I can't work out what it is you are so fussed about. Pigeons are a famous example in mainstream psychology of just how easy it is to train up human-like categorisations in birds with pretty small brains. You can coach them not just to recognise flowers and people, cars and chairs, but you can get then reliably to classify flowers and people as natural stimuli, cars and chairs as artificial ones.

This is psychology's most celebrated example of how similar animals are to humans in their ability to go beyond "direct experience" to categorise their experience abstractly.

In summary, the basic features of object category learning in pigeons are the following. First, pigeons can learn a variety of complex object categories and transfer this learning to novel objects. Second, pigeons can flexibly classify the same object according to different criteria (e.g., pseudocategories and superordinate categories). Third, pigeons extract a rich variety of visual properties from photographic images and use them in combination to learn the structure of object categories. Finally, pigeons learn common abstract representations for all members of the same trained category.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4195317/

In the study, 16 pigeons were trained to detect cancer by putting them in a roomy chamber where magnified biopsies of possible breast cancers were displayed. Correctly identifying a growth as benign or malignant by pecking one of two answer buttons on a touchscreen earned them a tasty 45 milligram pigeon pellet. Once trained, the pigeons’ average diagnostic accuracy reached an impressive 85 percent. But when a “flock sourcing” approach was taken, in which the most common answer among all subjects was used, group accuracy climbed to a staggering 99 percent, or what would be expected from a pathologist. The pigeons were also able to apply their knowledge to novel images, showing the findings weren’t simply a result of rote memorization.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/using-pigeons-to-diagnose-cancer/

Your move.

Human perception is of course linguistically scaffolded and so that takes it to a higher semiotic level. — apokrisis

emphasis mine...

We can say that a pigeon perceives precisely the same way that humans do — creativesoul

Or you could stop putting words like "precisely" in my mouth. That would be a good start.

Thus, if our notion of perception includes that which is existentially contingent upon written language, then we would be forced to deny any and all creatures without written language the very capability. — creativesoul

Well whoopsie-do. Again, making any claim about perception being existentially contingent on written language is a misconception of your own doing here. For whatever reason, you are again projecting you own baggage on to what I say.

To know the differences between pigeon perception and human perception one must know what both respectively consist of and require. — creativesoul

You are sounding particularly pompous today. Or should that be sounding/acting?

So the mind isn't part of the world? Then how do minds interact if not through the medium of the shared world? What is it that divides minds to call them separate? It seems that once you start down the path of claiming the mind isn't part of the world, you start down the path towards solipsism. — Harry Hindu

You are confusing the epistemic issue of direct vs indirect realism with the ontological commitments I might then argue concerning the mind~world issue.

Dream experiences of a tree differ from perceptual experiences of a tree in that we subsequently realise that the experience was in a dream, whereas for perceptual ones we do not. — andrewk

You are missing the point that dreams are real perceptual states. Sure we can decide later that they weren't perceptions of real things. But we can't dismiss the fact that they were perceptual states. We actually had an experience. And the fact we later realise it couldn't have been of the world is the issue.

Similarly, hallucination experiences can be distinguished from perceptual ones after the event, when the LSD or psychotic state has worn off. — andrewk

Interestingly, I saw my cat wandering across the lawn out of the corner of my eye a short while ago. I clearly saw it. Then I turned to focus properly and saw it was just the motion of a dark leaf blowing past. If I had never double-checked, I would only have known I "really saw the cat".

So these kinds of perceptual errors happen a lot and we just don't pay them much heed. We get used to projecting our sensory expectations on the world.

However if you are serious about the issues at a philosophical level - if you want to sustain some grand claim about direct realism - then you need to do more than just make dismissive "it never bothers me" noises.

We can all agree that the best explanation is there really is a world out there, and that when we are awake and alert and really paying close attention, there is some kind of very effective relationship at work. Our mental integration into the physical world is pretty effortless. Or indeed, even an effort couldn't change what we must perceive.

But in fact some people can really imagine a world for themselves that vividly. Ten per cent of the population are highly hypnotisable as they can project suggested imagery that strongly. From memory (I'd have to dig that out) there are some experiments where they can experience colour contrast after-effects after being asked to imagine a red or yellow field as vividly as they can for a few seconds.

So all these confident assertions about direct realism sound very hollow when set against a vast amount of accepted psychological science.

I would maybe contrast quantitative mechanism to "artistic"/metaphorical/interpretative thinking. Both seem essential and always already in operation. — t0m

The dichotomy of quantity and quality. And then you have that divided by the dichotomy of the subjective and the objective.

Good art is a rationally creative process just like good science. Both aim to tell a "truth" about reality - reality as it can best be experienced.

So I get that you want to make both extremes fully part of your life to make it a life with real felt breadth. You don't need to sell me on that.

I still contend both of our basic "metaphysical" positions are intimately related to our own notions of the virtuous individual. The "true" scientist or philosopher is every bit as heroic as Wolverine. Your demystification of individuality is (in other words) an expression of individuality. We are "selling" ourselves, one might say, asserting implicitly the potential value of our words for others. — t0m

That may be right. But is it a paradox for my position or rather its useful feature?

I could sum up my approach as pragmatic. It is the attempt to stand on the middle-ground, having discovered the limiting extremes.

So dialectics is a problem when it constructs irresolvable rival perspectives. That is the recipe for a schizoid life. Now I take that dialectic and offer its resolution. The schism is turned into the anchoring co-ordinates by which I can actually measure where I am at any time. I can decide if that is the best place to be in terms of the two possibilities that always frame that circumstance.

So yes, the scientist can play the virtuous hero. But am I blindly compelled to do that? Or is that a mode that I can switch on, switch off, by virtue of being able to stand back and see the shaping polarity in play?

Post-modernism was suppose to be about the self-consciousness that life is all a grand pose. But then, there still remains, well how should one actually be? Becoming an absurdist, nihilist, anarchist, and the other typical responses, are just another kind of great big dialectical reaction. It seems the logical next step, but few people really seem to find it a happy place to land up in. A non-belief in anything is not a way to fill a naturally-discovered gap.

I think you get this. I'm just emphasising that to the degree I have a theory about the right recipe for life, it would be of this nature. I understand that I do in fact stand for an extreme of individualism and self-actualisation. Looking back, I can see when this was just a blind drivenness. And now that it is a self-aware thing - informed by the science, the social understanding - the irony is that to speak of this as the actual human condition is as about way off the socially accepted map as it gets.

And I am not bigging up myself in saying that. I am always very careful to stress that I don't need to invent any wisdom here. There are towering intellectual figures like Peirce or Vygotsky who you can turn to for their penetrating insights ... towering figures who also wind up being off the general map because they did rise above the engrained dualism of the Western mindset.

It's funny. The more I accept the truth of my socially-constructed nature, the more "individualistic" a way of living that will be within the general culture in which I live.

It is not that most people don't learn this at the level of everyday commonsense. People generally have a functional relationship with their social locality. Families, friends, careers, small set-backs, small triumphs, are plenty enough to knit a good life from. It is only on philosophy sites that you get such a congregation of the socially displaced, the eternally questioning. The nihilists, the absurdists, the fanatics. :)

The bicycle is "ready-to-hand" in the knowing-style of "know-how." This is largely the way that things exist for us, not as entities for disengaged theory but rather as tools that become invisible the more successfully we use them to pursue the goal we are conscious of while using them. Do you agree? — t0m

Heidegger got how technology makes us who we are. We become machine-like so as to be good at machine using.

But then Romanticism is just as much a socialising technology. We become self-actualising supermen to the degree that we employ a diet of Marvel comics and other romantic imagery to fabricate "a self" for ourselves.

Our broad choices are to behave like machines or behave like spirits. Cartesian dualism wins both ways.

Sociologists point that out in the hope of winding people back from those extremes and actually becoming more human in our condition.

Modern society runs blindly into its future, letting itself be constructed in the form of its own driving myths - this irresolvable dichotomy of machine and spirit. Thank goodness for any science that can step back and objectivise, alert folk to what would actually be natural.

The Barbie doll and the Glock pistol are both coming from the damaging extremes of social self-construction. The philosophical critique only becomes interesting once it gets both the mechanistic scientific view and its "other" of romantic irrationalism firmly in its analytical sights.

I'm not 'shrugging it off', but I am pointing out that Shannon's theory was originally published as a theory about information transmission — Wayfarer

Jesus Christ. How do you think paradigms can be changed except by someone managing to ignore what everyone else was insisting had to be the central thing.

Like everyone else, you are obsessed by the semantic content of a message. You believe that it must exist - even though you've search high and low and nowhere does it seem to have physical existence. It is spookily immaterial - a transcendent ghost haunting the world.

Then along comes someone who ignores that it must be about the differences that make a difference and focuses on the physical limits of difference-making. The constraints on information at the general cosmic level. Forget about the vastly elaborate human level, let's get down to the fundamental basics.

I mean who would have thought the Universe has a limited information capacity before that was demonstrated by Shannon? Had it crossed any mind that you know of? Do you not see the genius in discovering that materiality can only hold a certain amount of meaning? Do you not yet get the Copernican nature of that revelation and why it now reverberates so loudly through the sciences?

So, what is the relationship between logical and thermodynamic entropy? it seems to me that they're being equivocated. — Wayfarer

You go check the equation and tell me where you see any equivocation.

By "pre-science" I mean the establishing of what counts as evidence in the first place. — t0m

But my point is that something can't count as evidence unless there is a theory framed to be countable.

So what is Romanticism counting? As a theory, what actually possible measurements does it suggest. If it doesn't offer any, then it is not even a theory. It is just an idea that is "not even wrong".

We started to think that this non-intuititive way of "deworlding" objects gave us the real object. I'd say that it just rips the object from the fullness of our experience of it in a way that's good for certain purposes. Beyond the usual "sentimental" objections to this, there is also the question of not wanting to inaccurately understand the world by uncritically being trapped in just one framework. — t0m

Fine words. But now deliver the theory that has countable facts and so can rise above the class of ideas that are not even wrong.

I mean poetry is fine. Feelings are fine. Pluralistic viewpoints are fine. There is a reason why Western culture promotes these things for sure.

And I have the right theory about that. :)

There is a rational sociological explanation for the fostering of irrationality. Convincing folk they are self-actualising beings creates the pool of requisite variety that rapid cultural evolution can feed off. Society becomes this great big competition for attention. Apply a ruthless filter over the top of that, and hey bingo, out pops out your master race. Or at least the ruling elite.

Of course there is then the rational reaction - the PC response to try and declare everyone some kind of cultural winner. Prizes all round. Everyone gets an equal share of the social limelight.

Yeah right. Dream on.

It's just that this notion of the shared world in terms of tool-use is at least as old as Being and Time. — t0m

Vygotsky and Mead were contemporaries. So we are talking about many people making the same "discovery" once the social sciences became actually a thing.

You had biological science and evolutionary theory emphasising how much the human mind is the product of hereditary and anatomical machinery. That was the big theme of Victorian science. Then followed the sociological correction as that became an established field of inquiry with its own professors and journals.

So it's odd to see it presented as some new idea in a 1979 book. — t0m

Gibson was a correction to the psychological cognitivism of his day. The start of the enactive or embodied view which now feels pretty mainstream.

It is all a tale of dialectical action and reaction. Rational inquiry has no other choice but organising itself this way so as to keep moving forward.

But what I quoted reminds me of the emergence or generation of "one" or they-self or "everyday Dasein" as the foundation on which the individual self is built. This is the 'operating system' that makes theory and individuation possible. — t0m

This is the further wisdom that I agree with. Everything has to start with phenomenology or the givenness of experience. And that is quite anti-science in a general way. It is always shades of idealism.

But then that is why I like Peirce. He was already there with a much more powerful scheme than Heidegger ever managed.

Not to say that Heidegger is thus wrong. I'm just unsure that he adds anything.

Last night it dreamed it was a butterfly, and then awoke, wondering if it was a butterfly dreaming. — Marchesk

It will be pissed when it wakes up from that dream in turn and discovers it is a figment of the Matrix. All it sees is magnetic 1s and 0s. And now the Google lab guys are reaching for the reset button to .... argh!

Isn't this just Heidegger? — t0m

It's lots of people. It's Vygotskian psychology. It's symbolic interactionism. It is any kind of social constructionism or developmental psychology that understands that "selfhood" is lesson, a social habit of self-regulation, that every newborn babe must be taught.

You have "freewill" as that is how you get trained - particular in modern Western society with its huge concern to produce self-actualising individuals.

That has to be taken with a grain of salt, because it depends on how familiar a scientist is with the philosophical arguments. Sometimes a scientist will publicly articulate a philosophical position that's not terribly sophisticated, but they act as if the science backs it, because they don't know the depth of the philosophical discussion on the matter. — Marchesk

Well what I'm saying is that I just don't come across cognitive scientists who could be so crassly unphilosophical as to be direct realists. And that would have to be the case ... if they are cognitive scientists. There would be nothing useful to study if they didn't believe "the world" is the product of an elaborately processed view.

Computer scientists can be a very different matter. To the degree they haven't studied biological science, they are liable to claim just about anything of their toy machines.

You often refer to that, but this was part of his paper on sending and receiving information, wasn't it? It wasn't a philosophical theory as such, was it? — Wayfarer

It was a vague "philosophical" distinction given solid mathematical/empirical foundations at last. And so that has had immense consequences if you actually believe in progress in metaphysics.

Information stopped being airy-fairy and hand-wavy. There was a formula for measuring it. And hey presto, it turned out to be the same formula as for measuring thermodynamic entropy. Mental uncertainty and physical disorder could be measured in exactly the same coin.

The fact that these two apparently totally unrelated things are somehow two aspects of the one thing has to be a pretty seismic metaphysical discovery, no?

Are you still just going to shrug it off?

This still assumes that the fundamental forms are physical. I have been researching the Forms, which is the 'formal' side of hylomorphism, and the original concept of the Forms is that they are outside space and time altogether. The motivation of early philosophy was not instrumental or scientific in our sense- it was as much 'the quest for the transcendent' as the quest for useful knowledge about the sensory domain. — Wayfarer

My working assumption is in fact that the fundamental forms are immanent, not transcendent. So I am with Aristotle rather than Plato on that score.

My metaphysics starts further back with Anaximander. The form of nature emerges through the expression of actions. The timeless/placeless symmetries are revealed to "exist" via the symmetry-breaking that actualises the world in which they are a formal/final source of cause.

That's where "Romanticism" comes in, which thinks in terms of these fundamental interpretations. It's "pre-science" or "pre-metaphysics" in that it thinks the conditions of possibility for metaphysical, scientific, and religious frameworks. On the other hand, it is itself such a framework, self-consciously holding itself at a distance from (other) particular commitments. — t0m

But Romanticism was also literally the reaction to the Enlightenment. So it is post that science and metaphysical turn.

In the end, the claims of being fundamental are stronger for the Enlightenment view - the method of objective reasoning.

You can dispute that and we can weigh the evidence.

(See, the scientific method wins again as the best way to do actual philosophy.)

The words don't constrain my mind at all, that is a completely deterministic assumption. — Metaphysician Undercover

Well I said it was a hope. I could have said a vain hope. ;)

I can follow the words, but my mind follows the words due to habits it has produced. The constraints on my interpretation are these habits, they are not the words. — Metaphysician Undercover

But I can see when you are not following the intended meaning that the words were supposed to encode. The information is not being transmitted. You may be responding back in words, but they are just other kinds of noises that have habitual meaning within your constructed world.

So yes, you do have a capacity for misunderstanding. That proves something here. But not what you think.

The point I made was that words can only constrain an interpretation, they can't determine an interpretation. So all one can hope to transmit is the constraints, not the actual cargo or contents -
which would be the meaning, the semantics, here.

You are proving I am right by asserting your irreducible freedom to confuse or confound any message.

The best my words could do is constrain your state of mind in a suitable way so that you more or less shared my intended meaning. You would have the same point of view - down to the level where any differences didn't make a meaningful difference.

But my words can fail even to achieve that. You can categorise the incoming text as a bunch of internet static lacking any embedded signal. So I can't determine your state of interpretance. And much of the time, I can't even limit its free variety in any measurable way.

And that's fine. That is what semiotics explains.

The words themselves have absolutely no power over the human being. — Metaphysician Undercover

But that is obvious bullshit. Everyone grows up spouting precisely whatever is the common wisdom of their formative linguistic context.

You are telling me you are a rational soul with freewill. Fine. I've done anthropology. I can recognise a social belief system when I see one.

But direct realists would make an exception for veridical perception and say that it's one way information flow from the senses to the brain. — Marchesk

So how does that square with the neurological evidence? Why is the most bottom-up situation - when I'm driving through the rush hour on automatic pilot - also the least conscious perceptual state?

Are there any cognitive neuroscientists or psychologists who could be direct realists? The only one that springs to mind is James Gibson. Which is ironic as he both made some really important points about the embodied condition of the mind, but also wound up sounding like a crank in taking it to a "direct perception" extreme. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance

But if perceive a tree looking like it might fall on my house, then I will take action. — Marchesk

So when you see the tree falling in your mind's eye, are you directly perceiving the future or merely perceiving your image of that future.

Are you actually clairvoyant or simply clever at forming anticipatory sensory images?

But then what does a dream tree represent? — Marchesk

A bit of neuroscience that may be pertinent. The brain’s hierarchy of processing is organised so information flows in both directions - bottom-up and top-down. Feed-forward and feedback.

In normal operation, it is going both ways at once to arrive at its settled "output" state. So higher level conceptions are framing lower level perceptions, while at the same time, those lower level perceptions are eliciting those higher level conceptions.

This is why perception seems so hard to understand. Folk want the information to flow in just one or other of these two ways. Idealism would see all awareness as the product of top-down (from the inside) projection. Realism would see it as instead bottom-up (all from the outside) sensory construction. But the neurological truth is that normal perception is these two information flows operating together in complementary fashion to produce our hybrid mental state - one that is neither idealist, nor realist, but some usefully balanced combo.

(One of the things to ask about DeepMind was where is its top-down feedback? It seems pretty mindless because it instead is all bottom-up feature extraction. It is not a sophisticated neural net model in the way of Grossberg's ART approach for instance, where this top-down/bottom-up logic is explicitly the thing.)

Anyway, dreams and other mental imagery are evidence of pure top-downness. The higher brain can project states of experience by driving patterns of activation all the way down to the primary visual cortex. Gate the usual flow of bottom-up sensory stimulation at the brainstem and still the brain has the memories to simply generate "a world".

The reverse can also apply. When driving a car, the actions can be so habitual that I can switch off at the higher conceptual/attentional level and motor along on automatic pilot. The information about the traffic around me, the bends in the road, the scenery flashing by, flows through bottom-up without being consciously perceived. Of course, it would be still accessible if I switched back on. But I can drive without crashing for considerable lengths of time - coming too and realising that nothing of the past minute or so has stuck. Any perception (and action) was all done without executive control.

So the "normal" form of perception can be dissociated. Just as the brain's neural archictecture would suggest. But also, the design is such that both directions of action are going to be in play when we are conscioiusly perceiving the world. So neither the idealist, nor the direct realist, has got it right in trying to insist the information flow should be going in just the one direction.

How could they be, if the being has to interpret the sign to determine the constraints required for interpretation? — Metaphysician Undercover

Are you confirming my point in your repeated failure to follow my meaning?

I’m posting you carefully worded thoughts. I’m hoping they might constrain your state of mind so that we share some point of view. Yet your responses come back as saying your understanding is at best vague or uncertain. Or actually you are in the habit of interpreting signals you can’t follow as “this just has to be wrong - it is not the formula of words that I am accustomed to responding to with the return signal of a thumb’s up,”

So definitely in verbal communication between humans,there are complex language games going on. You are forming your sense of you in terms of whatever you can recognise as “other”. Faced with a message that wants to constrain your understanding in a way not already your habit, you apply your own habit of finding anyway to deny the right of the words to have any force on the pattern of your thoughts. This becomes proof of both your own rational existence and your absolute freedom of will - inside the place that you call your mind.

I doubt therefore I am. The first principle of “philosophy”. :j

So sure. Signs can be intended to function as constraints, but they can regularly fail in that intended function. On their arrival in another mind, words can find that rival formulas of words have already taken up permanent residence. Aquinas might have got there first. And the resident interpretations don’t welcome the threatened intrusions.

All constraints on interpretation occur within the mind of the interpreter and this can be expressed as habit, or lack of habit. — Metaphysician Undercover

The mind is simply the fact of the process of interpretation. You don’t need a further kind of witnessing thing within which the interpretation is interpreted, or sensed, or perceived, or whatever other homuncular regress you want to leap into it.

Yes, interpretance also has variety as it must develop its stable habitual regularity. So the response to a signal may be vague or radically uncertain before an interpretation has become fixed as a habit. And human minds are complicated enough systems of interpretance that they seem a place where new acts of interpretation are always just “taking place within it”. There is hierarchical structure of that kind.

But the generalisation of semiosis, or the information theoretic perspective, is about boiling what is going on down to the barest possible notion of an interpretive relation. Our human-level notion of being a mind making meaning of a world stands at the other far extreme to the generalised or more fundamental notion here.

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In other words, information is a lack of uniformity per Donald MacCrimmon MacKay and Gregory Bateson. — Galuchat

It was more than a lack of uniformity for them. A difference that makes a difference also implies reciprocally the existence of differences that don’t. So signals stand out against a background of noise. But that then demands in turn a context of interpretance. Someone must be indifferent to the differences that don’t make a difference.

Thus there is an irreducible triadicy in the concept of information. At least in the way that the cyberneticists were trying to formalise a theory of information. Differences were hierarchically divided into noise and signal. That is, the indifferences and the differences that made a difference - according to some interpretive context.

Is information physical (meaningless), semantic (meaningful), or both (independently or simultaneously)? — Galuchat

The next step then is a more general physical view of information where even indifference or noise gets counted. So in the specific case, the concern was to count the signal. In the general case, the concern is to count any difference, or degree of freedom, that simply could have been a signal, under some context of interpretation.

That was Shannon’s big step, where he connected to concepts of entropy or fluctuation. A degree of freedom is the naked possibility of an action, a surprise, an uncertainty, a bare difference.

You will note how physics’s adoption of the information theoretic view is thus pansemiotic. An interpretive context is still implied - the one that can see the bare difference of noise as potential differences that make a difference. But now this interpreter is so generalised that it appears to drop out of the picture. The interpreter seems so unselective that it is as if the selection were meaningless.

Of course the second law of thermodynamics lurks here in the background. Entropification has become the cosmic purpose that provides the missing pansemiotic interpreter, the context that gives meaning even to physical noise.

So information theory now can count the meaningless differences as well as the differences that make a difference. And it does that by generalising the very notion of interpretance to its pansemiotic or cosmic limit.

Clever stuff.

What do you mean by being “part of the world”? Are you making a claim about the properties of physical objects or neurological processes?

Our conception of the physical world says wavelength and not colour is part of that world. Our conception of neurological processes is that colour is somehow part of what brains do. But that is actually quite a mysterious thing when considered as a “property”. Most folk would call it a property of the mind and not the world. This then leads to entrenched dualistic issues.

So you seem intent on bypassing the complexities of the question. That isn’t very useful.

I can guess. One is the real tree, the other it’s double image.

I gave those answers early in the thread. It boils down to a difference that makes a difference.

Good job then that the untenability of direct realism is matched by the unreasonableness of solipsism. That just leaves us to decide how to best characterise the indirectness that fills the gap in-between.

You can tag along if you like.

But you're wondering how perception can involve awareness of both mental and non-mental properties of an object. That is a good question. — Marchesk

Hah. OK. We agree on that. :)

How can perception be divided so that colour is your perception of a mental image and shape is your direct perception of the actuality?

I agree that this is an attractive position to take, But it is fundamentally inconsistent. How do you square it?

That's the reason the argument from hallucination has bite. — Marchesk

Fine. Answer that version of the same question then.

But is the tree mental when we actually perceive one (see, smell, touch, hear it fall in the woods, etc)? — Marchesk

When you perceive this actual tree, is it’s greenness also actual? Or mental? Or what?

It's weird, because I can go to SEP and it will clearly state what direct realism is about... — Marchesk

That one made me laugh. Show me the simple definition of direct realism, or even indirect realism, in this SEP entry - https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-episprob/

There are 100 shades of opinion. And that ain't a dreadful thing. There is a reason Descartes is where modern philosophy finally woke up and took its business seriously. Progress on the central issue has been an arduous affair. In a deep way, it may be logically irresolvable due to its self-referential nature.

On the other hand, psychological science has been steering in a direction. Representationalism is on the wane. Embodied and semiotic approaches are increasingly popular. It is a big step towards accepting the complexity of the mind~world relationship by shifting up from a dualistic framing to one that is irreducibly triadic (the hierarchical view).

No, we're talking about the perceived tree. Is it a mental image or not? That's what direct/indirect realism comes down to. All this other stuff is confusing the issue. — Marchesk

How can it be illegitimate to talk about the tree perceived in a dream? If you can't tell reality just by looking, then direct realism is dead from the get-go.

Of course we can learn to dismiss dreams as imaginings. Folk used to believe in the reality of their spirit wandering while they were asleep happily enough. Now we categorise that kind of experience differently. But it is still just a categorisation from a hard epistemological point of view. We are not justified in taking short-cuts just for the sake of argumentative convenience.

So again, it was your OP that wanted to use machine intelligence as an argument for direct realism. You clearly felt there was an issue at stake because a doubt is in play. You didn't just ignore the doubt. You felt it worthy of that attack.

And now that you are encountering pushback, you ought to be prepared to deal with it in turn. Dream trees and experiences of colour become fair game. Where does the indirectness leave off so the directness can start?

My own arguments have gone further. I have made the case for why indirectness is an advantage. It is how a self is even formed to stand in relation to "the world".

Likewise it was interesting to me how some actual vaunted neural network project reveals the Kantian structure that must be smuggled in to get its Lockean tabula rasa up and running, recognising cute kitten faces on the interweb.

But dreams, hallucinations, illusions and all the standard stuff is still relevant if your own interest is in defending an understanding of perception where the mediation never gets in the way of the production of the mediated experience.

But is inorganic matter on a continuum with life and mind? Or is there a discontinuity there? — Wayfarer

When have I ever not flagged the critical discontinuity? It's the epistemic cut. It is only after that that life and mind become a thing.

So that then raises the question of whether there is still a continuity that is "semiotic".

The reply is that if the epistemic cut internalises constraints - this being the information that membranes, genes, neurons, words and numbers encode - then that now raises the definite possibility of constraints which are encoded or remembered externally, out in the world itself. The Cosmos might be understood as a dissipative structure, organised by its historically fixed information.

And this is what the information theoretic turn of modern physics hinges on. Entropy. Event horizons. Holography. Quantum information. Material cause no longer carries the weight of explaining existence. Instead, formal cause provides the intelligible structure.

So it is telling that you ask about a continuity that can connect biosemiosis back to "inorganic matter". You assume that real physics can't afford to let go of material causality. But physics has pretty much let go now.

The symmetries that account for the fundamental forms of reality - the symmetries of spacetime and particle physics - are the part of existence that feel hard, definite, crystalline. They have the force of mathematical necessity.

The "action" that then animates this mathematical pattern must still be part of the physicalist story somehow. But now it feels like the mysterious ghost in the machine. The metaphysical puzzle has been reversed. Matter seems the most immaterial part of the modern physicalist equation.

Check out ontic structural realism to see how current metaphysics is trailing along in the wake of this particular turn of events.

I think that 'soul' might be productively interpreted as a metaphorical expression for the subjective unity of consciousness; it is the principle by which the being hangs together, physiologically, psychologically, and even spiritually (which is also very close to Aristotle's meaning). But when you ask, 'what is this principle' or 'where is this principle', then that is a reification. But it's also not simply non-existent. This is the point that I think perplexes everyone in this conversation - as soon as you name it, you reify it, and then ask 'can it exist'? But that's a reification and therefore a category error. — Wayfarer

You can name constraints. They really do things causally.

And when we talk about consciousness, that normally cashes out as attentional-level processing. And attention in turn is all about constraint - the limiting of awareness by a focus, or spotlight, or filter, or bottleneck, to use the usual metaphors.

So the soul - in the sense Aristotle seems to be striving after - would be a limitation on material possibility. It is not a substance, but the organisation that gives material possibility its rationally organised form.

And Aristotle wanted to insist that this constraining organisation was physically real and not ghostly or immaterial. He just lacked the modern knowledge to make full sense of that. We now know that the constraints that create bodies with intellects are physically real. They are the information that our semiotic machinery encodes. DNA really exists. Neurons really exist. Words really exist. That information gets made flesh. Animate matter gets its soulful form from a system of symbols interpreted as a state of organisation.

There are only two broad types of phenomena which I think embody 'interpretance', namely, organisms, and minds. — Wayfarer

You really only need organisms. Life and mind are just different levels of the same semiotic modelling relation.

As a stand in for all sorts of things from rudimentary seeing and hearing to complex linguistic conceptions... — creativesoul

A lot of familiar psychological terms are poorly defined. But we'll live. We can talk about the biological commonality with the laboratory animals into which we plunge our electrodes while also reminding of the particular difference that linguistic scaffolding makes to everything happening in a human mind.

So I'd agree that the standard jargon ought to reflect the distinctions better. Perhaps that is what you think you do with "thought/belief" and suchlike. I'm still waiting for you to explain. Somehow you never do.

Let's make this really, really simple. What is the result of visually perceiving a tree?

A. Seeing a mental image.

B. Seeing the tree.

I'll let your unsupervised neural network categorize the two. — Marchesk

Are we talking about a dream tree? How does your own unsupervised neural network categorise those?

And is the greenness of this tree - either real or imagined - something true of the actual tree or a property of the mental image. (You seemed to agree that colours were A, but that shapes would be B.)

So good luck with your ambition making things really, really simple. These are deep philosophical issues, and not merely language games, for a reason.

You could argue that a neuron simply responds to an electrical charge from a connected neuron. — Marchesk

No neuroscientist could accept that simple account. Neurons respond to significant differences in the patterns of connectivity they are feeling. And that can involve thousands of feedback, usually inhibitory, connections from processing levels further up the hierarchy.

So mostly a neuron is being actively restricted. And that constraint is being exerted from above. The brain is organised to that ideas - expectations, goals, plans - lead the way. The self-centred indirectness is what we see when we actually put individual neurons under the microscope.

The brain has to do be able to recognize a shape somehow. It's not magic, and shapes don't float along on photons into the eyes and travel from there on electrons into the homunculus sitting in the visual cortex. — Marchesk

Of course. I'm not defending any caricature story here. No need to put these words in my mouth.

No philosopher is going to defend a totally naive view of vision which involves an object showing up in the mind magically. There has to be a process. — Marchesk

Yep. So now again we must turn to why you insist this is better characterised by "direct" than "indirect".

If your argument is that the brain has the goal of being "as direct and veridical and uninterpreted as possible", then that is the view I'm rejecting. It is a very poor way to understand the neuroscientific logic at work.

But as you say, I wouldn't then want to be batting for good old fashioned idealism. We don't just imagine a world that is "not there".

So I am carefully outlining the semiotic version of indirect realism which gives mediation its proper functional place.

The question is whether the process of perception creates an intermediary which we are aware of when perceiving, or whether it's merely the mechanics of seeing, hearing, touching, etc. — Marchesk

That is no longer my question as I reject both direct perception and homuncular representation. My approach focuses on how the self arises along with the world in experience.

The surprise for most is that both these things in fact need to.

But you could use a camera stationed anywhere, and see what sort of objects an unsupervised network will learn to categorize. — Marchesk

Sure. The AI labs will want to keep improving. But a computer that can actually do human things might have to start off as helpless and needy as a human baby. Would you want to have to wait 20 years for your Apple Mac to grow up enough to be useful?

It's a two edge thing. Yes, it would be great to identify the minimal "Kantian" hardwiring needed to get a "self-educating machine" started. But then that comes at the cost of having to parent the damn device until it is usefully developed.

So - philosophically - neural networks are already based on the acceptance that the mind has Kantian structure. Awareness is not direct. So to replicate awareness in any meaningful fashion, it is the mediation - the indirect bit - we have to understand in a practical engineering sense.

The unsupervised learning is then the flip side of this. To the degree a machine design can learn from an interaction with the world, we are getting down to the deep Kantian structure that makes biology and neurology tick.

And as Michael points out, step back from the "computer just as fascinated by internet cat videos" nonsense used to hype DeepMind, and you can see just how far the AI labs have to go.

DeepMind's "reality" actually just is a hex code string, magnetic patterns on a disk. It is forming no picture of the world, and so no sense of self. It is the humans who point and say golly, DeepMind sure loves its YouTube cat clips.

So I agree it is an interesting experiment to consider. I just draw the opposite conclusion about what it tells us.