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Michael

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Perhaps, yes. Both direct and indirect realists are realists rather than subjective idealists because they believe that the existence and regularity a...
April 18, 2024 at 13:07
What is the source of the direct realist's confidence that the dot is caused by some unobservable entity?
April 18, 2024 at 13:01
We see colours. Colours are mental phenomena, perhaps reducible to activity in the primary visual cortex, often caused by light interacting with the e...
April 18, 2024 at 13:00
Both the direct and indirect realist infers the existence of some entity from some effect it is claimed to have caused. They just disagree on which ef...
April 18, 2024 at 12:54
The question is whether or not I directly perceive some distal object. That I directly perceive some aspect of the world (i.e. my mental phenomena) is...
April 18, 2024 at 12:43
If the direct realist can believe in the existence of unobservable entities like electrons and the Big Bang and in the veracity of a Geiger counter th...
April 18, 2024 at 12:35
I don't quite get what you're saying. Flat earthers assume that the Earth is flat, do experiments, and determine that the Earth is not flat. It's not ...
April 18, 2024 at 12:24
What exactly do you mean by "phenomenological character"? At the moment all you seem to be saying is that waking experiences are to dreams what a phot...
April 18, 2024 at 10:48
Correct.
April 18, 2024 at 08:28
I wouldn't say so. That scientific realism entails indirect realism is contingent on a posteriori facts, not a priori truths. Perhaps in some alternat...
April 18, 2024 at 08:04
Seeing a representation of a tree and seeing a tree are not mutually exclusive, exactly as feeling pain and feeling my hand burning are not mutually e...
April 18, 2024 at 07:31
I see things when I dream and the schizophrenic hears voices when hallucinating. Sensory organs are not involved. Seeing and hearing occurs when the v...
April 18, 2024 at 07:22
Those are the qualities of the experience, not the properties of the distal object. Experience exists within the brain. Distal objects exist outside t...
April 18, 2024 at 07:19
I addressed this in a previous comment. Firstly, if direct realism is true then scientific realism is true, and if scientific realism is true then dir...
April 17, 2024 at 23:13
The painting of some fictional landscape is identical with the painting – and identical to the paint itself. But the painting is still of something. S...
April 17, 2024 at 23:09
I’m with you. As I’ve repeatedly argued, all these “non-naive direct” or “non-indirect” realisms are just describing indirect realism but refusing to ...
April 17, 2024 at 22:53
Schizophrenics hear voices. I feel pain. As I’ve said before, arguing over the grammar of “I see X” is a confusion, precisely because as you say the t...
April 17, 2024 at 22:50
If you define "perception" as the body responding to external stimulation then this is a truism, but this isn't at all relevant to the debate between ...
April 17, 2024 at 16:34
That's not at all relevant. If my computer isn't plugged into the wall socket then it won't even start, but the operating system is to be found in the...
April 17, 2024 at 16:04
Bodies are required to keep brains alive and functioning, but conscious experience is to be found in the brain activity. When there's no (higher) brai...
April 17, 2024 at 15:36
We can say anything we like. That's a non sequitur. --- Of relevance is the anatomy of pain and suffering in the brain and its clinical implications: ...
April 17, 2024 at 14:23
Repeating yourself doesn't answer my question. You're just throwing in the word "directly" without any meaning or justification.
April 17, 2024 at 09:01
Which means what? What does it mean to be directly observed? Given that conscious experience exists within the brain and given that the properties of ...
April 17, 2024 at 08:58
Perception of distal objects is inference. Light from the sun travels to Earth, reflects off some object's surface, stimulates the sense receptors in ...
April 17, 2024 at 08:48
I may have been overly simplistic in my account but the point stands: I feel pain, pain is not a distal object/property but a mental/neurological phen...
April 17, 2024 at 08:27
The toe is the trigger. It's where the sense receptors are. But the sense receptors are not the pain. Pain occurs when the appropriate areas of the br...
April 17, 2024 at 08:20
We have direct perceptual knowledge of our body's response to stimulation. We have indirect perceptual knowledge of the distal objects that play a cau...
April 17, 2024 at 08:18
I didn't say that we don't have reliable knowledge, only that we don't have direct perceptual knowledge. Even the direct realist must admit that many ...
April 17, 2024 at 08:17
From a common neurobiology for pain and pleasure: /uploads/resized/files/ow/3bqi79bd8ysvic7s.png
April 16, 2024 at 19:33
I think that there are pain receptors in the toe, that these send signals to the brain, and then there is pain when the relevant areas in the brain ar...
April 16, 2024 at 19:03
The cognition. I believe it’s to be found in the prefrontal cortex, whereas pain is in the somatosensory cortex.
April 16, 2024 at 18:50
It is nonetheless the case that I see and hear things when I dream and hallucinate and that the things I see and hear when I dream and hallucinate are...
April 16, 2024 at 13:44
Do I see colours when I dream? Does the schizophrenic hear voices when hallucinating? I say "yes" to both. This is where you're getting confused by gr...
April 16, 2024 at 13:28
Okay. We have direct knowledge of colours, which are a mental phenomenon. Given that we have inferential – i.e. indirect – knowledge of the apple's ri...
April 16, 2024 at 13:17
Take the picture here. If indirect realism is true then if we remove the mental image then we have no knowledge of the distal object (or, to be more p...
April 16, 2024 at 13:14
Another picture that may prove helpful, with the lines representing some relevant causal connection. /uploads/resized/files/f9/amr0096dgaltgb9e.jpg
April 16, 2024 at 12:47
I know that I see the colour red. I know that in most humans seeing the colour red usually occurs when the eyes react to light with a wavelength of 70...
April 16, 2024 at 12:21
For example, we see colours. As per the Standard Model, colours are not a property of distal objects. Distal objects are just a collection of wave-par...
April 16, 2024 at 12:16
Are you suggesting that deaf and illiterate mutes don't see colours (or see everything to be the same colour)? I'm not entirely sure what you're tryin...
April 16, 2024 at 12:05
This is equivocation. There is "colour" as an object's surface disposition to reflect a certain wavelength of light and there is "colour" as the menta...
April 16, 2024 at 10:19
It would be interesting to hear what a human with his eyes replaced with those of a mantis shrimp (with their 12 channel colour vision compared to our...
April 16, 2024 at 09:32
It doesn't give me pause. Given that our eyes and brains are mostly similar, and given causal determinism, it stands to reason that the same kind of s...
April 16, 2024 at 09:31
I think you're overcomplicating it, being "bewitched by language" as Wittgenstein would put it. An apple reflects light with a wavelength of 700nm. Wh...
April 16, 2024 at 09:16
This appears to be equivocation. We use the term "colour" to refer to both the disposition to reflect a certain wavelength of light and to the mental ...
April 16, 2024 at 08:55
The epistemological problem of perception concerns whether or not perception provides us with direct knowledge of distal objects. One group claimed th...
April 16, 2024 at 08:41
I am saying that appearances are mental phenomena, often caused by the stimulation of some sense organ (dreams and hallucinations are the notable exce...
April 15, 2024 at 09:53
I don’t see how his account differs from indirect realism. Indirect realists simply claim that the thing we have direct knowledge of in perception is ...
April 14, 2024 at 12:01
Depends on the indirect realist. Some may believe that distal objects resemble our mental image, and so would replace the question mark with the Earth...
April 14, 2024 at 11:38
I think the issue is that people misleadingly think of this as being the distinction between direct and indirect realism: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/hs-jJ...
April 14, 2024 at 10:58
The indirect realist doesn’t claim that there are “appearances of appearances”. The indirect realist claims that a distal object's appearance is the i...
April 14, 2024 at 10:28