if you can accept that people see apples and that apples are red, then we're close enough to agreement for me. — jamalrob

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.

Sorry, this debate is making me feel nauseous, so I'm gonna duck out. Nothing personal. — jamalrob

See you around when you feel better.

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

Yes. I agree. I don't know what brains actually do with the data, but I'm fairly sure they don't make a picture, because there is no point - there is no one inside the brain to look at it. So that was misleading. So I'll strike that and move on.

Bodies have brains and brains connect to eyes, and eyes sample the ambient light and differentiate as to wavelength and direction. Neuroscience might tell us a little of what happens to the data in the brain. This process is called 'seeing'. The function of seeing is to detect food, danger, and obstacles at a distance and thus aid the organism to navigate the world.

The evidence that this is the function of seeing is, on the positive side, that the greyhound chases the hare, and the fox flees the hounds, and the bee finds the flower, and more conclusively on the negative side, that creatures that live in the darkness of caves de-evolve their vision and become eyeless, eyes being a useless extravagance in that environment.

So the evidence that an insect-eating bird sees the stick insect as a stick insect and the stick as a stick is in it's behaviour - eating the insects and not pecking at the sticks. The evidence that an ape sees the fruit is that we can watch it turn its head and scan and then head directly for the fruit. So we don't say that the brain sees or the eye sees, we say that the ape sees.

Blind apes have their driving licences revoked and are forbidden to drive, because they crash into things all the time.

Typically, eyes have a lens, such that a real image is formed at the back of the eye. This might confuse some into thinking that the ape sees that image. This is quite wrong. In order to see something, the ape needs eyes, so in order to see the image on the back of its eye, one would need another eye, pointing at the image. No such structure has ever been found, and this is unsurprising, because if it existed, it would presumably have a lens and form a real image of the image, and no progress would have been made.

Apes pick the fruit in the trees not the fruit images in their eyes, or fruit-like brain substances. They fairly reliably stop at traffic lights and avoid driving off the road, and it is uncontroversial that seeing is what enables them to do these things.

So to see is to be informed about the world, not to be informed about one's physiology eye-wise or brain-wise.

Now your indirect realist likes to talk about vision, because it is remote. There is a distance between the apple and the ape, and this, along with that image in the back of the eye makes it seem plausible that seeing is 'indirect'. I think the image question has been dealt with. To the extent one sees an image, one does not see an image, but an image of an image, or rather an image of an image of an image... etc. And if all that is meant is that vision is remote sensing, then again there is no argument at all.

But let us turn to touch. Finger presses key. Ape feels key depressing. 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? I don't really make love to my wife, I make love to a wife-like sensation in my brain?

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

I'm back. Yes, I'm quite drawn to the idea of affordances.

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

So how would you describe the sensation of decreasing distance between two ridges (felt with the finger), which, on later examination with a ruler, turn out not to have been decreasing? Or the sensation of vibration which, when later measured with vibration detectors turn out not to have been present? Or the sensation of slipperyness in place of coldness (often experienced by autistics) which, when later examined with slope experiments and thermometers turn out to be mistaken?

If all these sensations are just telling us exactly the way the world is, then what are we to make of the sensations which later tell us it was not that way? Do we construct some convoluted framework just to avoid having to cope with the fallibility of our senses? Or do we just use the ordinary language of 'illusions' and 'reality' to talk about that fallibility?

All indirect realism is saying is that the world, as we expect it to be, as we expect others to share it, is not the same as the world as we immediately percieve it, that sources other than immediate sense data form the expectation model we have of our environment. That's a perfectly valid use of the term 'indirect'. Sense data literally takes an indirect route from reality (the source of sense data) to our model of it (the thing we respond to as if it were the case).

If its neither then how do you know that what you experience has anything to do with apples at all? What is it about the experience that makes it about apples?

And this is what the indirect realist is continually pretending to do — 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?

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

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.

Computer facial recognition is comparing an image of your face, not your actual face, with information stored in memmory - which is just another representation of your face. Its just that the representation is an effect of the cause, which is you putting your real face in front of your Webcam and taking a picture. If that first cause did not happen there would be no information in the computer to compare.

How are apples different than songs? If you don't have apples in your head, can you have song in your head? Where do songs exist?

I'm quite drawn to the idea of affordances. — jamalrob

I take my clues from Merleau-Ponty, but both Gibson and MP draw on this from the Gestalt psychology of Hurt Koffka et al. MP explicitly cites Gestalt psychology in PoP, and the wikipedia entry on Gibson too. So maybe I'll have a look at that.

Cool, I'm into MP too.

He can be a bit verbose but not vainly so. I'm on the same general vibe and consider him quite solid and intellectually honest. Consider him a non-naïve realist.

Incidentally, I got to know Gibson's theory of direct perception by reading this book, available online as a PDF: Direct Perception, Claire F Michaels, Claudia Carello. It's very clear, and has a nice chapter on the philosophical implications.

Consider him a non-naïve realist. — Olivier5

I think it's not so easy to decide this one way or the other. It could make for an interesting discussion. It's unfortunate that my copy of PoP is a thousand kolimetres away and under lockdown.

But I just found a paper online called "Merleau-Ponty and Naïve Realism" by Keith Allen. Might be interesting.

Sorry but for me, the concept of direct perception is an oxymoron. By definition, all perception is indirect. Kant, noumena vs phenomena, the thing in itself vs how it interacts with the world and with our eyes. Any interaction requires a modus operandi, a link, a mechanism(s), a set of causes and effects that collectively and dependably results in a somewhat stable or identifiable interaction, in this case between the perceived and the perceiver.

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).

The difficulty in trying to put MP in one or other realist camp, either direct or indirect, naive or non-naive, is that his approach, which we see from Gibson too, is quite different:

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

I like this way of setting out the commitments of naive realism, that I found in the paper I mentioned (PDF):

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

That could be a good place to start a big discussion of naive realism.

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. And of course a good football player will correctly perceive the field not as a passive and static 'object' but as a force field, within which he moves, with which he interacts like all players do. But that doesn't make the noticing direct, precisely because of the Kantian issue.

Or they mean "direct" in a minimalist way, i.e. "more direct than the mechanistic alternative of perception as animals making up meaning entirely on their own based on a passively collected data field would have you believe".

That's one way of using the word "direct".

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

All right, let's look at things in a Kantian way for a few moments. There is no question of a perceiver perceiving noumena directly, because noumena are not the kind of things that are perceived. Any apprehension of the noumena would be an intellectual intuition, not a sensible one, i.e., it wouldn't be perception at all.

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

So given that the perception of noumena is not even on the cards, indeed hardly even makes sense (it's probably a category mistake), then we are left in the realm of empirical objects. With the posited ideal directness discarded, against what are you opposing the supposed indirectness of perception? If seeing in the way that we see is the only way we can ever expect to see, then how is it indirect?

Agreed that Kantian perception would be direct regarding empirical objects, but are the empirical objects the mind-independent ones realism is concerned with? Idealism also endorses direct perception, because the ideas are right there in the mind.

It's a fair point, but note that for Kant, empirical objects are not merely "in the mind".

@fdrake wrote a monster post about all this in our last debate, and I rudely didn't respond. Maybe I'll go back to it, because I don't like the feeling that I'm going around in circles, always finally unable to break out into the Real.

I made similar posts in the "Quining Qualia" thread too.

I may have a look. If you haven't solved the problem once and for all I'll be sorely disappointed.

Extremely doubtful.

are the empirical objects the mind-independent ones realism is concerned with? — Marchesk

Yes, but Kantian epistemology is not so concerned.

Some renditions of idealism may endorse direct perception because ideas are right there in the mind, whatever that actually means, but transcendental idealism does not. T.I. endorses, in fact is necessarily predicated on, direct perception because “....For, otherwise, we should require to affirm the existence of an appearance, without something that appears—which would be absurd....”.

The fundamental initiation of all Kantian cognitive metaphysics is the statement that objects are given to us, which makes explicit perception is a direct affectation on sensing physiology. It follows that we never interpret the perception, but rather we interpret the impression the perception imparts.

Anyway....if all this is generally understood already, somebody should tell me so I don’t butt in where I don’t contribute anything.

Anyway....if all this is generally understood already, somebody should tell me so I don’t butt in where I don’t contribute anything. — Mww

I think it's an excellent clarification.

Cool.

If seeing in the way that we see is the only way we can ever expect to see, then how is it indirect? — jamalrob

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:

1. it allows perceiving at a distance without invoking magic at-a-distance action.

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.

3. it may be necessary to correctly interpret sense data in some cases, e.g. when seeing lightning and counting the seconds before hearing thunder, as a way to estimate the distance of the event based on the velocity of sound waves.

4. it helps explain optical illusions, where what you perceived is at a demonstrable variance with the thing being perceived, or where you cannot decide what you see (is enlightened's avatar a horse or a frog?).

5. it attracts philosophers' attention to epistemology, which implies a critical outlook on our data gathering procedures, and involves attention to how theories shape our perception and data collection strategies.

That's a nice breakdown, but I don't think it works as it stands, because it goes wrong at the start. 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. Nobody thinks that perception is magic.

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

Yes, but this doesn't depend on the philosophical position of indirect realism.

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

So what? It is still important to distinguish conceptually between objects as perceived (objects of perception), and objects as they are in the world.

That distinction is not clear to me. I mean sure, houses have back doors that you can't see when you're in the front garden, and 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.

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

So apart from the cases where appearances oppose reality we shouldn't oppose appearance and reality?