I think the distinction is that the direct realist believes that apples and their properties are manifest in conscious experience such that how an object appears is how it is (even when it doesn't appear), whereas the indirect realist believes that the properties which are manifest in conscious experience (e.g. shapes and colours and tastes and smells) are properties only of conscious experience, albeit causally covariant with (and perhaps in a sense representative of) apples and their properties. — Michael

"properties", "manifest", "conscious experience", "cause" -- these are what I'd term metaphysics. Not in the literal sense of the mind being above what is physical, but in terms of that discipline of philosophy which deals with ontology, and these are the sorts of words I'd use in talking about what exists and how we relate to them. There's a way of thinking that states -- this is what exists! And as far as I can tell you believe two things exist: science, and experience. Science is what is real, and experience is what is indirectly connected to science.

This way of using "science" though -- it's not scientific! "Science is real" is a political slogan, or an ontological assertion, but not a scientific truth deduced from the body of knowledge thus far generated, though widely believed. It's what I'd term a philosophical belief.

So what I'm asking is -- how do you get to the "Science is real" when you start with "experience is not-real though causally connected to what is real" ? That's the part I'm failing to understand. Why is science real, philosophically speaking?

Why bother with Kant. It's confused waffle. — Banno

Owie wowie.

Tho I do love waffles...

I'd be interested to know Chomsky's opinion on the IWW's relationship to the future of political activity, if he's willing to share such a broad sentiment.

A main problem I feel in doing philosophy outside of academia is that it's difficult to maintain the same level of rigor and discipline. While minutiae can feel detached, so can the popular. And there are limits to pushing on people's ideas which aren't part of the traditional set of concerns. Further, keeping interest -- given that philosophy does take work, though it's worthwhile work -- is part of it too. (I include myself in here, as I really ought to be reading and tapping out notes to Marx)

Which I think kind of goes to show that there's something of a choice going on between positions, and our choices are largely based upon faults we see in the other position (hence accepting our own)

It has the smell of an antinomy.

I think I am. I believe I've already explained and argued for this above. It's true however that I'm not a metaphysical realist as described in the quote you provided.

The key point is that one sees the apple and not an image of the apple. Hence 'direct.' — plaque flag

Yup.

I don't think perception has anything to do with metaphysics. Perception has to do with biology and psychology and physics. and so science is the appropriate tool to use. — Michael

Couldn't there be a metaphysics of perception? Isn't that the distinction between direct and indirect? Such as @RussellA's worlds, where there is an external world and an internal world?

I think that if science is an appropriate tool to understand reality, then we must have access to reality to be able to assert such a thing reasonably. And the indirect access adds a metaphysical entity in between ourselves and reality, which is directly perceived but not real.

So I'm not seeing how you connect yourself back to reality to be able to assert that science is an appropriate tool to use to understand it -- it seems that your perception will always directly be of something that is not real, and so your perceptions, at least, aren't reliable in judging whether science is a good tool for understanding reality.

I voted yes. I don't believe human nature is fixed, and I don't believe human beings are bound by necessity such that a "system" is in place to make them behave this or that way.

The future is open. And we can demand the impossible.

Do you think a new political system can be born from the minds of people beholden to the establishment? — Ying

Nope.

I don't think I could define philosophy proper, or the philosopher -- but I think philosophy is wider than a particular institution of philosophy in the same way that mathematics is wider than any particular institution of mathematics. And even more I'd say philosophy is wider than institutions -- that philosophy would continue on with or without the institutions.

Philosophy is something that people do. It's cross-cultural. And from my memories of running Socrates Cafe style meetings what I found was that people without technical background frequently had philosophical thoughts, but they didn't have a venue to express them in or a sounding board or exposure or access. We'd form reading groups of texts from people who regularly attended and were interested too, so it wasn't just discussing our own ideas but for people really turned on by philosophy we'd get to go back to some texts.

Nice. :)

Similarly my exposure to the academic world of philosophy, and really the tools of philosophy proper, was in my undergraduate days.

I'll note here though:

And how minimal did I claim it to be? I was referring to the historical body of written philosophy which does not indicate that contemplation of the beauty and the good were somehow the central themes of philosophy either before or after Plato. — Arne

But philosophical practice and philosophical writing are not the same. The ancient practice of philosophy was not about writing but a way of living. — Fooloso4

"The central themes of philosophy" isn't in the academy's jurisdiction. Its mission, though it ought to treat philosophy better -- at least that's where a lot of my motivation is coming from -- isn't the same as philosophy proper.

I genuinely believe that philosophy is good for an education. Rather than philosophy losing its way I'd say philosophy has a lot of unexplored fecundity.

But that's as an outsider, and someone interested in what philosophy is or can be outside of the academy.

Reminds me of this New York Times The Stone article.

One of my earlier thoughts on moral realism is a two-predicate analysis. "...is good" is simply a different predicate from "...is true". But if "P is good" is true, then that fits the form of the proposition. The way to make "P is good" is true is through action. So actions are the value-makers in moral propositions -- if you act to make it so, and it is also good, then moral realism is true -- because the good is now true.

Where are the objective moral judgments in their view? — Bob Ross

I wouldn't speak for @unenlightened, as I believe they've been making the case well. :D But I'll share my thoughts.

Any sort of moral realism which depends upon our nature, similar to your:

I do commit myself to the principle that I ought to fixate upon what is of my nature I fixate upon the objective, implicit moral judgments—so I act, in every day-to-day life, like a moral realist. — Bob Ross

will have to reconcile with some apparent difficulties like the naturalistic fallacy or the fact/value distinction. In so doing I think the classic picture of moral realism / moral nihilism is blurred, as you note. In a way what's being questioned are these old distinctions about objective morals or subjective choices and so forth.

I think the way I'm reading @unenlightened is the actuality of human realitionships require moral commitments to be shared overall in order for said set of human relationships to not deteriorate. And by and large I think there's some truth to that. And it makes for an interesting case where we are sort of combining values and facts together at once -- from the existential perspective we can always choose against some rule or value, and there are some who are smarter than others and can exploit the rules, but in actuality people are generally wise to who they can trust. If trust fades then relationships die, and trust is very important when it comes to keeping people together -- the very stuff of morality.

But it's in this blurry space where the objective/subjective divide doesn't fit so nicely.

I'm more coming at this from the continental side, where language-soup-as-reality isn't too far off (but put differently -- a reduction might put it the difference is between putting intension or pragmatics first)

But the notion of language is wider than English. It's sense-making. Perceptions of the world without words is thought to be a part of our overall meaningful experience -- so meaning, Big-L Language, is still a part of our cognitive apparatus just by the fact that we're able to discriminate at all. There are, after all, parts of the world we had to develop instruments to be able to discriminate. And those instruments get folded into Big-L Language and sense-making.

At least, that's where I'm thinking from.

Even if they don't have words to describe the colours, they nonetheless see them, just as I can distinguish between a variety of different smells despite not having words for each individual kind of smell. — Michael

I'm not so sure. It's not the sort of thing we can check, right? What is it like to be a bat? What is it like to not have language while we imagine that scenario with language?

On what grounds can we possibly say that the dress must either be Blue/Black or White/Gold as an external data point. Why cannot it be both? What fact do we know about the data points of the external world which we can use to say with certainty that they cannot be two colours at once? — Isaac

Yup.

The dress is black, white, gold, and blue. And we don't know what perception is like without language, due to our indoctrination into a linguistic culture.

In the categories I posited earlier, we're just looking at different parts of the surface of reality. And reality ends up being surprising.


*****

I feel like I'm approaching, in my stumbling way, Derrida's criticism of Husserl, as far as I understand it. (there's always this strange interplay between continental-analytic that I see. One of the reasons I doubt it's anything more than a historical category)

Though I think I have to add -- and that relationship is not identity, to address @RussellA

Nope.

PerceiverRPercipient was my thought. A relationship holds between sets. So there's the set of perceivers and the set of percipients, and the relationship between them is no more than 1.

Of course one can talk about apples and light and rods and signals and nerves and thalamus' and occiptial cortexes -- I'm not sure about the "sense data" bit, I'm usually suspicious of that. Also I'd push against conscious visual experience -- experience is bound together with all the senses, all the cognitive machinery, and so forth. Our focus can change, but experience is much wider than an organ by necessity -- they aren't possible to separate for us because we aren't cameras.

We know about the world we inhabit because we are able to access it. Mostly I was attempting a formal definition to see if that made things click. But I can see it doesn't.

The chains come later and depend upon us being able to access reality to be able to say

we know that there is an apple, that the apple reflects light, that the light stimulates the rods and cones in our eyes, that the rods and cones in our eyes send electrical signals along the optic nerve to the thalamus, and that the thalamus sends electrical signals to the occipital cortex, generating a conscious visual experience. — Michael

Which means what? What does it mean for a perception to be "directly connected" to the real? — Michael

"directly connected" I'd say means there is no more than one relationship between a perceiver and a percipient. The relation itself may exist, in the sense that consciousness is sometimes considered real, but there are no more relationships between the perceiver and the percipient than one. A relationship exists, but it's not a chain of relationships. The chains come later, and depend upon us being able to access reality to be able to check them. Then, upon putting ourselves into the scientific engine, we pick it apart -- but we must retain a direct relationship to reality to be able to assert that our experiences are indirect.

Ahh I thought there was a connection there then. I'll think more on the question.

Which means what? What does it mean for a perception to be "directly connected" to the real? All experience, whether veridical or hallucinatory or illusory or imaginary is a causal consequence of some real thing. — Michael

Exactly! That's what it means!

It's a metaphysical assertion rather than an explanation for error.

Only that our perceptions tell us about the real. They are directly connected to the real, in some relation. Because they are directly connected to the real we can utilize them to come to understand the real better.

I want to float an idea -- What if both experiences of the dress are Directly real? The direct realist is willing to sacrifice the old pedagogical explanation of the law of non-contradiction "Nothing can be black and white all over". Here we have a reason to believe that the dress is black, blue, white, and gold.

I like the idea of punk sages. Not the front men or the bands, but say a Pythagorean Punk.

We can think of reason as a network of semantic norms which is used on itself. Philosophy rationally articulates in an accumulating way what it means to be rational. Neurath's boat. We take most of these norms (meanings of concepts, legitimacy of inferences) for granted as we argue for exceptions and extensions to those same norms. — plaque flag

That's interesting! I think I'd say boats -- as a metaphor for a tradition. Then there are boat builders of various kinds.

I much prefer the maritime metaphor for terra incognita.

Well I think that is good rhetorical tactics; rather than get into an argument that China might be a more peaceful, internationalist, and socially responsible society, just suggest learning from the enemy because they are certainly learning from you. — unenlightened

Fair point.

Which is pretty much straightforward Kant. Lies need to be justified, and the truth does not. — unenlightened

There's a tension in Kant that's related to this -- the tension between the absoluteness of one's maxim, and the allowance of exceptions as a further maxim. This is where it gets kind of funny. You can technically write a maxim as specific as you want and it will remain universalizable -- any rational being like myself with these abilities and those resources and those ends in this situation would act in accordance with this maxim... :D

The reason why it works as a reductio, though, is because of the tension between reason and passion in early modern philosophy, especially. Since passion can't be appealed to and any free agent can will a maxim and act in accordance with it out of respect for it (I certainly respect myself) there's not a clear cut way to rule out super specific maxims.

But the tension is that Kant was such an absolutist about lying, as indicated by his correction of a contemporary enthusiast of his system that it was OK to lie to the axe murderer, so the spirit of the philosopher's own interpretation of morality seems to indicate that we shouldn't be able to get away with that.

So it seems, if universal objective categorical imperatives are real, we shouldn't be able to make exceptions. I think that might be some of confusion between yourself and @Bob Ross? Maybe? I'm just making a guess in the dark.

But I want to hasten to add that any attempt to argue for moral realism that I've seen and thought was right basically questions the objective/subjective, or the naturalistic fallacy, or synthetic-analytic -- there's a conceptual change purposefully being made to try and make the case. (As it would have to be done -- since if you simply accept that there's a difference between truth and goodness then it's pretty hard to put them back together again)

I'd say it feels like we need Platonic forms, but I'm not sure why I feel that. It's definitely a thought I've held at one point, but have come to let go of it somehow.

In terms of having a conversation, though, I'd say you have to have some kind of standard -- be it a Form or no -- that isn't just "yeah I like that" to count as a conversation in aesthetics. Not that sharing what one likes is bad or anything. Just different from what it takes to talk aesthetics.

. . . According to the video China contained AI, and somehow they are bad guys in the presentation while attaining what the researchers want. Worth noting when they want to build international organizations.


You've done a wonderful job of defending moral realism, from my perspective -- for what that's worth. I think for me I'm just more interested in anti-realist ethics. I live in a nihilistic culture, so they seem relevant.

Something of an afterthought on classifying myself as an anti-realist Direct Realist is that it seems to follow pretty easily from a denial of Kant's system while acknowledging the worth of his arguments. It's the transcendental structure part that's doubted, the noumenal realm as anything more than a locution given it having no relation to theoretical knowledge. And then if you read Kant's ethics in an anti-realist direction, where the moral law and action is important precisely because the kingdom of ends won't exist unless people actually follow the moral law, you have a reason to doubt the noumenal has a reality from the perspective of practical reason too.

:up:

I'd say you're onto something deep!

The appeal to reason works because it is appealing. (or doesn't because it fails to meet the standards of reason -- it is unappealing by the standard of reason)

The trick with aesthetics is to get it off the ground you have to, in some sense, be talking about more than what you individually like. And that's similar to the appeal to reason -- it's just appealing to another sensibility or standard.

But words and sentences are something else. The fact that the same sentence can be expressed by multiple utterances (a text engraved in stone vs a professor's quotation,) show this. — frank

Bold of you to assume that they're the same sentence. ;)

Something I cannot decide, not even with an aesthetic guess, whether it is or is not mind-independent is individuation. It's a phenomena which is understandable within both language and perception: Names-predicates, in the first case, and object-foreground in the latter. And it's understandable as a real phenomena, similar to the way I was talking about causation earlier -- perhaps we trip across individuation because it's a real phenomena rather than because it's our way of dividing up the world. How could you possibly tell the difference?

Not sure exactly what you mean. In case it helps, for me the lifeworld has birds and blunders that we can talk about. Such articulated entities are just there for us. A (mistaken or less advisable) deworlding approach plucks all the leaves away to find the real artichoke. We acted as though we had tried to find the real artichoke by stripping it of its leaves. — plaque flag

Language-as-organ puts it in a similar category to eyes-as-organ -- both organs of perception which compose a body. So rather than semantics as something which is distinct from our perceptions it puts them together in a phrase.

Saying the whole is not knowable seems to imply that there is that which is unknowable. If there were that which is unknowable, would it follow that it is real, or would you say the word "real" here would be misapplied? — Janus

I agree with your deductions.

I think I'd have to remain agnostic there. I can't know if it's misapplied because it's not known. And I'm not sure how I get to that, now that I think on it -- I was clarifying and answering, not arguing.

I take it that when you you say "knowable" you mean 'discursively knowable' and then you go on to wonder if there could be another way to "settle it". Would settling it, for you, imply some kind of non-discursive knowing or just arriving at a feeling of its being settled? — Janus

In a way it would have to be a feeling that it's settled, but I'm not sure if that would be discursive or non-discursive. Gets back to the first question -- "the whole" is what I'm thinking, but I'm not sure how to get there since it wasn't in the categories posited so far.

Do you think what is real to us is the whole of what is real? — Janus

Put like that -- I believe it to be the case, but I do not know it to be the case. And I suspect the whole is not knowable, so knowledge cannot settle whether there is more to the real than what is real to us.

So what does? That's something I still ask and wonder about.

Invokes or evokes? I'm guessing you think counting life as a mystery, as opposed to merely thinking it absurd, opens the door to mysticism and/or religion, and for that reason you don't favour the framing? — Janus

Yes.

Though I want to highlight that it's very much a for me thing. For me, since philosophy is at least fairly personal, it's just what it looks like to me if asked. I'm definitely skeptical of mysticism and religion, but in a way that's not meant to posit myself as somehow above it. I couldn't make a distinction between invokes/evokes logically, though my word choice indicates what I feel.

So just to be clear you think that what appears real to us is (necessarily the whole of) what is real per se? — Janus

Hrm this is sounding similar to my discussion with @RussellA now...

I'm getting stuck on the parenthetical comment since you're wanting clarity -- can you put the question without parentheses?

Yes, the idea that life is absurd, at least as Camus framed it, is that it cannot answer the questions most important to us, and I think in that sense it follows that life is a mystery. — Janus

Sounds about right to me. "Mystery" invokes more than I like, so I like to say "absurd", but I admit functional equivalence.

Heh. That's not a thought I want to dissolve. I'm admitting it's the weak point in my thinking! :) -- it's something I see as a serious problem if I were to take my posited categories as the real. I'm making up another set of categories to offer to solve one set of problems, but admitting that these are provisional [EDIT:and] are for a particular line of thinking rather than universal.

Yea. I don't think they're the type of thing that can be held. — frank

Sounds good to me.

I think we've known this for millennia, wine, and all that. My only point was that those who are claiming that thoughts reduce to bodily activities that can be read by others is wrong. Thoughts and feelings are there even while there are no voluntary muscle movements. — frank

I actually was wondering so I'm glad to have clarified.

I'm not so sure -- but it'd be nitpicky and off the beaten path, since I've already pointed out that this is basically the weirdest part of what I've said. I'm not sure how direct perception of other minds works -- it's a bit odd. There are prima facie reasons to believe it, but it's definitely against usual way of thinking of things and a hard case.

I don't think a thought is like a blob that dwells somewhere. Thoughts come and go, like little moments of reflection. Parcels of awareness or recognition. I think this is the conventional view. — frank

Sounds about right to me. So no need for a mind at all to hold them, right?

Whatever they are, they exist even though the body of the thinker is paralyzed. We know this because we regularly give neuromuscular blockade drugs that stop everything except autonomic activities. If we don't also give sedatives to put the mind asleep, the patient will hear everything that's said, and worse, feel everything that might be happening, like surgery.

So the notion that thinking is something the body does is just wrong. — frank

I think that "giving sedatives" would count as the body still. It's a molecule, right? Not a mental-thing?

The blood moves, the oxygen burns, the sugar gets converted -- there's a body there with molecules. DIfferent drugs have incredibly different effects on the body. Is that any wonder that what we like to call the mind would respond to the molecules of the world? It's part of it after all.