think the OP is working on the premise that "facts of the world" are also such conventions — baker

Why would the OP, writing in defense of Naive Realism. believe this?

As if you can look at a sunset but not experience it...? — Banno

Depending on how closely you are attending to something else, you can see the sunset, and experience it fully, only somewhat, or not at all. The bandwidth of experiencing is more narrow than seeing.

Despite having read this several times, I can't see what your point is here. — Banno

Apologies. Communication is hard!

Is my distinction between the two uses of the word "see" clear? One refers to the process of seeing, the other to the experience of it, the qualia.

Then, if you ask, "do you really see the flower?", the answer depends on the usage of the word 'see'.

Process See: yes. The flower exists, light really did reflect off of it, your eyes receive it and function normally, as does your brain. The correct causal link is established, and the conditions of Process See are fulfilled. You really see the flower.

Experiential See: no. When speaking of the subjective experience of seeing the flower, this is not the flower. It is qualia, a mental construct. It is what seeing a flower is like, for you. But as you point out, there is no "what seeing the flower is really like". Therefore, what you see experientially is not what the flower is really like. You do not really see the flower.

Much of the confusion of this discussion comes from conflating these two usages of 'see'.

Take a look at Level 1 and Level 2 as set out at Theories of Experience. Is that roughly what you have in mind? — Banno

Not really. In my reading Level 1 and Level 2 both treat what I call Experiential Seeing. They ask, what is it? And how does it arise?

I am distinguishing between seeing as a process, and seeing as an experience. The word 'see' may refer to either.

Seeing as a process is just a way objects interact, via reflected light. We do it, microbes do it, robots do it. Experience may be a part of the process, or it may not. Even in humans it may not: "He saw the oncoming blow without being aware of it, and dodged purely by instinct" is a sensible sentence.

Seeing as an experience refers to the experiential component of the seeing process.

The point is, I maintain that you can consistently affirm that you see reality in the process sense, which requires the right kind of causal link between observer and observed. While denying that you see reality in the experiential sense, which requires that the experiential component of seeing coincides with the reality of what is seen.

I have a suspicion that the difference between our positions is more one of language than of content. — Banno

Part of the problem hinges on the word see. 'See' is used in at least two senses.

Process See: To 'see' is a process whereby light reflected from an object shines into an organism's eyes, whereby this signal may undergo many transformations as it is processed and potentially acted upon by the organism.
"I see 3 chairs in the room".

Experiential See: This usage is mostly confined to humans, refers to the last stage of internal transformation in Process See, which is subjective experience.
"Close your eyes and imagine the first chair. Describe what you see."

Lets get straight: no one here is denying the reality of Process See. Experiential See is at issue.

Naive realism claims that Experiential See is a faithful reflection of the world. This is the understanding we are born with, hence 'naive'.

I claim, Experiential See:
* Is usually causally connected to the world.
* Usually faithfully conveys information about the world.
* Is nonetheless something quite other than the world it depicts.

Here you will no doubt wave your finger in the air and shout "Depict to whom? A homunculus?!"

I feel homunculi are red herrings. If you insist on the strict identity of the subject and their perceptions, you would say "the subject undergoes the process of their own depictions", or something.
But I wonder how you make sense of the ordinary claim "I close my eyes and I see a red dragon". With sufficient powers of imagination, the red dragon appears as distinct from us as does the chair in the room.

Again, language is ambiguous. I would distinguish 'Bodily I' and 'Subjective I'. But this is enough for one post.

Again, if what you say were true, one would not be able to make true statements. — Banno

But I just demonstrated that is not the case, with the hologram example.

Ok, we don't spend time arguing about whether the cup has a handle or the car has wheels. — Banno

These are hypotheses which are not worth arguing.

Overwhelmingly, we agree as to what is the case — Banno

Not surprisingly, as we presumably live in the same world, share the same human nature, and the same broader culture.

We do not spend hours arguing about how many centimetres are in a metre or which city is the capital of Russia — Banno

These are conventions, not facts of the world. Truths because they are defined to be so. About these certainty is possible.

I may sit in a chair but cannot perceive the chair in which I sit. I may drive a car but cannot perceive it. Is there nothing about these statements that seem problematic to you? — Ciceronianus

We perceive the chair and the car. We just don't perceive them as they are. It is the nature of perception that it necessarily an illusion.

'Illusion' doesn't mean that what is illusory is not there. An illusion is simply that which is not as it appears. An illusion is always something, it is simply not as it presents itself. A hallucination, on the other hand, is nothing, at least nothing in the physical world.

The fallacy of naive realism is that it takes what is illusion to be what really is.

Doubt can only take place against a background of certainty - you can doubt that the liquid in the cup is water only if you already suppose there is a cup and a liquid. — Banno

You can doubt that the liquid in the cup is water only if your working hypothesis is that there is a cup and liquid. This is not certainty, in the face of true certainty doubt is impossible.

The issue becomes what it is reasonable to doubt. — Banno

Exactly so. This is the quandary of beings who lack certainty about the world, because they do not access it directly. The best they can do is make hypotheses, and question the ones worth questioning.

True, and so there is room for The Matrix/Philosophy 101 style doubts. This absence of independent verification is why these doubts cannot be disproven definitively.

Not so. Imagine a hologram of say a city from an overhead view. It is illusory, there is no actual solid, miniature city in front of you. But if you have reason to believe that the hologram is not purely a synthesis, that it is a projection of a real city, then you can derive true statements about how to navigate the city from this illusion.

The analogy with perception is exact.

1. You presume that we can say nothing about that which we cannot access directly.
2. We are dealing with them, but indirectly, via an illusory interface. No different than what you are doing with your computer right now. Are you dealing with opcodes and interrupts directly?
3. Vacuous, nothing to disagree with there.

'Qualia' is merely a less ambiguous version of 'perception', 'sensory experience'. etc.

An illusion occurs when the senses goes awry. — Banno

An illusion is that which is not what it appears to be. Perception itself is an exemplary illusion.

The word "direct" is not doing anything - except misleading you. — Banno

Not at all. Qualia are the elementals of our waking lives. Qualia, and nothing else, are immediately accessible to our awareness. Any knowledge we have outside of them is necessarily indirect.

those "phantom things" are not what we see, taste and touch; they are what our seeing, tasting and touching, at least in part, consists in. — Banno

So then we have a dualism. What we see/taste/touch, and what those consist in, for us.

As physical objects, we bounce around the world as well as any other. But as conscious beings, all we have direct access to is what our seeing/tasting/touching consists in. Anything more must be acquired by reasoning. This is the barrier of the op, and what is on the other side may as well be called things-in-themselves.

imposing a wall of "representation" or "illusion" which you assume precludes us from intelligent interaction — Ciceronianus

No, I am assuming nothing. Perception is an illusion, in that the sensory phenomena that appears to inhere to the world, the experiences of the 5 senses, are in fact phantasmal mental products. And yet, sensation is the projection of real environmental inputs onto the imaginary plane of qualia. This projection is information preserving, and so we can make intelligent decisions on the basis of these illusions. If we couldn't, we wouldn't have them.

Better, surely, to think of the plane as an individual, and your seeing it as something you might do, rather than as an individual. — Banno

Perception is an activity, not a thing. But, this activity consists in the construction of phantom things in the mind. These phantoms look, smell, taste, feel, sound certain ways. Naive realism says that this is so because things really do look, smell, taste, feel, sound this way.

In truth, everything we actually know about things, we know indirectly, through inference. Everything we experience directly is in fact illusion, constructions of the mind. Illusion because the presentation of these experiences is as if they are of the world itself.

You seem to be fascinated by your perception of me as a lawyer, or perhaps of lawyers in general. I suggest this unhealthy, as you say you believe it isn't real. — Ciceronianus

Lawyers are real, perceptions of lawyers are also real. While causally connected, they are not the same thing.

Not least because, the perception is not a thing at all. It is an event.

But not the naive variety.

QED, except that no one is arguing there is no plane.
The point is that blips, "plane"s, and planes are three distinct things. Therefore, when you see a blip and "plane", you are not seeing a plane.

But all that is irrelevant. — Banno

True.

Indeed. But the relevant point here is that they have made a claim about the plane. — Banno

You are missing the point. The fact that they can make any claim about the plane at all is because of the correlation between dot and plane. Were the dot to start blinking (unless the blinking signifies something else about the plane), that correlation would obviously have broken down. Therefore to make a claim about the plane's cycling existence and non-existence on the basis of the blinking is crazy.

Air traffic controllers do talk about the blip as the plane, and they are not wrong. — Banno

If the dot moves north and the atc says the plane is moving north, this is because they have a justified belief in the correspondence between the dot's movement and the plane's. But if the dot started blinking and the atc said the plane has begun popping in and out of existence, they would either be joking or insane.

How many worlds do you live in? — Ciceronianus

One world, with many different aspects which can be colloquially referred to as "worlds". You are being lawyerly, I guess.

There's nothing real in that mental world to begin with, apparently. — Ciceronianus

Words are real, perceptions are real. Both are removed from the realities they refer to. We can look up from books, we cannot look up from our perceptions.

Our heads are so crowded, then, — Ciceronianus

They are indeed crowded. But perceptions are more mental events rather than objects filling the brain with clutter. The bandwidth of these events is quite limited.

You must refer to your perception of a lawyer, — Ciceronianus

No, I refer to lawyers in the abstract. But this reference is, necessarily, mediated by words, and comprehension of these words is mediated by perceptual events, our perceptions of the virtual ink blots I made on our screens.

Nothing is direct in the mental world, everything is abstract and mediated. Do lawyers reside in these ink blots? No more does reality reside in perceptions.

There's a sound in my head? Are sights and smells in there as well? — Ciceronianus

"A sound" might be a perception (experience, qualia), or a physical event. The former is in your head.

Why should I know anything, if what you say is correct? — Ciceronianus

You can know many things without direct access to them. You must agree, or you would never read, and presumably make a terrible lawyer.

Books bear a correspondence to the reality they describe, and you can learn much from them. And yet, books are not that reality, they are ink blots, perfectly arbitrary ones.

Perceptions are the same way. They correspond to reality, and yet they are composed of arbitrary symbols. Unlike the example of books, they are all we have. Because of this, naive realists confuse these symbols with reality itself.

We began to insert (as it were) something between us and the "external world" some centuries ago, for reasons I find difficult to understand — Ciceronianus

It should not be so difficult to understand. The abolishment of naive realism ("naive", because that is how we start out in life, prior to philosophical sophistication) is one of the few definite results of philosophy. You should know it.

The naive realist believes perception reveals the world as it is. This is simply not so. Any perception is necessarily a co-creation of both the perceived and the perceiver. It cannot be any other way.

For something to be consciously perceived, it must be mapped onto a perceptual plane. This perceptual plane is contingent, and has everything to do with the perceiver, nothing to do with the perceived.

When you hear a pure 440hz tone, it sounds a certain way to you. But that sound in your head has nothing to do with the vibration in the air. Rather, it is a mapping from that vibration to your auditory perceptual plane. Which happens over many complex steps and signal transformations, from the vibration of your eardrum to the conscious event.

Others might perceive pure 440hz tones differently. Other species certainly do. None of these perceptions are privileged, none hear the tone as it really is. "Hearing it as it really is" is a contradiction in terms. "The world as it is" may be conceptualized, but it is perceptually inaccessible, due to the nature of perception itself.

We live immersed in a world of perceptual symbols, from which there is no escaping. It is like living your life in a library. You read words all day, every day. These words point to your understanding of the words, and as you read this understanding grows, as does your understanding of the world. But it's all book knowledge. You can't get out into the world itself, ever, the doors to the library are locked.

Please try to read more carefully. I was contrasting "loner", whose condition is voluntary, with an "outcast" whose isn't.

But I take your point, by definition no loners are in any pathological state — tim wood

I hope to avoid ever making such a ridiculous claim. Loners prefer to be alone, that is really all there is to it.

And you attribute to me a characterizations I did not and do not make. It being not mine, the "contempt," & etc. must be yours. — tim wood

These are my takes on the connotations of the word. I think most would agree, at least in my (American South) culture. It is quite hard to believe someone hasn't internalized these connotations who makes the the whopper of a claim that:

I do not think there is any such thing as a "successful" loner. To be a loner is already to have failed at life in perhaps the most significant ways — tim wood

Guess I'm just being defensive.

From this I infer - no doubt incorrectly - that you're something of a loner, and a bit afraid of it, certainly defensive. — tim wood

I happily claim to be something of a loner, though I go through phases. There were times people might have called me one behind my back (it is not something you say to someone's face, unless you intend to denigrate).

I do insist on such a definition. A loner voluntarily prefers solitude, for reasons you might consider healthy, unhealthy, and every gradation between. Where involuntary, "outcast" is more apt.

This is the denotation. Alongside this, there is a negative connotation of disapproval, distrust, and contempt. To call someone a loner is not to make a psychological diagnosis as you seem to believe. Rather, the word, beyond its denotation, is an act of social judgement. So far from understanding this distinction, you uncritically accept the social attitude as a given, reifying it as merely a reflection of the loner's failure and unhealth.

It is one of the roles of philosophy to disentangle these false "givens" from what is neutrally there. It is the role of junk philosophy to accept and bolster social consensus with half assed references to Aristotle and "Rogerian self actualization"

No.

And the distinction is moot, since I was clearly talking about loners, not merely the state of being alone.

A loner, by choice or otherwise, spends less time with other people than the norm. You, the self appointed arbiter of human merit, deems them to be failures. Good on you. I think you are a self important blowhard, but we each have our opinions.

A loner is someone who prefers being alone. Do you have a more substantive point?

Great OP.

To "true" in "false" I would not add "unknown", but rather the entire spectrum of degrees of truth and falsity in between. Not one of the oppositions you cite sits exactly on one end of that spectrum or the other. Every domain posses independent reality of some sort or another, and every one is apprehended by a subjective being that necessarily perceives, and/or constructs, everything from its own perspective. Objectivity is a concept that cannot be instantiated in a mind.

It is simply too easy to dress up ideas that are at best half baked with difficult language. Much easier than actually coming up with novel ideas and expressing them in language. It would therefore be surprising if it didn't happen in philosophy.

And it obviously, obviously does. Not every difficult work is dishonest, obviously. Ideas can be very difficult, and so can expressing them clearly. But the rampant abuse of difficult language, in contemporary writing especially, has caused a suspicion of all difficult writing.

That Irigary quote... The fact that it can exist at all, and the author not laughed out of academia, but rather be taught and celebrated, speaks to a deep corruption and dishonesty in academic humanities.. Which ruins the discipline for everyone, and deserves all the hate it gets.

also plausible. Then the minimum claim is, "Mary learns a way to experience red".

that's fine, I have no problem accepting that. Maybe perception is uniform across people, maybe spectrum s can be inverted or swapped around, maybe humanity is split into dozens of gene lines, each with color perceptions incomparable and inconceivable to the others.

But at minimum, Mary learns what it's like for her to experience red.

I do not think there is any such thing as a "successful" loner. To be a loner is already to have failed at life in perhaps the most significant ways - — tim wood

So is a loner who finds deep meaning and pleasure in creation, in nature, in their own thoughts, inherently a failure, compared to one who spends all their time around others, buffeted by this and that person's moods and needs, who feels their own emptiness keenly when alone, and had no identity outside their reflection in the mirror of another's eyes?

Whether or not you accept that red is 750nm light (I think it is true, in a sense), Mary learns what it is like to experience red. Just as you can learn different words that mean 0.

Is it not that simple?

Both perspectives are absurd on their own, only a synthesis of the two can arrive at a humane ethics.

Consequentialism is absurd because consequences are in principle unknowable before action. And, terrible actions may fortuitously have good consequences.

Deontology is absurd because it attempts a moral bureaucracy, subordinating human ends to arbitrary rules.

The best you can do is a consequentialist deontology: what are the consequences of these moral rules, versus those? You cannot know this at the outset, so you need to adjust with observation, and with changing circumstances.

This is what legal systems in their best form attempt.

There are high level aspects of brains and computer that are analogus. For instance they might be the only general information processing machines in the universe. But to pretend that the brain is running Java is just nonsense.

My point is that it is not inexplicable for a being to create something lesser than itself.

"The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" C.S Lewis

But aside from parents, anyone who creates, creates things that are less perfect, or at least lesser, than themselves.