But objects do have shapes, and those shapes are important to how the objects interact with the world. When we see a circle, we see that shape because...
When you dream, hallucinate, visualize or remember a tree, it's only available to you. When you perceive a tree, other people can also perceive it. Re...
I'm not sure how putting it in those terms dissolves the philosophical issue of what a perceived tree is, or the skeptical concern that we can't know....
Agreed, and it's a problem for direct realism, far as I'm concerned. Disjunctivism is one way of dealing with that. No, image of the tree is seeing th...
Direct realists deny that there are sense-data. Your access to the tree is direct because you're not aware of some idea in the mind (sense-data), you'...
That's like saying only mathematicians bother with questions like Fermat's last theorem. Except that questions about whether we really perceive the re...
But they're not. One is talking about a simulation running inside your head by which you're indirectly aware of an external world. The other is talkin...
Maybe that's because we have no choice in the matter? I wake up tomorrow and declare it's a new day, but I still have to deal with the consequences of...
Wasn't Berkley responding to Locke & Hume? Also, discrepancies in perception are probably part of what motivated humans to start asking philosophical ...
The Cyrenaics on perceptual relativity, which they took to mean that we can only have knowledge of our perceptual awareness, and not what caused it. A...
I expressed it as "experiencing seeing mental images", which does happen in dreams, imagination, memory and hallucination. In a dream in particular, t...
Nah, if the problem of perception were trivially a misuse of words, it wouldn't have persisted for several millennia. Someone back in Ancient Greece, ...
Whether perception is direct or indirect via a mental intermediary. Dreams, hallucinations, etc bring up the possibility that perception involves an i...
I'm not advocating for dream skepticism, and I recognize that we can differentiate our kinds of experiences, such that we know when we have a percepti...
The problem is that my experience of a dream tree is similar to an experience of perceiving a tree. So while you can say we don't see or hear when we ...
I understand that. But how does philosophical pragmatism help with concerns raised by noting that dream or hallucination experiences can be like perce...
Breakthrough in Google's DeepMind: Last night it dreamed it was a butterfly, and then awoke, wondering if it was a butterfly dreaming. EDIT: Should su...
That has to be taken with a grain of salt, because it depends on how familiar a scientist is with the philosophical arguments. Sometimes a scientist w...
That's interesting. But that it can't answer why the word-tools work means that philosophical questions remain. Maybe Witty relegated that to the myst...
Yeah, sure. It's not. I just mentioned the Cyrenaics as an example of people who acted on their metaphysical conclusions. It's more similar to mathema...
The pragmatic differences is what led to the philosophical questions. We can all be pragmatic and ignore philosophy if we want. But some of us don't w...
It means that perception is experienced inside our minds, just like the case with dreams. Well, there was a philosophical school in Ancient Greece cal...
That's a really good answer, Apo. But direct realists would make an exception for veridical perception and say that it's one way information flow from...
The reason the language game answer doesn't work for this is because the difference between a dream tree and a perceived tree matters a great deal. If...
Well, what happens when a tree falls on you and no other orbs are around to experience it? Does your experience end? Let's say you didn't even notice ...
Ah, the infamous duck-rabbit. Banno would be proud. It's interesting, but the thing is if you had never heard of a rabbit before, and you saw one, you...
The worry is that if see a mental image while perceiving a tree, then how do we know there is a tree at all? It could be just like a dream tree. That ...
I don't have much control over seeing a tree. Maybe some drugs and meditative exercises would help me see it in some other manner? I would say percept...
Pun intended? The reason is because color is likely creature dependent, while shape is not. Shape is objective, and doesn't depend on the kind of eyes...
I don't know. What makes perception qualitatively different from other mental experiences? It is remarkable how much a dream seems like you're perceiv...
We're in our world, regardless of what the actual metaphysics are. Does the act of perceiving a tree make us aware of the same sort of thing as it wou...
It is simply stated as whether there is mental mediary we're aware of when perceiving an object. If no, then direct realism is the case. The arguments...
Because perception doesn't occur in dreams. If you want to attack direct realism with dreams, then you need to say the experience is the same, That's ...
I agree, but it never helps in these discussions when the result is endless semantic dispute because nobody ever agrees on how the terms should be use...
I didn't come up with the direct/indirect realism debate. No, we're talking about the perceived tree. Is it a mental image or not? That's what direct/...
Charleston's referencing of Marchesk is ideal*, but I'm real. I'm physically identical to myself, although not the label. * or perhaps not, shouldn't ...
There isn't. The equivalence would be functional. Someone could probably a hook a camera up to a physical artificial neural network, where the neurons...
Yeah, the binary code can be any statement that can be represented by 1s and 0s. So maybe the statement would be (in human terms): "There is a 94.57% ...
Here's a link to simple neural network tutorial using Python that explains the basics, if you're curious about how actual code works (for simple examp...
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