We drop any separate “object of experience” in the mind. — Banno

I don't think experience has any particular location. It's something creatures with nervous systems do. A flood of electrical data comes into the brain, and the brain creates an integrated experience. Are you denying that?

No. The content of my experience is the cat, the ship, the smell of coffee. Not my neural processes, and not my neural representations. — Banno

Sure. You experience the cat indirectly. You experience the ship indirectly. You experience the smell of the coffee indirectly. Welcome to indirect realism.

No. Humans do not experience neural representations; experience is having neural representations.

You are not separate from your neural processes. — Banno

Ok. The content of your experience is neural representations. Happy?

My objection then goes back to, how could we know unless we assume DR? — AmadeusD

Direct realism is also subject to the decomposing effects of skepticism. We all get by with pragmatism.

I've been trying to make this argument for a long time. — AmadeusD

:up:

One can admit that neural representations exist and denying that such things are the objects of perception. These neural representations are our seeing, not what we see. — Banno

You're an indirect realist. You allow that humans experience neural representations, whether we call that seeing, hearing, tasting/smelling, touching (pressure and texture sensing).

If I see a cat, I'm not in direct contact with the cat even before it enters the CNS, and I don't receive the cat on my eye. — Hanover

Your eye is directly exposed to light bouncing off the cat. That's the only directness to the situation. Humans don't have any kind of direct perception.

My point is that your distinction that sometimes we have direct contact with the world and sometimes we don't doesn't exist. — Hanover

I didn't say that.

So, you are a realist!
Good analogy. — L'éléphant

We have the same experience of moving a flashlight around in dreams. I've had a lot of dreams where the locals have these violent and horrifying customs. They do these things because that's the way it's always been done. So there's a whole history implied. It's real in the dream.

Yes this would seem to be right but I suspect cunning arguments are available against this position. — Tom Storm

There are, but they're wrong. :grin:

Again, sensory organs are interfaces. They convey electrical discharges to the central nervous system, which is separated from the rest of the body by the blood-brain barrier. The CNS even has its own private immune system as if it's a separate entity. It's not directly in contact with the world the organism lives in. It's indirect realism.

I asked this crazy guy what his all-time favorite birthday gift was. I can't tell you what it was though.

A computer sees the world indirectly through its analog to digital converters. A microphone is in direct contact with the world. The computer recording the input from the microphone is not directly connected to the sound waves.

Why is this complicated?

We need not call a spectrum inverted person erroneous unless we already assume hte premise of colour being a property of objects rather than wavelength reflection. — AmadeusD

Scientists say humans look purple to cats. So to a cat, it would be true that humans are purple. If a human says that, there might be something wrong. Except Latino babies are actually purple. For real.

I didn't think so either, but apparently its not so trivial based on the discussion generated — Philosophim

I think they probably thought you were saying something a little more substantial.

Appreciate the input. — Philosophim

:up:

I still don't get how that applies to the OP Frank. — Philosophim

It doesn't appear the OP is saying anything that isn't trivially true.

Yes, but they aren't saying "Sex preference". I'm not sure what the point was here Frank. That's not intended to sound sarcastic, I'm just not sure what you meant here. — Philosophim

They were born with a certain sex. That's true. They tell you what their gender is.

That's worded quite strangely. If it the prevailing definition of the term 'woman' became social role instead of sex role, then the OP's conclusion would change. It has not as of this time. — Philosophim

Ok. But when you go to the hospital, someone is going to fill in a blank beside the words: Gender Preference. So you're cool with that because every hospital in America is presently doing it.

You just sort of go with the flow. I can't say I'm overly proud of you for that, but I recognize your stance.

Sure. That doesn't invalidate the OP. — Philosophim

Cool. So if people change the way they talk about gender, you'll change your views.

Effective language is used to describe reality. — Philosophim

Conceptions of reality change. Language changes with it.

The architecture of the nervous system makes indirect realism a no-brainer.

I've seen things you people wouldn't believe.

I mean, it's not like the US is going to herd the residents of Greenland into a re-education camp and zap them in their heads with cattle prods if they're slow in repeating back the American propaganda, "Wall Street above Main Street."

They'll probably just give them guarantees of transport to an American hospital if needed by fixed wing aircraft, for which they'll have to pay about $450. I'm guessing, I don't know how much it will be.

But for the perfect Amish woman, would you go all out with goat and what not? This is a test for how conservative you are.

These days it seems that some people are more uncomfortable with golden retrievers on fire than people. — Tom Storm

misanthropy, yep

Is that accurate? Is that Black Notebokk stuff? — Tom Storm

No, that's Steiner in 1979. The black notebooks just put an end to any possibility of apology.

Well if God is happy with this who are we not to share the enthusiasm? — Tom Storm

Well, it's just that most of us would be filled with horror at the thought of lighting a golden retriever on fire. We're better than God?

Tribalism — Tom Storm

One of Heidegger's biographers accused him of sadism due to his easy attitude toward violence and even genocide. If someone is happy with the concept of humans being tortured eternally, maybe there's some sadism to it?

The Baptists up the road from my old house believe all other denominations are wrong and destined for hell. — Tom Storm

There's some kind of syndrome that causes that. I don't know what it us, though. :grin:

Maybe if you put everyone's partials together, you get the whole truth? — Tom Storm

I think so. That's kind of the theme of War and Peace. Every story is made of directly opposing truths.

A Baptist told me that liberal Christians don't care about denomination, or even the divide between Christianity and Judaism. Conservative Christians care about divisions.

But Heidegger rejects the idea that there is a self-contained subject who merely “lights up” pre-existing objects that are already there in themselves. — Joshs

And yet his theory of truth emphasized revelation, uncovering. My theory of truth is that we see ourselves as in communication with the world. The division between a psyche and its world is the capacity to be mistaken, to read the world incorrectly.

Sure, in some mystical silence, the psyche and its world are one, but there's nothing to say about that. Life as we know it is in the realm of partial truths.

I started the activation for help for the homeless when Reagan was in office. And I sure am not religious, but that is also why I know the difficulty of getting anything done without an organization. — Athena

I think that's the main advantage of religion. It's a ready-made community that's held together by something over-arching. So even if people shout and disagree, grandstand and walk out, the community is still there. I think that kind of community is what made humans what we are today.

I think of the things outside of our immediate awareness as scaffolding necessary to hold our attention to what's within our means to perceive the world. — L'éléphant

Like in dreams, we know there is a world beyond the immediate. Consciousness seems like a flashlight in a dark room. We move the flashlight around and come to know what was already there.

But us non religious people show up at demonstrations, and we might contact our representatives on city, county, state, and federal levels. The secular folks use the government and law to get needs met, so I hope your comment was not intended to say we do not care and do not take action. — Athena

That's nice. But in the middle of night, some Latina lady is being discharged from the emergency department, and I know she needs some help. I give her a list of groups in the area who she can turn to. None of them are non-religious. I'd be overjoyed to put a non-religious organization on there. There just aren't any. Even freakin' Habitat for Humanity is a Christian organization.

Does Odysseus cross paths with Moses as they both try to fnd their way home? Wait, don't tell me and spoil it. — Hanover

The big expert on Homeric Greece was named Moses Finley (his real last name was Finkelstein.) The World of Odysseus

I knew you were going to say that... — Banno

I knew you knew I was going to say that.

.and yet we get on, regardless. Yep. It's what we do. — Banno

I think we understand each other via empathy. We're telepathic. :grin:

When you do speak of them, whatever is doing the work is the rule-governed use of the term, — Hanover

Probably not. There's no fact about which rules anyone has been following.

I’m concerned about all the lives lost and suffering as a result of Trump’s behaviour. — Punshhh

Ok. Grieve then. But accept what you can't change.

I think an important point to mention when we say "meaning is use" is that it completely disentangles metaphysics from grammar. Grammar answers the question of how we use words. When I say "I see a ship" and you ask what is a "ship," under a meaning is use analysis, the "ship" is defined by how it is used. If you start asking about the atomic structure of the ship and how the photons bounce off the boards to your optic nerve, you are answering a very different question. — Hanover

If by "meaning is use" we're envisioning that some activity is underway, and my language comprehension is entirely dependent on successful collaboration, then we have a kind of stilted scenario. I mean, when you read a history book, there's no collaborative activity that would allow you to feel confident about your interpretation, and yet most people don't struggle with reading.

Much of the time, you understand people because you're (possibly half-consciously) putting yourself in their shoes, looking at the world through their eyes. I think this is how reading works. Discerning context requires a meeting of minds. Now you could argue that such a meeting of minds is just a folk explanation. It doesn't really happen. But if that's true, how exactly does reading work? Kripke shows that it's probably not rule following.

So if the "put yourself in their shoes" scenario is how communication really works, then there is a consideration of what "ship" refers to. You'll need this once you are seeing the world that the speaker sees.

You sound pretty bitter about the whole thing. It's just politics. It doesn't mean anything. Feeling the rain on your face. That's what's important.