To classify is to discriminate by definition.

Statehood is something that's deeply embedded in who we are as a species now. Does it have a downside? Of course. It's like our knees: they cause all sorts of problems, but we can't very well stop using them.

Slavery was once considered in a similar manner. Nowadays we could never think about going back to it.

Yes. The belief in and proliferation of bad ideas can be held by anyone, regardless of what they look like.

The hyphen was to differentiate between the root word and the suffix in order to illustrate what I think is the definition. “Race” means the taxonomy of race. “-ism” means ideology or doctrine. So I intend race-ism to be racism.

I’m not sure any man can occupy a higher position over and above others if there is no such position. The failure of egalitarian causes is that they wish to occupy such positions, for whatever reason, thereby placing themselves over and above others. The problem is the existence of the State.

Except Dilbert never mentioned the inferiority or superiority of any race, at least according to the article.

Race-ism. The ideology of race. It is the fundamental idea motivating every racially discriminatory act. One has to racially discriminate in order to formulate the question, ask the question, record the results, etc.

Race-thinking is the problem to begin with. The poll, the question, the answer, Dilbert’s reaction, his cancellation, is all racist. Not only that but the question “Is it ok to be white?” is bloody weird.

If only 53% of white people polled believe it is ok to be black, would a black man be justified in saying that blacks people should stay away from whites? Or would we cancel him?

Racist polls invariably lead to racist reactions.

The self is always in reference to a particular living organism. It cannot be otherwise.

This sounds just like John Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment to show computers have syntax but not semantics. In this case, Y is just “moving” symbols around.

I suppose there is a parallel, but I don’t think it is says anything about the listener, who has semantics.

So what you are saying is that, in addition to whatever is encoded in the sentence, there is an additional element which only exists in the actual communicative event?

I don’t think anything is encoded in the sentence. All of it is encoded in the interlocutors, so to speak. It seems to me the interlocutors, and not the sentences, should be paramount in any theory of meaning. Speakers and their expressions appear frequently, but not so much listeners, who express nothing.

I think I would be differentiating between meaning and information.

I think so. It seems I'm a legal positivist. I think the use of the words "law" and "rights" result in confusion, and the law is distinct from morality. I favor legal rights as I think they serve to put limits on governmental power. But rights which aren't legal rights are what people think should be legal rights if they're not already.

I favor virtue ethics and other ethics which aren't based on concepts of individual rights. People claim so many rights.

The words do cause confusion. The idea that nature or God confers rights is untenable. Only men confer rights. As a play on words, it is man’s natural right to confer rights; or in Spinoza’s terms, conferring rights is coextensive with his desires and powers.

But if this is the case, the idea that man can only confer rights or develop laws so long as he does so in some official form is equally untenable. Who gave them the right to do so? Neither God nor Nature, of course. But if positive law gives positive law the right to develop laws then my law gives me the right to eschew them. Positive law is ungrounded. It can appeal only to its own tradition, not unlike the Bible.

This is why the Nuremberg trials appealed to natural law and human rights, for instance. The Nazis were following the law, such as they were. Of what are they guilty? Of not being virtuous enough?

It is the case that we confer rights based on principles developed through a general understanding of universal human nature, whatever that may be. Some positive laws, too, have developed from this understanding.

Then what can you say you do with the visual components of your dreams? With the auditory components?

I’m not sure. I’m asleep. My eyes do not point inward so I am unable to verify what goes on behind them. Supposing that it is possible, my only hope would be to ask others what I am doing, what sorts of movements I am making during this period, however subtle they may be.

Fine; I dream things in my dreams. I cannot say I see them.

@Dfpolis has published papers, given lectures, and written a book. By chance I happened upon his work long before I became a member on this forum. I think he was a theoretical physicist, though.

Basically the same place as the visual representations in your dreams. You see things in your dreams, right?

I dream dreams, certainly, but I couldn’t say I see them because my eyes are closed.

Yes. Where does this visual representation of a tree appear? Who or what is looking at it?

We have a fairly accurate account of the biology. We can simply look into the eyes and determine numerous visual impairments, for example.

How are we unable to perceive neural activity, but we’re able to perceive visible representations? Couldn’t the same thing that views representations view neural activity as well?

I just don't get how that is possible when you have a massive network, distributing sensory experience from different regions and rei-integrating them together. No one is going to have complete understanding of what is going on, but certainly, the medium matters, and the fact that there is a medium means that something is going on that isn't simply a mirror reflected of "reality". For example, an input in a computer becomes an electrical signal that then gets turned into a logic gate that affects the system and thus produces an output. I press a key on my keyboard and it almost instantaneously shows up on a computer screen. The physical stroke of my fingers is not the visual representation that shows up on my screen.

You are mixing the hard problem and the easy problem in wildly unproductive and invariant ways that confuse the whole issue. I am a pro-hard problem. That is to say, I think there is one. People like @Banno try to downplay it, it seems.

In this computer keyboard/monitor situation, for example, there is already an interpreter that interprets the letters as something meaningful. Therefore there is an extra layer in the equation beyond just input and output. Thus, as I've stated before, this is the Cartesian Theater problem whereby there is a constant regress whereby the mind "integrates" (aka the Homunculus Fallacy). However, direct realism doesn't solve the problem so much as raise questions as to how it is that sensory information is simply a mirror and that there is no processing involved as well. Again, certainly other animals process the world differently, as do babies when developing. There are differences in individual perception, etc. This to me indicates construction not wholesale mirroring.

The difference is in individual bodies. If we want to explain the difference between the way a man sees and the way a bat sees we explain the body. We don’t need to say they see different things, we need only say that they have different bodies and see differently.

You’re assuming inputs and outputs and the computational theory of mind. Computers and Turing machines may try to mimic human beings but they are not analogous to human beings, I’m afraid. Do you think computers can perceive?

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’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. It’s the same if one places the intermediary outside of the perceiver. It is indistinguishable from the perceived. So indirect realism is redundant.

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.

Again, “the perceived” is necessarily anything found within our periphery, including the tree, the tree’s “impact on light”. We can also perceive it through other senses as well, including touching it. So in no instance have you introduced any gap or indie text intermediary between perceiver and perceived.

3). I’m not sure it has any implications worth worrying about and I don’t think it should inform our day-to-day behaviors. It’s supposed to be occurring over generations, after all. But I think it does have implications for institutions, which may last for generations.

I don’t think it supports racism unless one believes in race or is in some way a methodological collectivist.

That being said I have thoroughly enjoyed reading Spencer lately. His areas of interest were so vast that I cannot think of anyone else who has thought about and written upon as much. His moral and political philosophies contradict the implications adopted by others, for instance eugenics, showing that his haters have wrongly and undeservedly cast him with aspersions from which his reputation has yet to recover. Such a shame.

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.

Even if I accept that we don’t perceive trees, only light, I’m still directly perceiving the environment, which includes trees, leaves, stars, teacups, earth, light, darkness.

I cannot understand how I am a part of a brain and not a body. How is such a belief possible? But as is inevitable with these ideas, it gives us an opportunity to put body, or bodily processes, between a perceiver and perceived, as if another step in this linear account of perception is required to perceive at all.

Ok, I'm stuck on this point because you seem to be incredibly wrong to me. I see some stars very far away. There is obviously an intermediary between my perception and the stars which I perceive. What is this intermediary, space, light, ether? How do you think that any of these proposals to account for the apparent separation between me and the stars, would be directly accessible to be perceived? I see each and every one of such proposals as a logical construct produced as a means to account for the intermediary. Don\t you? If I could see the thing between me and the stars, it would block my vision of the stars.

No matter which intermediary you choose, all of it is a part of the environment, which is directly accessible and perceived directly.

If there’s no model or prediction then how can we learn a skill like giggling, for instance, and eventually learn it so well that it requires little if any conscious attention?

What model or prediction of giggling do you propose we are learning from?

The intermediaries you speak of are in the environment, which is still directly accessible, and therefor still entails direct realism. You seem to be stuck on this point.

Barriers to what? Intermediaries to what? What is the perceiver interfering with? itself? With light? My fovea is in my own way? I am unable to perceive the tree directly because I have a fovea?

I’m not saying we see trees like eagles do or that we see things as if we didn’t have foveae. I’m saying we have direct perceptual contact with rest of the environment.

Nothing interferes along the route and nothing is made up because there is no end state or product of perception in the body. There is no model, no modelling, and nothing analogous to it occurring in there. There is no perception, sense data, bundle of sensations. There is no hypothesizing, constructing, inferencing, predictive processing occurring anywhere between the perceiver and the perceived, nor any in the perceiver as well. What we do have is the continuous anthropomorphism and computerization of the brain, which is absurd, and I could give a straw about any of that kind of literature.

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"?

There is no mitigating factor or intermediary between perceiver and perceived, therefor the perception is not indirect. The contact between perceiver and perceived is direct, therefor his perception of the perceived is direct.

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.

The transformations you listed are transformations of the perceiver, not the perceived. Until perceivers no longer have nerves and nerve signals, it cannot be said that these are transformations of anything else, let alone forms or sense datum.

It inevitably heads in the direction of a homunculus argument, which fails. It tries to account for phenomena in terms of the very phenomenon that it is supposed to explain.

The only way out of this, I think, is to say that “interpreting” and “configuring” reality are acts of perceiving, and abandon the idea that these interpretations and configurations of reality are the objects of perception. But then again, that would imply direct realism, making indirect realism redundant.

If direct realism is saying we are perceiving reality as it is, then indirect realism is perceiving reality exactly as it isn’t. But these qualifiers are essentially nonsensical and unnecessary. Though the problem of the external world is related to the problem of perception, I am speaking strictly of the problem of perception.

Great. So we agree on the “who”. Let’s see if we can discover the “what”.

If you’re not using eyes, how are you witness to the end result of this processed and interpreted information?

Such is the case with legal rights as well. Someone believes they should have a legal right to do X. Rather than appeal to nature, though, they appeal to those in power. The difference is that legislation is designed to let one man or group of men arbitrarily dictate to all other men what they may or may not do, not unlike slavery, which is contrary to natural law.

Another word for a collection of human organs and processes is a human being. This is the perceiver and can be confirmed to perceive. Any thing less, for instance a subset of organs, cannot be said to perceive. Human perceivers also digest, metabolize, breathe, and grow hair.

For these reasons it cannot be said that brains perceive. And since our eyes point outwards, it cannot be said we view are perceiving brain phenomena, whether we call them processes, configurations, qualia.

I want to know what perceives and what is it perceiving. The only thing I can glean from your posts is that the brain is viewing a configured tree.

Neither your configured tree or your perceiver can be instantiated. You are beginning to speak of things that either do not exist or do not perceive.

Yep, sure are. And by me adding this to the equation, what exactly would that be adding to the problem? We already have X brain and sensory components I mentioned, add more, and what changes? We already have various filters I have mentioned.

Everything standing in the way of our direct perception disappears. There is nothing between perceiver and perceived.

All that picture does is demonstrate the mechanics of human vision, from which the answer to that question is impossible, insofar as both forms of realism must accept that physiology.

Remove the word “tree”, then ask where and when the warrant for putting anything in its place, comes from.

Now let the games begin.

Anything that is the “mechanics of human vision” is itself the perceiving, and not the perceived. If indirect realism accepts this it is redundant.

The brain is a conglomeration of processes which, working together is the perceiving.

But there are more organs and more biology involved in perceiving.