Well if that's what is meant by it, fine.

Well if that's what is meant by it, fine. — jamalrob

Well, yeah. Except we then go on to look at which cases are which, we carry out carefully designed experiments to distinguish the two cases, we make predictive models and see how they fare against those experiments...but yeah, broadly speaking I don't think any indirect realist is saying that we somehow are mistaken about every single aspect of reality. It (or my version of it anyway) is just an acknowledgement that our model of the way the world is now (the thing we act in response to) is only partly formed by the data collected from the way the world is now. It is also partly (indeed mostly) formed from our prior expectations about the way the world is. So the realism of our model is not direct (formed from the data we receive), but indirect (formed after passing some filtering system which adapts and sometimes alters it completely).

Nice summary. It's not the way I see it, but right now I don't know how to respond adequately.

Well that's fair enough. I shall be interested to read any response if and when you might feel so inclined.

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. — Allen

The indirect realist is going to disagree that perception being relational makes the experience different from hallucinations and other non-perceptual experiences. Particularly if the same neural circuits are used for visual experiences of all kinds.

I gather that the direct realist is saying that when we have a hallucination, we are aware of the hallucination, but when we have a perception, we're aware of the external object. The difference being the content of the experience. Same for dreams and imagination.

The indirect realist might question why perceptual experience is different, other than the causal chain, which of course the indirect realist agrees with.

So let's say a technology like Neuralink is used to treat blindness. Images from a headset are sent to a chip surgically implanted in the brain which encodes the image data as electrical signals for the brain such that the patient can see again.

In this case, technology is acting in place of the retina and optic nerve to provide the brain with what it needs to form visual perceptions. Let's say no problem with direct realism so far.

But then as the technology advances, additional information in the form of digital overlays are also sent such that the patient sees various enhancements such as text, additional images and colors to highlight information not readily available to normal vision. Similar to the terminator's perspective from the Terminator movies. This would be like the Hololens technology. The indirect realist might say this is kind of what the brain is doing anyway.

Further advances allow complete digital environments to be sent to the patient. So now it's full on VR being beamed into the brain. Basically the visual part of a BIV. In all three scenarios, the indirect realist would challenge the direct realist to justify saying what's a mental image and what's direct awareness, since there is a causal relation from outside the body via the tech.

If it's neither then how do you know that what you experience has anything to do with apples at all? — Harry Hindu

Are you quite sure you are sticking with the premise?...

Premise: it's neither

real apples in our brains — Harry Hindu

nor

representations of them in our brains — Harry Hindu

If so (if you are sticking with the premise), and "what you experience" doesn't mean representations in my brain, then I'm surprised the question would arise.

What I experience are person-sees-apple events, person-reaches-for-apple events and person-eats-apple events: which are all pretty clearly to do with apples.

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. — jamalrob

"That kind of things" are found at the core of many scientific questions. We do see anthropomorphic figures everywhere, we can't help it. I guess it's better to err on the side of caution; in other words, it's less risky to mistake a pile of boxes for a small woman than vice versa.

Uber’s self-driving car saw the pedestrian but didn’t swerve – report
Tuning of car’s software to avoid false positives blamed, as US National Transportation Safety Board investigation continues

Samuel Gibbs, Tue 8 May 2018 06.00 EDT

An Uber self-driving test car which killed a woman crossing the street detected her but decided not to react immediately, a report has said.

The car was travelling at 40mph (64km/h) in self-driving mode when it collided with 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg at about 10pm on 18 March. Herzberg was pushing a bicycle across the road outside of a crossing. She later died from her injuries.

Although the car’s sensors detected Herzberg, its software which decides how it should react was tuned too far in favour of ignoring objects in its path which might be “false positives” (such as plastic bags), according to a report from the Information. This meant the modified Volvo XC90 did not react fast enough.

What?

What what?

↪Banno We're still on the topic of what it means to perceive. We agreed it implies an object and a mind perceiving it. This characterization seems to make biological sense, at least. It follows that there must be a causal chain 'starting' at the apple and 'ending' at a mind. (in brackets because nothing ever starts and ends beyond our subjective segmentation of time, it's all part of the big flow) — Olivier5

That what.

Could you be more specific?

Why does it follow? That last sentence is odd.

The perception must have a mechanism.

what does that mean, and why is it so?

It means that perception can be explained by physical mechanisms, and that absent these mechanism, you won't be able to perceive anything... No mechanism --> no perception.

You can't see an apple in the dark, for instance, simply because there's no light.

What I experience are person-sees-apple events, person-reaches-for-apple events and person-eats-apple events: which are all pretty clearly to do with apples. — bongo fury

How do you know these were apples, and not quinces?

How do you get to Carnegie Hall?

It's in the big apple.

:rofl:

Couldn't help it... I'm aware the correct answer is 'practice'. But to recognize an apple, one needs to have some clue about how apples look like.

Oh, is that all.

I'm aware the correct answer is 'practice'. But to recognize an apple, one needs to have some clue about how apples look like. — Olivier5

Are you quite sure you are sticking with the premise?...

Premise: it's neither

real apples in our brains — Harry Hindu

nor

representations of them in our brains — Harry Hindu

If so (if you are sticking with the premise), and "how apples look like" doesn't mean their matching representations in my brain, then I'm surprised the objection would arise.

How apples look like is how they participate in person-sees-fruit events, which are illumination events, which we learn to differentiate among through practice: active participation in such events.

active participation in such events. — bongo fury

How does "active participation in person-sees-fruit events" helps you in any way, if you cannot recognize some similarity with a previous event? If there's no trace left of the experience in the person, then that person will have no way to connect new experiences with past ones.

I tend to stick to simple ideas here.

If there's no trace left of the experience in the person, then that person will have no way to connect new experiences with past ones. — Olivier5

Is that your view as a biologist? That an organism learns by storing and comparing traces?

Is that your view as a biologist? That an organism learns by storing and comparing traces? — bongo fury

That an organism can learn is beyond dispute. Even organisms without neurones display an ability to learn. This ability must logically be supported by some biological mechanisms to somehow store some information and to retrieve or activate it later, usually regrouped under the term 'memory'. How memory works is an important area of cognitive research.

That an organism can learn is beyond dispute. — Olivier5

Not disputed.

Even organisms without neurones display an ability to learn. — Olivier5

:cool:

This ability must logically be... — Olivier5

Ah, so not your view as a biologist as such...

supported by some biological mechanisms to store some information, usually regrouped under the term 'memory'. — Olivier5

So, now that you think about it, it probably is all to do with storing traces in a memory.

So, you probably reject the premise. Ok.

I'll sulk if you didn't read the linked post, though.

Even organisms without neurones display an ability to learn.
— Olivier5
:cool: — bongo fury

The most controversial presentation was “Animal-Like Learning in Mimosa Pudica,” an unpublished paper by Monica Gagliano, a thirty-seven-year-old animal ecologist at the University of Western Australia who was working in Mancuso’s lab in Florence. Gagliano, who is tall, with long brown hair parted in the middle, based her experiment on a set of protocols commonly used to test learning in animals. She focussed on an elementary type of learning called “habituation,” in which an experimental subject is taught to ignore an irrelevant stimulus. “Habituation enables an organism to focus on the important information, while filtering out the rubbish,” Gagliano explained to the audience of plant scientists. How long does it take the animal to recognize that a stimulus is “rubbish,” and then how long will it remember what it has learned? Gagliano’s experimental question was bracing: Could the same thing be done with a plant?

Mimosa pudica, also called the “sensitive plant,” is that rare plant species with a behavior so speedy and visible that animals can observe it; the Venus flytrap is another. When the fernlike leaves of the mimosa are touched, they instantly fold up, presumably to frighten insects. The mimosa also collapses its leaves when the plant is dropped or jostled. Gagliano potted fifty-six mimosa plants and rigged a system to drop them from a height of fifteen centimetres every five seconds. Each “training session” involved sixty drops. She reported that some of the mimosas started to reopen their leaves after just four, five, or six drops, as if they had concluded that the stimulus could be safely ignored. “By the end, they were completely open,” Gagliano said to the audience. “They couldn’t care less anymore.”

Was it just fatigue? Apparently not: when the plants were shaken, they again closed up. “ ‘Oh, this is something new,’ ” Gagliano said, imagining these events from the plants’ point of view. “You see, you want to be attuned to something new coming in. Then we went back to the drops, and they didn’t respond.” Gagliano reported that she retested her plants after a week and found that they continued to disregard the drop stimulus, indicating that they “remembered” what they had learned. Even after twenty-eight days, the lesson had not been forgotten. She reminded her colleagues that, in similar experiments with bees, the insects forgot what they had learned after just forty-eight hours. Gagliano concluded by suggesting that “brains and neurons are a sophisticated solution but not a necessary requirement for learning,” and that there is “some unifying mechanism across living systems that can process information and learn.” — https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2013/12/23/the-intelligent-plant

Cool. And?