I’m not sure how that is the case, so I’ll say “no”.

You’re assuming that the apple is being presented in something called experience. But there is no evidence of such a place, let alone that apples appear in them.

Sure it is. I’m watching him experiencing an Apple directly.

It’s not a desire for change that motivates me but a conscientious effort to refuse participating in what I view as an evil arraignment. Fīat jūstitia ruat cælum.

There are other senses, though.

Does air prohibit us from directly experiencing air?



He's blind. He cannot see the apple.

Surely you can name or point to what prohibits direct experience.

Bodily interaction is not phenomenological experience. The former being direct says nothing about the latter being direct. A blind man can pick up and eat an apple, therefore picking up and eating an apple is not evidence that someone has a direct visual perception of the apple.

It is experience viewed objectively, from a view independent of any phenomenological account. From this view, to watch a blind man directly eat an apple on the one hand and say he is not experiencing the apple directly on the other is absurd. There is neither the evidence nor the reason to suppose that he is experiencing it indirectly.

And seeing someone pick up and eat an apple shows nothing that supports Direct Realist Presentation.

It shows that he is directly interacting with an apple. Nothing appears to be mediating his experience or perception, or otherwise hindering his experience of the apple. The contact between him and the apple is direct, therefor the experience is direct.

If a schizophrenic says he is hearing voices, yet others do not, we can confirm that he is in fact not hearing voices or any other sounds from anyone’s mouth, but that something else is occurring somewhere in his biology.

Direct Realist Presentation: perceptual experiences are direct perceptual presentations of ordinary objects.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/#Dir

An apple is an ordinary object.

But he’s touching it, destroying it, consuming it. At no point are the interactions indirect, so we need not say the experience is indirect.

If you watch someone eat an apple, what does the evidence show regarding the directness of his perception?

At times, the empirical needs to set the boundaries for the creative mind.

We can easily witness any person and the objects he interacts to see how direct perception really is. It’s so direct that some of the objects, like apples, can be consumed, physically entering the so-called inner world and passing through it. So we can put the directness of perception, or at least interaction, to the side.

Since the indirect realist neither has the periphery or range of sense to examine what is really going on during perception we can say his “experience” is invariably a limited and impoverished view of his own biology. His eyes and ears don’t point inward, and thus needs other instruments, other people, to fill in the blanks where his senses cannot reach. For example, all it takes is one or two other observers to confirm that a person is hallucinating or dreaming.

So why the indirect realist prefers the limited and impoverished view of his own biology is the real question.

The psychologist JJ Gibson has some good ideas about perception. Two good books, well worth the read, are The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception and The Perception of the Visual World.

The issue is direct vs indirect experience. Physically, we can directly experience only the five senses. We directly experience the idea of a tree and indirectly experience the tree as a physical object. (An analogous situation is seeing a tree on a computer monitor. All we can see on a computer monitor is light.)

Think "brain in a vat". Or the movie, The Matrix. Both make a similar point.

The matter of identity rears its head again and again. All of what you said could be true if you identify as a brain, a mind, or some other small and limited observer existing within the body. But everyone in the entire world can see that you are no such entity.

:fire:

Confusion doesn’t explain how a past action can impose on a future person.

Ok. So, for example, which past persons and which situations imposes on you?

I just don’t understand how one can impose on someone in the future. Which past people or situation imposes on you?

How does someone impose on a future person without having to travel through time?

Good explanation.

Of course this all depends on your theory of selfhood (what is 'me'?) but that's probably a whole 'nother can of worms we don't want to open here.

That’s an important point.

If one expands “the network doing the inference” to include the sensorimotor systems, what happens to the hidden state?

It troubles me because every single “network doing the inference” appears to be the organism itself. By their own admission, and our own, organisms infer.

Maybe this is partly a problem of systems theory in biology, the idea that this or that group of organs can be considered its own system, while other parts and other systems remain outside of it, different nodes so to speak. While this may be a decent abstract model of biological function, empirically this isn’t the case because whenever such a system is isolated, or otherwise taken out of the system, it no longer performs the functions it is supposed to and is known for. A brain sitting on a chair, for example, could not be said to be thinking. It’s only function as a system at this point is to rot.

So can an activity that only organisms can be shown to perform—experiencing, thinking, inferring, believing, seeing—be isolated to a single part of it?

You wouldn’t care if they were doing crack and hookers. That’s mighty lenient of you.

I’m all for it. What I’m against is the two-tiered justice system. If this was anyone else, for instance the son of the last president, the media coverage and persecution would be legendary.

I thought you of all people would be reporting on the criminal behavior of the first family of the Uniter States.

Oh, it’s just obvious. Very convincing.

The first son.

I honestly feel bad for the guy, and for many in this dysfunctional family, but the fact this man has avoided jail is the height of privilege.

I can’t find it in their cases, though. No such cases arose from the Mueller report, either.

Any witness tampering cases to show?

Teflon don. Keep trying.

And zero trials or convictions for what you claim are crimes. The patterns of the false accusations, though, are never-ending.

“After our last hearing. President Trump tried to call a witness in our investigation. A witness you have not yet seen in these hearings,” Rep. Liz Cheney, the vice chair of the committee, said on Tuesday.

“That person declined to answer or respond to President Trump’s call and instead alerted their lawyer to the call. Their lawyer alerted us. And this committee has supplied that information to the Department of Justice,” she added.

https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/12/jan-6-committee-notifies-doj-that-trump-tried-tampering-with-one-of-its-witnesses-cheney-says.html

Witness intimidation is a crime.

Phoning someone isn’t.

He allegedly phoned someone who never answered. Bmbshell!

The consistency here lies in wanting to deter the killing of human life. Punishment, capital or otherwise, is one such deterrent.

Not necessarily lies, I apologize. I left out other possibilities.
"Dissent" from universal expert consensus, i.e. climate deniers (are you one?), is either lies, or Dunning-Kreuger idiocy. Of course there is always the theoretical possibility of "Maverick Genius", but for our purposes we can ignore that one.

However, you have taken it one step further. I say, "Let X be true...", and you immediately raise your finger and say "I dissent! This contradicts my experiences and intuitions!". I don't know what to say, other than you must have been a joy to teach.

There is no evidence or compelling argument for the existence of p-zombies in your scenario. Unfortunately the assertion that something is true is not enough to convince me or many others. If you had some evidence or reasonable arguments it would be a different story.

The phrase “pro-life” pertains only to the abortion debate, not to other matters. It’s the same same with “pro-choice”. If pro-choicere were to oppose populations from choosing to enact anti-abortion laws, it doesn’t mean they harbor hidden reasons for defending a woman’s right to choose to kill her baby.

Simply banning abortions is not going to prevent all abortions. If you actually care about fetuses, then you should support the development of technology that will make it less likely that a women will choose to have one. But nobody in the pro-life movement supports this, because they don't actually care about fetuses - they care about keeping women controlled. They don't want women to be relieved of this crucial weakness. They want women to be vulnerable to becoming pregnant and make up a bunch of bullshit about the rights of fetuses to obscure it.

Every anti-abortion argument I’ve heard has to do with the termination of human life, so I’m not sure that’s accurate or a fair interpretation of what they care about or want.

Who knows? Maybe they would support artificial wombs had they known about them. I see little to no evidence that they wouldn’t.

In my imaginary scenario I have the power to stipulate whatever I wish. But please, "dissent" away. Is that you I see with the tin foil hat and cardboard sign?

You did stipulate what you wished, and it ended up implying dissent is lies and consensus is truth. I would wear a tinfoil hat and cardboard sign if it meant I didn’t have to agree with such absurdities.

It’s it doesn’t follow that because one opposes the evisceration of a human fetus he ought to support the production of artificial wombs. It’s like saying that because one opposes the evisceration of an adult human he ought to support life support technology.

That doesn’t make it true, either. Your stipulation is just that, a stipulation, like they stipulated phlogiston or a pantheon of gods. A dissenting view isn’t a lie. You ought to have had an option for dissenting from the prevailing view.

It’s not a lie to dissent. I would defer to dissent from the prevailing view because the claim that one is not conscious but they still perform the activity of conscious people betrays my intuition and experience.

I would retain my relationships in the belief that greater minds will supersede these views with their own.