As explained to Banno, this is agreeable because factual, but we still seem to disagree on the meaning of it. I have insisted on understanding the biological sense of the situation, as the correct basis for any further meaning. There are important reasons why the apple is red and why we can see it as such: so that we can eat it.if you can accept that people see apples and that apples are red, then we're close enough to agreement for me. — jamalrob
Brains analyse the data and resolve it into a meaningful landscape.
— unenlightened
I'm gong to second Olivier5 here and say this is where the dispute takes place. That meaningful landsacpe the brain resolves, what does it mean for it to be direct? — Marchesk
I have insisted on understanding the biological sense of the situation, as the correct basis for any further meaning. There are important reasons why the apple is red and why we can see it as such: so that we can eat it. — Olivier5
Rather harder to insert something between the key movement and the ape-body feeling the movement. We could go on about nerve fibres and proprioception, and molecular forces at the interface between finger and key, but the notion that touch is indirect seems less attractive as an idea. Will anyone argue for the indirect realism of touch? — unenlightened
What is the difference between indirect realism and direct realism? Is your mind part of the world? Do you directly or indirectly experience your brain or your mind?And this is what the indirect realist is continually pretending to do — unenlightened
How are you defining representation? Representations are an effect of a cause. Being that the cause is not the same as the effect, you don't have the cause in your brain, you have the effect. Its just that the representation is causally related to what it is about. So, thanks to causation you can represent an apple and that experience informs you of the reality. You can only talk about your thoughts and perceptions, but those perceptions are causally related with the world, hence you can talk about the world by talking about your thoughts.I assume your argument would something along the lines of needing some kind of representation in the brain in order to recognise an apple in the world? I don't think brains work like that, but even if they did, such representations would be used to recognise apples out there in the world, and not more representations in the brain. I mean what would be the point of that? — unenlightened
I'm quite drawn to the idea of affordances. — jamalrob
Consider him a non-naïve realist. — Olivier5
For the player in action the football field is not an “object,” that is, the ideal term which can give rise to an indefinite multiplicity of perspectival views and remain equivalent under its apparent transformations. It is pervaded with lines of force (the “yard lines”; those which demarcate the “penalty area”) and articulated in sectors (for example, the “openings” between the adversaries) which call for a certain mode of action and which initiate and guide the action as if the player were unaware of it. The field itself is not given to him, but present as the immanent term of his practical intentions; the player becomes one with it and feels the direction of the “goal,” for example, just as immediately as the vertical and the horizontal planes of his own body. It would not be sufficient to say that consciousness inhabits this milieu. At this moment consciousness is nothing other than the dialectic of milieu and action. Each maneuver undertaken by the player modifies the character of the field and establishes in it new lines of force in which the action in turn unfolds and is accomplished, again altering the phenomenal field. — Merleau-Ponty, The structure of behavior
Naïve realist theories of perception ... come in a variety of different forms, however they commonly embody a commitment to some or all of the following theoretical claims. First, perceptual experiences are essentially relational, in the sense that they are constituted in part by those things in the perceiver’s environment that they are experiences of. Second, the relational nature of perceptual experience cannot be explained in terms of perceptual experiences having representational content that is veridical if the things in the subject’s environment are as they are represented as being, and nonveridical otherwise. Third, the claim that perceptual experiences are essentially relational articulates the distinctive phenomenological character of perceptual experience, or ‘what it is like’ for a subject to have an experience. Fourth, given that veridical perceptual experiences are essentially relational, they differ in kind to non-veridical experiences such as hallucinations. Fifth, perceptual experiences are relations to specifically mind-independent objects, properties, and relations: things whose nature and existence are constitutively independent of the psychological responses of perceiving subjects. — Allen
Well, have a look at that book on direct perception and you might see that the concept is consistent with your view (aside from the Kantian issue). — jamalrob
I have. Yes, it's consistent with my views but I believe illogical in calling itself "direct". That there are signals in the environment, already meaningful, and that the perceiver notices them, that is true. But that doesn't make the noticing direct, precisely because of the Kantian issue. — Olivier5
Since, however, such a type of intuition, intellectual intuition, forms no part whatsoever of our faculty of knowledge, it follows that the employment of the categories can never extend further than to the objects of experience. Doubtless, indeed, there are intelligible entities corresponding to the sensible entities; there may also be intelligible entities to which our sensible faculty of intuition has no relation whatsoever; but our concepts of understanding, being mere forms of thought for our sensible intuition, could not in the least apply to them. That, therefore, which we entitle 'noumenon' must be understood as being such only in a negative sense. — Kant, B309
are the empirical objects the mind-independent ones realism is concerned with? — Marchesk
Granted that it's probably "as direct as can be", but direct still means (in this context): without intervening factors or intermediaries. Which is not something that can be said of perception. So postulating that a mechanism (an intermediary) is necessary for any perception achieves a number of things, among others:If seeing in the way that we see is the only way we can ever expect to see, then how is it indirect? — jamalrob
2. it focuses the attention on such mechanisms and their study can help improve people's vision or audition, e.g. I wear glasses and they help me to see. — Olivier5
So what? It is still important to distinguish conceptually between objects as perceived (objects of perception), and objects as they are in the world.If perception is indirect, it must mean not just that there are intervening factors (light? electrical impulses?), but that there are intervening objects of perception, that is, the things that are perceived. — jamalrob
the small woman I saw waiting outside my apartment building the other day was actually a pile of boxes, but apart from that kind of thing, appearance vs reality is a very troublesome opposition to me. — jamalrob
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