Two updates;

1. We're switching to La Nina now, so the weather will be cooler than last year.

2. The US economy isn't showing any signs of slowing, so no rate cuts and many frustrated investors. This is good for Main St and bad for Wall St., in other words the Antichrist has risen and we're all going to die.

Mmm... You don't have "access" to a percept. A percept is identical with either the whole, or a part of, the conceptual-perceptual state of an organism at a given time. That's a numerical/definitional identity, rather than an equivalence. Like the percept is not what perception or experience is of, the percept is an instance of perception. The taste percept of my coffee is the same as how I taste it.

The distinction there is between saying that a percept is an instance of perception vs saying that a percept is what perception acts upon. — fdrake

You're giving up on the integrity of the self over time. We usually assume it's one self and a flood of everchanging perceptions. You have the ability to direct your perception as you wish. If you allow yourself to become fragmented, you've entered into complete nonsense.

We have access to percepts. And we have access to the world. — Moliere

The indirect realist isn't denying this.

Perhaps, yes. Both direct and indirect realists are realists rather than subjective idealists because they believe that the existence and regularity and predictability of experience is best explained by the existence of a distal world which behaves according to regular and predictable laws. — Michael

True. I once asked a neuroscientist why he believed he had access to the real world, and he said "practicality."

What is the source of the direct realist's confidence that the dot is caused by some unobservable entity? — Michael

Practicality probably. Is that the source of the indirect realist's confidence?

The indirect realist claims to directly perceive the mental phenomenon as caused by the dot on the screen as caused by the unobservable entity. — Michael

Right. The question is: what is the source of the indirect realist's confidence that the mental phenomena are caused by the dot?

If the direct realist can believe in the existence of unobservable entities like electrons and the Big Bang and in the veracity of a Geiger counter then the indirect realist can believe in the existence of unobservable entities like electrons and the Big Bang and in the veracity of a Geiger counter. — Michael

But the direct realist relies on the observations that support belief in electrons (like the light dots on a CRT). The indirect realist has to say that those light dots are creations of the brain, and so may not reflect the facts. Btw, the idea that there was a Big Bang is declining these days (according to Matt O'Dowd from Spacetime.

I don't quite get what you're saying. Flat earthers assume that the Earth is flat, do experiments, and determine that the earth is not flat. It's not a paradox; it's just that the experiments have proven them wrong. — Michael

The question is about why you have confidence that your observations reflect the facts, when you've concluded that your observations are creations of your brain. It's just that indirect realism opens the door to skepticism.

One salient feature of hallucinatory and dream states is that when we experience them, our abilities to notice their anomalous nature is diminished or suppressed. — Pierre-Normand

Yea, but I've had dreams that were complex, with customs and history to it. One involved physicists who had giant potatoes where their torsos should be. It all seemed perfectly normal to me in the dream. What that demonstrates is sophisticated world-building capability. While awake, I start to think about how much of this world I'm in is a creation, and I realize it's actually quite a bit. I'm filling in blanks.

I think what the direct realist might be driven by is the necessity of a world. There's really no way to verify all of what we call the world, though. I think the difference between us is how comfortable each of us is about accepting that the mind is a masterful creator.

The first sentence is a paradox, isn't it?
— frank

I wouldn't say so. That scientific realism entails indirect realism is contingent on a posteriori facts, not a priori truths. — Michael

It's that the scientist starts by assuming direct realism, then disproves direct realism. It's an ouroboros.

Ok.

Well, for instance, it's hard to see how disjunctivism could be indirect. That a veridical viewing of, say, a tree, could be an instance of viewing a mental image of the tree, while an hallucination was not.. — Banno

I agree that there's a big difference between hallucinating and seeing our shared world. I think if indirect realism is specifically the situation with a homunculus, it's probably not true. I don't think there's a little person in there.

Indeed, which is where you err. — Banno

Quite likely.

Firstly, if direct realism is true then scientific realism is true, and if scientific realism is true then direct realism is false. Therefore direct realism is false. — Michael

The first sentence is a paradox, isn't it?

:up:
— Michael

If that is what they modern DRist is trying to do — AmadeusD

One of the conundrums with indirect realism is that it seems to start as direct realism, where the scientist assumes he sees the world exactly as it is, then he concludes from what he's observed that he's not seeing the world exactly as it is. How do you deal with that problem?

Indirect realism is the prevailing view of our time.
— frank
The most accepted vies is representationalism, which is neither direct nor indirect. — Banno

I think everything on that list was indirect realism.

since it is understood that we perceive by constructing a representation, which is better described as neither direct nor indirect. — Banno

I thought that was indirect.

Sure. That does nothing for the competing theories. Hence, certain levels of "wtf bro". — AmadeusD

Indirect realism is the prevailing view of our time. I think the contemporary direct realist is trying to steer clear of the problems associated with it?

Would you choose to be uploaded if it became available tomorrow? — Truth Seeker

I don't think so. When I'm done I want to sink down into the warm ooze of a worm's belly and come back out as something else. Fertilizer for an oak tree maybe.

As far as I know, our consciousness, personality and memories are substrate dependent i.e. they need the living brain. — Truth Seeker

I think the previously mentioned science fiction writers would say that nobody thought tuberculosis was curable, until it was. There were those who claimed it was impossible to go to the moon. I say put your biases aside and let yourself know the truth: we don't know. :blush:

So, is the self an entity the way a soul is an entity that can be resurrected or reincarnated? — Truth Seeker

I don't know. It's uploadable in a lot of science fiction, and those writers weren't thinking of anything mystical. I've always assumed it was some sort of pattern they were supposed to be uploading. Don't know.

I think my self is something like music, with notes and chords like a piano. There's a physical component, and intellectual and emotional ones.

Or I might think of it as a landscape like in the Divine Comedy. I can go exploring with my Virgil.

The fact that I have to resort to metaphors to think about it doesn't mean it's a illusion.

But a person can experience the world without engaging it in any way. If you mean the character of experience is shaped by interaction, I would agree to some extent. Some of it is just innate, though.

I think the idea that one must start with "atomic" concepts isn't wholly inconsistent with the sort of holism Wittgenstein advocated — Pierre-Normand

Atomism is indispensable. As long as the advocate of embodied consciousness understands that, all is well. It's just a shift in perspective of the sort that already exists in biology, so really, it just comes down to a matter of emphasis.

ecently, I stumbled upon a paper titled "Alignment of brain embeddings and artificial contextual embeddings in natural language points to common geometric patterns" (published last month in Nature Communications) and I asked Claude 3 Opus to help me understand it. I was puzzled by the fact the the researchers had chosen to look into Broca's area rather than into Wernicke's area in order to find semantically significant neural correlates of linguistic representations. Claude 3 informed me that:

"Historically, the Wernicke-Geschwind model of language processing has been influential, positing a division of labor between Broca's area (in the IFG) for speech production and Wernicke's area (in the superior temporal gyrus) for speech comprehension. However, more recent research has challenged this strict dichotomy, suggesting a more distributed and integrated network for language processing in the brain. — Pierre-Normand

On this point I'd offer rather than an objection, just the reason I've had trouble understanding those who talk about embodied consciousness. It's that in order to explain what you mean by holism, you'll use atomic biological concepts. So it's a case where the revolution needs the previous regime to make sense of itself.

This is vaguely inspired by Fodor's criticisms of meaning holism. As appealing as Wittgenstein-inspired meaning holism is, it doesn't work out on the ground. It's not clear how a human could learn a language if meaning is holistic. Likewise, the student of biology must start with atomic concepts like the nervous system (which has two halves). Eventually it will be revealed that you can't separate the nervous system from the endocrine system. It's one entity. But by the time this news is broken to you, you have enough understanding of the mechanics to see what they're saying. And honestly, once this has happened a few times, you're not at all surprised that you can't separate the lungs from the heart. You can't separate either of those from the kidneys, and so on.

This isn't new. As I mentioned, the boundary between organism and world can easily fall away. Organisms and their environments function as a unit. If you want to kill a species, don't attack the organisms, attack their environment. It's one thing. And this leads to my second point: you said that philosophy is the right domain for talking about this issue, but philosophy won't help you when there are no non-arbitrary ways to divide up the universe. Your biases divide it up. All you can do is become somewhat aware of what your biases are. Robert Rosen hammers this home in Life Itself, in which he examines issues associated with the fact that life has no scientific definition. The bias at the heart of it is the concept of purpose. He doesn't advise dispensing with the concept of purpose because there would be no biology without it. What he does is advise a Kantian approach.

So I'll throw those two things at you just as food for thought: you can't dispense with science and atomic concepts, and what you're calling a philosophical problem is really a matter of biases. Maybe an anti-Descartes, anti-Chalmers bias? I know it's not that simple.

I don't think that it's science's job to either establish or disconfirm this thesis. I think the mind/body problem, the so-called hard-problem of consciousness and radical skepticism stem from distinctive philosophical outlooks regarding the disconnect between the "manifest image" and the "scientific image" that Wilfrid Sellars identified as "idealizations of distinct conceptual frameworks in terms of which humans conceive of the world and their place in it." On my view, it's entirely a philosophical problem although neuroscience and psychology do present cases that are illustrative of (and sometimes affected by) the competing philosophical theses being discussed in this thread. — Pierre-Normand

You're suspicious of scientific findings because you think they're tainted by false preconceptions. Are you proposing that science sort of start over with a more holistic outlook? I mean, we have a vast wealth of information about how organisms interact with their environments, and "environment" is not a fixed entity here. Living things transform their environments to suit their needs, such that we could dissolve the boundary between organism and world and see both as a whole. We could and do extend that into the concept of biosphere. The holism doesn't end once its starts.

Which makes me think of Davidson's meaning holism. Have you ever looked into that?

Well said.

A ghost zombie. Hadn't thought of that. — Luke

You see the screen by way of the ghost zombie.

What's the intermediary? — Luke

It's a ghostly entity stranded in our universe who hopes to one day be able to eat your brain.

Whether, for example, I can see the screen in front of me, or whether I am seeing only an intermediary of the screen in front of me. — Luke

You're seeing the screen by way of an intermediary. :razz:

But if you know someone who endorses the "functionalist" label and who views phenomenal states to supervene widely on the brain+body+environment dynamics (like I do), I'd be happy to look at their views and compare them with mine. — Pierre-Normand

I did say you were "quasi-functionalist." I think if science were to show that functional consciousness is indeed a holistic relation between body and world, a functionalist would quickly adapt to that view and insist that talk of consciousness be limited to that relation. Isn't that your view?

Most of the examples that I've put forward to illustrate the direct realist thesis appealed directly to the relationships between the subjects (visible and manifest) embodied activity in the world and the objective features disclosed to them through skilfully engaging with those features — Pierre-Normand

Right. I don't think phenomenal consciousness is involved in navigation of the world as you seem to think it is. Walking, for instance involves an orchestral display of muscle movement which wouldn't happen at all if phenomenality had to enter the process. Consciousness of sights and sounds is a time consuming activity. I'm not saying you couldn't become aware of some of what your body is doing as you interact with the world. Phenomenal consciousness is like a flashlight. You can even direct it to the sensory input that handles proprioception, but your body certainly doesn't wait for you to do that before it orients itself in space.

My stance differs in important ways from a functionalist view, even though it may share some superficial similarities. The key distinction is that I'm not trying to identify mental states like perceptual experiences with narrow functional roles or internal representations realized in the brain. — Pierre-Normand

I don't think there's necessarily anything narrow about the reductionism of a functionalist. A functionalist just doesn't separate functional consciousness from phenomenal. She views the two as necessarily bound together, so that explaining one explains the other.

So when you say this:

In contrast, embodied conceptions sees perceptual experience as an active, world-engaged skill of the whole embodied agent, not just a function of the brain. — Pierre-Normand

What you're saying here is already true of functional consciousness. Every part of your body is engaged with the whole. The flowchart for how it all works together to keep you alive is startlingly large and complex, and along the endocrine system, the nervous system is the bodily government. However, none of this necessarily involves phenomenal consciousness. This is where you become sort of functionalist: that you assume that phenomenality has a necessary role in the functioning of the organism (or did I misread you?). That's something you'd have to argue for, ideally with scientific evidence. As of now, each side of the debate is focusing on information that seems to support their view, but neither has an argument with much weight. We don't know where phenomenal consciousness is coming from, whether it's the brain, the body, or quantum physics. We just don't know.

As I mentioned earlier, yours appears to be a quasi-functionalist view. It's a minority view, but one that's appealing to many. Its weakest point is that it has no force for lack of any evidence. Maybe one day that will change.

Otherwise, we are indeed using direct and indirect differently. I'll leave it there.

Because my comment, to which you replied, was made in the context of the GPT response posted by hypericin, which specifically referred to "mental representations". — Luke

Oh, yeah, I see that. Some of the posters, like @Pierre-Normand have been addressing the issue by going beyond mental representation to the realm of interaction with the world, much of which makes use of representation, but is not mental. Cause for confusion there.

I don't see that as being different to what I said, although let's stick to mental representations — Luke

Why stick to mental representation? That just leaves us with phenomenal consciousness and leaves out the bulk of representational content.

I take this to mean that the phrase "mental representations" can sometimes be used to refer to, or to include, unconscious states/processes, which is unlike how the word "qualia" is typically used. — Luke

I would take that to mean that representation is sometimes in the form of innate nervous responses (like algorithms) that don't involve phenomenal consciousness. This makes up the bulk of our interactions with the world. Something like this:

I had presented a challenge for indirect realists to explain how the phenomenology of perceiving an apple to be within reach, say, can be deemed to be true to the facts (or a case of misperception) if the intrinsic features of the representation don't include such things as expectations that the apple can indeed be reached by the perceiver's outstretched hand. It is those expectations that define the truth conditions of the visual content, in this particular case. — Pierre-Normand

Is the challenge meant to ask why indirect realists don't succumb to global skepticism? Or is it just asking how indirect realists explain how they sort real from unreal? If it's the former, once skepticism has taken over, there's no reason to be either indirect nor direct realist. Reality no longer has any significance. If it's the latter, I think that would be a matter of rational analysis of experience, involving some logic, some custom, some probability. Does that not answer the question?

There may indeed be some usefulness for purpose of neuroscientific inquiry to postulate internal "representations" on the retina or in the brain that enable the perceiver to attune their perceptual contents with their skills to act in the world. But those "representations" don't figure as objects directly seen by the perceivers. Just like those "upside down" retinal images, they are not seen by the embodied perceiver at all. They play a causal role in the enablement of the subjet's sensorimotor skills, but it is those (fallible) skills themselves that imbue their perceptual experiences with world-directed intentional purport. — Pierre-Normand

I think you're offering a quasi functionalist perspective? That's fine, but that view doesn't have a better grounding than any other. We don't know that phenomenal consciousness has something to do with skills. All we know for sure is that we have it. We don't know how the mind works to bring sensory data to life, we just know it's not a passive "blank slate." Would it improve things to just dispense with the terminology of direct and indirect?

Deflationary accounts of truth (such as disquotationalism or prosententialism) stress the pragmatic function of "truth" predicates while denying that truth is a property of the propositions they are predicated of. This sort of pragmatism about truth is somewhat different from the pragmatism of, say, Richard Rorty, who claims that what makes a belief "true" is nothing over and above the fact that believing it is useful. It is this latter form of pragmatism that you may be thinking of. Yet, there is an affinity between those two sorts of pragmatism. (Robert Brandom, who was a student of Rorty, defended a form of prosententialism.) — Pierre-Normand

I was just thinking of a broad deflationism following Frege's insights about the indefinability of truth.

However, suppose we grant you such a pragmatist conception of truth. The question regarding how "inner" perceptual states refer to "external" empirical facts about the world thereby gets translated into questions regarding the pragmatic function that enjoying such phenomenological states can serve. — Pierre-Normand

That would be true if I defined truth as usefulness, but that's not what I had in mind. Contemporary forms of indirect realism start with the assumption that we can rely on our perceptions of things like human anatomy and physiology. Representational models of human perception are natural developments from there.

But once we've noticed that perception can't be a passive process, were left wondering how far it goes and whether the whole issue becomes an ourobourous. That's where pragmatism comes in. Instead of abandoning the whole project because of the unknown, we carry on learning from this thing we've been calling the real world. We just do so with the knowledge in the background that we may be living in a dream. I don't think any of this intrudes on what scientists do.

Edit, btw, deflationists usually do accept that truth is a property of statements.

Couldn't an indirect realist just be deflationary about truth and say their grounding for justifications is practical purposes?

My suspicion, and it might be interesting to gather information on this, is that Overt Christianity in democratic political figures is a curiously 'mercan trait. — Banno

This doesn't bother me. It means they're trying to do what's right. That's not my assumption, it's in the historical record. Since the early 20th Century, American presidents have tried to be do-gooders. I'm not really sure about European leaders. I wonder if they have as little moral compass as the Europeans I've seen on line.

And we've not mentioned Kierkegaard's take on all this, which is to assert that the Binding was a test of faith and that there was no faith as great as Abraham's because he never questioned God — Hanover

In Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard is offering Abraham as an image of a human who has melded with God. He has the "power which is impotence", which means his will and God's will are indistinguishable. Apparently this power is available to those who can accept the universe as it is. Very few can do that, but Kierkegaard was dwelling on the topic just as Nietzsche was (amor fati).

You could probably get something equally profound by reading the label on your korn flakes. The profundity is coming from you, not the flakes, right?