I am unsure you are being generous here. Some, and on some accounts, most people do not think in words. They have to translate, essentially by rote learned language, their thought to be intelligible to others. So, it's not clear to me that it matters whether we think linguistically, to define thought. I do think it nearly impossible to define 'thought' though. There's no way to extricate each thought from the other, so is it just a mess of mentation? — AmadeusD

Yeah sure, but if we want to make something clear to us or to others, we use language, if we don't articulate to ourselves what we are thinking, we can't say anything about it much less express it to other people.

But then you'd count what goes on prior to articulation as thought and expression as a form of mediation, which thereby makes it indirect. If you want to say that you can do so, but it then becomes semantic, because I am calling what I am doing know directly expressing my thoughts to you and you will reply by saying that I am using language to express my thoughts and hence it is indirect communication.

One is a factual claim: do things happen prior to articulation? Yes. The other is the point of contention and hence terminological: either I am directly telling you what I think about this subject, or I am not, because language is mediation and hence indirect.

But since we have no other way of discussing thought, I don't see how we progress here.

I probably was having a thought about that. But i couldn't be thinking that. It is external to my thought, and cannot be identical with it. Also, was I thinking of the photo, or the flower (this is irrelevant, but quirky and worthy noting)? Any way you slice this, my thought is indirectly of any given external thing, and my utterance to you is representative of my thought. It strikes me as bizarre that people are so resistant to this obviousness. It's not really a matter of 'certainty'. There is no room for 'uncertainty' about those relations, given the words we have invented for different relations. — AmadeusD

Technically correct, especially the "having a thought about". I directly see a flower as given to me, a human being, not a tiger nor an angel.

There is no access to objects absent mediation, but I don't think mediation is equivalent to "indirectness". If we remove mediation, we are left with a mere postulate.

As Kant put the matter, one can be an empirical realist and a transcendental idealist.

But there are epistemological problems with indirect realism, and they are insurmountable. If one is privy only to his experience, or representation, whatever the case may be, how can he know whether they represent the real world? — NOS4A2

That's the point. Indirect realists believe that there is an epistemological problem precisely because the only information given directly to rational thought is the body's reaction to stimulation.

Direct realists believed that there isn't an epistemological problem because distal objects and their properties are actual constituents of the experience (and not just causes), and so entails things like the naive realist theory of colour. That's what it means for perception to be direct. But this view of the world was proven wrong by modern science.

That's the point. Indirect realists believe that there is an epistemological problem precisely because the only information given to rational thought is the body's reaction to stimulation.

Direct realists believed that there isn't an epistemological problem because distal objects and their properties are actual constituents of the experience (and not just causes), and so entails things like the naive realist theory of colour. That's what it means for perception to be direct. But this view of the world was proven wrong by modern science.

The fallacy of ambiguity always factors high in these discussions. I wager the activity described as "information given to rational thought" is something that does not occur. I apologize but I have to remain sceptical of what I can only describe as imaginary things and processes. It is unclear what any of these words refer to, if anything. I'd much prefer a look at what is actually going on there and use that as a basis. Only then can we speak of things and activities involved in perception.

I am a direct realist and do not believe distal objects and their properties are actual constituents of the experience. Again, in order to wade through the fallacy of ambiguity, I try my best to make sense of the argument, but so far "experience" appears to be a roundabout way of describing the body, at least metaphorically. So I'll have to dismiss it as just that. But scientists are also not immune to ambiguity. Searle takes up the argument from science quite well if you'd like to read an opposing argument.

I am a direct realist and do not believe distal objects and their properties are actual constituents of the experience. — NOS4A2

Then I don't know what you mean by "direct".

If both "direct" and indirect realists agree that distal objects and their properties are not actual constituents of the experience then what are they disagreeing about?

I try my best to make sense of the argument, but so far "experience" appears to be a roundabout way of describing the body, at least metaphorically.

So let's just examine the raw physics. There is a ball of plasma 150,000,000 km away. It emits electromagnetic radiation. This radiation stimulates the sense receptors in some organism's sense organ. These sense receptors send electrical signals to the brain and clusters of neurotransmitters activate, sending signals to the muscles causing the organism to move.

What do direct realists believe is happening here that indirect realists don't believe, or vice versa?

And to bring back in our ordinary way of describing this, what does "I see the Sun" mean? Specifically, what do the words "I" and "see" refer to? When we say "my experience is of the Sun" what does the word "experience" refer to and what is the word "of" doing? Everyone agrees that the body reacts to stimulation by electromagnetic radiation originating from the Sun, but direct and indirect realists are presumably disagreeing about something?

Then I don't know what you mean by "direct".

If both "direct" and indirect realists agree that distal objects and their properties are not actual constituents of the experience then what are they disagreeing over?

By direct I mean only not indirect. There is no mediating factor prohibiting me from sensing the world.

So let's just examining the raw physics. There is a ball of plasma 150,000,000 km away. It emits electromagnetic radiation. This radiation stimulates the sense receptors in some organism's eyes (or, feasibly, some other sense organ). These sense receptors send electrical signals to the brain and clusters of neurotransmitters activate, sending signals to the muscles causing the organism to move.

What do direct realists believe is happening here that indirect realists don't believe, and vice versa?

I can only speak for myself. The eyes aren't just stimulated as if they passively await light to hit them. The body isn't a Rube Goldberg device. The eyes are active; they seek out and use the light, transducing it, converting it to signals for use by the rest of the body, in a similar way you mention. My guess is indirect realists do not consider such an act as an act of perception because it doesn't involve a mediating factor.

The eyes are active; they seek out and use the light, transducing it, converting it to signals for use by the rest of the body, in a similar way you mention. My guess is indirect realists do not consider such an act as an act of perception because it doesn't involve a mediating factor. — NOS4A2

They agree that the eyes move about their sockets and in response to stimulation by electromagnetic radiation send signals to the brain, which in turn sends signals to the muscles.

But like many direct realists (and unlike you) they also believe in first-person experience, and perception is related to this rather than just the body's unconscious response to stimulation. Flowers react to light from the Sun but they don't see anything because they're not conscious.

The traditional disagreement between direct and indirect realists concerns the phenomenology of first-person experience and its relationship to distal objects. The direct realist believes that this relationship is constitutive (entailing such things as the naive theory of colour), whereas the indirect realist believes that it is only causal (and so those things which are constituents of the experience are the intermediary).

They agree that the eyes move about their sockets and in response to stimulation by electromagnetic radiation send electrical signals to the brain, which in turn sends signals to the muscles.

But, like many direct realists (and unlike you), they also believe in first-person experience and consciousness, and perception is related to this rather than just the body's unconscious response to stimulation.

I suppose you're right. The problem for me, as mentioned, is first-person experience of what is actually occurring behind the eyes is wholly limited. Much of what is occurring in there cannot be sensed, and it is this lack of sense that informs indirect realism, perhaps even feeling and subjectivity entirely, so the label "naive" is more appropriately applied to this view, I think.

Yeah sure, but if we want to make something clear to us or to others, we use language, if we don't articulate to ourselves what we are thinking, we can't say anything about it much less express it to other people. — Manuel

Hmm. Again, im not so sure (literally - i'm unsure, lol). Many things are much better understood by demonstration. Including many thoughts. "I was thinking..." *proceeds to demo a dance move apt for the pair's choreographic aims*. I just see too many exceptions while accepting that some form of "I was thinking.." is generally required. In any case, I take this process as indirect.

But then you'd count what goes on prior to articulation as thought and expression as a form of mediation — Manuel

I do, heh.

But since we have no other way of discussing thought, I don't see how we progress here. — Manuel

We accept that communication (of thought) is necessarily indirect. I don't see why that's so unsatisfactory, myself.
I suppose 'progress' would depend on whether you take an 'idea' to be different to a 'thought'. Thoughts are specific instances of ideas, surely. I just don't know if that adequate teases out separate concepts for each.

Technically correct, especially the "having a thought about". I directly see a flower as given to me, a human being, not a tiger nor an angel. — Manuel

I reject the 'direct' here, but you knew that. Otherwise, I hear your formulation and agree that both of our views seem to align on that.

There is no access to objects absent mediation, but I don't think mediation is equivalent to "indirectness". If we remove mediation, we are left with a mere postulate. — Manuel

*if* that's the case, then that's the case. That is, to my mind, clearly indirect on any conception of the word 'indirect' that I am aware of, and is coherent. I just don't have any discomfort with it! I can't understand that discomfort others have with concluding hte above (obviously, assuming it were true).

We accept that communication (of thought) is necessarily indirect. I don't see why that's so unsatisfactory, myself.
I suppose 'progress' would depend on whether you take an 'idea' to be different to a 'thought'. Thoughts are specific instances of ideas, surely. I just don't know if that adequate teases out separate concepts for each. — AmadeusD

I don't think it is. I see why you may want to say that and the reasons for it aren't bad, but I also don't see any evident benefits from saying that communication is indirect. Speaking for myself, I don't see a need for it, I think it causes more confusion than clarification, though we agree that there is something going on prior to language, so the issue here is one of preference as I see it.

I don't know quite well what an "idea" or a "thought" is, or how they differ. Yes, I have said that people can write down what they think, but this leaves the precise question of what "thought", which is very hard to clear up. And that's no surprise, it's been a problem for the philosophers for thousands of years.

That is, to my mind, clearly indirect on any conception of the word 'indirect' that I am aware of, and is coherent. I just don't have any discomfort with it! I can't understand that discomfort others have with concluding hte above (obviously, assuming it were true). — AmadeusD

I just don't see how this doesn't boil down, at bottom, to an issue of taste, I don't see substantial disagreements other than what word we use to describe specific processes. We agree on mediation but disagree on how mediation plays into a direct/indirect framework.

evident benefits from saying that communication is indirect. — Manuel

This is not a consideration in this discussion. If it is, it is. Benefits are not relevant to whether something is the case.

We agree on mediation but disagree on how mediation plays into a direct/indirect framework. — Manuel

I don't understand how its possible disagree, without being plain incoherent, that something heavily mediated is indirect. The definition of direct seems to preclude a mediated system to be claimed as direct from one end ot the other.

This is not a consideration in this discussion. If it is, it is. Benefits are not relevant to whether something is the case. — AmadeusD

Maybe it is not for you. I consider the ability to form sentences to express whatever it is that goes on in my head to be a direct process. I can't make sense of such statements as I indirectly state my thoughts in my sentences. I can say I'm expressing a thought that needs elucidation, but I wouldn't call it an indirectly expressed thought, unless I am purposively saying one thing to mean another thing and am being obscure about it.

I don't understand how its possible disagree, without being plain incoherent, that something heavily mediated is indirect. The definition of direct seems to preclude a mediated system to be claimed as direct from one end ot the other. — AmadeusD

Why is something heavily mediated indirect? Why? In other words, how does mediated necessitate something to be indirect? If I follow that route, I am going to end up saying I indirectly mediated my view of this thing.

Because I have mediation, I directly saw this thing, without mediation I cannot see anything. Again, this is in empirical reality, I am not talking about "ultimate natures", or the "ground of things" - not even physics attains this.

If I said, because of mediation I indirectly saw a flower indicates to me that there is a single proper way to see a flower, but this is false: knowledge is perspectival and relational.

I certainly don't accept naive realism; nor do I know of any scientist who does.

I suppose what is noteworthy here would be to ascertain just how well you "got" what the other person was thinking. One thing is to have a general indication of what they may be thinking, the other is those moments of knowing exactly what they are thinking. But sure, point taken. — Manuel

Right, it's always going to be more or less of an approximation, even in relation to knowing what I myself am thinking. I'm not one who believes in perfect introspection..

Searle takes up the argument from science quite well if you'd like to read an opposing argument. — NOS4A2

Indeed. Searle is a self-proclaimed naive realist. I'm currently listening/studying his lectures on philosophy of mind.

The direct realist believes that this relationship is constitutive (entailing such things as the naive theory of colour) — Michael

Do you believe that naive/direct realism cannot deny color as a property of objects? I mean, I suppose I do not see any reason that a position like naive realism cannot correct any flaws based upon newly acquired knowledge such as color perception.

I can't make sense of such statements as I indirectly state my thoughts in my sentences. — Manuel

Your thoughts aren't your statements. They are not identical. You are factually not directly conveying your thoughts. That is the nature of speech. I am entirely lost as to how you could call it anything else. It factually isn't direct, so your use of 'direct' must be a matter of your preference. This is why i keep coming back to "Why the discomfort?", That something isn't satisfying doesn't make it untrue.

I wouldn't call it an indirectly expressed thought — Manuel

But, it's not the thought. It literally is not the thought. You cant claim a direct transmission of your thought. That option isn't open.

Why is something heavily mediated indirect? — Manuel

You've answered your own Q. This is exactly like asking "Why is something that has been made not-dry wet?". It serves as an analytical statement, essentially.

If I follow that route, I am going to end up saying I indirectly mediated my view of this thing. — Manuel

I'm not quite sure this is apt, but linguistically, yes, this is true. You do not directly access anything about which you think, other than your own thoughts. You can directly represent a thought to yourself (say, going from considering an equation as written, to it's imagined geometry). But you cannot directly represent your thought outside your mind. Direct means there is no mediation. NO way-points. NO stops along the way. That is not hte case either with receiving external data to create a phenomenal experience or in communicating thoughts. They are necessarily indirect.

What DRist are claiming is that indirect processes(factually) give us Direct.. something (access to objects, communication, whatever). The term Direct in this sense is 100% convention and has nothing to do with describing hte facts. AS this thread has made extremely clear at every single opportunity presented to it by these exchanges.

If I said, because of mediation I indirectly saw a flower indicates to me that there is a single proper way to see a flower, but this is false: knowledge is perspectival and relational. — Manuel

Why would it indicate that? If there is not a way to directly apprehend something (i.e literally have it enter you mind without mediation) that doesn't mean we just give up and say ah well, closest we can get should be called Direct then. That is shoddy thinking, frankly. Somewhat cowardly, in the sense of retreating from the facts. If the case is that your communication is mediated and therefore indirect, we can then just call that direct and get on with it outside of day-to-day living(ie, this discussion is outside of that)

I certainly don't accept naive realism; nor do I know of any scientist who does. — Manuel

Well, that's a start(on, entirely, my terms hehehe). Penrose and Searle appear to. Anil Seth, C. Koch among others also appear to. It looks like Searle has been mentioned already.

There is no illusion.

There are two astronauts in space 150,000km away. Each is upside down relative to the other and looking at the Earth. Neither point of view shows the "correct" orientation of the external world because there is no such thing as a "correct" orientation. This doesn't change by bringing them to Earth, as if proximity to some sufficiently massive object makes a difference.

Also imagine I'm standing on my head. A straight line could be drawn from my feet to my head through the Earth's core reaching some other person's feet on the other side of the world and then their head. If their visual orientation is "correct" then so is mine. The existence of a big rock in between his feet and my head is irrelevant. — Michael

The two astronauts would not be using "on top of" and "below" in quite the same way that we use those terms to report on objective relations between thing that we see while inhabiting the surface of the Earth. When you are hanging upside down, the flower pot sitting on the floor may momentarily appear as if it is inverted and stuck to the ceiling. This would constitute a genuine perceptual illusion. What would not be an illusion, though, is your perception of the orientation of the pot (and of the surface it is either resting on or hanging from) relative to the orientation of your head. You could still temporarily be misled about the orientation of your own body (relative to the earth's local gravitational field). Recovering from this illusion would involve a characteristic change in your visual phenomenology (as does the recovery from the visual illusion that the world is tilting after you've messed up the operation of your vestibular system).

In the case of your astronaut example, since their environment is effectively gravity free, the only objective purport of relational predicates like "on top of" and "below" as applied to their visual phenomenology refers to the relative orientation of their own bodies. But it's still an objective fact about their shared environment that their own respective bodies are embedded in this or that way within it, and the seen orientations of distant celestial bodies cue them to those facts.

What is true of the relative orientations of things to your body is true of their distances away from it. Suppose you are walking towards a house. As your distance from it is reduced by half, the house doesn't visually appear to have grown twice as large. It rather looks like you now are standing at half the distance from it. Some of the visually perceptible affordances change while others remain invariant.

One affordance that changes is your ability to bridge the remaining distance by walking towards it in some amount of time (or some definite number of steps). An affordance that doesn't change is your ability to walk normally through the front door without bumping your head on the top frame. All of those affordances, as they figure in your visual phenomenology, have objective purport and your perceptions of them could both be revealed to be illusory if, after walking the remaining distance, the house would reveal itself to be farther away (and also objectively larger) than you had thought.

While the sizes of material objects is commonly regarded to be, unlike colors, primary properties of them, I think they should be better viewed as being multimodal. The sizes that things are perceived to have, either though visual or tactile modalities, also reveal "subjective" affordances for interacting bodily with them and therefore refer back to features of our own bodies. On that view, separating perceptible qualities of things as primary (objective) or secondary (subjective) is a false dichotomy that stems for privileging the objectivity of the physical sciences in contexts of human life where they aren't immediately relevant.

Your thoughts aren't your statements. They are not identical. You are factually not directly conveying your thoughts. That is the nature of speech. I am entirely lost as to how you could call it anything else. It factually isn't direct, so your use of 'direct' must be a matter of your preference. This is why i keep coming back to "Why the discomfort?", That something isn't satisfying doesn't make it untrue. — AmadeusD

I don't recall saying that thoughts are statements.

Statements are an expression of thought, it's the only kind of thought we have acquaintance with, whatever else goes on prior to articulation, call it thought, call it mental activity, is not something that can be expressed and it is even doubtful it is open to introspection.

You are telling me that I am not conveying my thoughts because my statements are not identical to my thoughts, I say I am telling you what I think, in so far as we can use "think" to have any practical meaning at all. What you are requiring be given, in order to admit "direct" thought, is something that cannot be provided, as even the subject matter is extremely obscure.

Here it doesn't have much to do with discomfort, it seems as if you have defined thought in a way in which it must be indirect. Fine, if you want to do that. If so, then I think you would need to add that one does not have access to ones own thoughts, because when we express them, we are leaving out what matters.

But, it's not the thought. It literally is not the thought. You cant claim a direct transmission of your thought. That option isn't open. — AmadeusD

By this standard, as mentioned previously, I don't have access to my own thoughts. Then I think we would need a better conception of what this "thought" is which you insist we are not able to express or get across.

You've answered your own Q. This is exactly like asking "Why is something that has been made not-dry wet?". It serves as an analytical statement, essentially. — AmadeusD

If you say so.

I take it that mediation and directness (or indirectness) are different things, again with Kant: empirical reality, transcendental ideality.

Direct means there is no mediation. NO way-points. NO stops along the way. That is not hte case either with receiving external data to create a phenomenal experience or in communicating thoughts. They are necessarily indirect. — AmadeusD

If this is how directness is defined, then nothing is direct.

But then indirectness loses any meaning, there is no contrast to it, for even speaking about directness is indirect.

The issue here is insisting that mediation must mean indirectness. I don't see this as following.

Why would it indicate that? If there is not a way to directly apprehend something (i.e literally have it enter you mind without mediation) that doesn't mean we just give up and say ah well, closest we can get should be called Direct then. That is shoddy thinking, frankly. Somewhat cowardly, in the sense of retreating from the facts. If the case is that your communication is mediated and therefore indirect, we can then just call that direct and get on with it outside of day-to-day living(ie, this discussion is outside of that) — AmadeusD

No. We only have our concepts and our mode of cognition to interact with the world, there are no other avenues available to us. This has nothing to do with giving up, this is facing our situation as human beings. A flower (or whatever it is absent us) "in itself" is nothing without something that gives it some significance. "Closest we can get?" The only thing we get. Maybe there are intelligent aliens with a more sophisticated mind than ours, they would then see a flower in a different manner from us, perhaps see aspects of it we cannot.

This does not remove the fact that we deal with the world the only way we can.

We don't know how the mind works to bring sensory data to life, we just know it's not a passive "blank slate." Would it improve things to just dispense with the terminology of direct and indirect? — frank

I think much of the disagreements regarding the use of "direct" or "indirect" regarding particular cases of people perceiving things stem from disagreements about the nature of the perceiving subject. Is it a living animal, a brain, some unspecified locus of consciousness, or a passive spectator in the Cartesian theater? Much psychology of perception and cognitive neuroscience (until a few decades ago) has been done under the sway of something very similar to this last view. Daniel Dennett has dubbed this theoretical stance "Cartesian materialism". My own view is that the subject is a whole embodied animal subject/agent.

A paradigmatic case of indirect perception is a security guard witnessing a robbery scene through a live CCTV feed in a remote room. An indirect realist (or representationalist) about visual perception seems to conceive ordinary visual perception on this model. The subject of a visual experience is conceived as some sort of a homunculus that has all of the intelligence and visual acuity of a human being, but none of their abilities to move and interact directly in the midsts of the objects merely seen in the (internally represented) visual scenery. The homunculus passively witnesses the scene just like our security guard who sits still in the remote room and watches the CCTV feed.

There is a way in which we could empower our security guard to perceive the robbery scene directly and, by the same token, empower him/her to intervene directly within it. The camera capturing the live footage and the monitor displaying it could both be miniaturised and integrated into wearable goggles. (I am setting aside issues of binocular disparity for the sake of simplicity although accounting for them would buttress my point). Such a scenario might make sense if the theater of the robbery was a pitch dark room and the robbers could only be seen in the infrared spectrum. The long causal pathways that lead from the robbery taking place, through the (infrared) light being emitted by the robbers, though the (IR) camera, though the display screen, and then to the eyes of the security guards would be just as indirect as before. However, the witnessing of the robbery by the guard would now be direct. The guard's apprehension of the visible affordances of the scene (such as the guard's ability to hide behind a shelf, or reach for one the the robber's gun) would be direct and immediately responsive to their (the guard's) own movements and actions within the scene.

It is this direct responsiveness, and also the manner in which the guard's visual phenomenology immediately engages with his/her intentional movements and actions (thereby potentially disclosing them to be veridical or illusory) that qualifies the perceptions as direct. The planar surface of the screens within the goggles, unlike the flat CCTV monitor in the first scenario, would effectively become transparent to the security guard's visual phenomenology. The guard would be able to focus his/her attention (and intentional bodily interactions) on the objects directly seen.

Forty-two pages ago, I posited:

This argument is interminable because folk fail to think about how they are using direct and indirect. — Banno

Forty-two pages ago, I posited [...] — Banno

You were right but there are loads of philosophical presuppositions that underlie the uses of the terms "direct" and "indirect" in particular cases of human perception. So, of course, resolving the disagreement isn't just a matter of agreeing on semantics.

As I mentioned earlier, yours appears to be a quasi-functionalist view. It's a minority view, but one that's appealing to many. Its weakest point is that it has no force for lack of any evidence. Maybe one day that will change.

Otherwise, we are indeed using direct and indirect differently. I'll leave it there.

I don't recall saying that thoughts are statements. — Manuel

You didn't. I didn't intimate you did. Sorry if it came off that way. I am telling you that they aren't as a premise for a further comment on what you did say. Hopefully that is clearer as I go through this response..

Statements are an expression of thought, it's the only kind of thought we have acquaintance with, whatever else goes on prior to articulation, call it thought, call it mental activity, is not something that can be expressed and it is even doubtful it is open to introspection. — Manuel

100%, we're in the same boat. This is exactly why I noted you answered your own question. You have described, exactly, and with great clarity, why both communication and phenomenal experience are indirectly achieved. Nice (yes, I am being cheeky here).

You are telling me that I am not conveying my thoughts — Manuel

This is straight-up false. I am saying you are not directly transmitting your thoughts to me for my review. I have, no where at all, intimated that your communication isn't an approximation of your thoughts. I think I actually said that outright, but cbf'd going back to quote it here. Seems pedantic.

"think" to have any practical meaning at all. — Manuel

You have just used thinking/mentation with a practical meaning other than this, and linked it to why it is not identical, or even similar, to you conveying an expression of your thought through the air (or whatever) to me, another mind. So, this, on your own terms, is false. I agree.

is something that cannot be provided, as even the subject matter is extremely obscure. — Manuel

It's not what i require. THis is what meets the standard of 'Direct' in any other context. No idea why this one requires some massaging of that to make people comfortable. ONly discomfort with concluding that we do not directly communicate thoughts could require that weird side-step (on my view). Happy to hear another reason. One hasn't been presented so far.

it seems as if you have defined thought in a way in which it must be indirect. — Manuel

No. I have observed thought, and it is indirect. I haven't defined thought at all. It is not possible you to directly transmit your thoughts to me, by any method we know. I already had the definition of Indirect loaded up, by virtue of having encountered the word in thousands of other circumstances. I have applied it here. And the result is obvious. It's not my idea. It's not my interpretation. It is using plain language as it is used elsewhere, in this context. If there's some special definition of Direct which includes indirectness, all good. But, you can see where that's going.. surely. You've not actually addressed the supporting discussions, I note, which are the empirical facts I am consistently mentioning, but are being ignored in favour of idea-fiddling.

If so, then I think you would need to add that one does not have access to ones own thoughts, because when we express them, we are leaving out what matters. — Manuel

This does not make any sense to me. My thoughts are accessible to me directly as they exist as the entity which can review them. They are one-and-the-same. You, another mind, are not. That's all we need.

I take it that mediation and directness (or indirectness) are different things — Manuel

This is misleading. mediation and indirectness are analogous. Very, very strongly so. Something cannot be mediated, and direct.

then nothing is direct. — Manuel

What do you mean by 'nothing'? I am close to agreeing with you, but this doesn't make a huge amount of sense. Any mental activity within the same mind is a direct apprehension within that mind. Every-day use of 'direct' is still apt for most things we experience. I just simply don't see a problem. If this is the case, this is the case.

But then indirectness loses any meaning, there is no contrast to it, for even speaking about directness is indirect. — Manuel

No, it doesn't. It would (on that account) lose practical application - like Unicorn leather.

No. We only have our concepts and our mode of cognition to interact with the world, there are no other avenues available to us. — Manuel

so use them! rather than doing what you're doing which is apparently:

1. Describing in clear detail the indirect nature of X and Y;
2. Agreeing that we agree on those facts; and
3. Claiming that we have to use the term 'direct' because there isn't a sufficient example of 'indirect' despite you having used that concept to describe X and Y.

To me, this is a non sequitur of the kind that would normally have me asking some perhaps less-than-professional questions about how you make that move. I am still waiting on how that's hte case, though, from several previous iterations of the question about how the empirically indirect can somehow magically be direct when discussed by Philosophers.

"Closest we can get?" The only thing we get. — Manuel

You're conflating about seven different discreet things that should be teased apart here, so I don't take this as applying to any specific claim i'm making.



I think you were probably wrong, despite that being an accurate description of some of the exchanges. Some, thought, have been directly on that exact topic. It's just that we don't all agree with you.

It's interminable because you've made your conclusion and have moved on. Those who disagree with you continue to toil while you sit outside drinking lemonade, shouting epithets once in a while. Which is fun. But not indicative of being right. We keep moving...

As I mentioned earlier, yours appears to be a quasi-functionalist view. It's a minority view, but one that's appealing to many. Its weakest point is that it has no force for lack of any evidence. Maybe one day that will change. — frank

My stance differs in important ways from a functionalist view, even though it may share some superficial similarities. The key distinction is that I'm not trying to identify mental states like perceptual experiences with narrow functional roles or internal representations realized in the brain.

Rather, I align more closely with what has been called "philosophical behaviorism" - the view associated with thinkers like Wittgenstein and Ryle. As the psychologist Alan Costall has pointed out, modern cognitive psychology and neuroscience have tended to import the old S-R schema of behaviorism, just inserting a cognitive "C" step in between the passive sensory input and the motor output. Philosophical behaviorism, so called, rejects the shema.

The S-C-R "sandwich model" of cognition, as Susan Hurley has also called it, still treats perception as an early stage in a kind of input-output process, even if mediated by internal representations. In contrast, embodied conceptions sees perceptual experience as an active, world-engaged skill of the whole embodied agent, not just a function of the brain.

The intentional content of perception isn't defined by narrow functional roles, but by the agent's successful (or unsuccessful) coupling with environmental affordances through their sensorimotor capacities. So while functionalists may recognize the constitutive role of action, I go further in grounding perceptual content directly in these embodied skills, rather than just seeing action as an "output" following from prior cognitive processing.

100%, we're in the same boat. This is exactly why I noted you answered your own question. You have described, exactly, and with great clarity, why both communication and phenomenal experience are indirectly achieved. Nice (yes, I am being cheeky here). — AmadeusD

Yes, these are expressions of thought - they form a crucial part of it - that part that connects to the quite obscure aspect of non-linguistic thought with linguistic thought, but it is the linguistic aspect that gets discussed virtually everywhere. The linguistic expression of thought is direct, it comes from my brain and I articulate to you that aspect of thought which is capable of expression.

You have just used thinking/mentation with a practical meaning other than this, and linked it to why it is not identical, or even similar, to you conveying an expression of your thought through the air (or whatever) to me, another mind. So, this, on your own terms, is false. I agree. — AmadeusD

We don't know enough about unconscious brain processes to say if non-linguistic thought is, or is not, language like.

When speaking about thought, the best we can do is to be practical about how we express ourselves about it, I have used thought in saying that it has likely has a non-linguistic basis, but this amounts to saying very little about it.

It's not what i require. THis is what meets the standard of 'Direct' in any other context. No idea why this one requires some massaging of that to make people comfortable. ONly discomfort with concluding that we do not directly communicate thoughts could require that weird side-step (on my view). Happy to hear another reason. One hasn't been presented so far. — AmadeusD

You really enjoy pushing the idea of discomfort.

I've said several times Kant's point, that the world is empirically real but transcendentally ideal. In empirical reality, we directly perceive objects, in virtue of our mode of cognition. Indirect would be something like attempting to find out a persons brain state if they are paralyzed, here we have to use some kind of experiments to figure on what's going on in the brain, absent this person speaking about his symptoms or sensations.

. It is using plain language as it is used elsewhere, in this context. If there's some special definition of Direct which includes indirectness, all good. But, you can see where that's going.. surely. You've not actually addressed the supporting discussions, I note, which are the empirical facts I am consistently mentioning, but are being ignored in favour of idea-fiddling. — AmadeusD

Plain language? Tell a biologist studying animals or plants and let them tell you that they are indirectly separating flowers based on colors. They will tell you they are directly identifying an object by its colors, even if colors are no mind-independent properties.

Claiming that we have to use the term 'direct' because there isn't a sufficient example of 'indirect' despite you having used that concept to describe X and Y. — AmadeusD

Not sufficient example is not the issue, it's the coherency of the argument. There are situations in which we do indirectly study things: coma patients, looking at the sun, etc.

When you are hanging upside down, the flower pot sitting on the floor may momentarily appear as if it is inverted and stuck to the ceiling. — Pierre-Normand

It doesn't appear as if it's stuck to the ceiling. It appears as if the floor is up and the ceiling is down, which they are.

As you seem to think that gravity is relevant, I refer you again to an O'Neill cylinder:


There are three liveable "islands", each with their own artificial gravity. It is not the case that those living on Island 1 are seeing the world the "right way up" and those living on Islands 2 and 3 are seeing the world "the wrong way up" or vice versa.

And imagine someone were to use a jetpack to lift towards another island (and eventually fall towards it when they are sufficiently close to be affected by its gravity), maintaining their bodily orientation (i.e. head-first towards the other island's ground). At which point do you claim their visual orientation changes from "veridical" to "illusory"? The moment the other island's artificial gravity is sufficiently strong to pull them in?

Suppose you are walking towards a house. As your distance from it is reduced by half, the house doesn't visually appear to have grown twice as large. — Pierre-Normand

This is ambiguous. The visual appearance of the house certainly has gotten bigger. I can test this by holding a ruler at arm's length from my face as I walk towards the house. When I start walking the bottom of the house is parallel to the 10mm mark and the top of the house is parallel to the 20mm mark. As I walk towards the house the bottom becomes parallel to the 0mm mark and the top becomes parallel to the 30mm mark.

I'm not sure what other meaning of "visually appears to grow" you might mean. I accept that the house doesn't appear to have new bricks added into its walls or anything like that, but then I don't think anyone claims otherwise.

Or rather than walking towards the house, let's say I look through a pair of binoculars. Which of my ordinary eyesight and my binocular-enhanced vision shows the "correct" size of the house?

Much like visual orientation, visual size is also subjective. There's no "correct" orientation and no "correct" size. There's just the apparent orientation and apparent size given the individual's biology.

Some organism when standing on the ground may see with its naked eyes what I see when hanging upside down and looking through a pair of red-tinted binoculars. Neither point of view is more "correct" than the other. Neither point of view is illusory.

Do you believe that naive/direct realism cannot deny color as a property of objects? — creativesoul

I think that if they admit that colours are not properties of objects then they must admit that colours are the exact mental intermediary (e.g. sense-data or qualia or whatever) that indirect realists claim exist and are seen. And the same for smells and tastes.

So how is their position not indirect realism?

Direct realists claimed that there is no epistemological problem of perception because distal objects are actual constituents of experience. Indirect realists claimed that there is an epistemological problem of perception because distal objects are not actual constituents of experience (and that the actual constituents of experience are something like sense-data or qualia or whatever).

Now we have so-called "direct" realists who seem to accept that distal objects are not actual constituents of experience (and so accept that something else must be) but still claim to be "direct" realists, which seems to have simply redefined the meaning of "direct" into meaninglessness and doesn't appear at all opposed to indirect realism.

To me, it's simple: experience is constituted of mental phenomena, not distal objects. The mental phenomena that constitute experience is what directly informs our understanding, and so there is an epistemological problem of perception. "Indirect realism" is the most appropriate label for this.

And to repeat something I said earlier: indirect realism does not entail unsuccessful interaction with the world, and so successful interaction with the world does not entail direct perception.

Therefore, "direct perception" cannot be defined in terms of successful interaction with the world.

I'm not sure what other meaning of "visually appears to grow" you might mean. — Michael

With the phrase "visually appears to grow" I refer to the visual information about an objective increase in the dimensions of an object. You can see a loaf of bread growing in the oven, or a balloon inflating when it is being filled with helium. If, by contrast, you are walking towards your little niece holding a party balloon, as your distance from her diminishes from 10 feet to 5 feet, it doesn't look like the balloon progressively inflated to twice its original size. If the contextual perspectival cues were removed, then you might fall prey to such an illusion. If, for instance, you would look at a balloon with just one eye (in order to remove cues from binocular disparity) through a hole in the wall of a uniformly white chamber, and this balloon would be moving towards you, you could be under the illusion that it is stationary and progressively inflating.

In normal conditions of observation, you don't directly perceive the sizes of the images that objects project on your retina and, in a second stage, infer their distances and true dimensions. Rather, your perceptual system integrates visible perspectival cues, and also informations about you own bodily motions, to generate your visual "input" or phenomenology. It's the sizes of the retinal images that are actually inferred indirectly on the basis of your tacit knowledge of some features of projective geometry, which have been adduced from your familiarity with the process of producing and consuming flat visual representations of things.

With the phrase "visually appears to grow" I refer to the visual information about an objective increase in the dimensions of an object. — Pierre-Normand

The visual phenomenon grows (as shown by comparing it to the ruler held at arm's length from my face). If you infer from this that some distal object grows then you may have made a false inference.

But at least we've established the distinction between the visual phenomenon and the distal object. The visual phenomenon grows, the distal object doesn't, therefore the visual phenomenon is not the distal object.

We've also established the distinction between perception and inference. The inference (about the distal object) may be correct or incorrect, but the perception just is what it is (neither correct nor incorrect). It's not the case that given this distance from the object this is the size it should appear such that if I look at it through a pair of thick glasses then its increased size (relative to not wearing glasses) is an "illusion".

Perhaps also relevant is this experiment:

We are in an empty black room, looking at a wall. Two circles appear on the wall. One of the circles is going to grow in size and the other circle is going to move towards us (e.g. the wall panel moves towards us). The rate at which one grows and the rate at which the other moves towards us is such that from our perspective the top and bottom of the circles are always parallel.

Two different external behaviours are causing the same visual phenomenon (a growing circle). It's impossible to visually distinguish which distal object is growing and which is moving towards us.

My stance differs in important ways from a functionalist view, even though it may share some superficial similarities. The key distinction is that I'm not trying to identify mental states like perceptual experiences with narrow functional roles or internal representations realized in the brain. — Pierre-Normand

I don't think there's necessarily anything narrow about the reductionism of a functionalist. A functionalist just doesn't separate functional consciousness from phenomenal. She views the two as necessarily bound together, so that explaining one explains the other.

So when you say this:

In contrast, embodied conceptions sees perceptual experience as an active, world-engaged skill of the whole embodied agent, not just a function of the brain. — Pierre-Normand

What you're saying here is already true of functional consciousness. Every part of your body is engaged with the whole. The flowchart for how it all works together to keep you alive is startlingly large and complex, and along the endocrine system, the nervous system is the bodily government. However, none of this necessarily involves phenomenal consciousness. This is where you become sort of functionalist: that you assume that phenomenality has a necessary role in the functioning of the organism (or did I misread you?). That's something you'd have to argue for, ideally with scientific evidence. As of now, each side of the debate is focusing on information that seems to support their view, but neither has an argument with much weight. We don't know where phenomenal consciousness is coming from, whether it's the brain, the body, or quantum physics. We just don't know.