The Adverbialist rejects sense data. Sense data should go the way of the aether, of historic interest only. — RussellA

According to the SEP article adverbialists accept qualia. If sense data and qualia are the same thing then according to the SEP article adverbialists accept sense data.

Maybe there's a distinction between accepting the existence of sense data and accepting the sense datum theory of perception. Perhaps it's a semantic distinction; an argument over whether or not "I see sense data" is correct grammar.

The thesis of Direct Realism (at least, according to the SEP article) is that "we can directly perceive ordinary objects". Some of us believe this thesis but disagree with naive realism. We are also direct realists. I genuinely disagree that we always perceive an intermediary and that we cannot directly perceive ordinary objects. Call that a semantic disagreement if you will, but we can't both be correct. — Luke

In what sense is an olfactory sensation caused by odour molecules in the air stimulating the sense receptors in my nose the "direct" perception of a cake in the oven?

Any non-naive sense of "direct" seems to stretch the meaning of "direct" into meaninglessness, and does nothing to resolve the epistemological problem of perception.

But again, if what naive direct realists mean by "direct" isn't what non-naive direct realists mean by "direct" then it's possible that perception isn't direct in the naive sense but is direct in the non-naive sense. Indirect realists argue that perception isn't direct in the naive sense. Indirect realists argue that perception is indirect in the naive sense.

Indirect realism is compatible with intentionalism, even if intentionalists refer to themselves as being direct realists. Each group simply means something different by "direct". This is the argument made by Robinson in Semantic Direct Realism.

According to the SEP article adverbialists accept qualia. If sense data and qualia are the same thing then according to the SEP article adverbialists accept sense data. — Michael

The Adverbialist may accept qualia but don't need sense data. For the Adverbialist, qualia exist but sense data don't, so they cannot be the same thing.

From SEP article The Problem of Perception

Part of the point of adverbialism, as defended by Ducasse (1942) and Chisholm (1957) is to do justice to the phenomenology of experience whilst avoiding the dubious metaphysical commitments of the sense-datum theory. The only entities which the adverbialist needs to acknowledge are subjects of experience, experiences themselves, and ways these experiences are modified.

From Philosophy 575 Prof. Clare Batty on Adverbialism

1. Against the Sense Datum View
The adverbialist rejects the Phenomenal Principle, that if there sensibly appears to a subject to be something which possesses a particular sensible quality then there is something of which the subject is aware which does possess that quality.
According to the adverbialist, statements that appear to commit us to the existence of sense data can be reinterpreted so as to avoid those commitments. In doing so, the adverbialism rejects the act/object model of perceptual experience—the model on which sensory experience involves a particular act of sensing directed at an existent object (e.g., a sense datum).

The Adverbialist may accept qualia but don't need sense data. — RussellA

That's what I don't understand. As I understand it, sense data and qualia are the same thing.

As I understand it, sense data and qualia are the same thing. — Michael

Only if sense data exist. The Adverbialist doesn't need them. Why do you think sense data exist if they are not needed?

Only if sense data exist. The Adverbialist doesn't need them. Why do you think sense data exist if they are not needed? — RussellA

I don't understand what you're asking.

I'm saying that the terms "sense data" and "qualia" refer to the same thing. Therefore, if qualia exist then sense data exists. According to the SEP article, adverbialists accept that qualia exist.

Your comments are like saying "I believe that bachelors exist but I don't believe that unmarried men exist".

So if I'm wrong and there is a difference between sense data and qualia then what is that difference?

I have a great deal of sympathy for some forms of adverbialism. It seems to get something right, namely that conciousness is processual, not a bunch of relationships between discrete things.

However, I also see problems with it. It's not just that no one talks like an adverbialism, it's that it's literally impossible to describe one's experiences to another person coherently in adverbial language, making zero reference to the objects of experience. I think I already mentioned ITT about how the Routledge introduction to phenomenology has a very funny set of excerpts of scientists and philosophers trying to explain perception without reference to its contents (objects) and failing miserably, either reverting to listing off the things that look yellow or taste like coffee, etc. or painting an entirely confused picture of what is being spoken of.

For example, the relational view of color does a good job explaining how the properties of the object perceived, the ambient enviornment, and the perceiver all go into the generation of an experience. Could an adverbial description do the same thing? Maybe, but not easily. And it's hard to see what the benefit would be.

In general though, the adverbial view tends to apply adverbs only to the perceiver, e.g., to people "seeing greenly," but not to plants "reflecting light greenly." But to the extent this brackets off the production of experience into the presupposed boundaries of the "perceiver who carries out the verbs," it seems doomed to miss things of importance, and this is my biggest qualm with it.

For example, the relational view of color does a good job explaining how the properties of the object perceived, the ambient enviornment, and the perceiver all go into the generation of an experience. Could an adverbial description do the same thing? Maybe, but not easily. And it's hard to see what the benefit would be. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So how do you make sense of this:

Phenylthiocarbamide tastes bitter to 70% of people and doesn't taste bitter to 30% of people.

What does the word "bitter" mean/refer to? What does the phrase "tastes bitter" mean/refer to?

So if I'm wrong and there is a difference between sense data and qualia then what is that difference? — Michael

One difference could be that qualia exist and sense data don't. I directly know the "qualia" of the colour red, a sharp pain, an acrid smell, etc. But I don't know where my sense data are. Has any scientist discovered the site of sense data in the brain?

One difference could be that qualia exist and sense data don't. — RussellA

Which is like saying "one difference could be that bachelors exist and unmarried men don't".

Phenylthiocarbamide tastes bitter to 70% of people and doesn't taste bitter to 30% of people.

What does the word "bitter" mean/refer to? What does the phrase "tastes bitter" mean/refer to?

That's a great example, and one I shall start using since it is a little nicer than the "shit smells like... well shit to humans; flies love it," I had been using. Cilantro is another good example, or how orange juice tastes terrible after you brush your teeth. Smell and taste are often considered the least real of all the senses for this reason.

IMO, "tastes bitter," is a relationship that obtains between some thing and some taster, the same way solubility is a relationship that obtains between salt and water. Salt doesn't dissolve in H2O unless its placed in water, the same way nothing tastes bitter unless it goes in your mouth. And the ambient enviornment matters too. Nothing tastes bitter in a room filled with nitrous oxide because presumably you're fully anesthetized (and dying of hypoxia), and salt isn't exactly going to dissolve well if you mix it into a bucket of H2O that is cooled to near absolute zero. Hell, salt won't event dissolve in water well if you use those big kosher salt crystals, they just sit there in boiling water.

Hence, what the relational view gets right. What it often misses, which adverbial theories sort of get at, is that experiencing is a process itself and the result of a process. We can talk about relationships between properties as a form of abstraction, but at the end of the day taking about sets of processes that produce given qualia is probably the better model.

Which is like saying "one difference could be that bachelors exist and unmarried men don't". — Michael

Not really, as that statement is factually untrue. Both bachelors and unmarried men exist.

Why do you think that sense data exist?

I don't understand why you don't understand what I'm asking and I don't know how to explain it in any simpler terms.

You seem to be describing enactivism?

it's literally impossible to describe one's experiences to another person coherently in adverbial language — Count Timothy von Icarus

True, but then again it's literally impossible to describe one's subjective experiences to another person coherently using any language, in that how would it be possible to describe the experience of the colour red to someone who has never had the ability to see colour.
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Could an adverbial description do the same thing? — Count Timothy von Icarus

One advantage of an adverbial description is that it negates the homunculus problem.
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In general though, the adverbial view tends to apply adverbs only to the perceiver, e.g., to people "seeing greenly," but not to plants "reflecting light greenly." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, because it is the perceiver who perceives things. If I perceive the colour green, it could have had numerous causes, a traffic light, grass, a plant, a bird, etc, My perception of the colour green will be identical even though it could have have multiple possible causes.

It is the nature of language to mix the literal with the figurative, in that "I perceive the colour green" is a figure of speech for the more literal "I perceive greenly".

I don't understand why you don't understand what I'm asking and I don't know how to explain it in any simpler terms. — Michael

I generally agree with what you say, so I apologise if I'm missing something. Perhaps I'm thinking of my glass of red wine over dinner.

1. Shannon's model, developed for radios and telephones — for precisely this sort of transformation of energy types — is now applied to all physical interactions. So if the model entails indirectness, then everything is indirect. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Shannon was originally looking at noise on transmission lines. Noise is created by electromagnetism in the vicinity of a line. If it's a digital transmission, that means 1's might turn into 0's, and so forth. It's not about energy transformation per se. It's about degradation of information. That idea of information was picked up and exploded in various realms. I mean, there's no doubt that you hear a person on your phone indirectly. I don't think that fact impacts the meaning of information in other realms. If you think it does, could you explain why?

2. These different types of energy turn out not to always be sui generis types. There has been a lot of work unifying these. We still have multiple "fundemental forces," but the goal/intuition, is that these can be unified as well, like electricity and magnetism, or then electromagnetism and the weak nuclear force. — Count Timothy von Icarus

With a computer, the analog-to-digital (A/D) converter isn't transforming energy types. It's just sampling the analog signal and creating a digital stream that can be used to recreate an analog signal somewhere else. It's like if you heard someone and then mimicked them. Something like the A/D, then D/A conversion happened. That's what we imagine, anyway, looking at a human nervous system. The reason I brought this up was to just highlight the meaning of functionality. Mimicry can happen without any phenomenal consciousness. It's all functional. Phenomenality is an extra added bit. We don't know why it's there or where it comes from.

This would seem to leave too many relations as indirect. And if perception is an indirect experience of the world merely in the way that light has an indirect relationship with photosynthesis or sex has an indirect relationship with pregnancy, then the epistemological claims related to this sort of indirectness seem much less acute (maybe this is a feature, not a bug). — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is an interesting avenue to ponder. What's confusing is that you brought experience back into it. We don't know how experience is generated, or if it's even right to say that it is "generated." This argument will have to wait until there's a working theory of phenomenal consciousness (if we ever get that far).

Another wrinkle: wouldn't pain be the transformation of kinetic energy into electrochemical energy, and experience of our own pain thus also be indirect? — Count Timothy von Icarus

Pain is associated with electrical discharges that travel along sensory nerves into the central nervous system. A variety of things can trigger those discharges. A fair portion of an organism's reaction to pain is reflexive. Pain has the potential to alter behavior through conditioning , but again, this doesn't necessarily entail experience. Where there is memory of pain, that's obviously indirect access to the pain.

Anyway, I see where your headed, you're saying the idea of indirectness, once introduced, will quickly generalize.

Science and metaphysics are different from one another, but they bleed over into one another all the time. The first time I heard of "emergent properties" was in a molecular biology class, not a philosophy lecture. Metaphysics and ontology tend to touch science on the theory side.

So, any book on quantum foundations is going to discuss metaphysical ideas. Any discussion of "what is a species and how do we define it," gets into the same sort of territory. "What is complexity?" and "what is information?" or "is there biological information?" are not uncommon questions for journal articles to focus on. Debates over methods, frequentism in particular, are another area of overlap. This isn't the bread and butter of 101 classes — although in Bio 101 we were asked to write an essay on "what life is?" and consider if viruses or prions were alive, a philosophical question — but it's also not absent from scientific considerations either.

The two seem related in that both inform one another. Physicists have informed opinions re the question of substance versus process based metaphysics for example, or mereological nihilism — i.e., "is the world a collection of things with properties or one thing/process?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

I think I'd say that these are questions within the philosophy of science -- it requires knowledge of both to reasonably perform philosophy of science.

By contrast I think your distinction between two positions is philosophy distinct from science:

we don't want a strange world of nothing but particles arranged x-wise or one undifferentiated process either. We'd like to say cats exist on mats (and just one at one time and place), that lemons are yellow, that rocks have mass and shape, etc. I am just unconvinced that these can be properly be dealt with fully on the nature side of the Nature/Geist distinction. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The acceptance of the Nature/Geist distinction is what would be open to philosophical question which wouldn't require knowledge of science in the same way that your first questions which demonstrate where the two disciplines seem to get along or resemble one another.

Likewise, so goes the indirect/direct realist distinction. The direct and the indirect realist can accommodate their position to some accepted scientific body of knowledge; or, they could even make it falsifiable, but then it might just be science at that point.

What I think makes the task difficult in distinguishing these is that knowledge in both can help both, yet I'd still maintain their distinctness -- and that the series of questions you ask shows how the connection between metaphysics and science is at least difficult to trace :).

In what sense is an olfactory sensation caused by odour molecules in the air stimulating the sense receptors in my nose the "direct" perception of a cake in the oven? — Michael

To put it bluntly:

The perception is: the smell (of cake).
The causes of the perception are: the odour molecules in the air stimulating the sense receptors.

What you perceive/smell is the cake.
What you don’t perceive/smell are the causes of the perception.

The perception is the final product; the smell. All you smell is the cake. You don’t smell the causes of the perception.

I don’t know how you could smell the cake more directly. Without the causes, perhaps?

The perception is the final product; the smell. All you smell is the cake. You don’t smell the causes of the perception.

I don’t know how you could smell the cake more directly. Would it be without the causes? — Luke

Yes, this is the clarity that Indirect Realists seem to see, that Direct Realists don't. It's not that it puts paid to either position, but an Indirect Realist needs some wholesale importation of object into experience, for it to be direct. Which is, obviously, incoherent. Hence, rejection Realism. Direct-ers don't seem to require - directness - for their position.

But, taking your enumeration of perception at face value, I'm unsure how a direct realist can maintain a straight face. If we're only directly in touch with our perceptions, we're not directly in touch with objects. I presume that a DR would come up with some Banno-esque " But how do you perceive your perceptions?" (the seeing seeings problem, from a few pages back) which is not the relevant question. Perceptions are experienced. They are direct to experience, qua perception. They are not direct to experience, qua object. As you've noted.

If we're only directly in touch with our perceptions, we're not directly in touch with objects. — AmadeusD

Are you unable to touch objects?

Seriously, though, it is a question of whether our perceptions of objects are direct or not. I don’t know what kind of perception you envisage that would be more direct.

The word "direct" and "indirect" don't really seem to apply to experience itself to me - experience is experience, it's fundamental, it's nothing else other than itself. Direct and indirect can be words we use to categorize casual chains that lead to experience, but not experience itself. — flannel jesus

Disagree. Applying direct and indirect to experience is the only way I've seen to make sense of this question. Casual chains lead to a mare's nest of problems and ambiguities, this way is intuitive and easy to understand.

To indirectly experience x is to experience it via a more direct experience. To directly experience x is to experience it without an intermediary experience.

The best example might be TV. When you are watching something, say a baseball game, you are experiencing it, but only indirectly, via the direct experience of the TV itself. The baseball game is casually connected to the TV, the features on the TV map to features of the game. Yet, what you experience is not the game itself, but in fact a representation of it.

Once you understand that, the claim indirect realists are making becomes clear; all of experienced reality stands in relation to phenomenal experience as the baseball game stands in relation to the TV. It is a bedrock layer of direct experience via which everything else is experienced(a positive claim, not mere negation of direct realism).

if Bob told me what Jodie said this morning, I may indeed be aware of what Jodie said this morning, but only indirectly. What I am directly aware of, my actual experience, are the words Bob told me. — hypericin

When you are watching something, say a baseball game, you are experiencing it, but only indirectly, via the direct experience of the TV itself. The baseball game is casually connected to the TV, the features on the TV map to features of the game. Yet, what you experience is not the game itself, but in fact a representation of it. — hypericin

If Jodie had told you herself, instead of hearing it from Bob, or if you went to the baseball game and saw it live, instead of watching it on TV, then these would be direct perceptions, right?

Seriously, though, it is a question of whether our perceptions of objects are direct or not — Luke

But a perception is nothing to a human, unless we have an experience. So, the question actually probably isn't apt to that delineation. Whether a chimp 'directly' perceives something is a non-question to us, because we have no access to their experience of anything.

Similarly, it may well be the case that I can experience touching of an object, but that "touching of an object" is an experience conjured by my mind. That doesn't mean the object isn't there, but it does mean my perception is indirect. Again, if the idea here is that you're taking about the perception, and not the experience, I don't think there's anything to even be discussed. We have no experience of perceptions, per se.

The experience is the perception is the smelling.

Not so, to my mind. Perceptions need not be accompanied by conscious experience of them, in emotional terms. This seems patent, as we talk about sentient and non-sentient conscious beings. The feeling is the difference. Subjective judgement of something perceived.

The experience is the smelling of something particular given an emotional valence. Is the implication in your position that there is no difference between the experience of say "sweet smell" and the data which produces that smell? Seems well-off-the-mark to me.

Again, it’s a question of whether our perceptions of objects are direct or indirect. The perception is the smell, not the data which produce it. You don’t smell data.

Suffice to say, no, and i direct you to my previous post. The question contain therein is crucial to my understanding how you could possible think that was the question.

Suffice to say, no, and i direct you to my previous post. The question contain therein is crucial to my understanding how you could possible think that was the question. — AmadeusD

I wasn't referring to a question of yours, but to the question of the discussion: direct realism vs indirect realism.

Obviously I think there is a difference between a smell the and the causes which produce it. I've been arguing that the perception is the smell, not its causes.

To put it bluntly:

The perception is: the smell (of cake).
The causes of the perception are: the odour molecules in the air stimulating the sense receptors.

What you perceive/smell is the cake.
What you don’t perceive/smell are the causes of the perception.

The perception is the final product; the smell. All you smell is the cake. You don’t smell the causes of the perception. — Luke

Your account is akin to saying: I'm not watching pixels activate on my television screen, I'm watching Joe Biden's inauguration.

This "semantic" directness is so far divorced from the phenomenological directness that concerns the epistemological problem of perception and the dispute between naive and indirect realists that it seems entirely misplaced in these discussions.

I don’t know how you could smell the cake more directly. — Luke

That it's "as direct as it can be" isn't that it's direct. The point made by indirect realists is that you can't smell the cake directly. Direct perception of a cake would require naive realism to be true, which it never is. This non-naive sense of "directness" is a misnomer.