Consider that you saying they hear voices is just you joining them in their madness. I see why it's tempting, but I think it's cleaner the other way. — plaque flag

It's not me joining them in their madness. The primary auditory cortex in their brain really does activate. It's just that it activates without being sent signals by the cochlea.

A mentally ill person might mistakenly think they heard voices. — plaque flag

They do hear voices. They mistakenly believe that the voices originate outside their head. You confuse experience itself with our interpretation of experience. There is a difference between seeing and thinking, between perception and cognition.

That's its virtue. — plaque flag

No, that's why it fails to address the philosophical disagreement between direct and indirect realism. I've already shown you the SEP articles. There is simply far more to the argument than the overly simplistic grammatical issue that you are asserting.

The key point is that one sees the apple and not an image of the apple. Hence 'direct.' — plaque flag

That's an impoverished account of what it means for perception to be direct.

What does it mean to see an apple? What does it mean so see an image of an apple? What does it mean for the schizophrenic to hear voices?

Those initial terms we all understood are now in doubt, the external objects may or may not resemble the ideas. So, all the indirect realist can say is “some object caused an idea of rock” and “some object caused an idea of cat.” — Richard B

That's precisely why the indirect realist says that there is an epistemological problem of perception.

I would argue that our modern scientific understanding of the world, such as that of quantum mechanics, the Standard Model, string theory, etc. supports that conclusion above. The world is a mass of fundamental wave-particles, bouncing around, interacting with each another, and when the right stuff interacts in the right way, there's the conscious experience of seeing a red apple.

I've been trying to defend direct realism from a position that takes the philosophical situation itself as the only meaningful center of reality. — plaque flag

But you're not defending direct realism. Direct realism claims that there are mind-independent objects, with mind-independent properties, and that these mind-independent objects and their mind-independent properties manifest themselves in conscious experience such that conscious experience provides us with information about the nature of mind-independent objects and their mind-independent properties.

Your position doesn't defend this view, and so doesn't defend direct realism. Your position doesn't seem to say anything about perception at all.

Why would you think that free will, the capacity to make a choice, is superstition? Do you really believe that you do not have the capacity to choose? — Metaphysician Undercover

Not in the libertarianist sense. Either our decisions are determined by some prior cause or they occur spontaneously, neither of which seem to satisfy libertarian free will.

We might not even have it in the compatibilist sense. See unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain:

There has been a long controversy as to whether subjectively 'free' decisions are determined by brain activity ahead of time. We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 s before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.

At least that description pretends that promises and divorces aren't real. — plaque flag

I've said this many times before: antirealism isn't unrealism. Being a realist about something doesn't just mean that you believe that thing is real. You need to get past the use of the word "real" in the name.

There's one real world that we live in and talk about. I find it funny that that's not supposed to be realism. — plaque flag

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/realism-sem-challenge/

According to metaphysical realism, the world is as it is independent of how humans or other inquiring agents take it to be. The objects the world contains, together with their properties and the relations they enter into, fix the world’s nature and these objects [together with the properties they have and the relations they enter into] exist independently of our ability to discover they do. Unless this is so, metaphysical realists argue, none of our beliefs about our world could be objectively true since true beliefs tell us how things are and beliefs are objective when true or false independently of what anyone might think.

I reject the idea of 'innate' nature. — plaque flag

Then you don't appear to be a realist of any sort, let alone a direct realist.

If I close my eyes, the apple is still red. — plaque flag

So what does "is red" mean? What is the physical property red?

Does gay marriage exist or not ? — plaque flag

Not in a metaphysical realist sense, unlike (perhaps) the existence of electrons.

So when you say that apples are red, are you saying that this is true in the metaphysical realist sense or the antirealist sense? Does the apple being red depend on us (on the way we perceive and talk about the world) or does it being red have nothing to do with us and everything to do with its innate nature?

This is a matter of how best to talk about this stuff. — plaque flag

"Best" as in "pragmatic" or "best" as in "true"? We're concerned with what's true.

This is a silly question !

It's a perfectly reasonable question. And direct realists do say that the properties we perceive objects to have are the properties they have even when not being perceived. That's what the "direct" in "direct realism" means. It's why they believed that there wasn't an epistemological problem of perception. This contrasted with indirect realists who said that the properties we perceive objects to have are properties of our mental phenomena (at least in the case of Locke's secondary qualities) and not properties of external objects. That's what the "indirect" in "indirect realism" means. It's why they believed that there was an epistemological problem of perception.

Our ordinary life in which we shop for groceries, promise to walk to the dog, return books to the library....is real. — plaque flag

That's not relevant to the epistemological problem of perception. What matters to this topic is whether or not objects like apples and cats exist even when not being perceived, and whether or not the properties they are perceived to have are properties they have even when not being perceived. And this is to be understood in a literally true and realist sense, not in some fictionalist (e.g. pragmatic narrative) or antirealist sense.

And you missed a paragraph from that description of Reid's philosophy:

Reid's picture, however, is more complex than such general statements of it may suggest. For Reid continues to accept Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities of objects. Locke held that, among our ideas of objects, some (such as shape) do resemble qualities of the objects that produce them, while others (such as color) do not. Of course, Reid cannot accept the distinction in those terms, so he does so in terms of 'sensations.' When we perceive objects, Reid claims, we find in ourselves certain sensations. Sensations are the effects of the causal influence of objects on us, and these are what lead the mind to perceive the object. Yet sensations themselves, being feelings, cannot resemble their objects (in this, Reid echoes Berkeley's famous claim that nothing can be like an idea except another idea). When, for instance, we perceive though touch that some object is hot, we feel a certain sensation. We know that feature of the object caused us to have that sensation, but we may not know anything about the feature other than that (unlike the case of the extension of the object, which we perceive directly). The feature of the object which produces the sensation of heat is a secondary quality, and all other secondary qualities are individuated in the same manner: via some sensation we have.

Reid noted that, as soon as this picture is in place, the question naturally arises as to just how far our ideas might diverge from their causes. Indeed, it begins to seem that we are completely cut off from reality, stuck behind a veil of ideas. This is a counter-intuitive conclusion, and Reid thinks it indicates that the original positing of ideas, as things we perceive that are distinct from the objects was misguided (here, the view echoes that of Antoine Arnauld in his debate with Nicolas Malebranche). Common sense, he argues, dictates that what we perceive just are objects and their qualities. — plaque flag

His reasoning appears question-begging. The world is counterintuitive. Quantum mechanics has shown that. Common sense doesn't trump scientific evidence.

I really don't think you've grasped my approach to this issue yet. — plaque flag

You're right, because I don't know what you're trying to say below:

Our articulation of the world is deeply historical and constantly being revised, but we live in that articulation. The scientific image describes relatively stable features of our world. But even its concepts evolve (Kuhn, etc.)

Regardless, I don't think your approach has anything to do with direct realism at all, even though you insist on using that label.

If it is either fictionalism or antirealism then in no sense is it direct realism. In fact in no sense does it address the epistemological problem of perception at all.

So this is either fictionalism or anti realism.

I don't think the scientific image is the Real beneath some paintjob of color and values. — plaque flag

So you’re not a scientific realist? You believe in something like colour realist primitivism?

I don't think 'mind-independent' is a very clear term. — plaque flag

Then forget that term. Is the redness a property of that bundle of matter which is the apple?

We see red apples, the blue sky. We can talk about colors (as adjectives, concepts,...) — plaque flag

Is the redness of an apple a mind-independent property of the apple?

Yes, I need my nervous system to do this. But my eyes and brain let me see this apple in our world directly. Yes, I need light to come from the apple to my retina. That's part of how I see the apple. But I don't see an image of the apple, and I don't see a private world in which the apple is given directly. I see the apple right there in our world, the world. And I talk about that apple. It is the case that an apple is there in front of me. — plaque flag

Let's restart with something simple. Do we see colours?

There's a similar case with Smartmatic that's ongoing. They're suing for $2.7 billion.

What do we make of inverted color spectrums ? — plaque flag

It’s perfectly coherent. The example of the dress that some see as white and gold and others as black and blue shows that we can have different sensory experiences to the same external stimulus. The case of tetrachromats are another example. There’s empirical evidence that women can distinguish a greater number of hues than men. As personal evidence, the colours I see in my left eye are more “full” than the colours I see in my right eye.

So it’s easy to understand, both in principle and in practice, that the sensory experience you call red might not be the sensory experience that I call red.

Yes, I think you can intend my private experience. You can speculate about my concealed feelings. Such concealed feelings make sense (I claim) inasmuch as they function in inferences. — plaque flag

And this isn't exclusive to emotions; it's also true of so-called "qualia" (whether reducible to some physical phenomena or not). Just as words like "sad" and "happy" can refer to your concealed feelings, words like "red" and "sweet" can refer your concealed sensory experience.

The point is that the norms for applying concepts are impersonal, public.

'I fucking hate getting wet, so I ran naked into the rain' does not make sense in any but the most outlandish context. — plaque flag

That's not the point. The point is that I can talk about your first person experience even if your first person experience is hidden from me, whether in practice or in principle.

I never denied this. — plaque flag

Then why is it that we can talk about something that's hidden in practice but not hidden in principle?

Again with Wittgenstein's beetle-in-a-box. In one scenario we can look inside each others' boxes but never do. We can talk about the thing inside each others' boxes. In another scenario we can't look inside each others' boxes. Therefore we can't talk about the thing inside each others' boxes? I don't see why it would make any difference. If we can talk about something that's hidden from us in practice then we can talk about something that's hidden from us in principle, and so even if there is such a thing as hidden-in-principle first-person consciousness/qualia, we can still talk about it.

You need to spell out how that fallacy is relevant to what I'm saying. My argument is simple:

1. I sometimes feel sad
2. This sadness is reducible to the firing of certain neurons
3. The firing of my neurons is in practice hidden from other people
4. Other people can talk about me being sad
5. Therefore, other people can talk about things which are in practice hidden from them

The issue is that we can talk about and understand each other's feelings, as distinct from any consequential overt activity, and that these feelings are hidden from us in practice. And we can talk about and understand this even if we don't know anything about the brain and its role. Young children can understand being (secretly) sad, and can understand other people being (secretly) sad, and can talk about it all.

As I brought up before, it's just like Wittgenstein's beetle-in-a-box, except that we can in principle look inside each other's boxes but in practice never do. So how does that affect his reasoning and your view on language?

I see the cat and not an image of the cat. — plaque flag

These aren't mutually exclusive. I feel pain and I feel the fire. I feel cold and I feel the Arctic air. I see shapes and colours and I see the cat.

Yes. It's in his body. It is a disposition. It's all connected to the rest of the world, not hidden away in some box which is causally and logically isolated.

But it is hidden away in practice, given that you don't look inside people's heads and examine their brains and endocrine system.

That's the point. — plaque flag

The point is that him feeling enraged is a real thing that happens, independent of any overt action he may perform as a consequence.

He can be enraged and act out. He can be enraged and do nothing. Either way there is an "inner" feeling (which may be reducible to brain activity) that we can, and do, talk about.

You don't see the cat at all. — plaque flag

And yet it is still the intentional object that we talk about. Which is why your argument that we talk about trees has nothing to do with the epistemological problem of perception. The epistemological problem of perception concerns what we see, not what we talk about.

Because he was enraged, he through the coffee pot into the wall. — plaque flag

There are two parts to this statement

1. He was enranged
2. He threw the coffee pot into the wall

These mean different things. Both are true. The latter is a consequence of the former. And it is perfectly possible to be enraged and not throw the coffee pot into the wall. I'm concerned about 1). I don't know why you keep talking about 2). It's a separate matter entirely.

No, I don't accept that. — plaque flag

I said "I’m aware of the cat hiding under the covers. Doesn’t mean I directly see it."

You responded with "Why would it ? No one promised a clear line of sight to every intentional object."

Was this not you agreeing with me that I don't directly see the cat (because it's hiding under the covers)?

Why would it ? No one promised a clear line of sight to every intentional object.

This is why I consider 'we talk about the cat and not about our image of the cat' as a less confusing approach to direct realism. — plaque flag

The problem I have is with your use of "direct realism" to describe your position. You accept that I don't directly see the cat but that it is nonetheless the intentional object that we talk about. So you should accept that there is a meaningful difference between saying that we directly see some object and saying that some object is the intentional object that we talk about. Direct realism, as ordinarily understood, and as the position that indirect realists argue against, makes a claim about what we directly see, not about what is the intentional object that we talk about. Why repurpose an existing label to argue for something different? It just causes confusion as evidenced by this discussion.

And it's not inconsistent to argue that experience is constituted of some private (even if only in practice) mental phenomena (even if reducible to physical phenomena) and that external world objects are the intentional objects that we talk about. I feel cold and talk about the Arctic air. I feel pain and talk about the fire. I see shapes and colours and talk about the tree. So one can be an indirect realist and still accept your claim that we talk about cats rather than our image of cats.

I suggest that consciousness isn't doing much work here. Wouldn't awareness be better ? We are aware of distant stars, apples just out of reach. — plaque flag

I’m aware of the cat hiding under the covers. Doesn’t mean I directly see it.

We talk about those distant stars — plaque flag

But again, direct and indirect realism are positions about the nature of perception, not about what we talk about.

Does not sound like a belief in this quote. — Richard B

When someone believes that something is true it’s normal for them to assert what they believe rather than that they believe it.

I don’t usually say “I believe it’s raining”. I just say “it’s raining”. I don’t usually say “I believe I’m in pain”. I just say “I’m in pain”.

So I wouldn’t normally say “I believe that I can see colours without describing them to someone else”. I just say “I can see colours without describing them to someone else”.

It seems that you have this position. — Richard B

There’s a difference between me asserting “X is a fact” because I believe it to be so and me asserting “X is a fact because I believe it to be so”.

If saying "what ever I believe is a fact is a fact" is not ridiculous — Richard B

I haven't said that, so not sure the relevance of this.