I think you’re running together causal intermediacy with epistemic/intentional intermediacy.

1) Glass/fog/glasses don’t make perception “indirect” in the IR sense.

They are conditions that modulate how the same world-directed act succeeds or fails. They don’t introduce a distinct intentional terminus that I am aware of and only through which I access the world. Most of the time I don’t see “the glass” at all; I see the street through it. If the glass becomes salient (dirty, scratched), then it can become the object—but that’s a shift in what my attention takes as its target, not proof that the glass was always the immediate object.

That’s the difference from a TV or photograph: there the image is itself a public, inspectable object that can stably function as the terminus of awareness (pixels, screen, frame, resolution). That’s what makes “indirect” natural there.

2) I’m not claiming awareness of qualia requires a separate introspective act.

You’re right: there isn’t an extra act “between” hearing a chime and being aware of the chime’s sound. The phenomenal character is simply how the chime is heard. What I deny is that the phenomenal character is thereby a second object the hearing terminates on.

So: redness-as-seen, chiming-as-heard, pungency-as-smelled are not “introspected objects” in the first instance. They are features of the perceiving—the mode in which the distal thing is present. We can thematize them reflectively (“listen to the timbre,” “attend to the hue”), but that’s a change of stance, not the baseline structure.

3) “How can awareness of the object come first if sensation reveals it?”

Because “sensation” here is not a freestanding item that gets noticed first and then interpreted into an object. It is the vehicle of disclosure, not an inner object of disclosure. The system-level story is: neural/sensory processing enables an act whose intentional terminus is the world. That’s not mysterious unless we assume in advance that whatever enables awareness must itself be what awareness is of.

4) The TV junkie case actually helps distinguish the views.

A TV viewer is directly aware of an image/sound presentation and only through that indirectly aware of the event (which might be live, recorded, simulated, edited). Here “epistemic mediation” makes sense because there is a stable intermediary object (the audiovisual display) that can be inspected independently of the event.

In ordinary perception there is no analogous intermediary object “on display” for an inner observer. The neural processes are enabling conditions, not presented items. That’s exactly the step you keep asserting but haven’t shown: that because processing occurs, the subject is therefore aware of a processed intermediary.

So I’m not saying “everything is direct because it’s intentional,” and I’m not saying “everything is indirect because something is between.” I’m saying: indirect realism requires a distinct object of awareness interposed between subject and world—and your glass/fog cases don’t supply that, while TV/photos do.

On your view, what is the intermediary object of awareness in ordinary perception, analogous to the TV screen image—something we can in principle re-identify and inspect as the terminus of awareness? If your answer is “the experience itself,” then you owe an account of why experience isn’t just the act’s manner of disclosing the world.

Indeed. When your words do not square with your actions, something has gone astray.

I'd lay the blame at the many misconceptions in "...the mind-independent nature of distal objects".

:up:

My reply would be that your actions in the world contradict this. — Sam26

I've never seen anyone do anythign remote closely to what Michael describes. One who's never left their room, but wears VR could be said to appear that way. This just, again, as always, misses the issue entirely. I suspect it's just not interesting to the likes of yourself, Essa and Banno - but then, why continue contributing?

When Banno claims he has, it makes no sense. He just claims it. Onward we go..

I've never seen anyone do anythign remote close to what Michael describes. — AmadeusD

Actions don't demonstrate confidence in mind-independence, as if you couldn't act without sorting that out first. :lol:

I can't glean anything from this (which, now that I've edited my comment (while you were replying it seems) is ironic).

Could you perhaps try to say something I can respond to, if you're going to?

Could you perhaps try to say something I can respond to, if you're going to? — AmadeusD

I might have been responding to the wrong thing. I thought you were talking about mentally verifying mind-independence. Michael said we can't do that. Someone else commented that our actions demonstrate that we're doing it, which is absurd.

Oh lol, yes. I think you may have responded to the wrong thing. I'm suggesting it does no such thing.

I'm suggesting it does no such thing. — AmadeusD

I agree.

If your answer is “the experience itself,” then you owe an account of why experience isn’t just the act’s manner of disclosing the world. — Esse Quam Videri

You know my answer is experience itself.

Your account seems to hinge on what appears to be a very thin distinction: the experience itself is not an "object of awareness", it is the "perceptual act's manner of disclosing the world". But there is a problem: I agree. I see nothing problematic in that phrasing.

At the same time, the image is the TV's manner of disclosing the "action". And, the TV image is an"object of awareness". There is nothing contradictory in these two descriptions.

Experience is an object of awareness, and perception's manner of disclosing the world. Where is the contradiction?

I'm not saying there is a contradiction, I'm saying that no good reason has been given for treating "experience" itself as the object of perception, whereas there are good reasons for not treating it as such (e.g. it has no criteria of identity, persistence, affordance or counterfactuality).

It seems like the discussion is starting to loop now. Perhaps we've hit bedrock.

I thought you were talking about mentally verifying mind-independence. Michael said we can't do that. — frank

I'd like to clarify that this isn't what I said. I said that my intellect cannot reach out beyond my body to grasp the mind-independent nature of distal objects. Cognition is either reducible to or emerges from neural activity in the brain, and the only information accessible to it is information present in the brain.

I'm not an idealist. I believe that there is a mind-independent world and that the information accessible to me suffices to justify this belief. I just recognise that distal objects and their properties are only causally responsible for and not also constituents of first-person phenomenal experience, and so that this phenomenal experience is an epistemic intermediary.

I'd like to clarify that this isn't what I said. I said that my intellect cannot reach out beyond my body to grasp the mind-independent nature of distal objects. Cognition is either reducible to or emerges from neural activity in the brain, and the only information accessible to it is information present in the brain. — Michael

Cool. A lot of the wording you're using could stand some clarification, like what you mean by intellect and information. There's a sense of information that has to do with variations in the sensory input to your brain. Strictly speaking, your intellect doesn't have access to that. It has access to a model that's been updated based on that information.

The model isn't built out of data coming from the outside world. Kant explains in the Transcendental Aesthetic why it can't be. The basic building blocks of the model aren't things you learn at any point. They're embedded in your cognition. But among the features of the model are things like space and time, and therefore the very idea of information, whether it's sensory data or information in the form of facts, obtaining states of affairs, or however you put it.

One of the posters had stated that your activities indicate that your intellect does reach out beyond your body to grasp the mind-independent nature of distal objects. I guess I don't know what that means or how it relates to what your said.

I'm not an idealist. I believe that there is a mind-independent world and that the information accessible to me suffices to justify this belief. — Michael

Mind-independence is an idea that plays a part in a very abstract realm of pure ideas. It ties into your base-line worldview. This is beyond basic perception and navigation of the world. If your mind was a corporation, the part that thinks about mind-independence is the board of directors. They aren't involved in everyday decisions, and if things that you do directly contradict their adopted outlines, they can't really do anything about it. Plus, they're asleep most of the time. They only wake up when you start getting philosophical. Then they brush their teeth, wash their faces, and act like they know what they're doing.

I'm not an idealist. — Michael

I gotta say….all that follows from what you said there, fits my mindset, and I have no qualms calling myself an idealist. Certain brand thereof perhaps, but still….

Maybe it’s like the mattress ad on tv: they want their product to be known as a “restorative sleep provider”, but it’s just a damn mattress after all.

You still haven't explained why " object of perception" is necessary. Why doesn't, for instance "perceptual intermediary" suffice?

If it is established that qualia

* Is apprehensible
* Is logically prior to apprehension of the object
* Is the sole constituent of experience, such that were it removed from experience, nothing would remain

This seems sufficient to establish qualia as a perceptual intermediary. Why do we need these extra object criteria?

Do the images on the VS meet the criteria identity, persistence, affordance or counterfactuality? Keep in mind, it is not the housing, not the electronics, not the physical pixels that are the intermediary. These are the intermediary's implementation. It is the images themselves that intermediate.

If the images do not meet these criteria, yet they intermediate between the viewer and the subject, then these object criteria are irrelevant.

It seems like the discussion is starting to loop now. Perhaps we've hit bedrock. — Esse Quam Videri

I think some looping is inevitable. I actually don't think we have quite hit bedrock yet. But if you think it is getting repetitive, or you have just had enough, I certainly understand. It's been a hell of a discussion, either way.

You still haven't explained why " object of perception" is necessary. Why doesn't, for instance "perceptual intermediary" suffice? — hypericin

This was something that was discussed at length earlier in the thread. The TLDR is that, on my view, perception is an intrinsically normative and publicly assessable act that is not fully reducible to causal analysis. In order for perception to be publicly assessable, whatever plays the role of "the object of perception" must satisfy criteria of re-identification and intersubjective reference that qualia, as such, cannot satisfy.

If it is established that qualia

* Is apprehensible
* Is logically prior to apprehension of the object
* Is the sole constituent of experience, such that were it removed from experience, nothing would remain — hypericin

I apologize if I have given the impression that I would accept the three of these claims. While I would accept the first with qualifications, I would not accept the other two. Those two claims are basically the whole indirect realist picture. If you assume them, then of course “qualia as intermediary” follows — but that’s exactly what’s at issue.

Do the images on the VS meet the criteria identity, persistence, affordance or counterfactuality? Keep in mind, it is not the housing, not the electronics, not the physical pixels that are the intermediary. These are the intermediary's implementation. It is the images themselves that intermediate.

If the images do not meet these criteria, yet they intermediate between the viewer and the subject, then these object criteria are irrelevant. — hypericin

The images absolutely do have criteria of identity and persistence. They can be re-identified across frames, inspected for artifacts, compared with other feeds, paused, replayed, etc. That’s precisely why they can function as intermediaries. They have a determinate structure independent of the distal apple.

If you deny that the VS image has any such identity conditions, then it’s hard to see what could even count as “the same image” across time, and the analogy stops doing the work you want it to do.

So yes: I insist on “object-like” criteria because without them “intermediary” becomes too thin to do the necessary philosophical work. “Apprehensible” is not enough; what matters is whether awareness terminates in something that can be specified and tracked as distinct from the distal object. That’s what happens in VS. It’s not what happens in ordinary perception.

I think some looping is inevitable. I actually don't think we have quite hit bedrock yet. But if you think it is getting repetitive, or you have just had enough, I certainly understand. It's been a hell of a discussion, either way. — hypericin

After 42 pages I think I'm getting a little burnt out on the topic, but I agree it's been a great discussion.