Your mathematician is still very much alive, so activities of the body such as breathing and circulation of the blood, as well as thought and perception, even if not ostensible movement, are still ongoing, no?

The question as to whether there are objects without perception is not an unequivocal one. It depends on what you count as an object, in other words.

If you take the idealist line and count objects as being themselves perceptions, then, obviously you could not coherently claim that there are objects absent perception.

If you take the realist line and think that objects are revealed to us in perception, and are not themselves perceptions, then logically it follows that the objects must exist absent perception of them.

I agree with you that experience (perception) can be analyzed as 'subject-object-act of knowing' and that it is really all one unitary process. But from this it does not follow that objects are 'subject-object-act of knowing'.

When we say anything we are reliant on 'abstraction and symbolic thought' if that is the way you want to characterize it, so of course under such a characterization our discourse about perception will be about subjects, objects and acts of knowing. I would say that perceived objects are real (as are our bodies), as configurations of energy that act on light and sound, which in turn act on our bodies enabling us to see and hear them. I see no good reason to doubt this.

In a different (logical) sense objects are merely formal identities, but I still think it is reasonable to grant them an ontological status as the fore-mentioned real configurations of energy that those formal identities identify. Subjects are also formal identities, logically speaking, and the subject is the formal identity of the perceiving body, so their ontological status is also, just like the object, as a configuration of energy.

Why are we talking about realism, when we don't even know what realism is? Is it a direct relationship to reality? But we don't know what reality is. Phenomenology hates the term "reality", because it can't be grounded in a clear method; all approaches rely on assumptions about the very things they are holding up for examination -- methods of description, validation by others, the list goes on. The problem is the term itself -- it is infected with presumption.

"OK," you say, "we just can't do ontology. But how can we trust the public arena, if reality itself cannot be pinned down?" We trust the arena in a Wittgensteinian sense -- we play by shared rules and make progress thereby. But every game contains an element of risk, because every meaning we can identify is anchored in a yet to be satisfied arc of completion. We are tilted toward the future, and as such we are tilted, unavoidably, toward uncertainty.

Attempts to make this uncertainty certain are the work of tyrants. It takes a twisted agenda to deny the rickety and half-baked nature of the human condition. Follow the tyrant, and you lose touch with humanity; seek solace in certainty, and you will have to bury your failures in denial.

There is no "reality", the sharing of which comes without strings. Nor can we avoid the sharing. Let's just not pretend otherwise.

You resurrected a really old thread. But I enjoyed re-reading it after all this time, for the first few pages. But then it fell apart. I take issue with the direct realists in this argument on two issues.

1. They fail to properly deal with TGW's hallucination/dream argument that direct realism has no way of determining whether perception is ever veridical if hallucinations and dreams can be phenomenologically indistinguishable. The counter argument was that the distinction would lose it's meaning if everything was a hallucination or dream.

But consider BIVs, the Matrix, Inception, Boltzman Brains and a version of the Simulation argument (just the brain and inputs). What matters here is that there is never any actual perception, only the experience of perception. The direct realist needs to argue these scenarios are impossible, because otherwise they have no means of saying whether they are directly perceiving the world or are in one of these scenarios. And I don't think we know enough to conclusively discount them.

2. The direct realists attempt to defend the realism of colors, smells, sounds, tastes and feels as objective properties of objects to defend against Michael's argument for indirect realism. And I'm pretty sure problems discovered in ancient philosophy disposed with such naive realism, let alone modern science. And thus TGW's ultimate frustration with where the argument ended.

"If you wish to bake an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." - Carl Sagan

May I ask a few questions? (Sorry in advance if these have already been discussed at length.)

1. How do we know that even our impressions of reality are in fact 'real impressions', rather than, say, 'simulated', or 'forgotten' ones, and not just a sort of habituated blend of neuro-electric (or <insert your favorite thought model>) stimuli?

2. Does partitioning ourselves from the rest of the universe draw us closer to where we wish to be, or could it also be psychologically damaging? Which argument or counterargument best serves the needs of our philosophical mission?

3. How do we know that anyone ever really escapes the Matrix, or that the Matrix is the sort of thing that can even be escaped? (Can robots really levitate that way without making a ton of noise? Is a super-intelligent AI necessarily more compassionate than any human being?)

To get things going on our articles web site I've published something I wrote some time ago about indirect realism.

[EDIT: broken link removed] — Jamal

I found this interesting, especially as a window to see how some contemporary philosophers approach Hume's work. (Note that the link is now down and perhaps the domain needs to be renewed.)

Arguments like this one, so colossally influential in philosophy and beyond, are also colossally mistaken. — Jamal

I am reminded of David Oderberg's quip:

‘We have eyes, therefore we cannot see’ would be almost too much for a Pyrrhonist to swallow. — David Oderberg, Hume, the Occult, and the Substance of the School

In a footnote he notes that David Stove gave this as an example of ‘the worst argument in the world’.

This reflects the somewhat common argument that if a reality is mediated then it must also be inaccessible or at least distorted. If our eyes mediate reality, then apparently we cannot see. But what, then, is the alternative to mediated realities?

The problem of erroneous perceptions was obvious to all philosophers, but very few took the route that Hume took, and none with such confidence and even hubris.

Thanks for reading.

Note that the link is now down and perhaps the domain needs to be renewed — Leontiskos

Yes, I let the articles site lapse since nobody ever sent in a suitable article; there was only that one by me. Maybe I'll just re-publish it within this site somehow, although I no longer stand by it entirely: I think I may have made a couple of stupid mistakes of argumentation, and it's probably a bit shallow.

(Note that I've edited your post to remove the broken link)

although I no longer stand by it entirely: I think I may have made a couple of stupid mistakes of argumentation, and it's probably a bit shallow. — Jamal

We haven't had that argument in 3 years now. Could be time to have it again.

And it’s probably about time that I responded to your monster post.

That's okay. I don't agree with it any more either.

But it would be cool to have another discussion about perceptual content and its relationship to the nature of its distal environmental causes.

I look forward to that!

Sounds good Jamal, that all makes sense. Given that the article is available via Wayback Machine (and perhaps other internet archives) it might be nice to have the old link visible somewhere. Here is the link to the most recent archive on Wayback Machine: The Argument for Indirect Realism.

:up:

Note: I wrote it some time around 2010, not 2020 as it says there.

Indeed! That's an odd mix up on Wayback Machine.