The important part: their cause, which you explicitly omit:Which part of receptor (eye) in combination with signal interpreter (in this case the cerebrum) did I fail to clarify? — Barry Etheridge
"You don't see light. You respond to an electrical signal transmitted from a receptor in your eye which obviously isn't light at all." — Barry Etheridge
You wish. But to also revolve around other things wont make 'The earth revolves around the sun' false. — jkop
It cannot be based on studies of the brain because that is only possible via the very perception that he claims does not show things to be anything like what "they really are". — John
Without photons your visual cortex "operates" only hallucinations, in which nothing is seen. That's why they are called 'hallucinations'.We do of course know that the visual cortex can and does operate without photons because we have visual dreams and hallucinations. — Barry Etheridge
And how could you see that it has a different construction than what we actually see? Divine vision? Or is it somehow implied by the trivial fact that we sometimes mistake the things we see for something else?. .what we see is a construct bearing little or no resemblance to what is actually sending photons toward us. — Barry Etheridge
Sounds more like idealism or phenomenalism or some other anti-realism. — Michael
Idealism (subjective at least) proposes that reality is exhaustively constituted by ideas. I haven't said that, nor does anything I have said entail that. So my position is certainly not subjective idealism; although it's not too far from objective or absolute idealism. But that position is indistinguishable from realism.
And my position is not phenomenalism because i allow for real causation and conditions for the possibility of experience that are not themselves directly experienced.
As to anti-realism; I don't think that is even a coherently definable position; other than being a negatively reactive rejection of what all realists are (incorrectly) purported to be necessarily claiming. — John
So my position is certainly not subjective idealism; although it's not too far from objective or absolute idealism. But that position is indistinguishable from realism. — John
The brain does not fabricate a rectangular picture of an object explained away as invisible. — jkop
Except that is exactly what happens in one of the most famous optical illusions. We simply do not see an exact map of the photons received at the retina. — Barry Etheridge
Everything we perceive is filtered through subjectivity. So, no matter how objective we want to become, there will always remain a remnant of subjectivity — saw038
Or in other words, you're not at all a realist in the conventional sense of that term.There is no reality apart from what we perceive and think about what we perceive. — John
Except that is exactly what happens in one of the most famous optical illusions. We simply do not see an exact map of the photons received at the retina. . . . — Barry Etheridge
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