Balls. If that were so there would not be a philosophical issue. There is no difference in the physics or physiology between direct and indirect descriptions. The difference is that the direct realist sees a cow, the indirect realist sees... something mental. You keep setting out a scientific account as if it settles the issue, but there is no disagreement here.. The philosophical dispute between direct (naive) and indirect (non-naive) realists concerns the physics and physiology of perception. Indirect realists are right and direct realists are wrong. — Michael
Balls. If that were so there would not be a philosophical issue. There is no difference in the physics or physiology between direct and indirect descriptions. The difference is that the direct realist sees a cow, the indirect realist sees... something mental. You keep setting out a scientific account as if it settles the issue, but there is no disagreement here. — Banno
Yep, a continuing attack on "direct realism", a position that no one actually holds.There's semantic hijacking going on in here concerning what counts as direct realism/perception. — creativesoul
So we have two scenarios. In both there are things in the world. In both there are representations of those things. But in indirect realism one says that "what I see is the representation". Here the "I" doing the "seeing" is seperate to the representation, and the "I" never sees the thing.
Now this leads to various difficulties. It means, for instance, that when you say that you see the cup has a handle, what you mean is that the representation of the cup has a handle. You are not saying anything about the cup. It leads to a whole network of philosophical garden paths in which, absurdly, the self is forever "cut off" from the world in which it lives.
In the other account, one says something like that "I see things by representing them". Here, the "I" doing the seeing is doing the representing. When you say that the cup has a handle, you are saying that it is the cup that has the handle, not the representation.
The physics and physiology is the same in both cases. The wording in the first account cuts one off from the world. The wording in the second account embeds one in the world. The framing, the grammar one chooses, has consequences well beyond mere perception. — Banno
The trouble here is how indirect realism can produce reliable information about the number of handles on the cup. — Banno
When you have an hallucination of a cow, you do not see a cow, because there is no cow to see. — Banno
The second formulation is the constitutive claim, which says that it introspectively seems to one that the perceived mind-independent objects (and their features) are constituents of the experiential state. Nudds, for instance, argues that ‘visual experiences seem to have the NR [Naïve Realist] property’ (2009, p. 335), which he defines as ‘the property of having some mind-independent object or feature as a constituent’ (2009, p. 334), and, more explicitly, that ‘our experience […] seems to have mind-independent objects and features as constituents’ (2013, p. 271). Martin claims that ‘when one introspects one’s veridical perception one recognises that this is a situation in which some mind-independent object is present and is a constituent of the experiential episode’ (2004, p. 65).
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... Intentionalism typically characterizes the connection between perception (taken as a representative state) and the perceived mind-independent objects as a merely causal one. But if the connection is merely causal, then it seems natural to take the suitable mind-independent objects to be distinct from the experience itself and, therefore, not literally constituents of it.
Here's the point, again; one does not see the representation; seeing is constructing the representation.
There is a "blind spot" in each local visual field where the optic nerve enters the eye. — Agree-to-Disagree
Indirect realism has you sitting inside your head, seeing and touching what is constructed by your nerves. — Banno
Unfortunately, when it comes to words like "see" and "hear" and "smell" and "taste" we don't (as far as I know) have terms that can be separated out in this way, and so Banno conflates the meaning of "see" in "I see colours when I hallucinate" and the meaning of "see" in "I see a cow". Indirect realists are using the former meaning when they say that we see mental images.
“Hallucinate” would be a better verb than “see” when comes to such events. “I am hallucinating voices”, for instance, doesn’t imply that the sound of a voice is hitting the ear, and recognizes that some bodily activity is producing the phenomena. — NOS4A2
A voice, though, is the sound released from the larynx. To hear a voice is to have that sound affect the ears. Since neither of these things and events are present in a hallucination, to say “I hear voices” is to mischaracterize the experience.
One can distinguish between between two different hallucinations by simply describing how they are different. One might be audible or visual, for example. — NOS4A2
I’m fine with them saying it. But I’m not fine with the indirect realist saying it, especially if accuracy is any concern.
What would be your motivation for wishing to retain the language used to describe the interactions of distal objects and the sense organs to describe mental objects and the mental organs? — NOS4A2
The claim “I hear voices” in the case of hallucination is not true, though. — NOS4A2
it just boggles my mind why they’d appropriate the language used to describe those things and interactions to describe mind-dependant things and interactions — NOS4A2
According to what you mean by “hear”, but what you mean isn’t always what others mean, and certainly isn’t what they mean when they say that the schizophrenic hears voices.
You can tell me what you mean by “hearing” and “voices” and I’m willing to adopt your definitions. If you think hearing doesn’t involves the use of ears and that a voice isn’t the sounds from the larynx, then what are they? — NOS4A2
If both hearing and hallucinating are the activities of the auditory cortex, and the voice is merely the product of this activity, there seems to me no way to distinguish between veridical experience and hallucination, whether it arrives from an appropriate proximal stimulus or not. — NOS4A2
If one only has direct knowledge of the voice as the cortex has constructed it, how does one infer whether there is a proximal stimulus of the cortex or not? It seems to me there must first be some direct knowledge of a proximal stimulus that is not merely the product of the cortex. — NOS4A2
It leads to a whole network of philosophical garden paths in which, absurdly, the self is forever "cut off" from the world in which it lives. — Banno
It also seems that nobody here believes that our perceptions are the objects (…). But I imagine that is because no idealist has entered the thread yet. — Lionino
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