active participation in such events. — bongo fury

How does "active participation in person-sees-fruit events" helps you in any way, if you cannot recognize some similarity with a previous event? If there's no trace left of the experience in the person, then that person will have no way to connect new experiences with past ones.

Couldn't help it... I'm aware the correct answer is 'practice'. But to recognize an apple, one needs to have some clue about how apples look like.

It's in the big apple.

What I experience are person-sees-apple events, person-reaches-for-apple events and person-eats-apple events: which are all pretty clearly to do with apples. — bongo fury

How do you know these were apples, and not quinces?

It means that perception can be explained by physical mechanisms, and that absent these mechanism, you won't be able to perceive anything... No mechanism --> no perception.

You can't see an apple in the dark, for instance, simply because there's no light.

The perception must have a mechanism.

Could you be more specific?

What what?

sure, houses have back doors that you can't see when you're in the front garden, and the small woman I saw waiting outside my apartment building the other day was actually a pile of boxes, but apart from that kind of thing, appearance vs reality is a very troublesome opposition to me. — jamalrob

"That kind of things" are found at the core of many scientific questions. We do see anthropomorphic figures everywhere, we can't help it. I guess it's better to err on the side of caution; in other words, it's less risky to mistake a pile of boxes for a small woman than vice versa.

Uber’s self-driving car saw the pedestrian but didn’t swerve – report
Tuning of car’s software to avoid false positives blamed, as US National Transportation Safety Board investigation continues

Samuel Gibbs, Tue 8 May 2018 06.00 EDT

An Uber self-driving test car which killed a woman crossing the street detected her but decided not to react immediately, a report has said.

The car was travelling at 40mph (64km/h) in self-driving mode when it collided with 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg at about 10pm on 18 March. Herzberg was pushing a bicycle across the road outside of a crossing. She later died from her injuries.

Although the car’s sensors detected Herzberg, its software which decides how it should react was tuned too far in favour of ignoring objects in its path which might be “false positives” (such as plastic bags), according to a report from the Information. This meant the modified Volvo XC90 did not react fast enough.

If perception is indirect, it must mean not just that there are intervening factors (light? electrical impulses?), but that there are intervening objects of perception, that is, the things that are perceived. — jamalrob

So what? It is still important to distinguish conceptually between objects as perceived (objects of perception), and objects as they are in the world.

If seeing in the way that we see is the only way we can ever expect to see, then how is it indirect? — jamalrob

Granted that it's probably "as direct as can be", but direct still means (in this context): without intervening factors or intermediaries. Which is not something that can be said of perception. So postulating that a mechanism (an intermediary) is necessary for any perception achieves a number of things, among others:

1. it allows perceiving at a distance without invoking magic at-a-distance action.

2. it focuses the attention on such mechanisms and their study can help improve people's vision or audition, e.g. I wear glasses and they help me to see.

3. it may be necessary to correctly interpret sense data in some cases, e.g. when seeing lightning and counting the seconds before hearing thunder, as a way to estimate the distance of the event based on the velocity of sound waves.

4. it helps explain optical illusions, where what you perceived is at a demonstrable variance with the thing being perceived, or where you cannot decide what you see (is enlightened's avatar a horse or a frog?).

5. it attracts philosophers' attention to epistemology, which implies a critical outlook on our data gathering procedures, and involves attention to how theories shape our perception and data collection strategies.

Well, have a look at that book on direct perception and you might see that the concept is consistent with your view (aside from the Kantian issue). — jamalrob

I have. Yes, it's consistent with my views but I believe illogical in calling itself "direct". That there are signals in the environment, already meaningful, and that the perceiver notices them, that is true. And of course a good football player will correctly perceive the field not as a passive and static 'object' but as a force field, within which he moves, with which he interacts like all players do. But that doesn't make the noticing direct, precisely because of the Kantian issue.

Or they mean "direct" in a minimalist way, i.e. "more direct than the mechanistic alternative of perception as animals making up meaning entirely on their own based on a passively collected data field would have you believe".

That's one way of using the word "direct".

Sorry but for me, the concept of direct perception is an oxymoron. By definition, all perception is indirect. Kant, noumena vs phenomena, the thing in itself vs how it interacts with the world and with our eyes. Any interaction requires a modus operandi, a link, a mechanism(s), a set of causes and effects that collectively and dependably results in a somewhat stable or identifiable interaction, in this case between the perceived and the perceiver.

He can be a bit verbose but not vainly so. I'm on the same general vibe and consider him quite solid and intellectually honest. Consider him a non-naïve realist.

I'm quite drawn to the idea of affordances. — jamalrob

I take my clues from Merleau-Ponty, but both Gibson and MP draw on this from the Gestalt psychology of Hurt Koffka et al. MP explicitly cites Gestalt psychology in PoP, and the wikipedia entry on Gibson too. So maybe I'll have a look at that.

Sorry, this debate is making me feel nauseous, so I'm gonna duck out. Nothing personal. — jamalrob

See you around when you feel better.

if you can accept that people see apples and that apples are red, then we're close enough to agreement for me. — jamalrob

As explained to Banno, this is agreeable because factual, but we still seem to disagree on the meaning of it. I have insisted on understanding the biological sense of the situation, as the correct basis for any further meaning. There are important reasons why the apple is red and why we can see it as such: so that we can eat it.

I think it makes a big difference, — jamalrob

Why do you think so? Why is it so important to correctly (or not too incorrectly) define ourselves?

We're still on the topic of what it means to perceive. We agreed it implies an object and a mind perceiving it. This characterization seems to make biological sense, at least. It follows that there must be a causal chain 'starting' at the apple and 'ending' at a mind. (in brackets because nothing ever starts and ends beyond our subjective segmentation of time, it's all part of the big flow)

..or brains in vats, or rational animals, or vehicles for genes, or eternal souls...

Yeh, it makes you dizzy. — jamalrob

Not at all, you just need to keep tabs on the menagerie. Don't confuse the brains in vats with the brains in bats, for instance.

In the final analysis, we cannot understand perception by throwing away the perceived and/or the perceiver. So whether you call us people or brains or minds makes no significant difference to the problem.

That should surprise you, who think of them existing in some separate planes.

Minds are a different sort of thing to apples. — Banno

And yet they can perceive apples.

Then I'll eat it before you do...

People, I suppose. Why do you ask? — jamalrob

Because of the menagerie of fantastic creatures that populates this site, and that must come from some old medieval treatise on exotic beasts with two heads and one leg or something... I mean, you could mean zombies, or automatons, or winged rabbits... People is a good answer, it's human and familiar.

According to the most relevant sense of "see", I agree that our eyes don't see, that it's better here to say that we see by means of our eyes. — jamalrob

And who is "we", in this context? How would you describe these things you call "I", "we", "you"?

We agreed already that it's red. What we still disagree about, I think, is what we mean when we say that it's red. I mean (among other things) that I can perceive and recognize the meaningful signal of a ripe, eatable apple, detach it somehow as an 'object' from a background that is supposedly not red. That this helps me locate the apple in relation to my own position, using as a proxy some 3D simulation of the world that I happen to constantly create and maintain, a 3D simulation which helps me grab the apple, peal it and cut it without cutting my own fingers, and eat it.

Minds don't see, not least because minds don't have eyes. — jamalrob

By this token, eyes don't see, because eyes don't have eyes... :lol:

It's a system. It's made of interconnected pieces. Each piece does its own work, in synch with the other pieces.

I was checking that you agreed there was an apple. — Banno

I know, and I was checking that you agreed there was a mind seeing the apple. As pointed by Jamal, there was some legitimate reasons to doubt that. Now that we agree that there exist both an apple and a mind, we could explore (or meaningfully exchange about) the perception of the former by the latter. See if we can agree on something else.

I think they're only spooked when people claim that minds, rather than people or animals, see apples — jamalrob

Right, because they are out of their mind.

direct perception — Marchesk

Direct perception is a contradiction in terms. It cannot logically exist.

Somehow I doubt that Banno's going to agree with that. — jamalrob

The apple is red in order to be noticed by an animal. Banno may think that he is no mind, but he is most probably an animal, with some capacity to perceive, remember and desire things for himself. What the ancients called 'anima'.

He can even get pissed, and since I doubt that computers, automatons and zombies can get pissed, I conclude he must be an animal.

As any animal of the Homo sapiens species, he can reflect upon himself, and maybe he is afraid of himself. Lot's of people are. That's why 'mind talk' spooks them. They fear their own mental shadows.

Biology agrees with self organization. — Pop

Why yes. It's where the idea comes from, in fact.

Seems then that we agree that there is mind seeing the apple

Thought it worth checking, given how people here are easily spooked by their own psychological shadows.

Seems then that we agree that there is an apple ot be seen.

Thought it worth checking. I wouldn't want the apple to just be in my mind. — Banno

If there were no apple, there would be no point in seeing an apple. Our senses have developed through evolution, because they work. Yes they do help us locate true, existing and desirable things, such as apples.

countering the mooted argument that we only ever see the apple through the mediations of optics and neurons, and hence we never actually see the apple.

But no one would ever say that, would they, Olivier5? — Banno

Seeing the apple means precisely to apprehend it through our senses, to construct a meaningful representation of it based on sense data. It's a relationship. It takes some work.

Sense data themselves are already meaningful, don't get me wrong. The apple is red for a reason, it's a biological signal of its maturity, as I explained. Our senses work with this material, cut down on some details, fill in others, heighten some contrasts, adjust to lighting conditions, draw lines and objects, etc. We notice it once in a while when we see an optical illusion. Our senses shape the message so as to make it more effective. They "go after" meaning; sometimes they invent it. But by and large they helps us detect the biological sense of the situation. Red apple-->yummy apple.

But there are many other meaningful things about how an apple looks, which nobody notices except the specialists: the artists, the cooks or the farmers. Did you ever notice that no apple is radially symmetrical? The "axis" is always markedly off center, one side smaller than the other. It's something you need to know when you draw apples (if you want to draw them realistically enough). It seems like nothing but once you notice it, you can see it in any apple, even though before you didn't see it in any apple. At best you noticed that some apples were very asymmetrical. That is likely because our sense of vision gives a premium to symmetry: it tries to find it everywhere, and it tends to neglect or hide minor asymmetries.

ultimately a philosopher has to answer how inanimate matter becomes animate, and there is no solution from the paradigm that you pose. Not even a hint of a solution, even after several hundred years of effort. However, a panpsychist solution exists. — Pop

Not to be pedant, but panpsychism doesn't actually provide a solution to this problem. It rather explains how animate matter becomes ever more animate. In doing so it trivializes the problem, it underplays the radical novelty and importance of life, in my view. Life is information bossing matter around. It radically changes the rules of the game. And the centuries of effort you mentioned were inspired by mechanics. That was the wrong track, the wrong metaphor. Seeing biology as infused with meaning is a better way to solve the hard problem and explain how consciousness emerged.

Bodies have brains and brains connect to eyes, and eyes sample the ambient light and differentiate as to wavelength and direction. Brains analyse the data and resolve it into a meaningful landscape. This process is called 'seeing'. The function of seeing is to detect food, danger, and obstacles at a distance and thus aid the organism to navigate the world.

Is any of this in dispute? — unenlightened

I believe the bold part is precisely what is in dispute in this thread, and agree broadly with your characterisation of it.

Did you meet him on this forum, or in your mind? — jamalrob

If he can live out of his mind, maybe he can meet me in mine. That would be a literal meeting of minds...

What's the difference between redness and red? — creativesoul

At a basic, grammatical level, the latter is the adjective, while the former is the noun derived from the adjective. Redness is therefore the state or quality of being red, for an object. The "redness of her skin", "the redness of the sky at sunset".

But on a more philosophical plane, you were trying to make a fine distinction between the pre-theoretical perception of something "red" and our theories about the perception of "redness" (what you call meta-cognition). I suppose the idea is that the concept of "redness" reifies a mere colour (or set of colours) into a thing, but only you can tell what the connection was, if you still remember.

You can't reject anything if you're not a human being. — Andrew M

It's not about your species. Animals can reject things. Dogs tend to reject salad. Cats tend to reject swimming (and dogs). The capacity to reject things is about being a self-aware decision-making center, i.e. a subject. Note the common etymology.

To reject = to ‘throw back’, from the verb reicere, from re- ‘back’ + jacere ‘to throw’
Subject = ‘lying beneath’, from subiectus, past participle of subicere, from sub- ‘under’ + jacere ‘throw’.