you presumably claim. But all your colour seeing friends would independently add red to the same apples and not to other ones. Explain how everyone knows to add red to the same apples.
Bite the fucking bullet man. How do everyone's eyes get to signal the same apples as red? Is it telepathy , or is there something about the apples that tells the eyes to signal red? Or come up with another explanation that actually explains.
Reply to unenlightened Dude, you know it's the wavelength of the photons. I don't know what telepathy has to do with anything. The difficult thing to account for is the redness, not the causal chain.
unenlightenedNovember 16, 2020 at 11:31#4720690 likes
Dude, you know it's the wavelength of the photons. I don't know what telepathy has to do with anything.
Yes I do know its the wavelength of the photons that are absorbed and reemitted from the surface of the goddam apples because the goddam apples are red. It's called colour vision, and it's no great mystery to me. It becomes mysterious when you try and claim that the eyes somehow project redness onto the brain from nowhere.
And yet it is a great mystery to others. For example, how come wave lengths get coded in colours? Where does that happen?
In the paint shop, maybe.
Let's not get into the fine details just yet. Some of us are trying to grasp how we tell a red apple from a green apple, and think the difference is somehow in the brain. My suggestion is that if we consistently and independently agree about which apples are red and which are green (which we do), then either the apples are different or our brains are in direct communication by telepathy.
I favour the former explanation, and call the difference "the colour of the apples".
Some of us are trying to grasp how we tell a red apple from a green apple, and think the difference is somehow in the brain.
The colors we see are in the brain, because that's where the perception is formed. The cause comes from outside, but the cause is different from the colors seen. That different wavelengths activate different cones in our eyes, sending the resulting signals to the visual cortex, allowing us to discriminate red and green apples (as we call the color difference). But that gets turned into a color experience.
How do we know your red and my red are the same? We don't. We just know we can discriminate the same.
Harry HinduNovember 16, 2020 at 12:03#4720780 likes
Bite the fucking bullet man. How do everyone's eyes get to signal the same apples as red? Is it telepathy , or is there something about the apples that tells the eyes to signal red? Or come up with another explanation that actually explains.
Dude, you know it's the wavelength of the photons. I don't know what telepathy has to do with anything. The difficult thing to account for is the redness, not the causal chain.
But as enlightened pointed out before, not everyone's eyes get the signal because we have color blind people. Where does the "physical" difference between those that are color blind and those that are not lie? If all else us the same, the apple, the light, etc, then why are there color blind people?
The apple isn't red. It is ripe. The light isn't red. Its an EM wave that has a 650nm wavelength.
The color is the effect, and effects are not their causes. The "difficult thing" is resolved by thinking of everything as information, not "physical" objects. Red is causal information about the ripeness if the apple, the level of light, and the state of your eyes and brain. The difficult part comes in trying to discern what part of red gives us information about just one of those things. We can't because red is single product of multiple interactions and all we have access to is the single final product.
The apple isn't red. It is ripe. The light isn't red. Its an EM wave that has a 650nm wavelength.
Agreed. So where does the red come in to play? I agree that information comes into the brain from the senses interacting with the world. But then what?
if we consistently and independently agree about which apples are red and which are green (which we do), then either the apples are different or our brains are in direct communication by telepathy
People have disagreed about apple colours before. When they do, are they seeing a different apple?
Beside, there are also optical illusions about colour, whereby a similar objective hue is subjectively seen as two or more different colours. In this case, there is a demonstrable difference between the objective and the subjective.
unenlightenedNovember 16, 2020 at 12:15#4720820 likes
The colors we see are in the brain, because that's where the perception is formed. The cause comes from outside, but the cause is different from the colors seen.
Well, speak for yourself. I see colours in the apples and don't see my brain at all. I see apples out there, not in my brain, and the apples are out there, not in my brain. Seeing an apple is not having an apple in the brain, and seeing something red is not having something red in the brain.
Reply to unenlightened Speaking for myself, I experience looking out at the world from my eyes. But I know that's not how it works. I also know the colors I see are just a small part of the EM spectrum, and if I could see the entirety of it in colors, the world would like quite different. The apple would not be quite so red and solid looking.
Moral of the story is just because the world is experienced a certain way, doesn't mean it is that way.
Harry HinduNovember 16, 2020 at 12:22#4720850 likes
It's not all the same. Color blind people either have a defect in their eyes or in their brains.
Right, so we continue troubleshooting. If we take one of each type of patient and prod their brains with a metal rod, does either one experience red? If the patient with a defect in their eyes experiences red but the latter patient does not, than that seems to imply that colors are generated in the brain, not by the eyes.
Agreed. So where does the red come in to play? I agree that information comes into the brain from the senses interacting with the world. But then what?
I'm not sure I understand your question. If everything is information, then the way we think about red apples as physical objects is wrong. Physical objects, like colors, exist only in the brain as digitized representations of an analog world.
We realists call that 'an illusion'. It's not a real red visual cortex, the way a red apple is a real red apple. This is a very useful distinction for a philosopher, that allows us to admit the possibility of error. Sometimes, one might mistake a stick insect for a stick, or a mirage for an oasis, or a bang on the head for a red glow in the sky.
How does one distinguish between the illusion of red and red that is not an illusion. Red appears the same way to me.
unenlightenedNovember 16, 2020 at 12:25#4720870 likes
In this case, there is a demonstrable difference between the objective and the subjective.
Alas for the indirect realist, whenever there is a demonstrable difference between the objective and the subjective, it demonstrates that there is an objective, that we can be deceived about. Sometimes we are deceived, sometimes things are ambiguous, sometimes we disagree. And we can explore and describe the circumstances when this tends to happen, and learn that some people see better than others, and everyone has a blind spot and all sorts of interesting stuff. We do not find that we see in our brains.
unenlightenedNovember 16, 2020 at 12:31#4720890 likes
Alas for the indirect realist, whenever there is a demonstrable difference between the objective and the subjective, it demonstrates that there is an objective, that we can be deceived about.
Alas for the naïve realist, it also demonstrates that there is a subjective perception as well, that perception is distinct from its objects.
Harry HinduNovember 16, 2020 at 12:43#4720920 likes
Alas for the naïve realist, it also demonstrates that there is a subjective perception as well, that perception is distinct from its objects.
Not a problem for naive realists, I see the apple as distinct from my seeing already. Sometimes, when I peep round the back of what seemed to be a red apple, it turns out to be green on the other side. I still see it out there, not in my head.
The language of perceptions attempts to drive a wedge between the senses and the world, and create an 'inner world' of perceptions but then, folks will say, 'I don't see the outer world, I see this inner world of perceptions.' This is impossible unless I have inner eyes with which to see these perceptions and I do not.
No, I see the world. I see it partially, incompletely, in some aspects, from a point of view, with limitations and subject to errors. But it's the world I see and not my brain, I never see my brain or my perceptions or my inner world.
unenlightenedNovember 16, 2020 at 12:56#4720950 likes
Ok. We represent apples in our brains, and we represent our brains in our brains, and we represent ourselves in our brains and our eyes in our brains and our propensity to represent stuff in our brains.
And then what? does the representation of the eye examine the representation of the apple and feed the information to the representation of the brain? Where the representation of the representation of the eye in the representation of brain in the brain examines...
I think we'd do better to stick with the first presentation of the real apple to the real eye. See the red apple, climb the tree, pick the apple, eat. Yum.
I see the apple as distinct from my seeing already. Sometimes, when I peep round the back of what seemed to be a red apple, it turns out to be green on the other side. I still see it out there, not in my head.
Okay so you conceive of your "seeing of an apple" as different from the real apple. That's all there is to it. That's what the debate is about.
When people say it is "in your head" they don't mean it literally. They mean it's in your mind.
Like when they propose a cup of tea? I've learnt by experience that you're not supposed to keep or eat that cup.
My problem with it is the implicit assumption that the apple is red the way it looks red to the perceiver. In my view, the awareness of red is added by the perceiver.
While I subscribe to that condition as well, it may be worth remarking that the schematic doesn’t qualify the real object perceived as having any color at all. There is a real object, we are aware....wordlessly in fact....of that real object. Doesn’t look to me like the implicit assumption of color is given, so I don’t see a conflict with our view.
The problem would arise if the schematic specified red apple instead of real apple, followed by awareness of red apple instead of awareness of real apple, in which case of course, red is certainly not added by the perceiver but is antecedently specified as a property of the apple, a contradiction to our philosophical d’ruthers.
Did I miss something? I hate it when that happens........
unenlightenedNovember 16, 2020 at 14:30#4721090 likes
My problem with it is the implicit assumption that the apple is red the way it looks red to the perceiver. In my view, the awareness of red is added by the perceiver.
— Marchesk
While I subscribe to that condition as well, it may be worth remarking that the schematic doesn’t qualify the real object perceived as having any color at all.
I just noticed the weasel: "the implicit assumption that the apple is red the way it looks red to the perceiver."
In what way does does a red apple look red to the perceiver? Only in the way it stands out from the yellow, green, brown, black, and purple apples. About how red looks to the perceiver, nothing can be said because it is a figment of a private inner world that cannot be made consistent or inconsistent with anyone else's private world. We cannot talk about it, and so we never do except by way of weaselling. (See private language argument.)
I just noticed the weasel: "...the awareness of red is added by the perceiver."
I concede. The apple is unaware of its redness. but it is unaware of anything much.
This is how we talk: we say that some apples are red, and that some light is red. And we are fairly consistent about it and in agreement most of the time about it, and this consistency and agreement is the mark of what we like to call the real. Stuff that I see or voices that I hear that no one else does are rightly regarded as suspect. But ask a five year old to show you the red toy, and they can usually do it consistently. Ask them to show you a visual cortex or a perception,, and they might be in difficulty.
All this clever optics and neuro-science is an explanation of reality, not a substitute for it. Photons and wavelengths and neurones explain how we see the world, not how we don't see it.
bongo furyNovember 16, 2020 at 14:32#4721110 likes
I see the apple as distinct from my seeing already. [...]
— unenlightened
Okay so you conceive of your "seeing of an apple" as different from the real apple. That's all there is to it. That's what the debate is about.
Noooooo! ... "my seeing" nooooht a mental image (internal picture etc.). Just a person-sees-apple event.
I hope...
unenlightenedNovember 16, 2020 at 14:56#4721170 likes
But we are off topic. It's the darkness - how do we see the darkness? Only in the darkness of the mind can the darkness be seen. Those of us who do not live in the mind can go deep into the darkness of a cave and find that we cannot see anything at all; our eyes are useless there, and we might as well be blind.
The world is a vast place. You could be a little more specific. I bet you live quite close to a certain human body of flesh, bones and nerves, that you can somehow control, and that people call "you".
unenlightenedNovember 16, 2020 at 19:36#4721900 likes
No argument from me, just curious about your kind. I've met zombies before, as well as automaton wannabees, but it's the first time I meet with an out-of-minder.
Harry HinduNovember 17, 2020 at 11:44#4723070 likes
And then what? does the representation of the eye examine the representation of the apple and feed the information to the representation of the brain? Where the representation of the representation of the eye in the representation of brain in the brain examines...
Its either representations in our brains, or the real objects in our brains. Do we have real apples in our brains or representations of them in our brains? How does the representation differ from the real thing yet inform you of the state of the real thing, as in the apple is ripe? Isnt the knowing that the apple is ripe more useful than knowing the apple is red?
bongo furyNovember 17, 2020 at 12:50#4723120 likes
What about when the color perceived is the result of the brain adjusting for lighting conditions, which differs from the color normally perceived from the wavelength being reflected? Is this not evidence the brain is coloring in the resulting image?
unenlightenedNovember 17, 2020 at 15:35#4723300 likes
Its either representations in our brains, or the real objects in our brains. Do we have real apples in our brains or representations of them in our brains?
Is it? I'm fairly sure I don't have apples in my brain, though I confess I've never looked. And for the same reason, I've never noticed any representations of apples there either. I assume your argument would something along the lines of needing some kind of representation in the brain in order to recognise an apple in the world? I don't think brains work like that, but even if they did, such representations would be used to recognise apples out there in the world, and not more representations in the brain. I mean what would be the point of that?
My point though is that 'brain' substitutes in the language game for 'I' .
Thus "I see a red apple" equates roughly to "Brain recognises sense data as red apple."
There is no possibility of "I watch my brain receiving sense data and comparing it to representation in the brain."
There is no possibility of perceptions being perceived.
And this is what the indirect realist is continually pretending to do. like this
What about when the color perceived is the result of the brain adjusting for lighting conditions, which differs from the color normally perceived from the wavelength being reflected?
Yes, what about it? Eyes adjust according to ambient light, and brains compensate as best they can for ambient light conditions. Nevertheless, sight is imperfect and errors occur. "I t'ought I saw a puddy cat", but perhaps I didn't after all. What I didn't think I saw, and nobody ever did think they saw was a perception.
There is no possibility of "I watch my brain receiving sense data and comparing it to representation in the brain."
There is no possibility of perceptions being perceived.
And this is what the indirect realist is continually pretending to do. like this
What makes you so certain? This is an ongoing philosophical debate, not a settled one. And even one where some neuroscientists and psychologists come down on the side of indirect perception. Why are you being dogmatic? Maybe direct perception ends up being right, but what makes you so sure it is? It's not like there aren't reasons motivating the indirect side of the debate. I just read a paper defending direct realism that lists eight challenges presented by indirect realists. The author defends direct realism against all eight, but has to make a few concessions to do so. I'm not so sure the concessions amount to direct perception.
unenlightenedNovember 17, 2020 at 17:28#4723580 likes
I have never seen my brain, let alone seen it doing anything. Have you seen your brain? Do you know anyone who has seen their brain? Have you read any reports of people seeing their brain? My certainty combines never having heard of such a thing, with very good practical reasons why it is an impossibility that I will repeat since you seem to have a difficulty. People's eyes almost always point the opposite way, away from their brains, and it is usually pitch black inside the skull I believe, and if there is light getting in anywhere, it is almost always a serious medical emergency.
There are some few reports of out of body experiences under surgery, and if you like we can discuss that, but I assumed you had already rejected the spiritual realm as a serious consideration.
Why are you being dogmatic? Maybe direct perception is right, but what makes you so sure it is? It's not like there aren't reasons motivating the indirect side of the debate.
If there are reasons, you haven't made them understandable to me. I become more dogmatic as the linguistic confusion multiplies. Suppose we make this thing entirely impersonal and mechanical:
_____________________________________________________
Bodies have brains and brains connect to eyes, and eyes sample the ambient light and differentiate as to wavelength and direction. Brains analyse the data and resolve it into a meaningful landscape. This process is called 'seeing'. The function of seeing is to detect food, danger, and obstacles at a distance and thus aid the organism to navigate the world.
The eight main arguments against Direct Realism are the Causal Argument, the TimeLag Argument, the Partial Character of Perception Argument, the Perceptual Relativity
Argument, the Argument from Perceptual Illusion, the Argument from Hallucination, the
Dubitability Argument, and the Objective Feature Argument. In what follows below,
each argument will first be exposited and then subjected to a Direct Realist rebuttal.
https://owd.tcnj.edu/~lemorvan/DR_web.pdf
You can read the details of each argument in that paper, but I'm confident you're already acquainted with most of them. Instead you want to caricature indirect realism with statements like "perceptions being perceived", which is not what is being claimed. The claim is about the nature of the perception, and why there are reasons to doubt it is direct. It's not a linguistic confusion.
Bodies have brains and brains connect to eyes, and eyes sample the ambient light and differentiate as to wavelength and direction. Brains analyse the data and resolve it into a meaningful landscape. This process is called 'seeing'. The function of seeing is to detect food, danger, and obstacles at a distance and thus aid the organism to navigate the world.
Is any of this in dispute?
I believe the bold part is precisely what is in dispute in this thread, and agree broadly with your characterisation of it.
Brains analyse the data and resolve it into a meaningful landscape.
I'm gong to second Olivier5 here and say this is where the dispute takes place. That meaningful landsacpe the brain resolves, what does it mean for it to be direct?
Reply to Marchesk The way you're using the word "perception" looks different from how I use it. Anyway, the brain and eyeballs both have important roles to play in perception. What's your point?
Reply to Marchesk I didn't say "perception occurs on the forum" (I don't know what that means). I was responding to Olivier's apparent surprise that unenlightened lives in the world and not in his mind.
All this clever optics and neuro-science is an explanation of reality, not a substitute for it. Photons and wavelengths and neurones explain how we see the world, not how we don't see it.
Incidentally, one could argue that he doesn't live in the world either. He lives in, perhaps, a house, and in England, and near Wales, and in the Milky Way, and in the lap of luxury, but to say he lives in the world is to unjustifiably posit a great big container object, or else is to say no more than that he lives.
But that's a topic for another discussion: "Where do you live?"
Reply to jamalrob It's a nice version of Stove's Gem, of course; countering the mooted argument that we only ever see the apple through the mediations of optics and neurons, and hence we never actually see the apple.
But no one would ever say that, would they, @Olivier5?
countering the mooted argument that we only ever see the apple through the mediations of optics and neurons, and hence we never actually see the apple.
But no one would ever say that, would they, Olivier5?
Seeing the apple means precisely to apprehend it through our senses, to construct a meaningful representation of it based on sense data. It's a relationship. It takes some work.
Sense data themselves are already meaningful, don't get me wrong. The apple is red for a reason, it's a biological signal of its maturity, as I explained. Our senses work with this material, cut down on some details, fill in others, heighten some contrasts, adjust to lighting conditions, draw lines and objects, etc. We notice it once in a while when we see an optical illusion. Our senses shape the message so as to make it more effective. They "go after" meaning; sometimes they invent it. But by and large they helps us detect the biological sense of the situation. Red apple-->yummy apple.
But there are many other meaningful things about how an apple looks, which nobody notices except the specialists: the artists, the cooks or the farmers. Did you ever notice that no apple is radially symmetrical? The "axis" is always markedly off center, one side smaller than the other. It's something you need to know when you draw apples (if you want to draw them realistically enough). It seems like nothing but once you notice it, you can see it in any apple, even though before you didn't see it in any apple. At best you noticed that some apples were very asymmetrical. That is likely because our sense of vision gives a premium to symmetry: it tries to find it everywhere, and it tends to neglect or hide minor asymmetries.
Seeing the apple means precisely to apprehend it through our senses, to construct a meaningful representation of it based on sense data. It's a relationship. It takes some work.
Seems then that we agree that there is an apple ot be seen.
Thought it worth checking. I wouldn't want the apple to just be in my mind.
Seems then that we agree that there is an apple ot be seen.
Thought it worth checking. I wouldn't want the apple to just be in my mind.
If there were no apple, there would be no point in seeing an apple. Our senses have developed through evolution, because they work. Yes they do help us locate true, existing and desirable things, such as apples.
Reply to jamalrob If I recall correctly, those of us involved came to an agreement on Kantian terms, not Dennett's. But if we're talking in terms of the modern consciousness debate, I'm more inclined to side with Chalmers.
Reply to Marchesk I may have used Kantian terms, but that wasn't the substance. Also, I haven't mentioned Dennett here and I'm not talking about qualia.
I may have used Kantian terms, but that wasn't the substance.
I'm got to two current threads confused. Was the substance that we have direct access via perceptual sensations? That seeing color is what makes us visually aware of objects?
One of the challenges to direct perception is that if the object appears differently in some ways to us than it is, then we're directly aware of a mental object, and only indirectly the physical cause.
Reply to Marchesk I think our disagreement, as ever, comes down to this:
You think that our scientific investigations have revealed that apples are not actually red.
I think that this is as confused as saying that solid things are not actually solid. Following unenlightened, I think that our scientific investigations, rather than being a substitute for seeing, explain it, i.e., explain how we see red apples.
Somehow I doubt that Banno's going to agree with that.
The apple is red in order to be noticed by an animal. Banno may think that he is no mind, but he is most probably an animal, with some capacity to perceive, remember and desire things for himself. What the ancients called 'anima'.
He can even get pissed, and since I doubt that computers, automatons and zombies can get pissed, I conclude he must be an animal.
As any animal of the Homo sapiens species, he can reflect upon himself, and maybe he is afraid of himself. Lot's of people are. That's why 'mind talk' spooks them. They fear their own mental shadows.
Reply to Olivier5 I think they're only spooked when people claim that minds, rather than people or animals, see apples--and other such confusions. But I'll leave it to Banno to respond.
I think that this is as confused as saying that solid things are not actually solid.
They're not solid in the way old-fashioned materialists thought they were. It being mostly empty space held together by electromagnetic bonds would have blown their minds.
Following unenlightened, I think that our scientific investigations, rather than being a substitute for seeing, explain it, i.e., explain how we see red apples.
It doesn't explain how there's a red experience, only that there is a strong correlation with our biology of vision.
And anyway, the world is different than how it appears to us, at the very least because we don't have the sensory capabilities to perceive most of it. Our vision, as useful as it is, doesn't capture most of the light, which would make the world look colored in quite different ways, assuming that's how we saw all those radio and microwaves and what not. Which would be a function of our biology that we don't understand.
It being mostly empty space held together by electromagnetic bonds would have blown their minds.
It would have blown their minds that this is what solidity is, yes. Turns out, for a neutrino, the table doesn't feel anything like the same as it does for us.
One of the challenges to direct perception is that if the object appears differently in some ways to us than it is, then we're directly aware of a mental object, and only indirectly the physical cause.
So...when I'm looking at the the moon I can cover it with my hand, but the moon is too big to be covered by my hand, therefore I'm not seeing the moon, but just a mental object. Is that about right?
You think that our scientific investigations have revealed that apples are not actually red.
I think that this is as confused as saying that solid things are not actually solid. Following unenlightened, I think that our scientific investigations, rather than being a substitute for seeing, explain it, i.e., explain how we see red apples.
Right, so if all our terms, all our language, just means what it means to us a lay people, then what language is left to the scientist in which to render his answer?
Reply to Isaac I don't really see the problem, at least as you've described it. Physicists have no problem using "solid", and it's consistent with one of the main ways we use it in everyday life. Tables and walls and rocks are solid, and the scientist explains what a solid is down at the atomic level etc.
I was checking that you agreed there was an apple.
I know, and I was checking that you agreed there was a mind seeing the apple. As pointed by Jamal, there was some legitimate reasons to doubt that. Now that we agree that there exist both an apple and a mind, we could explore (or meaningfully exchange about) the perception of the former by the latter. See if we can agree on something else.
It's a system. It's made of interconnected pieces. Each piece does its own work, in synch with the other pieces.
Meh. It's not systematic, so much as metaphoric. There is not a causal chain starting at the apple and ending at a mind. Minds are a different sort of thing to apples.
By this token, eyes don't see, because eyes don't have eyes
According to the most relevant sense of "see", I agree that our eyes don't see, that it's better here to say that we see by means of our eyes. We can use words in different ways, and in philosophy we have to be careful not to use two senses of a word without realizing it.
Reply to Banno We agreed already that it's red. What we still disagree about, I think, is what we mean when we say that it's red. I mean (among other things) that I can perceive and recognize the meaningful signal of a ripe, eatable apple, detach it somehow as an 'object' from a background that is supposedly not red. That this helps me locate the apple in relation to my own position, using as a proxy some 3D simulation of the world that I happen to constantly create and maintain, a 3D simulation which helps me grab the apple, peal it and cut it without cutting my own fingers, and eat it.
We agreed already that it's red. What we still disagree about, I think, is what we mean when we say that it's red. I mean (among other things) that I can perceive and recognise the meaningful signal of an ripe, eatable apple, that this helps me locate the apple in relation to my own position, using as a proxy some 3D simulation of the world that I happen to constantly create and maintain, a 3D simulation which helps me grab the apple, peal it and cut it without cutting my own fingers, and eat it...
I don't really see the problem, at least as you've described it. Physicists have no problem using "solid", and it's consistent with one of the main ways we use it in everyday life. Tables and walls and rocks are solid, and the scientist explains what a solid is down at the atomic level etc.
I think that this is as confused as saying that solid things are not actually solid.
If you say to me "this block of wood is solid", and I cut it open to find a hollow in the centre, I'd be liable to say "no, this is not solid". When the scientist 'cuts open' the wood even smaller and find no less of a hollow you want to deny him recourse to the same language to describe his findings.
Likewise with a magic trick where it appears there's an apple before you, the magician might later say "there wasn't 'actually' an apple", by which he means the way things seemed to you was not as there were. Then, when the neuroscientist finds such a relationship between the world as we respond to it mentally and the world as we detect it with other instruments (say cameras), you want again to deny him use of the same language to describe his findings.
Because of the menagerie of fantastic creatures that populates this site, and that must come from some old medieval treatise on exotic beasts with two heads and one leg or something... I mean, you could mean zombies, or automatons, or winged rabbits... People is a good answer, it's human and familiar.
If you say to me "this block of wood is solid", and i cut it open to find a hollow in the centre, I'd be liable to say "no, this is not solid". When the scientist 'cuts open' the wood even smaller and find no less of a hollow you want to deny him recourse to the same language to describe his findings.
You appear to be under the impression that scientists claim that what we call solid objects are not actually solid. This isn't true. Ever heard of the states of matter, or solid-state physics?
Same for neuroscientists.
But if you just mean that they should be allowed to say, speaking loosely, "tables are not really solid", and "we don't really see apples", then I guess it's a way of getting their point across. It seems far too misleading to me, and I've only seen it from bad popularizations.
So...when I'm looking at the the moon I can cover it with my hand, but the moon is too big to be covered by my hand, therefore I'm not seeing the moon, but just a mental object. Is that about right?
I quoted eight objections to direct realism from a paper countering those objections a few posts back, while making what the author thought were some necessary concessions to defeat all eight. I'm not sure which objection your example falls into, but it's not a very convincing one in my book, and not what the color argument is about. Some of the objections are stronger than others, and some of the concessions made to defeat all eight are more troubling for direct reaiism than others.
Because of the menagerie of fantastic creatures that populates this site, and that must come from some old medieval treatise on exotic beasts with two heads and one leg or something... I mean, you could mean zombies, or automatons, or winged rabbits
...or brains in vats, or rational animals, or vehicles for genes, or eternal souls...
But if you just mean that they should be allowed to say, speaking loosely, "tables are not really solid", and "we don't really see apples", then I guess it's a way of getting their point across. It seems far too misleading to me, and I've only seen it from bad popularizations.
It means the world is different than it appears to us. Now whether that's a problem for direct realism is what the debate is about. I say the evidence is the world isn't colored the way we perceive it to be, and this means that naive realism (or primitivism) about visual objects is false, although a more sophisticated causal argument for direct realism could be true.
What is 'the same'? I'm not sure what you're saying here. We use terms Luke 'solid', 'really', 'actually' differently in different contexts and we seem to manage fine. A scientist might well say he studies 'solids' and at the same time say "of course, they're not really 'solid'" and a competent English speaker would have little trouble recognising the change of context.
Likewise here. It seems to you, looking at your fruit bowl, that you 'see' the red apples which are actually there outside of you, in our shared world. That's what 'actually' does in that context. If I then find, by experiment, that the way things seem to you is informed more by your prior expectations than by what is, right now, in our shared world, why does it now become 'misleading' to use the exact same contextual meaning to say you're not seeing the fruit bowl as it 'actually' is?
..or brains in vats, or rational animals, or vehicles for genes, or eternal souls...
Yeh, it makes you dizzy.
Not at all, you just need to keep tabs on the menagerie. Don't confuse the brains in vats with the brains in bats, for instance.
In the final analysis, we cannot understand perception by throwing away the perceived and/or the perceiver. So whether you call us people or brains or minds makes no significant difference to the problem.
Reply to Banno We're still on the topic of what it means to perceive. We agreed it implies an object and a mind perceiving it. This characterization seems to make biological sense, at least. It follows that there must be a causal chain 'starting' at the apple and 'ending' at a mind. (in brackets because nothing ever starts and ends beyond our subjective segmentation of time, it's all part of the big flow)
In the final analysis, we cannot understand perception by throwing away the perceived and/or the perceiver. So whether you call us people or brains or minds makes no significant difference to the problem.
I think it makes a big difference, but if you can accept that people see apples and that apples are red, then we're close enough to agreement for me.
if you can accept that people see apples and that apples are red, then we're close enough to agreement for me.
As explained to Banno, this is agreeable because factual, but we still seem to disagree on the meaning of it. I have insisted on understanding the biological sense of the situation, as the correct basis for any further meaning. There are important reasons why the apple is red and why we can see it as such: so that we can eat it.
Brains analyse the data and resolve it into a meaningful landscape.
— unenlightened
I'm gong to second Olivier5 here and say this is where the dispute takes place. That meaningful landsacpe the brain resolves, what does it mean for it to be direct?
Yes. I agree. I don't know what brains actually do with the data, but I'm fairly sure they don't make a picture, because there is no point - there is no one inside the brain to look at it. So that was misleading. So I'll strike that and move on.
Bodies have brains and brains connect to eyes, and eyes sample the ambient light and differentiate as to wavelength and direction. Neuroscience might tell us a little of what happens to the data in the brain. This process is called 'seeing'. The function of seeing is to detect food, danger, and obstacles at a distance and thus aid the organism to navigate the world.
The evidence that this is the function of seeing is, on the positive side, that the greyhound chases the hare, and the fox flees the hounds, and the bee finds the flower, and more conclusively on the negative side, that creatures that live in the darkness of caves de-evolve their vision and become eyeless, eyes being a useless extravagance in that environment.
So the evidence that an insect-eating bird sees the stick insect as a stick insect and the stick as a stick is in it's behaviour - eating the insects and not pecking at the sticks. The evidence that an ape sees the fruit is that we can watch it turn its head and scan and then head directly for the fruit. So we don't say that the brain sees or the eye sees, we say that the ape sees.
Blind apes have their driving licences revoked and are forbidden to drive, because they crash into things all the time.
Typically, eyes have a lens, such that a real image is formed at the back of the eye. This might confuse some into thinking that the ape sees that image. This is quite wrong. In order to see something, the ape needs eyes, so in order to see the image on the back of its eye, one would need another eye, pointing at the image. No such structure has ever been found, and this is unsurprising, because if it existed, it would presumably have a lens and form a real image of the image, and no progress would have been made.
Apes pick the fruit in the trees not the fruit images in their eyes, or fruit-like brain substances. They fairly reliably stop at traffic lights and avoid driving off the road, and it is uncontroversial that seeing is what enables them to do these things.
So to see is to be informed about the world, not to be informed about one's physiology eye-wise or brain-wise.
Now your indirect realist likes to talk about vision, because it is remote. There is a distance between the apple and the ape, and this, along with that image in the back of the eye makes it seem plausible that seeing is 'indirect'. I think the image question has been dealt with. To the extent one sees an image, one does not see an image, but an image of an image, or rather an image of an image of an image... etc. And if all that is meant is that vision is remote sensing, then again there is no argument at all.
But let us turn to touch. Finger presses key. Ape feels key depressing. Rather harder to insert something between the key movement and the ape-body feeling the movement. We could go on about nerve fibres and proprioception, and molecular forces at the interface between finger and key, but the notion that touch is indirect seems less attractive as an idea. Will anyone argue for the indirect realism of touch? I don't really make love to my wife, I make love to a wife-like sensation in my brain?
I have insisted on understanding the biological sense of the situation, as the correct basis for any further meaning. There are important reasons why the apple is red and why we can see it as such: so that we can eat it.
I'm back. Yes, I'm quite drawn to the idea of affordances.
Rather harder to insert something between the key movement and the ape-body feeling the movement. We could go on about nerve fibres and proprioception, and molecular forces at the interface between finger and key, but the notion that touch is indirect seems less attractive as an idea. Will anyone argue for the indirect realism of touch?
So how would you describe the sensation of decreasing distance between two ridges (felt with the finger), which, on later examination with a ruler, turn out not to have been decreasing? Or the sensation of vibration which, when later measured with vibration detectors turn out not to have been present? Or the sensation of slipperyness in place of coldness (often experienced by autistics) which, when later examined with slope experiments and thermometers turn out to be mistaken?
If all these sensations are just telling us exactly the way the world is, then what are we to make of the sensations which later tell us it was not that way? Do we construct some convoluted framework just to avoid having to cope with the fallibility of our senses? Or do we just use the ordinary language of 'illusions' and 'reality' to talk about that fallibility?
All indirect realism is saying is that the world, as we expect it to be, as we expect others to share it, is not the same as the world as we immediately percieve it, that sources other than immediate sense data form the expectation model we have of our environment. That's a perfectly valid use of the term 'indirect'. Sense data literally takes an indirect route from reality (the source of sense data) to our model of it (the thing we respond to as if it were the case).
Harry HinduNovember 18, 2020 at 11:32#4725810 likes
Reply to bongo fury
If its neither then how do you know that what you experience has anything to do with apples at all? What is it about the experience that makes it about apples?
And this is what the indirect realist is continually pretending to do
What is the difference between indirect realism and direct realism? Is your mind part of the world? Do you directly or indirectly experience your brain or your mind?
I assume your argument would something along the lines of needing some kind of representation in the brain in order to recognise an apple in the world? I don't think brains work like that, but even if they did, such representations would be used to recognise apples out there in the world, and not more representations in the brain. I mean what would be the point of that?
How are you defining representation? Representations are an effect of a cause. Being that the cause is not the same as the effect, you don't have the cause in your brain, you have the effect. Its just that the representation is causally related to what it is about. So, thanks to causation you can represent an apple and that experience informs you of the reality. You can only talk about your thoughts and perceptions, but those perceptions are causally related with the world, hence you can talk about the world by talking about your thoughts.
Computer facial recognition is comparing an image of your face, not your actual face, with information stored in memmory - which is just another representation of your face. Its just that the representation is an effect of the cause, which is you putting your real face in front of your Webcam and taking a picture. If that first cause did not happen there would be no information in the computer to compare.
How are apples different than songs? If you don't have apples in your head, can you have song in your head? Where do songs exist?
I take my clues from Merleau-Ponty, but both Gibson and MP draw on this from the Gestalt psychology of Hurt Koffka et al. MP explicitly cites Gestalt psychology in PoP, and the wikipedia entry on Gibson too. So maybe I'll have a look at that.
Reply to jamalrob He can be a bit verbose but not vainly so. I'm on the same general vibe and consider him quite solid and intellectually honest. Consider him a non-naïve realist.
I think it's not so easy to decide this one way or the other. It could make for an interesting discussion. It's unfortunate that my copy of PoP is a thousand kolimetres away and under lockdown.
But I just found a paper online called "Merleau-Ponty and Naïve Realism" by Keith Allen. Might be interesting.
Reply to jamalrob Sorry but for me, the concept of direct perception is an oxymoron. By definition, all perception is indirect. Kant, noumena vs phenomena, the thing in itself vs how it interacts with the world and with our eyes. Any interaction requires a modus operandi, a link, a mechanism(s), a set of causes and effects that collectively and dependably results in a somewhat stable or identifiable interaction, in this case between the perceived and the perceiver.
Reply to Olivier5 Well, have a look at that book on direct perception and you might see that the concept is consistent with your view (aside from the Kantian issue).
The difficulty in trying to put MP in one or other realist camp, either direct or indirect, naive or non-naive, is that his approach, which we see from Gibson too, is quite different:
[quote=Merleau-Ponty, The structure of behavior]For the player in action the football field is not an “object,” that is, the ideal term which can give rise to an indefinite multiplicity of perspectival views and remain equivalent under its apparent transformations. It is pervaded with lines of force (the “yard lines”; those which demarcate the “penalty area”) and articulated in sectors (for example, the “openings” between the adversaries) which call for a certain mode of action and which initiate and guide the action as if the player were unaware of it. The field itself is not given to him, but present as the immanent term of his practical intentions; the player becomes one with it and feels the direction of the “goal,” for example, just as immediately as the vertical and the horizontal planes of his own body. It would not be sufficient to say that consciousness inhabits this milieu. At this moment consciousness is nothing other than the dialectic of milieu and action. Each maneuver undertaken by the player modifies the character of the field and establishes in it new lines of force in which the action in turn unfolds and is accomplished, again altering the phenomenal field.[/quote]
I like this way of setting out the commitments of naive realism, that I found in the paper I mentioned (PDF):
[quote=Allen]Naïve realist theories of perception ... come in a variety of different forms, however they commonly embody a commitment to some or all of the following theoretical claims. First, perceptual experiences are essentially relational, in the sense that they are constituted in part by those things in the perceiver’s environment that they are experiences of. Second, the relational nature of perceptual experience cannot be explained in terms of perceptual experiences having representational content that is veridical if the things in the subject’s environment are as they are represented as being, and nonveridical otherwise. Third, the claim that perceptual experiences are essentially relational articulates the distinctive phenomenological character of perceptual experience, or ‘what it is like’ for a subject to have an experience. Fourth, given that veridical perceptual experiences are essentially relational, they differ in kind to non-veridical experiences such as hallucinations. Fifth, perceptual experiences are relations to specifically mind-independent objects, properties, and relations: things whose nature and existence are constitutively independent of the psychological responses of perceiving subjects.[/quote]
That could be a good place to start a big discussion of naive realism.
Well, have a look at that book on direct perception and you might see that the concept is consistent with your view (aside from the Kantian issue).
I have. Yes, it's consistent with my views but I believe illogical in calling itself "direct". That there are signals in the environment, already meaningful, and that the perceiver notices them, that is true. And of course a good football player will correctly perceive the field not as a passive and static 'object' but as a force field, within which he moves, with which he interacts like all players do. But that doesn't make the noticing direct, precisely because of the Kantian issue.
Or they mean "direct" in a minimalist way, i.e. "more direct than the mechanistic alternative of perception as animals making up meaning entirely on their own based on a passively collected data field would have you believe".
I have. Yes, it's consistent with my views but I believe illogical in calling itself "direct". That there are signals in the environment, already meaningful, and that the perceiver notices them, that is true. But that doesn't make the noticing direct, precisely because of the Kantian issue.
All right, let's look at things in a Kantian way for a few moments. There is no question of a perceiver perceiving noumena directly, because noumena are not the kind of things that are perceived. Any apprehension of the noumena would be an intellectual intuition, not a sensible one, i.e., it wouldn't be perception at all.
[quote=Kant, B309]Since, however, such a type of intuition, intellectual intuition, forms no part whatsoever of our faculty of knowledge, it follows that the employment of the categories can never extend further than to the objects of experience. Doubtless, indeed, there are intelligible entities corresponding to the sensible entities; there may also be intelligible entities to which our sensible faculty of intuition has no relation whatsoever; but our concepts of understanding, being mere forms of thought for our sensible intuition, could not in the least apply to them. That, therefore, which we entitle 'noumenon' must be understood as being such only in a negative sense.[/quote]
So given that the perception of noumena is not even on the cards, indeed hardly even makes sense (it's probably a category mistake), then we are left in the realm of empirical objects. With the posited ideal directness discarded, against what are you opposing the supposed indirectness of perception? If seeing in the way that we see is the only way we can ever expect to see, then how is it indirect?
Reply to jamalrob Agreed that Kantian perception would be direct regarding empirical objects, but are the empirical objects the mind-independent ones realism is concerned with? Idealism also endorses direct perception, because the ideas are right there in the mind.
@fdrake wrote a monster post about all this in our last debate, and I rudely didn't respond. Maybe I'll go back to it, because I don't like the feeling that I'm going around in circles, always finally unable to break out into the Real.
are the empirical objects the mind-independent ones realism is concerned with?
Yes, but Kantian epistemology is not so concerned.
Some renditions of idealism may endorse direct perception because ideas are right there in the mind, whatever that actually means, but transcendental idealism does not. T.I. endorses, in fact is necessarily predicated on, direct perception because “....For, otherwise, we should require to affirm the existence of an appearance, without something that appears—which would be absurd....”.
The fundamental initiation of all Kantian cognitive metaphysics is the statement that objects are given to us, which makes explicit perception is a direct affectation on sensing physiology. It follows that we never interpret the perception, but rather we interpret the impression the perception imparts.
Anyway....if all this is generally understood already, somebody should tell me so I don’t butt in where I don’t contribute anything.
If seeing in the way that we see is the only way we can ever expect to see, then how is it indirect?
Granted that it's probably "as direct as can be", but direct still means (in this context): without intervening factors or intermediaries. Which is not something that can be said of perception. So postulating that a mechanism (an intermediary) is necessary for any perception achieves a number of things, among others:
1. it allows perceiving at a distance without invoking magic at-a-distance action.
2. it focuses the attention on such mechanisms and their study can help improve people's vision or audition, e.g. I wear glasses and they help me to see.
3. it may be necessary to correctly interpret sense data in some cases, e.g. when seeing lightning and counting the seconds before hearing thunder, as a way to estimate the distance of the event based on the velocity of sound waves.
4. it helps explain optical illusions, where what you perceived is at a demonstrable variance with the thing being perceived, or where you cannot decide what you see (is enlightened's avatar a horse or a frog?).
5. it attracts philosophers' attention to epistemology, which implies a critical outlook on our data gathering procedures, and involves attention to how theories shape our perception and data collection strategies.
Reply to Olivier5 That's a nice breakdown, but I don't think it works as it stands, because it goes wrong at the start. If perception is indirect, it must mean not just that there are intervening factors (light? electrical impulses?), but that there are intervening objects of perception, that is, the things that are perceived. Nobody thinks that perception is magic.
2. it focuses the attention on such mechanisms and their study can help improve people's vision or audition, e.g. I wear glasses and they help me to see.
Yes, but this doesn't depend on the philosophical position of indirect realism.
If perception is indirect, it must mean not just that there are intervening factors (light? electrical impulses?), but that there are intervening objects of perception, that is, the things that are perceived.
So what? It is still important to distinguish conceptually between objects as perceived (objects of perception), and objects as they are in the world.
Reply to Olivier5 That distinction is not clear to me. I mean sure, houses have back doors that you can't see when you're in the front garden, and the small woman I saw waiting outside my apartment building the other day was actually a pile of boxes, but apart from that kind of thing, appearance vs reality is a very troublesome opposition to me.
the small woman I saw waiting outside my apartment building the other day was actually a pile of boxes, but apart from that kind of thing, appearance vs reality is a very troublesome opposition to me.
So apart from the cases where appearances oppose reality we shouldn't oppose appearance and reality?
Well, yeah. Except we then go on to look at which cases are which, we carry out carefully designed experiments to distinguish the two cases, we make predictive models and see how they fare against those experiments...but yeah, broadly speaking I don't think any indirect realist is saying that we somehow are mistaken about every single aspect of reality. It (or my version of it anyway) is just an acknowledgement that our model of the way the world is now (the thing we act in response to) is only partly formed by the data collected from the way the world is now. It is also partly (indeed mostly) formed from our prior expectations about the way the world is. So the realism of our model is not direct (formed from the data we receive), but indirect (formed after passing some filtering system which adapts and sometimes alters it completely).
Allen:Third, the claim that perceptual experiences are essentially relational articulates the distinctive phenomenological character of perceptual experience, or ‘what it is like’ for a subject to have an experience. Fourth, given that veridical perceptual experiences are essentially relational, they differ in kind to non-veridical experiences such as hallucinations.
The indirect realist is going to disagree that perception being relational makes the experience different from hallucinations and other non-perceptual experiences. Particularly if the same neural circuits are used for visual experiences of all kinds.
I gather that the direct realist is saying that when we have a hallucination, we are aware of the hallucination, but when we have a perception, we're aware of the external object. The difference being the content of the experience. Same for dreams and imagination.
The indirect realist might question why perceptual experience is different, other than the causal chain, which of course the indirect realist agrees with.
So let's say a technology like Neuralink is used to treat blindness. Images from a headset are sent to a chip surgically implanted in the brain which encodes the image data as electrical signals for the brain such that the patient can see again.
In this case, technology is acting in place of the retina and optic nerve to provide the brain with what it needs to form visual perceptions. Let's say no problem with direct realism so far.
But then as the technology advances, additional information in the form of digital overlays are also sent such that the patient sees various enhancements such as text, additional images and colors to highlight information not readily available to normal vision. Similar to the terminator's perspective from the Terminator movies. This would be like the Hololens technology. The indirect realist might say this is kind of what the brain is doing anyway.
Further advances allow complete digital environments to be sent to the patient. So now it's full on VR being beamed into the brain. Basically the visual part of a BIV. In all three scenarios, the indirect realist would challenge the direct realist to justify saying what's a mental image and what's direct awareness, since there is a causal relation from outside the body via the tech.
bongo furyNovember 18, 2020 at 18:11#4726760 likes
If so (if you are sticking with the premise), and "what you experience" doesn't mean representations in my brain, then I'm surprised the question would arise.
What I experience are person-sees-apple events, person-reaches-for-apple events and person-eats-apple events: which are all pretty clearly to do with apples.
sure, houses have back doors that you can't see when you're in the front garden, and the small woman I saw waiting outside my apartment building the other day was actually a pile of boxes, but apart from that kind of thing, appearance vs reality is a very troublesome opposition to me.
"That kind of things" are found at the core of many scientific questions. We do see anthropomorphic figures everywhere, we can't help it. I guess it's better to err on the side of caution; in other words, it's less risky to mistake a pile of boxes for a small woman than vice versa.
[b]Uber’s self-driving car saw the pedestrian but didn’t swerve – report
Tuning of car’s software to avoid false positives blamed[/b], as US National Transportation Safety Board investigation continues
Samuel Gibbs, Tue 8 May 2018 06.00 EDT
An Uber self-driving test car which killed a woman crossing the street detected her but decided not to react immediately, a report has said.
The car was travelling at 40mph (64km/h) in self-driving mode when it collided with 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg at about 10pm on 18 March. Herzberg was pushing a bicycle across the road outside of a crossing. She later died from her injuries.
Although the car’s sensors detected Herzberg, its software which decides how it should react was tuned too far in favour of ignoring objects in its path which might be “false positives” (such as plastic bags), according to a report from the Information. This meant the modified Volvo XC90 did not react fast enough.
?Banno We're still on the topic of what it means to perceive. We agreed it implies an object and a mind perceiving it. This characterization seems to make biological sense, at least. It follows that there must be a causal chain 'starting' at the apple and 'ending' at a mind. (in brackets because nothing ever starts and ends beyond our subjective segmentation of time, it's all part of the big flow)
Reply to Banno It means that perception can be explained by physical mechanisms, and that absent these mechanism, you won't be able to perceive anything... No mechanism --> no perception.
You can't see an apple in the dark, for instance, simply because there's no light.
What I experience are person-sees-apple events, person-reaches-for-apple events and person-eats-apple events: which are all pretty clearly to do with apples.
How do you know these were apples, and not quinces?
bongo furyNovember 19, 2020 at 07:25#4728120 likes
Reply to bongo fury Couldn't help it... I'm aware the correct answer is 'practice'. But to recognize an apple, one needs to have some clue about how apples look like.
If so (if you are sticking with the premise), and "how apples look like" doesn't mean their matching representations in my brain, then I'm surprised the objection would arise.
How apples look like is how they participate in person-sees-fruit events, which are illumination events, which we learn to differentiate among through practice: active participation in such events.
How does "active participation in person-sees-fruit events" helps you in any way, if you cannot recognize some similarity with a previous event? If there's no trace left of the experience in the person, then that person will have no way to connect new experiences with past ones.
Is that your view as a biologist? That an organism learns by storing and comparing traces?
That an organism can learn is beyond dispute. Even organisms without neurones display an ability to learn. This ability must logically be supported by some biological mechanisms to somehow store some information and to retrieve or activate it later, usually regrouped under the term 'memory'. How memory works is an important area of cognitive research.
bongo furyNovember 19, 2020 at 10:26#4728590 likes
Even organisms without neurones display an ability to learn.
— Olivier5
:cool:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligent-plant:The most controversial presentation was “Animal-Like Learning in Mimosa Pudica,” an unpublished paper by Monica Gagliano, a thirty-seven-year-old animal ecologist at the University of Western Australia who was working in Mancuso’s lab in Florence. Gagliano, who is tall, with long brown hair parted in the middle, based her experiment on a set of protocols commonly used to test learning in animals. She focussed on an elementary type of learning called “habituation,” in which an experimental subject is taught to ignore an irrelevant stimulus. “Habituation enables an organism to focus on the important information, while filtering out the rubbish,” Gagliano explained to the audience of plant scientists. How long does it take the animal to recognize that a stimulus is “rubbish,” and then how long will it remember what it has learned? Gagliano’s experimental question was bracing: Could the same thing be done with a plant?
Mimosa pudica, also called the “sensitive plant,” is that rare plant species with a behavior so speedy and visible that animals can observe it; the Venus flytrap is another. When the fernlike leaves of the mimosa are touched, they instantly fold up, presumably to frighten insects. The mimosa also collapses its leaves when the plant is dropped or jostled. Gagliano potted fifty-six mimosa plants and rigged a system to drop them from a height of fifteen centimetres every five seconds. Each “training session” involved sixty drops. She reported that some of the mimosas started to reopen their leaves after just four, five, or six drops, as if they had concluded that the stimulus could be safely ignored. “By the end, they were completely open,” Gagliano said to the audience. “They couldn’t care less anymore.”
Was it just fatigue? Apparently not: when the plants were shaken, they again closed up. “ ‘Oh, this is something new,’ ” Gagliano said, imagining these events from the plants’ point of view. “You see, you want to be attuned to something new coming in. Then we went back to the drops, and they didn’t respond.” Gagliano reported that she retested her plants after a week and found that they continued to disregard the drop stimulus, indicating that they “remembered” what they had learned. Even after twenty-eight days, the lesson had not been forgotten. She reminded her colleagues that, in similar experiments with bees, the insects forgot what they had learned after just forty-eight hours. Gagliano concluded by suggesting that “brains and neurons are a sophisticated solution but not a necessary requirement for learning,” and that there is “some unifying mechanism across living systems that can process information and learn.”
bongo furyNovember 19, 2020 at 10:35#4728630 likes
Reply to bongo fury If all organisms and even plants can learn, they can link past and present events, in the present. How do you explain that if no trace of the past is left in the organism?
Harry HinduNovember 19, 2020 at 11:23#4728700 likes
Are you quite sure you are sticking with the premise?...
You obviously didn't understand the question. If its neither, then you haven't said anything useful. I'm asking what it is that is in our heads, not what is not in our heads.
And I asked about songs. How are songs different than apples. Unenlightened asserts there are no apples in our heads, but I'm sure that you've heard the expression of having a song in your head.
Do we have direct access to our mind or our brain? And what is the "we" that has this direct or indirect access? Personally, i think the use of the terms, "direct" and "indirect" are the cause of the problem. As usual, the problem is language use.
Harry HinduNovember 19, 2020 at 12:05#4728850 likes
How apples look like is how they participate in person-sees-fruit events, which are illumination events, which we learn to differentiate among through practice: active participation in such events.
Sounds like you have person-sees-fruit events in your head which contradicts your assertion that it is "neither".
bongo furyNovember 19, 2020 at 12:43#4728920 likes
So, now that you think about it, it probably is all to do with storing traces in a memory.
So, you probably reject the premise. Ok.
— bongo fury
I beg to differ. Your premise says nothing about storing traces or not storing traces.
Well, it says no representations in the brain. Storable units corresponding to (representing) external events are excluded by implication. (Was my reasoning.)
If all organisms and even plants can learn, they can link past and present events, in the present. How do you explain that if no trace of the past is left in the organism?
The organism's ability to repeat and modify behaviours is a kind of a trace of the past. But explaining that doesn't seem to require us to infer the storing of traces or representations.
bongo furyNovember 19, 2020 at 13:06#4728980 likes
Songs are sound events. Having them "in your head" is practicing brain (and general neural and muscular) shivers that refine your readiness to engage with and participate in the sound events.
it says no representations in the brain. Storable units corresponding to (representing) external events are excluded by implication. (Was my reasoning.)
So how do you explain your own memories?
bongo furyNovember 19, 2020 at 13:16#4729000 likes
bongo furyNovember 19, 2020 at 13:23#4729020 likes
Neural events. But not words or pictures.
Because I meant memories in the sense of rememberings.
In the sense of the scenes remembered, I could have said either the scenery itself or the words or pictures readied for use, or both. (None of which are, as neural events are, in the head.)
If you can remember events from the past, you must have some way to record them.
That's one view, which people have widely held, even before the invention of the camera. (E.g. Hippocrates. Can't locate the source. "Soul receive images by day, recalls them by night", roughly.)
The opposite view is that "recalling a scene to mind" is a uniquely human skill of rehearsing and maintaining a narrative, ideally a highly flexible but consistent one. (E.g. Bartlett, Frankish.)
Having a narrative in the head is like having a song in the head. It's not literally there. (See above.)
The opposite view is that "recalling a scene to mind" is a uniquely human skill of practicing and maintaining a narrative, ideally a highly flexible but consistent one. (E.g. Bartlett.)
Tell that to the plants around you. Apparently they have some capacity to learn and yet none to maintain narratives.
The opposite view is that "recalling a scene to mind" is a uniquely human skill of rehearsing and maintaining a narrative, ideally a highly flexible but consistent one. (E.g. Bartlett.)
Interesting... Where? I'd like to read some more.
I did some stuff on narratives as corporate memory, long ago.
bongo furyNovember 20, 2020 at 00:04#4730040 likes
Reply to Banno Ok, I may be exaggerating. Apparently it's only Bartlett and I that see the absurdity of the trace theories and memory-bank theories of memory. (Or google isn't my friend tonight.) [Edit: added Frankish link above.] But do share...
But is it reasonable to expect that any animals without language ever "recall a scene to mind"? Except whilst asleep and dreaming, of course...
But is it reasonable to expect that any animals without language ever "recall a scene to mind"?
I wouldn't be surprised if apes, elephants, whales/dolphins and some birds did it.
bongo furyNovember 20, 2020 at 00:21#4730070 likes
Reply to Marchesk I doubt that we ourselves do it before we grasp the reference of words and pictures.
I'm open to persuasion though. Start with an ape? In what situation might it have the brain shivers that you would describe as having a mental image and I would describe as readying to select among pictures?
Songs are sound events. Having them "in your head" is practicing brain (and general neural and muscular) shivers that refine your readiness to engage with and participate in the sound events.
Then its brain shiver events all the way down? If not, then the brain shivers represent events that are not brain shivers. If not, then how are brain shiver events about events that are not just other brain shivers?
bongo furyNovember 20, 2020 at 16:18#4731270 likes
OK - but the basic idea that episodic memory is reconstructed rather than recalled seems uncontroversial.
Yes, until one dares to drop the re from reconstructed, and thus challenge the near-universal presumption of an original recording, and hence even of recall of smaller fragments merely subject to rearrangement.
What is corporate memory? Anything to do with Dennett's multiple drafts? Which I may have had in mind when claiming there is an "opposite view" (to that which assumes a recording).
off-line thoughts [dreams] don't (whereas at least some of the on-line ones do) have to be "about" the ongoing scenery and the organism's path through it. On the other hand, nothing is to stop them from replicating (if only partially and incoherently) previous on-line thoughts of that kind. The question is whether this, if it is roughly what happens, implicates mental images, as we tend to assume it does...
If I'm wrong, and the appropriately confused machine might still be unconscious, I need alerting towards features of my own conscious thoughts that I am leaving out of consideration.
But is it reasonable to expect that any animals without language ever "recall a scene to mind"?
— bongo fury
What would possess you to have such a doubt?
Anthropomorphic assumptions, possibly. Like, that recalling a particular scene (e.g. the mouse nearly caught half and hour ago) involves recognising a time and place within a narrative (however primitive) of the day's events. Without that narrative, you only have a dream, possibly a day dream. Less plausibly recall of a scene. The neuro-muscular shiver relates no more specifically to the scene in question than does the shiver that happens more visibly when the cat claws at a toy.
Or, as I say, persuade me otherwise, by better describing a typical occasion on which an animal recalls a scene to mind.
@Olivier5 I speculate that human recall is based on such non-specific shivers, connected into a narrative; not on a recording, however distorted or fragmented.
Thoughts are "about" things in that they are the brain so shivering its neurons as to adjust its readiness to act on those things. Conscious thoughts, in particular, adjust its readiness to select among symbols for pointing at those things. This kind of thought is thus (whether online or off) thought "in" symbols, and consequently prone to making us think (mistakenly, though often harmlessly) that the symbols are in our heads.
the basic idea that episodic memory is reconstructed rather than recalled seems uncontroversial.
The question is: reconstructed based on what? Surely not some image bank like in a computer; I agree with Fury and you on this, because it's hard to recall a mental image of anything or anyone, or even imagine a face as clear as a picture in one's mind. Dreams (which includes characters and some background) are very vague and impermanent. Memories like dreams and imagined things, are often vague, and impermanent though they last longer than dreams.
So, memories are reconstructed alright, but based on what? There must be some physical trace left somewhere.
Or, as I say, persuade me otherwise, by better describing a typical occasion on which an animal recalls a scene to mind.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29754898/
But I wasn't so much interested in persuading you, that seems a Sisyphean task (not you personally, just in general), I was just interested in why you would hold such a presumption in the absence of any evidence either way. People's assumptions intrigue me.
bongo furyNovember 20, 2020 at 18:23#4731420 likes
Reply to Isaac Ok, anthropomorphic assumptions, apparently. Thanks for the link. With it's shockingly anthropomorphic illustration! I shall study.
... Haha, point taken. Links to fascinating studies answering this too:
Start with an ape? In what situation might it have the brain shivers that you would describe as having a mental image and I would describe as readying to select among pictures?
Still, the mental images (whatever we call them or construe them as) aren't traces, or recordings.
Oh, no, nothing so profound, but perhaps more useful. I wrote a short thesis on methods for corporate bodies - educational institutions were my examples - advocating narratives as a way of tracking corporate history.
We ought take some care as to what we are referring to. There's short term and long term memory, of course. he concern here is more with long term. Then there is episodic, autobiographic and semantic memory. I'm not too convinced about autobiographical memory as a distinct thing, but the difference between episodic and semantic memory seems pretty straight forward.
A cat can remember it was fed, but it cannot remember that it was fed last Tuesday. So semantic memory might not be available to animals that do not have language.
Semantic memory is not vague, in the way episodic memory might be.
As for the 'physical trace', I'm happy to leave that to science. There's a growing body of evidence on the topic...@Isaac?
Harry HinduNovember 21, 2020 at 01:08#4731940 likes
Thoughts are "about" things in that they are the brain so shivering its neurons as to adjust its readiness to act on those things. Conscious thoughts, in particular, adjust its readiness to select among symbols for pointing at those things. This kind of thought is thus (whether online or off) thought "in" symbols, and consequently prone to making us think (mistakenly, though often harmlessly) that the symbols are in our heads.
But isn't our brain in our heads? Your brain shivers are meaningless. Where are the scribbles you are reading now - in your head, in your brain, on the screen? Where is the scribbles' meaning - in your head, in your brain or on the screen?
Absence of color is the absence of light. Light is responsible for the ability for us to perceive color. Without light, there can be no color (at least color perceived by us) Biological in nature. Rod and Cone
Olivier5 I speculate that human recall is based on such non-specific shivers, connected into a narrative; not on a recording, however distorted or fragmented.
Assuming that you trust your speculation shivers and your logic shivers, note that, in order to offer any structure shiver to your memory shivers, a narrative shiver ought to be recorded, even if shiveringly so.
Assuming that you trust your speculation shivers and your logic shivers, note that, in order to offer any structure shiver to your memory shivers, a narrative shiver ought to be recorded, even if shiveringly so.
The organism's ability to repeat and modify behaviours is a kind of a trace of the past. But explaining that doesn't seem to require us to infer the storing of traces or representations.
Not literally, anyway. It might, of course, be convenient and useful to make the inference in a figurative manner of speaking.
Start with an ape? In what situation might it have the brain shivers that you would describe as having a mental image and I would describe as readying to select among pictures? — bongo fury
Still, the mental images (whatever we call them or construe them as) aren't traces, or recordings.
I'm not sure what you might mean by the difference. It's obviously a really complex subject, but a 'mental image' from memory consists of almost exactly the same neural activity as the image in front of you right now. They are fired in a different order and from different sources, but it's the same neurons. so, you might see a table and that would result from neurons for edges, colour, texture etc all coming together with contextual areas such as the room you're in the activity you're doing, (and hundreds of others, it can't be overstressed how complex this really is) to fire the neuron for 'table' (or more likely specifically for 'my kitchen table'). This then goes on to fire areas which respond to this (those that search for the word 'table', those that prepare you to put your cup on it...). All of which is linked together by neurons in the hippocampus so that they can fire simultaneously the next time one element is fired. What's happening in memory recall is that those neurons are being fired in the reverse order. One element fires (the cause of recollection, maybe the word 'table') and the neuron in the hippocampus then fires all the others so that your brain is put in the same state as if it had seen the table.
I think what throws a lot of people about this 'same state' idea is the way memories seem more vague and malleable. This is caused by two things - the number of links the hippocampus drew together in forming the memory (it may have missed elements which were there), but much much more importantly than that is the constant re-appraisal that 'live' images undergo in perception. It's not the inaccuracy of the 'snapshot' that's being misunderstood here, it's the inaccuracy of the exact same moment of actual live perception. Any given instant of immediate perception is no less vague and malleable than that same instant of recollected perception. It's just that with immediate perception, the very millisecond in which the doubt arises about a section of an image, it can be resolved with a saccade focussing on reducing uncertainty there. We do the same with mental images (the eyes actually move around the mental image), but we have less data with which to resolve uncertainty. One of the theories about REM sleep is that the eyes are constantly trying to resolve the uncertainty in the flurry of mental images produced in the dream state.
(The above is all extremely speculative - the science is still uncertain in many areas)
All of which is to say that recall is basically the same as the initial perception, just limited by an inability to reduce uncertainty with focussed data hunting. Whether you want to call perception a 'mental image' or not, is moot, but if you do, then recall is probably one too.
As to apes...I don't really keep a stock of animal cognition papers, only one or two that cross over with stuff I'm interested in, but I know that work was done on macaques showing the same image recognition from memory using the same processes that human subject showed.
As for the 'physical trace', I'm happy to leave that to science. There's a growing body of evidence on the topic...@Isaac?
Indeed (see above). Growing, but still inconclusive as yet. It think the jury's out on the single-neuron vs neural-system theories, but, as Stephen Kosslyn put it
At this juncture, it is clear that the bulk of the evidence supports the claim that visual mental imagery not only draws on many of the same mechanisms used in visual perception, but also that topographically organised early visual areas play a functional role in some types of imagery.
At this juncture, it is clear that the bulk of the evidence supports the claim that visual mental imagery not only draws on many of the same mechanisms used in visual perception, but also that topographically organised early visual areas play a functional role in some types of imagery.
Sounds similar to the hallucination argument in favor of indirect realism.
Harry HinduNovember 22, 2020 at 13:45#4735810 likes
But how do you know that? Is knowing that your brain is in your head the same as your brain being in your head? Is there a stat of affairs where both are true - that there is a knowing your brain is in your head and a state where a brain is inside a physical head? If so, are the two states of affairs causally related in any way?
a 'mental image' from memory consists of almost exactly the same neural activity as the image in front of you right now.
Sure, if you mean, the neural activity we might figuratively call "mental imaging from memory" is of largely the same character as the neural activity we might figuratively call "mental imaging from visual attention".
One possible next question, for lovers of clarification, is how this literally involves images, if at all.
Reply to Harry Hindu Is this about, how can we be sure of things? I'm not usually into all that, sorry. My bad, if you can explain it.
Is there a clear difference between literal brain shivers and figurative ones, and if yes, what could it be?
Not sure what you mean. If it helps, I think there's a clear difference between brain shivers (ok, neural activity) literally and only figuratively consisting of pictures or representations.
Reply to Marchesk As usual, I am using the reflexivity of thought against thought deniers. The denial of thoughts is itself a thought. It applies to Fury calling thoughts "brain shivers", derogatively. By reflexivity, that very idea of him then becomes a mere "brain shiver", nothing serious. And when he fails to understand something, he's just not shivering his brain hard enough... :-)
Reply to Olivier5 I believe the qualia-phobes think our brains are not shivering hard enough when it comes to consciousness, thus our belief in color woo. We can tell that Dennett's brain shivers particularly hard, because of his zombie views.
bongo furyNovember 23, 2020 at 10:53#4737720 likes
In my defence, I settled on "shiver" in preference to "spasm". For the prosecution, I should have said "neural activity". To switch sides again, I wanted a sortal, and neural "events" or "episodes" sounded medical.
Reply to bongo fury If you want to think about thoughts, and speak about them, you have to realize that anything you say about thoughts can apply reflexively, to itself, because what you say about thoughts is still thoughts. So if you're thinking about saying that thoughts are useless, for instance, or illusions, or mere physical spasms, then this very idea of yours becomes itself a useless illusion or spasm.
Reason cannot undermine reason. Thoughts cannot undermine thoughts. No amount of clever thinking will ever prove that there is no such thing as clever thinking.
So to answer your question, no need to torture the language in order to demean what you are trying to explain; that's like shooting yourself in the conceptual foot. Usually, common English offers a variety of decent starting points, and it's a Frenchman talking. "Neuronal activity" is perfectly fine and clear, if you are talking about objectively observable neuronal activity. "Thoughts" is a perfectly fine word too, about the subjective experience of thinking...
Harry HinduNovember 23, 2020 at 13:10#4737910 likes
A term that explains why from your vantage point it appears that my brain is shivering and from my vantage point it appears that the world is shivering colors and shapes and sounds, etc.
bongo furyNovember 23, 2020 at 14:59#4738190 likes
"Neuronal activity" is perfectly fine and clear, if you are talking about objectively observable neuronal activity
Including that crowning achievement of animal life, thinking in symbols: neuro-muscular activity which is preparing to select among symbols to identify the
"Thoughts" is a perfectly fine word too, about the subjective experience of thinking...
Sure - pending literal clarification of the poetry. If you are going to then apply logic to it, anyway. Poetry has different (no less exacting) standards.
A term that explains why from your vantage point it appears that my brain is shivering and from my vantage point it appears that the world is shivering colors and shapes and sounds, etc.
I propose "shivering qualia". This is a harder problem, because one cannot just quine the shivering away. Actually, I kind of like the term "shivering" now.
bongo furyNovember 23, 2020 at 15:41#4738310 likes
Sure - pending literal clarification of the poetry. If you are going to then apply logic to it, anyway. Poetry has different (no less exacting) standards.
You do it again! Thoughts cannot undermine thoughts.
Thoughts are "poetry" you say? That is not even beautiful poetry... Logic makes for boringly predictable poetry as well. :vomit:
bongo furyNovember 23, 2020 at 16:45#4738530 likes
No, "the subjective experience of thinking" is a poetical description of the thoughts, I say. You won't be able to clarify it in concrete terms, saying "here's some", and "here's some more", "that thing isn't some" etc.
No, "the subjective experience of thinking" is a poetical description of the thoughts, I say. You won't be able to clarify it in concrete terms, saying "here's some", and "here's some more", "that thing isn't some" etc.
"The subjective experience of thinking" is required for any of your thoughts to have any meaning for and to other subjective beings, such as other posters here or people in your life. If you'd tell them you are not actually a subject but a mere object, a machine composing your sentences mechanically, rather than based on human observation and reason, not many people would take said sentences seriously. (not saying they do now...)
(There's a thread out there on machine poetry, if you're interested in that...)
I propose "shivering qualia". This is a harder problem, because one cannot just quine the shivering away. Actually, I kind of like the term "shivering" now.
"Shivering" is itself a particular type of qualia. "Shivering" is a term that only an entity with visual experiences could use in the appropriate way.
bongo furyNovember 24, 2020 at 13:38#4741490 likes
"Shivering" is a term that only an entity with visual experiences could use in the appropriate way.
Surely, anyone with sufficient flair for metaphor who had experienced shivering, e.g. with cold, could apply the term appropriately to sound events just as well as to illumination events?
Harry HinduNovember 24, 2020 at 14:33#4741670 likes
What else could it be? Where does the observation of shivering brains reside? In what form does the knowledge that brains shiver take if not a visual of a shivering brain?
Surely, anyone with sufficient flair for metaphor who had experienced shivering, e.g. with cold, could apply the term appropriately to sound events just as well as to illumination events?
Using metaphors is part what it means to be poetic.
Does my brain shiver when its cold, or is it my body that shivers?
Black is the qualia that first made me realize that color is not "out there".
But some people still don't quite get it, so you might find a better example is certain composite colors like magenta. There is no single wavelength of EM radiation that will make a human see magenta; the right cone activation only happens from two different wavelengths hitting that patch of the retina. But, we know those photons don't actually "mix", or interact with each other. So how can magenta be "out there"?
Comments (278)
Darkness is briefly mentioned in the colour entry on the IEP when discussing dispositionalism. It seems to suggest that unlike naive colour realism (primitivism or non-reductive realism), dispositionalism better deals with darkness.
I am quite interested to know the angle you are coming from as your discussion point for the thread was brief. Is it in relation to the philosophy of art. I am also finding it interesting that your thread on darkness is currently sitting next to my one on the human shadow. Perhaps a shadowy darkness is hovering over us today.
But I do art work myself and do battle with issues of shadow and colour. I often choose to draw in black and white, and if anything get carried away and end up making art that is too dark. For this reason, I have even experimented in drawing in white to curb my gothic inclinations.
I do frequently draw in a pointilist way and I find that the play of light. Luminescence is extremely important and the colour spectrum can achieve certain pictorial representations limited by black and white.
But getting back to your question, perhaps light and darkness sits outside of the naiive realist colour palette.
I would be glad to know what the question was related to if not the philosophy of art. I am not being critical, but just curious to know where you are you coming from, metaphorical or otherwise?
Another thing to be aware of here is that in terms of the information you have, when you see black, you know that you are definitely NOT detecting photons from that location. If you are blind, you lack this knowledge. This is probably why you don't have a sense of blackness when blind or trying to see via your hand or the back of your head. Where there is no information, there are no qualities at all.
It's relevant. Whatever the theory, whether naive realist or whatever, it must take into account and explain the difference between seeing black and not seeing.
I suppose the naive realist would have to try to say that blackness is truly what a lack of light looks like, in itself. You are truly seeing that there is no light. But I am not sure this really makes sense. If you experience only and directly the things out there themselves, I don't know how you could really experience an absence of something. It seems to me that if what you experience is directly just objects themselves (light in this case), if something is there, you'd see it, but if nothing is there, you wouldn't see anything, not even blackness. You would likely only experience what is present, not any kind of absence. And blackness is an indication of a known negative.
Personally, I think naive realism is wrong. Perhaps our seeing of black is one of the many challenges it faces.
Hmm. I'm not sure I understand the difference between naive (direct) realism and indirect realism. Is your mind not part of the world, and you have direct access to the contents of your mind? What do you mean by naive realism? Would another person experience the same thing I experience if they were me? Or maybe I should ask if I have the same experience everytime when there is no light, then does that not say something objective about the relationship between me and some amount of light in the world? If so, does not that mean that my experiences are objective? If we can predict what someone experiences given that they are a human in an environment without any light, does that make what they experience objective?
What does it mean for the apple to be red when there is no visible light reflecting off it? For that matter. What does it mean for the apple to be red when nobody is looking at it?
Naive realist means an unreflective assumption that the world is pretty much as it appears to us humans. A direct realist would be aware of the various critiques of naive realism, armed with counter arguments in favor of the world looking at least somewhat as it appears to us, without there being some sort of mental intermediary.
Hi Harry Hindu. There's something that I want to run by you. It's got to do with the "color" black. I don't how to put this into the right words but I'll give it my best shot. I know there are more colors in existence than I can name so I'll stick to the so-called primary colors - last I checked these colors in the right combination can produce all other colors. So, for the purpose of this discussion, assume the primary triplet of red, blue, and green are all colors.
Anyway, Let's put the colors together in a cute little set, like so: colors = {red, green, blue, black}. Prima facie, it all seems fine. We aren't saying anything out of the ordinary here, right?
A little bit of highschool physics brought to bear on the set and the "color" black sticks out like a sore thumb - unlike the rest of the colors in the set which are reflected light, black isn't, black is the absence of all reflected light. In simpler terms, for all colors except black there are photons emanating from the colors that strike our retina. Isn't this a fundamental difference in property? Doesn't it mean black, in being so unique, isn't a color or if one doesn't take kindly to such a proposal, that black needs its own subcategory under the rubric of colors?
What say you?
What I say is that if the existence of colors is not dependent upon the existence of light in the environment, rather colors always occur when there is an eye-brain system, then colors are a product of some state of an eye-brain system, and not necessarily a product of light.
As I have mentioned before in other threads, we cannot sever the part of our experience that is about the world from how the world relates to the body. Every experience is both about the world and about the body. In other words, we cannot experience the world as it is independent of our observations of it. Our observations always include a bit of information about ourselves. This is why the eye doctor is able to get at the state of your eye-brain system by asking you to report the contents of you mind when observing an eye chart. The doctor isn't concerned about the state of the chart. That is constant. The variable is the patient and their visual experiences, and that is what the doctor is getting at. Does this mean that our experiences are objective in that they can be talked about, predicted and tested?
Short and sweet. Just the kinda thing I was looking for. Thanks a million.
Is it fair to say then that the naive realist would simply conclude that color (black needs special treatment - I'll get to that in a while) is a feature of reality and that it's a property of objects and their interactions with light?
Coming to the "color" black, my intuition is that this comes close to a category mistake. Perhaps "misnomer" is the more apt word but put that aside for the moment and consider the fact that an important distinction exists between black and all other colors: all colors except black are perceived as photons hitting our retina; black is the absence of photons. This, to me, means that black is either not a color or, if one is not sympathetic to such a point of view, that it needs a category of its own in the color domain. The former option seems the most reasonable one to me.
Anyway, darkness is basically black but this comes from a person who's taken the time to analyze the matter seriously enough. It appears that the darkness = black identity is not an obvious one. Why else are there two words viz. "dark" and "black" and why is it that they aren't interchanageable? "It becomes dark around sevenish" is easier on the tongue and ear than "it becomes black around sevenish" and "the box is black" feels more natural than "the box is dark". This feeling of appropriateness of the words "black" and "dark" suggests that our ancestors, those who first coined these words, failed to make the connection between darkness and blackness and made a distinction where there's no difference. Just a theory, unsubstantiated, take it with a grain of salt.
And here's where it gets interesting in my humble opinion. I mentioned in the paragraph above that the darkness-blackness distinction is one without a difference. If so, the false distinction is all mental, exclusively mind and has nothing to do with the external world. In other words, the mind is capable of creating certain conceptual frameworks for reality that aren't true per se but also not completely false. But wait, it gets better (I think!?) To understand that the darkness-blackness distinction is a mistake takes logic, something all mental, all mind.
In essence, I don't believe that reality is, in any way, untruthful or that it possesses mechanisms to distort its impressions on our senses. I believe it's What You See Is What You Get (WYSIWYG).
The same can't be said of the mind as the case of the blackness-darkness distinction without a difference proves. The mind seems capable of, for some odd reason, distorting reality, imposing its own agenda as it were on reality. All in all, if you ever get fooled by reality, you know whom to blame.
Isn't the eye a just a fancy light-detector?
Quoting Harry Hindu
I share your sentiments on the issue. The mind seems to have an agenda, probably because of it's driven to comprehend, make sense of, the sense-data (is this correct usage?) and this manifests as "...a bit of information about ourselves." in the picture of reality that the minds constructs from the sense-data. This is all conjecture of course so put on your skeptical hat. It probably sounds ridiculous and downright funny but kindly indulge me.
An eye-chart, to my reckoning, is sense-data poor in the sense it has very little variation, has minimal complexity, and doesn't/fails to activate parts of the mind dedicated toward detecting certain specific patterns in the visual data. On the other hand, a more natural setting, outdoors or a city perhaps, and also those times when shown an optical illusion, that which I refered to as the mind's agenda, becomes more apparent, more visible. Mind you, I'm not disagreeing with you here. I'm simply contemplating scenarios in which that you referred to as "...a bit of information about ourselves" can be isolated, magnified, or both to make their study feasible.
I say 'more or less' because Mummy always insisted on taking more important things, like clothes, to a window before she bought them, to check how they looked in daylight, shop lighting being somewhat deceptive.
:up:
:ok:
You have to play on a violin to see what sounds it makes. And you have to let the light play on a dress to see what colours it makes.
A musical pitch is an equivalence class of sound events.
A visual colour is an equivalence class of illumination events.
Indeed. stuff is coloured in relation to light and eyes. But to say that one sees by means of light and using one's eyes, is not to say one sees indirectly, simply to explain what seeing is.
Yes. If there was an intermediary representation, presumably in my brain, I wouldn't be able to see it, because 1. it's behind my eyes, and 2. it's pitch black in there.
... Namely, an ordering or classification of illumination events. Which isn't something specially suggestive of either direct nor indirect... which are more germane to internal-picture philosophies.
We realists call that 'an illusion'. It's not a real red visual cortex, the way a red apple is a real red apple. This is a very useful distinction for a philosopher, that allows us to admit the possibility of error. Sometimes, one might mistake a stick insect for a stick, or a mirage for an oasis, or a bang on the head for a red glow in the sky.
Where else would the experiences be? They're not out there in the objects. They're not on our eyeballs, ears or skin. We have good empirical reasons to think the brain is responsible. That's why dreams, illusions and other experiences are possible. The flow of sensory information comes into the brain, not the other way around.
But yes, it does require an inference to a physical world responsible for our having a body that perceives the world. However, metaphysically speaking, there are alternatives. It's just the physical one fits science best.
My problem with it is the implicit assumption that the apple is red the way it looks red to the perceiver. In my view, the awareness of red is added by the perceiver.
If you were colourblind, then you as a perceiver would not be adding red to the apple - you presumably claim. But all your colour seeing friends would independently add red to the same apples and not to other ones. Explain how everyone knows to add red to the same apples.
Their brains are stimulated to see red.
By telepathy? or by some feature of the apples?
Electrical signals from the cones in their eyes.
Bite the fucking bullet man. How do everyone's eyes get to signal the same apples as red? Is it telepathy , or is there something about the apples that tells the eyes to signal red? Or come up with another explanation that actually explains.
Yes I do know its the wavelength of the photons that are absorbed and reemitted from the surface of the goddam apples because the goddam apples are red. It's called colour vision, and it's no great mystery to me. It becomes mysterious when you try and claim that the eyes somehow project redness onto the brain from nowhere.
Quoting unenlightened
And yet it is a great mystery to others. For example, how come wave lengths get coded in colours? Where does that happen?
In the paint shop, maybe.
Let's not get into the fine details just yet. Some of us are trying to grasp how we tell a red apple from a green apple, and think the difference is somehow in the brain. My suggestion is that if we consistently and independently agree about which apples are red and which are green (which we do), then either the apples are different or our brains are in direct communication by telepathy.
I favour the former explanation, and call the difference "the colour of the apples".
The colors we see are in the brain, because that's where the perception is formed. The cause comes from outside, but the cause is different from the colors seen. That different wavelengths activate different cones in our eyes, sending the resulting signals to the visual cortex, allowing us to discriminate red and green apples (as we call the color difference). But that gets turned into a color experience.
How do we know your red and my red are the same? We don't. We just know we can discriminate the same.
Quoting Marchesk
But as enlightened pointed out before, not everyone's eyes get the signal because we have color blind people. Where does the "physical" difference between those that are color blind and those that are not lie? If all else us the same, the apple, the light, etc, then why are there color blind people?
The apple isn't red. It is ripe. The light isn't red. Its an EM wave that has a 650nm wavelength.
The color is the effect, and effects are not their causes. The "difficult thing" is resolved by thinking of everything as information, not "physical" objects. Red is causal information about the ripeness if the apple, the level of light, and the state of your eyes and brain. The difficult part comes in trying to discern what part of red gives us information about just one of those things. We can't because red is single product of multiple interactions and all we have access to is the single final product.
It's not all the same. Color blind people either have a defect in their eyes or in their brains.
Quoting Harry Hindu
I'm not sure how this works for consciousness.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Agreed. So where does the red come in to play? I agree that information comes into the brain from the senses interacting with the world. But then what?
People have disagreed about apple colours before. When they do, are they seeing a different apple?
Beside, there are also optical illusions about colour, whereby a similar objective hue is subjectively seen as two or more different colours. In this case, there is a demonstrable difference between the objective and the subjective.
Well, speak for yourself. I see colours in the apples and don't see my brain at all. I see apples out there, not in my brain, and the apples are out there, not in my brain. Seeing an apple is not having an apple in the brain, and seeing something red is not having something red in the brain.
Moral of the story is just because the world is experienced a certain way, doesn't mean it is that way.
Right, so we continue troubleshooting. If we take one of each type of patient and prod their brains with a metal rod, does either one experience red? If the patient with a defect in their eyes experiences red but the latter patient does not, than that seems to imply that colors are generated in the brain, not by the eyes.
Quoting Marchesk
I'm not sure I understand your question. If everything is information, then the way we think about red apples as physical objects is wrong. Physical objects, like colors, exist only in the brain as digitized representations of an analog world.
Quoting unenlightened
How does one distinguish between the illusion of red and red that is not an illusion. Red appears the same way to me.
Alas for the indirect realist, whenever there is a demonstrable difference between the objective and the subjective, it demonstrates that there is an objective, that we can be deceived about. Sometimes we are deceived, sometimes things are ambiguous, sometimes we disagree. And we can explore and describe the circumstances when this tends to happen, and learn that some people see better than others, and everyone has a blind spot and all sorts of interesting stuff. We do not find that we see in our brains.
A classic.
If you were blind, apples wouldn't look like anything at all.
Moral of the story is you can't see them even if you can see them.
Alas for the naïve realist, it also demonstrates that there is a subjective perception as well, that perception is distinct from its objects.
I don't think that was ever said or implied. We represent, or model, in our brains.
Not a problem for naive realists, I see the apple as distinct from my seeing already. Sometimes, when I peep round the back of what seemed to be a red apple, it turns out to be green on the other side. I still see it out there, not in my head.
The language of perceptions attempts to drive a wedge between the senses and the world, and create an 'inner world' of perceptions but then, folks will say, 'I don't see the outer world, I see this inner world of perceptions.' This is impossible unless I have inner eyes with which to see these perceptions and I do not.
No, I see the world. I see it partially, incompletely, in some aspects, from a point of view, with limitations and subject to errors. But it's the world I see and not my brain, I never see my brain or my perceptions or my inner world.
Ok. We represent apples in our brains, and we represent our brains in our brains, and we represent ourselves in our brains and our eyes in our brains and our propensity to represent stuff in our brains.
And then what? does the representation of the eye examine the representation of the apple and feed the information to the representation of the brain? Where the representation of the representation of the eye in the representation of brain in the brain examines...
I think we'd do better to stick with the first presentation of the real apple to the real eye. See the red apple, climb the tree, pick the apple, eat. Yum.
Okay so you conceive of your "seeing of an apple" as different from the real apple. That's all there is to it. That's what the debate is about.
When people say it is "in your head" they don't mean it literally. They mean it's in your mind.
Like when they propose a cup of tea? I've learnt by experience that you're not supposed to keep or eat that cup.
While I subscribe to that condition as well, it may be worth remarking that the schematic doesn’t qualify the real object perceived as having any color at all. There is a real object, we are aware....wordlessly in fact....of that real object. Doesn’t look to me like the implicit assumption of color is given, so I don’t see a conflict with our view.
The problem would arise if the schematic specified red apple instead of real apple, followed by awareness of red apple instead of awareness of real apple, in which case of course, red is certainly not added by the perceiver but is antecedently specified as a property of the apple, a contradiction to our philosophical d’ruthers.
Did I miss something? I hate it when that happens........
I just noticed the weasel: "the implicit assumption that the apple is red the way it looks red to the perceiver."
In what way does does a red apple look red to the perceiver? Only in the way it stands out from the yellow, green, brown, black, and purple apples. About how red looks to the perceiver, nothing can be said because it is a figment of a private inner world that cannot be made consistent or inconsistent with anyone else's private world. We cannot talk about it, and so we never do except by way of weaselling. (See private language argument.)
I just noticed the weasel: "...the awareness of red is added by the perceiver."
I concede. The apple is unaware of its redness. but it is unaware of anything much.
This is how we talk: we say that some apples are red, and that some light is red. And we are fairly consistent about it and in agreement most of the time about it, and this consistency and agreement is the mark of what we like to call the real. Stuff that I see or voices that I hear that no one else does are rightly regarded as suspect. But ask a five year old to show you the red toy, and they can usually do it consistently. Ask them to show you a visual cortex or a perception,, and they might be in difficulty.
All this clever optics and neuro-science is an explanation of reality, not a substitute for it. Photons and wavelengths and neurones explain how we see the world, not how we don't see it.
Noooooo! ... "my seeing" nooooht a mental image (internal picture etc.). Just a person-sees-apple event.
I hope...
Spooky, huh?
You guys live literally "out of your mind"?
I don’t understand this noticing a weasel.
Google is your friend.
I literally live in the world.
The world is a vast place. You could be a little more specific. I bet you live quite close to a certain human body of flesh, bones and nerves, that you can somehow control, and that people call "you".
How do you know? Have you seen it?
Of course.
What’s that like?
Quoting Marchesk
It's like the perception of red.
Its either representations in our brains, or the real objects in our brains. Do we have real apples in our brains or representations of them in our brains? How does the representation differ from the real thing yet inform you of the state of the real thing, as in the apple is ripe? Isnt the knowing that the apple is ripe more useful than knowing the apple is red?
Or is it neither?
What about when the color perceived is the result of the brain adjusting for lighting conditions, which differs from the color normally perceived from the wavelength being reflected? Is this not evidence the brain is coloring in the resulting image?
Is it? I'm fairly sure I don't have apples in my brain, though I confess I've never looked. And for the same reason, I've never noticed any representations of apples there either. I assume your argument would something along the lines of needing some kind of representation in the brain in order to recognise an apple in the world? I don't think brains work like that, but even if they did, such representations would be used to recognise apples out there in the world, and not more representations in the brain. I mean what would be the point of that?
My point though is that 'brain' substitutes in the language game for 'I' .
Thus "I see a red apple" equates roughly to "Brain recognises sense data as red apple."
There is no possibility of "I watch my brain receiving sense data and comparing it to representation in the brain."
There is no possibility of perceptions being perceived.
And this is what the indirect realist is continually pretending to do. like this
Quoting Marchesk
Yes, what about it? Eyes adjust according to ambient light, and brains compensate as best they can for ambient light conditions. Nevertheless, sight is imperfect and errors occur. "I t'ought I saw a puddy cat", but perhaps I didn't after all. What I didn't think I saw, and nobody ever did think they saw was a perception.
What makes you so certain? This is an ongoing philosophical debate, not a settled one. And even one where some neuroscientists and psychologists come down on the side of indirect perception. Why are you being dogmatic? Maybe direct perception ends up being right, but what makes you so sure it is? It's not like there aren't reasons motivating the indirect side of the debate. I just read a paper defending direct realism that lists eight challenges presented by indirect realists. The author defends direct realism against all eight, but has to make a few concessions to do so. I'm not so sure the concessions amount to direct perception.
I have never seen my brain, let alone seen it doing anything. Have you seen your brain? Do you know anyone who has seen their brain? Have you read any reports of people seeing their brain? My certainty combines never having heard of such a thing, with very good practical reasons why it is an impossibility that I will repeat since you seem to have a difficulty. People's eyes almost always point the opposite way, away from their brains, and it is usually pitch black inside the skull I believe, and if there is light getting in anywhere, it is almost always a serious medical emergency.
There are some few reports of out of body experiences under surgery, and if you like we can discuss that, but I assumed you had already rejected the spiritual realm as a serious consideration.
Quoting Marchesk If there are reasons, you haven't made them understandable to me. I become more dogmatic as the linguistic confusion multiplies. Suppose we make this thing entirely impersonal and mechanical:
_____________________________________________________
Bodies have brains and brains connect to eyes, and eyes sample the ambient light and differentiate as to wavelength and direction. Brains analyse the data and resolve it into a meaningful landscape. This process is called 'seeing'. The function of seeing is to detect food, danger, and obstacles at a distance and thus aid the organism to navigate the world.
Is any of this in dispute?
Did you meet him on this forum, or in your mind?
If he can live out of his mind, maybe he can meet me in mine. That would be a literal meeting of minds...
Quoting Pierre Le Morvan
You can read the details of each argument in that paper, but I'm confident you're already acquainted with most of them. Instead you want to caricature indirect realism with statements like "perceptions being perceived", which is not what is being claimed. The claim is about the nature of the perception, and why there are reasons to doubt it is direct. It's not a linguistic confusion.
Did the perception of meeting him in this forum occur in the mind, or on this forum?
I believe the bold part is precisely what is in dispute in this thread, and agree broadly with your characterisation of it.
Where is the perception formed? On the forum, at your eyeballs, or in the brain?
I'm gong to second Olivier5 here and say this is where the dispute takes place. That meaningful landsacpe the brain resolves, what does it mean for it to be direct?
Nice.
But that's a topic for another discussion: "Where do you live?"
But no one would ever say that, would they, @Olivier5?
Seeing the apple means precisely to apprehend it through our senses, to construct a meaningful representation of it based on sense data. It's a relationship. It takes some work.
Sense data themselves are already meaningful, don't get me wrong. The apple is red for a reason, it's a biological signal of its maturity, as I explained. Our senses work with this material, cut down on some details, fill in others, heighten some contrasts, adjust to lighting conditions, draw lines and objects, etc. We notice it once in a while when we see an optical illusion. Our senses shape the message so as to make it more effective. They "go after" meaning; sometimes they invent it. But by and large they helps us detect the biological sense of the situation. Red apple-->yummy apple.
But there are many other meaningful things about how an apple looks, which nobody notices except the specialists: the artists, the cooks or the farmers. Did you ever notice that no apple is radially symmetrical? The "axis" is always markedly off center, one side smaller than the other. It's something you need to know when you draw apples (if you want to draw them realistically enough). It seems like nothing but once you notice it, you can see it in any apple, even though before you didn't see it in any apple. At best you noticed that some apples were very asymmetrical. That is likely because our sense of vision gives a premium to symmetry: it tries to find it everywhere, and it tends to neglect or hide minor asymmetries.
Seems then that we agree that there is an apple ot be seen.
Thought it worth checking. I wouldn't want the apple to just be in my mind.
If there were no apple, there would be no point in seeing an apple. Our senses have developed through evolution, because they work. Yes they do help us locate true, existing and desirable things, such as apples.
I thought you were on the way to recovery after our last debate, but it looks like you've had a relapse. :wink:
Thought it worth checking, given how people here are easily spooked by their own psychological shadows.
:rofl: Somehow I doubt that Banno's going to agree with that.
I'm got to two current threads confused. Was the substance that we have direct access via perceptual sensations? That seeing color is what makes us visually aware of objects?
I think that's true.
Quoting Marchesk
Well, seeing things normally involves seeing their colour, of course, but one can see (be visually aware of) things without seeing their colour.
I don't know what we're talking about here.
One of the challenges to direct perception is that if the object appears differently in some ways to us than it is, then we're directly aware of a mental object, and only indirectly the physical cause.
You think that our scientific investigations have revealed that apples are not actually red.
I think that this is as confused as saying that solid things are not actually solid. Following unenlightened, I think that our scientific investigations, rather than being a substitute for seeing, explain it, i.e., explain how we see red apples.
The apple is red in order to be noticed by an animal. Banno may think that he is no mind, but he is most probably an animal, with some capacity to perceive, remember and desire things for himself. What the ancients called 'anima'.
He can even get pissed, and since I doubt that computers, automatons and zombies can get pissed, I conclude he must be an animal.
As any animal of the Homo sapiens species, he can reflect upon himself, and maybe he is afraid of himself. Lot's of people are. That's why 'mind talk' spooks them. They fear their own mental shadows.
Direct perception is a contradiction in terms. It cannot logically exist.
Right, because they are out of their mind.
They're not solid in the way old-fashioned materialists thought they were. It being mostly empty space held together by electromagnetic bonds would have blown their minds.
Quoting jamalrob
It doesn't explain how there's a red experience, only that there is a strong correlation with our biology of vision.
And anyway, the world is different than how it appears to us, at the very least because we don't have the sensory capabilities to perceive most of it. Our vision, as useful as it is, doesn't capture most of the light, which would make the world look colored in quite different ways, assuming that's how we saw all those radio and microwaves and what not. Which would be a function of our biology that we don't understand.
It would have blown their minds that this is what solidity is, yes. Turns out, for a neutrino, the table doesn't feel anything like the same as it does for us.
So...when I'm looking at the the moon I can cover it with my hand, but the moon is too big to be covered by my hand, therefore I'm not seeing the moon, but just a mental object. Is that about right?
Right, so if all our terms, all our language, just means what it means to us a lay people, then what language is left to the scientist in which to render his answer?
Oh, that was not in doubt. I was checking that you agreed there was an apple. Quoting jamalrob
Why not? It's an odd way of talking, but...?
Maybe it's just me that disagrees then. Minds don't see, not least because minds don't have eyes.
:rofl:
I know, and I was checking that you agreed there was a mind seeing the apple. As pointed by Jamal, there was some legitimate reasons to doubt that. Now that we agree that there exist both an apple and a mind, we could explore (or meaningfully exchange about) the perception of the former by the latter. See if we can agree on something else.
By this token, eyes don't see, because eyes don't have eyes... :lol:
It's a system. It's made of interconnected pieces. Each piece does its own work, in synch with the other pieces.
Meh. It's not systematic, so much as metaphoric. There is not a causal chain starting at the apple and ending at a mind. Minds are a different sort of thing to apples.
According to the most relevant sense of "see", I agree that our eyes don't see, that it's better here to say that we see by means of our eyes. We can use words in different ways, and in philosophy we have to be careful not to use two senses of a word without realizing it.
And who is "we", in this context? How would you describe these things you call "I", "we", "you"?
...while I mean that it's red.
You said...
Quoting jamalrob
If you say to me "this block of wood is solid", and I cut it open to find a hollow in the centre, I'd be liable to say "no, this is not solid". When the scientist 'cuts open' the wood even smaller and find no less of a hollow you want to deny him recourse to the same language to describe his findings.
Likewise with a magic trick where it appears there's an apple before you, the magician might later say "there wasn't 'actually' an apple", by which he means the way things seemed to you was not as there were. Then, when the neuroscientist finds such a relationship between the world as we respond to it mentally and the world as we detect it with other instruments (say cameras), you want again to deny him use of the same language to describe his findings.
Because of the menagerie of fantastic creatures that populates this site, and that must come from some old medieval treatise on exotic beasts with two heads and one leg or something... I mean, you could mean zombies, or automatons, or winged rabbits... People is a good answer, it's human and familiar.
You appear to be under the impression that scientists claim that what we call solid objects are not actually solid. This isn't true. Ever heard of the states of matter, or solid-state physics?
Same for neuroscientists.
But if you just mean that they should be allowed to say, speaking loosely, "tables are not really solid", and "we don't really see apples", then I guess it's a way of getting their point across. It seems far too misleading to me, and I've only seen it from bad popularizations.
And yet they can perceive apples.
I quoted eight objections to direct realism from a paper countering those objections a few posts back, while making what the author thought were some necessary concessions to defeat all eight. I'm not sure which objection your example falls into, but it's not a very convincing one in my book, and not what the color argument is about. Some of the objections are stronger than others, and some of the concessions made to defeat all eight are more troubling for direct reaiism than others.
That surprises you?
...or brains in vats, or rational animals, or vehicles for genes, or eternal souls...
Yeh, it makes you dizzy.
It means the world is different than it appears to us. Now whether that's a problem for direct realism is what the debate is about. I say the evidence is the world isn't colored the way we perceive it to be, and this means that naive realism (or primitivism) about visual objects is false, although a more sophisticated causal argument for direct realism could be true.
What is 'the same'? I'm not sure what you're saying here. We use terms Luke 'solid', 'really', 'actually' differently in different contexts and we seem to manage fine. A scientist might well say he studies 'solids' and at the same time say "of course, they're not really 'solid'" and a competent English speaker would have little trouble recognising the change of context.
Likewise here. It seems to you, looking at your fruit bowl, that you 'see' the red apples which are actually there outside of you, in our shared world. That's what 'actually' does in that context. If I then find, by experiment, that the way things seem to you is informed more by your prior expectations than by what is, right now, in our shared world, why does it now become 'misleading' to use the exact same contextual meaning to say you're not seeing the fruit bowl as it 'actually' is?
...so we should digress to reasons as causes. That might be interesting.
Not at all, you just need to keep tabs on the menagerie. Don't confuse the brains in vats with the brains in bats, for instance.
In the final analysis, we cannot understand perception by throwing away the perceived and/or the perceiver. So whether you call us people or brains or minds makes no significant difference to the problem.
I think it makes a big difference, but if you can accept that people see apples and that apples are red, then we're close enough to agreement for me.
Why do you think so? Why is it so important to correctly (or not too incorrectly) define ourselves?
As explained to Banno, this is agreeable because factual, but we still seem to disagree on the meaning of it. I have insisted on understanding the biological sense of the situation, as the correct basis for any further meaning. There are important reasons why the apple is red and why we can see it as such: so that we can eat it.
See you around when you feel better.
Yes. I agree. I don't know what brains actually do with the data, but I'm fairly sure they don't make a picture, because there is no point - there is no one inside the brain to look at it. So that was misleading. So I'll strike that and move on.
Bodies have brains and brains connect to eyes, and eyes sample the ambient light and differentiate as to wavelength and direction. Neuroscience might tell us a little of what happens to the data in the brain. This process is called 'seeing'. The function of seeing is to detect food, danger, and obstacles at a distance and thus aid the organism to navigate the world.
The evidence that this is the function of seeing is, on the positive side, that the greyhound chases the hare, and the fox flees the hounds, and the bee finds the flower, and more conclusively on the negative side, that creatures that live in the darkness of caves de-evolve their vision and become eyeless, eyes being a useless extravagance in that environment.
So the evidence that an insect-eating bird sees the stick insect as a stick insect and the stick as a stick is in it's behaviour - eating the insects and not pecking at the sticks. The evidence that an ape sees the fruit is that we can watch it turn its head and scan and then head directly for the fruit. So we don't say that the brain sees or the eye sees, we say that the ape sees.
Blind apes have their driving licences revoked and are forbidden to drive, because they crash into things all the time.
Typically, eyes have a lens, such that a real image is formed at the back of the eye. This might confuse some into thinking that the ape sees that image. This is quite wrong. In order to see something, the ape needs eyes, so in order to see the image on the back of its eye, one would need another eye, pointing at the image. No such structure has ever been found, and this is unsurprising, because if it existed, it would presumably have a lens and form a real image of the image, and no progress would have been made.
Apes pick the fruit in the trees not the fruit images in their eyes, or fruit-like brain substances. They fairly reliably stop at traffic lights and avoid driving off the road, and it is uncontroversial that seeing is what enables them to do these things.
So to see is to be informed about the world, not to be informed about one's physiology eye-wise or brain-wise.
Now your indirect realist likes to talk about vision, because it is remote. There is a distance between the apple and the ape, and this, along with that image in the back of the eye makes it seem plausible that seeing is 'indirect'. I think the image question has been dealt with. To the extent one sees an image, one does not see an image, but an image of an image, or rather an image of an image of an image... etc. And if all that is meant is that vision is remote sensing, then again there is no argument at all.
But let us turn to touch. Finger presses key. Ape feels key depressing. Rather harder to insert something between the key movement and the ape-body feeling the movement. We could go on about nerve fibres and proprioception, and molecular forces at the interface between finger and key, but the notion that touch is indirect seems less attractive as an idea. Will anyone argue for the indirect realism of touch? I don't really make love to my wife, I make love to a wife-like sensation in my brain?
I'm back. Yes, I'm quite drawn to the idea of affordances.
So how would you describe the sensation of decreasing distance between two ridges (felt with the finger), which, on later examination with a ruler, turn out not to have been decreasing? Or the sensation of vibration which, when later measured with vibration detectors turn out not to have been present? Or the sensation of slipperyness in place of coldness (often experienced by autistics) which, when later examined with slope experiments and thermometers turn out to be mistaken?
If all these sensations are just telling us exactly the way the world is, then what are we to make of the sensations which later tell us it was not that way? Do we construct some convoluted framework just to avoid having to cope with the fallibility of our senses? Or do we just use the ordinary language of 'illusions' and 'reality' to talk about that fallibility?
All indirect realism is saying is that the world, as we expect it to be, as we expect others to share it, is not the same as the world as we immediately percieve it, that sources other than immediate sense data form the expectation model we have of our environment. That's a perfectly valid use of the term 'indirect'. Sense data literally takes an indirect route from reality (the source of sense data) to our model of it (the thing we respond to as if it were the case).
If its neither then how do you know that what you experience has anything to do with apples at all? What is it about the experience that makes it about apples?
Quoting unenlightened
What is the difference between indirect realism and direct realism? Is your mind part of the world? Do you directly or indirectly experience your brain or your mind?
Quoting unenlightened
How are you defining representation? Representations are an effect of a cause. Being that the cause is not the same as the effect, you don't have the cause in your brain, you have the effect. Its just that the representation is causally related to what it is about. So, thanks to causation you can represent an apple and that experience informs you of the reality. You can only talk about your thoughts and perceptions, but those perceptions are causally related with the world, hence you can talk about the world by talking about your thoughts.
Computer facial recognition is comparing an image of your face, not your actual face, with information stored in memmory - which is just another representation of your face. Its just that the representation is an effect of the cause, which is you putting your real face in front of your Webcam and taking a picture. If that first cause did not happen there would be no information in the computer to compare.
How are apples different than songs? If you don't have apples in your head, can you have song in your head? Where do songs exist?
I take my clues from Merleau-Ponty, but both Gibson and MP draw on this from the Gestalt psychology of Hurt Koffka et al. MP explicitly cites Gestalt psychology in PoP, and the wikipedia entry on Gibson too. So maybe I'll have a look at that.
I think it's not so easy to decide this one way or the other. It could make for an interesting discussion. It's unfortunate that my copy of PoP is a thousand kolimetres away and under lockdown.
But I just found a paper online called "Merleau-Ponty and Naïve Realism" by Keith Allen. Might be interesting.
The difficulty in trying to put MP in one or other realist camp, either direct or indirect, naive or non-naive, is that his approach, which we see from Gibson too, is quite different:
[quote=Merleau-Ponty, The structure of behavior]For the player in action the football field is not an “object,” that is, the ideal term which can give rise to an indefinite multiplicity of perspectival views and remain equivalent under its apparent transformations. It is pervaded with lines of force (the “yard lines”; those which demarcate the “penalty area”) and articulated in sectors (for example, the “openings” between the adversaries) which call for a certain mode of action and which initiate and guide the action as if the player were unaware of it. The field itself is not given to him, but present as the immanent term of his practical intentions; the player becomes one with it and feels the direction of the “goal,” for example, just as immediately as the vertical and the horizontal planes of his own body. It would not be sufficient to say that consciousness inhabits this milieu. At this moment consciousness is nothing other than the dialectic of milieu and action. Each maneuver undertaken by the player modifies the character of the field and establishes in it new lines of force in which the action in turn unfolds and is accomplished, again altering the phenomenal field.[/quote]
[quote=Allen]Naïve realist theories of perception ... come in a variety of different forms, however they commonly embody a commitment to some or all of the following theoretical claims. First, perceptual experiences are essentially relational, in the sense that they are constituted in part by those things in the perceiver’s environment that they are experiences of. Second, the relational nature of perceptual experience cannot be explained in terms of perceptual experiences having representational content that is veridical if the things in the subject’s environment are as they are represented as being, and nonveridical otherwise. Third, the claim that perceptual experiences are essentially relational articulates the distinctive phenomenological character of perceptual experience, or ‘what it is like’ for a subject to have an experience. Fourth, given that veridical perceptual experiences are essentially relational, they differ in kind to non-veridical experiences such as hallucinations. Fifth, perceptual experiences are relations to specifically mind-independent objects, properties, and relations: things whose nature and existence are constitutively independent of the psychological responses of perceiving subjects.[/quote]
That could be a good place to start a big discussion of naive realism.
I have. Yes, it's consistent with my views but I believe illogical in calling itself "direct". That there are signals in the environment, already meaningful, and that the perceiver notices them, that is true. And of course a good football player will correctly perceive the field not as a passive and static 'object' but as a force field, within which he moves, with which he interacts like all players do. But that doesn't make the noticing direct, precisely because of the Kantian issue.
Or they mean "direct" in a minimalist way, i.e. "more direct than the mechanistic alternative of perception as animals making up meaning entirely on their own based on a passively collected data field would have you believe".
That's one way of using the word "direct".
All right, let's look at things in a Kantian way for a few moments. There is no question of a perceiver perceiving noumena directly, because noumena are not the kind of things that are perceived. Any apprehension of the noumena would be an intellectual intuition, not a sensible one, i.e., it wouldn't be perception at all.
[quote=Kant, B309]Since, however, such a type of intuition, intellectual intuition, forms no part whatsoever of our faculty of knowledge, it follows that the employment of the categories can never extend further than to the objects of experience. Doubtless, indeed, there are intelligible entities corresponding to the sensible entities; there may also be intelligible entities to which our sensible faculty of intuition has no relation whatsoever; but our concepts of understanding, being mere forms of thought for our sensible intuition, could not in the least apply to them. That, therefore, which we entitle 'noumenon' must be understood as being such only in a negative sense.[/quote]
So given that the perception of noumena is not even on the cards, indeed hardly even makes sense (it's probably a category mistake), then we are left in the realm of empirical objects. With the posited ideal directness discarded, against what are you opposing the supposed indirectness of perception? If seeing in the way that we see is the only way we can ever expect to see, then how is it indirect?
I made similar posts in the "Quining Qualia" thread too.
Extremely doubtful.
Yes, but Kantian epistemology is not so concerned.
Some renditions of idealism may endorse direct perception because ideas are right there in the mind, whatever that actually means, but transcendental idealism does not. T.I. endorses, in fact is necessarily predicated on, direct perception because “....For, otherwise, we should require to affirm the existence of an appearance, without something that appears—which would be absurd....”.
The fundamental initiation of all Kantian cognitive metaphysics is the statement that objects are given to us, which makes explicit perception is a direct affectation on sensing physiology. It follows that we never interpret the perception, but rather we interpret the impression the perception imparts.
Anyway....if all this is generally understood already, somebody should tell me so I don’t butt in where I don’t contribute anything.
I think it's an excellent clarification.
Cool.
Granted that it's probably "as direct as can be", but direct still means (in this context): without intervening factors or intermediaries. Which is not something that can be said of perception. So postulating that a mechanism (an intermediary) is necessary for any perception achieves a number of things, among others:
1. it allows perceiving at a distance without invoking magic at-a-distance action.
2. it focuses the attention on such mechanisms and their study can help improve people's vision or audition, e.g. I wear glasses and they help me to see.
3. it may be necessary to correctly interpret sense data in some cases, e.g. when seeing lightning and counting the seconds before hearing thunder, as a way to estimate the distance of the event based on the velocity of sound waves.
4. it helps explain optical illusions, where what you perceived is at a demonstrable variance with the thing being perceived, or where you cannot decide what you see (is enlightened's avatar a horse or a frog?).
5. it attracts philosophers' attention to epistemology, which implies a critical outlook on our data gathering procedures, and involves attention to how theories shape our perception and data collection strategies.
Quoting Olivier5
Yes, but this doesn't depend on the philosophical position of indirect realism.
So what? It is still important to distinguish conceptually between objects as perceived (objects of perception), and objects as they are in the world.
So apart from the cases where appearances oppose reality we shouldn't oppose appearance and reality?
Well, yeah. Except we then go on to look at which cases are which, we carry out carefully designed experiments to distinguish the two cases, we make predictive models and see how they fare against those experiments...but yeah, broadly speaking I don't think any indirect realist is saying that we somehow are mistaken about every single aspect of reality. It (or my version of it anyway) is just an acknowledgement that our model of the way the world is now (the thing we act in response to) is only partly formed by the data collected from the way the world is now. It is also partly (indeed mostly) formed from our prior expectations about the way the world is. So the realism of our model is not direct (formed from the data we receive), but indirect (formed after passing some filtering system which adapts and sometimes alters it completely).
Well that's fair enough. I shall be interested to read any response if and when you might feel so inclined.
The indirect realist is going to disagree that perception being relational makes the experience different from hallucinations and other non-perceptual experiences. Particularly if the same neural circuits are used for visual experiences of all kinds.
I gather that the direct realist is saying that when we have a hallucination, we are aware of the hallucination, but when we have a perception, we're aware of the external object. The difference being the content of the experience. Same for dreams and imagination.
The indirect realist might question why perceptual experience is different, other than the causal chain, which of course the indirect realist agrees with.
In this case, technology is acting in place of the retina and optic nerve to provide the brain with what it needs to form visual perceptions. Let's say no problem with direct realism so far.
But then as the technology advances, additional information in the form of digital overlays are also sent such that the patient sees various enhancements such as text, additional images and colors to highlight information not readily available to normal vision. Similar to the terminator's perspective from the Terminator movies. This would be like the Hololens technology. The indirect realist might say this is kind of what the brain is doing anyway.
Further advances allow complete digital environments to be sent to the patient. So now it's full on VR being beamed into the brain. Basically the visual part of a BIV. In all three scenarios, the indirect realist would challenge the direct realist to justify saying what's a mental image and what's direct awareness, since there is a causal relation from outside the body via the tech.
Are you quite sure you are sticking with the premise?...
Premise: it's neither
Quoting Harry Hindu
nor
Quoting Harry Hindu
If so (if you are sticking with the premise), and "what you experience" doesn't mean representations in my brain, then I'm surprised the question would arise.
What I experience are person-sees-apple events, person-reaches-for-apple events and person-eats-apple events: which are all pretty clearly to do with apples.
"That kind of things" are found at the core of many scientific questions. We do see anthropomorphic figures everywhere, we can't help it. I guess it's better to err on the side of caution; in other words, it's less risky to mistake a pile of boxes for a small woman than vice versa.
That what.
You can't see an apple in the dark, for instance, simply because there's no light.
How do you know these were apples, and not quinces?
How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
:rofl:
Are you quite sure you are sticking with the premise?...
Premise: it's neither
Quoting Harry Hindu
nor
Quoting Harry Hindu
If so (if you are sticking with the premise), and "how apples look like" doesn't mean their matching representations in my brain, then I'm surprised the objection would arise.
How apples look like is how they participate in person-sees-fruit events, which are illumination events, which we learn to differentiate among through practice: active participation in such events.
How does "active participation in person-sees-fruit events" helps you in any way, if you cannot recognize some similarity with a previous event? If there's no trace left of the experience in the person, then that person will have no way to connect new experiences with past ones.
Is that your view as a biologist? That an organism learns by storing and comparing traces?
That an organism can learn is beyond dispute. Even organisms without neurones display an ability to learn. This ability must logically be supported by some biological mechanisms to somehow store some information and to retrieve or activate it later, usually regrouped under the term 'memory'. How memory works is an important area of cognitive research.
Not disputed.
Quoting Olivier5
:cool:
Quoting Olivier5
Ah, so not your view as a biologist as such...
Quoting Olivier5
So, now that you think about it, it probably is all to do with storing traces in a memory.
So, you probably reject the premise. Ok.
I'll sulk if you didn't read the linked post, though.
Cool. And?
I beg to differ. Your premise says nothing about storing traces or not storing traces.
And I asked about songs. How are songs different than apples. Unenlightened asserts there are no apples in our heads, but I'm sure that you've heard the expression of having a song in your head.
Do we have direct access to our mind or our brain? And what is the "we" that has this direct or indirect access? Personally, i think the use of the terms, "direct" and "indirect" are the cause of the problem. As usual, the problem is language use.
Sounds like you have person-sees-fruit events in your head which contradicts your assertion that it is "neither".
Well, it says no representations in the brain. Storable units corresponding to (representing) external events are excluded by implication. (Was my reasoning.)
Quoting Olivier5
The organism's ability to repeat and modify behaviours is a kind of a trace of the past. But explaining that doesn't seem to require us to infer the storing of traces or representations.
So you reject the premise that I said. Ok.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Songs are sound events. Having them "in your head" is practicing brain (and general neural and muscular) shivers that refine your readiness to engage with and participate in the sound events.
Quoting Harry Hindu
To me, they do sometimes indicate a common commitment to internal representations. Hence my efforts here.
Quoting Harry Hindu
No, I experience, undergo, participate in them.
So how do you explain your own memories?
As brain shivers that reset my readiness to choose appropriate words and pictures.
Meaning?
Because I meant memories in the sense of rememberings.
In the sense of the scenes remembered, I could have said either the scenery itself or the words or pictures readied for use, or both. (None of which are, as neural events are, in the head.)
That's what I meant too. If you can remember events from the past, you must have some way to record them.
That's one view, which people have widely held, even before the invention of the camera. (E.g. Hippocrates. Can't locate the source. "Soul receive images by day, recalls them by night", roughly.)
The opposite view is that "recalling a scene to mind" is a uniquely human skill of rehearsing and maintaining a narrative, ideally a highly flexible but consistent one. (E.g. Bartlett, Frankish.)
Having a narrative in the head is like having a song in the head. It's not literally there. (See above.)
Tell that to the plants around you. Apparently they have some capacity to learn and yet none to maintain narratives.
Interesting... Where? I'd like to read some more.
I did some stuff on narratives as corporate memory, long ago.
But is it reasonable to expect that any animals without language ever "recall a scene to mind"? Except whilst asleep and dreaming, of course...
I wouldn't be surprised if apes, elephants, whales/dolphins and some birds did it.
I'm open to persuasion though. Start with an ape? In what situation might it have the brain shivers that you would describe as having a mental image and I would describe as readying to select among pictures?
Far more reasonable than what you usually say. If they can dream, they can imagine and recall scenes.
Sounds suspiciously like a zombie!
The persuasion is not the interesting thing here though, it's the doubt. What would possess you to have such a doubt?
Then its brain shiver events all the way down? If not, then the brain shivers represent events that are not brain shivers. If not, then how are brain shiver events about events that are not just other brain shivers?
Yes, until one dares to drop the re from reconstructed, and thus challenge the near-universal presumption of an original recording, and hence even of recall of smaller fragments merely subject to rearrangement.
What is corporate memory? Anything to do with Dennett's multiple drafts? Which I may have had in mind when claiming there is an "opposite view" (to that which assumes a recording).
Quoting Olivier5
Quoting bongo fury
Quoting Marchesk
Quoting bongo fury
Quoting Isaac
Anthropomorphic assumptions, possibly. Like, that recalling a particular scene (e.g. the mouse nearly caught half and hour ago) involves recognising a time and place within a narrative (however primitive) of the day's events. Without that narrative, you only have a dream, possibly a day dream. Less plausibly recall of a scene. The neuro-muscular shiver relates no more specifically to the scene in question than does the shiver that happens more visibly when the cat claws at a toy.
Or, as I say, persuade me otherwise, by better describing a typical occasion on which an animal recalls a scene to mind.
@Olivier5 I speculate that human recall is based on such non-specific shivers, connected into a narrative; not on a recording, however distorted or fragmented.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Quoting bongo fury
The question is: reconstructed based on what? Surely not some image bank like in a computer; I agree with Fury and you on this, because it's hard to recall a mental image of anything or anyone, or even imagine a face as clear as a picture in one's mind. Dreams (which includes characters and some background) are very vague and impermanent. Memories like dreams and imagined things, are often vague, and impermanent though they last longer than dreams.
So, memories are reconstructed alright, but based on what? There must be some physical trace left somewhere.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29754898/
But I wasn't so much interested in persuading you, that seems a Sisyphean task (not you personally, just in general), I was just interested in why you would hold such a presumption in the absence of any evidence either way. People's assumptions intrigue me.
... Haha, point taken. Links to fascinating studies answering this too:
Quoting bongo fury
Still, the mental images (whatever we call them or construe them as) aren't traces, or recordings.
Oh, no, nothing so profound, but perhaps more useful. I wrote a short thesis on methods for corporate bodies - educational institutions were my examples - advocating narratives as a way of tracking corporate history.
We ought take some care as to what we are referring to. There's short term and long term memory, of course. he concern here is more with long term. Then there is episodic, autobiographic and semantic memory. I'm not too convinced about autobiographical memory as a distinct thing, but the difference between episodic and semantic memory seems pretty straight forward.
A cat can remember it was fed, but it cannot remember that it was fed last Tuesday. So semantic memory might not be available to animals that do not have language.
Semantic memory is not vague, in the way episodic memory might be.
As for the 'physical trace', I'm happy to leave that to science. There's a growing body of evidence on the topic...@Isaac?
But isn't our brain in our heads? Your brain shivers are meaningless. Where are the scribbles you are reading now - in your head, in your brain, on the screen? Where is the scribbles' meaning - in your head, in your brain or on the screen?
Just pointing out that recognizing red apples implies a certain prior knowledge of red and of apples.
Assuming that you trust your speculation shivers and your logic shivers, note that, in order to offer any structure shiver to your memory shivers, a narrative shiver ought to be recorded, even if shiveringly so.
Anamnesis?
I don't remember.
Don't you worry about me.
It should be.
Quoting Harry Hindu
If you mean they aren't representations, then yes, that's my point.
Quoting Harry Hindu
On the screen.
Quoting Harry Hindu
In the game in which we agree to pretend that the scribbles point at or represent things.
Quoting bongo fury
Not literally, anyway. It might, of course, be convenient and useful to make the inference in a figurative manner of speaking.
I'm not sure what you might mean by the difference. It's obviously a really complex subject, but a 'mental image' from memory consists of almost exactly the same neural activity as the image in front of you right now. They are fired in a different order and from different sources, but it's the same neurons. so, you might see a table and that would result from neurons for edges, colour, texture etc all coming together with contextual areas such as the room you're in the activity you're doing, (and hundreds of others, it can't be overstressed how complex this really is) to fire the neuron for 'table' (or more likely specifically for 'my kitchen table'). This then goes on to fire areas which respond to this (those that search for the word 'table', those that prepare you to put your cup on it...). All of which is linked together by neurons in the hippocampus so that they can fire simultaneously the next time one element is fired. What's happening in memory recall is that those neurons are being fired in the reverse order. One element fires (the cause of recollection, maybe the word 'table') and the neuron in the hippocampus then fires all the others so that your brain is put in the same state as if it had seen the table.
I think what throws a lot of people about this 'same state' idea is the way memories seem more vague and malleable. This is caused by two things - the number of links the hippocampus drew together in forming the memory (it may have missed elements which were there), but much much more importantly than that is the constant re-appraisal that 'live' images undergo in perception. It's not the inaccuracy of the 'snapshot' that's being misunderstood here, it's the inaccuracy of the exact same moment of actual live perception. Any given instant of immediate perception is no less vague and malleable than that same instant of recollected perception. It's just that with immediate perception, the very millisecond in which the doubt arises about a section of an image, it can be resolved with a saccade focussing on reducing uncertainty there. We do the same with mental images (the eyes actually move around the mental image), but we have less data with which to resolve uncertainty. One of the theories about REM sleep is that the eyes are constantly trying to resolve the uncertainty in the flurry of mental images produced in the dream state.
(The above is all extremely speculative - the science is still uncertain in many areas)
All of which is to say that recall is basically the same as the initial perception, just limited by an inability to reduce uncertainty with focussed data hunting. Whether you want to call perception a 'mental image' or not, is moot, but if you do, then recall is probably one too.
As to apes...I don't really keep a stock of animal cognition papers, only one or two that cross over with stuff I'm interested in, but I know that work was done on macaques showing the same image recognition from memory using the same processes that human subject showed.
Quoting Banno
Indeed (see above). Growing, but still inconclusive as yet. It think the jury's out on the single-neuron vs neural-system theories, but, as Stephen Kosslyn put it
Sounds similar to the hallucination argument in favor of indirect realism.
But how do you know that? Is knowing that your brain is in your head the same as your brain being in your head? Is there a stat of affairs where both are true - that there is a knowing your brain is in your head and a state where a brain is inside a physical head? If so, are the two states of affairs causally related in any way?
Is there a clear difference between literal brain shivers and figurative ones, and if yes, what could it be?
Sure, if you mean, the neural activity we might figuratively call "mental imaging from memory" is of largely the same character as the neural activity we might figuratively call "mental imaging from visual attention".
One possible next question, for lovers of clarification, is how this literally involves images, if at all.
Is this about, how can we be sure of things? I'm not usually into all that, sorry. My bad, if you can explain it.
Quoting Olivier5
Not sure what you mean. If it helps, I think there's a clear difference between brain shivers (ok, neural activity) literally and only figuratively consisting of pictures or representations.
Maybe because you're not brain shivering hard enough.
In my defence, I settled on "shiver" in preference to "spasm". For the prosecution, I should have said "neural activity". To switch sides again, I wanted a sortal, and neural "events" or "episodes" sounded medical.
I can only apologise if my remarks etc.
Reason cannot undermine reason. Thoughts cannot undermine thoughts. No amount of clever thinking will ever prove that there is no such thing as clever thinking.
So to answer your question, no need to torture the language in order to demean what you are trying to explain; that's like shooting yourself in the conceptual foot. Usually, common English offers a variety of decent starting points, and it's a Frenchman talking. "Neuronal activity" is perfectly fine and clear, if you are talking about objectively observable neuronal activity. "Thoughts" is a perfectly fine word too, about the subjective experience of thinking...
A term that explains why from your vantage point it appears that my brain is shivering and from my vantage point it appears that the world is shivering colors and shapes and sounds, etc.
Including that crowning achievement of animal life, thinking in symbols: neuro-muscular activity which is preparing to select among symbols to identify the
Quoting Harry Hindu
Quoting Olivier5
Sure - pending literal clarification of the poetry. If you are going to then apply logic to it, anyway. Poetry has different (no less exacting) standards.
I propose "shivering qualia". This is a harder problem, because one cannot just quine the shivering away. Actually, I kind of like the term "shivering" now.
You do it again! Thoughts cannot undermine thoughts.
Thoughts are "poetry" you say? That is not even beautiful poetry... Logic makes for boringly predictable poetry as well. :vomit:
No, "the subjective experience of thinking" is a poetical description of the thoughts, I say. You won't be able to clarify it in concrete terms, saying "here's some", and "here's some more", "that thing isn't some" etc.
"The subjective experience of thinking" is required for any of your thoughts to have any meaning for and to other subjective beings, such as other posters here or people in your life. If you'd tell them you are not actually a subject but a mere object, a machine composing your sentences mechanically, rather than based on human observation and reason, not many people would take said sentences seriously. (not saying they do now...)
(There's a thread out there on machine poetry, if you're interested in that...)
I am searching for your qualia
Everything shivers
In gray matter
Heaven forbid.
And the observation of brain shivers is the same thing - a poetical description of another's thoughts.
"Shivering" is itself a particular type of qualia. "Shivering" is a term that only an entity with visual experiences could use in the appropriate way.
Not necessarily.
Quoting Harry Hindu
Surely, anyone with sufficient flair for metaphor who had experienced shivering, e.g. with cold, could apply the term appropriately to sound events just as well as to illumination events?
What else could it be? Where does the observation of shivering brains reside? In what form does the knowledge that brains shiver take if not a visual of a shivering brain?
Quoting bongo fury Using metaphors is part what it means to be poetic.
Does my brain shiver when its cold, or is it my body that shivers?
But some people still don't quite get it, so you might find a better example is certain composite colors like magenta. There is no single wavelength of EM radiation that will make a human see magenta; the right cone activation only happens from two different wavelengths hitting that patch of the retina. But, we know those photons don't actually "mix", or interact with each other. So how can magenta be "out there"?