Who Perceives What?
The answer to this question seems obvious to my naive and common-sense realism, but I struggle to answer it for other theories. It seems to me that in order for any confidence in these theories to occur both the who and the what need to be instantiated. So I pose it to the philosophers.
At some level all perception is direct. For the direct realist, the man directly perceives a tree. X directly perceives Y.
For the indirect realist, though, something within the man (the mind, the brain, a little man) directly perceives something else within the man (sense data, representation, idea). But the boundaries between both X and Y are so unclear and amorphous that it could rather be the case that X is directly perceiving X.
Who perceives what? If we were to remove both those things from the man, both the perceiver and the perceived, place them on a table next to each other for observation, what would be there? Would there be one object or two? And could one be said to be perceiving the other?
At some level all perception is direct. For the direct realist, the man directly perceives a tree. X directly perceives Y.
For the indirect realist, though, something within the man (the mind, the brain, a little man) directly perceives something else within the man (sense data, representation, idea). But the boundaries between both X and Y are so unclear and amorphous that it could rather be the case that X is directly perceiving X.
Who perceives what? If we were to remove both those things from the man, both the perceiver and the perceived, place them on a table next to each other for observation, what would be there? Would there be one object or two? And could one be said to be perceiving the other?
Comments (585)
The indirect realist doesn't say that something inside the man perceives something else (but then you did say you'd come to expect straw-manning, so...)
The concern between direct and indirect realism is about properties, not naming conventions. So it's not about what gets to be called 'tree', it's about whether the properties of whatever we're going to call the perception are given by the external world (directly), or via the internal world (indirectly).
It's a given that external objects are what we're naming. When I use the word 'tree' in conversation, it cannot be a private reference to some model in my head, since the word would thereby have no public meaning. But at the same time, it cannot be argued that the properties of the external object somehow make their way into my actions toward it (speech, interaction, etc) completely untouched by internal mental action on them.
As such, it seems very hard to accept direct realism other than by assuming it relates only to the object of reference. But then it seems impossible to accept indirect realism by that definition.
Likewise it seem impossible to accept indirect realism other than by seeing it in terms of the the steps taken from the external cause to the internal cause of reciprocal action. But in that sense, direct realism is nonsense.
So the argument between them seems like another rather pointless one where each side makes the other look untenable by uncharitable definition... As you have done.
When looking at a green tree, does the Direct Realist directly perceive the colour green or directly perceive the wavelength 500nm ?
So what does the indirect realist perceive?
I suspect that he directly perceives all of the above, and everything else within his periphery.
The tree. As I said, it's not ab out the name we give to the object. Our naming practices are necessarily public and so necessarily external. Saying "prune that tree" cannot refer to an internal mental state. It want you to prune something in the external world, not my mental state.
No indirect realist is going to say that the object of "prune that tree" is an internal representation. so arguing that way is obviously missing the point.
What is 'directly' doing here? As opposed to what?
If I get a message from you, I could get it 'directly' (from you to me) or I could get it indirectly (via a third person). It is still the message I'm getting. The difference is the degree to which it may have been tampered with, the veracity...
So to claim 'directness' in the sense of 'no possibility of being tampered with', no stepwise progression, is clearly wrong. A cursory glance at the way perception works in the brain would show that.
Then who or what perceives the tree?
A person. When we use the expression "John saw a tree" we're clearly talking about a person and a tree. We're not saying "some part of John saw some other part of John". This is obvious from our expectation of the outcome of a sentence like "John, go and cut down that tree".
I know thats not what youre saying. I just want to know what John is directly perceiving to the indirect realist. If John is not directly perceiving the tree, what is it that he directly perceives?
Nothing. John does not 'directly' perceive anything because perception is not a direct process. In much the same way as the answer to the question "which messages do I directly receive through the telegram" would be "none - the telegram is not a direct messaging service".
It was my understanding that for indirect realism there is a perceptual intermediary between perceiver and perceived. If there is none then the distinction between direct and indirect realism is redundant.
EDIT: Is this a version of the 'extended mind' idea? Don't know. I should probably DuckDuckGo it.
Youre right. I also challenge them to instantiate who and what are the objects of this relationship.
Thats where Im at too.
In an optical illusion, a picture of a three-dimensional object is presented with gaps in it. The illusion is that viewers dont see the gaps. They fill them in. Where doesnt this filling-in come from? It comes from memory. A figure is drawn in the dirt. Someone sees it as a series of squiggly lines. Another sees it as a chinese word symbol. Would you agree the person seeing the image as a word is filling in from memory what is not actually being perceived from the world, similarly to the optical illusion? If I think I see a tree ahead of me , and on closer inspection it turns out to be something else, am I filling in from memory what I am not actually perceiving? The process involved in filling in would be a melding of information coming from the receptors and that coming from memory. Does that sound reasonable to you?
I don't know of any version of indirect realism which claims some 'other object' in the brain is what is being perceived.
The distinction is not though redundant. As I said, it's about the degree to which the various steps of the perception process make up the properties of the object.
I suspect a direct realist would like to say there is such a thing as a tree and it's 'correct' properties might be found out by the process of perception or not (if the process isn't working well).
A moderate indirect realist would prefer to say that the 'correct' properties of the object of perception are partially a social construct. I'm incorrect about my perception to the degree I don't conform to that. But partially related to some external constraints on what those object properties can be. (this is my position, by the way).
The more extreme indirect realist would want to say that the perceived object is entirely a dynamic and continually 'being formed' construct created as a collaboration between us and it (we interact with it, form ideas about it, impose those ideas on it etc).
In none of these cases (that I know of), is it claimed that the actual object about which the perception is the subject resides in the head.
Why do you think that?
I have no satisfying answer to the argument from illusion. But if perception is decidedly direct, it seems to me that any hallucination or illusion is the result of some act or reflex of the perceiver and not of the perceived. I dont think any of this precludes direct realism.
Yeah I assumed sense-data, ideas, representations, or whatever else is posited as a perceptual intermediary exists within the perceiver for the simple reason they cannot be found anywhere else. If you can suggest a better location Im all ears.
My point is that the filling in from memory that I associated with illusion is always operative when we perceive something. Perceptual psychologists tell us that most of what we see when we recognize objects is filled in from memory. What we actually take in though our sense receptors is very informationally impoverished.
Im staring at a flower pot right now and I fail to recognize any impoverishment in what I perceive, nor how memory is informing it. Ill look into it, though.
That seems to match my experience. How many times have I seen something and realized a second later that it was not the thing I thought I saw? Heaps. Anticipation and memory seemed to co-create what is in front of me.
Well there is your stepwise route. Perception is not a direct process. Whatever data is gathered from the external system is passed through several internal stages at each of which data other than from the (current) external state is allowed to modify the prediction of the external state used in, for example, speech about it, or interaction with it.
The process is not direct.
Interesting. The latter would be idealism, wouldn't it?
Quoting Isaac
It seems that the issue is where do we draw the line between indirect and the idea that 'materialism' is an illusion created by perception?
In my mind the internal stages are a part of the perceiver and thus mediated by him. I dont see why we need to include some other intermediary. If there is no intermediary the perception is direct.
I think so. Not my wheelhouse.
Quoting Tom Storm
Yes, that's right. I subscribe to a version of perception which is a kind of collaborative process of continual interaction between a system and the data points which lie outside that system. In one direction, the system tries to predict the external causes of its boundary states, in the other it tries to act upon those states to make them more closely match those predictions.
Such a model is predicated on there being actual external states, but not on them being of any fixed form.
Well, that's just wrong. If I hit your knee your lower leg will rise. The process is entirely internal. You don't 'mediate' it in any way whatsoever. It's happening in an exactly predictable and consistent manner no matter what you think of it.
You can't stand outside the act of cognition. Put another way, you can't cognise the cogniser. The act of cognition involves subjective and objective poles, but both of those poles arise as aspects of the conscious act. But framing the question the way you have introduces a kind of realist premise which is not commensurable with the kind of question you're asking, you're trying to treat 'the perceiver' as an object, which it never is.
Quoting Joshs
Notice this graphic from physicist John Wheeler's essay Law Without Law
This was in the context of the construction of scientific theory, but I think it can be generalised.
Anything internal is me, though. What else mediates it?
Really interesting. Do you believe that from this position there is a 'reality as it is in itself' or do you consider such a term incoherent - 'reality' being a constructivist process, dependent on a point of view for its meaning?
Depends what you mean by 'mediate'. Again, if you don't want to make a distinction between conscious mediation and subconscious mediation then the distinction between direct realism and indirect realism will be irrelevant. The distinction is very much about such a distinction.
The latter. I think what we call 'reality', or 'the world' is the construction. The external states are just a theorised cause of that reality, a model of how it might have come about.
I think it's a kind of category error to call the theorised external states 'reality'. After all, they themselves can, by this very theory, only be a prediction.
Im trying to distinguish between the perceiver and what he perceives. Perception is either mediated by the perceiver, and thus direct, or it is mediated by something else, thus indirect. I think this problem can be illuminated by answering the question, who perceives what?
What does the perceiver directly perceive? When I see a photo of a tree, I indirectly perceive the tree, but directly perceive the photo, for example.
I respect that, but it's a very deep question. I'm suggesting that the way you're going about it is in terms of trying to assume a perspective or point of view outside both perceiver and perceived. You're trying to imagine the issue in objective terms. But you can't do that, because you're inextricably part of the picture. To quote a hackneyed phrase by Max Planck, 'Science cannot solve the ultimate mystery of nature. And that is because, in the last analysis, we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve.'
The way I'm approaching it is through nondualism. It starts with a recognition of the fact that 'the eye cannot see itself'. Of course theres then a lot more too it, but its a very different mindset to that of the objective sciences, although it can be understood as being complementary to them. You find some of those in e.g. the consciousness conferences of David Chalmers et al.
Given how often we come back to this key conceptual frame there really ought to be a simple 'sticky' on it here. Many people find it hard to conceptualize. I got there through French thinker Michel Bitbol. It takes repetition and a speculative imagination.
Quoting Wayfarer
Which is a non-physicalist monism. Do you have a useful definition of reality that comes out of this model or do you think 'reality' is a vexed term?
I think Michel Bitbol is a good source - incidentally I found his writings through this forum. But also @Joshs has a lot of understanding of the phenomenological approach. Its not the same as the non-dual approach, but theres an emerging consensus, arising from the seminal book The Embodied Mind (Thomson Varela et al) which attempted to combine elements of both.
That's an important point I wasn't aware of.
Its true; I do assume that perspective because I can witness both perceiver and perceived from outside their relationship, and see only direct interaction. But I also assume it subjectively because I can find no intermediary between me and the rest of the world. Whether through thick-headedness or naïveté, I cannot pretend that that is not what is occurring and assume some other relationship.
Seems to me that commences with, and insists on, a division between perceiver and perceived. But your replies, Isaac, show this not to be the case. Quoting NOS4A2
If Isaac is right then such a distinction cannot, on close examination, be maintained. The Cartesian Theatre is an illusion.
Quoting Wayfarer
Seems to me that that is what a mirror is for. That is, once we see that "we ourselves are a part of the mystery that we are trying to solve" we might be able to take that into account, to make another iteration.
Quoting Isaac
I must take exception to the "just". The tree remains a tree, and even if it is a construct of our neural nets and shared grammar it is more than a mere "theory".
Neither - its through cultural conditioning.
Quoting Banno
You see a reflection of the eye in the mirror, but you do not see the act of seeing.
@Isaac sees the act of seeing in the scans of the neural networks he deals with. In the third, not the first, person.
Sure I do. I am seeing. I see myself. Therefore I see myself seeing.
If there is no distinction between perceiver and perceived then it seems to me indirect realism is redundant.
The discussion moved on in the eighties to a more formal (logical) play between realism and antirealism, where realists claim that sentences about the world are either true or they are false, and antirealists say that some sentences are neither true nor false. So a realist will say the tree has a trunk and three branches, even when no one is looking, and the antirealist will say that the sentence " the tree has a trunk and three branches" is neither true nor false when no one is looking.
The conversation has doubtless moved on since then.
Quoting NOS4A2
No youre not. Youre seeing an external image of an inner process. If you were in pain you would see your expression of pain in the mirror, but you wouldnt see the pain in the mirror.
Its moved on since Locke and Berkeley too. Then again I just read a book called The Case Against Reality by a prominent cognitive scientist utilizing much the same arguments. If analytic philosophers were able to think about anything other than words or sentences now and then, they might notice that it hasnt really moved on.
I have been conditioned to believe that the act of seeing and that which sees is the same thing. I can see my eyes at the same time I use my eyes to see. Seeing and pain are activities of the very same body that stands before the mirror.
There's a tendency amongst those of the neuro-scientific* persuasion to sell books by making claims along the lines of "reality is just a mental construction!". It's a good sales pitch, but bad thinking. Not that Hoffman is wrong, I haven't read what he actually says. But I very much doubt that he, a scientist, would be suggesting that there can be no true sentences about the world.
*...and quantum...
Yes, but from different perspectives, and here the matter of perspective is significant, surely. Nobody will say that an image of a grimacing face is the same as the first-person experience of pain, would they?
(Incidentally, I want to add a meta-philosophical point here. My own approach to this issue is very much a product of my own interest in counter-cultural philosophy which was in turn influenced by popular Eastern philosophy. So it is a different orientation to that of canonical Western philosophy. Within the context of counter-cultural philosophy, the separateness of knower and known is more than a matter for cognitive science - it represents the existential plight of individualism. It was this sense of isolation and existential angst which various counter-cultural movements intended to address. That pre-occupation is not nearly so obvious in canonical Western philosophy although it is addressed by various existentialist and phenomenological philosophers. Im saying this to try and bring out why these kinds of dialogues often result in participants talking past one another.)
I appreciate the background. Consider me a representative of the Charvaka school.
Youre right. No one would. But the pain is no doubt contingent on some physical aspect of the being that experiences it, and therefor that aspect is visible from both perspectives. Unfortunately the person does not have transparent skin and his eyes do not point inward, so it is no wonder he seeks anothers input.
That's a hard question to answer. I suppose it's partly because I'm a panpsychist, and I think that an experience happens when something undergoes a change (@unenlightened helped me with that idea a bit). Any act of perception involves a change to the perceiver's body (I'm taking that as a given - counter-examples are welcome if you can think of any), that change constitutes the perception in the most direct and visceral way. Of course we can then go on to model a world based on these, I don't doubt that. And then we talk about perceiving in its more usual sense, like me perceiving a tree, in which the perceiver is separate from and largely conceived to be independent of and unaffected by the object of perception - we build a model of the world that isn't the world. And out aquaintance with those objects, if they can be called objects, is mediated by this process of construction. Questions of consistency, illusions, object permanence and so on that bedevil various realisms are then reducible to how useful and accurate our models are. Not sure what that makes me really, apart from a wanker. Does this view have a name? I'm not totally convinced I'm right, but it seems the most coherent line to take to me at the moment.
Quoting NOS4A2
The mirror metaphor is apt here. The question of who perceives what presupposes that perception consists of a mirroring or representing of an outside by an inside. An alternative approach ditches the mirror metaphor in favor of a model of perception as knowledge-guided active sensory-motor exploration.
Imagine a team of engineers operating a remote-controlled underwater vessel exploring the remains of the Titanic, and imagine a villainous aquatic monster that has interfered with the control cable by mixing up the connections to and from the underwater cameras, sonar equipment, robot arms, actuators, and sensors. What appears on the many screens, lights, and dials, no longer makes any sense, and the actua-tors no longer have their usual functions. What can the en-gineers do to save the situation? By observing the structure of the changes on the control panel that occur when they press various buttons and levers, the engineers should be able to deduce which buttons control which kind of motion of the vehicle, and which lights correspond to information deriving from the sensors mounted outside the vessel, which indicators correspond to sensors on the vessel's ten-tacles, and so on.
There is an analogy to be drawn between this example and the situation faced by the brain. From the point of view of the brain, there is nothing that in itself differentiates ner-vous influx coming from retinal, haptic, proprioceptive, ol-factory, and other senses, and there is nothing to discrimi-nate motor neurons that are connected to extraocular muscles, skeletal muscles, or any other structures. Even if the size, the shape, the firing patterns, or the places where the neurons are localized in the cortex differ, this does not in itself confer them with any particular visual, olfactory, motor or other perceptual quality. On the other hand, what does differentiate vision from, say, audition or touch, is the structure of the rules governing the sensory changes produced by various motor actions, that is, what we call the sensorimotor contingencies governing visual exploration. (O'Regan & Noë: A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness)
The reason I wanted to conceptually remove the perceiver from the manin your example, the brainand place it on a table is to imagine if it can perceive.
The brain in a vat, for example, assumes the brain is a perceiver that can still perceive even if removed from the rest of the body, but then goes on to include in the scenario some sort of life-suspending liquid and electrical inputs, to act in the place of the body. In this I think they show that the rest of the body is required for perception to occur, but rather than admit it, they attempt to disguise it by replacing it with some synthetic organism.
But Ive seen real brains in vats and would be speaking nonsense if I said either of them still perceived. Brains cannot live, let alone perceive, on their own. So perception is an act of an organism, brains and all.
What if we considered this particular act of the organism, what we call perception, not as the act of representing external objects or stimuli, but the act of manipulating and changing an object, and anticipating the feedback from the changes we make in our environment. Then the necessity of a body would not be merely for keeping a brain alive, but for allowing it to physically move itself relative to objects , and move those objects relative to the embodied brain. This account of perception explains why it is that young animals deprived of the ability to manipulate objects in their environment dont develop normal perceptual capacities in spite of having normally functioning sensory receptors.
You've still not described what your 'direct' perception would look like. Looking at a tree, the light from it might be mediated by the atmospheric conditions, other light sources, partially blocking objects... is that now an 'indirect' observation? Because if so, then most observations are (being as we live in a crowded world). You seem to be wanting to ask simply "Does anything get in the way of light?" and make a philosophical question out of it.
Quoting NOS4A2
Again, if that's your definition of 'indirect' then I cannot for the life of me think why you're asking the question. You're asking if we're really looking at trees or at photos of them? You're asking if the world is a hologram of some other 'real' world?
If you're asking "is there something like a photo in the process of perception?", then yes. We could possibly say any of the stages in visual processing were 'like a photo' depending on how alike you'd need them to be to qualify. Just as the photons from the actual tree form a pattern on the photographic paper, the photons in perception form a pattern of excitement in the ganglia of the retina which the visual cortex then 'reads'. But then you've dismissed anything happening inside the body as not the object of your questions.
If you're saying "is there something like the photo, but outside of the human body?" then obviously not. It's a daft question, you can see that for yourself.
You seem to trying to make something out of nothing in the fact that the process of perception is stepwise, and then ignore the only interesting part of that discovery - which is the extent to which our expectations bias how we perceive.
My clumsy wording there.
Its important to recognize that this is not an ontological theory, its not claiming that there are really things called external states (or worse, that thereby trees and cars are not really real). It's a theory about process. It's answering the question of how we come to detect the world around us. What the method is - and how that method affects the end result - behaviour.
'External states' in this theory are data points, so nothing with any material existence. It's simply saying that if we conceive of a 'tree' as a series of points of data, how is it we come to perceive the tree from those data points. That's why I referred to external states as 'theoretical', because they're not yet accepted as part of our external world in the same way trees are. A bit like atomic theory before it was confirmed.
So yes, the tree is real. Has to be, or else nothing is. But we don't yet have a full picture of how it is we come to know there's a tree there, and that's what this model of perception is describing.
The slightly anti-realist angle to the theory (which some take much further than I do), is that if the model is correct and this is, indeed, how we know of the external 'tree', then we have to accept a good deal less consistency than we perhaps naively expected there to be. That if the model is correct, then our expectations (cultural and personal) play a larger part than we previously thought in what we do (speech, interaction, conception) with the signals we're getting from outside of ourselves.
For me, when modelling, there's no 'tree'. I don't even have a step in the process where there's a thing I could call a tree. It's just about signals and responses. One of those responses might be to form the word 'tree', or to act in such a way I'd personally recognise as responding to a tree, but in the model, there's no tree. It's just data>>response.
That's why I'm so enamoured of the anomalous monism idea you introduced me to. I think it really helps to make sense of the work I do (used to do), insofar as I don't need to ever find 'the tree' in the neurological process. It's not there. It's in our day-to-day world.
Quoting NOS4A2
Sunlight hits the leaves of a tree, wavelengths from the blue and red spectrum are absorbed by the Chlorophyll in the leaves and green, yellow and orange are reflected off the leaves towards our eyes. A wavelength of, say, 500nm then travels from the tree to our eyes, which we can then perceive as the colour green.
.
How is it possible to not only perceive the colour green but also to perceive the cause of our perception of the colour green, ie the wavelength of 500nm ?
Pretty good explanatory nutshell, right there.
In your first post youve already explained quite well where you think the issue lies, and Im satisfied by your definitions of direct and indirect realism: Its about whether the properties of whatever we're going to call the perception are given by the external world (directly), or via the internal world (indirectly).
The only difference between us here, I think, is when I write of perception I do not include the actions toward it (speech, interaction, etc), reciprocal action, like conversing about trees, which are no doubt given by the internal world. These to me are not acts of perception, though I suppose thats debatable. I am only speaking of raw, sensory experience, acts such as seeing, hearing, smelling, and so on.
I do not dismiss that anything happening inside the body as not the object of [my] questions, but I deny that anything happening in the body is the direct object of perception, the perceived. Rather, these are the actions of the body, the perciever.
Anyways, I hope that clarifies.
Quoting NOS4A2
Hallucinogenic chemicals modify the appearance of perceived objects in many ways; in terms of size, shape, color and degrees of movement or rest. They dont have this effect at the level of the sensory receptors but at deeper levels of processing in the brain. Manipulations of the receptors can decrease the amount of data received by the brain ( blurring, loss of peripheral vision, color-blindness, etc) but not qualitatively distort objects the way hallucinogens can. i suspect that the longer one remains under the effect of a hallucinogen , the greater the likelihood that ones visual system begins to correct the distortions.
I say this because research subjects who wear glasses which turn their visual field upside are able to see the visual field normally again while using the glasses for a certain period of time. The distortion of the visual field by the glasses takes place at the level of the receptors but the correction by the subjects perceptual system takes place at a deeper level of processing. If these deeper levels of processing have such power over what objects we see and how we see them, dont this suggest that perception is a model we construct of the world and test against it, rather than a direct reception of data?
My issue is that these models are nowhere to be found, so I am unable to say anything of the sort is constructed, at least until such models can be instantiated. The representational theory of perception, that we are constructing models of reality and viewing them, implies that something is viewing the representationbut again, this viewer needs to be instantiated. This is why I ask the indirect realist to reify this model and reify this little viewer so we that we can better understand their natures. What are these models? Who is viewing these models? Who perceives what?
Until then I would prefer to say that the perceiver is modified, for instance by ingesting hallucinogens. He sees things differently than he usually would because he himself is different than he usually would be. I think this approach would better describe the difference in character of phenomenological experience between veridical experience on the one hand, and illusions and hallucinations on the other. In other words, if we describe how the perceiver and not the perceived are different, well come to a better understanding of illusion and hallucination in general.
Direct realism argues we perceive the world directly.
A possible sequence is: sunlight travels from the sun to a tree and hits its leaves. Wavelengths between 415 and 740 nm are absorbed by the Chlorophyll in the leaves, and wavelengths between 520 and 625 nm are reflected off the leaves towards our eyes. Say a wavelength of 550 nm enters my eye. In my sense data is a patch of green, I perceive that I am looking at a green tree, and my cognition tells me to go towards it as there may be edible fruit on it.
Both the Indirect and Direct Realist would agree that we directly sense the colour green. However, it is impossible to directly know just from an effect the cause of that effect, although it may be possible to discover its cause indirectly. Therefore, it is impossible to directly know just from sensing the colour green its cause, although it may be possible to discover 550 nm as its cause indirectly.
For example, if a stationary 1kg object starts to move at 10 ms after being hit by another object, we know from the conservation of momentum that the mass * velocity of the hitting object was 10 kg m/s. However, there are an infinite number of possible combinations of m and v of the hitting object. This means that, even if we did know the mass and velocity of the object that was hit, we cannot directly know just from the behaviour of the hit object the m and v of the hitting object, although it may be possible to discover this information indirectly.
Therefore:
1) Just by knowing an effect, it is impossible to directly know its cause. Just from sensing the colour green, it is impossible to directly know that it was caused by a wavelength of 550 nm, although it may be possible to discover this information indirectly.
2) Similarly, it is impossible to directly know that the 550 nm was caused by a green tree.
3) Therefore, Direct Realism, which argues that from just knowing an effect we are directly able to know its cause, which is impossible, is not a valid position to take.
The direct and indirect realist differ in respect to what they directly perceive. For the direct realist, we directly perceive all thats in our periphery. For the indirect realist, we directly perceive some kind of sense data. So I doubt they would both agree that they directly sense the color green.
Im not sure a direct realist position entails the argument that just by knowing an effect we are directly able to know its cause. Would you explain?
Direct Realism requires backwards causation, which is impossible
There is a direction to causation, in that it is not the case that first there is an effect and later there is a cause. For example, first sunlight hits the leaves of a tree, then light travels from the leaf to our eyes which we can then sense as green. It is obviously not the case that we sense green, then light travels backwards from our eye to the leaf. There is a direction of causation as there is an arrow of time.
Causation also requires that there is a direction in which information flows. For example, I know that if I throw a stone at a window there will most likely be one possible effect, the glass will shatter. But if I see a shattered window, I cannot know which of several possible causes was the actual cause, a thrown stone, a broken branch or a flying bird. For the same reason, in just sensing the colour green, I cannot directly know its cause because of the fundamental direction of causation, and the direction of information flow within causation.
But on the other hand, when I sense the colour green I psychologically know beyond doubt that I am looking at a single event, a green tree. So how to explain this seeming paradox, that information has appeared to flow backwards through time, in that, given a single effect, my sensing green, I believe I know a single cause, a green tree, something that is impossible given the arrow of causation.
Direct Realism's solution to this seeming paradox is by equating the effect with the cause, in that, if the effect is sensing of the colour green, Direct Realism says that the cause is also the colour green. Given a single effect, Direct Realism gives a single cause that is identical with the effect. However, this is an illusion.
One of the arguments against Direct Realism is the problem of illusion, in that a stick half in water appears bent. However, this is a different kind of illusion to that of Direct Realism, the psychological illusion that the cause of an effect is identical with the effect, that when we sense the colour green its cause was also the colour green. Direct Realism is a psychological illusion, where the mind a priori believes that an effect, a sensation in the mind, such as sensing the colour green, is also the cause of that sensation, ie, seeing a green tree.
This is also a different argument to the argument that there can often be a long and complex causal sequence between an object and event and the perceiver. Many Direct Realists accept this fact, and still maintain that external physical objects or events can be immediate or direct objects of perception, which is a reasonable position. My argument is that Direct Realism is an illusion because it does not take into account the fundamental restrictions in the direction of information flow. There is an asymmetry in the direction of causation, in that causal indirectness inevitably results in cognitive indirectness.
The "arrow of time" linking causal interconnections is one aspect of Leibniz's Principle of Sufficient Reason, one of the four laws of thought, which states that everything must have a reason or a cause. Our normal understanding of causation is that we can only causally affect the future but not the past. In all cases of causation, the cause and the effect are placed in time such that the cause precedes its effect temporally, to such a degree that we intuitively have great difficulty imagining things otherwise. Whereas David Hume argued that causes are inferred from non-causal observations, Immanuel Kant claimed that people have innate assumptions about causes, and about the temporal ordering of events and "directionality" of time
In our example of sensing the colour green and seeing a green tree, Direct Realism is the position that the green tree is a necessary cause of sensing green, whereas Indirect Realism is the position that the green tree is only one sufficient cause of sensing green.
Direct Realism is an illusion because it equates the cause of an effect with the effect, in that it equates sensing the colour green with its cause, a green tree, which is impossible, as it would require backwards causation.
From my own standpoint, the necessary and sufficient cause of human perception is the human perceiver, and I would hold that the human perceiver is the beginning of every causal chain regarding human perception, including seeing green trees. Perhaps one can formulate a better causal chain from this starting point, whether green trees are sufficient/necessary conditions to seeing green trees, and so on. But the cause will no doubt precede any subsequent effect in your arrow of time.
But for now, from whom, and upon what, is this activity directed? is my central question to the indirect realist.
Suppose that if the perceiver is not perceiving something directly he is perceiving nothing. There must be something upon which the activity is directed.
For direct realism, the perceiver directly perceives the world, and thus we are able to distinguish between the perceiver and the things upon which he is directing this activity.
For the indirect realist, the perceiver directly perceives sense data, ideas, impressions, representations, models, sensationsinternal flora and fauna indistinguishable from the perceiver himselfleaving us no distinction between perceiver and perceived. So its like saying we perceive perceptions, we see seeings, or we feel feelings.
In order to answer the question of what we are directly perceiving, one must posit something that is not the perceiver to find it. Since indirect realism is unable to do so, indirect realism is redundant.
Lets clarify something here. What caused us to detected the green coming from the leaves of the tree. Well scientific theory teaches us that chlorophyll gives plants their green color because it does not absorb the green wavelengths of white light. This is a cause. In your example you are asking what causes a human being to sense green in reflected light. This cause is happening in the eye and brain. This cause occurs in the brain and is after the light striking the leaf.
But how does it follow that we do not perceive the external world as it really is. The leaf is green because it does not absorb the green wavelength. If it is not, what color is it? If you say there is no color, well OK feel free to define what it really is any way you like, maybe it will have some interesting utility for us.
[quote=Thomas Nagel, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion]Unless it is coupled with an independent basis for con fidence in reason, the evolutionary hypothesis is threatening rather than reassuring. It is consistent with continued confidence only if it amounts to the hypothesis that evolution has led to the existence of creatures, namely us, with a capacity for reasoning in whose validity we can have much stronger confidence than would be warranted merely from its having come into existence in that way. I have to be able to believe that the evolutionary explanation is consistent with the proposition that I follow the rules of logic because they are correct-not merely because I am biologically programmed to do so. But to believe that, I have to be justified independently in believing that they are correct. And this cannot be merely on the basis of my contingent psychol ogical disposition, together with the hypothesis that it is the product of natural selection. I can have no justification for trusting a reasoning capacity I have as a consequence of natural selection, unless I am justified in trusting it simply in itself believing what it tells me, in virtue of the content of the arguments it delivers. [/quote]
I think these debates ultimately come down to "what" physical properties are without an observer. What does it mean that charge, mass, energy is "objective"? What is a universe without any point of view? People insert themselves into the picture.. Often when we think of "a universe devoid of a point of view" we think of empty space, or images of planets with nothing else, or something like that. But that's not it either. "Events happening" with no epistemological element, is something we cannot compute.
I'll pose it to the forum, what are "objective properties"? What does that even mean in any coherent way without measurement, interpreters? Whence is the platform for these events? Are we saying space and time are the [s]interpreters[/s], epistemological frame of the events "objectively"?
@Joshs @RussellA @Tom Storm
I suspect an objective property is one that is public, available for anyone to measure. With this one neednt eliminate an observer.
What does "available" even mean in that context? "What" are these "things" availing themselves?
It means that anyone can observe the same properties if they were so inclined. These things would be the objects and systems we measure. Properties describe these things.
Nicely summarized. :up: I avoid strong metaphysical commitments by claiming a form of pragmatism. I don't need to know what or why just how. No matter what we belief about the nature of reality and being, as soon as we walk out the door we behave as naïve realists. At some level the games we can play with conceptual framing and language don't matter all that much.
Quoting Wayfarer
I think this also holds for the Young Liberals I have known.
Again, these are all category errors in the context I described:
Quoting schopenhauer1
You are doing what I was saying we tend to do- inserting ourselves in the picture. You are coming at it from a post-facto manner.
Sure, fair enough. But the question being asked here requires metaphysical positing, maybe not commitments, so that is what I am doing. Obviously, if you asked me about baking an apple pie, observing a tree sway in the wind, and the like, that would be different questions I would be asking :smile:.
I agree with you. Can we even talk about this subject without being hopelessly enmeshed in strictures of experience and our conceptual schemas?
Even language is a kind of sense that does not make actual contact with the things it is describing. Language's connection to reality seems as tenuous as that of visual perception.
goes for a lot of folks, don't make it right ;-)
Why would I leave ourselves out of the picture?
It's philosophy, and inherently messy subjects, so I say go for it. If you want to remain silent on any speculative thing, than do so, but I see us missing out without some speculative hypothesizing. I had a whole thread on this.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/13996/have-we-modern-culture-lost-the-art-of-speculation/p1
Because I think this will better elucidate your idea about direct realism.
You misunderstand me. I am asking how it is possible for us to build a robust case (the least 'messy' case possible) in this space. I am not saying that it shouldn't be done.
The perceiver is required in order to formulate any theory of perception. If I leave it out there is no perception. I only which to understand from indirect realism the point at which the perceiver ends and the perceived begins, and whether something lies between them.
Well, that's why you need to understand that question. Direct realism seems to me, to posit that we "objectively" see the thing "as it is in itself". What is something "in itself" though? A tree is the tree you see as a perceiver when there is no perceiver? Mind you, I'm not saying the tree doesn't exist without a perceiver. If you answer, "Well, no the tree isn't what an average human 'sees' when observing a tree", you have your answer- and it doesn't indicate direct realism. Sense data, goes through other layers of the brain, and creates something we have called a tree. Even if you (oddly) posited just "sense data" and no other layers involved (whatever that might mean), then there is still something there as a barrier to what is the tree in itself. It is its own "indirect".
I wouldnt posit any noumenon, personally. And I reject the view that sense data creates a tree because neither the perceiver nor the perceived can be instantiated, subjectively or objectively.
Direct realism is simply that we are seeing a tree. This need not entail that we apprehend all properties of the tree just by looking at it.
Who is arguing against this? So a tree exists, and we are seeing a tree. But that is not really the direct realism argument. Rather, it is positing whether we are seeing the tree in some non-representational way, that is to say, "as it is in its reality". I refer you back again to my previous posts.
Yes, were not viewing a representation of the tree. We need not include the thing in itself, which considers the tree independent of any perception of it. I refer you back to my previous posts.
I'm not introducing the "thing itself" in the "noumena" way. Rather, I am using it in the sense that we are perceiving the tree exactly as it is in reality. What do you think it is that is "directly" perceived? If you say the "tree", then that is the very thing being disputed. Is the tree in reality how we perceive it? Otherwise, this debate makes no sense to me. What is the content that you are debating? We see a tree is not the issue. Rather, whether epistemologically what we are seeing corresponds to what is the case (what is external). Otherwise, it would be an argument of circular nonsense or just one without any impetus (we see a tree).
Perhaps youre a naive realist. Suppose the following image is accurate.
Which tree do we perceive? And who is perceiving that tree?
Yes, this another way of saying what I am asking, which is why I'm perplexed at your objection. The naive/direct realist believes the perceiver is perceiving the tree exactly as it is, without any "indirectness" (mediation/interpretation), and I am refuting thus. I am saying that, unless you think that the tree is exactly as we perceive it in "reality", then direct realism is false. The tree can only be thus interpreted by the human subject. It is a tree "for us".
I see no other way of looking at it, because if you ask, "No what I am asking is if we 'distort' the tree in any way", this STILL automatically implies that the question is, "Are we seeing the tree for how it is in reality, or not". Otherwise, you get circular arguments such as, "Are we seeing what we really see?". That makes no sense. Rather, it is, "Are what we seeing, what is corresponding to what is there (in "reality"/externally)?"
I still dont know why wed add the qualifier exactly as it is. Do you believe we are viewing the trees exactly as they are not?
That is why I have to bring in metaphysics, I am sorry. Humans bring an interpretive point of view. Do you believe there was a time without humans, or a possibility of a no human universe? If you are not a solipsist or brand of idealist, I am sure you will answer, "yes, of course". There is a tree that exists without human interpretation. What direct realism seems to indicate is, humans have direct access to that view, as if humans are like the "eyes and ears" of the universe itself. But I am sure you don't believe that either, that the tree can have qualities, and properties that are not how it is perceived by humans. But humans have their own schema, that creates for us what we usually think of as how a tree is perceived.
No problem at all. Yeah, Im not sure how one can have direct access to a world that does not exist. Im concerned strictly with the tree as it is perceived by human beings, though.
He doesn't like terms like "actually out there". He only cares what we perceive, but it is exactly the fact that direct realism posits that what we perceive is "actually out there" that is the question at hand. But then he keeps not wanting that to be the case!
It's been interesting to read.
Ok, I thought I was crazy. I looked back at the previous conversations, and it seems like he is asking a basically empirical question: "How is it that what I think is immediately correct about the world is but just a representational component of mind?". Well, that's like saying, "The computer screen is displaying everything without any computation occurring to make it so". That seems wrong, even on the face of it. Besides the fact that, I don't think that idea is really "direct realism" so much as naive computationalism, or something of that sort.
Then he's talking about something else and latched onto the nearest object so to speak.
Ha, perhaps so!
He's in a high level domain where one's mind and the thoughts its thinking can't be adequately distinguished; stuff like what he's going through is part of the territory.
Again, I think an empirical question. We know for example, that the brain has various ways of integrating information from sensory information. Humans develop over time from fetuses, and all that pretty standard stuff.
That is what we all agree is the case. I don't see a problem/issue except that it's what it is.
I want to know the answer to the question Who perceives what? For the indirect realist. I want to see if we can examine these objects and their natures.
It seems like you are simply getting at the hard problem of consciousness, which is probably where @bert1 is coming at it, if I remember, as he (if memory recalls) is a kind of panpsychist. So the idea from a panpsychist would be that there is an internal aspect to the physical.
But getting back to your question, what do you mean by "Who perceives what"? As others explained, it is basically inputs integrating information and various neural networks doing what it is they do, when they come across these inputs through sensory apparatuses. Light shines on the retina, fires the optical nerve, causing a whole bunch of neurons to go through a series of networks moving up cortical layers and subcortical layers, etc.
I know how the biology works. The question can be answered in the form X perceives Y.
You are a human. Humans are comprised of various sensory organs that are wired to a central processing called the brain. This brain processes the data coming in from the sensory organs called stimuli. That is your detailed version of X perceives Y. In colloquial terms, we say a "person perceives a tree".
Right, thats how naive realism would say it. How would an indirect realist say it?
You are playing around with definitions. A naive realist would say that what the person is perceiving is "really" the tree as it is, without any interpretation... But I just gave you the fact that the brain is doing stuff (that is the interpretation), so it is indirectly accessing the tree, as it filters through that process.. which by the way, if I haven't stated it, is a human process.
Quoting Schopenhauer0
Indeed. And in this argument it might be posited that via this 'human process' is built-in neuro-cognitive schema that impose what we think is reality upon the external world - in the Kantian sense, I guess, that time and space may not have a reality outside of human experience and are part of our sense making apparatus, etc.
This can all get highly complex when you add in intentional states and the work of direct realists like Putnam and Searle - none of whom I understand very well.
Then of course there is idealism, which would dissolve the entire problem of realism/antirealism and claim that while what we see is 'real' it is not what we think. Reality is the the product of consciousness and matter (trees, etc) is merely what consciousness looks like when seen from a particular perspective of mentation. This debate about realism is a kind of dress rehearsal for the mind body problem.
All this of course ends up in metaphysics or ontology... or both.
[quote= Qingyuan Weixin]Before I had studied Chan [Zen] for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and rivers as rivers. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers. But now that I have got its very substance I am at rest. For its just that I see mountains once again as mountains, and rivers once again as rivers.[/quote]
(I assume as a matter of course that all here are at the 'before' stage, myself included of course.)
But there is only one tree in that picture.
Is the brain perceiving the process, then?
Exactly.
There's something very archetypal about that formulation: the quotidian/the higher awareness/the quotidian And comforting...
However, I can also understand your proposition as referring to your frame of reference rather than mine. In which case, the number of trees depends upon the general consideration as to whether the reference of a proposition is taken to be relative to perspective.
If I interpret you as referring to either mine or to your frame of reference but not both, then it remains true that "there is one tree that stands before us", however it is semantically indeterminate as to which tree (i.e. which perspective) is being referred to the proposition.
On the other hand, if the reference of this proposition is considered to entail both perspectives then it is no longer the case that we can say that there exists only one tree, for there are two distinct perspectives.
My memory is that you would have no truck with the idea of a tree 'as it is in itself', finding this qualifier redundant.
Do you agree with Searle's account of 'the bad argument' as being a key fallacy driving these sorts of discussions that inevitable end up talking about visual illusions, etc?
Is there a fallacy found in that we are not seeing the seeing, the visual experience?
What do you say to the person who asserts that when a human regards an object, that object is to a greater or lesser extent created in the experience of perception, which brings with it anticipatory notions and memories, along with a particular cognitive apparatus which sees colours and other attributes which are present in the experience of looking but not in the object being seen. I've never known where one can stop with this (idealism I guess) and why it matters, except as a problematic foundational argument for a particular ontological position.
Quoting Richard B
A wavelength does not have an inherent colour, though any set of wavelengths can be given the name of a colour. The wavelength between 570 and 500 nm has been named "green", though it equally well have been named "vert".
A machine may be programmed such that if its input is 570 to 500nm its output is "green", though it could equally well have been programmed such that if its input was 530 to 420 nm its output was "xyz".
Rather than say " The leaf is green because it does not absorb the green wavelength", one could also correctly say "the machine gives the output green because its input was between 570 and 500nm due to that being the wavelength the leaf did not absorb".
As regards language, I would say that the machine is able to sense a wavelength but is not able to perceive it.
Well, the core of the bad argument is pretty much what was done with 's picture: the supposition that there is more than one tree in the picture. Seems was making a joke.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Nuh. Direct realism is where what we talk about is the tree, not the image of the tree or some other philosophical supposition.
I would have thought that was botany. Or forestry.
Same thing bro.
Also,
[quote=Wiki] In philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind, naïve realism (also known as direct realism, perceptual realism, or common sense realism) is the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are.[/quote]
And thats my point. What true here mean? See my reply to @Banno.
Yes indeed, much different conception from Mr. Schop and one I like to delve into but so far in this discussion keeping it mild by just starting with indirect realism
The brain is a conglomeration of processes which, working together is the perceiving.
All that picture does is demonstrate the mechanics of human vision, from which the answer to that question is impossible, insofar as both forms of realism must accept that physiology.
Remove the word tree, then ask where and when the warrant for putting anything in its place, comes from.
Now let the games begin.
The argument is that as the Indirect Realist directly perceives sense data, this leaves no distinction between perceiver and perceived, meaning that the Indirect Realist would be unable to perceive any external world. However the same argument would apply also to the Direct Realist, who also directly perceives sense data, but claiming that sense data is veridical and coincides with reality.
Sense data exists in the mind and is perceived by the mind. If Direct Realism is able to transcend its perception of sense data to the objects in the world that are its cause, then similarly so could Indirect Realism.
For the Direct Realist:
1) We directly perceive sense data
2) There is an external world
3) Sense data is caused by the external world
4) We directly engage with objects in the world using the perceptual intermediary of sense data.
For the Indirect Realist:
1) We directly perceive sense data.
2) There is an an external world
3) Sense data is caused by the external world
4) We indirectly engage with objects in the world using the perceptual intermediary of sense data.
5) From these sense data we construct an internal representation of objects in the world
6) There is a direct causal link from objects in the world, to our sense data and to our perception of these sense data.
7) The fact there is a direct causal link from object in the world to our perception of it in the mind does not mean that we can necessarily have direct knowledge of what is in the world. For example, from the fact that there is a storm, the wind blows, a tree sways, a branch hits a window and the glass breaks it does not follow that when we see broken glass we know the cause was a storm. There is a direction of causation from storm to broken glass. Knowledge of backward causation from broken glass to storm is not possible.
Good
But, is this direct or indirect realism really? Direct realism I would say is about knowledge of the world, not mechanism of the knowledge. The mechanism is agnostic (sense data, or Y or Z). All that a statement needs to fall under the class direct realism, is that the mind is perceiving an exact replica of what the tree is externally, in the world.
An indirect realist might also use the sense data mechanism, but as long as that sense data is in some way changing the tree into its own schema of that tree, it is indirect.
Of course sense data alone is too basic in both cases but its just an example of how that can remain constant and the argument doesnt change for either.
I agree that in one sense the Direct Realist is looking at a tree in the world , not at the sense data in the mind. They are "looking through" the sense data to the tree on the other side of it, as one looks through a window to the world outside.
However, if someone somehow removed the sense data from the brain of the Direct Realist, they wouldn't be able to see the tree.
In another sense, the Direct Realist is directly looking at something that is at the same time both sense data and a tree. This could be part of the argument against Direct Realism, in that the Direct Realist is perceiving something which is in fact sense data although they think it is a tree, ie, a psychological illusion.
:up: Yeah this sounds like a good synthesis of the landscape.
I think the bigger picture is not the epistemology but the metaphysics. What are "physical properties" really? How do physical properties obtain without a perceiver? What is an event without an perceiver? Is it space-time that becomes the placeholder for the event to obtain? Here comes idealism creeping in slowly...
Scenario one
I just perceive the colour green. As anything could have caused it, this is an argument against Direct Realism which is the position that its cause would be known.
Scenario two
Over the recent past I had seen a tree and perceived the colour green. Today, I just perceive the colour green. I infer that the cause of my perception of green is a tree, but as inferences may be wrong, my knowledge that the cause is a tree can only be indirect. Another argument against Direct Realism which is the position that its cause would be known.
Scenario three
I see light from the sun hitting the leaves of a tree, green light is reflected and enters my eye which I perceive as green. I know the causal chain that started at the sun and ends up with my perception of green. But each stage in the causal chain has the same problem: I perceive white, how do I know that it was caused by the sun, I perceive green, how do I know it was caused by the leaves. If the question is, when I perceive a green tree how do I know it was caused by a green tree, the fact that there are many stages in a causal chain doesn't ensure a solution if each stage suffers from the same problem, how do I know what caused my perception.
The problem of knowing the cause of my perception of the colour green is the same problem as how I know the cause of the broken window seen on my walk into work. Causation is directional from the sun to my perception of green. Backwards causation is impossible. Even though one knows the final stage of a causal chain, it would be impossible to discover how the chain was initiated, in that for each effect there will be several possible causes.
And yet one "knows" that the green tree I perceive in my mind was caused by a green tree in the world. The mind must equate effect with cause. If I perceive green the cause was green, if I perceive a tree the cause was a tree, if I perceive a green tree the cause was a green tree.
For the mind, it seems to me, it is not that we directly attend to objects in the world that are independent of us, as in Direct Realism, rather we directly attend to our sense data which we equate with what exists in the world, as in Indirect Realism.
But there are more organs and more biology involved in perceiving.
Anything that is the mechanics of human vision is itself the perceiving, and not the perceived. If indirect realism accepts this it is redundant.
I can discover in the world several shapes that are square at the top and round at the base.
I can invent the physical property "squund", which is a shape that is square at the top and round at its base. As a property is a concept, it cannot exist in the world. Although there may be particular instantiations of the property squund in the world, an instantiation of a property is not a property.
Therefore, physical properties cannot obtain without a perceiver.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Unperceived.
Quoting schopenhauer1
There's nothing else apart from space-time that could be a placeholder.
Let's say I work at the hadron collider institute in Geneva, using the sophisticated machinery I witness subatomic particles interact at the smallest fractions of time. I go outside and encounter an ancient carving on a stone never before seen. Then I look up into the clear night sky and witness the light of a thousand stars streaming into my eyes.
What is the scope of my observations in the past hour?
I've observed information from the most minute, brief moments of the present, I've observed information from ancient humans carved on stone, and I've observed information millions of light years old coming from the stars, the great beyond.
My scope of of awareness here spans eons. I am observing both the immediate quantum interactions and space at large and everything in between.
Where does my awareness end and external unobserved information begin? This dynamic changes constantly.
The sphere of awareness is not fixed but always changing. But it all takes place in a self referential timeframe of "my present" not the present moment from which the any of the above outlined information originated. As info takes time to travel distance.
These are some examples of the Interplay between time and awareness. I don't know if this is useful to your inquiry but its one line of thinking for you to consider.
Yep, sure are. And by me adding this to the equation, what exactly would that be adding to the problem? We already have X brain and sensory components I mentioned, add more, and what changes? We already have various filters I have mentioned.
First, my response would be, "I perceive trees", "I perceive green leaves", etc. Second, I would not say, "I perceive sense data of trees, green leave" etc. Second, I am not sure if I would use the word "create" unless this means we came up with the word "green" to communicate with our fellow humans about a particular color. Additionally, I think indirect realism and direct realism share a similar problem in that these positions can be concerned with arguing about objects "as they really are". For example, just take these two definitions:
1. direct realism: the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are.
2. indirect realism: the idea that we do not perceive the external world as it really is, but know only our ideas of the way the world is
To say, "I directly perceive the tree" sounds redundant to "I perceive the tree", unless you want to set up the comparison with "I indirectly perceive the tree in a mirror." But to say only say "I directly perceive a tree as it really is" seems to have go down the path of philosophical confusion. Could you give it meaning? I suppose you could, and maybe if there is enough agreement in judgment your got agreement in the form of life, for example, scientific theory of color.
Lastly, if what you say, "what is out there in reality is...", means just that our current scientific theory says the color "green" has a particular wavelength and we can talk about the color "green" with each other, OK I am good with that.
I will leave you with what Wittgenstein say in Philosophical investigations, "'So you are saying that human agreement decides what is true and what is false?' It is what human beings say that is true and false; and they agree in the language they use. That is not agreement in opinions but in form of life."
Everything standing in the way of our direct perception disappears. There is nothing between perceiver and perceived.
Can you elaborate on this, defining instantiation here, and property and why one instantiation of property is not property? I may agree, but just want to see if I understand your thought here first.
Quoting RussellA
That really doesn't help though. That is simply rephrasing the problem, "What is an event that is unperceived" then?
Quoting RussellA
But I guess, what does that even mean for space and time to be a placeholder for an event sans perceiver?
How is that related conclusion occurring by adding more biological components (or any at all)? You are simply restating a claim and then not refuting the counterargument (the components of the body are configuring the tree for the person seeing it).
Neither your configured tree or your perceiver can be instantiated. You are beginning to speak of things that either do not exist or do not perceive.
Not getting what you are saying other than (unintentionally) vague allusions to Idealist arguments (the tree is just and idea and not external, etc.).
I want to know what perceives and what is it perceiving. The only thing I can glean from your posts is that the brain is viewing a configured tree.
Correct, according to the current scientific account- the perceiver is the culmination of various brain and body processes. This collection when discussing the question, "What is it that is perceiving X", is the proper locus for what can be called "the perceiver". In general human parlance, this is often called "perception" or other cognitive psychological placeholder term.
What is configured is the qualia, and conceptual associations that go along with said brain processes. I mean, if we want to venture into the mind-body problem, be my guest. I've done it on this forum many times, and I'm often the one contrary to the typical materialists, so make my day. But, before you jump to the "hard problem", I would like to at least recognize that there are indeed "easy problems", which you seem to be dismissing.
Another word for a collection of human organs and processes is a human being. This is the perceiver and can be confirmed to perceive. Any thing less, for instance a subset of organs, cannot be said to perceive. Human perceivers also digest, metabolize, breathe, and grow hair.
For these reasons it cannot be said that brains perceive. And since our eyes point outwards, it cannot be said we view are perceiving brain phenomena, whether we call them processes, configurations, qualia.
Yep, and that was what I was getting at.. one of the colloquial terms, aye. Don't play word games. For once Witty may be right when it comes to this kind of argument. None of this refutes what I said if you read it with charity. You went right for "brain processes" and then said, "Ah, can't be that as there is more to the human than that!". Well, duh, hence my emphasis on "collection of processes" and "colloquial terms" (aka human being). That doesn't negate the fact that indeed those processes are all part of the package of the human being (even if they don't exhaust it. Nor have I ever claimed that.
Quoting NOS4A2
Eyes point outward is also word games. The information is still thus processed and interpreted thus. A dead person's eyeballs are also pointed outward, so?
Great. So we agree on the who. Lets see if we can discover the what.
If youre not using eyes, how are you witness to the end result of this processed and interpreted information?
So you bring up the Cartesian Theater problem, something I've discussed often. This is simply Hard Problem stuff. Have we moved to this topic?
Before we do, going back here- the question of indirect/direct realism is whether the we are perceiving exactly as reality is externally. That is to say, that there is a 1-to-1 correspondence between what is external and what is perceived. Indirect would say that the brain, due to its processing and evolutionary biology, can only ever interpret and reconfigure what is external.
Although I think Dennett is wrong about his overall theory of consciousness, he does have some neat little examples of how the mind reinterprets and edits the world (though again, these are the easy problems which he thus reifies in a way as the hard problem and thus negates it as a problem which is a move too far in my estimate).
Also, again, moving to idealism (even further from indirect realism), we can even question "what" it means for a quality or property (primary or otherwise) to be instantiated in something without a perceiver.
One of the strengths that folk ascribe to this idea that we "directly perceive sense data" is the certainty that they can not be in error. This is the great appeal. However, I don't believe that the veracity of this idea can be proven, and the idea itself incoherent.
1. We all would agree that the truth that we "directly perceive sense data" cannot be verified by anyone because the idea presupposes that sense data is private, inaccessible for anyone to verify.
2. As for the coherency of this idea that you can not be in error, for example, if the sense data is "green" I cannot be in error that it is "green" because I directly perceive that it is "green". Let's take look at this example: the subject of a test is given an object and is asked what is the color of the object. The subject responds "my sense data I perceive is red". All the scientists in the room look at each other with concern. They ask the subject to repeat, and the subject says the same thing "my sense data I perceive is red". The scientists in the room look puzzled because they showed the subject a green object. To verify, they test the object for color and their instrument detects the color "green". What this shows is that what we will appeal to in order to determine if we are in error or not is not our sense data, which was supposedly unquestionable, but humans, in general, on what they agree in calling something "green" and judging that in fact it is a "green" object.
It inevitably heads in the direction of a homunculus argument, which fails. It tries to account for phenomena in terms of the very phenomenon that it is supposed to explain.
The only way out of this, I think, is to say that interpreting and configuring reality are acts of perceiving, and abandon the idea that these interpretations and configurations of reality are the objects of perception. But then again, that would imply direct realism, making indirect realism redundant.
If direct realism is saying we are perceiving reality as it is, then indirect realism is perceiving reality exactly as it isnt. But these qualifiers are essentially nonsensical and unnecessary. Though the problem of the external world is related to the problem of perception, I am speaking strictly of the problem of perception.
1. The transformation from sensory media (light, sound waves, chemicals) into nerve signals.
2: The transformation or interpretation of nerve signals into the abstract, fictive qualities of experience (colors, sounds, smells).
This double transformation is the precondition of perception and rules out direct realism.
To answer your question, you perceive the tree. But to perceive entails the above two transformations.
The mechanics of any human sensory device makes the perceiving possible, being necessary but not sufficient for it, in accordance with their design alone.
Quoting NOS4A2
Obviously, hence trivially correct.
Quoting NOS4A2
Redundancy is moot, insofar as the proper indirect realist accepts as given, that the mechanics is neither the perceiving nor the perceived. The former belongs strictly to agency, the latter belongs strictly to that which affects agency.
If sensation is removed, as output of sensory devices, and all else being undisturbed, is it rational to say perceiving remains intact?
There is no version of direct realism that Im aware of that would deny these. A major type of direct realism is distinguished by its claim that we perceive trees, not representations of treesnot that perception isnt a transformative process.
That said, while I couldnt resist making that point, Ive come to think that this whole debate tends to go wrong from the start, that the direct-indirect dichotomy is unhelpful.
We perceive directly.
Perception is a transformative process.
How can these be consistent?
It is reasonable to treat the mental act of categorization as part of the perception. It is also reasonable to distinguish it from the perception.
A clue: when you fly directly from London to Istanbul, it doesnt mean you dont have to get on a plane and move through the sky to get there. It means you dont stop anywhere on the way.
EDIT: if that seemed unnecessarily rude or curt, its because you failed to observe the principle of charity, and I found this rather annoying. It should be obvious that direct realists cannot possibly mean what you take them to mean.
I think it falls under the heading of 'apperception': how the mind organises incoming data into categories and reacts to it.
"Act of the mind by which it becomes conscious of its ideas as its own (1876) is from German Apperzeption, coined by Leibniz (1646-1716) as noun corresponding to French apercevoir "perceive, notice, become aware of" on analogy of Perzeption/percevoir."
Quoting Richard B
Move over post-modernism. For those who wish to understand perception and the nature of the real, I suspect this approach is unlikely to satisfy.
Most of our problems in philosophy seem to stem from 'as they really are'.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/328147585_The_Philosophy_of_Perception_and_the_Bad_Argument_Sprachtheoretische_und_interdisziplinare_Aspekte_einer_brisanten_Alternative
Yep, for some, finding an answer to the the question is more satisfying, than accepting the question is nonsense or confused and so there is no answer.
I literally wrote about this several times before regarding the hard problem.
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/102760
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/417503
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/194285
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/305002
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/416211
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/106635
https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/470051
So you are a little late to the game, NOS!
Quoting NOS4A2
This part, I don't get why that conclusion must result. I am missing your explanation here. Cartesian theater, thus indirect idealism false, seems odd to me.
I've been watching, but I wasn't much interested in joining in. The progress here was predictable, with those who reject realism insisting on expounding a version of it that is not held by those who more or less agree with it.
The strange constituency of this forum might have you think there is a great philosophical debate between direct realism and idealism. It ain't so. Overwhelmingly, philosophers, like the general population, will if asked say that they are realists (80% in the PhilPapers survey, with idealism garnering less than 6%. Yes, we don't do philosophy via polls and it's a survey of English-speaking philosophers and so on, but that's a level of agreement which is for philosophers pretty much unheard of.)
Quoting Tom Storm
I'm fond of Austin's take-down of sense-data accounts. Searle extends and renovates Austin's basic intuition that when we talk about, say, a tree or a kettle, it is the tree or the kettle we are discussing and not something like our perceptions or mental images or whatever. When one says the tree has leaves, that's about the tree, not anything else.
Quoting Tom Storm
Most assuredly.
Quoting Tom Storm
Sure. For those interested in doing some actual thinking about the issue, a sample can be found at The Philosophy of Perception and the Bad Argument. Variations of the bad argument have already been used in this thread, but perhaps Searle sets out the logic more clearly (@Isaac has previously set out much the same refutation in terms of Markov Blankets).
To be sure, there are issues in Searle's account of perception, but these take place within the framework of realism.
Quoting Tom Storm
My diagnosis is that hereabouts - that is, on this forum - there are folk who begin by dividing things into a private world and a public world. They sometimes phrase this as internal vs external, or object vs subject, first person vs third person, and so on. They then proceed to conclude that there are two worlds, or to collapse the whole of the "external" world to some internal characteristic - the will, for example. they think they have presented an argument for one of the varieties of idealism when all they have done is to assume idealism.
Quoting Tom Storm
Well, sure, when you look at a tree, there are various physiological and psychological processes that go along with seeing the tree. Nevertheless, there is a tree. It's the tree that either does or does not have leaves, regardless of our perceptions and representations.
No one is saying it doesn't on the indirect realism side.
Direct vs. indirect realism becomes about whatever the caller wants apparently. Direct realism thinks there is basically an immediate access to the tree without any interpretation.
Being that it is realism debating realism, it is about how veridical this "window" into the tree is.
The transformations you listed are transformations of the perceiver, not the perceived. Until perceivers no longer have nerves and nerve signals, it cannot be said that these are transformations of anything else, let alone forms or sense datum.
Sure, it's complex. And you? Do you think that there is indeed a tree with leaves? Is there something about your view that opposes it to direct realism, or perhaps even realism? What?
Exactly right, the tree transforms the light that reflects off it, which transforms the chemical activity of the light receptors, which transforms electrical activity in the nervous system, which transforms subjective experience.
What exactly about this process is "direct"?
Exactly as I would have predicted. Allied to some version of naturalism and/or physicalism. It's the zeitgeist.
Before I get to my view, I'd like to defend indirect realism, at least as it opposes direct realism. I think Dennett does have good evidence when discussing this case (not his overall theory of consciousness, however, which denies and ignores the problem at hand- the hard problem).
Some examples he gives:
-Our mind "fills in gaps" with things like patterns (checkerboards, two-faced pictures, etc).
-Optical illusions, like the one that shows two lines of equal length, but one line appears longer than the other because of the arrangement of the arrows on the ends of the lines.
-The variability of sensory perception amongst different people or the same person at a different timeframe.
- Attention shapes how an object is recognized. If we have the intention of finding something, that object becomes more apparent to us than if not.
But, besides these examples, the fact that at the end of the day, the "result" is based on electrical impulses and chemical information transfer, means that there is a "filter" of the various processes themselves that inevitably affect the result, and makes it "not just a copy" of the input. The medium matters, the image is not being psychically passed but rather, computed via neural networking via chemical and electrical integration points.
Again, I'm totally taking the role of an indirect realist here.
I didn't reply to your post, and I should have. I see the difficulty in expressing these ideas without appearing to give solace to metaphysical notions of idealism. In the Searle article cited elsewhere, he says "In the sense in which I see the tree, I do not see a sense datum". This strikes me as the converse of what you say here:
Quoting Isaac
We've two ways of talking, one involving trees, the other - and here my expression will be loose - some sort of nested Markov Blankets setting out the relations between physical systems. And neither of these is complete, neither contains the other, and they do not, cannot, stand contrary to each other. Hence anomalous monism, or some variation thereof.
Cheers.
There is no mitigating factor or intermediary between perceiver and perceived, therefor the perception is not indirect. The contact between perceiver and perceived is direct, therefor his perception of the perceived is direct.
I'm not surprised.
Quoting Wayfarer
Demonstrably, @Isaac and his friends do stand outside of the act of cognition, looking in. If you start by dividing a thing in twain, you ought not be surprised that you have two pieces.
But we have
Quoting Wayfarer
to my
Quoting Banno
So there must be more to be said.
And your response to other things from last post (the ones that pertain to the arguments being made in this thread)?
A decision moves a hand intentionally, as we are capable of intentional action, and intoxication affects your judgement and also your motor skills.
Quoting Banno
And that is cognitive science. It is an adjoining discipline, but not the same as philosophical analysis, although I do note a (recent?) element of circumspection in Isaac's posts.
(There is incidentally a scholar by the name of Andrew Brooks who has written a lot on Kant and cognitive science, see for instance this reference. )
The 'division between self and world' that I'm referring to elucidated more in this comment. The drift is to question the basic subject-object division that is apparent in science since Galileo and Descartes. That is what 'cuts things asunder' - as I've probably already quoted in thread earlier:
[quote=Nagel, Mind and Cosmos]The modern mind-body problem arose out of the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, as a direct result of the concept of objective physical reality that drove that revolution. Galileo and Descartes made the crucial conceptual division by proposing that physical science should provide a mathematically precise quantitative description of an external reality extended in space and time, a description limited to spatiotemporal primary qualities such as shape, size, and motion, and to laws governing the relations among them. Subjective appearances, on the other hand -- how this physical world appears to human perception -- were assigned to the mind, and the secondary qualities like color, sound, and smell were to be analyzed relationally, in terms of the power of physical things, acting on the senses, to produce those appearances in the minds of observers. It was essential to leave out or subtract subjective appearances and the human mind -- as well as human intentions and purposes -- from the physical world in order to permit this powerful but austere spatiotemporal conception of objective physical reality to develop. [/quote]
That is where the whole 'problem' of explaining intentionality arises from (which is why 'intentionality' (or 'aboutness') was to become the main point of attack against physicalist reductionism by phenomenology.)
So we might reject a division between self and world, seeing the self as embedded and capable of interacting with the world. Of changing how things are and being changed by how things are.
Consider:
Quoting Stanford
Or instead of intentionalist or adverbialist views, should we we talk of disjunctivism, behaviouralism, functionalism?
Or embedded or embodied minds?
Or you could pay some attention to 's view, which will be more amenable to your anachronistic philosophical stand than anything I might offer you.
Yep. Those transformations are part of the process of seeing, not what is being seen. What one sees is the tree.
Your point is much the same as Searle's counter to the bad argument, of which @hypericin provides yet another example.
Quoting Banno
The role assumption plays in these kinds of discussions is fascinating. Cheers - T
A really nice article. This in particular stood out...
It ties in really well with the understanding of perception I use (largely a Bayesian inference model). That model relies on an external (external to the system) world which the system is predicting. It relies on it because the prediction models are based on the Gaussian distribution of entropic forces external to a known system. If perception were based on internal states, then there would be no Gaussian distribution, no 'prediction', states would simply be transferred from node to node by linear functions.
It frustrates me when people use arguments from hallucination, or Bayesian modelling to promote any kind of idealism or disconnect from the external world when these theories imply the exact opposite. Mathematically, the 'free-energy' model, for example doesn't even work unless it is modelling an external state, the whole gradient climbing Lagrange equations the model is based on need an assumed Gaussian distribution of entropic variables - ie external data.
Anyway, rant over. The article sets out the error of such think really nicely, but I don't hold out much hope of it's penetrating the darkness here.
You were asked to explain how it does. Not repeat the claim that it does.
It's this kind of wording that doesn't help the 'direct' account. there clearly are barriers and intermediaries. None of these change the object of the process (we perceive 'a tree'), but claiming there's nothing interfering along the route is the sort of ultra-veridical claim that makes this 'extremist' wing of direct realism look ridiculous.
You can perceive a tree in front of you in full colour despite the fact that there's a massive gap in the middle which you can't possible see (because your fovea is in the way) and the light values are constantly changing because of the effect of continual saccades. The periphery is of far lower granularity than the centre, the ambient light changes the colours throughout the day (yet you still know the leaves are green). And much more...
You literally make up what goes in the gaps, you make up much of the colour (by interpreting and making guesses about the effect of ambient light) and you make up edges that can't be seen as your saccades move about the scene. All of this is amply demonstrated in the literature. You make up a very large proportion of that to which you eventually respond.
The important point (which your naive version misses) is that this 'making up' is part of the process of perceiving the tree and is predictive of the tree. It's not an indication that we perceive something other than the tree because if that were the case, there'd be no inference, no modelling, no testing and improving of models because there's be no access to an external uncertain state against which to test the model.
We perceive the tree, not the model. But we do not have some kind of direct (as in unfettered) access to the tree, we make inferences within the constraints of the data we have. That's what 'seeing a tree' is, a continual process of inferring the external causes of sense data.
If you take away the inference part (as you seem to want to do), you're simply ignoring unequivocal facts about how perception works.
If you take away the external part (as the most vocal 'indirect realists' seem to want to do), you're left with a very big gap in explaining how inference equations are so very similar to Bayesian model selection equations when there's no source of Gaussian uncertainty.
Yep.
Yep
Quoting Isaac
Yep.
To be fair, Im trying to play by the dichotomy setup by the OP. If hes talking about a crude direct realism, whereby we have unfettered access to the external, then thats what Im debating. And yes, historically that is what it means. Your own reply here implies that even direct realists are mitigated direct realists. They are direct-ish and its a spectrum, but that is already drifting away from a fully direct view where we are pure window into reality.
Even with the more modern views you mention, surely red the visual qualia is not instantiated in the apple. A bat and a human perceive that apple differently. But certainly they are experiencing an apple. You change the ride and cones or cause aphasia, and that qualia changes. Thats not inverted qualia either as you can compare the two differences and note the change. And just by the nature of neurons, they are constructing perception via specific layers and neurons in the brain that are mapped. This mapping implies evolutionary response to stimuli that has constructed the object. Surely a slug constructing an apple is going to have a very different perception of the apple. The indirect doesnt deny the apple simply that the access to the apple is not a window to the external object as it is in the world. And certainly it is unhelpful to object that the experience of an apple is still about the apple. The interaction of a table with an apple is no more direct access to the apple than a human. The table doesnt perceive anything. Surely it is interacting with the apple in some way, or an aspect of it, but is that access to the apple? Id be inclined to question interaction itself without perception but I step too far.
At the end of the day I may actually agree with your wanting to scrap the dichotomy setup here and this line if thinking but taking it at face value as this is what the debate at hand is and not changing it as Im going to suit a better framing. Im just going with that original idea about directness vs indirectness.
The debate between direct and indirect realism is as misplaced as Galilean debates before Einstein as to whether an object is moving or not.
That they aren't in the head.
Direct realism can be thought of as absolutised idealism, to recall Berkeley's 'Master Argument' that all acts of measurement, thought and observation are in relation to some perspective; if one denies or ignores perspectival relativism, one jumps from subjective idealism to direct realism.
That is one quality, but from what I can gather from the OP's posts, he doubts precisely that.
I'm not sure. I recall @Terrapin Station arguing for that kind of direct realism, and likening the alleged directness of his alleged mental [s]representations[/s] awareness to the fidelity commonly attributed to photos over and above hand-drawn painting. If I read him right.
I'm curious whether the OP's point is the same (boo) or different (hooray).
... Having now checked: https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/297414
@Terrapin Station denies his awareness-picture-in-the-head is a representation-picture-in-the-head. I never quite saw the difference. Shame we can't ask him.
Quoting NOS4A2
You seem to be stuck on this point, which is incorrect. We hear things which are far away, therefore there is an intermediary. We see things which are far away, therefore an intermediary is called for. Touch and taste appear to have no intermediary, but smell appears to have an intermediary.
Because of these differences between the various modes of perceiving, we cannot make any general statement about whether perception requires an intermediary or not. Therefore we need a more precise description as to how we perceive, one which would be inclusive of all five senses, before we can make any general conclusions about whether there is an intermediary or not.
John Searle: The Philosophy of Perception and the Bad Argument
Searle's refutation of The Argument from Illusion is weak
One reason philosophers in the past have rejected Direct Realism is because of The Argument from Illusion, which is obviously a strong argument. It is argued that the hallucination and veridical experience can be type identical, such that if an hallucination can only be explained by seeing sense data, then a veridical visual experience must also be explained by seeing sense data.
John Austin was critical of sense data, and in his 1962 book Sense and Sensibilia took aim at the doctrine that we never directly perceive material objects but only sense data. However, Searle's refutation of the Argument from illusion is more recent, writing about the topic in the article above.
Searle calls his refutation of The Argument from Illusion The Bad Argument. However, his refutation is quite weak, and not persuasive.
He says that when one sees an hallucination and when one sees an object in a veridical visual experience, the word "see" is being used in two different ways.
However, he doesn't explain how one knows whether one's visual experience is an hallucination or a veridical visual experience, and if two visual experiences appear the same, such that we don't know which is an hallucination and which is veridical, then how do we know in which each sense "see" is being used.
Searle makes the statements " In the sense in which I see the tree, I do not see a sense datum." and " in the ordinary sense of see in the hallucinatory case, I do not see anything", neither of which he backs up with any justification.
He writes " it is obvious that the argument is fallacious", to which the retort may well be ""it is obvious that the argument is sound", which doesn't get anyone anywhere.
Direct Realism would require backwards causation, causation from mind to world
My key argument against Direct Realism uses part of Searle's own article, where he discusses the hierarchy of perception, the direction of fit and the direction of causation.
He writes "Perception has the mind-to-world direction of fit and the world-to-mind direction of causation. That is just the fancy way of saying that the perception is satisfied or unsatisfied depending on how the world is in fact independently of the perception (mind-to-world direction of fit), but the world being that way has to cause the perception to be that way (world-to-mind direction of causation)"
It is true that an object in the world could cause a perception in the mind, such that an object in the world could cause the perception of a green tree in the mind, in that causation has a world to mind direction.
Searle writes that the direction of causation is from world to mind, not mind to world, in that there is no backwards causation.
One problem with Direct Realism is that it requires backwards causation, from perceiving a green tree to knowing that the cause of this perception was also a green tree.
For Searle, there is only a mind to world direction of fit, not a mind to world direction of causation. As regards mind to world direction of fit, a perception is satisfied or unsatisfied depending on how the world is in fact independently of the perception. The key is whether the perception is satisfied or unsatisfied. If satisfied the perception fits the world, if not satisfied the perception does not fit the world. There is nothing in this statement that the perception has to fit the world.
For the same reason that when seeing a broken window on one's walk to work, it is impossible to know just from the broken window what caused it to break, just by having the perception of a green tree in one's mind it is impossible to know what caused that perception.
As Searle himself writes, for perception, causation is from world to mind, not mind to world.
Yes and I think I rather like@RussellAs response to Searle https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/comment/782060
By definition, a property is any member of a class of entities that are capable of being attributed to objects, so there must be at least two things before there can be a property. My starting position is that properties don't exist in the world but only exist in the mind as concepts, along the lines of Conceptualism and Nominalism. It follows that if a "tree is green", the properties green and tree only exist in the mind and not the world. So what exists in the world. There is nothing left but space-time, elementary forces and elementary particles, along the lines of Neutral Monism and Panprotopsychism. Everything else exists in the mind, such as tables, mountains, apples, governments, morality, ethics and green trees.
Quoting schopenhauer1
In conceptual terms, what is most widely accepted today is the giant-impact theory. It proposes that the Moon formed during a collision between the Earth and another small planet, about the size of Mars. The debris from this impact collected in an orbit around Earth to form the Moon.
In reductionist terms, there were changes to the elementary forces and elementary particles within space-time.
Wasn't this an event in space-time without a perceiver ?
If you need that explaining you may want to seek professional help.
Quoting RussellA
But there's nothing causal here. Not knowing whether A caused B has no bearing on the plausibility of an hypothesis that A causes B.
Barriers to what? Intermediaries to what? What is the perceiver interfering with? itself? With light? My fovea is in my own way? I am unable to perceive the tree directly because I have a fovea?
Im not saying we see trees like eagles do or that we see things as if we didnt have foveae. Im saying we have direct perceptual contact with rest of the environment.
Nothing interferes along the route and nothing is made up because there is no end state or product of perception in the body. There is no model, no modelling, and nothing analogous to it occurring in there. There is no perception, sense data, bundle of sensations. There is no hypothesizing, constructing, inferencing, predictive processing occurring anywhere between the perceiver and the perceived, nor any in the perceiver as well. What we do have is the continuous anthropomorphism and computerization of the brain, which is absurd, and I could give a straw about any of that kind of literature.
The intermediaries you speak of are in the environment, which is still directly accessible, and therefor still entails direct realism. You seem to be stuck on this point.
If theres no model or prediction then how can we learn a skill like juggling, for instance, and eventually learn it so well that it requires little if any conscious attention?
Ok, I'm stuck on this point because you seem to be incredibly wrong to me. I see some stars very far away. There is obviously an intermediary between my perception and the stars which I perceive. What is this intermediary, space, light, ether? How do you think that any of these proposals to account for the apparent separation between me and the stars, would be directly accessible to be perceived? I see each and every one of such proposals as a logical construct produced as a means to account for the intermediary. Don\t you? If I could see the thing between me and the stars, it would block my vision of the stars.
Yes indeed, it seems space-time is what saves realism for the events to obtain (or does it?). What does it mean to be a localized event or interaction? What comes to my mind is a large space-time space and grid and then zooms in on a particular event that is very small and keeps zooming in. But that is preposterously anthropomorphic and conceptual. Can we really talk about non-perceived events and interactions, even WITH the saving grace of the container of "space-time"? Certainly we can "talk" about it in entertaining the notion, as pragmatically, it fits our schema. But otherwise, I am skeptical.
What model or prediction of giggling do you propose we are learning from?
No matter which intermediary you choose, all of it is a part of the environment, which is directly accessible and perceived directly.
:grin: I meant to say juggling. Could be any skill, like swimming or even walking.
Anyway, what model do we learn from? We learn with our own models (such as a model or concept of a ball) to learn or improve particular models, like juggling. Of course, we can learn from other people's models as well, through instruction or just observation.
We understand someone is hallucinating because others have "veridical experiences" and judge the one hallucinating is not acting normally. So how can one establish that someones "sense data" is identical to the other's "veridical experience" when it is inaccessible to verification, testing, or evaluation? How can we even establish if the memory of the hallucination is accurate? Or, if the one hallucinating uses the appropriate words to describe? All of this is not available to us. This undermines the testimony that can be provided by the one who hallucinates. Then what value does positing "sense data" have? None.
I would suggest abandoning such a metaphysical theory, and if you seek an "explanation", maybe look toward scientific theories, such understanding how pharmacological agents impact our the brain. There may be more satisfying explanations to be found.
Quoting Isaac
Yep.
Searle sets out with great clarity the difference. When one sees a tree, there is a tree to be seen. When one hallucinates a tree, there is no tree to be seen.
He does take this distinction as granted, as well as that the folk he is addressing can, at least for the most part, tell the difference. But I suppose that @RussellA and @schopenhauer1 cannot tell if they are hallucinating gives us an explanation for why there is not much hope of "penetrating the darkness here".
Quoting RussellA
You've mixed your intentionality with your causation. Knowing involves intentionality, rather than cause. That is, claiming to know something is adopting a certain intentional attitude towards that state of affairs: that this is true. So Isaac is right:
Quoting Isaac
Quoting Richard B
Yep.
As Searle says in his conclusion, the core of the bad argument is to "...think that somehow or other, the experiences are themselves the object of the experiences". There is a sort of folding of the mind in on itself, so that the picture is of a homunculus attempting and failing to prove that there is a world "outside". The homunculi conclude that there are only experiences, never the things experienced. In Wittgensteinian terms, they suppose there only to be a private world. But mind is inherently embedded in a shared, public world. The implications of the private language argument are vast.
Indeed, one of the things one almost never sees, is the inverted image on the back of the eye. Not even if one peers into the mirror. It's just too dark in there, and there's nowhere to sit.
When you see a tree, you are directly seeing not the tree but it's reflected light. That is one level of indirection.
Your body might tumble around and bump into other objects. But, you are not your body. You are the part of your brain that is aware. If you fall into a vegetative coma, you are gone, even if the rest of your body is healthy. If your awareness survived your body's death, you would survive.
This part of the brain that is aware has no direct access to the world. It can only interpret certain brain activity sensorily. These interpretations, experiences, are at a great remove from the objects that stimulate them.
Which is not to say you only access these experiences. These experiences track real actions and properties of real objects, and so you are aware of objects, not merely experiences. But this awareness is at a remove from the objects, it is indirect.
You cannot see the tree as it really is, this is a contraction. To see is to experience subjectively. Bats will see the tree differently than us, and aliens will see it differently than us and bats. There is no right answer among these different ways of seeing, they are all interpretations.
Bang, The bad argument.
That is a straw man. There may be a tree, but is it the veridical access to the tree?
Rather, the human mind constructs a tree otherwise what is cognition versus any old interaction of the tree?
Usually.
What is risible is to suppose that one never sees the tree.
Even Kant supposed a thing in itself. Something may be there. An apple on a table- how do you suppose the apple interacts with the table? Certainly you would say its different than cognition and there a difference lies. What is that distinction? A constructed view of the tree for one.
An appeal to the supposed authority of Kant will not carry much weight here.
Have you an argument? Your claim is that we cannot have veridical access to the tree. I have sufficient access to it to be able to prune it. What more do you need? If there is a "thing in itself" about which we can know nothing, then it is irrelevant and need not concern us.
We see the tree.
What is at stake is the nature of perception. Claims like
Quoting NOS4A2
Are contradictory and fundamentally misunderstand perception.
I think this may be my favourite line here so far.
"Only"? No, we see the tree. We see the tree as a result of the reflected light, sure. But we do not see the reflected light. Your statement was wrong.
It's not @NOS4A2 who has the fundamental misunderstanding.
Presumably I can only prune the light from the tree and not the tree-in-itself...?
I don't think it's possible to get to a clear view of this, since we are embedded in what we are trying to gain a "god's eye view' of. And further, what difference would it make as to what view one holds?
Then we do what with it?
What is at stake is not vocabulary debates over how "see" shall or shall not be used, but rather how perception should be understood.
Pray tell what is my fundamental misunderstanding?
:rofl: That so encapsulates the image I have of your character.
Quoting Banno
Yes, it is. Some wordplay is more interesting and some less.The wordplay varies according to what starting assumptions are made. There is no right or wrong answer, just two dogmas shadowboxing the world with their images.
Quoting Janus
Yes.
Quoting Janus
This is a question you can ask of all philosophy.
This:
Quoting hypericin
Quoting Searle
Does the camera, producing the photo, directly perceive the tree?
Also.
Is it different for words? When you see the name "Fido", do you indirectly perceive the dog?
Or is it more relevant to ask: when you read a description of Fido, do you indirectly perceive the dog?
Are we directly affected by the light reflected off of objects? What would it mean to say we are indirectly affected by light?
And I agree that is a question that can be asked of all philosophy. Do you think philosophy, in the sense that it is being "practiced" here is anything more than an amusing pastime?
Quoting bongo fury
Do we seriously entertain the possibility that cameras perceive anything?
Yours is pretty ordinary at the moment.
Quoting Banno
Kant was a direct realist. The external world is the empirically real and the tree is an empirical object that we experience immediately. See the Refutation of Idealism.
[quote=B276]here it is proved that outer experience is really immediate[/quote]
Not that its remotely relevant.
I'm actually quite gratified to hear that you consider my words to be ordinary; I'd be horrified if you found them interesting, just as I'd be concerned if I began to find your commonplace assertions interesting.
Yet he posited that time/space/causality and the categories were in the "mind". So he doesn't deny the objects, just that we have access to what they are in-themselves (veridical correspondence), and thus I would say not a direct realist in that regard. We have access to our shaping of the tree, not the tree-in itself. I'd say that is Kant's main (mainstream?) idealist position.
As I understand Kant the empirical world is real only in the sense of being a collective representation.
It would be wrong to interpret him as saying that we just see things in our heads.
So you think his self-categorization as transcendental idealist was erroneous?
His refutation of idealism was intended to differentiate his Critique from what he called the problematical idealism of Berkeley. He also said you could be at once an empirical realist AND a transcendental idealist and that these were not in conflict.
Quoting Banno
What are you a freakn Hobbit in the Shire? "Oh that Kant-speak is for them 'queer folk' that ain't from around these parts". What an odd prejudice for a philosophy forum. Solipsistic indeed! The world of Banno!
You can prune the tree, you can interact with the tree. That doesn't mean you are verdically having access to the tree. You are thus perceiving the tree, cognizing with it, and there is an interplay between stimuli, sensory datum, and cognitive processing.
As I said before (and yet you conspicuously ignore because you might not see its import), the apple interacting with the table is different than the human interacting with the tree. What is the difference between cognition of an object and any old interaction with the object? Yet you do not have a good answer.
You are getting caught up in word games. The refutation isn't if something is "really" interacting per se (though arguments can be made against that), but rather if the interaction has a direct kind of "knowledge" of the tree without mediation.
Quoting Janus
Our eyes are directly affected.
The central claim of direct or naive realism is that we perceive things "as the are". Apples look red because that's really how apples look. This is called naive because I think we all start from there, we intuitively take this for granted as children. In some people this perspective is never abandoned, and they try to buttress this unchallenged intuition with philosophical arguments.
Quoting Janus
Not really.
Our heads are just collective representations like the rest. We don't experience things as being in our heads. but as being outside.
So, we could say that things are not in our phenomenal heads, but are in our noumenal 'heads'.
And thus, I would say, not quite a direct realist. Perhaps he did think we had immediate access to the categories but I would say that is still a mediated one and thus indirect (idealist even more indirect than indirect realism in the sense that it isn't even material things we are immediately accessing, simply the structures of the background).
Not at all, experience is actively constructed, it is not a passive process. It's the direct realist that believe experiences are passively received from the outside.
The idea that we perceive things "as they are' seems incoherent to me. But that is indeed the naive assumption; that our eyes are like windows through which we look out onto a world of real objects. Naive realists like @Banno don't seem to be able to let go of this primal picture.
:up:
Ok, I confess: to describe Kant as a direct realist tout court is an exaggeration. But as Horkheimer said, sometimes only exaggeration is true.
By the way, its not immediate access to the categories that we have, but immediate access to things in the world around us.
:ok:
Quoting Jamal
Do we not, by our very thinking nature have "immediate" background structures of his categories? The things that structure the very world (cognition) itself? By immediate I guess I mean here, that it is entailed in the very structure of thought itself (and thus how world is presented).
I think its more that he is reacting to the equally incoherent claim that we dont perceive things as they (really) are.
You can perceive, yet have a wrong notion of what is there. A simple mirage tells us that. Why should we have more direct access than is evolutionarily necessary to interact with that object?
I suppose you could say that. I felt it confused the issue to use immediate in that way, because Kant is using it specifically with regard to the perception of things in the world.
Exactly, it is incoherent.
Quoting Janus
And yet they strut and prance as if their naivete were in fact sharp insight. That is what is most objectionable.
Got it. Well, I think his idea of "immediate intuitions" are "unmediated" awareness of sensory input, it's not necessarily an accurate picture of the external world. As you noted, his idea is that the things-in-themselves are always an unknown and can never be but non-revealed.
:lol:
Right, we perceive things as they really are for us, not as they really are for an ant or an aardvark. It's the idea that we see things as they really are "in themselves" (meaning as they really are independently of any and all percipients) which is absurd.
Quoting hypericin
True that!
Ill tell you what I think is most objectionable. Its when people are explicitly and politely told that what they are attacking is a position that nobody holds, and they ignore the information completely. Or when someone helpfully cites the philosophical literature and sets out the state of philosophical debate on the issue, and likewise is ignored.
Direct/indirect realism is like grammar controversies: it attracts those who are sure of themselves but at the same time unwilling to do the most basic research.
Reacting to who's claim? His mental strawman he points at and shouts "Bad Argument! Stove's Gem!"
I think it pays to remember that there is no "accurate picture" of an external world, except relative to the context of our collective representation: the empirical world.
Correct, though if I was a good realist, Id add in evolutionary fit regarding why this empirical world and not a bats, or a slug, let alone interaction without animal perception.
I'll take your word for it.
If I were attacking a position nobody holds no one would disagree with me.
I think it can be coherently argued that the principle problem of philosophy is precisely learning to perceive truly. This does not only apply to the hypothetical tree, apple, or coffee cup which is the perennial stand-in for the world. If you go back to the beginning of philosophy (with Parmenides and the Eleatics) the understanding of how things can come to be as they are is the fundamental question. I *think* this is what Heidegger was attempting to revive with his question of the meaning of being.
Anglo philosophy is now as Banno pointed out overwhelmingly realist (and I would add naturalistic) in orientation. It starts with the assumption of the reality of the tree/apple/coffee cup and then tries to work backward from that assumption without ever really calling it into question. Whereas what is generally categorised as idealist philosophy and also phenomenology, does call the normal attitude into question. But that kind of questioning is generally considered out-of-scope by realism for what should be pretty obvious reasons.
(The term critical realism comes to mind, although I cant quite put my finger on where I read it - perhaps Roy Bhaskar.)
Quoting Janus
There's the misrepresentation of realism again.
Yep.
The pretence is that our only choice is between a direct realism that does not recognise a causal chain involved in prception - a view that no one here actually holds - and the explicitly stated, and quite wrong, view that Quoting hypericin
It's poor form.
Quoting Wayfarer
That's mighty unfair on the likes of Midgley, Anscombe, Rorty...
I have two modes that I havent quite been able to reconcile. One is my Anglo mode, in which Im a plain-speaking direct realist, and the other is my sort of phenomenological, sort of Marxian, quite traditional, wannabe Hegelian mode, in which philosophy has ambitions as grand as youve set out here. From the latter point of view, Wittgensteins statement that philosophy leaves everything as it is is an abomination.
That the principle problem of philosophy is precisely learning to perceive truly, in a wider sense than is meant in this here discussion, sounds good to me. I think youd really appreciate Horkheimers Eclipse of Reason, which Im reading now. He has a notion of objective reason, which aims at universal truths and might line up with your own conception of philosophy.
[quote=Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason]Great philosophical systems, such as those of Plato and Aristotle, scholasticism, and German idealism were founded on an objective theory of reason. It aimed at evolving a comprehensive system, or hierarchy, of all beings, including man and his aims. The degree of reasonableness of a mans life could be determined according to its harmony with this totality. Its objective structure, and not just man and his purposes, was to be the measuring rod for individual thoughts and actions. This concept of reason never precluded subjective reason, but regarded the latter as only a partial, limited expression of a universal rationality from which criteria for all things and beings were derived.[/quote]
Indeed - Ibe happened on that book of Horkheimers and agree with his diagnosis. Its clearly related to his work elsewhere on the instrumentalisation of reason. Thats why Im starting to appreciate the insights of existentialism - not all of them, I dont much care for Sartre and Camus, but the more spiritually-inclined of them.
Exactly. He wrote it around the same time he was writing DofE with Adorno. But its much clearer.
It is not directly perceived though, that's the point. I do not sense space, it's conceptual. But if you're quite sure that you are sensing space I see no point to the discussion.
Not just a casual chain, a series of fundamental transformations, between which there is nothing "direct".
We've discussed previously how I share a disquiet with much of the scientism assumed in analytic philosophy. But we part ways in that, if I've understood you correctly, you are a dualist while I am a monist; you accept some form of spiritualism while I remain stuck at the various conceptual problems with the supernatural, reincarnation, surviving death and so on.
I'll not accept your characterising me as not calling realism into question.
The problem with this thread, and the reason I did not at first pay it much attention, is its parsing of the issues in terms of direct realism. I think I made the point earlier that the discussion elsewhere passed on to realism and anti-realism, the truth-values of our sentences about the world around us, and then on to intentionality. I agree that there are issues with Searle's article, but I think the counterpoint he is making - a remake of Austin - quite telling.
And I hope you have the integrity to agree that @hypericin account of perception and @schopenhauer1's characterisation of direct realism are shonky.
Even the best of us have a fatal flaw.
I'll try one more time to show how this is a mischaracterisation of realism.
Realism holds that the sentence "the tree has leaves" is about the tree, and not about the perception of the tree, or our beliefs about the tree, or any other relation between ourselves and the tree. That the tree has leaves is true if and only if the tree has leaves, regardless of what we perceive or believe.
In particular, for you, "the tree has leaves" is not about the light reflected from the tree.
(Now someone will claim that, that it is a "tree" and that these count as "leaves" are all down to our interpretation and not facts in the world, which is not exactly wrong but certainly not quite right; yes, we structure the interpretation we give to the world - but we can do this only since there is a world to so interpret).
The opposite of realism is not idealism, but anitrealism; the view that the truth of our sentences about the tree are not just either true or false.
You can see further discussion of this at Realism.
Only one?
But this is trivially true regardless of one's metaphysics. The idealist or anti-realist can equally say that "the tree has leaves" is about the tree not about anyone's perception of the tree. So, you're presenting a strawman; you are doing the misunderstanding, while incorrectly imagining that others have misunderstood you.
The absurdity of what you are claiming as the thinking of idealists and anti-realists is shown in the actual sentence you want to impute to them: "my perception of the tree has leaves" as if it could just as easily have not included them. Your interlocutors are not as stupid as you, stupidly, like to think.
Oh, that's good. Should save plenty of paper, then.
Wittgenstein cannot have really believed that "philosophy leaves everything as it is" since he saw it as a therapeutic, transformative process of liberation from reificatory thinking, of "bewitchment by means of language".
Quoting Banno
Really, what are you using paper for? In any case, I'll take that as a statement of agreement
I don't understand this comment; can you explain?
A human experience, a bat experience, and a slug experience of the tree is obviously very different. A rock's interacting with a tree is even more far afield (some would say a category error to group it with animal experience). I think @Banno isn't seeing the "realism" in "indirect realism". That is to say, the human, bat, and slug are experiencing a "real" tree, but each one "constructs" (and there is the indirect) the tree differently.
Now, once we add in non-perceiving/mon-animal/non-living forms that are simply "interacting" with the tree, that is where I feel things get interesting and metaphysical, and INFORMS the animal/perceiving/living interactions.
With "learning to perceive truly" do you mean something like 'learning to see richness instead of paucity'? I don't understand Heidegger as ever being concerned with the "understanding of how things can come to be as they are".
In Being and Time (as I understand it) Heidegger is attempting a phenomenological analysis of what it is to be a human being; an analysis which ultimately fails in my view, and I think in Heidegger's own view (which explains his "Kehre" or "turning" to poetic instead of analytical language).
I dont think its a contradiction but Im unwilling to work out exactly why it isnt. The main point is that what you call a transformative process of liberation, others would call a purely negative effort to clear up some deep confusions. Getting our house in order so we can all get on with whatever it is that we already, with no input or comment from philosophy, regard as important in our social and spiritual lives. It is in this sense that some critics have labelled him as basically conservative.
I think theyre pretty much right but I also think Wittgenstein is great.
What if debating philosophy gives us social and spiritual fulfillment? Some philosophers like the perplexing madness of it (though dealing with shitty personalities of the pompous, egotistical, and trolling variety that might be drawn to philosophy I'd say ruins some of it). Certainly "going about your day" can be very mundane so not sure why he couldn't circle back to that idea at least pragmatically speaking, being that he was kind of a linguistic pragmatist.
As I understand it, his deep project was about the meaning of being, so wouldnt that entail an understanding of how things can come to be as they are?
Quoting schopenhauer1
I dont understand what youre saying here schop.
This discussion has gone off-topic. I have a feeling it was my fault.
I don't know about @Banno, but I think @Isaac would agree that different organisms perceive the tree differently. Organisms' perceptions are affected both exogenously and endogenously.
Personally, I think the whole direct/ indirect parlance is inapt. It's just another example of being bewitched by dualistic thinking. From different perspectives 'direct" and 'indirect' are both OK, but the idea that one or the other is "correct", in anything but a contextual sense is misguided in my view.
Philosophy delivers only contextual truths, and there are as many possible assumptions to begin from as there are philosophies. The idea that some are "correct" and others not, tout court, erroneously fails to acknowledge the different presuppositions in play, and the reality of talking past one another on account of that.
Quoting Jamal
I agree, the "purely negative effort to clear up some deep confusions" is precisely what I understand to be philosophy's "transformative process of liberation". I can speculate that Wittgenstein may have meant that philosophy leaves the world just as it is, in the sense of not adopting any metaphysical view about the nature of reality, and I would agree with that.
I see philosophy as a propaedeutic to spiritual transformation, to learning to see non-dually. Still, I would say that although philosophy cannot effect a far-reaching spiritual transformation, it can help to liberate us from being concerned with "views", just as Nagarjuna's dialectic is intended to do, and that that counts as a "transformative process of liberation"; albeit merely an intellectual one.
Quoting Jamal
I guess it's a matter of interpretation: to me an "understanding of how things can come to be as they are" suggests some kind of causal account of the genesis of the world, and I don't think Heidegger was concerned with that. Of course I might be mistaken, and I could be persuaded to change my mind by being presented with anything he wrote which would suggest otherwise.
You seemed to indicate that Witty is saying philosophy is a hindrance to spiritual fulfillment, but what if it is part of it for some people? And thus bypassing would not be good, as you seem to be interpreting him.
Yeah I'm with you. I don't like using direct or indirect realism either. I think oddly enough, we are all in agreement about the outdated/outmoded dichotomy that this presents. It simply doesn't capture the sophistication of the subject and makes it more confusing than helpful distinctions. It comes from a time when strict distinctions of idealism and realism were in play perhaps. More 18th century than 21st century.
No I dont disagree. It does look too ontic.
But going back to the rock interacting with the tree, I would like to at least ask the question how it is that physical properties obtain without perception. What is it that interaction between non-perceiving objects is like? And you see, this IS where this direct/indirect/ideal becomes kind of "personal" for those who care about metaphysical theories. As I said before, I think informs the perceiving interactions.
Sounds lovely. But Ive run out of things to say about this, because I havent worked out what I think about it.
Quoting schopenhauer1
We can only say what interaction between what we think of as non-perceiving objects is like for us. Personally I find metaphysical theories interesting in that they explore the possibilities that are (coherently or incoherently?) imaginable to us. I think that is worth exploring just for its own sake; it's aesthetic interest, if you like.
Beyond that level of interest, I don't care about them: I have no more objection to physicalism than I do to idealism, because I don't see any "ism" as ruling out anything important or as capturing the nature of reality, or as being more or less important for the ongoing evolution of humanity.
I could be a physicalist, an idealist or an anti-realist and still be fully committed to meditation, the arts and personal transformation, provided I didn't take the views I might entertain as being the most plausible so seriously that I couldn't let them go, and they consequently interfered with my peace of mind.
I can't relate to crusaders of philosophical correctness on any side of the argument; I think that is a deeply misguided and arrogant project. Although I don't agree with Hegel's notion of absolute knowledge, I think his treatment of the history of philosophical ideas as a progressive (not in the sense of "progress" but as analogous to the musical idea of a chord progression) dialectical unfolding presentation of what is imaginable to the human is right on.
Yes indeed. Agreed. I think people get persnickety because it goes beyond the empirical descriptions of scientific textbooks. It is speculative and therefore abhorrent. To them, this makes philosophy garish and baroque rather than simply helping with some mathematical logic problems perhaps or simply clarifying terminology usage in service of the sciences. That's my guess anyways.
This is why I find Whitehead somewhat fascinating. Like Russell, he helped create complex proofs in mathematics like in Principia Mathematica, connecting them with symbolic logic. In that sense he was the most analytic of analytics. But then he wrote stuff like Process and Reality and Adventures in Ideas that couldn't be more baroque in its metaphysical system.
Fair point and Im not trying to offend, but I cant help but notice the constant return to quotidian objects - spoons, trees, coffee cups - from which you seek to make your rhetorical point. Youd have to acknowledge this seems to indicate at least a realist tendency. And I dont want to portray this as me casting aspersions - its more like a gestalt shift or change of perception which shifts the centre of gravity as it were.
Quoting Janus
Obviously a big call, but what I have in mind is very like what is described by avidya, in Eastern philosophy - its usually translated as ignorance, but I think something like spiritual blindness is more apt. Its kind of like sin albeit more cognitive than volitional - that we dont see the world aright. (Ive long thought that the fact that it became entangled with dogma about sin is one of the things that prevents us from seeing it.) Hey I know thats bound to be controversial but I cant help but see it like that.
Quoting Janus
Isnt that cultural relativism? I know its very difficult to adjudicate betweeen the thousands of systems of ideas out there but some must resonate, and some decision must be made as to which.
Quoting schopenhauer1
One of the books I keep referring up to is Charles Pinter. Mind and the Cosmic Order, published February 2021, Hes a mathematics emeritus whose only other published books are on set theory and algebra but has a deep interest in neural modelling. This book is a real breakthrough in philosophy of cognitive science in my view. Google it and just scan through the chapter abstracts, its about just this question.
Cool I'll check it out.
It seems to me that those who get "persnickety" are those who "have a dog in the race" and/ or are uncomfortable with uncertainty. I think uncertainty is, spiritually speaking, a blessing, because it makes for humility.
:up:
I see ignorance as consisting, not in holding one view rather than another (except in the empirical context) but in being wedded to some (necessarily dualistic) view or other. For me sin, or "missing the mark", consists in not seeing the world non-dually.
Quoting Wayfarer
Right, I do think that ethically speaking, at least, there are right and wrong views, "right" views leading more to social harmony and "wrong" views more to disharmony, so I am no relativist in that domain. When it comes to aesthetics and even more so metaphysics, I am more of a relativist, as I see no criteria that can serve decidability.
That said, the best metaphysical view, for me personally is the one that resonates most strongly, and serves best to inspire and motivate praxis, aesthetically and metaphysically. But I don't expect that my preferred ideas will, or should, be preferred by others, so in that sense I am a relativist.
I also think there is a reification and exaltation of mundanity. If it's not about accuracy of numbers crunching, or a goal of some sort of complex culmination leading to outputs, it doesn't matter (think electronics, construction, and technology in general). Cue existentialists and meaning. I had this idea a while ago about instrumentality- we do to do to do to do. In this sense, Hegel has the illusion of being right. The mundaneites would say that the complexity of the modern world has a sort of axiological positive value. There is something inherently better about the complexity. I call it minutia-mongering. But some people will exalt in it. In that sense, the aesthetics of speculation is nonsensical derivations off the path of working towards more complexity of outputs. So to the mundane-ites, speculation is sinful as it doesn't contribute to outputs. There is no room for such. It is like metaphysical Marxism.. Marxism proposed that the superstructure is material. We must focus on the superstructure to change things. However, unlike the mundane-ites, his goal was so that we can enjoy life, perhaps in some Epicurean way (not sure exactly how that Communist utopia was supposed to look really). Certainly, drab grey uniforms and production outputs couldn't be it. If so, what a sad socioeconomic system.
Even if I accept that we dont perceive trees, only light, Im still directly perceiving the environment, which includes trees, leaves, stars, teacups, earth, light, darkness.
I cannot understand how I am a part of a brain and not a body. How is such a belief possible? But as is inevitable with these ideas, it gives us an opportunity to put body, or bodily processes, between a perceiver and perceived, as if another step in this linear account of perception is required to perceive at all.
So, the argument goes that we have hallucinations which seems to be indistinguishable from the veridical experience. To be consistent, whatever we say about the hallucination, we have to say the same thing for the vertical experience. Since the hallucination is not seeing a material object, we need to see something else. And along come "sense data."
But I have many questions here. If I come along and find somebody who does not hallucinate, does this mean they don't have "sense data"? Better yet, if no human being ever hallucinated, would that mean they don't have "sense data"? In this imaginary world, can we say these humans see the tree directly? What if I give two people a hallucinogen, and person #1 is determine to hallucinate, and person #2 is determine not to hallucinate, so does this mean we can conclude one person has "sense data", and the other does not. But if that is the case, we all know that most people don't hallucinate, so why to we talk like "sense data" is something universal to all human beings?
I'm beginning to wonder if it's something about trees, some type of Agnosia (I'm going to here coin the term Arbagnosia).
The thing is, I recognise many of the names here from other discussions (particularly the political ones) - @hypericin and @Wayfarer spring to mind most - wherein they find themselves absolutely certain of some state of affairs in the world (widely acknowledged to be extremely complex) like the geopolitical goals and strategies of major world powers (Ukraine War), or the net benefits and risks of public health strategies (Covid). Yet neither of these people, despite such certainty about the state of extremely complex events, seem to find any way in which they can be certain about the tree in their back garden.
It is apparently easy enough to be sure about world events that one can quite hysterically object to alternative interpretations of them, and yet strangely, they can never be sure they're really seeing the tree as it is.
Likewise, here all are professing with some certainty the way the brain processes sense data (a very complex and as yet undecided model), yet still unsure about the tree. I find, among my colleagues, the majority are quite uncertain about how perception actually works despite being at the coalface of discovering new facts about it; yet none seem to have trouble with the tree in the courtyard. Here we have the exact reverse of that.
What is it about trees, for these people, that is so impenetrable, I wonder?
I wrote that Searle doesn't explain how one knows whether one's visual experience is an hallucination or a veridical visual experience.
Searle wrote:
[i]"I realize that the great geniuses of our tradition were vastly better philosophers than any of us alive and that they created the framework within which we work. But it seems to me they made horrendous mistakes"
"The second mistake almost as bad is the view that we do not directly perceive objects and states of affairs in the world. For this view famous arguments were advanced, and I am going to argue in this article that the arguments are all variations on a single bad argument, which I will honor with the capital title The Bad Argument
"I think the great philosophers of the past rejected Direct Realism because of an argument which was, until recently, quite commonly accepted among members of the profession. Some of them thought Direct Realism was so obviously false as not to be worth arguing against. There are different versions of it but the most common is called the argument from illusion and here is how it goes"[/i]
According to Searle, even the great geniuses of philosophy were concerned with The Argument from Illusion, in how to know whether one's visual experience is an hallucination or a veridical visual experience, so I am in good company.
Quoting Isaac
I agree, but I thought the whole point of Direct Realism is that one directly sees the green tree, not hypothesise about it.
There is a useful paragraph in the SEP article Nonexistant Objects.
"One of the reasons why there are doubts about the concept of a nonexistent object is this: to be able to say truly of an object that it doesnt exist, it seems that one has to presuppose that it exists, for doesnt a thing have to exist if we are to make a true claim about it? In the face of this puzzling situation, one has to be very careful when accepting or formulating the idea that there are nonexistent objects. It turns out that Kants view that exists is not a real predicate and Freges view, that exists is not a predicate of individuals (i.e., a predicate that yields a well-formed sentence if one puts a singular term in front of it), has to be abandoned if one is to accept the claim that there are nonexistent objects"
In order to talk about a non-perceived event, one first has to presuppose that we are able to perceive it.
This just misuses the word 'know'. In no other case is 'know' used other than simply having sufficient warrant (putting aside for now arguments about post hoc judgements of truth). You have sufficient warrant to believe the tree you see is, in fact, a tree, all the while that interacting with it as if it were a tree yields the results you'd expect of it if it were a tree.
Interesting. Physical properties interacting with each other without perceivers, becomes oddly anthropomorphic in its conception. The objects become idealized as like placeholders. But surely how objects, forces and events are said to be interacting is metaphysically mysterious. At what localization is an event taking place? There is no view from the object. Our minds imagine one but that cant actually be the case.
I agree with that. This is the position of the Indirect Realist, a pragmatic approach to the world.
We've heard talk from self-described indirect realists that contradicts this, including from yourself.
You questioned whether we know what we see is the tree.
If...
Quoting Isaac
...and...
Quoting Isaac
...then we 'know' what we see is the tree all the while that interacting with it as if it were a tree yields the results you'd expect of it if it were a tree.
Which, for simple objects like a tree, is virtually all the time.
So we can conclude that virtually all the time we know what we see is the tree. It's not a mystery.
Other oddities from indirect realists here have been claims that, for example, we don't 'really' see the tree, we see light, but not the tree, we see a model of the tree, we don't see the 'tree as it is'...etc.
None of these odd expressions have anything to do with pragmatism. They are claims of certainty about what is the case. They're just wrong.
Exactly. A case of psychological projection, rather than onto other people onto the world around us. As the Wikipedia article on Psychological Projection writes, "Psychological projection is a defence mechanism of alterity concerning "inside" content mistaken to be coming from the "outside".
When Aristotle addressed being qua being, in his Metaphysics, this he said was the fundamental question, why is a thing what it is, rather than something else. As an approach to this question, the law of identity, that a thing is necessarily what it is and not something else, was presented. When he considered the law of identity, (that a thing is necessarily what it is and not something else), along with the activity of becoming (coming to be), he concluded that the form of the thing is necessarily prior to the material existence of it. We can say that the form predetermines, as a cause, what the thing will be, so that when it comes to be, it will be the thing that it is, rather than something else.
Quoting Janus
The problem is that some assumptions lead us toward understanding, while others lead us toward misunderstanding. Since understanding is what is desired over misunderstanding, it is appropriate to say that some assumptions are correct and others incorrect.
Quoting schopenhauer1
The tree wraps its roots around the rock, and takes from the rock whatever it can get. Unbeknownst to the tree, the rock is also active, and may roll, killing the tree. This is the way of interaction between living things and inanimate things. The living being wants to take all that it can get from the inanimate. But the living being's inadequate knowledge of the activity of inanimate things makes this a very risky activity. So the being must develop a balanced approach between taking all that it can get, and producing the knowledge and capacity required to restrain itself, according to the dangers involved with the activities of inanimate things.
Beyond the problem of interaction between living beings and non-perceiving things, there is a further problem of interaction between distinct living beings. This problem is far more difficult because when the basic problem is complex, and unresolved, the difficulties tend to mount exponentially.
I believe that Marx provided a very unique and informative approach (in the form of basic assumptions) toward the interactions between things, both animate and inanimate. He has very insightful principles which ought not be ignored by anyone interested in the interactions between beings, things, and both.
Enough with these comments Smith.
As an Indirect Realist, I believe that I directly see a model or a representation of a tree in my mind. I don't directly see a tree in the world, but only indirectly.
When I perceive a tree, I don't question that I am perceiving a tree, but I do question that what I am perceiving as a tree exists in the world as a tree.
As a believer in Realism, I believe the world exists, and believe that there is something out there in the world that I perceive as a tree. Even if it not a tree, I can act towards it as if it were. As you rightly said "all the while that interacting with it as if it were a tree yields the results you'd expect of it if it were a tree"
As a Realist, I believe that there is a world out there and I am part of it. In believing that I can transact with a world that is inseparable from my agency within it, my approach is that of a Pragmatist. As originally conceived by Charles Sanders Peirce, the core of pragmatism was the Pragmatic Maxim, a rule for clarifying the meaning of hypotheses by tracing their practical consequences, their implications for experience in specific situations. I can treat the something I perceive as a tree as a tree in the world, act towards it as tree, and follow the consequences of my actions. If the results are not as I expected, I can adjust my future interactions with the world.
Quoting Isaac
I agree when you say that "all the while that interacting with it as if it were a tree yields the results you'd expect of it if it were a tree", but don't agree that your conclusion would logically follow "So we can conclude that virtually all the time we know what we see is the tree"
It doesn't necessarily follow that because we treat something as a tree then it is a tree.
Without knowing exactly what you mean, I tend to agree. However, its probably essential in understanding Marx to see that he was attempting a philosophy of praxis, a realization of philosophy in history:
This isnt an anti-intellectual dismissal of philosophy but rather an imperative: philosophy ought to be more than simply speculative metaphysics (and certainly should not be less than speculative metaphysics, which would describe empiricism and positivism).
Dunno about these people, but lil ol me ..go back to that picture on pg 4. See that word tree beside the object? At the same time, notice the first condition of visual experience in Searles list? See where the picture says tree, but #1 says object?
In Searles list, object becomes tree at #3, and in the picture it can be a tree only after Searles #3, but without that condition, which is not even implied by the picture, it is the case that it should have been object on the left, at instance of perception, and never a tree. Nevertheless, the picture correctly represents the initial conditions for visual experience, demonstrating the presentation of an object directly to the system, according to physical law.
-
Quoting Isaac
Ehhhh .thats just conflicts in domain of discourse. Over-extended physicalist reductionism adds nothing to the human physiological act of perceiving, such that without it knowledge of objects is impossible. Our intellect, in its empirical manifestations, concerns itself initially with the output of sensory devices rather than their input, and it shouldnt be contentious that our intellect works indirectly with, and is necessarily conditioned by, the real in accordance with its own methodology, whatever that may in fact be.
Ya know, something I wondered about, given our conversations, fly on the wall kinda thing .are you and your colleagues appalled at the extent to which humans cant find agreement among themselves on the most fundamental human considerations? To be honest, I might guess you guys just figure we all like to bark at the moon, confident in the pretension that it is listening.
Searle, hallucination and the veridical
Searle discusses the ambiguity of the word "see".
"What shall we say about the bad argument in both of its versions? I think in spite of its enormous influence it rests on a simple fallacy of ambiguity over see and other perceptual verbs" and "In the ordinary sense of see in which I now see the tree, in the hallucinatory case I do not see anything".
Searle repeats a scientific version of the "argument from illusion":
You told us earlier that visual experience takes place when photons strike the photoreceptor cells and set up a series of causal events that eventually results in a visual experience in the cortex. But it is of that visual experience that we are visually aware. The science of vision has proven that the only thing you can actually see, literally, scientifically is the visual experience going on in your head. We might as well have a name for these visual experiences. Call them sense data. All you ever perceive are sense data, and by way of vision all you can ever perceive are visual sense data.
Searle says someone could see a tree even if there wasn't one
"but when I see the tree I cannot separate the visual experience from an awareness of the presence of the tree. This is true even if it is a hallucination and even if I know that it is a hallucination. In such a case, I have the experience of the perceptual presentation of an object even though there is no object there."
Generally, one knows something one perceives is not there because its being there would be improbable or anomalous, for example, an airplane divebombing the house, or a spectre of death standing on the edge of the forest. But for a common object as a tree, something that is not out of place, and there is nothing improbable or anomalous about it, and is something that one definitely expects to perceive, how can one know that there is no tree there.
Searle is saying that in the hallucinatory case the observer perceives a tree within sense data but doesn't see the tree, and in the ordinary case the observer doesn't perceive a tree in the sense data but does see the tree. If the observer perceives a tree, and there is nothing anomalous about the tree, there can be no way for the observer to know whether the tree exists or is an hallucination. If the tree exists, then the observer sees the tree. If the tree doesn't exist, then the observer perceives the sense data.
If there is no way for the observer to know whether everyday objects such as trees exist or are hallucinations, how does the observer know whether they are seeing the tree or perceiving the sense data ?
Searle doesn't explain how an observer can know they are hallucinating about an object that is neither improbable or anomalous.
Searle writes about the mistakes of philosophers of great genius
"I realize that the great geniuses of our tradition were vastly better philosophers than any of us alive and that they created the framework within which we work. But it seems to me they made horrendous mistakes."
As regarding the debate between Indirect and Direct Realism, he writes
"The second mistake almost as bad is the view that we do not directly perceive objects and states of affairs in the world."
I agree that he writes with great clarity about what he perceives as the mistakes of the past, but he is a bit short on giving any reasons or justifications why they were mistaken. As you say, he takes a lot for granted.
Quoting Banno
There is a direction of information flow in a causal process
Searle writes about perception and direction of fit and causation
"Perception has the mind-to-world direction of fit and the world-to-mind direction of causation. That is just the fancy way of saying that the perception is satisfied or unsatisfied depending on how the world is in fact independently of the perception (mind-to-world direction of fit), but the world being that way has to cause the perception to be that way (world-to-mind direction of causation)."
Searle writes about the intentionality and causation of a visual experience
"A fourth feature of the situation is that the visual experience has intrinsic intentionality. The experience sets conditions of satisfaction, and these conditions are those under which the experience is veridical as opposed to those conditions under which it is not veridical. Confining ourselves to seeing the tree in front of me we can say that the conditions of satisfaction of the visual experience are that there has to be a tree there and the fact that the tree is there is causing in a certain way the current visual experience. So on this account the visual experience in its conditions of satisfaction is causally self-reflexive in that the causal condition refers to the perceptual experience itself. If the perceptual experience could talk it would say, If I am to be satisfied (veridical) I must be caused by the very object of which I seem to be the seeing."
In order to know that I am seeing a tree, my visual experience must have an intrinsic intentionality about the tree, such that my mind is directed at the tree. But in order to see the tree, there must have been a temporally prior world-to-mind causation, from the tree being the way it is in the world to the tree in my mind.
Therefore, as Searle writes, knowing requires both intentionality and causation, in that the cause of a perception is temporally prior to the perception itself. Between the cause of the perception and the perception itself there may have been several intermediary stages in a long causal chain.
There is only one direction of flow of information in a causal chain, in that, just by seeing a broken window on a walk into town, one cannot know, of the several possible causes, which was the actual cause. If backwards flow of information was possible through a long causal chain, a detective at the scene of a crime would straight away know the identity of the criminal.
The puzzle is, how can the mind, when perceiving an object, know the single cause of its perception, when the cause happened prior to the perception and at the far end of a long causal chain.
The Direct Realist's position is that the perceiver of an object knows a single cause of that perception, yet this would require a backwards flow of information through a causal chain, which is impossible.
If Direct Realism was how reality worked, every detective would be taught Direct Realism in order to give them a 100% success rate in crime solving.
I like to keep challenging this idea of "sense data" derived from the Argument of Illusion. I believe one needs to to assume first that our vertical experiences are the normal background in which we understand and recognize others have hallucinations. Or, we start down the path of radical skepticism in which we believe the whole world is one big hallucination. Additionally, the Argument of Illusion is based on our experience where we identified those who we say are hallucinating. This is not determined by some inward private determination. Given this, human beings who hallucinate are few, and most human beings have never hallucinated, and when hallucinations do occur, it occurs infrequently. So how did something that few humans being will ever experience, may never experience, and, if experienced, will happen infrequently, turn into positing "sense data" that every human being must have when perceiving the world around them. Maybe this shows that a metaphysical explanation that desires universal generality does not apply here. Or maybe it demonstrates a particular absurdity like concluding when I close my eyes and don't perceive anything, the world no longer exist.
You ask other minds, look at the evidence, and see what is persuasive. In this case, this is done in a public realm, not the private realm of "sense data".
Being wedded to the view that duality is sin and non-duality is virtue is extremely dualistic, and unrealistic, isnt it? The best we can do is merely reduce anxiety by quieting our minds. To see non-dually is to not see at all.
Let's say I designed some glasses which duplicate an object, so when I put them on I see two objects, I take them off and I see one object. So metaphysically, why am I not committed to the glasses having "sense data" just like when I push one of my eye balls and report I see two of the objects. Can't we just say, "there is nothing to say here metaphysically, just our perception is distorted?"
On the contrary, I'm quite certian I'm not "seeing the tree as it really is", as this is nonsensical, an oxymoron. To perceive is necessarily to translate the sensory information into experiential terms, which cannot somehow be coincident with "the tree itself".
Quoting Banno
I'm afraid this bears little relation to anything I've written.
Quoting Banno
Great, I never said it was. My point, again, is that what is *directly* interacted with, by the body, (on one side of the table, in terms of the OP's metaphor), is something totally other than the tree: its imprint on light which has interacted with it. This is just one of the gaps I've described between perceiver and perceived which makes nonsense of the "direct" in direct realism.
Maybe I have you wrong but isn't this the kind of dogmatic position you were speaking against earlier? What do you mean by seeing the world non-dually? Do you mean holding a monist ontology like idealism?
I was more interested in non-living with non-living things. However, even this account, though fun to read, is simply the human view of a tree doing what it does. What is the event without a perceiver (like a human). Perhaps the tree "perceives" in some way, but it is precisely this difference whereby cognition (like an animal's) has something above and beyond some sort of "direct access" to the object. That is to say, there is "cognizing" happening which mediates the animals interactions based on evolutionary contingencies.
The moment of "great disaster" is when Descartes decided to retreat to the private world of introspection to look for certainty at the expense of the public realm in which we learn to communicate with words to convey understanding to our fellow humans about a world that can get a bit messy.
Again, the perceived is necessarily anything found within our periphery, including the tree, the trees impact on light. We can also perceive it through other senses as well, including touching it. So in no instance have you introduced any gap or indie text intermediary between perceiver and perceived.
Yes, I think the mundane is exalted when the creative joy of living has been sucked out by the internal dialogue, by seeing ourselves as somehow set against life or life set against us.
Quoting praxis
I haven't said anything about sin as vice or the opposite of virtue. I explicitly stated that I was talking about sin in terms of "missing the mark". Missing the mark in this context means being caught up in views and failing to see things in their numinous light. The best you can do may be reducing anxiety, and that is a necessary beginning, but you have no warrant for believing it is just the same for others.
Of course there is always a linguistic overlay to our seeing, but that can be put in abeyance with practice. Maybe try some psychedelics to get you started. Animals do not deploy dualistic language; do you think they do not see at all?
Quoting Tom Storm
See my response to praxis above. I'm not taking about holding any ontology, but rather about letting go of all ontologies and concerns about ontology in order to experience the numinous; to see that all experience is, primordially, prior to subject and object and all the linguistically generated dualities that flow on from that.
Quoting Metaphysician Undercover
Your assumptions lead you towards your understanding and mine mine. So you are already assuming that there is a correct understanding, meaning your reasoning is circular. Note, I am not saying there are not more or less correct understandings in relation to empirical matters or the effectiveness of practices, but I'm speaking here specifically about discursive metaphysical understandings. How do you know there is a correct metaphysical understanding and how would you identify it as being correct?
With touch, your body is directly interacting with the perceived object. But touch is not special. Like other senses, touch, via sensory receptors, must induce nervous activity. And then this nervous activity must be somehow transformed to, or interpreted as, experiential content. You know what it is like to touch an object by way of this experiential content.
In what sense is this sequence "direct"? Certainly, a transformation or interpretation of nervous activity is not the same as the touched object.
When they stop doing philosophy and pick up the pruning saw, things are presumably different. They have no trouble with only being to cut a branch indirectly.
Quoting Mww
Which list?
Quoting praxis
Nice.
Ok. I don't think I have any idea of the numinous but I get your general point. I suppose I wonder how long does one sit in this 'letting go-ness' and where does it take you? Are you suggesting perhaps some kind of meditative experience with some eventual form of enlightenment?
This notion that - all experience is, primordially, prior to subject and object and all the linguistically generated dualities that flow on from that - seems to be arrived at through conscious judgment and rationality.
:lol: You've sinned (missed the mark) yet again; you're headed straight for hell! Or maybe you're already there, since it must be hellish for you having to force yourself to participate in something of so little value or interest to you, such as these threads. Remarkably, despite your oft-declared lack of interest and disdain, you seem to have made more posts than anyone else. :chin:
If you have no sense of the numinous then what to do? If you want to let go, then you must practice, but you would need incentive. It takes you to where you already are. But it's not important if you're not interested. What could it matter, if it doesn't matter to you?
The notion is arrived at via experience. But it also makes sense to ask what the experience of animals might be like given they would seem to have no linguistic overlay.
Best I leave you to your deliberations.
Its direct because there is nothing between perceiver and perceived. The transformation and interpretation of nervous activity is indistinguishable from the perceiver and the act of perceiving, so is therefor not in between perceiver and perceived. Its the same if one places the intermediary outside of the perceiver. It is indistinguishable from the perceived. So indirect realism is redundant.
I don't think it is accurate to assume that if someone has no experience of the numinous they are not interested in what people think it is.
Quoting Janus
Just briefly, what do you mean by practice or incentive?
I just don't get how that is possible when you have a massive network, distributing sensory experience from different regions and rei-integrating them together. No one is going to have complete understanding of what is going on, but certainly, the medium matters, and the fact that there is a medium means that something is going on that isn't simply a mirror reflected of "reality". For example, an input in a computer becomes an electrical signal that then gets turned into a logic gate that affects the system and thus produces an output. I press a key on my keyboard and it almost instantaneously shows up on a computer screen. The physical stroke of my fingers is not the visual representation that shows up on my screen.
You are mixing the hard problem and the easy problem in wildly unproductive and invariant ways that confuse the whole issue. I am a pro-hard problem. That is to say, I think there is one. People like @Banno try to downplay it, it seems.
In this computer keyboard/monitor situation, for example, there is already an interpreter that interprets the letters as something meaningful. Therefore there is an extra layer in the equation beyond just input and output. Thus, as I've stated before, this is the Cartesian Theater problem whereby there is a constant regress whereby the mind "integrates" (aka the Homunculus Fallacy). However, direct realism doesn't solve the problem so much as raise questions as to how it is that sensory information is simply a mirror and that there is no processing involved as well. Again, certainly other animals process the world differently, as do babies when developing. There are differences in individual perception, etc. This to me indicates construction not wholesale mirroring.
You know the currently fashionable talk at the table. Linked herein some time ago by somebody. And, fortuitously enough, upon reconciliation of the ambiguity over the word see and other assorted and sundry perceptual verbs, the Bad Argument disappears. Still, as we all know only too well, only to be replaced with another one.
They see in essentially the same way as we do. To see non-dually would mean to entirely lack the ability to distinguish anything. A tree, for instance, couldnt be distinguished from the ground or the sky or any part of its surroundings. There could be no tree/not-tree duality, right?
This is a problem for two reason:
1. In principle, this claim cannot be verified since it is inaccessible.
2. The indirect realist likes to claim that perceiving the material object is indirect because scientific theory shows this, but do we really think that using a hallucinogen that results in a hallucination is not also plague by a series of intermediary steps in the brain as well. To be consistent, we should also say it is indirect. But this is unfortunate, it seems the word "direct" is dissolving into being senseless, not exemplified by anything, real or conceptual.
I haven't assumed you are not interested; I did include the "if".
Quoting Tom Storm
Practice is to let go of thoughts and incentive is desire.
I don't believe animals parse experience in terms of subject/ object.
To see non-dually is to see without the discursive overlay. Distinguishing things is not disabled by that. I can see a tree without thinking in terms of a tree/ not-tree duality. I don't have to separate a tree from its surroundings in order to see it.
I'll see if I can state succinctly what I believe to be the important point. The difference between Hegel and Marx is the difference between idealism and materialism. The two are actually very similar, but there is an inversion between them in the way that first principles are produced, which results in somewhat opposing ways of looking at the very same thing.
So Hegel described the State as being a manifestation of the Idea. The Idea might be something like "the good", "the right", "the just", and being ideal, it's derived from God. From here, the history of the State is described as a history of the Idea, and how human beings strive to serve the Idea. The Idea comes from God, and there is always a need for the human subjects to be servants to the Idea.
Marx liked Hegel's historical approach, but figured he got the first principle wrong. In order to produce a true historicity he had to replace the Idea with matter, as the first principle. This was to place the living human being, and its material body as the first principle, rather than some pie in the sky "good", "right", or "God". So from Marx's perspective there is real substance grounding these ideas like "good", "right", "just", and this is the material needs of the material human being. From this perspective we can have a real history of the State, judging by its practises of providing for the material needs of material human bodies.
You can see the inversion. From the Hegelian perspective, the people must be judged in their capacity to serve the ideals of the State. From the Marxian perspective, the State must be judged in its capacity to serve the material needs of human beings.
Quoting Janus
No, there's no circle. I've already noticed that some of my presumed understandings turn out to be misunderstandings. And that is the basis for the conclusion that there is such a thing as correctness. It's not circular because the grounding for "misunderstanding" is in my personal failures.
Quoting Janus
I can know this from the same principle. I know that some supposed understandings lead to success, and some lead to failures, and, metaphysics is comprised of propositions for understanding. By deduction I can conclude that some metaphysical understandings lead to successes and others to failures.
Quoting Janus
I tend to judge metaphysical understandings by how pervasive they are through multiple cultures, and how well they stand up to the test of time. I think that those principles provide a good indication of success and therefore correctness. It's similar to natural selection in evolution.
Thanks Tom. It's an oversimplification which I believe to be somewhat accurate.
What is 'seeing' as a process for you? clearly it doesn't involve eyes (since you don't use your eyes to 'see' the model). It also doesn't involve external objects, since you 'see' the model. It doesn't even involve your visual cortex (that's involved in the modelling, and yet what you 'see' is somehow the finished model)
So what is it to 'see' something? My dictionary simply has...
Quoting https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/see
I'm intrigued by what makes you want to alter that definition.
Quoting RussellA
You just said...
Quoting RussellA
...so are you seeing two things? One, the tree(indirectly) and two, the model (directly).
Quoting RussellA
What would it mean to exist 'as a tree'? As opposed to what?
Quoting RussellA
I don't see how you would know what 'treating it like a tree' would entail if no-one has any veridical experience of trees.
Quoting RussellA
It just logically follows. If to 'know' something is to have sufficient warrant for believing it', and if 'sufficient warrant' is 'having something respond as expected when treating it as if it were what you believe it to be' - then is simply follows, by substitution, that you 'know' you see a tree all the while you treat it as if it were a tree and it responds accordingly.
If you disagree you need to supply an alternative definition for 'I know', because with the one you previously agreed to you, you must 'know' you're seeing a tree. all I've done is directly substitute 'know' for your definition of 'know'.
Absolutely. Part of the process of 'seeing' we can be fairly sure about now is that it involves what's termed 'construction'. We take all those patterns of light we sampled, put them into a prediction engine together with a ton of previous assumptions about what we expect to sample, and come up with a set of instructions for what to do about that sample. The vast majority of those instructions are geared toward getting a better sample, reducing our uncertainty about the data. Some instructions are even ways to manipulate the data so it more closely matches what we expect (prune the tree so it's branches match what we expect them to be).
Nowhere in that whole process is there a tree. Nowhere is there even a model of a tree. There's just a load of chemicals and electrical signals.
The 'tree' is an aspect of our language and commonly it refers to the external world. the thing that's 'out there'. It seems something of an odd pastime of philosophers to start fiddling with that.
Quoting Mww
Ha! My research would have come to a very ignominious end had humans turned out to have agreed with each other about the most fundamental human considerations. Mostly, we're grateful.
Exactly my point. You have trouble with the tree, yet when considering, say public health policy (over which you've become quite hysterically opposed to alternative views) you are absolutely pathologically certain of what you believe to be the case about the world.
Why is it in complex cases of public health policy you're absolutely certain that the way the world seems to you is the way it is, but with a simple tree you're unsure?
With the second sense, its incoherent because its like saying I see the tree as it appears without my intervening process of perception. But obviously, a tree that is not perceived does not appear.
Despite appearances, this is an argument against indirect, not direct, realism.
* Sometimes not: I was at the top of a mountain once, looking down upon a pine forest. Within this forest, surrounded by pines, was a group of golden birch trees, which was strange considering it was the South of France in spring. A short while later the correct perception snapped into place: they were not birch trees at all but just a patch of pine trees lit up by evening sunlight through a gap in the clouds.
I think you succeeded. Nicely put.
If I had to quibble or add something, Id want to emphasize that material needs for Marx included social, creative, spiritual and intellectual needs.
Quoting Janus
What they lack is the ability to consider themselves as subjects, i.e. they're absent rational self-awareness. Yes some can pass the mirror test, but I bet none of them are thinking 'what am I doing here?' or 'what does being an elephant mean, really?' They dont have the predicament of selfhood.
I've always thought this position really odd. I mean you've literally zero evidence either way. There's no behavioural indicator of questioning selfhood and no reason to think a spoken language is required. So why would you "bet" either way?
A puzzle I have my own solution to, but remains to be accepted by the Direct Realist.
I wrote "Direct Realism's solution to this seeming paradox is by equating the effect with the cause, in that, if the effect is sensing of the colour green, Direct Realism says that the cause is also the colour green. Given a single effect, Direct Realism gives a single cause that is identical with the effect. However, this is an illusion."
As Searle wrote, the experience of pain is identical with the pain
"The relation of perception to the experience is one of identity. It is like the pain and the experience of pain. The experience of pain does not have pain as an object because the experience of pain is identical with the pain. Similarly, if the experience of perceiving is an object of perceiving, then it becomes identical with the perceiving. Just as the pain is identical with the experience of pain, so the visual experience is identical with the experience of seeing"
The Indirect Realist accepts that perceiving a single cause for a single effect is an illusion, but this is not something that the Direct Realist accepts.
Other factors that the the Direct Realist need to take into account are: i) the asymmetry of causal relations, which coincides with temporal asymmetry, whereby effects do not precede their causes, and ii) the over determination problem, where an effect such as perceiving the colour green can have two or more distinct sufficient causes.
Quoting Banno
Very true. Who are you. You may be a sixteen year old working as a waiter and living in Lima, you might be Kamala Harris passing her evenings in Washington, you could be a forty year old tax inspector living in Beijing wanting to improve their English, or you may even be a ChatGPT. I don't know. I am responding to the post, not the author of the post who is unknown to me.
Roland Barthes wrote The Death of the Author in 1967, which emphasizes the primacy of each individual reader's interpretation of the work over any "definitive" meaning intended by the author.
Logical thing to do, from their point of view, when fiddling with the in here couldnt be improved.
Quoting Isaac
I can .errr .see how that is likely true.
Right, and I think that is actually quite important. The reason I said Marx is so insightful, is the same reason why his materialism is so similar to Hegel's idealism. He successfully transforms Hegel's "Idea" into "matter". So instead of rejecting Hegel, as pie-in-the-sky idealism, he just takes Hegel's historicity pretty much as it is, goes one step beyond, and grounds it in something supposedly real, i.e. matter. Therefore all the features of the Idea are manifestations of matter.
This is similar to what Aristotle did with Plato's "the good". The good is cast as some sort of guiding principle for the human being, combining both body and mind to act coherently, in unison. But the good is left by Plato as fundamentally unknowable. Aristotle saw that if the good is supposed to be the guiding principle, it cannot be left as unknowable, so he moved toward positing a real tangible "end" to human actions and that was "happiness".
The issue which arises, is that if the thing posited as the real tangible end, happiness for Aristotle, or material existence for Marx, turns out to be elusive, incoherent, or unintelligible itself (merely a pie-in-the-sky ideal), then the proposal is eroded, the structure collapses back, and is revealed as being just another form of idealism. So what is pivotal is the truth to the grounding of the idea.
Along the lines of what is written in Searle's article:
You said that you directly perceive the tree, but suppose it is a hallucination. And suppose the hallucination is type identical with the veridical experience. What do you see then? It is obvious that you do not see the tree but only the visual experience itself, what the traditional philosophers called an idea, an impression, or a sense datum.
The Cambridge Dictionary describes "to see" as:
to be conscious of what is around you by using your eyes
to watch a film, television programme, etc.
to be the time or place when something happens
to understand, know, or realize
to meet or visit someone, or to visit a place
to consider or think about
to imagine someone doing a particular activity
to take someone somewhere by going there with them
to try to discover
to make certain that something happens
I see what you mean, but both the good and bad thing about language is that each word may have several different meanings, and knowing what is meant often depends on context, which is often ambiguous.
Quoting Isaac
I think that I am seeing only one thing, a model of a tree in my mind.
Searle wrote:
"The experience of pain does not have pain as an object because the experience of pain is identical with the pain."
Using Searle's words, it is not that the visual experiences has a tree as an object because the visual experience is identical with the tree.
Quoting Isaac
"Trees" exist in my mind as concepts. What exists in the world are elementary particles, elementary forces and space-time.
Quoting Isaac
"Trees" as private concepts didn't exist before being named in a public performative act, which could have been either by social acceptance over a period of time or by an institutional body. Before being publicly named, no one would have had any veridical experience of "trees". For example, in France, trees were named "arbres" and in Germany were named "alberi". This public performative act is available to everyone who uses that language. Therefore an individual's private concept of "tree" has been determined by knowledge of the public performative act of naming a certain set of shapes and colours as a "tree".
For example, no one at this moment has any veridical experience of a squund. However, if I pointed out to you a certain shape that was square at the top and round at its base and said "I name this a "squund"", we would then both have the private knowledge that this particular shape had the name "squund". I could then ask you to pass me the squund, and you could do so, even though your private knowledge of a squund is inaccessible to me, and my private knowledge of a squund is inaccessible to you. The veridical knowledge of squunds is then henceforth stored in the public domain, either in dictionaries or in conversations
Similarly for trees, my concept of tree is different to yours, I can never know your private concept of tree, yet we can both sensibly discuss trees because what a tree is is stored in the public domain.
Quoting Isaac
A warrant is a justification. They say knowledge is justified true belief. I may believe that there is a tree in the field and can justify my belief, but a justified belief is not knowledge.
To be knowledge, the justified belief has to be true. There arrives the problem.
A Direct Realist argues that they have direct knowledge of the world, and therefore knows that there is a tree there. An Indirect Realist argues that they only have indirect knowledge of the world, and therefore can only believe that there is a tree there.
Anyways I don't know why you think I have "trouble with trees". I have none.
But the context in which 'see' means to get signals from an internal model absent of any involvement of the eyes seem entirely a fabrication of philosophers pushing the brand of indirect realism for which it was coined. It's not in common use in any other field. So why fabricate it thus?
Quoting RussellA
So your eyes are not even involved in seeing? If you don't see the tree, then how do you know what it is your model is a model of?
Quoting RussellA
How do you know they exist? The only means we have of detecting them has been via the same flawed senses which you doubt can detect a tree. How on earth can they now detect an elementary particle?
Quoting RussellA
So if what you see matches the definition in that public domain, in what sense have you still not seen a tree?
Quoting RussellA
No direct realist I've ever read claims this. Do you have a quote or reference to work from?
You said...
Quoting hypericin
Are you also quite certain that vaccine researchers are not seeing the results of their tests as they really are? That they may well be wrong?
The point is your sophistic uncertainty about the external world is performatively contradicted by your every action toward it. You are certain that the chemicals in the vaccine will have a real effect on real cells in your body to help fight off real virus particles. You don't even doubt it as much as you should, let alone as much as you claim to doubt the reality of trees.
Except I make no such claim. The tree is real, and the tree as represented experientially is not the "way the tree really is". It is likely a faithful mapping of real properties of the tree, but it is a mapping, not a "true representation". A "true representation" is a fiction, a contradiction.
Our experiences of a tree stand in the same relation to a physical tree as the phrase "a tree" does. "A tree" maps faithfully to a tree, if there is one, but it is not a tree, and there is no "true phrase" among all the possible translations.
I am sure it is true hallucinations is a rare event, but perhaps a lot of philosophy is based on trying to solve inconsistencies in a theory, such as Frege's puzzles and Russell's paradox.
Searle wrote about Direct Realism and the problem with hallucinations
"I think the great philosophers of the past rejected Direct Realism because of an argument which was, until recently, quite commonly accepted among members of the profession. Some of them thought Direct Realism was so obviously false as not to be worth arguing against. There are different versions of it but the most common is called the argument from illusion and here is how it goes. You said that you directly perceive the tree, but suppose it is a hallucination. And suppose the hallucination is type identical with the veridical experience. What do you see then? It is obvious that you do not see the tree but only the visual experience itself, what the traditional philosophers called an idea, an impression, or a sense datum."
Perhaps illusion would be a better word than hallucination, in that illusions are far more common than hallucinations. For example, I perceive someone 5m away as being taller than the same person 10m away. Perhaps this would also be a route into the discussion as to whether we see the person directly or indirectly.
However, even within Direct Realism there are two versions, naive realism and scientific realism. For naive realism, objects continue to have all the properties that we usually perceive them to have, properties such as yellowness, warmth, and mass, whilst for scientific realism, some of the properties an object is perceived as having are dependent on the perceiver.
Quoting Richard B
True, most of my knowledge comes from the public realm, the Moon Landing, Disney Land, The Large Hadron Collider, Australia etc, ie, Russell's Knowledge by Description.
But this knowledge is indirect, more along the lines of Indirect Realism than Direct Realism.
Quoting Richard B
Quoting Richard B
As Searle writes, we might as well have a name for our visual experiences, which we may as well call "sense data"
You told us earlier that visual experience takes place when photons strike the photoreceptor cells and set up a series of causal events that eventually results in a visual experience in the cortex. But it is of that visual experience that we are visually aware. The science of vision has proven that the only thing you can actually see, literally, scientifically is the visual experience going on in your head. We might as well have a name for these visual experiences. Call them sense data. All you ever perceive are sense data, and by way of vision all you can ever perceive are visual sense data."
I think the term "sense data" should be taken metaphorically rather than literally, as with many other scientific terms, such as The Laws of Nature, Natural Selection, gravity, etc. From the object in the world to our perception of it, there may be be a long chain of intermediary events, meaning that it would be impossible to pinpoint exactly where these sense data are, even if they exist at all
Sense data has the metaphorical meaning in that we don't perceive the object in the world directly, but only indirectly through a chain of intermediary events. It means that we are not perceiving the object as it is in the world, only as to how we perceive it to be in the world.
Quoting Richard B
I think you are being too harsh on Descartes. He had an intense interest in the sciences, was not a sceptic but used scepticism as a means of philosophical enquiry.
Right. So when the vaccine scientist sees the result of their test in the pertri dish, it's not the way the result 'really is'. We ought doubt it.
Quoting hypericin
So we map trees, but we don't see trees? Any reason why the normal use of the word 'see' here is replaced with 'map'? what was wrong with 'see' to describe (as it has done for thousands of years) the process of what you're now calling 'mapping' the tree?
The difference is in individual bodies. If we want to explain the difference between the way a man sees and the way a bat sees we explain the body. We dont need to say they see different things, we need only say that they have different bodies and see differently.
Youre assuming inputs and outputs and the computational theory of mind. Computers and Turing machines may try to mimic human beings but they are not analogous to human beings, Im afraid. Do you think computers can perceive?
So do we see trees then?
Finally.
Quoting Isaac
IEP article on Objects of Perception
[i]The objects of perception are the entities we attend to when we perceive the world. Perception lies at the root of all our empirical knowledge. We may have acquired much of what we know about the world through testimony, but originally such knowledge relies on the world having been perceived by others or ourselves using our five senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste, and smell.
Perceptual realism is the common sense view that tables, chairs and cups of coffee exist independently of perceivers. Direct realists also claim that it is with such objects that we directly engage. The objects of perception include such familiar items as paper clips, suns and olive oil tins. It is these things themselves that we see, smell, touch, taste and listen to.[/i]
If Perceptual Realism claims that we directly engage with objects such as paper clips, and such objects exist independently of the perceiver, and the perception of these objects lies at the root of all our empirical knowledge, then doesn't this suggest that the Direct Realist's perception gives direct knowledge of the world.
Wikipedia article on Direct and indirect realism
[i]Naïve realism is known as direct realism, which was developed to counter indirect or representative realism.
The representational realist would deny that "first-hand knowledge" is a coherent concept, since knowledge is always via some means, and argue instead that our ideas of the world are interpretations of sensory input derived from an external world that is real.[/i]
If Direct Realism is a counter to Representative Realism, and the Representational Realist denies that "first-hand knowledge" is a coherent concept, then doesn't that presuppose that the Direct Realist believes that "first-hand knowledge" is a coherent concept.
If the Direct Realist doesn't claim that have they have direct knowledge of the world, what do they claim ?
Direct doesn't exclude the possibility of error, so it in no way assumes perfect knowledge. You said yourself...
Quoting RussellA
Does that directness mean it is impossible to be wrong? That no error can possibly occur between sense data and conscious awareness?
Searle wrote:
"The experience of pain does not have pain as an object because the experience of pain is identical with the pain. Similarly, if the experience of perceiving is an object of perceiving, then it becomes identical with the perceiving. Just as the pain is identical with the experience of pain, so the visual experience is identical with the experience of seeing."
Using Searle's concept of identity between the experience of pain and pain, the model and what the model is of are one and the same, therefore knowing one means knowing both.
That's not remotely what Searle is saying there. He's saying that one does not 'experience' pain because pain is an experience. Likewise one does not 'experience' a perceptual representation because representing something is an experience, not an object.
The quote has nothing to do with modeling external objects. He's certainly not saying models and that which they model are identical. That would be absurd.
I never said he did. I said that using the concept of identity, such as that between the experience of pain and pain, the model and what the model is of are one and the same.
There is absolutely something in between: all the neural machinery that, however it does, produces perception. This is readily distinguishable from the perceiver by it being imperceptible. You are not aware of the vast effort your brain undergoes to give you a nice clean visual representation.
So your table is broken, split in two. On one half is the tree, on the other half is the perception of the tree, as experienced by the perceiver. Both halves are completely different in their properties. In between them lies a chasm of unconscious neural activity, which is neither the perceiver, as it is imperceptible, nor is it the perceived (obviously).
Then you've failed to provide any evidence to back up your claim that...
Quoting RussellA
How are we unable to perceive neural activity, but were able to perceive visible representations? Couldnt the same thing that views representations view neural activity as well?
We have a fairly accurate account of the biology. We can simply look into the eyes and determine numerous visual impairments, for example.
Yes. Where does this visual representation of a tree appear? Who or what is looking at it?
I can't help thinking that nothing could be more "caught up in views" than seeing things in their numinous light. Given enough exposure, even the most wonderous spiritual experiences become ordinary and we cease to be caught up in their reverence. The sacred has a nasty habit of becoming mundane, in other words.
Quoting Janus
It appears to be the same. I do understand the grasping desire for pleasant experiences to persist and remain unchanging though.
Quoting Janus
To be clear, you're not talking about seeing visually but a particular kind of brain state. Modern people tend to have a hyperactive default mode network or so-called 'monkey mind'. A common problem with this hyperactivity is that it may cause undue anxiety. Reducing hyperactivity can reduce anxiety, generally speaking. Not to undervalue wonderous numinous light, of course. That's super cool too.
So I too can develop a giant ego like Leary and crew? No thank you.
I think it's counterproductive to conflate vision and abstract thought.
Quoting Janus
They have an internal model of their bodies just as we do, as well as a model for everything else they know, just as we do. They can develop maladaptive responses to situations that cause them undue anxiety, just as we can. We have an advantage in that regard because we can use our reasoning to overcome our conditioning, to some extent at least, as with cognitive behavior therapy for instance.
Quoting Janus
That's an odd thing to say, that you don't have to separate a tree from its surroundings in order to see it. If you mean to say that our minds, and the minds of animals, automatically distinguish things like trees and you don't need to consciously focus on a tree to see it then yeah, that makes sense.
Basically the same place as the visual representations in your dreams. You see things in your dreams, right?
I dream dreams, certainly, but I couldnt say I see them because my eyes are closed.
I asked if you see things in your dreams, not if you see dreams.
You asked where a visual representation of a tree appears and I suggested that it appears where all visual representations appear.
Fine; I dream things in my dreams. I cannot say I see them.
I suppose it may be possible to take the neural activity of dreams and somehow convert the signals into a visual display. Then you could see recordings of your dreams.
Then what can you say you do with the visual components of your dreams? With the auditory components?
Yes, all that seems obvious; since they would need symbolic language to think "what am I doing here?" or "what does being an elephant mean, really?", and we don't think they possess symbolic language.
The question was: if they don't possess symbolic language then they don't conceive of their experience dualistically (meaning they would not "consider themselves as subjects), but does it follow that they would experience nothing, as @praxis claimed?
I'm not sure of this. Selfhood (in my perhaps idiosyncratic view) consists in the organism voluntarily generating its own phenomenal experience. This is thinking. When we think, we typically generate the phenomenal experience of a voice, or of images. This cleaves the phenomenal world in two: some phenomenal experience comes from the outside, some comes involuntarily from the inside (pains, emotions), some come from, and are initiated by, the inside. This latter duo, the initiator of its own internal experiences, coupled with those internal experiences themselves, is what we call the self.
While animals do not speak, nothing stops them from generating their own phenomenal experiences, and thus having at least a rudimentary sense of self.
It just sounds to me like you lack the experience, because that is not at all in accordance with mine.
Quoting praxis
Human experience is mediated by abstract thought. Consequently, we understand the world in dualistic terms. It is possible to let that whole machinery go, and you seemed to be claiming that if we did that we would experience nothing at all. So I asked you about whether you think animals experience nothing at all.
Quoting praxis
Your unexamined attitudes are a laugh! You don't know what you are missing.
Quoting praxis
So we must imagine, since we understand things dualistically in terms of model/ reality: of having a model of reality. Models need not be understood in this kind of dualistic fashion. We could instead say that modeling is intrinsic to experience. that experience just is modeling.
I don't know about animals developing maladaptive responses, but they can certainly suffer and be miserable in situations that cause them anxiety; situations mostly created by humans.
Quoting praxis
I'd say both animals and humans distinguish things that are of significance to them. Animals are not split off from their experience, caught up in an internal dialogue or monologue that pushes them to seek some illusionary stable dualistic understanding that will answer all their linguistically generated questions once and for all. Animals, I imagine, live in the eternal present, in a non-dual state of awareness.
I'm wondering why you speak in terms of "generating" phenomenal experience. It would seem that phenomenal experience is ongoing for percipients as long as they are alive. What do you think a "rudimentary sense of self" consists in? Just the basic proprioceptive and sensational experience that comes with being alive, or something more than that?
I completely accept that animals are subjects of experience- that they're beings, distinct from objects or things. I thnk the Cartesian view of animals as automata is grotesquely mistaken. But the key indicator of human awareness just is the sense of what is mine, what am I, what I possess, and so on. That is the basic fact that is symbolised by various 'myths of the fall'. We reflect on meaning, on suffering, on loss, in a way that animals cannot. One of my pet peeves is the way modern philosophy blurs that distinction, mainly due to misinterpreting Darwinian evolution as a philosophy, which it isn't (i.e. we're fully determined by evolutionary biology.)
Quoting hypericin
Well, first, I'm not at all certain what 'generating your own phenomenal experience' means. Do you mean, hallucinating?
Quoting Janus
I'm sure that's a kind of romantic myth. They're also incapable of wrestling with the meaning of existence, that is the perogative of rational sentient beings. (See Are Humans Special, David Loy.)
I never said they see different things. They have a different cognitive framework based on their bodies.
Quoting NOS4A2
No, I don't. It was not analogous to mind but rather intended to be analogous for how outputs can be processed as different from their inputs, and not even in a 1-to-1 correspondence.
I'm not promoting the idea that animals live in some kind of aesthetic rapture, or even that humans who attain non-dual awareness do. I think non-dual awareness is very ordinary, it is just everyday experience. Our experience itself is always already non-dual; it is the rational discursive mind that creates the illusion of a world of subjects and objects. I don't believe animals share that illusion.
I'll have a look at the Loy article, but my response right now to the idea of human exceptionalism is that all animals are special. 'Special' is related to species, and all species are unique. So humans are not special by virtue of being the only special ones, but are ordinary just like the other animals in terms of being special.
We are the only species that possesses symbolic language, and all the cultural creativity that enables, and the suffering and sense of loss and being lost that also comes with self-reflection. Other animals do not have to bear that burden, and in that sense also we are special. But all of that has interest and meaning only for us. We also exploit other animals and each other more than any other animals do.
Quoting Wayfarer
No, I mean thinking. When you think to yourself, "I'm having a nice day", you are generating the phenomenal experience of a voice in your head saying "I'm having a nice day". Or, you might think visually, and generate the visual phenomenal experience of you sitting outside in a sunny day.
You do wonder, then, why it's origins and traditions lie mostly with renunciates and sannyasins.
You might be referring to the 'ordinary mind' approach of Zen but bear in mind it is situated in Japanese society with high levels of ritual and aesthetic enculturation. It appeals to Westerners because it sounds very approachable but I think the reality is different.
Quoting hypericin
I don't think of internal mentation as being phenomenal. Phenomena means 'appearance' or 'what appears'.
No? I think of it as entirely phenomenal. When you visualize, or play a song in your head, is that not phenomenal?
Im not sure. Im asleep. My eyes do not point inward so I am unable to verify what goes on behind them. Supposing that it is possible, my only hope would be to ask others what I am doing, what sorts of movements I am making during this period, however subtle they may be.
I imagine the ordinary mind of the Japanese is suffused with Japanese culture just as the ordinary mind of a westerner is suffused with western culture.
I'm not suggesting that the practice that must be undertaken to realize (with your whole being and not merely intellectually) that experience is non-dual is easy, and that is why renouncing the workaday life of social commitments and all the stress and confusion that comes with that ( in any culture, but arguably even more so in modern life) would not be a hindrance.
What do you imagine the experience of the "enlightened ones" is like? Ordinary or "satcitananda"; is there a difference; do you imagine it is a state of aesthetic rapture?
I agree; all appearances, images, sensations, impressions; whether "internal" or "external" count as phenomena in my book.
No. Phenomena are 'what appears' - sensory input. The stream of consciousness is just that, a stream of consciousness. 'Phenomena' is a hugely overused word nowadays, because it's come to mean, basically, 'everything' - which makes it meaningless, as it doesn't differentiate anything.
Quoting Janus
I learned in Enlightenment 101 that the state of enlightenment is inconceivable, but let's not get too far into the long grass.
The ordinary state of non-dual awareness is "inconceivable", simply because all conceptions are dualistic. The question I asked is along a different trajectory: I was asking whether you imagined enlightenment as being in a constant state of ecstasy, such as might be experienced when tripping, or when having a "mystical" or intense aesthetic experience.
If you want to do philosophy you must be prepared to get into the long grass. On the other hand there is no imperative to do philosophy; philosophy is not spiritual practice, but may be good preparation for it.
Apart from internality and accuracy, what is qualitatively different about the song you hear and the song you play in your head?
Quoting Wayfarer
It means the appearance or experience of things, that which has a "what it is like". This applies to internal experiences as much as external.
Quoting Wayfarer
Which of course says nothing at all.
I'm not asking about your eyes, but about your visual experiences.
That only I can imagine the music in my head. It's not 'an appearance' for anyone, not even me.
'Phenomenon:1. a fact or situation that is observed to exist or happen, especially one whose cause or explanation is in question. "glaciers are interesting natural phenomena".'
this blog post by Edward Feser differentiating concepts from sensation and imagination might be relevant.
Quoting Janus
I think my response would always be 'defiled' or 'contaminated' by my own preconceptions and expectations. I also think there's considerable danger in envisaging such states in terms of what we consider pleasure or ecstacy. (I actually I recall a remark in the preface to Zen Mind Beginner's Mind where Suzuki roshi remarks that, if you have an enlightenment experience, you may not like it!)
There is an everyday usage of 'phenomena' which arguably restricts the term to appearances of the external kind. But, as I understand it, the term has a much wider range in phenomenology.
In its most basic form, phenomenology attempts to create conditions for the objective study of topics usually regarded as subjective: consciousness and the content of conscious experiences such as judgements, perceptions, and emotions. Although phenomenology seeks to be scientific, it does not attempt to study consciousness from the perspective of clinical psychology or neurology. Instead, it seeks through systematic reflection to determine the essential properties and structures of experience.
From here
All our responses are "defiled" by preconceptions and expectations. As Wittgenstein says "Don't for heaven's sake, be afraid of talking nonsense! But you must pay attention to your nonsense."
I don't imagine that non-dual experience (enlightenment) is always pleasant. Pain can be a non-dual experience.Is enlightenment the cessation of all suffering or the cessation of attachment to suffering? The body is always prone to suffer.
I think what Shunryu is referring to is the fear that can be attendant upon losing a sense of self; think "bad trip" as opposed to "good trip" and how quickly we can shift from the first to the second, if we "let go". I have plenty of experience of that dynamic.
As regards 'non-dual experience', I think maybe that ought to be another topic, although I suppose it does have some important light to cast on the question of 'who perceives what'. It's just that the other posters here presumably don't have much of a grasp of non-dualism (which is a very elusive topic anyway). I have some reference material I could locate later but don't particularly want to pursue it further here.
Whoever has a solid grasp of it, please, explain away. :lol:
I think we're merely capable of more abstract thought than animals, because of our relatively large cerebral cortex. You'll need to be clearer about what "machinery" it's possible to let go of. I've already agreed that people can have a hyperactive default mode network or 'monkey mind' and that deactivating it can reduce any anxiety produced by the hyperactivity.
Quoting Janus
I'm glad that your imagination has a good sense of humor. I do wish that Leary and his contemporaries had more thoroughly examined their attitudes toward it. Perhaps without their deluded visions of grandeur, it may not have turned out to be classified as a Schedule I substance.
Quoting Janus
We all live in the present, actually, though that present is often lost in thought, and all that thought may have a tendency to cause undo anxiety. Animals may suffer maladaptive anxiety nevertheless, though not caused by overthinking. The good news is that we can think our way out of it, unlike animals.
If you are interested, and find it strange when someone might not admit that they see in their dreams, I recommend you read a book called "Dreaming" by Norman Malcolm. In this book, he argues that it is a conceptual confusion to think one judges, reasons, feels, or sees in a dream. Malcolm is a great elucidator of Wittgenstein's later philosophy and uses to its fullest extent to challenge this notion of some mental phenomenon occurs in sleep.
I do agree that a healthy dose of skepticism in life is extreme valuable, unfortunately, Descartes takes it too far where I would label it radical skepticism. To doubt whether there is a world or it is just a dream is taking it too far where the only way he saw to rescue the world is to rely on all loving God that would not deceive.
I appreciate and admire John Searle's ability to critique philosophical theories, and I often find I am in agreement with is final positions. However, John's desire to theorize moves him away from some of the fundamental points Wittgenstein was trying to make in Philosophical Investigations. For example, I have concerns with his distinction between the ontological subjective, and ontological objective. I feel the weight of the private language argument more than he does.
Depending on circumstance on how one uses "I see a tree" and "I know I see a tree" these don't mean the same thing. Furthermore, this starts us down the path where Wittgenstein's in "On Certainty" explores Moore's misuse of "I know" in "I know I have two hands." In summary, both sentences do not make sense,"I know I have two hands" or "I do not know I have two hands", only but in extreme rare circumstances.
I have always was puzzled why Bertrand Russel in "Problem of Philosophy" had this expectation that the must be "the height", "the color", or "the shape" of a table. He never presented any argument on why this is the case, but used it as a spring board to start his skepticism of what we can know and cannot know.
Good point, I just think philosophy tends to start real well rooted in what we all experience, but goes off the deep end when they loose site of the world and get mesmerized by the Eternal Platonic Realm of Ideas. This is where I part ways with Bertrand Russel when he said in "The Problems of Philosophy", "Thus, utility does not belong to philosophy." Maybe if utility was consider a little more, more consensus would be achieved, like in science.
:lol:
The beauty of it is that if you can project sufficient authority you can say pretty much anything and the faithful will hang on your every word and hold it as precious truth.
Do you think abstract thought is possible without language? It is possible to slow down the internal dialogue, and my own experience shows me that in order to do that I must already be calmer; I doubt it is possible to shut it down completely. It is also possible to avoid being carried away by thought, but it is far from easy.
Does the anxiety cause the hyperactivity or vice versa? Probably a "feedback" process, but who knows where it starts?
Quoting praxis
Leary alarmed the authorities with his revolutionary rhetoric. I don't see it as egomania or "visions of grandeur", but more like childish over-enthusiasm. I can't think of any of his contemporaries who got nearly as carried away and/or caused nearly as much alarm as Leary. Your view of Leary ( and unnamed contemporaries) seems over the top to me.
Quoting praxis
Of course by definition we all live in the present, but that is trivially true: we don't all experience living in the present. Perhaps you could give an example of a situation that could be characterized as an animal that is suffering maladaptive anxiety due to a situation not caused by humans. That would perhaps help me to see what I might not be seeing about what you're saying now.
It will take a while to work through your subtle ideas, though I will do what I can. A proper answer would involve a better understanding of Searle's Thinking about the Real World, Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein's On Certainty, Russell's Problems of Philosophy and how all these relate to the question posed in the OP, "who perceives what?". The "who" being the Direct Realist and the Indirect Realist. The "what" being do they directly perceive the world or indirectly perceive the world by means of a representation of the world in their mind.
I'm tempted to say that all thought is abstract, especially in light of this 'non-dual' awareness that you mention. Are there really separate things or is it just that our minds separate things? If our minds didn't separate things then we wouldn't be able to 'see' anything, right?
For example, if I spoke to you in a language that you've never heard of before you wouldn't be able to pick out any words. It would just be continuous gibberish. You couldn't 'see' any words even though you possess the concepts of language, words, letters, etc. Similarly, if you didn't know anything about trees or plant life in general, if you lacked those concepts, the first time you saw a tree you wouldn't know what you were looking at. It would be one thing until you analyzed it and broke it down into distinct parts. Your concept of 'tree' could become more robust the more you learned about trees.
Animals form concepts the same way and manipulate them in order to fulfill their needs, without language, or rather without language like ours.
But the word is "Phenomenal":
2.perceptible by the senses or through immediate experience.
We have immediate experience of internal imaginings as much as we do the external world.
Lets not get caught up in vocabulary. My claim is that thinking is the voluntary generation of immediate experience, and that this is the foundation of the sense of self. The blog post looks interesting and very relevant, I will read it when I have more time.
The more abstract ideas we build up around things the stronger our grasp of them becomes. Our conceptual "grip" becomes firmer. I also think that things have their perceptual boundariessurfaces that reflect light, and I think that in one way or another these light-illuminated edge boundaries make things to potentially stand out for all percipients.
This makes for the world to seem to be constituted by separate things, but I think this is a light-generated illusion. On the other hand I don't think the world is an amorphous mass, I don't doubt the world is a field of differential intensities that is neither one nor many; hence non-dualism.
Indirect Realism is incoherent.
The use of the word "indirect" commits us to this idea that there is no resemblance between our "idea/sense data of a tree" and the "material object tree." That we directly perceive the idea/sense data but indirectly perceive the tree.
First, let us recall how we are taught the word "resemblance". Maybe it was done by showing two objects and our teacher says, "See, these two objects resemble each other, while those two objects do not resemble each". With each new encounter we use the word and show that we judge similar to our teachers and thus demonstrate that we understand.
Is the indirect realist use of word "resemble" coherent? This is what indirect realist is asking: see how these objects do not resemble each other:
1. The idea/sense data that is not accessible to us since it is a private object.
2. The tree itself is hidden under the veil of our experience since it is indirectly perceived
So, in principle, both objects are not available to compare on whether they are resembling each other; so, the use of the word "resemblance" in this theory is incoherent. And thus, indirect realism is incoherent.
Hume has a nice quote from Enquiry
"It is a question of fact, whether the perceptions of the senses be produced by external objects, resembling them: How shall this question be determined? by experience surely...But here experience is, and must be entirely silent. The mind has never any thing present to it but the perceptions, and cannot possibly reach any experience of their connexion with objects. The supposition of such a connexion is , therefore, without any foundation in reason."
So, indirect realism have is "without foundation in reason" according to Hume. However, I argue that the situation is even more dire because the theory is just incoherent due to the use of "resemblance"
I would argue the opposite, that Direct Realism is "without foundation in reason" according to Hume.
Hume wrote: i) "The mind has never any thing present to it but the perceptions, and cannot possibly reach any experience of their connexion with objects" and ii) "The supposition of such a connexion is, therefore, without any foundation of reason".
Item i) is not the position of the Direct Realist, where things in the world are perceived immediately or directly rather than inferred on the basis of perceptual evidence. This is more the position of the Indirect Realist, where our conscious experience is not of the real world itself but of an internal representation, a miniature virtual-reality replica of the world. Knowledge is always via some means, and our ideas of the world are interpretations of sensory input derived from an external world that is real.
Item ii) reconfirms Hume's position that the mind only has knowledge of its perceptions, and that it is not possible to know just from these perceptions their cause in the world, a position again in agreement with that of the Indirect Realist.
In modern terms, Hume's position has been described as realist, anti-realist and projective.
For Hume, Realism about the external world is vindicated, defensible, endorsed or justified, not supported by reason but from our propensity to believe in our senses and experience through inference about what we observe rather than from direct knowledge of what we observe.
Anti-realist is a term coined by Michael Dummett against realism which he saw as a "colourless reductionism". An external reality is assumed rather than hypothetical, and the truth of a statement rests on its demonstrability through internal logic rather than any correspondence to an external, independent reality, A position not that of Direct Realism.
Projective may be a) feature projection, the attribution of features of minds to other objects and has "spatial connotations" of throwing forward features of the mind, something 'in here', onto something 'out there' in the world or b) explanatory projection, where there is an "appearance whose explanation lies not in the world being the way that it seems but because of the mentality of the thinker". A belief in causal necessity is a feature of both feature and explanatory projection, in that as genuine causal necessity is not possible as this would require acquaintance with some a priori knowledge of the object's causal consequences, this motivates a projective explanation of how we can determine a necessary connection that we cannot detect. Hume should be read as a realist about causal power, in that unknowable but real causal powers exist in nature. This means that although perceptions cannot be necessarily connected to their causes in the world, this bundle of casually related perceptions becomes the foundation for the self of the perceiver. Hume rejects that one idea is tied to another, necessarily conjoined, since that would mean we knew something prior to experience. But rather the source of our knowledge of necessary connections arises out of the observation of constant conjunction of certain impressions across many instances. People know of necessity through rigorous custom or habit and not from any immediate or direct knowledge. None of this is that of Direct Realism, whose position is that things in the world are perceived immediately or directly rather than inferred on the basis of perceptual evidence.
Although the terms Direct Realism and Indirect Realism may not have been used at his time of writing, Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding indicates a support for Indirect Realism rather than Direct Realism.
The Indirect Realist is not saying that there is no resemblance between what they perceive in their sense data and the cause of that perception, they are saying that they cannot know whether there is or isn't a resemblance between what they perceive in their sense data and the cause of that perception.
An effect is always overdetermined by sufficient causes
The problem is the same for both the Direct and Indirect Realist, given the effect, the perception in our sense data of a tree, how can one know the cause of that perception, how can one know the cause of that perception is a tree or not. The Indirect Realist argues that it is not possible to know the cause, whilst the Direct Realist argues that it is possible to know the cause.
I think that the term "sense data" should be treated more as a metaphor than literally, as Searle said "Give it a name, call it a sense datum.
The fundamental problem is that any effect is always overdetermined by sufficient causes. For example, when seeing a broken window, I cannot know the single cause, a stone, branch, or bird, when visiting the scene of a crime, the detective cannot know just from what they see the criminal responsible, when reading a post on the Forum, I cannot know just from the post whether the author was a 20 year old from Peru or a 80 year old from New Zealand. Similarly I cannot know just from my perception of a tree the cause of that perception, as the effect is overdetermined by more than one sufficient cause.
The mind has evolved to equate effect with cause, such that when perceiving the colour green, the mind assumes that the cause was the colour green, when perceiving a tree, the cause was a tree. As Searle wrote "The relation of perception to the experience is one of identity. It is like the pain and the experience of pain. The experience of pain does not have pain as an object because the experience of pain is identical with the pain".
The Indirect Realist accepts that the mind equates effect with cause, in that the relation of effect to perceived cause is one of identity, the Direct Realist doesn't.
"I perceive the tree" does not commit anyone to the realist position, or for that matter any other metaphysical position. Also, neither does saying "I directly perceive the tree" commit us; so as long we understand "directly" is being used in contrasting circumstances where we perceive the tree "indirectly", say in a mirror. Neither indirect or direct realism is needed to metaphysically explain, "I perceive a tree".
Quoting RussellA
What I am attempting to argue is that it does not even make sense to say "that they cannot know whether there is or isn't a resemblance between...." because the position is incoherent. My philosophical position is utilizing Wittgenstein's concept of a grammatical fiction (see Philosophical Investigation section 304 to 307). We learn words like "perceive" and "resemblance" from our fellow human beings and looking at trees and tables aids in this endeavor, not by introspection of "sense data of trees" and "sense data of tables" (PI, "What we deny is that the picture of the inner process gives us the correct idea of the use of the word "to remember".)
Lastly, some say that science supports the indirect realism position. I find this odd. When we asked scientist to study why tree leaves have the color green, they did not start by studying the brain because all we can perceive "directly" is our sense data of the green leaves. The scientist studies the light and its behavior reflecting off the leaf; they study the chemical make-up of the leaf; and they study how these chemicals reacted to the light. Let me assure you the scientist perceives the the lab, instruments, and reagents they might use to determine how leaves are green; the lab, instruments, and reagents are not inferred experiences, internal representations, or replicas.
Nice.
I wonder what to make of "The tree has three branches"? That seems to involve a tree, and not a perception-of-tree. It's different to "I perceive that the tree has three branches". It must be, as one might be wrong while the other is correct.
What do you think?
I say "The tree has three branches" is about the tree, and not about anyone's perceptions, direct or otherwise.
I agree that I don't need to be a philosopher in order to prune a tree. But this is what sets a human using their reason and intellect apart from an animal using their instinct. A pigeon may instinctively peck at grain thrown on the ground, whilst a human invents philosophy to ponder the question, am I looking at this tree directly or indirectly.
I agree that neither indirect or direct realism is needed to explain, "I perceive a tree", though I do disagree that neither indirect or direct realism is needed to metaphysically explain, "I perceive a tree". How else can indirect and direct realism be considered other than metaphysically.
However, reason and intellect are needed to be able to successfully prune a tree, rather than just hacking away at its branches causing irreparable damage. I would recommend the book Philosophy for Gardeners: Ideas and paradoxes to ponder in the garden by Kate Collyns, where she explores ideas and considers the big questions from working in the garden. She describes growers by their nature as philosophers, existentialists who try to live and work by their own rules in a garden, stoics who put up with slug damage again and again, and try to work in harmony with nature and practical quantum scientists who witness incredible processes going on in plant cells beneath the ground.
Quoting Richard B
The problem is, how can I know if there is the resemblance between my perception and the cause of my perception if all I know is my perception. I agree that knowing an effect one may be able to indirectly discover its cause, but is there a philosophical explanation that knowing an effect one has direct knowledge to its cause, taking into account the problem of over determination of sufficient causes ?
Quoting Richard B
Mine also. As with Wittgenstein, there is no doubt in my mind that I perceive a tree, you perceive a tree, and everyone else perceives a tree. As Wittgenstein says, the problem begins when someone says "I perceive a tree". What do these words mean ?
Quoting Richard B
I agree. The meaning of words are fixed in performative public situations.
Quoting Richard B
When a scientist starts to study why leaves are green, the first thing they use is their brain.
I agree they don't need to study their own brain, but they do need to use their own brain. If they didn't use their own brain, they wouldn't be able to do any studying. And using their brain means they are using their own perceptions of the world around them. One cannot get away from the fact that even scientists start from the position of perceiving the world around them.
Quoting Richard B
You say that for a scientist the laboratory is not an inferred experience. But this statement in itself is making an inference.
But this is the whole debate, how do we know whether or not the scientist's perception of the laboratory is or isn't an inferred experience. The indirect Realist is arguing that what the scientist perceives as a laboratory is an inferred experience. The Direct Realist is arguing that what the scientist perceives as a laboratory isn't an inferred experience.
You included a reference to Hume's An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding in a previous post. Hume wrote:
[i]"But philosophers, who carry their scrutiny a little farther, immediately perceive, that, even in the most familiar events, the energy of the cause is as unintelligible as in the most unusual, and that we only learn by experience the frequent Conjunction of objects, without being ever able to comprehend any thing like Connection between them."
"When we say, therefore, that one object is connected with another, we mean only, that they have acquired a connexion in our thought, and give rise to this inference, by which they become proofs of each other's existence: A conclusion, which is somewhat extraordinary; but which seems founded on sufficient evidence."[/i]
The question is, when the scientist perceives an event in their laboratory, as Hume asks, can this only ever be an inference ?
But see 308 and 309.
The process is taken as granted, trapping the fly in the bottle of thinking in terms of juxtaposing the "internal" process against the "external" world. But "I am in the process of feeling a pain" is just feeling a pain. and "I am in the process of seeing a tree" is just seeing a tree.
Again, "The tree has three branches" is very different from "I perceive the tree to have three branches". Idealism is the conflation of the two.
That is conflating various forms of Idealism. Kantian Idealism is not going to conflate that. Perhaps Berkeleyianism. In fact, Kantianism would insist on that division.
"The tree has three branches" is very different from "I perceive the tree to have three branches".
I was addressing a point you made, and declaring it not accurate. But if we are strictly saying Berekley's version of Idealism = idealism, then that would only be accurate. I am refuting that this is the only form though.
Quoting Banno
Correct. And would be very close to what an indirect realist would say, perhaps, or a Kantian.
The argument can probably be modifide to meet any form of idealism you want to discuss. I took that as fairly obvious.
"The tree has three branches" is very different from "I perceive the tree to have three branches"
"The tree has three branches" is very different from "I believe the tree to have three branches"
"The tree has three branches" is very different from "I will the tree to have three branches"
"The tree has three branches" is very different from " the tree-in-itself has three branches"
and so on.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Rather, I'm saying that arguing about accounts of historical sources is replacing thinking about the problem.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Or an arborist, or a child; the practical and the innocent. It takes doing philosophy to muddle such simple language games.
I mean, I agree to an extent sure. Here is a language game people often conflate:
1) Consciousness is CAUSED by X [place any physical system here].
2) Consciousness IS X [place any physical system here].
Yes, agreed.
Quoting Banno
Some might be doing this, but not all. Certainly, if you don't assent to something like, "All is mind, and can only be mind", then this would be seen as muddling the two, as the idealist would be accused of denying any reality outside their perception, and this is seen as incredulously absurd, based on notion that inputs (outside the person's mind) seem to be causing the experiences we are having of a tree.
Further, tying it to my previous statement, the idealist might be making the same error:
"My experience IS the tree" rather than,
"My experience is CAUSED by the tree".
(Error of the Idealist)
And as I think about it more, this error of the idealist is akin to the error by the realist/materialist as to consciousness. It is misplaced ontology, or something like this.
"Consciousness IS the physical system"
"Consciousness is CAUSED by the physical system"
(Error of the realist)
I take idealism to be pretty much defined by this transformation of facts about trees to facts about minds.
Not at all sure what you are saying at ...
Just that Kantian Idealists wouldn't say this and other kinds that acknowledge an external reality that is outside the framework of mind. That is all. Nothing more.
Again, going back to first part here, I was commenting that Kantian is seen as idealist (transcendental idealist), and it is an example of idealism that does not deny an external reality. That is all I was saying. I moved past this and just accepted you meant a certain variety of idealism, and am now just going with that so that this language game can continue.
For the purpose of this particular dialogue yes, I can accept this.
I'm being quite specific here. The error I see in idealism is that a fact about the world - say f(a), is treated as a relation involving mind, say f(a,m).
What would be the equivalent in the realist/materialist attitude to consciousness?
Not equivalent. I am not sure if it is the inverse/converse, or what not but analogously, just as an idealist is mistaking ontology with causation, so too might the realist.
Thus,
"The tree IS my experience" is the idealist error. Rather it should be:
"The tree CAUSES my experience (of that tree)"
The realist makes a similar error in terms of emergence and especially consciousness. Thus,
"Consciousness IS X physical system." Rather it should be:
"Consciousness is CAUSED by X physical system".
So while not the same, they make inverse/converse(not sure nor do I care the proper term) mistake.
In much the same way as this line can be a bunch of pixels or a sentence in English.
But again, this is a change of topic.
Isn't this just restating the problem at hand rather than answering it?
The problem:
There is mind and there are physical systems that correlate with mind.
Banno's Answer:
The event can be seen as a physical system or as being conscious. Two sides of the same coin.
This simply seems to be stating:
"There is mind and there are physical systems that correlate with mind".
That is indeed the problem we are trying to solve, but not answering the problem.
Quoting Banno
They dovetail nicely because of the error in language used. You can replace either one with a different wording and still errors ensue (use correlates or impresses upon, or anything else instead of cause to indicate that it is external)
That's an observation, not a problem.
Quoting schopenhauer1
I'm not seeing it.
How is one the other and vice versa? That is the problem.
Quoting Banno
They both make the error of one BEING the other versus one CAUSED by the other. Something may be caused, but not actually be the same as what causes it.
Is the tree the same as the experience of the tree? No. The tree impresses upon the experiencer which then experiences the tree.
Is consciousness the same as the physical systems causing the consciousness? Not necessarily.
that is not idealism - it is representative realism, where the idea or perception represents the actuality.
'Realism (in philosophy) is the view that certain concepts refer to real things. For Locke, it is the view that our sensory ideas (sensations) represent material objects in the world.
We must distinguish between the mental representation of an object, and the object itself. The mental representation is an idea (probably a complex idea). The object in the world is not an idea but an object. The slogan is ideas in the mind, qualities in bodies. Ideas can represent qualities, as well as (entire) objects.'
I am aware of this, but going down @Banno's rabbit hole. I pointed this error out if you looked a few posts prior to that.
Again, a change of topic.
I think this in the main a question for neuroscience. The contribution of philosophy might go no further than pointing out a few grammatical subtleties.
Again this is chiefly illustrative of the difficulties that plain language philosophy has with the meaning of idealism. It seems to always insist that idealists of all kinds are muddling or confusing 'the idea of x' with 'x', and that if we restrict our conversation to 'x' without bringing in the 'idea of x' then the whole problem goes away.
But that doesn't solve the problem that idealisms sought to address in the first place, which is not about the nature of 'x', but about the nature of knowing.
And as far as the neuroscience is concerned, as I have pointed out in the thread on the idealism poll, there is an outstanding problem in neuroscientific accounts of conscious experience, which is that it cannot seem to locate any specific area of the neural systems responsible for the subjective unity of perception, as is amply documented in this reference.
From the plain language point of view, the problem does go away. Or better, doesn't even get started.
Quoting Wayfarer
...which it treats by treating the nature of 'x' in absurd ways.
There are other ways to treat "knowing" than getting rid of the things of our world.
Quoting Wayfarer
The god of the gaps, written into neuroscience. There not being a specific region responsible for this or that is part of how the architecture of neural networks functions.
That there are unanswered questions does not imply that there are no suitable answers.
Look, the defence of idealism here is a proxy for a defence of some form of spiritualism or similar; and so the idealist brings stuff form outside the problem to bear. Fair enough. But I'll insist in countering this move by asking about how many branches the tree has. "The tree has three branches" is about the tree, not about our relation to the tree. And that's pretty much what realism contends.
Which is a joke, of course, but has some semblance of truth. What I'm keen to discover here are the best arguments from both positions, in recognition that this debate is probably insoluble for now.
I do find myself coming back to a simple query about idealism which is, if all human knowledge is a swirling constructivist enterprise of perception and consciousness which can tell us nothing about reality as it really is, then how can we say idealism is at the heart of reality? Is idealism really just one way of expressing a problem in epistemology - that of the perspectival nature of knowledge, expressed through language, with all its dead ends and confusions?
I want to stop the question there, as I think it's this framing that is problematic.
Basically, what could reality be if not the stuff we know about via the swirling constructivist enterprise of perception and consciousness?
And if that's right, then of course we know about reality, and the notion of a reality about which we know nothing is just nonsense. Word games.
Indeed it doesn't, but it does indicate that your directing the whole issue to neuroscience might have - well - gaps.
Quoting Banno
It clashes with the presumed physicalism of secular philosophy. It's out of bounds, hence 'stuff from the outside'. Anglo philosophy overwhelmingly comprises polite conversation about language, with the presumption that science has been assigned the task of solving every problem worth solving, and bugger the objections. All of your arguments simply come back to coffee cups, spoons, number of branches, and so on. 'Look old chap, be sensible. Stop with all this idealism nonsense, it belongs to a bygone age. Get with the program'.
I'm solemnly intending to do some concentrated reading on the current neuro-philosophers, like Antonio Damasio, Thomas Metzinger, Anil Seth, and Donald Hoffman, because their work tends to challenge what I think should be designated 'cognitive realism'. Not that any of them advocate philosophical idealism directly. Meanwhile - and I really have to log out and work - here's an OP from many years ago which I think presages a lot of these debates - David Brooks, The Neural Buddhists (NY Times, might be paywalled if so try a fresh browser).
For good reason. One doesn't go to "The Hunting of the Snark" for advice on navigation.
I was introduced to Bernard Gert the other day, who's catch phrase seems to have been "I'm a philosopher, I don't know anything that you don't know". I quite like that. It's not that philosophers have cast out spiritual thinking, so much as that the stuff we know about the world isn't found in spiritual thought. The Dali Lama doesn't make laptops.
I have Hoffman's book next to me here, in the Pile. When I get to it, I will be reading to see if he is advocating anything other than realism, and how. I doubt that he is.
It is true that the Dalai Lama doesnt make computers, but also quite irrelevant.
So here's the thing: would Hoffman deny that the tree has three branches? I hope not, for his sake.
The automatic association of philosophical idealism with 'spiritual thought' is what is at issue. I think it amounts to a prejudice - there is a taboo in play. It's very much shaped by cultural dynamics.
As regards Hoffman, here's an abstract in the form of a Q&A. He says straight up 'The world presented to us by our perceptions is nothing like reality' on the grounds that our perception is shaped by evolutionary biology to orient us to what is effective for survival. To be honest, I'm not sure I buy his argument but I am going to finish the book first.
Teacher: "Student I have shown you many examples of what a branch looks like on a tree.
Student: "Yes, you have."
Teacher: "Please go outside to the courtyard and tell me how branches the tree has."
Student: "I will"
Student returns inside where the tree is not viewable and says "The tree has three branches."
To be honest this has been my default, without the benefit of any philosophy. I'm curious these days to understand the idealist model better so I can say to myself I didn't dismiss things out of hand. I enjoy speculative, imaginative exercises - to a point.
Quoting Banno
He seems to be an infotech Kant in some ways. From what I can tell, Hoffman would posit that humans have evolved a tailored and limited account of reality which assists us in survival. We do not apprehend reality. What we experience through our senses is like the icons on a computer desktop (phenomena?) but these icons are heuristic tools and are not to be confused with the reality they represent (noumena?) Unfortunately we can say nothing useful about the world beyond appearances so I wonder how helpful Hoffman is.
There's a minefield right there.
I think you are saying not only "the scientist perceives an event in their laboratory" as an inference, but "the laboratory" itself can only ever be an inference.
This is an absurdity derived from a grammatical fiction.
Me, too.
Not seeing an answer here.
Quoting Tom Storm
yes, so it seems.
Interestingly, Alvin Plantinga takes this idea to show how evolutionary ideas undermine naturalism. That evolution is only selecting for survival ability and not truth finding ability, thus, our ability to determine the truth of naturalism or anything for that matter is severely questionable.
Generally, trying to think how these phases are used in everyday circumstances. In my example, using "The tree has three branches", there was no perception of a tree when it was used.
Beat me to it, I was going to say exactly that. But they draw very different conclusions as far as I can see - Hoffman doesnt seem to read any religious implication, or even specifically philosophical conclusions, from his work, he sees himself as a cognitive scientist first and foremost. One thing Hoffman does say is that reality is conscious agents all the way down, which cant help but remind me of Liebniz monads, although I dont know if hes ever commented on that or anyone else has noticed it.
We have no idea if there are objects without ideas. :lol:
Yet there are plenty of people here with no idea.
That's true. I think Plantinga was inspired by Kant's transcendental arguments.
Quoting Donald D. Hoffman
I think Davidson has shown that such an equation is both fraught and unnecessary. Anomalous monism requires no such thing, and in so doing fits in with connectionist views of neural architecture. There simple need be no particular structure that we all have that is our taste of basil.
But as you can see, I'm at p.15, so he has time to redeem himself.
(Scanned that with an iPhone. neat.)
Did I miss anything essential?
Quoting Wayfarer
Uncomfortable with that. Better to say something like that every mental even is a physical event.
I'm not at all happy with assuming the causal closure of the physical, given my scepticism about the place of causation in physical explanation. But it seems perhaps Davidson was so content.
The important insight is that it need not be the case that each and every metal event is identical to some specific physical state of a brain.
Two fundamental problems with Direct Realism
In my opinion, there are two fundamental problems with Direct Realism:
1) When we perceive the world, how can we directly know the cause of what we have perceived when our only knowledge of any external world has come from the perceptions themselves.
2) How is it possible to know from knowing an effect the cause of that effect, when every effect is overdetermined by more than one sufficient causes.
Item 2) suffers from the same problem as anomalous monism, that of over determination. If there was an explanation as to how the problem of over determination could be negated in anomalous monism, then perhaps the same argument could be used for item 2).
John Searle in The Philosophy of Perception and the Bad Argument wrote
"I realize that the great geniuses of our tradition were vastly better philosophers than any of us alive and that they created the framework within which we work. But it seems to me they made horrendous mistakes..............The second mistake almost as bad is the view that we do not directly perceive objects and states of affairs in the world."
Whether a scientist or an artist, all humans start off by perceiving the world. The question is, is the Idealist correct that the world is a mental construct, or is the Direct Realist correct that they directly perceive an external world, or is the Indirect Realist correct that they directly perceive sense data (metaphorically speaking) and only indirectly perceive the external world.
I think you will need a stronger argument against Indirect Realism than it is absurd, as, as Searle writes, Direct Realism was not supported by the great geniuses of philosophy.
Just elaborating:
The Idealist, Indirect Realist and Direct Realist agree that they perceive the tree to have three branches.
For the Idealist, as reality is a mental construct, both the tree and the perception of the tree exist in the mind and are therefore the same.
For both the Indirect and Direct Realist, there is something in a mind independent external world. The Direct Realist knows that this something is a tree with three branches. The Indirect Realist knows that they perceive a tree with three branches, but doesn't know what this something is in the external world.
Quoting Banno
Wittgenstein in PI is more an Indirect Realist than a Direct Realist
It is clear that Wittgenstein is not an Idealist treating the world as a mental construct because of the importance he places on the public language game.
Para 21. "Imagine a language-game in which A asks and B reports the number of slabs or blocks in a pile, or the colours and shapes of the building-stones that are stacked in such-and-such a place.Such a report might run: "Five slabs". Now what is the difference between the report or statement "Five slabs" and the order "Five slabs!"?"
Para 246 suggests Indirect Realism rather than Direct Realism
"The truth is: it makes sense to say about other people that they doubt whether I am in pain; but not to say it about myself."
He writes that I cannot doubt that I am in pain but I can doubt that others are in pain. Similarly, it must follow that although I cannot doubt that I perceive a tree with three branches, I can doubt that others perceive the same tree with three branches. And if that is the case, this casts doubt on there being a tree with three branches in an external world able to be perceived in the first place.
Para 293 also suggests Indirect Realism rather than Direct Realism
"If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" meansmust I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly? Now someone tells me that he knows what pain is only from his own case!Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing.But suppose the word "beetle" had a use in these people's language?If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.No, one can 'divide through' by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is. That is to say: if we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation' the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant."
He writes that the object in my box, my pain, my beetle, may be different to everyone else's object in their box, their pain, their beetle, and therefore the object can play no part in the language game. The name "pain" or "beetle" has a use in a language game, but not as a name for a particular thing existing in the world. Similarly, the object that I perceive in my box, a tree with three branches, may be different to what everyone else perceives in their box. Therefore, the object. my perception of a tree with three branches, can play no part in the language game. The name "a tree with three branches" has a use in a language game but not as a name for a particular thing existing in the world.
This is not the position of the Direct Realist for whom there exists a tree with three branches in the world. This is more the position of the Indirect Realist, where "a tree with three branches" does not refer to something existing in the world but rather refers to a representation in the mind being used within a language game.
Let me repeat, this is an absurdity derived from a grammatical fiction. What is the fiction? Directly perceived sense data.
I believe this distinction is based on perception not knowledge.
The direct realist perceives the tree.
The indirect realist perceives the sense data of the tree.
How does the direct realist know they perceive a tree. Well, there are many actions they could do like look at it from a different angle, touch it, consult an expert, perform a DNA test and so forth.
How about an indirect realist? The same? I feel the pragmatist in me is ready to carve out the metaphysical fat.
What is your answer? I have checked a few other messages/comments that follow your description of the topic but couldn't find it. Maybe you have already exposed it somewhere in this thread, but there are 17 pages in it and I cannot read all your message. Sorry. So, can you give me the link of a message in which you expose your answer?
Re "direct" and "indirect" perception: There's only direct perception. An indirect perception would be e.g. as if we are perceiving an object through the senses of some other entity. (Which I don't think is pertinent to this discussion.)
Perception has to do with being aware of things in our environment and inside us (thoughts, feelings, etc.). Even in its simplest form, it involves some degree of recognition and/or undestanding. That is, perception is not just sensing/b]. This is on the [b]physical level and it is the task of the brain. Even simple organisms can perceive things in their environment as stimuli and react automatically or instintively to them.
Quoting NOS4A2
Can a perceived object also perceive you?
BTW, do you maybe refer to Krishnamurti's "the observed is the observer"?
It seems obvious to me that I perceive a tree. It doesn't seem obvious to me that I perceive perceptions, representations, sense-data, or any other such entities.
Yes, a perceived object can perceive me so long as it is capable of perceiving.
The universe as a whole perceives all perceptions as it contains all perceivers and all that is perceived.
And what remains? That yet to be perceived, that which may never be percieved at all or that yet to be a perciever. Or all three.
I think if it sort of in the analogy that 0 neither perceives nor is perceived. However 0 can = - 1 + 1 (where - 1 can perceive +1 or +1 can percieve - 1), or both simultaneously.
Most probably, you mean an entitity, a living organism. Which is a special case. You can't generalize it and apply it to inanimate things, can you? This is what I meant.
I'm not sure it is the case that we perceive perceptions any more than we see seeings or hear hearings or digest digestions.
True, that's what I meant. Anything that is incapable of perceiving would not be able to perceive us.
OK.
Do you think we confuse the act of perceiving with the object of perception? Maybe our language doesn't permit us to do otherwise. I honestly do not know.
Because ofc we cannot perceive for them. We can only watch them doing it and hear of the results from what they say.
And that's how there is a difference between seeing a tree and hallucinating a tree; in the former, there is a tree.
There's the bad argument again.
Quoting Banno
Quoting Benj96
I prefer my waffles with honey.
The homunculus surfaces again. At least they can take comfort that they can perceive directly.
I would say Wittgenstein would take neither side of debate.
Indirect vs direct
It is about the commonly perceived tree and is either true or false, as can be confirmed inter-subjectively. If I say, "the tree I perceive has three branches" and no one else sees it as having three branches, then it would be considered to be false, because the usual conclusion would be that I am hallucinating or lying. If I say, "I perceive the tree to have three branches, that could be true about what I perceive, but not about the tree, if others do not perceive it to have three branches.
If the tree is an idea in God's mind (pace Berkeley) then it either has three branches or it doesn't. I could still misperceive the tree in that scenario. The Kantian version of its having three branches or not is down to inter-subjectivity.
I think later Wittgenstein resist being labeled an Idealist or Realist, or anything in-between. May be difficult to argue this sufficiently in a posting, but I will give it try.
From Philosophical Investigations(PI)
P. 402, he says the following, "For this is what disputes between Idealist, Solipsists and Realist look like. The one party attack the normal form of expression as if they were attacking a statement; the other defend it, as if they were stating facts recognized by every reasonable human being." Definitely not defending any particular position here, but suggesting all parties are mis-using are ordinary language.
From On Certainty(OC)
P. 24, he says, "The idealist's question would be something like: 'What right have I not to doubt the existence of my hands?' (And to that the answer can't be" I know that they exist.). But someone who asks such a question is overlooking the fact that a doubt about existence only works in a language game. Hence, that we should first have to ask: what would such a doubt be like? and don't understand this straight off." Here he is not supporting the skeptical idealist nor the realism of G.E. Moore. Throughout the OC, Wittgenstein is arguing against philosophical skepticism, as well as Moore's Realism, who takes these objective certainties as if they are absolutely unconditional.
So, is Wittgenstein an Idealist or Realist? He is resisting this label because of how he views the purpose of philosophy. Consider the following from PI:
P. 116 "When philosophers use a word - "knowledge", "being", "object", "I", "proposition", "name"- and try to grasp the essence of the thing, one must always ask oneself: is the word ever actually used in this way in the language-game which is its original home? What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use."
and
P. 124 "Philosophy may in no way interfere with the actual use of language; it can in the end only describe it. For it cannot give it any foundation either. It leaves everything as it is."
This is about what we know about the tree, not about the tree. It's like saying something like "The tree has three branches if and only if it is observed, by some statistically significant number of people, to have three branches"
But that's not right. "The tree has three branches" is true IFF the tree has three branches, regardless of who and how it is observed.
But we've had this discussion previously.
I don't know where does this question refer to ... :chin:
But as an independent question --e.g. a new topic :smile:-- my answer is maybe. It depends who is "we", esp. because you used the word "confuse". Some people might and others not. I don't. Perception is a process and objects are ... well, objects. The one is you, the observer, and the other is outside, independent of you. Even if it is part of your body. Because you are not your body.
Sure - I agree.
But our knowing or not knowing has no impact on the number of branches on the tree. It either has three branches, or not. That is, the better approach used here is realist, not anti-realist, so we can proceed with a bivalent logic. If you instead wish to drop the law of excluded middle and use a nonstandard logic, then go ahead, but I, and I guess most others, will not be joining you.
We've been here before. I'm not too keen on repeating an old tit for tat, so unless you have a new way to approach this, I might let it go.
[quote=Adorno]Ever since puberty, when it is customary to get excited about such questions, I have never again really understood the so-called problem of relativism. My experience was that whoever gave himself over in earnest to the discipline of a particular subject learned to distinguish very precisely between true and false, and that in contrast to such experience the assertion of general insecurity as to what is known had something abstract and unconvincing about it. Let it be that confronted with the ideal of the absolute, everything human stands under the shadow of the conditional and temporary - what happens when the boundary is reached at which thought must recognize that it is not identical to being, not only allows the most convincing insights, but forces them.[/quote]
Im thinking that indirect realism, though popularly often expressed in modern scientific language, is a hangover from theology and speculative metaphysics. Compared with the view of God, everything human stands under the shadow of the conditional and temporary,in this case, everything we experience is removed from the world and uncertain.
Ditch the ideal of the absolute, and experience is no longer a barrier, but just the way we interact with the rest of the world.
It also makes me think of Wittgenstein:
[quote=Wittgenstein, On Certainty]215. Here we see that the idea of 'agreement with reality' does not have any clear application.[/quote]
Nice Adorno quote. I've been looking for quotes expressing precisely this sentiment.
Quoting Jamal
In a somewhat cruder form, this kind of thinking informs my atheism. The idea of God, or some 'really real reality' which cannot be perceived has, for me, no clear application. It can in no way change my experience of what it is to be human in the world and can offer little but distraction and futility. Or some shit...
I like to think its more than boredom or pragmatism that makes me question the veil of perception.
Fair enough, but I like my swords double edged...
It cannot be such a silly debate without philosophic substance if some modern philosophers believe that the great genius philosophers of the past were mistaken.
In Searle's words: "I realize that the great geniuses of our tradition were vastly better philosophers than any of us alive...........The second mistake almost as bad is the view that we do not directly perceive objects and states of affairs in the world."
It is interesting that Searle in his article The Philosophy of Perception and the Bad Argument doesn't logically justify his belief in Direct Realism.
Quoting Banno
From the IEP article Objects of Perception, both the Indirect and Direct Realist would agree with "the common sense view that tables, chairs and cups of coffee exist independently of perceivers". However, "Direct realists also claim that it is with such objects that we directly engage." and for the Indirect Realist, "through perception I do not directly engage with this cup; there is a perceptual intermediary that comes between it and me."
The IEP also notes "There are, however, two versions of direct realism: naïve direct realism and scientific direct realism."
The article Arguments Against Direct Realism and How to Counter Them by Pierre Le Morvan addresses the "causal argument".
He suggests that the Direct Realist should accept that perception is indirect, in that it involves a long, complex causal series of events. However, he argues that accepting causal indirectness does not require rejecting cognitive directness, in that the perceiver is still cognitively directly aware of the external object.
However, this doesn't answer my two fundamental problems with Direct Realism:
1) When we perceive the world, how can we directly know the cause of what we have perceived when our only knowledge of any external world has come from the perceptions themselves.
2) How is it possible to know from knowing an effect the cause of that effect, when every effect is overdetermined by more than one sufficient causes.
I agree that, in a sense, "sense data" is a linguistic fiction, in that, for me, the term is metaphorical rather than literal.
As @NOS4A2 wrote: "For the direct realist, the man directly perceives a tree. For the indirect realist, though, something within the man (the mind, the brain, a little man) directly perceives something else within the man (sense data, representation, idea)."
As Searle wrote: "But the something is not a material object. Give it a name, call it a sense
datum."
My conscious mind does perceive something, and there is a long causal chain between this conscious perception and an object in the external world. Exactly what happens in the brain is still mysterious, but the mind does perceive something. The term "sense data" may be a metaphor, but it is still useful, as are the metaphors Evolution by Natural Selection, Laws of Nature, Gravity, General Relativity, etc.
We can label Wittgenstein, even if he wouldn't have done so himself
I agree that Wittgenstein would resist being labelled, as that does not seem to be in his character. Although I definately disagree with your position that "Indirect Realism is incoherent", I appreciate your reasoned arguments.
However, I do think we can label Wittgenstein's position, even if he himself would object to being so labelled, not that he can do anything about it. As Wikipedia's article about The Death of the Author writes: "Barthes's essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of relying on the intentions and biography of an author to definitively explain the "ultimate meaning" of a text. Instead, the essay emphasizes the primacy of each individual reader's interpretation of the work over any "definitive" meaning intended by the author, a process in which subtle or unnoticed characteristics may be drawn out for new insight"
For example, I am sure it could strongly be argued that Wittgenstein was definitely not an Idealist, in that he argued that a language understandable by only a single individual was incoherent. He wrote in para 256 of PI:
"Now, what about the language which describes my inner experiences and which only I myself can understand? How do I use words to stand for my sensations?As we ordinarily do? Then are my words for sensations tied up with my natural expressions of sensation? In that case my language is not a 'private' one. Someone else might understand it as well as 1.But suppose I didn't have any natural expression for the sensation, but only had the sensation? And now I simply associate names with sensations and use these names in descriptions."
As regarding paras 116, 124 and 402 from PI and para 24 from On Certainty, I agree that there is the tendency to attack the words being used rather than what the words mean, but that doesn't mean, as Wittgenstein is seeming to suggest, that words should be taken at their common sense face value, ie, as used by the pedestrian in the street. This is clearly impractical. If a physicist at CERN could only use the word accelerator as understood in everyday language, I doubt future scientific breakthroughs would be possible. Similarly, if we could only use the words direct and indirect as commonly used in everyday situations, such as shopping, our understanding of the true nature of reality would be very much diminished.
The beetle in the box story is incompatible with Direct Realism
Similarly, I would argue that his story about a beetle in a box, para 293, can be used as an argument against Direct Realism, even if he didn't do so himself.
I will use your definitions of Direct Realism as the idea that the senses provide us with direct awareness of objects as they really are and Indirect Realism as the idea that we do not perceive the external world as it really is, but know only our ideas of the way the world is. Therefore, if I perceive a tree with three branches, the Direct Realist would argue that I am directly perceiving a tree with tree branches in the external world and the Indirect Realist would argue that I am directly perceiving a model or a representation of something that is in the external world.
Wittgenstein's private language argument argues that my private perception of a tree with three branches may not correspond with anyone else's private perception of a tree with three branches, in that my own beetle in a box must remain a mystery to anyone else. I can never know the private perception of another, but may only infer it from their behaviour.
Therefore, if "a tree with three branches" has a use within the language of a community, it cannot be the name of something. Either it is entirely possible that each person had a different private perception, or even that an individuals private perception continually changed or there was in fact no private perception. The private perception is irrelevant to whatever language game it is used in, as all we can discuss is what is available within a public language.
But if Direct Realism is correct, when I perceive a tree with three branches, this would mean that in the external world there is in fact a tree with three branches. Then given there is in fact a tree with three branches in the external world, someone else, assuming that Direct Realism is correct, would also directly perceive a tree with three branches.
Therefore, both myself and the other person would be having the exact same perception, that of a tree with three branches. But Wittgenstein's private language argument says that this is impossible. Therefore, Direct Realism and Wittgenstein's private language argument are incompatible.
Therefore, Wittgenstein's beetle in the box story may be used as an argument against Direct Realism.
If perceiving is an act of a perceiving agent, the act and the agent are one and the same. If they are one and the same, we can remove perception as some kind of intermediary between knower and the external world. If there is no intermediary, direct access to the external world is not only possible, but a brute fact. If we are able to directly access the external world, it means we are in the world, a part of the world. If we are a part of the world the knowledge is not circular, but open and relational.
Im trying to grasp the question but am unsure what is cause and what is effect. Could you illustrate using our good ol tree?
You were? Strange for you to say.
I, on the the other hand, was referring to Searle's argument, introduced by , to which I previously gave reference: Quoting Banno
and which formed the basis of much of the discussion since then. "The bad argument" is the name Searle gives to what you produced as a throw-away, but which others have taken seriously.
If I were one of those who subscribe to the idea that seeing the tree collapses the wave function and determines how many branches it has, which I'm not. I would disagree, which I don't. I think that the number of branches on a tree is not determined by us at all but by an independent actuality, whatever we might think that is.
That said I think the tree, like everything else, is a (non-arbitrary) collective representation, and it is within that representation, and not outside that human context, that the notion of tree, three and branches finds its sense.
An unimportant point, perhaps, but there you go. We don't seem to be disagreeing about anything that has more than the most subtle philosophical import.
Both the Indirect and Direct Realist would agree that there is a world outside the mind. The Direct Realist would argue that we directly perceive the world outside the mind. The Indirect Realist would argue that we directly perceive a world inside the mind and only indirectly perceive the world outside the mind.
Is the discussion about direct and indirect inconsequential ? I don't think so. It is true it is not something we need to be concerned about when shopping for lamb, but then again, the lamb didn't question what was going on when approached by a friendly farmer and shepherded into a truck with the word abattoir on the side. It does make a difference to our fundamental understanding of reality whether we directly perceive the world as it is or what we perceive is an illusion that we have to pragmatically work through.
Item 3 doesn't follow from items 1 and 2.
1. If perceiving is an act of a perceiving agent, the act and the agent are one and the same.
I agree with item 1. It is not as if there is a homunculus in the mind that is perceiving an act of perception, but rather, the perceiver is the act of perception. The perceiver and the act of perception are one and the same. As Searle wrote "It is like the pain and the experience of pain. The experience of pain does not have pain as an object because the experience of pain is identical with the pain".
2. If they are one and the same, we can remove perception as some kind of intermediary between knower and the external world.
I agree with item 2 that perception is not an intermediary between the perceiving agent and the external world, as the perceiving agent and their perception are one and the same.
3. If there is no intermediary, direct access to the external world is not only possible, but a brute fact.
Item 3 doesn't follow from items 1 and 2. I agree that there is direct access by the perceiving agent to their perception of the world, as they are one and the same, which is a brute fact. However, it has not yet been shown that the world the perceiving agent is perceiving exists within the mind or outside the mind.
4. If we are able to directly access the external world, it means we are in the world, a part of the world.
It depends what one means by "world". I agree that both the Indirect and Direct Realist believe they are part of The World, where The World consists of both the world inside the mind and the world outside the mind.
5. If we are a part of the world the knowledge is not circular, but open and relational.
It depends again on what is meant by "world". I agree that the Direct Realist believes that the perceiving agent has direct knowledge of The World. However, the Indirect Realist believes that the perceiving agent has direct knowledge of the world in their mind, only indirect knowledge of the world outside their mind and therefore only indirect knowledge of The World.
It remains to be shown how direct knowledge of a world in one's mind can lead to direct knowledge of the world outside one's mind.
However, it has not yet been shown that the world the perceiving agent is perceiving exists within the mind or outside the mind.
Youve inserted another element or space within the perceiver called the world inside the mind.
To avoid question begging and to test whether or not this is an area where a world could be perceived, that it contains a world, and that a perceiver can perceive it, I suggested in the original post that we ought to remove this element from the rest of the man like we can any other part of the man (like any organ), put it on a table beside a perceiver (like weve been doing with a perceiver and a tree) for the purpose of analysis.
What is on the table? Who perceives what? What part of the man is perceiver, what part of the man is perceived? Finally, is perception still occurring?
If perception is not occurring, one does not perceive the other, and neither element is perceiver or perceived.
The Indirect Realist believes they are perceiving a world that exists in their mind. The Direct Realist believes they are perceiving a world than exists outside their mind. Whether or not another element has been inserted within the perceiver depends on one's belief in Indirect or Direct Realism.
If one believes in Indirect Realism, then "the world inside the mind" isn't an element that is additional to the perceiver.
Quoting NOS4A2
I agree with what you wrote before: "If perceiving is an act of a perceiving agent, the act and the agent are one and the same". For the Indirect Realist, the act of perceiving a world and the perceiving agent are one and the same. Therefore, for the Indirect Realist, the act of perceiving a world inside their mind cannot be removed from the perceiving agent, even for the purpose of analysis.
It would be the same problem that Searle wrote about, that of removing pain from the experience of pain.
Assuming that anything within the mind is also within the perceiver, then one is indistinguishable from the other (so long as it is not a foreign element). The perceiver cannot stand in the way of himself and the outer world, or be his own intermediary, or placed before himself in the causal chain of perception.
Dad: Yes, son
Son: Do I have sense data?
Dad: Sure, let me show you. Look at that tree. Now, press you eye like this and you will see two trees.
Son: Like this?
Dad: Yes
Son: But I don't see two trees.
Dad: You must be doing it wrong. Let me press them.
Son: Ouch! That hurts. And I still don't see two trees.
Dad: Well son, I guess you don't have sense data. I guess you are one of the few actual direct realist.
Son: Wow, that's neat. What are you?
Dad: An indirect realist. By the way, what does the tree look like?
Son: It looks like ..........
Dad: Funny, that is how it looks to me.
That's how I see it. The perceiver is at one end of a causal chain of intermediaries that links the perceiver to what the perceiver is perceiving. At one end of the causal chain with intermediaries is someone who perceives a green tree with three branches. At the other end is something in the world that the perceiver perceives as a green tree with three branches.
As green, trees, branches, etc are concepts that exist only in the mind, what is being perceived can therefore only exist in the mind.
And what is the nature of this chain?
There is an article Arguments against Direct Realism and how to counter them by Pierre Le Morvan, where he writes, when discussing the causal argument against Direct Realism:
[i]"Its wise for Direct Realists to concede that for humans, and for percipients physiologically
like us in the actual world, perception involves a long and complex causal series of events, and that perception is indeed dependent upon the condition of the eyes, of the optic nerve, and of the brain, upon the nature of the intervening medium, and so on."[/i]
"But perception involves a long and complex causal series of events. For instance, light quanta are reflected or emitted from an external object, the light quanta then travel through an intervening medium (e.g., air and/or water), they then hyperpolarize retinal cells by bleaching rhodopsin photopigment molecules, and then a very complex series of physiological processes takes place in the eye and in the brain eventuating in perception."
Light travelling from the something in the external world that we perceive as a green tree with three branches to the eye of the perceiver is part of this causal chain.
Part of the nature of this causal chain is that causal relations are generally understood to be asymmetric. This asymmetry is often assumed to coincide with a temporal asymmetry according to which effects do not precede their causes.
As Searle wrote in The Philosophy of Perception and the Bad Argument, perception has the mind-to-world direction of fit and the world-to-mind direction of causation.
Even if it was true that trees are concepts that exist only in the mind, they are at the same place in the causal chain as the rest of the perceiver, as already intimated, and so are not intermediaries between perceiver and perceived. The perceiver cannot put himself before himself on the causal chain.
And why do you think many have taken it seriously.
Suppose just as many people take it seriously as take it as a "bad argument". Who do we believe? What's the ultimate consensus? And is the majority even relevant? Does collective stance (based on collective experience) hold more weight than minority stance?
Well they can. Self-fulfilling prophecies are an example of where a certain expectation of future outcome causes the resultant future outcome.
For example, if I say, oh I'm stupid, it's no use trying for that job application in a month, I'm not good enough to get offered the position. You then proceed not to prepare or research, and then ultimately because of this ill-prepared state and lack of charisma you do end up failing to get the job. You already knew you wouldn't. The events confirm your belief and the belief itself confirm the events.
You can argue that your belief about the future brought around that future. As an inevitability.
Which way does causality work here? Did the future absolutism behave in the same manner as a past defined absolute. Dictating the impossibility of it ever becoming a reality?
Another example, I say someone is trying to incarcerate me against my will because they don't believe I'm mentally well. A family member is concerned about the unfounded confession and all the anxiety and agitation that comes with it and brings you to a psychiatrist which agrees that you are in need of help. So they involuntarily commit you. Thus confirming your original statement as correct.
The prediction was for all intents and purposes accurate and so further aggravates your anxiety/agitation about what you knew would happen.
No one can say you're wrong. As it did happen. And then that begs the question if your fear was confirmed as valid/real ought that not invalidate the very reason for you to be considered deluded and in need of help?
You wrote: "For the direct realist, the man directly perceives a tree............For the indirect realist, though, something within the man (the mind, the brain, a little man) directly perceives something else within the man (sense data, representation, idea).
If the man directly perceives a tree, and the tree is a concept that exists only in the mind, doesn't this mean that the man is an Indirect Realist ?
I would agree with that.
I also said the boundaries between both X and Y are so unclear and amorphous that it could rather be the case that X is directly perceiving X.
How can we perceive a concept that exists only in mind if our eyes point outward, not inward? If the tree is a concept that exists only in the mind, somewhere behind the eyes, that would place the tree at the tail-end of the causal chain.
Sure, for me to perceive the tree, I need light. For me to perceive the tree, I need to have my eyes open. And this is suppose to turn me into indirect realist because of the causal train of events.
So, if there is no light the tree does not have a color, when there is light the tree has color. But to be a direct realist, it has to have a color for me to directly perceive no matter if there is light or not? Yes, according the indirect realist, it is part of the casual process.
Based on their logic, the indirect realist does not have to introduce the mind, brain, nerves, sense data, etc to refute the direct realist. They got light on their side.
But I do not think the direct realist should be concerned about how we perceive, but how we learn and use the word perceive, how we make judgements about what we perceive, or how we gain knowledge from what we perceive.
I have attempted to show indirect realism: 1) Is incoherent based on this idea of "directly perceiving sense data" because it was shown to be a grammatical fiction. 2) cannot be determined to be truth, in principle, due to the nature of "sense data" being a private, inaccessible experience. 3) inadequately claims to universally applied to all human beings if based on hallucinations which most do not experience. 4) pragmatically does not differ from direct realism in terms of establishing knowledge claims.
Next, I like to show at least one example of human beings directly perceiving something which an indirect realist would wrongly claim to be an inference. This is to show at least it is plausible this idea of direct realism. Also, I like to show at least one example of an illusion which conflicts with this idea of human beings must have "sense data" to explain such phenomenon.
a. I draw a stick figure of a person from my imagination. I show this picture to a child and ask her "what to you see?" The child may reply, "I perceive a stick figure of a person." Can we not claim that the child directly perceives a picture of a stick figure? It seems incorrect to say this is an inference from my perception of sense data. I drew the figure, I know exactly what I intended to draw. The child reported exactly what I drew. It is difficult for the indirect realist to say, "Well, we cannot say what is behind this sense data of the picture of the stick figure" because the author of the creation is telling us what it is, (unlike "Mother Nature" who seems to hide her secrets according to the indirect realist).
b. The famous picture of the "duck-rabbit" is an illusion. If presented to someone, they could see the picture as a rabbit, or, another time, see the picture as a duck. However, could we not say the what we perceive is the same figure in both cases? If so, the positing of sense data has no explanatory power in this case to explain this illusion.
Quoting NOS4A2
The perceiver and what is directly perceived by the perceiver must be one and the same
There is X, the mind, the brain, the little man and there is Y, sense data, representation, idea. X is the perceiver and Y is what is perceived.
As Searle said, pain cannot be removed from the experience of pain. Similarly, what is directly perceived cannot be removed from the perceiver.
As Brentano said about intentionality, mental states are an incomplete essence, in that they cannot exist unless they are completed by something other than themselves. The relation between the intentionality of the mind and the intentional object cannot be a causal relation.
For the mind to understand an object it is perceiving, the mind must have ideas about the object. The ability to have ideas must be part of the essence of the mind. The mind, distinguished by the ability to have ideas, is then able to perceive ideas.
But if the mind is X, and Y is ideas, and if the mind is distinguished by its ability to have ideas, then X must by Y.
Quoting NOS4A2
The whole concept may only exist in the mind but the parts on which the concepts are based exist in the external world
When we look at a green tree with three branches, we are looking at one particular instantiation of the concept "tree". When we are looking at a particular set of colours and shapes, we perceive it as being one instantiation of the concept "tree". The concept "tree" does not exist in the world, only in the mind. The instantiation of the concept exists in the world. So we are perceiving two things at the same time, the instantiation of the concept "tree" existing in the external world and the concept "tree" existing in the mind.
But the instantiation of the "tree" that we perceive is made up of parts, consisting of a set of colours and shapes. For example, the colour green, a vertical line, three and a horizontal line.
Searle when discussing the science argument against Direct Realism comments that colours such as red don't exist in the world but only in our own mind. The colour green we perceive doesn't exist in the external world but only in our mind.
When looking at a vertical line, we are again perceiving two things at the same time, a particular instantiation of the concept "vertical line" as a set of points existing in the world and the concept "vertical line" existing in the mind.
Similarly when looking at a horizontal line.
As regards the number three, I would argue that numbers only exist as concepts in the mind, though others would disagree. Though if colours and shapes are concepts, then why not numbers also.
The end result is that when we perceive a green tree with three branches, we are in fact perceiving two things at the same time, a set of points existing in the external world which we determine as a green tree with three branches using concepts existing in the mind.
As Searle writes about intentionality and causality, in belief, validity is achieved when the mind matches the world, and in a valid desire the world must come to match the world. The conditions of satisfaction for an intentional state is self-referential, in that perception has a part of its very meaning that it be a state caused by the object represented in it. Searle would say that I have a visual experience with mind to world fit whose intentional content is that there is a green tree with three branches before me and that there is a green tree before me causing this visual experience.
When the Direct Realist says that they are directly looking at a green tree with three branches in the external world, what this means is that they are perceiving on the one hand a set of point in the external world and on the other hand perceiving concepts existing in the mind.
As Searle asks, how do we avoid scepticism, subjectivism or solipsism if our understanding is through concepts which only exist in the mind. Our knowledge of the world derives from the causal connection between points in the external world existing in time and space and our experience of them, and making sense of these experiences using concepts that exist in the mind perceiving these experiences.
Pierre Le Morvan in his article Arguments against Direct Realism and how to counter them is making the valid point that a Direct Realist can accept causal indirectness without accepting cognitive indirectness.
Quoting Richard B
Surely a Direct Realist doesn't need to make any judgement when perceiving the colour green, for example, as they directly perceive the colour green. It is the Indirect Realist who needs to make a judgement when perceiving the colour green.
Wittgenstein's Beetle in the Box argument can be used against Direct Realism
Wittgenstein uses the beetle in a box to argue that a language understandable by only a single individual is incoherent, ie, his private language argument. Para 293 of PI: "Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a "beetle". No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle." He argues that no one can ever never know the private perception of another, but can only infer it from their behaviour.
If Direct Realism was correct, given a picture of a stick figure in the external world, I would directly perceive the stick figure, and the child would directly perceive the stick figure. This would mean that I would know that my private perception was the same as the child's private perception, and vice versa. But this would contradict Wittgenstein's private language argument.
Quoting Richard B
The Argument from Illusion can be used against Direct Realism
Searle refers to a similar argument used by the Indirect Realists to argue for the existence of sense data. If you hold up one finger and look into the distance past the finger, you will not see one object but will see two sense datum. This means that it is not the object you are directly looking at but the sense datum. Then, when you look at your finger, it may appear that you are directly looking at an object, but in fact you are are directly looking at sense datum.
When someone looks at a duck-rabbit they can only see either a duck or a rabbit, they cannot see both a duck and rabbit at the same time.
Imagine they see a duck. As before, they look into the distance past the picture and will see not one object but two sense datum. This means that it is not the object they are directly looking at but the sense datum. Then, when they look at the picture, it may appear that they are directly looking at an object, but in fact they are directly looking at sense datum.
This is incorrect. Wittgenstein is saying that this picture of naming something private drops out as inconsequential in terms of how we understand what is being communicated.
Quoting RussellA
This is incorrect. See above. Both are perceiving, talking about a publicly shared object. Not providing proof of what they are supposedly perceiving privately.
Quoting RussellA
But they cannot distinguish between the two sense datum of the picture, they are the same. The positing of sense datum does not explain why they report a rabbit one time and a duck another. So, sense datum has no explanatory power in this case.
According to Wittgenstein, in addition to the fact that no one can ever never know the private perception of another, but can only infer it from their behaviour, the object can play no part in the language game. The name "pain" may have a use in a language game, but not as a name for a particular thing existing in the world.
Quoting Richard B
From Wikipedia - Naive Realism: Things in the world are perceived immediately or directly rather than inferred on the basis of perceptual evidence. According to the naïve realist, the objects of perception are not representations of external objects, but are in fact those external objects themselves.
An Indirect Realist would need proof, but a Direct Realist wouldn't, otherwise they wouldn't be a Direct Realist. To be a Direct Realist is to subscribe to the idea that their private perception is directly of the public object.
Quoting Richard B
Someone may first see a duck and later see a rabbit, but they cannot see a duck and a rabbit at the same time. At one moment in time there can only be one intentional object.
I think it has explanatory power in the case of the dress that some see to be black and blue and others see to be white and gold. Each person can be looking at the same photo, in the same lighting conditions, and from the same perspective, but given their differences in eye and brain structure, the quality of their visual experiences differ.
One person sees white and gold, and so uses the phrase "white and gold" to refer to what they see. The other person sees black and blue, and so uses the phrase "black and blue" to refer to what they see. In a quite understandable sense, each person is seeing something different. So if each person is seeing something different, despite the shared external world stimulus, then they aren't seeing that shared external world stimulus.
At the very least this shows an ambiguity with the word "see", such that under one meaning they are seeing the same thing and under another meaning they are seeing a different thing. And this is why I think much of the time both direct and indirect realists are talking past each other, and why I think the very question "do we see the object directly or indirectly" is a red herring. The more pertinent question is whether or not colour, shape, sound, taste, etc. are properties inherent in external world objects or are properties that emerge in the act of seeing, hearing, tasting, etc.
Historically at least, direct (or naive) realists would argue that colour, shape, sound, taste, etc. are properties inherent in external world objects, and indirect realists would argue that they're not. And I think our current understanding of the world, at least with respect to colour, sound, and taste, agrees with the latter.
If the mind, the brain, or the little man can perceive sense-data, representation, idea, both the perceiver and the perceived ought to be able to stand in direct relation to one another, where one perceives and the other is perceived.
But when we take a mind, a brain, or the homunculus and place it in direct relation to sense-data, representation, or idea, perception cannot be said to be occurring by any single measure. At best we have a pile of decomposing organic material, and, well, nothing else.
What I wanted to do with this thought experiment was to take the idea of a perceiver as postulated by an indirect realist, and add to it the necessary components involved in perception, so that we can finally say "Yes, X is perceiving". If it is unable to perceive, it is not a perceiver.
A brain, for example, for instance in a jar, cannot be said to be perceiving. A brain needs vast quantities of blood, and therefor requires a circulatory system, so we add it. Still, all we have is a pile of decomposing organic material. Brains need oxygen, so we add lungs. It needs energy, so we add a digestive system, a liver, kidneys. Still no perception; still just a pile of decomposing organic material. We add the spine and skeleton so at least it isn't all just lying on the floor. We add neurons, visual, olfactory and auditory organs, but it's all just hanging there as if from a hat rack. So we add a skull, muscles, tendons, and so on. At this point he might be able to perceive, but all of it would be excruciating and our perceiver would be a poor soul indeed. So we add skin, eyelids, ears, and so on. Anyways, you catch the drift.
The point is, perceivers have most if not all of the above. Therefor perceivers are not brains, minds, or homunculi.
So, I would say DR posits that we have unmediated access to a mind-independent reality, whereas IR posits that we have unmediated access only to a mind-mediated reality.
The mind-mediated reality is also determined in pre-cognitive ways by a mind-independent actuality that cannot be real for us, even though we cannot but think of it as being real in itself.
To be clear, I am not arguing the scientific description/explanation of perception but only the metaphysical explanation. From your passage it is not clear which of these you are trying to argue.
Quoting Michael
Many times in human experience, two people can disagree on what they see for many reasons without appeal to "sense data". For example, maybe when someone looks at a duck-rabbit picture they only report seeing a rabbit because they never experience every seeing a duck, thus, there is no need to use "sense data" to explain. Another example, I show a rectangle where at one end it is one color transitioning to the other end into another color. At both ends, most people will judge and agree what the color is. But as we transition we will find less agreement in the middle and maybe sometimes some will not commit to any color. Do I need "sense data" to explain this or just the fact that I created an example to solicit different responses. But maybe thru training, I might eventually get greater agreement. Goodbye again "sense data". Or, scientifically, human beings differ biologically from person to person. Like a color blind person who has difficulty judging between red and green. This is discovered not by asking someone, can you explore your sense data and tell me what color you see, but designing publicly observable samples to see how one judges against accepted responses.
Quoting Michael
Yeah but there is a problem the indirect realist seems to create. Let us say we have a tree outside of a house. We place a video camera to focus on the tree. We hook up some cables and move them into the house where we connect them to a video screen. When I look at the screen, I perceive the image of the tree. I can say "I am looking at it indirectly." Is that because I have this casual train from light to the lens of camera, to the electrons flowing in the wires, etc. etc. etc. Or because, I can go outside and "directly" perceive the tree. But, the indirect realist says, "this is not the same because we do not know what the tree "really" looks like to compare, we only have our "sense data". This makes no sense because the indirect realist suggests that if only we could "directly perceive" something where we are not involved in the perceiving. It is like saying, "what is the color of the tree when there is no light?"
Are you referring to Innatism, Enactivism, Kant's a priori intuition, etc, in that life has evolved in synergy with the world for at least 3.5 billion years. I agree, if you are.
If the mind is the perceiver and the idea is the perceived, and the perceiver and perceived are separate entities, how can the mind ever have knowledge of the idea if the idea is forever separate from the mind?
Quoting NOS4A2
If the perceiver cannot be found in either the mind or the brain, where exactly is the perceiver?
What's the difference? We know that the external world is constituted of things like atoms and electromagnetic radiation. We know that electromagnetic radiation is reflected by bundles of atoms into our eyes (which are themselves bundles of atoms). This stimulates brain activity (which is itself bundles of atoms). This triggers the occurrence of visual or auditory or tactical experience. What else is there to add to this?
And many times in human experience two people disagree on what they see for reasons that do appeal to sense data, e.g. a dress that one person sees as white and gold and another as black and blue.
Another example of sense data having explanatory power is that of dreaming or hallucinations. I see and hear and feel things when I dream. I'm not seeing or hearing or feeling some external world stimulus. I'm not seeing or hearing or feeling my brain. So what am I seeing and hearing and feeling? I think there are two different, equally acceptable, ways to answer this. The ordinary answer is that I see people and hear music and feel warmth. Of course, these people and this music and this warmth are all "in my head", but I see and hear and feel them all the same. The philosophical answer is that I see and hear and feel sense data.
Quoting Richard B
That is the very question that gave rise to the distinction between direct and indirect realism. We wanted to know if the world "really is, objectively" as it appears to be. The direct realists argued that the world "really is, objectively" as it appears to be, because we see it "directly" (whatever that means). It therefore follows that if the world isn't "really, objectively" as it appears to be, then we don't see it "directly" (whatever that means).
The irony here is that you (and many others) appear to be using direct realist terminology but accept the indirect realist's conclusion regarding the disconnect between how things appear and how they "really, objectively" are. And this is why I said before that direct and indirect realists are talking past each other and that the question of whether or not we see things "directly" is a red herring. To repeat my previous comment: the pertinent question is whether or not colour, shape, sound, taste, etc. are properties inherent in external world objects or are properties of experience. That's the issue that has philosophical significance, and I think our best understanding of the world and perception firmly supports the latter view which is the essence of indirect realism, even if you disagree with the way in which it's often described ("seeing sense data/internal representations").
Not sense data. What is the distinction between metaphysics and scientific explanations. Lets start with the following definition of metaphysics: Derived from the Greek meta ta physika ("after the things of nature"); referring to an idea, doctrine, or posited reality outside of human sense perception. Sure does not sound like what science is suppose to investigated. Ok, now lets look at a definition of science: the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation. Looks like different fields of study. Pragmatically speaking, how do they differ? Well one way scientist will investigate is the utilization of labs, instruments, experiments, and/or data analysis. What about philosophers? They construct arguments. Sense data is an argue from ideas of hallucinations and veridical experiences (Argument from Illusion)
Quoting Michael
This is a conceptual confusion. What we humans do is report that we have dreams. That is how we come to understand this term. I would encourage anyone who wishes to understand this argument to read Norman Malcolms book Dreaming.
Quoting Michael
Using words like direct and indirect have meaning is everyday use. However, the problem here is that both the direct and indirect realist misuse they terms and create great deal of confusion when moved from its ordinary use (as I tried to show with my camera/tree example)
Quoting Michael
I would not say I am arguing for the direct realist position but I am arguing against the metaphysical position of both the direct and indirect realist. Only that the indirect realist has more to argue against, their confusion runs deeper. As for what appear to be so vs what it is really, again when philosophers take these ordinary terms for their ordinary use, that is when the trouble begins.
Because we see and hear and feel things when asleep. That's what dreaming is.
Quoting Richard B
I agree, which is why it is more productive to ask if things like colour, shape, sound, taste, etc. are properties inherent in external world objects or are properties of experience. That gets to the crux of the real disagreement between direct and indirect realists.
It cannot.
If human perception involves all of the components I have mentioned, the perciever is invariably a human organism, nothing more nothing less. Brains, minds, and so on, cannot be shown to perceive, and so are not perceivers.
When we sleep our eyes are closed, we do not see things while we sleep. So we hear, maybe, especially if we are a light sleepers, any noise might wake us up. Do we feel, again maybe, we hear someone who is moaning as if they are in pain. When we wake up we may report seeing many things, however, we know this is not true because none of the events reported happened, that is why we call it a dream.
Not word games, this is how we learn and understand the meaning of the word dream
Its more the absence of sense data, in so far as sense data has any meaning. Lights, sounds, touchwhat is given to sensetend to wake us from sleep.
There is but an interplay of energies, that which perceives an apparent reality is an experiencing energy form. While the surrounding energies play upon this energy-conscious form as one would play an instrument, the melody played/apparent reality; is only heard by the instrument/conscious energy form itself. One knows not whether other energy forms like biology itself are listening to the music of themselves, unaware of their private apparent realities.
If what you think you see is the same as what you actually see, then when, at the opticians, you think you see a 'W', but the optician tells you it's a 'V' what exactly are the glasses he prescribes you aimed at modifying. Not your ability to see, it seems, since you 'saw' the 'W' fine.
This must be quite a skill. If I find you sleeping and held a stick in front of your face you would able to see it. I bet you are peeking.
It seems I missed this response of yours previously. I'm not sure about "innatism", but enactivism and Kant's a priori intuition (if you mean space and time) seem about right.
Quoting Richard B
No doubt I'll be corrected if wrong, but I think the reference is to dreaming.
Yeah, even so, this does not make sense. Imagine a child wakes up from a deep sleep and says to their parent, I just saw a pink elephant in my room. The parent will assure the child that they did not see a pink elephant, and will correct the child and say something like No, you dreamt that you saw a pink elephant. Being in a deep sleep logically excludes that one sees anything.
Do you think we stop seeing when we sleep? That we close our eyes and find darkness in order to sleep suggests we might not. The whole time we are staring at the back of our eyelids. Perhaps dreaming serves to distract us from our senses.
Of course, scientists can explore all they want when it comes to what is occurring in the brain when we sleep.
However, as for what psychologists are doing with regards to dream is a somewhat precarious.
Quoting NOS4A2
If you closed your eyes, I would not say you are staring at all.
It's a fantastic question, and a most difficult one to solve, given that we have to assume certain things that cannot be proven: external world, permanent objects, other minds, etc.
Quoting NOS4A2
I've struggled quite a bit with this formulation, but discussion here and elsewhere makes me want to state this in a different manner:
Most perception is direct (edge cases aside), we directly perceive a tree. But direct perception does not imply unmediated perception. In fact, it wouldn't be possible to have any experience if we did not mediate it, we would be like lumps of clay, capable of no cognition or perception.
So, we can say we have direct mediated perception and differentiate that from direct un-mediated perception, which is sometimes obscurely implied when speaking about "direct realism".
Quoting NOS4A2
This is the hard issue, subject to the most varied types of interpretations.
I'd say, we, as human being - biological organisms - perceive sense-data, caused by objects. The "I" we use to denote a self is a "fiction" - in Hume's sense, roughly something we postulate that goes beyond what can be asserted given the evidence we have at our disposal.
But then this "I" is just as fictitious as a "rock" or a "tree." Put rather simply, a bird or a snake does not perceive these things AS "rocks" or "trees" - they lack the relevant symbolic system that allows for human language and concept formation.
That's roughly my take on it, but there's a lot more that could be said...
I always took unmediated to mean that nothing else is intervening in the relationship between perceiver and perceived. In other words there is no veil or buffer or experience between man and tree. I could be wrong on that and appreciate any other formulation.
For me, problems arise when insert some other object of perception like sense data. If we are perceiving sense-data, then we ought to be able to instantiate it. If we can perceive it we ought to be able to point to it, because for anything to be perceptible (perceivable?) it must have some scope and position in time and space. The problem is, whenever we try to examine the nature of sense-data, experience, impressions, we end up examining a persons brain or some other loci within the body. We are invariably examining the perceiver in search of the perceived, as if they were one and the same, or one was inside the other.
I mean, it depends on what you consider a "buffer" here. We need eyes (and a brain) to see, we need ears to hear, and so on. Now, some people aren't as lucky, they are born blind or deaf or anything else, which prevents them from getting the information we have by merely having eyes and ears.
Then there's interpretation - you see a puddle of water in the distance, but aren't thirsty now. A few hours later you get thirsty and you start walking towards the puddle - but it continues receding. Now you know you don't have a *puddle* (*=denotes concept), but a *mirage*. Of course, this is done so rapidly, we hardly notice this.
Now, if you don't consider these things to be "buffers" or "veils", then fine.
Quoting NOS4A2
I'm not sure I see the problem. If you and me are next to each other and we are looking at the Empire State Building, I can point to it and say "that's the Empire State Building". I can only assume - all else being equal - that you will see something very similar to what I see. There's no way to literally get into somebody else's head, but, daily experience seems to show we see things similarly.
Quoting NOS4A2
If you are interested in how the brain works, that's the topic of neuroscience and cognitive science. You aren't going to find an entity "the self" in the brain, even if such constructions originate there - with interplay with the environment of course.
I think I may be missing something, or probably am missing something.
The debate over the argument from illusion is quite extensive, already. Whatever your stance on it its an interesting one.
The problem is with the idea of sense-data. It leads us to believe we are not able to see the Empire State Building, only the sense data. JL Austen states it like this:
The general doctrine, generally stated, goes like this: we never see or otherwise perceive (or 'sense'), or anyhow we never directly perceive or sense, material objects (or material things), but only sense-data (or our own ideas, impressions, sensa, sense-perceptions, percepts, &c.).
Its like saying we sense sense, or experience experiences.
Right, there is no self living in the brain viewing experiences and perceptions. So indirect realism is redundant. Thats the basic point.
I'm familiar with Locke and Hume, who speak about these things. For Locke what we perceive are ideas which are directly caused by objects. Hume says something somewhat similar but speaks of perceptions instead of ideas.
Such a view as presented here gives the feeling that there is a fundamental difference between objects and our perceptions caused by objects. I fail to see why this implies a veil, as if, somehow, if we did not have ideas or perceptions, we would have a better view of objects.
It seems to me we would have no objects at all. I mean, we know now that colour is caused by reflected light bouncing off objects. In a sense, as pointed out by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, what color the object actually IS, is all the colours combined, except the one we see.
If we didn't have eyes to receive photons, we wouldn't see anything. But then we have to say light is mediated by the eye. But if this is a veil, then we could be seen as implying that a blind person has a better idea of objects, because the objects they perceive aren't mediated by eyes.
Quoting NOS4A2
I would agree. I think indirect realism is not a clear notion. But I don't see how we get out of the idea of something being mediated.
So, we directly see objects, precisely because they are mediated. That or we say Nagel's phrase that we aspire to a "view from nowhere". I don't see how we get out of the concept that knowledge is necessarily relational.