There's a sound in my head? Are sights and smells in there as well? — Ciceronianus

By the locked-in-the-library theory we can never know whether what's in each others' heads are sights and smells and sounds or something else or nothing. And we can't know about anything outside our heads, either. I can't see how I would ever get to know what's even in my own head or what a head is.

By the locked-in-the-library theory we can never know whether what's in each others' heads are sights and smells and sounds or something else or nothing. And we can't know about anything outside our heads, either. I can't see how I would ever get to know what's even in my own head or what a head is. — Cuthbert

Perhaps our heads are in our heads.

Scientific evidence doesn't support the claim that we can't know, or interact with, the rest of the world in which we live. If we could not, we wouldn't be alive. — Ciceronianus

The only word I disagree with in this post is the word "know." Remove that word, and we're in complete agreement.

Knowledge = Justified True Belief. Truth is the problem here. I see the flower as X, you as Y, the bee as Z, yet we're all seeing the same thing. What is that thing? Is it X, Y, or Z or an amalgamation of all of them?

My take is that the flower is the cause of your perceptions, but it does not consist of your perceptions. Your perceptions come from you and are a part of your consciousness. The passing car is not the blinking light, but it caused the blinking light. We react to our environment for the reasons you said, so that we can survive in our environment. How we evolved to do that, whether to see the flower as red, to smell its scent, to find it a thing of great beauty, is all part of our design to enable our survival.

I just don't see why we must dump our baggage on the flower. The flower is whatever it is making us do what we do, but it's not the things we do.

That there are multiple points of entry for the sensory data and that they are at some point processed into a single experience doesn't seem to offer support for the direct realist position. — Hanover

No, it certainly doesn’t. Is that what he was arguing for?

No, it certainly doesn’t. Is that what he was arguing for? — Joshs

I think so. i really don't want to misstate the positions here, but my understanding of a challenge with the direct realist position is that it cannot allow for any mediating influence between the object and the perceiver. The flower in the ground is replicated in the perception. If the direct realist allows for optic nerves, lenses, brain processes and other things to mediate the object, he must then allow for a final perceiver inside the brain to perceive the net result of the various processes. Not wanting to do that, he must insist the flower is just slammed into the holistic person as a perception unmediated and unchanged.

I don't get it. It seems like some concocted craziness designed not to cause interference with other deeply held philosophical positions, but that is just my commentary.

If mind itself is nonmind-dependent (i.e. not ideal, more-than-just-ideal), then neither mind nor nonmind are mind-dependent (i.e. both facts are external-to-mind); therefore, nonmind is mind-invariant and not "mind-independent" (or ontologically separate from mind) insofar as mind is an aspect, or phase-state, of nonmind (i.e. more-than-ideality aka "reality" ~Spinoza, Anselm). — 180 Proof's Prolegomena for the Fourfold Root of Insufficient Reason

:chin: Do you want to give me a stroke or what? :joke:

That's just scientifically incorrect. My nose doesn't see things, nor does my pancreas.

You do in fact, regardless of how messy it makes philosophical analysis, have a part or parts of your brain that perceive. The perception occurs when that faculty receives sensory input, either through impulses from your sensory organs, artificial electrodes in the brain, drug abuse, psychological disturbance, damage to the brain, or even through purely internal processes like dreams.

That's just the way it works. If it's easier to think it another way, do that, but it'll be wrong and you'll need to stay a philosopher, as opposed to a doctor.

That’s empirically incorrect. Every being that perceives is an organism. Brains or parts of brains or noses or pancreases do not perceive. That’s just the way it works.

I think you overlook a serious problem here. If you admit that the presence of Y between object X and perceiver Z distorts, modifies, or alters the perception, then you admit to indirect realism as X is no longer what you perceive, but it's instead the conglomerate of everything between X and Z, including all biological processes prior to being perceived.

But I don’t admit that the presence of Y between object X and perceiver Z distorts, modifies, or alters perception. As I stated earlier it alters the environment.

That’s empirically incorrect. Every being that perceives is an organism. Brains or parts of brains or noses or pancreases do not perceive. That’s just the way it works. — NOS4A2

You can remove a pancreas and a nose and still perceive. It's not the entire entity that perceives, any more than it's the entire entity that bends. That task is left to the joints. I do understand that the perceiving faculties must be supported by blood and other life sustaining functions, but that doesn't mean the blood is what is doing the perceiving. The car's headlights shine the light, not the bumper, even if you wish to insist it's the car that is lit up and the bumper is part of the car.

But I don’t admit that the presence of Y between object X and perceiver Z distorts, modifies, or alters perception. As I stated earlier it alters the environment. — NOS4A2

You're arguing perception is not alterable? Suppose you're knocked unconscious?

You can remove a pancreas and a nose and still perceive. It's not the entire entity that perceives, any more than it's the entire entity that bends. That task is left to the joints. I do understand that the perceiving faculties must be supported by blood and other life sustaining functions, but that doesn't mean the blood is what is doing the perceiving. The car's headlights shine the light, not the bumper, even if you wish to insist it's the car that is lit up and the bumper is part of the car.

You’ll still be a living organism if you lose your pancreas or nose, at least with the aid of medication. The thing that perceives is, in every case, the living organism. The moment we eviscerate that organism, separate it into perceiving and non-perceiving faculties, there is no perceiving. A brain or faculty or any combination of disembodied organs in a vat cannot perceive.

You're arguing perception is not alterable? Suppose you're knocked unconscious?

I’m arguing that the only thing that is altered is the biology. I think this is what direct realism entails, at least, and that we ought to speak about such activity in this way.

You’ll still be a living organism if you lose your pancreas or nose, at least with the aid of medication. The thing that perceives is, in every case, the living organism. The moment we eviscerate that organism, separate it into perceiving and non-perceiving faculties, there is no perceiving. A brain or faculty or any combination of disembodied organs in a vat cannot perceive. — NOS4A2

You can still be a living organism and not have the ability to perceive even without eviscerating it. You can simply fall asleep.

I'm not sure what you're trying to do here, but it seems like you're trying to decipher the essence of a perceiver, listing out what the essential elements must exist to perceive. Obviously you can remove some parts of the body and it still be able to perceive, so arguing that the perceiver is the entire organism isn't correct.

At any rate, to the extent it has bearing on what we're discussing:

"In 2011, Dutch scientists hooked an EEG (electroencephalography) machine to the brains of mice fated to decapitation. The results showed continued electrical activity in the severed brains, remaining at frequencies indicating conscious activity for nearly four seconds. Studies in other small mammals suggest even longer periods."

https://www.livescience.com/39219-can-severed-head-live.html

The science doesn't support a direct realist position. The direct realist position is a position that attempts to simplify the metaphysical debate by eliminating unknowables, like the fundamental composition of things. At best, it admits to a pragmatism by stating there is nothing gained by itemizing objects as unknowable (I see this as @Banno's approach). At worst, it insists the world really is as they say it is. I think that's what you're trying to do here.

We receive representations of objects and what those objects are without the representative quality imposed on them by us is unknowable. Who we are as perceivers is also not the whole indivisible person, but it's just part of us. This means part of us interprets, part of us adds, part of us subtracts, and part of us perceives. What this conscious perceiving thing is and how we have these phenomenological states is a complete mystery. We just know it happens, somewhere in the brain.

:up: Right, I tend to think that direct and indirect realism are just two ways of speaking about the same thing. Indirect realism says that sense data is filtered through our optical, nervous and neural systems and that's why we only see things "indirectly". This is true, as far as it goes, but all this detail is also then known only indirectly, and the argument is basing itself on this "indirectly" known data. So, if we want to be able to make any cogent argument at all, the idea that by being "indirect" anything is thereby somehow occluded is wrong-headed.So in that sense it remains correct to say that we see things directly, else we cannot make justified claims about how things are.

What I am trying to do is speak about these things in terms of direct realism, without appealing to noun-phrases that signify nothing, which is admittedly difficult at times.

I said and meant that perceivers are organisms, which I can prove by pointing at entities that perceive. I don't believe an organism needs to be completely whole or without certain bodily functions in order to perceive, so I don't think the "entire" modifier need be added.

I struggle to see how 4 seconds of electrical activity in the brain of a decapitated mouse suffices to refute direct realism. Such electrical activity probably occurs in the bottom half, as it does with headless chickens. At best it indicates that electrical activity doesn't immediately disappear upon severing a spinal cord.

It's just difficult for me to accept that a "part of us adds" or a "part of us perceive", simply because such activities cannot be shown to be performed by parts. If I had to point to an entity that adds and subtracts, I can be satisfied by pointing to human beings. And if for some reason we'd like to narrow our focus, we should do so, but never once do we observe something other than the organism.

It's just difficult for me to accept that a "part of us adds" or a "part of us perceive", simply because such activities cannot be shown to be performed by parts. — NOS4A2

I don't see how you say this though. We can remove our arms, legs, many of our internal organs, and on and on and see that our ability to perceive is unaffected, yet when we alter our brain, something different happens. Our cognitive ability remains unaffected by damage to our sense organs, so it seems reasonable to conclude that my experience of the flower was not occurring in my eye. I also note that my sense organs do provide the stimulus to my brain because damage to the sense organ interferes with my ability to sense. If I put on red glasses, everything is red. I can then conclude that the lens within my eye offers its own alterations to the sense data being received.

This is just elementary stuff that I'm sure you fully accept, so I'm wondering why it need be explained and that there's this dropping back to some sort of holism that demands that every part of me is sentient and every part of me cognitive, from the hair on top of my head to the my toenails.

My hand picks things up, my nose smells, my mouth talks, my brain thinks. Organs each have functions, making up the complete organism, but each organ doesn't do everything.

Scientific evidence doesn't support the claim that we can't know, or interact with, the rest of the world in which we live. If we could not, we wouldn't be alive.
— Ciceronianus

The only word I disagree with in this post is the word "know." Remove that word, and we're in complete agreement.

Knowledge = Justified True Belief. Truth is the problem here. I see the flower as X, you as Y, the bee as Z, yet we're all seeing the same thing. What is that thing? Is it X, Y, or Z or an amalgamation of all of them? — Hanover

I think it's important to clarify what you're saying. Regarding your objection to the use of the word "know."

Do you claim we can't know what a flower is, or do you claim we can't know what it's color, or smell, or stem is?

Do you claim we can't know what a flower is because bees don't see flowers as we do?

Do you think you and I disagree regarding the nature of flowers?

Do you think we know something about flowers, but not other things about flowers?

It seems to me that you believe flowers (and everything else, apparently) cannot be known because they're part of the world in which we and other creatures live. We living organisms in some sense taint
the rest of the world, it would seem; we prevent it from being perceived in the isolation needed to support true knowledge. Would God know what the world is, or some being unlimited by the restrictions imposed on us?

I'd say we know a great deal about flowers as they're part of the world in which we live. For example, we know how they grow, we know how their pigment is determined through DNA, we know they're attached to soil, we know they're pollinated by bees, we know how to plant them. In what sense is it that we don't know these things? Why do you maintain that we're not justified in concluding that we do?

I see the flower as X, you as Y, the bee as Z, yet we're all seeing the same thing. What is that thing? — Hanover

It's a flower.

You keep missing the point. The flower is not the perception-of-flower.

It's the same error you have been making for years.

I just noticed it may have appeared that I was referring to your position. I have corrected the post to make it clear I was referring to Hanover's.

You keep missing the point. The flower is not the perception-of-flower. — Banno

I'm aware there are flowers and perceptions of flowers. The flower is in the garden and the perception in my head, up until I blink, at which time it's just in the garden.

Do you agree with this?

I say "yes", you claim that direct realism is the belief that the perception and the flower are the same thing, I point out that this is not so, that direct realism holds that one's perception of a flower is of a flower, not of an unknown.

Let's take it from there. You now start constructing direct realist men of straw.

That would seem to me to make the mind the "internal world." — Ciceronianus

:100:

There's a sound in my head? Are sights and smells in there as well? — Ciceronianus

"A sound" might be a perception (experience, qualia), or a physical event. The former is in your head.

Why should I know anything, if what you say is correct? — Ciceronianus

You can know many things without direct access to them. You must agree, or you would never read, and presumably make a terrible lawyer.

Books bear a correspondence to the reality they describe, and you can learn much from them. And yet, books are not that reality, they are ink blots, perfectly arbitrary ones.

Perceptions are the same way. They correspond to reality, and yet they are composed of arbitrary symbols. Unlike the example of books, they are all we have. Because of this, naive realists confuse these symbols with reality itself.

"A sound" might be a perception (experience, qualia), or a physical event. The former is in your head. — hypericin

Our heads are so crowded, then, it's remarkable we can know what's "in" them, let alone what's "out" of them. Is your perception of the ink blots you make in your head?

You can know many things without direct access to them. You must agree, or you would never read, and presumably make a terrible lawyer. — hypericin

You must refer to your perception of a lawyer, and what you believe a lawyer perceives when confronted with ink blots, or rather his perception of them, which are in his/her head, just as your perception of the lawyer and what you perceive he/she does when you perceive he/she is reading are in your head. I have a question, though. If you have a perception of a lawyer reading in your head, do you also have a perception of what he/she is reading in your head? If you don't, why do you maintain that what he reads, or if he reads (or rather what he has a perception of reading in his head, just as you have a perception of him reading in your head) makes any difference to whether the lawyer is a good lawyer or a bad lawyer? The lawyer may be pretending to read; may never have read anything.

Our heads are so crowded, then, — Ciceronianus

They are indeed crowded. But perceptions are more mental events rather than objects filling the brain with clutter. The bandwidth of these events is quite limited.

You must refer to your perception of a lawyer, — Ciceronianus

No, I refer to lawyers in the abstract. But this reference is, necessarily, mediated by words, and comprehension of these words is mediated by perceptual events, our perceptions of the virtual ink blots I made on our screens.

Nothing is direct in the mental world, everything is abstract and mediated. Do lawyers reside in these ink blots? No more does reality reside in perceptions.

There's a sound in my head? Are sights and smells in there as well? — Ciceronianus

Imo, the best objection to the theory that mental states are identical to brain states is simply that I can imagine a blue car, but there's no blue car in my skull. Same with songs; we can play songs "in our heads", but there's no music in our skulls. This is pretty off-topic, though.

So in that sense it remains correct to say that we see things directly, else we cannot make justified claims about how things are. — Janus

You realize that argument only works for realists. Skeptics and idealists will remain unconvinced by it. They will just reply that we can't make justified claims about a mind-independent real world.

ndirect realism says that sense data is filtered through our optical, nervous and neural systems and that's why we only see things "indirectly". — Janus

I understand the indirect argument to mean there is something mental mediating perception of the real thing, as a result of all that neural activity. Thus why we have illusions, hallucinations and secondary qualities. Also why it's possible to have internal visual and auditory experiences, like with dreams and imagination.

I say "yes", you claim that direct realism is the belief that the perception and the flower are the same thing, I point out that this is not so, that direct realism holds that one's perception of a flower is of a flower, not of an unknown. — Banno

Sure, but since the act of perception is not the thing perceived, that raises the question of whether the result of perception differs at all from thing perceived. If it does, can we be directly aware of the thing itself?

Direct perception works fine if naive realism is the case. It's a little more tricky if the world isn't quite as we perceive it. The indirect realists can then bring science to bear on the matter.

Yep.

Perceiving the flower incorrectly is still about the flower.

Realism does not claim that our perceptions are always correct.

It just rejects the weirdness of "the thing itself" as opposed to "the thing".

SO for example we know about colourblindness, we know that some folk see the flower's colour differently. We understand that this is not a fact about the flower. But most pertinently, we know that there is a flower for all this to be true of. We do not make the invalid inference that all there is, is perceptions-of-flowers, nor make the equally absurd presumption that there is a flower-in-itself that we can never know. Both these views are philosophical junk.

I say "yes", you claim that direct realism is the belief that the perception and the flower are the same thing, I point out that this is not so, that direct realism holds that one's perception of a flower is of a flower, not of an unknown.

Let's take it from there. You now start constructing direct realist men of straw. — Banno

It's not men of straw, it's naive realism I describe, but not the naive realism you accept. Very well. I see your post above, and I'm not sure what you're saying is any different from my claim that the flower is causative of the perception. To state otherwise would be idealism, a position no one here has so far held.

To say the pain from my stubbed toe is the road is an odd way of saying it, as I see that pain as evidence of the road, but speak as you may. The blip on the radar screen isn't quite a plane to me, but is a representation of it. What is the plane? The air traffic controller stuck with his head only on that screen might be inclined to think the blip is an airplane, but others might disagree. Those who would disagree would be those who have seen actual airplanes. Bristle as you will with the world "actual" here, but it does have meaning in this context when comparing the airplane you sit it in against that blip on the screen. Which is more accurate would be hard to say, as we don't speak of things in themselves anymore, so we don't know what a true airplane is other than that we can figure out how to interact with.

But to ask this directly, which is the better representation of the airplane? The blip or the plane you're in? Or, are neither representations, but only airplanes? Curious question, right? And what of the word "airplane," is that not also the airplane, as its creation was caused by the airplane? Why wouldn't the word be the thing under this position, or do you hold that as well?

Notice the air traffic controller sits looking at his screen.

But do you sit, looking at your perceptions? No. You have your perceptions. The alternative is the homunculus fallacy, the little man inside your head looking out.

You've mislead yourself with the analogy.

Perceiving the flower incorrectly is still about the flower.

Realism does not claim that our perceptions are always correct.

It just rejects the weirdness of "the thing itself" as opposed to "the thing".

SO for example we know about colourblindness, we know that some folk see the flower's colour differently. We understand that this is not a fact about the flower. But most pertinently, we know that there is a flower for all this to be true of. We do not make the invalid inference that all there is, is perceptions-of-flowers, nor make the equally absurd presumption that there is a flower-in-itself that we can never know. Both these views are philosophical junk. — Banno

Nicely put and helpful.

Nothing is direct in the mental world, everything is abstract and mediated. — hypericin

How many worlds do you live in?