t’s 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. — NOS4A2

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).

Yes. I am not denying seeing trees, I'm describing what seeing trees is.

A recent thread has me wondering how far the community here differs from the general community of philosophers. It seems, from the noise, that there are more folk hereabouts who reject realism than in the wider philosophical community. — Banno

Who in that tread was rejecting realism?

you claim to doubt the reality of trees. — Isaac

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.

"hysterical"? "Pathologically certain"? Myself, I would ascribe these to the monomaniacal author of the 100s of posts long antivax crusade. But that's just me.

Anyways I don't know why you think I have "trouble with trees". I have none.

We can also perceive it through other senses as well, including touching it. — NOS4A2

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.

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. — Isaac

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".

I'll try one more time to show how this is a mischaracterisation of realism. — Banno

I'm afraid this bears little relation to anything I've written.

In particular, for you, "the tree has leaves" is not about the light reflected from the tree. — 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.

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 — Banno

Not just a casual chain, a series of fundamental transformations, between which there is nothing "direct".

It’s when people are explicitly and politely told that what they are attacking is a position that nobody holds, and they ignore the information completely. — Jamal

If I were attacking a position nobody holds no one would disagree with me.

I think it’s more that he is reacting to the equally incoherent claim that we don’t perceive things “as they (really) are”. — Jamal

Reacting to who's claim? His mental strawman he points at and shouts "Bad Argument! Stove's Gem!"

The idea that we perceive things "as they are' seems incoherent to me. — Janus

Exactly, it is incoherent.

Naive realists like Banno don't seem to be able to let go of this primal picture. — Janus

And yet they strut and prance as if their naivete were in fact sharp insight. That is what is most objectionable.

is oddly passive — Banno

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.

Do you think philosophy, in the sense that it is being "practiced" here is anything more than an amusing pastime? — Janus

Are we directly affected by the light reflected off of objects? What would it mean to say we are indirectly affected by light? — 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.

Do you think philosophy, in the sense that it is being "practiced" here is anything more than an amusing pastime? — Janus

Not really.

Experientially considered perception seems direct, but scientific analysis of the organs of seeing show that it is a process. Does that mean it is indirect? — Janus

Yes.

And further, what difference would it make as to what view one holds? — Janus

This is a question you can ask of all philosophy.

But we do not see the reflected light. — Banno

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?

nothing more significant than playing with words is going on here. — Janus

What is at stake is the nature of perception. Claims like

For the direct realist, the man directly perceives a tree. X directly perceives Y. — NOS4A2

Are contradictory and fundamentally misunderstand perception.

Reflected light is what the eye directly interacts with, not the tree. Only in this sense do we "only see" the reflected light.

To see something *is* to experience it via its reflected light, so yes you see the tree. The argument is not that you don't see it, but that you see it via layers of indirection.

Rather, you do not *directly* see the tree. To see is to indirectly experience something visually.

There is no mitigating factor or intermediary between perceiver and perceived, therefor the perception is not indirect. — NOS4A2

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.

transformations you listed are transformations of the perceiver, not the perceived. — NOS4A2

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"?

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 major type of direct realism is distinguished by its claim that we perceive trees, not representations of trees—not that perception isn’t a transformative process. — Jamal

We perceive directly.
Perception is a transformative process.

How can these be consistent?

Direct realism is logically impossible. To perceive something means to translate it's sense data into a form that is apprehendable by an agent. This involves two transformations:

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.

However, I believe this possibility is ruled out by the conditions that have defined the physical sciences from the beginning. — Thomas Nagel, The Core of Mind and Cosmos

Does this imply that an amended science could account for the mental? What could that amendment look like?

It seems that recently our willingness to grant consciousness to others has increased recently. I was surprised to see Sartre, the philosopher of subjectivity, declare animals to be machines, not even a century ago. And my feeling is that even children were not granted full consciousness status not long ago, in spite of the evidence of peoples own memories. Were women deemed to be conscious in 1860?

Is this broadening of what is deemed conscious a reflection of a broader trend towards greater inclusivity? Is the perception of something as an insentient thing a necessary step towards abusing, exploiting, and killing it?

Precisely because we have no answer to the hard problem, we don't know definitely, we can only make educated guesses.

The hard problem seems inescapable. Even if you claim, "phenomenal consciousness is an illusion", the question remains, "why do some systems experience this illusion, and others do not?". People are experiencing something, and this must be explained.

Basically, because (2) is at least possible, there's no 'hard problem' of consciousness because neuroscience's failure to account for it in terms of one-to-one correspondence with physically instantiated objects may be simply because there is no such correspondence to be found. — Isaac

After what, 100 posts on this topic? You demonstrate you have no clue what the hard problem is.

At least read this: https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness/#:~:text=The%20hard%20problem%20of%20consciousness%20is%20the%20problem%20of%20explaining,directly%20appear%20to%20the%20subject.

In more detail, the challenge arises because it does not seem that the qualitative and subjective aspects of conscious experience—how consciousness “feels” and the fact that it is directly “for me”—fit into a physicalist ontology, one consisting of just the basic elements of physics plus structural, dynamical, and functional combinations of those basic elements. It appears that even a complete specification of a creature in physical terms leaves unanswered the question of whether or not the creature is conscious. And it seems that we can easily conceive of creatures just like us physically and functionally that nonetheless lack consciousness. This indicates that a physical explanation of consciousness is fundamentally incomplete: it leaves out what it is like to be the subject, for the subject. There seems to be an unbridgeable explanatory gap between the physical world and consciousness. All these factors make the hard problem hard.

It's entity all the way down and any action is just the movements and contortions of that entity. — NOS4A2

In other words, the activity of that entity.

As I gave the example of earlier, early scientists used to refer to 'ether' and each would know what the other meant. Their use of the word didn't create a necessity for science to explain what 'ether' was. It doesn't exist, there's no such thing. — Isaac

You can only say that because you have the advantage of the 20th century knowledge that the ether doesn't exist..

In the 19th century there were very good reasons for believing in the ether, we would have too if we lived then (if we were lucky enough to be educated). You didn't get to just say, "hey guys, ether is just a felicitous word, that doesn't imply it exists." That's because no one was arguing from it's use in language. You had to actually demonstrate the ether doesn't exist, that the good reasons were not good enough, which is not a trivial thing.

This radical separation of cognitive processes from consciousness created a peculiar "explanatory gap" in scientific theorizing about the mind. — Joshs

This suggests that the origin of the explanatory gap is theoretical, if only the wrong theory wasn't chosen there wouldn't be one.. I can't see how this is so. One of these two propositions must be shown to be false to resolve the hard problem:

1. The existence of mental events is conditional on the right kinds of physical events taking place. (note that this does not imply epiphenomenalism).

2. We can't conceive how physical events can engender mental events, as an exhaustive inventory of physical events does not seem to imply mental events.

Does the choice of theory as described here impact either?

Its role is not as an internal agent or ho-munculus that issues commands, but as an order parameter that or-ganizes and regulates dynamic activity. Freeman and Varela thus agree that consciousness is neurally embodied as a global dynamic activity pattern that organizes activity throughout the brain.” — Joshs

Does this mean something?

Hi Ukraine. How's the weather up there, cold enough for ya? Sorry about Dnipro and all. I'm sure you have your ideas on how to proceed from here, but I'm afraid @Isaac says that borders don't exist. As it thereby follows that your will in this matter has no particular moral claim, we decided to consult with a random sampling of hotdog vendors instead. Have a nice day.

This thread consist in impotent virtue signalling. — Banno

A complaint typically levied by those lacking the virtue in question.

There isn't any phenomenal aspect to the third person account. It's the God's eye view. — frank

In the literary sense it doesn't have to be free of phenomenal content. It just means that the point of view is not tied to any one character:

Tommy squirmed in the hard plastic chair, suffocating in the reek of recent flatulence which pervaded the office. The principal's voice was a drone, a distant second to the large red birthmark on the principal's forehead in the competition for Tommy's attention.

Philosophers don't generally use the 1st/3rd person distinction in the strict literary sense however, the usage is more by analogy. The third person perspective is that of the detached observer, while the first is the perspective of the conscious individual. In this sense everybody takes on both perspectives, and when looking in the mirror, simultaneously, on the same object.

Well... it's that we couldn't communicate all without any preceding common ground. — frank

The fact that we share a common experiential ground stems from the fact that we share a common world, as well as a common neurology. Nonetheless I cannot look through your eyes, as you cannot mine. We can never know what it would actually be like, if we could.

I think Chalmers is including all of that as phenomenal consciousness, of the outer world and the realm of imagination. — frank

Yup

Would you agree that the third person view is a construction? — frank

In what sense? When we observe anything in the world, we are observing it from a third person perspective. That is a component of our first person perspective, what it is like to be us.

Having said that, if someone wants to create a new account with a new email address its not that difficult, sure they have lost their philosophical history but it allows them to participate once again. A fresh start.

It's not like anyone can be permanently banned from contributing, it's account specific. — Benj96

For new posters, and even someone like me, that is not that a big deal. But Olivier5 had thousands of posts, and more importantly, real relationships, mayhap even friendships. It seems cruel to sever those over this incident, which had multiple sides to it.

Think of tpf as a magazine or philosophical daily paper, staffed by volunteer contributors and volunteer editors. — unenlightened

Except it is not. It is a voluntary community, moderated ideally for that communities benefit. There was no benefit here afaict, rather the mere assuagement of the moderators' egos.

It basically concludes that communication is always a matter of pointing to facets of your audience's experience. — frank

If communication requires common experiential ground, this seems to rather imply the privacy of experience. If experience were communicable, then the relevant experiential background could be communicated.

There could be cases where experience varies significantly, as with people with aphantasia, but knowledge of that implies some commonality in order to communicate it. — frank

Aphantasia is kind of a special case. Our experience of our inner world echoes our experience of the outer world. Our inner monologue echoes the sound of us (or someone) talking, and our inner visualization echo (faintly,to be sure, for most) the experience of seeing. And so it is possible to understand one in terms of the other. Since those with aphantasia can still see, they can imagine visualization as a movie playing inside the head. But if they lacked both inner and outer sight, then it is impossible to communicate vision to that person.

As for "internal". I just don't understand what it's supposed to be internal to. My skull? — frank

Internality to me is close to privacy: from the external, third-person perspective, the organism's experience is not evident. Experience is only revealed from the internal, first-person perspective. That is, to the organism.

A few things struck me as odd. Why does epiphenomenalism "threaten"?
So what if

the aspect of phenomenality cannot be all that significant — Joshs

? Are we supposed to reason towards what elevates our self esteem and makes us feel good? Rather than towards the truth?

is experience and intentionality on the contrary intimately connected? — Joshs

I think I agree with this, but in the sense that explaining cognition without experience is hopeless, in the same way that explaining biology without cells is hopeless. Sure, all biology is ultimately reducible to molecules bouncing around, but you won't get anywhere trying to describe it in those terms. It is the wrong level of description. Similarly, neural activity is the wrong level of description to explain "higher" (that is, conscious) cognition. It (we) treats phenomenal experience as if it were elemental, and thinks in terms of them, even if they are ultimately reducible to neural activity (in ways yet to be elucidated).