How to reconcile the biology of sense organs with our sensory perceptions?

dukkha

They appear completely incompatible to me.

Take vision for example. My visual perception feels as if I am focusing my eyes upon objects which exist 'out there' in the world around me. There's a gaze coming from my eyes, almost like an arrow shooting out at objects in the world. Sometimes it even feels like I look through my eyes, as if myself (as a cogito) is located a couple inches behind my nose, in my brain, and it looks through my eyes at the world around me. Which is why naive realism seems intuitive. We are presented with a world around our bodies, our body itself appearing to be merely another object within this world - although it's an object possessing a subjectivity. The properties which the objects posses, such as colour, shape, smell, sound, appear to have nothing to do with my perceptual systems. It's as if objects exists exactly how they are perceived by me, including my own body. The red of my shoes exists as part of the shoe, out there separate from myself, my brain, and my visual sensory system. So it's as if all my physiological visual system (my eyes, optic cord, visual cortex) does, is allow the world to be seen. The world would exist in exactly the same way, in the absence of my visual system. The visual system is just a mechanism or tool which allows me to view what is out there. I think of it as my eyes being 'windows upon the world.' At least, this is how our visual perceptions feel.

However, when we study the physiology of the visual system, its function appears completely contradictory to our experience of seeing, so much so that it seems (to me at least) almost impossible to reconcile.

When we practice science and study the human eye, we don't find anything at all which would support a gaze travelling from our eyes into the world around us. All the eye does, is the lens focuses lightwaves upon the retina, which is an arrangement of cells whose function is to fire off neuronal impulses when lightwaves reach the cell. This impulse just travels through the optic cord into the brain. The point here is that, we observe no physiological means by which a gaze could then go back out into the world around us. The visual system, physiologically is just an incoming process. Light is detected by retinal cells, which respond by sending neuronal impulses into the brain. There's no outgoing process here. And yet what we visually perceive is a world around us.

So what we have here is two seemingly contradictory things. We look out at the world around us. Yet the means by which we look seems to not support this at all. There's no physiological means by which one could look from (or through) our eyes at the world, at least none which we can currently scientifically observe.

It's the same with sound perception. Scientifically, the theory is that there are sound waves in the world around us, which travel into the ear canal and vibrate the ear drum. The vibrations travel through the three tiny bones which put pressure upon the cochlea. Within the cochlea are little hairs which generate nerve impulses in response to the changing pressure within the cochleal liquid. These nerve impulses travel along the auditory nerve and into the brain. Again the point here is that there is no outgoing process here. It's just sound waves travel into the ear, and then nerve impulses travel into the brain. Like the eye, the ear is just a mechanism which converts a physical stimuli into nerve impulses.

And yet, our actual perception of hearing is completely contradictory to this. We perceive sounds as being located in the world around us. For instance, the music coming from my laptop right now is being perceived to be located where the speakers are. The music is perceived to be located out there in the laptop. But, by what physiological means am I perceiving this sound out there? The nerve impulses come through the auditory nerve into the brain, and then through some magic I perceive the sound which is way out there in the world outside the brain. Or the sound of a car engine is located where the engine is. It appears as if the sound is out there in the world, and we merely perceive what is already there. If you leave the house but forget to turn off the television, what we think is that the television is making a noise within the house and we have to turn it off, even though we can't hear the noise. We perceive sounds as if they exist out there in the world.

The way in which we actually perceive things seems completely unsupported by the physiology of our sensory organs. How is it that all the auditory system seems to do is convert sound waves into nerve impulses, and yet what we perceive is the sound out there in the world?

What to make of this? I anticipate that somebody might respond that the nerve impulses sent from the sensory organs are turned into a perception within the brain. As in, the retina sends off nerve impulses into the brain, and then a visual perception is generated by the brain. The problem here though is, if this visual perception is actually located within a brain (your perceived visual field is located within a brain), then you must commit to the position that your entire body itself (and the world around it, and the people you interact with) are already within a brain. What I mean is that if you say your perceived visual field is located within a brain, then your body, being perceived within this visual field, must therefore itself already be within a brain (visual perceptions are within brains). You're therefore a homunculus, your entire existence essentially, is an onboard model of the external world, existing entirely within a brain. This is a pretty crazy idea. Of course, it being a very bizarre theory doesn't mean it's incorrect, but there's also massive epistemic problems with this position. From the position of the onboard homonculus (your position), how is it that you could possibly have any knowledge of anything outside the model? The brain which is supposedly generating your perceptions/experience transcends entirely what you can access, so how do you even know it's there? And also, this position is extremely solipsistic. Thomas Metzinger refers to this isolation as the "ego tunnel", whereupon one is entirely cut off from other minds, each stuck in their own private worlds.

However, you might say that the brain generates a perception, but this perception isn't located within the brain, it's out there in the world. As if the brain generates a mind which superimposes itself upon things in the world around it. Your visual field being like a blanket, spread over the objects in the world around you. But I struggle to see how this could be possible. It's certainly not supported by any of our scientific observations. How could the brain generate something internally which is not located internally?

An idea I've been toying with however, which does away with this contradiction between our physiology and our perceptions, is that our biological sensory systems have no casual relationship with our perceptions whatsoever. So by that I mean, the eye, the optic nerve, the visual cortex - none of these in any way cause or generate our visual perceptions. They are correlated, sure, where if you take out one of your eyes you lose part of your visual field and some depth perception, but this is merely a correlation, and not that the missing eye actually played a causal role in creating the part of your visual perception which is now missing. Note, I am not advocating this position it's just a theory.

Another thing to consider is that our knowledge of our sensory organs/systems comes about through observation, which complicates the whole thing greatly. We know about eyes, retinas, brains, through visually perceiving them. Sense observation is the foundation of science. So maybe the problem here is that we can't sense our sense organs correctly? Maybe our visual system cannot generate an accurate visual perception of itself. Here the perception of your visual system (eyes, etc), would itself be created by your physiological visual system, but yet your physiological visual system is only known about through visual perception. So here, it's as if your visual system is creating it's own physiological existence.

Anyway, what do you think? What do you make of the seeming contradiction between the physiology of our sensory systems, and our sensory perceptions?

Wayfarer

we don't find anything at all which would support a gaze travelling from our eyes into the world around us. — dukkha

Again the point here is that there is no outgoing process here. It's just sound waves travel into the ear, and then nerve impulses travel into the brain — dukkha

I don't think that it has ever been suggested that a 'gaze travels' or that anything 'travels out' from the ear to the source of sound. So why would the fact that this doesn't happen constitute a problem?

I struggle to see how this could be possible. It's certainly not supported by any of our scientific observations. — dukkha

Nor by sound reasoning in this case.

BC

I don't think that it has ever been suggested that a 'gaze travels' or that anything 'travels out' from the ear to the source of sound. So why would the fact that this doesn't happen constitute a problem? — Wayfarer

It seems to me that I read (once upon a time) a statement that the ancients thought that vision was caused by something like a beam of light from the eye. (Why they didn't think it odd that they didn't see a beam in the dark, like a spotlight, don't know. Inadequate theory, I suppose.)

BC

What do you make of the seeming contradiction between the physiology of our sensory systems, and our sensory perceptions? — dukkha

Sensory systems evolved, and brains evolved in tandem. Primitive systems of analyzing signals from eyes, ears, noses, etc. became more complicated, but retained some of the earlier features. They were retained because they worked well enough to keep the organism out of harms way, and supplied with food, and hitched up with a mate.

So, your retinal signals are not like a digital picture. Rather, different systems in the brain pick up different features, like... horizontal edges, vertical edges, flat planes, curving edges, texture, color, patterns, etc. Additional systems down stream assemble edges, planes, textures, colors, and patterns into a figure. The brain has learned what figures are possible from hard-won trial and error experience.

When things go haywire in the brain (strokes, for instance) parts of the visual system may be lost, and depending on what is lost, the familiar figures can no longer be assembled. Imagine seeing without vertical edges, for instance.

Whether the images that our brains form are accurate representations of the world outside our skulls, I don't know. I find it much easier to assume that they are, then to suppose they might be quite different than the out-of-skull world. The system works--not always, but mostly.

Were we frogs, our vision system would function without internal interference. Being the overly bright apes that we are, our own brains (minds) screw around with perception. We project images onto our perceptions. Sometimes this is pleasant, sometimes it is hair-raising. We don't see what we don't believe is there, or we start seeing things that are not there.

Streetlight

These are awesome questions, but there's alot of presuppositions behind them need to be unpacked, and in some cases, perhaps reworked altogether. As a first clue to where things might be badly put, recall that our sensory world is always - if the science is right - 'cross-modal'. That is, we can't separate out sight, smell, touch, movement and hearing and treat them on their own terms without doing violence to the phenomenology of perception. Perception always occurs in an integrated 'perceptual field' in which all our senses are brought to bear on a particular 'scene'. One way to think about this is to turn around the usual intuition that our senses are individual and 'additive' (perception = sight + smell + movement, etc). Rather, one begins with an integrated perceptual field from which the individual senses can be progressively distinguished (to close one's eyes is to 'subtract' sight from a more originary sensory plenum).

The reason for this is that we are essentially meaning-seeking beings (or rather, 'significance seeking beings'). We perceive not in order to simply see, hear and touch objects, sounds and textures (this is a very abstract way to think about things, despite it being intuitive), but in order to negotiate an environment around which to move, to avoid threats and danger, cultivate safety and food, respond to sadness or joy. In others words we 'see' meanings no less than we see 'things'. It is actaully a relatively poor and impoverished phenomenology to say that we simply see things extended in space that are colored, textured, etc. The senses work instead to give us clues regarding how to 'live', in the most mundane sense of the term: how slowly should I walk across this slippery surface (which is glistening with the sheen and transparency of water)? How should I comport my body to walk this narrow ledge? All perception is interrogative, it has an impetus.

To the degree that we are biological beings, our senses have evolved for our survival (although this does not mean that they are only used for survival), and it's in this context that we must approach perception. And it's in this sense that to 'perceive' is in a large measure to seek out the significance of one's environment, rather than to just see and feel a world of objects laid out in space. So it's not quite right to think about our 'biological sensory organs' in isolation from a integrated field of living as such; nerve optics and so on are the biological mechanisms by which perception takes place, but they do not, on their own, explain perception, an account of which would need to take into account the whole developmental history of a living being in an environment in which it lives. Perception works in the service of significance, not in the service of perceiving 'things'.

Another way to approach this is to think not in terms of 'lines' where (say) vision shoots out into the world or vice versa, but in terms of a perpetual circuit in which both body and world are implicated in with respect to a life as it is lived. Perception is not a matter of registering static images on a silver plate that is the brain, it is a matter of living, of a dynamism in which significance and movement are primary to it's understanding. We do not 'model' the world 'in the brain'; we respond to it by being in it, moving through it, reacting to the significances that it presents to us.

And the cool thing is that this is what the science shows. If you take new born kittens with perfectly working eyes (biologically), but do not give them the chance to move around their environment (so as to integrate movement and the significance of what they see), they remain effectively blind.

dukkha

I don't think that it has ever been suggested that a 'gaze travels' or that anything 'travels out' from the ear to the source of sound. So why would the fact that this doesn't happen constitute a problem? — Wayfarer

We hear the sounds in the world around us. The lawnmower is making a loud noise. When I perceive a noise, I perceive it to be located at the source of the noise and not say located in my ear. We say "what is that noise?" and search in the world around us to find the noise. The sound of the telephone ring, is perceived to be located at the telephone. Even though physiologically all that's detect is a change in the pressure in the cochlea. How can I perceive the sound to be where the telephone is? By what physiological means does this happen, when all the auditory system does is send neuronal impulses into the brain in response to changes in pressure in the cochlea (caused by sound waves vibrating the ear drum).

As in, how is that we somehow access the sounds in the world around us, when it does not appear, at least from our current observations of the auditory system, that there is any means by which this could happen?

Wayfarer

Even though physiologically all that's detect is a change in the pressure in the cochlea. How can I perceive the sound to be where the telephone is? i — dukkha

This question is about cognitive science. It has to do with stereoscopic sound resolution, i.e. your ears are several inches apart, your brain triangulates the sound to provide an approximation. It's not that good in h. sapiens, but in owls and bats, it's phenomenal - enables owls to pinpoint the heartbeat of a field mouse from hundreds of meters away, and bats to catch mosquitoes on the wing.

If you take new born kittens with perfectly working eyes (biologically), but do not give them the chance to move around their environment (so as to integrate movement and the significance of what they see), they remain effectively blind. — StreetlightX

Right! I heard about an experiment wihere newborn kittens were raised in an environment of mainly horizontal objects for a few weeks. When they were introducted into an environment with vertical barriers, they would collide with them, at least until they started to recognise 'vertical'.

But it's still a matter for cognitive science rather than philosophy as such.

Streetlight

Yeah, its one of my favourite scientific experiments: the perceptual world is a significant world. This was basically the founding insight of phenomenology (but of course perception does not exhaust our implication with the world...). But I don't see any reason to draw a line of opposition between cognitive science and philosophy. To treat them as somehow mutually exclusive is an apologia for ignorance at best, a wilful impoverishment of both at worst.

Terrapin Station

However, when we study the physiology of the visual system, its function appears completely contradictory to our experience of seeing, — dukkha

I know I'm like a broken record, but it's a point worth repeating: you have to study the physiology of perceptual faculties via perception. If perception can't provide accurate information about the external world, then it can't provide accurate information about what our perceptual faculties are like/how they function. That completely undermines a claim (based on such research) that the world can't be as our perceptions have it.

As soon as you claim that we can scientifically study our perceptual faculties and know what they're like, you're claiming that our perceptions can provide accurate information about external-to-our-minds phenomena.

Terrapin Station

if this visual perception is actually located within a brain (your perceived visual field is located within a brain), then you must commit to the position that your entire body itself (and the world around it, and the people you interact with) are already within a brain. — dukkha

Perception doesn't exhaust the inventory of the world. It doesn't exhaust the inventory of your body either. Lots of things, processes, etc. exist other than perception.

Metaphysician Undercover

It seems to me that I read (once upon a time) a statement that the ancients thought that vision was caused by something like a beam of light from the eye. — Bitter Crank

The theory is described well in Plato's Theaetetus, if I remember correctly. At that time in history, the nature of light, and how we see, was not at all understood. The theory is described as a very awe inspiring, speculative theory, held by those high in science, which may or may not be true. I consider it similar to a bat's radar, but I think that the ray coming from the eye is supposed to meet with a ray coming from the object, and bounce back, this would account for why we can't see in the dark.

Take vision for example. My visual perception feels as if I am focusing my eyes upon objects which exist 'out there' in the world around me. — dukkha

I consider that we project ourselves into the world, and this is where intention and attention unite. The desire to know what is going on at a particular point "out there", causes one to project oneself to that particular point, in an attempt to determine the activity there, in the case of sound, or just to determine what is there, in the case of sight.

This can be understood even better with respect to the temporal aspect of reality, than it can with the spatial aspect. We live at the present, but we continuously project ourselves to points in the past, in our efforts of remembering, and we project ourselves to points in the future in our efforts of predicting. It seems like what we do is abstract from our experience of presence, and project this to an artificial, created, presence at a past time, or at a future time. We don't actually send our minds to these different times, just like we don't actually send our senses to these different places, though in some ways it appears like we do.

Metaphysician Undercover

This question is about cognitive science. It has to do with stereoscopic sound resolution, i.e. your ears are several inches apart, your brain triangulates the sound to provide an approximation. It's not that good in h. sapiens, but in owls and bats, it's phenomenal - enables owls to pinpoint the heartbeat of a field mouse from hundreds of meters away, and bats to catch mosquitoes on the wing. — Wayfarer

This capacity in birds is utterly amazing; so much so, that I think there must be more to it than simple triangulation. Bird watchers have cell-phone apps with bird calls. When you locate a bird by hearing it, or seeing it flitting around in the trees, you can play the call. The bird will instantaneously fly precisely to the source of that sound. As you say, it's phenomenal. I asked a bird watcher, how do you think the bird can do this. He said it has good ears.

dukkha

These are awesome questions, but there's alot of presuppositions behind them need to be unpacked, and in some cases, perhaps reworked altogether. As a first clue to where things might be badly put, recall that our sensory world is always - if the science is right - 'cross-modal'. That is, we can't separate out sight, smell, touch, movement and hearing and treat them on their own terms without doing violence to the phenomenology of perception. Perception always occurs in an integrated 'perceptual field' in which all our senses are brought to bear on a particular 'scene'. One way to think about this is to turn around the usual intuition that our senses are individual and 'additive' (perception = sight + smell + movement, etc). Rather, one begins with an integrated perceptual field from which the individual senses can be progressively distinguished (to close one's eyes is to 'subtract' sight from a more originary sensory plenum). — StreetlightX

Reminds me of how when you watch the news on TV, the voice of the person talking appears to be coming from their mouth, yet intellectually we can step back and say that the voice is actually coming from the speakers and it's an illusion that the weatherman is speaking. We can separate the image on the screen from the sound intellectually, but our normal perception is of the weatherman speaking.

So it's not quite right to think about our 'biological sensory organs' in isolation from a integrated field of living as such; nerve optics and so on are the biological mechanisms by which perception takes place, but they do not, on their own, explain perception, an account of which would need to take into account the whole developmental history of a living being in an environment in which it lives. Perception works in the service of significance, not in the service of perceiving 'things'. — StreetlightX

This is a good point. You can imagine two identical twins, born with the same 'biological mechanisms' but one's abandoned and raised by wolves and the other raised by his parents in a society, with language, education, etc. Their perceptions would differ greatly. As an example, the normal kid would perceive a jacket as something to wear for warmth, protection, and modesty - or even to be fashionable, or to attract a girlfriend. Whereas wolfboy, well I don't even know how he'd perceive it - certainly not as something to impress the ladies, and almost certainly not even as something to be worn. I can imagine he might perceive it as something which might be edible, or something to rip up and destroy, as dogs are prone to do.

Another way to approach this is to think not in terms of 'lines' where (say) vision shoots out into the world or vice versa, but in terms of a perpetual circuit in which both body and world are implicated in with respect to a life as it is lived. Perception is not a matter of registering static images on a silver plate that is the brain, it is a matter of living, of a dynamism in which significance and movement are primary to it's understanding.We do not 'model' the world 'in the brain'; we respond to it by being in it, moving through it, reacting to the significances that it presents to us. — StreetlightX

I have difficulty understanding what this actually means though. So the brain doesn't produce a miniature model of how the world is, sure. But still, what seems to be entailed by this understanding is that the brain does produce, internally, an 'integrated perceptual field'. The point being that the our bodies and the world around us is produced by a brain. Do you agree?

So, the 'significance's presented to us' are contingent upon our individual history. If my history was different, then the world around me would be perceived differently. But the world does not actually itself change depending on my specific history. So how to account for this? You'd have to say there's a single world, containing brains, and each brain produces specific 'perceptual fields' depending on that persons (or animals) history. As an example, I'm seeing a pair of shoes, as a pair of shoes (something to wear on feet, etc). But, say I was born in some strange culture with no shoes, my perception would be a lot different. But, we wouldn't to say here that in my alternative timeline the thing in the world (which I in this timeline see as shoes) has actually changed. The shoes are not 'in-itself' things to be worn on feet. That's just my interpretation of them. As in, how the world exists 'in-itself' is not dependent on my specific history. So, isn't some sort of indirect realism entailed here? Otherwise you'd have two people directly seeing the shoes in two completely different ways. How would this work?

If so, you're still in this weird position of there being two worlds. Our individual perceptual worlds produced by brains, and the wider singular world which our brains exist within. And with this position comes all these epistemic problems, and concerns about solipsism.

Or you could say that everyone with the same 'biological mechanisms' perceives the very same object. As in, it's the actual object in the external world which we see in our visual field. But depending on our history, our brains add particular meanings to the objects. You also could say all the possible meanings and 'significance's' exist out in the external world and it just depends on someone's history which of those the person perceives.

The reason for this is that we are essentially meaning-seeking beings (or rather, 'significance seeking beings'). We perceive not in order to simply see, hear and touch objects, sounds and textures (this is a very abstract way to think about things, despite it being intuitive), but in order to negotiate an environment around which to move, to avoid threats and danger, cultivate safety and food, respond to sadness or joy. In others words we 'see' meanings no less than we see 'things' — StreetlightX

Do you think that there's a real issue for the science of perception? Because we come to know about our sensory organs, and our bodies through perception. But, if 'the senses work instead to give us clues regarding how to live' then necessarily what we are perceiving is not the sensory organs/bodies which are 'prior' to the perceptions they produce. So the sensory organs and body work together to produce a sensory field of meanings and signficance, but because the bodies and sensory organs which we know about are within this very sensory field, we can't be seeing the actual 'biological mechanisms' which produced this sensory field. Again you're in this position where these two bodies. The meaningful perceived body, and whatever it is that has produced this perception - which we can't access. Science can only study the 'meaningful body'.

We do not 'model' the world 'in the brain'; we respond to it by being in it, moving through it, reacting to the significances that it presents to us. —

What do you actually mean by this? Is the world our (perceived) bodies move through, produced by a brain/sensory organs?

Janus

Is the world our (perceived) bodies move through, produced by a brain/sensory organs? — dukkha

The brain is just one of the perceptible items in the chain of interaction that results in perception. Thinking, for simplicity's sake, just of visual perceptions this chain involves the objects that are perceived, the light that is reflected from the objects, the eye, the retina, the optic nerve, the visual cortex, and the rest of the brain/body that supports the organs of sense. So it is probably most accurate to say that the world produces reflections (perceptions) of itself via living creatures that are suitably equipped.

Punshhh

If a scientist examines a concert hall, say the Albert Hall, during a concert. They might come away with a map of the auditorium, the sheets of music, descriptions of the instruments. Recordings and vibrational readings in different places in the room. The anthropology of the people in the room. Etc etc.

However they would probably be lacking in data to convey the experience of being a member of the audience. So there is a dimension of personal experience, which is personal, within people and people are not well understood by science.

unenlightened

I love how all the deep philosophical problems are laid out Janet and John, first reader. "Spot sees the ball." It is called naive to suggest that Spot does actually see the ball, because we philosophers somehow know, and if we don't them scientists will tell us, that the ball is out there, and over there, and couldn't fit in Spot's eye anyway. So Spot doesn't 'really' see the ball.

The more detailed the analysis of how one sees, with photons, receptors, neural pathways, learned interpretation, and so on, the more clear it becomes that one does not see what one seems to see. It is as if one takes a watch apart to find out how it keeps time, and then presents the little pile of cogs and springs to demonstrate that it it does not.

There are only three terms: 'Spot', 'the ball' and 'sees'. Let us say that everything contained in the surface comprising Spot's furry skin and the surface of his eye is Spot, ignoring for the moment the undigested dinner, doggy breath,and gut bacteria. So 'Spot' includes his eyes the lenses and receptors, his learned interpretations, neurones and so on.

I'll pretend we've all seen the ball and know what it is.

And then there is 'sees' which is the sum of processes that make up the relational interaction.

If it is kept in mind that the analysis does not in fact dismantle Spot, the ball, or seeing, and that seeing is not consuming, touching, knowing everything about, or whatever, then I think it will turn out that when Spot sees the ball, it is the case that Spot sees the ball, and not interpreted light or the workings of his doggy brain.

Mongrel

Two things went through my mind while reading the OP:

1. It's something I experience from time to time at work (intensive care). A person appears to be staring at me and it turns out they aren't. It's in that split second that I become aware that their eyes aren't tracking that I realize the patient isn't "in there" as we say.

2. Heidegger's OWA where he talks about drawing sensory information in while the concept of the thing is pushed out into the world. Dynamic tension between the two.

People who are bound up in morality for whatever reason are the ones who can't deny the person who's "in there." Anybody can take a morality-break.. it just means looking at the world amorally.. realizing the forest fire isn't really evil.. that sort of thing. Then there are people who really fundamentally don't understand what morality is. There's something broken in their gourds. Oddly, people like that are sometimes the most self-righteous. Weird.

Streetlight

The shoes are not 'in-itself' things to be worn on feet. That's just my interpretation of them. As in, how the world exists 'in-itself' is not dependent on my specific history. So, isn't some sort of indirect realism entailed here? Otherwise you'd have two people directly seeing the shoes in two completely different ways. How would this work? — dukkha

One needs to be very, very careful to distinguish between perception and existence. To say that the world looks or feels or smells the way it does because of one's lived experience is not the same as saying that it exists because of that experience. Perception might well be just a limited, local process that happens for some (living) beings in a vast universe which is otherwise indifferent to perception: things don't necessarily 'really look like' or 'really smell like' anything at all. The smell and appearance of things might be relative to beings for whom smelling and looking is an issue at all (who have evolved the capacity to engage the world in terms of smell, in terms of sight, in terms of touch) outside of which smelling, appearance and texture are meaningless. One imagines that there are other modes of engagement with the world that have nothing at all to do with perception, or nothing to do with (human) perception, as with insects who can 'see' the ultra-violet spectrum of light.

One way to think about this is that there is no 'in-itself' of the world, not because 'everything is relative to perception' (the idealist thesis), but because perception itself is a relative phenomenon. We - living beings - just so happen to be the kind of beings who have developed a capacity called perception, which is one among a myriad of ways with engaging and interacting with the world around us. To say this is not to accede to any kind of idealism, but to acknowledge a kind of humbleness with respect to humanity. We have developed - evolutionarily - a manner of engaging in the universe (called 'perception'), which in no way exhausts the many, myriad, and uncountable manners in which it could be otherwise engaged with. If it is true that we do not perceive the world 'in-itself', this is not because there 'really is' a way in which the world ought to be perceived, but because perception as such, is a limited way of engaging with the world to begin with .

(This by the way is how to understand Kant's distinction between 'discursive' and 'intellectual' intuition: Kant's theory of the in-itself has nothing to do with the vulgar idea that there is a world that is 'beyond' perception in the sense that it has perceptual qualities that we cannot know. Rather, the in-itself is aperceptual, it has qualities which have nothing to do with perception, and that is why it will remain a 'thing-in-itself'. It is not that there are parts of the world that are 'beyond knowledge', as if a superior, non-human, or divine knowledge could grasp it, but that the very idea of knowledge is no longer applicable to certain aspects of the world, that is is a simple 'category error' to say we can know such and such beyond our experience of it. This is why Kant remained an empirical realist no less than he was a 'transcendental idealist').

Real Gone Cat

Perhaps I have misread the OP (I am rather tired), or perhaps it is because I come from a science background and not a philosophy one, but I must say I am bewildered by this. Is it everyone's experience that eye-beams shoot from your eyes (and ear-beams from your ears) when you look at things? Like the character Cyclops in the Marvel comics? Is this some esoteric philosophy terminology that I have yet to run across? I am at a loss.

Marchesk

This by the way is how to understand Kant's distinction between 'discursive' and 'intellectual' intuition: Kant's theory of the in-itself has nothing to do with the vulgar idea that there is a world that is 'beyond' perception in the sense that it has perceptual qualities that we cannot know. Rather, the in-itself is aperceptual, it has qualities which have nothing to do with perception, and that is why it will remain a 'thing-in-itself'. It is not that there are parts of the world that are 'beyond knowledge', as if a superior, non-human, or divine knowledge could grasp it, but that the very idea of knowledge is no longer applicable to certain aspects of the world, that is is a simple 'category error' to say we can know such and such beyond our experience of it. This is why Kant remained an empirical realist no less than he was a 'transcendental idealist'). — StreetlightX

That's very interesting, but I have a hard time reconciling it with ontological considerations. So if I adopt scientific realism, and I'm wondering about the nature of black holes, then is there something about black holes which can't be known? That we can't say at all what black holes are, independent of our astronomical experiences?

Such that advances in theoretical physics about the interior of black holes will only ever be about black holes in relation to how we humans perceive and think about the world? That there is something apart from that which is what black holes are, but can't be understood by us, or even aliens (based on how the perceive and think), or our machine overlords in the future?

Is the nature of black holes inherently unknowable?

Real Gone Cat

I have just re-read the OP, and this is the most anti-science thing I have ever read. I know philosophy isn't enamored of science, but this is like someone raised by wolves making up their own ideas of how the human body (and world) works. I hate to be so negative, but this is bizarre. And everyone responding seems to be nodding their heads, going, "Yup. Eye-beams."

What am I missing?

Mongrel

It is not that there are parts of the world that are 'beyond knowledge', as if a superior, non-human, or divine knowledge could grasp it, but that the very idea of knowledge is no longer applicable to certain aspects of the world, that is is a simple 'category error' to say we can know such and such beyond our experience of it. This is why Kant remained an empirical realist no less than he was a 'transcendental idealist'). — StreetlightX

You're saying there's no non-metaphoric knowledge. Knowledge is fundamentally metaphoric. Thing-in-itself is a logical entity that just falls out of any analysis of perception. We represent and we do it pervasively and profoundly... time, space, the very concept of nature.. all apriori.

Empirical realist? Yes. There is a structure to the world and knowledge of that structure is available to us.. partly empirically, partly innately.

Metaphysician Undercover

I have just re-read the OP, and this is the most anti-science thing I have ever read. I know philosophy isn't enamored of science, but this is like someone raised by wolves making up their own ideas of how the human body (and world) works. I hate to be so negative, but this is bizarre. And everyone responding seems to be nodding their heads, going, "Yup. Eye-beams."

What am I missing? — Real Gone Cat

Welcome to the world of philosophy.

Wayfarer

↪Real Gone Cat

You're not missing anything, that was my reaction also.

Streetlight

That's very interesting, but I have a hard time reconciling it with ontological considerations. So if I adopt scientific realism, and I'm wondering about the nature of black holes, then is there something about black holes which can't be known? That we can't say at all what black holes are, independent of our astronomical experiences?

Such that advances in theoretical physics about the interior of black holes will only ever be about black holes in relation to how we humans perceive and think about the world? That there is something apart from that which is what black holes are, but can't be understood by us, or even aliens (based on how the perceive and think), or our machine overlords in the future?

Is the nature of black holes inherently unknowable? — Marchesk

Eh, I got ahead of myself in talking about knowledge here. The thing to note is that perception is one manner - and definitely not the only manner - in which we engage with the world. The case of black holes is exemplary in this regard: we predicted them before we had any evidence of them, and the evidence we do have is 'indirect' (gravitational lensing), such that we can't perceive them 'directly'. Perception is clearly at stake here only in a minor way. So to use some Kantian terminology, perception and knowledge belong to two different 'faculties', and in truth, I moved too quickly in talking about knowledge previously. I ought to have stuck more closely with the theme of perception here.

The point of invoking Kant should have been to affirm his idea that not everything is available to perception, not because there are perceptual qualities beyond our ken (although there are), but that the very idea of perceptual qualities may only make sense to beings who can perceive to begin with at all. Recall that what Kant designates as the noumenon is simply "a thing which is not to be thought as object of the senses", and furthermore that "we cannot assert of sensibility that it is the sole possible kind of intuition.... The concept of a noumenon is thus a merely limiting concept, the function of which is to curb the pretensions of sensibility; and it is therefore only of negative employment... It is bound up with the limitation of sensibility, though it cannot affirm anything positive beyond the field of sensibility." (CPR, B310).

The implication - that I read here anyway - is that if sensibility is cannot be 'the sole possible kind of intuition', there can in fact be other - perhaps non-human - kinds of intuition, giving rise to other forms of knowledge, perhaps specific to beings who have evolved in a different way than us. Alternatively, it may be the case that there as aspects of the world which simply have nothing to do with forms of sensibility at all, and that the very idea of sensibility is relative to certain kinds of beings in the first place.

I read Kant then as something of a naturalist, for whom the whole machinery of the Critiques simply bear upon humans, insofar as we are one particular kind of being in a universe in which we may or may not have come into being at all. This is why says that he simply speaks from 'the human standpoint' (CPR, B42). Anyway, I don't want to make this into an exegesis of Kant, but simply use him to tackle what @dukkha referred to as the problem of 'competing world' (in-itself/for-us). I think Kant muddles up the issue by using this latter terminology (especially the 'thing-in-itself'), but if you take seriously what he says about sensibility in particular, you can properly sort out many of the otherwise weird oscillations between idealism and realism in Kant.

dukkha

(This by the way is how to understand Kant's distinction between 'discursive' and 'intellectual' intuition: Kant's theory of the in-itself has nothing to do with the vulgar idea that there is a world that is 'beyond' perception in the sense that it has perceptual qualities that we cannot know. Rather, the in-itself is aperceptual, it has qualities which have nothing to do with perception, and that is why it will remain a 'thing-in-itself'. It is not that there are parts of the world that are 'beyond knowledge', as if a superior, non-human, or divine knowledge could grasp it, but that the very idea of knowledge is no longer applicable to certain aspects of the world, that is is a simple 'category error' to say we can know such and such beyond our experience of it. This is why Kant remained an empirical realist no less than he was a 'transcendental idealist'). — StreetlightX

Then doesn't this do away with the notion of anything causing our perceptions altogether?

What's causing our perceptions is a 'thing-in-itself' (if it's perceptual, then our sense organs are literally the cause of their own existence), but if knowledge doesn't apply to 'things-in-themselves', then it makes no sense to say they cause our perceptions. So the whole notion of perception having some cause dissolves.

Metaphysician Undercover

What's causing our perceptions is a 'thing-in-itself' (if it's perceptual, then our sense organs are literally the cause of their own existence), but if knowledge doesn't apply to 'things-in-themselves', then it makes no sense to say they cause our perceptions. So the whole notion of perception having some cause dissolves. — dukkha

Yes, the living being causes the existence of the sense organs, and sense organs cause the perception. So the perception has a "cause", to this extent, it is caused by the living being. It is really not appropriate to say that the thing-in-itself causes the perception. When you realize this, then you can notice a disjoint between the perception and the assumed, thing perceived. It is the way that you reconcile this difference which forms the basis of your epistemology.

jkop

I suppose you could describe the intentionality of perception as a "gaze" which goes out from your body towards the object that you see.

Unlike electromagnetic radiation which goes towards your body so that your sense organs can interact with it the sensing is characterized by an outwards going direction as in identifying what causes a sensed change in the frequencies of the radiation: for example, the presence of a radiation-reflecting object in your visual field. The sensing is about that object, so you see the object, e.g. a cat. Unless you're hallucinating the present cat is the cause of sensing/seeing a cat.

Metaphysician Undercover

Unless you're hallucinating the present cat is the cause of sensing/seeing a cat. — jkop

Try this jkop. Say "I am sensing". This means that the subject "I" is engaged in the activity of sensing. This act produces sensation, perhaps the seeing of a cat. How do you conclude that the cat causes that sensation? Isn't it clear to you, that the subject, "I", is engaged in the activity of sensing, and this activity of sensing has caused the sensation, which is the seeing of a cat? How do you misconstrue this such that the cat is understood as the cause of the sensation?

jkop

This act produces sensation, perhaps the seeing of a cat. — Metaphysician Undercover

The act is the sensation/seeing, the act cannot produce the cat that you see, only its presence in your visual field can.

dukkha

Lets say physiological sense organs/nervous systems give rise/cause this experience that you are presently undergoing.

But the problem here is that our physiological sense organs are only known about through perception. So, your eyes and brain are causing your visual perception of seeing this screen. But what am I actually referring to here with "eyes" and "brain"? I say that what my physiological eye is, to me, is experiential. I can touch it, I feel myself moving it, I see it in the mirror, and I read and learn about it's function. Nothing about my understanding, and conception of my physiological eye is anything which transcends my experience. And yet this is precisely what the physiological eye must be in order it to be causing my visual perceptions. Otherwise you are in the situation where the cause is the effect. The eye causes it's own physiological existence.

So what I am saying is there nothing about a physiological organ which goes beyond experience. And so, if the physiological eye is causing your visual perceptions, then eg in the case of looking in the mirror at your eyes, your eyes are causing the very existence of themselves. Because you look in the mirror at a physiological eye. And how you look is through visual perception, which is itself caused by the physiological eye (among other things).So here, your perception has created your eyes own physiological existence to you.

Can things be the both a cause and an effect? Can they cause themselves? Seems incoherent.

How to reconcile the biology of sense organs with our sensory perceptions?

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