Educated and nuanced is how they see themselves, but then they repeat almost verbatim the propaganda they’ve been spoon fed for the last few years, as if it was soy. Trump was educated in the Ivy League. I’d love to compare their education, but then again these days “educated” is another word for “instructed”, and instruction aptly describes how they think about politics. It’s why they fell for the Russia hoax, and every hoax since—just following instruction.

I didn't say that. I said that the perceiver (in general) is the medium between the perception and the perceived.

You also said that the nervous system was the medium. So if both perceiver and nervous systems (in general) is the medium, then I’m left to assume nervous systems are perceivers in your view. They perceive and are also mediums. But I just don’t know how that can be possible, because much more than a nervous system is required for the act of perceiving.

Humans and other animals perceive, and are therefor perceivers. This is what I mean when I use the term “perceiver”: a thing that perceives. It can be said these things perceive. The same cannot be said of nervous systems.

As for your positioning of perceiver, perceptions, and mediums, it’s too odd for me to think about because it implies the perception (whatever that is) is somewhere outside or behind the perceiver.

I don’t think it can be established that a perceiver is both perceiver and perceived. I suspect that, given the indirectness theory, that you would say we perceive our nervous systems, and not the sound waves in air. Is this so?

All processes are mediated or mediate. Perception can be validly understood as a process.

I’m not so sure. I cannot see the difference between the body and a bodily process. When I point to either, or both, I am pointing at the same thing. I don’t know how to distinguish between the thing that moves and the movements it makes, as if I was distinguishing between the morning and the evening star.



The nervous system is not a medium, though, because it is a part of that which senses—the perceiver—not that which the perceiver senses. I guess my next question is: where does the perceiver begin and end? I doubt appealing to biology can furnish an answer in favor of the indirectness of perception. Sound waves, for example, where the medium is air, contacts the sensitive biology of the ear directly, not indirectly.

Why do you think other adults require your brand of protection, unless you thought they were children? You advise taking their weapons and then turn around and suggest protecting them from the people who are going to take their weapons. If you want to protect them from the state and totalitarianism, let them keep their weapons and instead take the weapons away from the state.

If philosophers would respect the fact that there is always a medium between the thing sensed (sometimes called external), and the sensation of the individual (sometimes called internal), most of these silly problems could be avoided.

What is the medium?

I don’t care about any screed that proposes treating adults like children and limiting their most basic rights so Christoffer can feel a little safer.

Replacing and updating is not equivalent of "trashing". Try again without the strawman.

Trashing it and replacing it with one Christoffer likes.

Lovers of wisdom should have no fear of information they do not like.

Cringe. Now we’re to learn about “Democracy” from people who suggest trashing a constitution and censoring information they don’t like.

I agree there are many facts about perception, including scientific observations about how it works, but that wasn't my point: the point was that whether it is 'direct' or 'indirect' is a matter of looking at it from different perspectives, using different definitions of 'direct' and 'indirect'. Perhaps the terms 'mediate' and 'immediate' would be better alternatives. Phenomenologically speaking our perceptions certainly seem immediate. On the other hand. scientific analysis show perceptions to be highly mediated processes. Which is right? Well, they both are in their own ways.

The question arises, as it invariably does: what mediates perceptions?

I get that. But we are perceiving light, not electrical signals. We are our eyes, the signals, the brain, etc. We cannot be both perceivers and mediums.

I ask because nothing in biology shows that we are viewing our own eyes. Rather, eyes are included in the act of perceiving, as necessary components of the perceiver. And the contact with light on the retina is quite direct—light hits the retina. This contact between perceiver and perceived suggests the directness of perception.

I know how eyes work. The question is: how are you able to view the medium of your eyes?

Usually we use our eyes to view mediums, such as light for example. So one might say we perceive light. But you’re saying the eyes are the medium. Eyes are no longer an aspect of the perceiver, but of the perceived. So it raises the question. If the eyes are the medium, and you believe that we perceive this medium, how are you perceiving them if not with eyes? Do you think the perceiver is the brain?

To say eyes are one of the mediums of visual perception is to point out that perceptions are indirect. It had been mentioned particularly, because it is the most obvious and unmistakable example of the medium in visual perception by anyone, due to the fact that some folks in this thread seem to have problems in understanding why perceptions are indirect.

One problem I have with your obvious and unmistakeable example is routine biology. One usually uses her eyes to view mediums. So how does one view the medium of her own eyes, if not with her eyes?

You miss the point. If you are going to assert that the objects of perception are unreal or that tables and chairs are real, it is a good idea to know what the word means, including what it means to other people. Unless you offer your own definition of real, other people will assume that you mean by it what it means in ordinary language. But in ordinary language, the assertion that tables and chairs are real is extraordinarily pointless, and the assertion that rainbows and sunsets are unreal is completely puzzling.

He makes the point clear enough. It is a “fatal enterprise” to use the word in the way Ayer does. If us ordinary people need our hand held in what the word “real” might mean, perhaps he should have reminded his readers that it isn’t really fatal to use the word in such a manner.

That’s a good guess. The indirect realist position presents itself with a problem of self-hood, among others. It implies the perceiver is like a little viewer who observes the neural circuitry of his sense organs as they dutifully present him with impulses that turn out to look like chairs, sound like horns, and smell like lavender.

It’s a shame Austin doesn’t wade into any of these problems given the title of his book (just another play on words, I guess), and is content to split-hairs on rather trivial matters, like an entire lecture on the word “real”.

I am easily persuadable given good arguments, but indirect realism is lacking in that department. So thank you for at least sharing what you believe.

He quibbles throughout, but then says that, according to the argument from illusion, sense-data is perceived directly.

As I mentioned earlier, the argument from illusion is intended primarily to persuade us that, in certain exceptional, abnormal situations, what we perceive—directly anyway—is a sense-datum; but then there comes a second stage, in which we are to be brought to agree that what we (directly) perceive is always a sense-datum, even in the normal, unexceptional cases.

P.44

So whether we are perceiving a table or sense-datum, both are perceived directly.

It’s not only the leaf, but also the binoculars, the window, the garden, the chemicals and particulates in the air that you are seeing. To the question “what is it that is perceived”, all of it must be included. The mistake, I think, is to consider the “perceived” as an isolated object, like a leaf or table. Moreover, everything witnessed in the entire sensual periphery must be considered as “the perceived”, including smells, sounds, and so on. If all of it included, as I think it must be, it is impossible to say perception is indirect because there is no intermediary there.

If the law of identity holds, I cannot consider “the final place where the perceptual judgement took place” as perceived, because the brain is a component of the perceiver. Does X perceive Y, or does X perceive X? At any rate, neither precludes any intermediary.

To be fair, as Austin intimates somewhere, all perception is direct. It’s just a question of what it is we are perceiving. In my opinion there are only two likely candidates: ourselves or the world. So in my mind it also becomes a question of identity and selfhood.

Given his ability (or lack thereof) I can’t say Biden is really running the country. He even needs direction on which side he should leave the stage. It would be interesting to know who is really calling the shots here.

My problem is that I can't imagine what direct perception would be. Isn't this part of what we need to recognize here? If nothing could count as direct perception, then the idea that perception is actually indirect doesn't make sense. The problem is the move from "some perception is indirect" to "all perception is indirect".

The “directness” describes the relationship between perceiver and perceived. By “direct” one means there is no causal intermediary between the perceiver and the rest of the world, that we aren’t viewing sense-data, neurons, shadows on a cave wall, but the things themselves.

A state has "whims"? I would think that eliminating whims from the ruling system would be a defining feature of success.

How would you do that?

I would propose that a state is successful wherever it is considered sovereign, while the people who it nominally represent remain dependent and subordinate to its whims. With this it is successful in its most basic function.

The ever-widening goalposts of Biden and his representatives.

Joe Biden and his representatives have repeatedly defended him from criticism related to his relatives, his son in particular, by issuing blanket denials of misconduct and disclaiming contact with their business affairs.

But, in recent months, as congressional Republicans have opened an impeachment inquiry and controversies related to Hunter Biden continue to be litigated in the courts and in the public square, a steady trickle of revelations have contradicted the president’s denials.

A POLITICO review of recent congressional testimony and exhibits, along with court filings and media reports, casts doubt on several statements made by Biden and his representatives.

https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/05/hunter-joe-biden-business-testimony-00125056

There are cases where the objects are not visible at all by bare eye sight. Consider a far away star too dim to be seen with bare eyes in the night sky.

But when you use a telescope (good quality), and see it, it becomes visible. There is a medium (a good quality telescope) between your eyes and the object (the faint star). So, we could say that we don't perceive things directly always?

And when one gets old, hearing gets poor. The folk would use a hearing aid. All the sounds the folk hears would come via the hearing aid. Does the folk then hear the sound directly or indirectly?

I think Austin is wrong to quibble about the terms “direct” and “indirect”, because both succinctly describe the relationship between perceiver and perceived as it pertains to the arguments for and against realism.

For example, we might contrast the man who saw the procession through a periscope with the man who didn’t, and rightly call the one “indirect” and the other “direct” when describing the perceptual relationship between those particular men and that particular procession.

But in terms of realism, “directly” and “indirectly” describe the perceptual relationship between the man and everything he perceives, which includes the periscope, the air, the clouds, etc. It doesn’t describe the relationship between the man and the procession, the tea cup, or whatever the relationship between the subject and the object of a sentence may be.

Of course. They also gave us the "nation-state". Indeed, I would argue it is how the ideas of "nation-state" collide with ideas of "liberalism" "conservatism" and "socialism" that cause many issues of the 19th-21st centuries.

I think you’re right about that. I would go further and say the nation-state is just a repurposing of the Ancien Régime, not a repudiation, and the ideas you mention are built around seeking that power.

Anyways, there is a good little book by Pascal Brukner called The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism that goes deep into your topic from the French perspective. It’s basically a form of narcissism arising from a wing of well-fed socialists upset that, in the end, the proletariat sided with their bogeyman.

The West has also given us fascism, socialism, communism, and whatever the current brand of nanny-statism is.

Saying that one can feel tactile sensations is a bit like saying that one can feel feelings or sense sensations. It’s a kind of question-begging. It appears to be a common move among species of idealisms, for some reason.

It consists in erasing the object (the coffee mug), duplicating the verb or some other aspect of the subject, reifying it, disguising it with equivocation, and placing it into the object position. With this the idealist can avoid the perils of grammar which reveal he never has an object in his predicate.

The problem with the assumption that people are pushed around by “narratives” is that it should be just as easy to push them in the opposite direction through the very same methods. But try to talk them out of what they believe and you’ll see that theory falsified immediately.

Rather, it is the fragility of the grand narrative that has led to its repudiation. Those tasked with ordering our lives, with informing us, with protecting our livelihoods and liberties, have all revealed themselves to be incompetent, corrupt, and self-concerned frauds, so much so that a reality TV host can come in for one term and do a better job than someone who has spent his life in politics. And despite the propaganda, people can witness with their own eyes the nonsense that is the current order. Under the current and typical regime it appears we are inching towards total war and economic failure, both of which the reactionary and incompetent experts told us would happen under the Trump regime, but never did. So maybe it isn’t any narrative that pulls us away from our obedience to the old regime, but its own stupidity and corruption.

I just mean we literally don't have them, ontologically speaking, that we are not in fact considering "conscious experience" as such, we are only considering the physical body in a roundabout way. It is my contention that thought experiments such as p-zombies are exercises in dancing around the facts of biology.

The difference between the scenario of vibrations enveloping you and vibrations enveloping a rock are the objects involved. The same difference occurs in the scenario of a human vs a robot, or person vs another person—the objects are different, thus they move differently and respond differently to the vibrations in the air.

And that, to me, is why p-zombies are inconceivable. Given two persons physically and operationally identical, how can one be missing "conscious experience"? It's incoherent and impossible to consider, and only question-begging can push the argument a little further.

I think it is called callousness, and is causing many many problems worldwide.

It's called government. Foreign aid is in the billions of dollars for most Western nations. Whenever the unfortunate ask for a dollar, you tell them the government has already confiscated your dollar for their benefit. Take it up with them.

The state is our collective organ of charity and good will, of peace of mind, and consequently, the source of individual inaction. So long have we relied on it for these purposes that we no longer need to be responsible for each other. There's your safety net; fall into it.

I really don’t know how you mean this. It sounds like you’re saying we shouldn’t acknowledge them. That they don’t exist. I don’t know much about ontology. It seems there is not agreement on what categories of ontology there are, or even if there are different categories. So I couldn’t argue what species of ontology acts are in. But here we are, talking about them. And, as you’re posting in TPG, I assume you put a lot of thought into these things. I I would think they have some form of existence?

Sorry for the silly jargon. By ontology I mean our beliefs about "the nature of being" or "that which is". It's like a list of that which exists, and accordingly, that which demands consideration.

It’s quite simple, in my mind. The act and that which acts are the exact same thing. So when you observe the act of a punch or a kick, for example, you're observing a particular person moving in such a fashion. Despite our use of two or more nouns which imply that we are considering two or more things, there are not two or more persons, places, or things that we are observing. We can observe only one.

So in my opinion only one deserves a place in the pantheon of being while the rest, like acts, abstract objects, fomrs, qualities, properties, are merely conventions of language.

Music is vibrations in the air, over some period of time. Certainly an action. How do you know under which circumstances actions are nouns?

Things act; acts are not themselves things. We can see this empirically.

Though we treat acts as things in language (and it’s extremely difficult to do otherwise), we ought not to include them in our ontology as existing things because we risk reifying them. So though it may be necessary for linguistic purposes, acts are unnecessary and even confusing for any species of ontology. This applies also to the qualities, properties, characteristics, or attributes of things, which often take the form of adjectives.

so you don't feel like there's anything beyond an act when you see a colour, for example. Look at something vibrantly red or blue or green. It's that summed up entirely in the act of how you respond to it?

I don’t believe there is anything beyond the things or objects involved. For example, I don’t see a color, I see a colorful thing.

Yes.

From what I’ve read he leans towards “property dualism”. I’m not sure what his views are these days.

But yes the language used to abstract the description of things from the things themselves has led to the confusion in philosophy of mind, in my opinion.

Most people have conscious experiences, and so take that as a given. Do you have conscious experiences?

Experience is an act, not a thing. So while people are conscious and do experience, they do not have conscious experiences. There is no need to invoke other things and substances with noun phrases.

Exactly right. The argument makes two assumptions: there is a property of persons called “conscious experience”, and that we can conceive of beings identical in both biology and behavior without this property. Something, whatever that may be in fact, is missing in the p-zombie, which is an odd stretch because both are physically identical.

It seems to me the existence this property must be proven of the former before it can be said to be missing from the latter. But I’ve never seen anyone able to say exactly what it is. Until the fact of conscious experience is proven, p-zombies will remain inconceivable.

in the end it all appears a clever trick to smuggle dualism past the customs.