IE, it is a problem of circularity, in that there are two objects provided we have already determined that there are two objects. — RussellA

Very good point. I think what this point really alludes to from my perspective is that numbers is not strictly a passive consequence of objects in the world but are consequences of our ability to create cognitive maps or models we use to navigate the world. Spaces with dimensions, distances, transformations. We develop the ability to deal with metric information (even rats can deal with distance, duration, numerosity) just in virtue of a brain which can sequentially sample environmental inputs, has memory, can act to manipulate those sequences, and can abstract regularities or overarching structure from that kind of sequential sampling of the world, one viewpoint or location at a time. Counting on a number line is like tracking a location in a 1D space.

what is entailed by 'mental only' — AmadeusD

Well what is entailed by it then? I haven't understood from what you have said so far. I don't recall talking to or reading about anyone else who has this issue with the notion of idealism.

I have. "What are the experiences of" is a good enough question to at the very least, put the position you're driving at on the rocks, if not infer a position that requires externalities (in a 'proper' use of the word - not the economic one) to inform any type of experience. Otherwise, we have infinite regress - at what point would content be involved, if it's experience all the way down? Seems a massive gap here. — AmadeusD

Why do experiences have to be of anything? All I know is that I have experiences. Why can't experiences be externalities? I don't see any justification here for an infinite regress.

As noted a couple of times, and apparently ignored: Experiences must be OF something(if you do not accept this, we may be at an end of the road we travel together). — AmadeusD

You should then be able to give a logically entailed justification why an experience must be of something or come from somewhere.

Mental objects do not exist outside of mind, by definition. What's not getting through? — AmadeusD

This issue can bypassed by just postulating that the universe is a mind or made out of minds. At the same time, I see nothing here suggesting that minds need to be supported by something else like the physical.

This is the exclusion you seem to just straight-up ignore. — AmadeusD

If it looks like I am ignoring what you have said, it is because you haven't given sufficient justification. You just keep reiterating your position that experiences must be a certain way and must be related to some other external stuff in a certain way. But from what I gather, this is just based on definitions you have started with that you perhaps find very intuitive. You haven't logically ruled out alternatives in any case. You just keep going on that it must be this way without giving me a further reason.

"why isn't anything conscious"? The latter is not irrelevant, in the discussion we're having. — AmadeusD

Yes, but questions like these and "why is there experience?" are no more or less difficult than asking why the world isn't some other metaphysical kind of way. The point was that the issue of why there is experience is no longer the hard problem of consciousness, which is specifically about the inability to explain consciousness through physical and functional explanation. In an idealist universe, this is no longer a problem.

This is not a problem, and it does not suggest this. I would recommend reading all of Chalmers, if this is where you're going. — AmadeusD

I recommend you reading it because he says this paradox is probably the greatest tension created by dualism. It is definitely a big problem. A p-zombie believes they have consciousness, they report on it in ways identical to any non-p-zombie. Whats worse is they do it for the exact same reasons we do. We report our experiences and profess them because our brain fires in a certain way which leads to our behaviours and reports. Your beliefs about consciousness then seem to have nothing to do with consciousness itself and all to do with the causal action of whats going on in your brain. Chalmers' only response to this is pretty much that we are directly aquainted with out consciousness which is not something I am denying. But I am denying dualism because that story makes no sense, and the only way it can make sense is if there wasn't really any dualism at all.

From this point of view, "Discovering that the consciousness does not logically supervene on the physical" is not saying something about the profound ontology of the world but about how information processing and explanations work, which is exactly why a zombie would come up with the same conclusions. There is no reason why a zombie could know anything about the profound ontologies of the world just from the functional interactions that go on in a brain. There is no reason to think we do either.

Can you explain why this would have any weight in displacing the (potential) property dualist account? — AmadeusD

I think the story of a world that logically makes sense but we don't have direct access to for pretty reasonable justofications regarding how minds and brains work - is a much better explanation than a world which doesn't logically make any sense at all and then postulates two different ontological categories which we can't even explain anyway under this view.

He would posit that nothing you've said changes the fact that Consciousness is irreducible. — AmadeusD

Well then you have not understood a thing I have said. *I am not motivated to change the irreducibility of conscious experiences, only the idea that this represents some fundamental ontological category that sits beside some other fundamental ontological category called the physical*. As I just happened to say earlier in this thread, my view is probably closest to a kind of neutral monism which Chalmers goes through briefly on page 153 - 156 of the excerpt of his book you linked me.

I'm beginning to think you're confusing yourself. — AmadeusD

No, I think you are confused if you think indirect perceptual realism is about directly accessing the world.

Do you know any idealist scientific realists? — AmadeusD

There is nothing necessarily inherent that contradicts it if you are open to the kinds of definition in the article on idealism that I linked which the majority of other people seem to think is a reasonable definition.

But we know, for sure, that cognition happens sans any experience. — AmadeusD

I disagree. I think all of what we call cognition is things we observe ourselves through experience. The difference between conscious and non-conscious experience is to do with things like whether we perceive cognition to be automatic or deliberative, or whether our attention is strong or weak. But they all still occur through the flow of experience and the kinds of non-experiential aspects that explain the flow are the same for both conscious and non-conscious cognition, involving dynamics of brain activity. There is a non-trivial difference in the experiences of conscious and non-conscious cognition, but they are both experiential and are underlaid by the same kind of non-experiential explanations.


Edit: * *

Just commenting on this to remember/"bookmark" it because I thought it was interesting.

"why are social practices what they are? why do they evolve the way they do? etc." — Count Timothy von Icarus

Because we have a brain with trillions of parameters capable of extremely complicated abstraction and inference tasks!

Everything I am saying about idealism is just the basic contemporary opinion on it. I linked an article by David Chalmers as the source for my definition and conceptualization of idealism. Notable contemporary idealists like Bernardo Kastrup and his followers thinking about idealism in precisely this way, as you may have seen.

I feel like you have this strong preconception that any kind of phenomena is necessarily internal to some kind of external physical things, because you are dualist. But I don't see how this view is strictly necessary and how other kinds of views of phenomena as ontology are not at least conceivable.

You seem to agree that:

"We have no idea about the intrinsic nature of what we scientifically observe beyond our experiences ..... there is absolutely no reason why we should be able to have any tangible access to some fundamental metaphysical nature of how the universe is, whether from science or perception"

Elaborating (in a similar way to the Chalmers chapter you linked): all we have direct access to is our personal experiences; our engagement with and articulation of physical theories is through experience; and the content of physical theories is relational or functional.

So if physical theories are defined purely functionally or relationally and say absolutely nothing about the intrinsic nature of what is beyond our personal experiences, I think you have to give an argument to rule out the idea that what is beyond our personal experiences can conceivably be more experiences and nothing else.

Again, we have established that you have no idea about the intrinsic nature of what is going on beyond your immediate experiences so I don't see what standard you are using to judge that what is going on beyond cannot be experiential. There are various options such as one universal mind filled with mental things interacting or many different individual minds interacting. What we think of as physical objects can still exist, just they have to be made of phenomena. What is the basis for saying that "Mental "objects" giving rise to conscious experience sans anything else is just dumb"? I haven't seen justification. What standard are you using if you don't even know what physical things intrinsically are? Does a standard even exist if physical concepts are purely relational?

It then seems pretty clear that if everything were phenomenal, an idealist would avoid the hard problem in its most basic sense (perhaps not the combination problems). The question of "why do experiences exist?" would be no different from the question of why any other different kind of intrinsic stuff were to exist (e.g. why does material exist? (perhaps in a hypothetical universe that only has material and no consciousness)).

With regard to dualism?

There have been absolutely no discoveries in science that suggest some kind of inherent metaphysical separation between mental and physical stuff in any sense. Such a dualism is incoherent.

My main argument against dualism is probably the "paradox of phenomenal judgment" that Chalmers talks about in chapter 5 of the Chalmers link you gave, and it is a consequence of epiphenomenalism (it follows soon after the pages you recommended). The problem is that consciousness is rendered causally irrelevant not only to our behavior but to our own knowledge of consciousness. The absurdity suggests that dualism is an illusion and that there is no dual-aspect.

There is no need for a dual-aspect. Physical theories are just models that are used within the human experience to predict and carve out abstract functional relations to other intrinsic experiences. They cannot tell me anything about the intrinsic nature behind "physical" objects. In fact, I think that not only are all physical theories relational and functional… all beliefs, hypotheses, knowledge, etc, etc, etc, are relational and functional. No knowledge, as a cognitive process, can ever tell you anything about any kind of intrinsicness, simply by the nature of what descriptions and explanations do and that is also why phenomenal experiences are fundamentally ineffable. I think this is less mysterianism than the fact that if you endorse kinds of scientific and metaphysical deflationism / antirealism, then the need for inherent dual-aspects is not pressing. The fact that there is no accepted peer review published scientific evidence for non-physical properties and the incoherence from the "paradox of phenomenal judgment" then presses even more against the idea of dualism. Because this view doesn't rely on falsifying phenomenal experiences, it evades Chalmers' responses. I don't think Chalmers would see this view as adversarial to his though, even if he may not necessarily agree with it.

I think the closest we can get to characterizing reality is that there are objective structures in reality which we cannot directly access; my experiences are what it is like to be some of that structure at some particular scale (or I guess even what it is like to be information to move closer to Chalmers' thoughts). And as more or less an instrumentalist about cognition and knowledge, that characterization doesn't even necessarily mean much other than a story that helps conceptualize the world. At the same time, the brain, information processing and cognition should still in principle be the ultimate basis for explaining why people have difficulties articulating things about consciousness and why explanations about it fail (given the p-zombie who is confused by the hard problem because of his brain independently of consciousness).

Scientific realism posits there is an external world we can accurately measure. Perceptual realism posits that we, without measurement, can directly access an external world — AmadeusD

Your latter definition only accounts for direct realism, not indirect realism. Also, scientific realism is not about positing an external world per se, it posits that our theories about the world are true. Doesn't seem very different from the idea of perceptions being true representations or giving true access to the world.

What's your take here, then? Pure curiosity. To come to table, 'cognition' doesn't seem to me something that is the same as experience. So, all cognition is 'conscious' but barely any cognition arises in experience — AmadeusD

Cognition is just a higher-order description of what is happening in the flow of experience imo. The difference between "conscious" and "non-conscious" cognition essentially comes down to differences in this flow of experience.

Atomization (also mistakenly termed 'individualism'/'individualization') is a result of these types policies — Tzeentch

Sounds a bit reductive, no? The world is much more complicated than that. At the same time, were the issues being discussed much better for societies that are less atomized, perhaps in the past? Not sure about that. Seems a distraction from the issue at hand imo. I am not entirely sure ideals like this are reliable just as the notion of the American Dream never was.

Getting rid of neoliberalism, heh.

Very interesting.

with senses other than sight I'm not sure what is representative. — Moliere

I certainly get the intuition. We know that the sensation of sweetness is associated with certain molecules but its not clear that perceptions of taste are representing anything like this to us. From my viewpoint, vision is not inherently different.

To be honest, for some further reading around the issue, which seems more nuanced than I thought and my own preconception of what indirectness meant, I have become much more sympathetic to the direct view and the ambiguity of what constitutes directness/indirectness. For instance, I find the following passage reasonable:

"In this light, consider the following two
claims:

(i) perception is indirect in the sense that it
involves a series of causal intermediaries
between the external object (or event) and
the percipient;

and

(ii) perception is indirect in the sense of involving a prior awareness of something other
than the external object (or event).

Claims (i) and (ii) thus distinguished,
Direct Realists can argue that it does not
follow from the fact that perception is indirect in the sense of (i) that it is indirect in the sense of (ii). What the Causal Argument establishes is only the causal indirectness of perception in the sense of (i), not the cognitive indirectness in the sense
of (ii)."

Ofcourse, my own inclinations away from realism generally don't take a strong preference of one set of views or the other or even either, perhaps. The topic as a whole seems too complex for me to give a well-thought view without a lot of research.

I feel like your misunderstandings here must come from a different notion of idealism.

Idealism as I described and as entertained in the article I linked is completely consistent with external objects beyond your immediate experience so the idea of external objects is completely consistent, they just happen to be mental or experiential. In the first paragraph it even says that it is analogous to physicalism, the only difference is replacing physical with mental. I think your notion of idealism is far narrower than most people seriously entertaining idealism today.

It then follows that when you say something like:

If consciousness does not reduce to the physical — AmadeusD

The idealist would agree and then they would say the physical simply does not exist so there is no problem. There is no need to reduce the mental to the physical because the physical just doesn't exist. All there is are experiences. Consciousness doesn't supervene on the physical because consciousness is all there is.

Once you formulate an idealist universe as identical to a physicalist one except that everything is made out of mental stuff, then there is literally no hard problem of consciousness. We can ask in the physicalist universe why energy exists or forces exist or fields exist or anything else. There will always be some point where it just doesn't have an answer - we don't know why things exist or don't exist. The problem of why experience exists would reduce to exactly that problem for an idealist. There is no other thing that gives rise to experience for the idealist because all there is is experience. Existence and being is simply experience at all levels. So the hard problem doesn't exist for the idealist and this is probably one of the major advantages amy idealist will give you to their theory.

I'm not quite sure I'm understand thsi reply. — AmadeusD

The reply is saying that a dualist reality where there is a metaphysical divide between the mental and physical is unfounded. It has no basis in science. Now I can also say that I have experiences but the fact that I say I have experiences doesn't entail that there must be some other physical substance which is profoundly metaphysically different and from which experiences arise. We have no idea about the intrinsic nature of what we scientifically observe beyond our experiences because we can only do science within our experiences. It follows that any metaphysical distinction is inaccessible and science gives no reason to suggest that there is one. At the same time given how the information processing that undergirds perception and knowledge is due to brain structure and functional capabilities, there is absolutely no reason why we should be able to have any tangible access to some fundamental metaphysical nature of how the universe is, whether from science or perception. None of this comes from a particular realist viewpoint which I think is probably key. Essentially all that we work with when it comes to knowledge is empirical structures that we happen to find in what we observe, and models we create concerning those observational structures. From that standpoint the most I can say is perhaps that the universe has some kind of structure which I cannot directly access. Loosely, I am what it is like to be some kind of structure in the universe. But then again, neither the notion of "structure" or "what it is like"(experience) have any substantive definitions that let me pick out anything metaphysically or scientifically meaningful, let alone any dichotomy between experience and the physical which would only lead to an incoherent type of epiphenomenalism.

One question here is going to be (or more accurately "How do we produce conscious experiences of the external world?") but another, separate and probably more profound question is "How could we know that anything in the external world is actually as-it-seems? Even if we have 'direct' perception we still have the issue of Descartes Demon and all that fun stuff - whereas the question around scientific realism addresses the problem of whether our perception is of actual things. In world A' we may have direct perceptions of things which are not actually things, for instance. It is a false perception, but its a direct relation with the mental substance that it arises from. Even in world A, we might have indirect perception yet trust that our scientific instruments are relaying the actual behind our perceptions. — AmadeusD

So in the Scientific sense, are we even metaphysically able to ascertain the world as-it-is? And for Perception its do we, humans, naturally, perceive the world in direct causal relation (regardless of whether the world actually allows for accurate measurement. — AmadeusD

I don't think you have said anything here that distinguishes realism about scientific theories from that about objects of perceptual. Descartes Demon exemplifies a general skeptical problem that can be applied to anything whereas the question of whether our perception is about actual things seems to me just as much a concern for realism about perception as it is for scientific theories. We may have scientific theories that turn out to not be of actual things also. The last two lines also seem to be basically the same except you have added direct for perception which seems to be besides the issue since you can have indirect-realism.

You can keep question one, and simply swap question two for the more specific version: Why is anything in the Universe conscious? To essentially outline the two distinct questions that idealism would still post. Consciousness not supervening on the physical simply doesn't explain it as the majority of cognition is not accompanied by any experience. — AmadeusD

The question of "why the universe is the way it is?" is the same for any kind of metaphysical position because you can imagine the universe in a vast number of different ways even for the physicalist, which are just as arbitrary as the universe being conscious or not or some other distinction. So too you can have an idealist universe where even what you are thinking of as non-experiential cognition is still experience or consciousness. Personally I don't believe in some strong distinction between "conscious" and "non-conscious" cognition in the way that I believe you are thinking about it.

Again, the meat of the hard problem is the reducibility of experience to physical and functional explanation:

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cluster=2544424150595524876&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_vis=1

Quotes from above:

"It is undeniable that some organisms are subjects of experience. But the question of
how it is that these systems are subjects of experience is perplexing. Why is it that when
our cognitive systems engage in visual and auditory information-processing, we have
visual or auditory experience:"

"It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical
processing give rise to a rich inner life at all? It seems objectively unreasonable that it
should, and yet it does."

"What makes the hard problem hard and almost unique is that it goes beyond problems about the performance of functions."

"Why doesn't all this information-processing go on in the darkí free of any inner feel? Why is it that
when electromagnetic waveforms impinge on a retina and are discriminated and categorized by a visual system, this discrimination and categorization is experienced as a
sensation of vivid red? We know that conscious experience does arise when these
functions are performed, but the very fact that it arises is the central mystery. There is an
explanatory gap (a term due to Levine 1983) between the functions and experience"

The problem of consciousness is only in contrast to the metaphysics of the physical and functional.

This is interesting. It reads lile you view your bodily sensations as fundamentally different from your visual experiences in some separable way?

That literally is the hard problem. Perhaps you have an erroneous idea of what it is? The hard problem consists in this exact question. — AmadeusD

AS above, clearly this is not right. — AmadeusD

If the only thing that exists is experiences, then how are the questions different? "Why is there experience?" would be precisely the same as "Why is there anything at all?"

Its just ignoring one problem for another. — AmadeusD

Well from this perspective, it isn't a true metaphysical problem which is why illusionists may be more interested in the meta-problem of consciousness instead, aiming to explain what it is about human cognition and computation that leads to these limits of explanation.

https://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_vis=1&q=metaproblem+chalmers&btnG=

It's very hard to see how this could matter. If one is having an experience, that's all that's needed. The framework in whcih is sits isn't relevant the Hard Problem. It is the experience per se that needs explaining. — AmadeusD

This is not my understanding of the hard problem. The issue is the reducibility of consciousness to physical explanations. If you remove the physical from the equation then there is no hard problem. The issue I was talking about in the quote you replied to effectively also amounts to a problem of irreducibility but between different experiences.

An idealist rejects that there are external objects. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you're getting at here. — AmadeusD

The kind of idealism I have in mind is just that everything in the universe is mental (definition exists in the paper below), which I guess could be quite broad in terms of possible types of idealism.

https://scholar.googleusercontent.com/scholar?q=cache:-7cyUpbkVq4J:scholar.google.com/+modern+idealism+chalmers&hl=en&as_sdt=0,5&as_ylo=2020&as_vis=1

Because you're misattributing what 'realism' stands for within each framework. — AmadeusD

Can you elaborate the differences in realism for science vs. perceptual representations?

My take is that there isn't really evidence for indirect realism as much as indirect realism is an interpretation of what we know -- so I'm providing an alternate interpretation to weaken the justification for indirect realism. Or at least that's the strategy. — Moliere

Yeah, fair enough. I do agree you can plausibly see it different ways depending on how you frame things.

It seems so to me, yes. — Moliere

I think our metaphysics clearly are just quite different and don't agree.

I don't understand what a representation of my toe would be when I'm stubbing it or not. — Moliere

Minimally I have a hard time thinking of the perception of my body as a representation: I can go as far as to say it's a bundle, and there is no "I", but I don't think my body is a bundle of representations. — Moliere

Very interesting; can you elaborate? Especially the first bit.

all Russian peasants held their land in a form of communal ownership known as obshchina or mir, which was similar, but not identical, to the commons-based communities in pre-industrial England — Monthly Review

Very interesting. Makes me think that communism as created by Marx maybe was envisioned specifically in these kinds of communal contexts and so communism would be a kind of radical political modification to a familiar (or at least not so far off) social situation.

Look how different society is now though - how individualized but at the same time geographically extended / globalized it is; how much economies have shifted from manufacturing and producing material goods to services and entertainment; how we have gone way beyond basic necessities to choice and consumerism. I wonder if communism actually even makes sense in modern society without some radical re-invention of it. Maybe someone has done that. That said, even experiments in socialist communities back in the 1800s basically all failed as far as I'm aware.

Was Russia ever actually truly communist though?

These are explanations for phenomena used to support indirect realism which don't resort to the position of indirect realism — Moliere

But most indirect realists do think that these explanations are directly evidencing indirect realisms.

I think "information" counts as kind of idealism, if you're positing it as a kind of fundamental substance that everything is composed of. — Moliere

No, I'm not implying it in a fundamental metaphysical sense. But some have pointed out that my actual view on mind-body metaphysics is not so dissimilar from a kind of neutral monism (maybe a very minimalist one) so maybe you would still think it the case of my view anyway. Though I don't think I see my view that way.

Isn't that pretty much what the topic of indirect or naive realism is about? Fundamental metaphysics? — Moliere

I'm not sure to be honest. I think it depends on the angle you take. As you say below, it can be quite vague all this talk I think. I don't think indirect realists necessarily have to bring strong metaphysics into it beyond the talk of realism about representations, similar to the way you can talk about whether scientific theories (are real)*. The science I think provides quite a good description of how perceptions would be indirect so not much work is needed to be done there. Naive direct realism I'm not so sure.

I'm uncertain of the best way to put it, but at the very least what it means is that though direct realists directly perceive objects in the world that does not then entail that what they see is a fixed property, or that there are not other properties which a given perception is not perceiving.

It's mostly the notion of permanent objects and their essences that I'd try to avoid -- things are in constant flux. — Moliere

My intuition is that this would certainly require a more elaborate metaphysics about the world.

- a term of art meant to contrast with "properties", is what I was thinking. — Moliere

Ah well, fair enough.

Perhaps this is a way of differentiating the naive from the direct realist: I think the naive realist is seeing something real, that literal objects are a part of their experience, but that does not then mean that every judgment about that real thing which a naive realist makes is going to be true or comprehensive. — Moliere

But the experiences still extend into the outside world beyond the head?

While I've come to discount the notion of an information ontology, you're far from alone in thinking like that. — Moliere

Well I only use it in a weak sense as opposed to a fundamental, tangible ontology.

in a sense I'd say that every judgment has a dual-awareness -- the judgment ,and what the judgment is about) — Moliere

Yes, I think I understand.

But how do we really differentiate which is the better way to talk? — Moliere

Well I'm not sure since it seems you were perhaps using affordance in different sense, ha. But possibly yes, I definitely think I have preferred starting points in my reasonings that are probably not the same as yours.

Edit: ( )*.

No theory has an explanation of why experience compliments activity. Idealism still cannot answer the hard problem. It just shifts from having experiences of 'the world', to having experiences of one's mind. But the problem of experience remains. — AmadeusD

I don't know exactly what you mean for experience to compliment activity.

If everything is experience, there is no hard problem because the problem just becomes "why are there experiences?" but if everything is experience, then this is no different from "why does anything exist?" which is equally applicable to a physicalist. There is no physical things in idealism just experiential phenomena that follow the laws of physics.

This is a hard problem but not the one of consciousness and is arguably even more intractable to the point that most people don't consider it that interesting except perhaps people who believe in God or something.

Aside:

And maybe people similarly-minded to Dennett actually want to turn the hard problem of consciousness into this kind of more trivial hard problem - i.e. the reasoning going something like - Why does anything exist? Can we even answer that? Do we have to make up an additional metaphysical substance of consciousness that needs its own separate answer? This is probably close to my view on that matter. I don't think there are sufficiently clear notions of fundamental metaphysics that warrant an intrinsic dualism of experience vs. physical so there is no reason to postulate that a different kind of creation story should exist for something called experience. I think that the nature and limits of our information processing is plausibly a sufficient way of explaining why the hard problem arises for people (in terms of being unable to explaim certain things about reality)**.

Back to idealism:

To my mind, problems analogous to the hard problem of consciousness (which I think are probably actually closer in spirit to the combination problems of panpsychism e.g. see stanford encyclopedia panpsychism page) only come about in idealism when you postulate something like observers that have a way they seem to themselves, via their own experiences, which is different to how they seem from another observer's perspective.

Obviously, this construction has an inherent indirect aspect to it in the sense that there are experiences out in the world and then your own experiences which seem to be about those experiences but are not the same - they are separated. For instance, I have my own experience of what is going on inside my mind. Presumably other people perceive what is going on in my mind as brains in their own experience, through various levels of mediation. And it is only then imo that there is this kind of hard problem/combination-type problem of consciousness for idealism - because it seems inexplicable that my experiences right now look like a brain to someone else, which is an objects that seems structurally completely different. But again, this presupposes an indirectness about how we observe things. At the same time it is not identical to the hard problem because physical things still don't exist - its more the problem of how certain experiences can produce other disparate experiences (i.e. my experiences create the impression of a brain).

I think if you take away that indirectness and just have mental observers all observing a common experiential world then this hard-type problem doesn't arise. It might not actually be a plausible way to view the world based on scientific knowledge we have, but that is because imo scientific knowledge paints a picture of indirect mediation (i.e. object perception mediated by chains of events from the surface of an object to a brain which implies boundaries that gatekeep information and separate internal events / representations / experiences from different external stuff out there). Indirect mediation is precisely why I have both the notion of a ball and the atoms that make it up... at least, that is the best explanation. At the same time, without indirect mediation I feel like there would be no need to identify brain processes and experiences or distinguish internal experiences from external stuff. That's not to say older Cartesian notions of mind-body problem wouldn't arise but not sure its same as more modern versions I would be interested in.

So I think in that sense hard-type problems in idealism do presuppose indirect realism (including external objects to be realist about which are qualitatively different from internal perception). If everything were direct, the hard problem of consciousness would just reduce to the problem of why experiences exist? why are the laws of nature they are? - which isn't particularly different from analogous questions for a physicist.. Why do we have certain physical laws? etc.

therefore there is no hard problem. Experience is a brute fact of reality.

The bolded, appears to me, an absolute fact as long as one is not an Idealist. There is the world. There is inside the head. — AmadeusD

So it appears you already anticipated the answer I gave about why idealism doesn't necessarily have a hard problem of consciousness.

Obviously, you may think it an absolute fact, but then what I am saying is if it wasn't, the idealist would have no hard problem.

I'm not entirely sure what's being suggested here. AI doesn't have conscious experience, that we know of. — AmadeusD

It's not clear to me that indirect realism needs to be a concept restricted to conscious experiencers. For instance, if realism is a concept that can be attributed to mathematical scientific theories, why can't it be attributed to the representations and models built in machine learning? And often, these machine learning models quite aptly embody the idea of in-direct realism, since they are what neuroscientists use to model how the brain and mind works. For instance, Bayesian statistics involving the idea of learning internal representations or models about hidden variables based on noisy sensory data. This is similar to how debates about indirect vs direct perception in psychology have been framed (e.g. gregory vs gibson https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Gregory). A mathematical scientific theory cannot talk about anything about as much as A.I., yet people often attribute realism to them.

So I think really these debates about direct and indirect realism, though obviously may involve the concept of experience, may not be directly related to the hard problem of consciousness itself.

Edit: ()**

but hallucinations like one experiences on hallucinogens or when they don't have enough sugar to make the brain function as it normally does. — Moliere

I am not sure I see a profound difference tbh. Disruption of normal functioning is what the indirect realist sees as disruption of normal representations.

if we do not analyze them using Cartesian assumptions, are evidence that our mind is a part of the world because the world influences it, rather than the other way about — Moliere

Again, maybe this is all just a semantics issue rather than representing deep conflicts with what the indirect realist conventionally believes.

I think I will just note that my "direct awareness of information" doesn't seem conceptually that far away from semantic direct realism... minus the realism.. so I guess it isn't so close, ha. But the concept is reminiscient imo in terms of the kind of change it makes to differ itself from direct realism.

So I'd claim that I am aware of my toe — Moliere

Right. For me this almost implies some form of idealism where the object of my toe is just the experience of my toe, without anything more. I think I would also be open though toward some kind of notion of direct awareness of information or something like that which I
think is similar to this comment here you made:

If it's all just experience then wouldn't that be a kind of direct realism? There wouldn't even be a self as much as a local bundle of experiences which gets in the habit of calling itself "I", erroneously. — Moliere

But to clarify I wasn't trying to necessarily imply anything about the universe being just experiences. I don't believe sufficiently clear notions of fundamental metaphysics are accessible so I don't bother with that.

I was just saying that I am having what I call experiences and they flow and any time I recognize errors, that is just encompassed in types of experiential flow. And yes, what I would call the self is enacted in the flow too just like you said.

It might not be apt to call it direct realism though because I wouldn't say it conflicted with the idea of mediational processes and a chain of causes originating outside of what is experienced. It is more appropriately, and perhaps trivially, a direct awareness of what is going on in my head which I think is then not the same as the kind of direct realism described on wikipedia or something. It would be quite weakened and I would even push back against the notion of there being a fact of the matter about the sense that these experiences are about objective objects out in the world in the same kind of way I push back against scientific realism. As an analogy, I would say what we perceive is closer to a notion of an instrumentalist science where we construct theories that predict data, as opposed to theories being objectively real.

I think objects have affordances more than distinct properties. — Moliere

But what does it mean for a color itself to be an affordance? What is it inherently that colors afford? On the contrary, color seems more closely related to wavelength properties in light, which maybe then can be used to construct affordances in some sense afterward (and cannot be identical per se).

And sometimes people do see features which are not actually there from some other person's perspective, like hallucinations. Someone on an LSD trip might see motion in the carpet where another person sees none at all. (Though I guess you might say motion and non-motion are both there?)

Tbh I think the affordance/J.J.Gibson-kind of direct perception is closer to my "direct awareness of information" than it is to more literal direct realism. But I suspect maybe that interpretation may be particular to me. The idea of affordances definitely was a significant input, among others, to what led me to the idea that our experiences are fundamentally just about "what happens next?" and enacting that... which I see as pretty much just a more general view of affordances. So affordances is an important concept to me but I have gone away from the idea that the kind of qualities I directly experience are literally affordances. If sensory information arises from patterns on sensory boundaries like the retina, then the connection to affordances must come in afterwards.

For me, I don't think it makes sense to say the dress can be two colors without loosening realism and directness, arguably both. But again, I don't think that contradicts my "direct awareness of information" thing imo.

Edit: ( ).

though it's not all that satisfying to me to say that the hard problem presupposes anything. — AmadeusD

I think it does. If you are like an idealist and the world of experience is just the world, then I don't think there is a hard problem for them in the way you imply. For there to be a hard problem I think there must be a kind of dualism where what is going on outside the head differs from inside the head (presupposing indirectness that would not be there for the idealist where the nature of the world as it is is right before their very eyes).

If there's no conscious experience, there's nothing to compare with mind-independence. — AmadeusD

Why can't I just talk about some kind of representations an A.I. has?

Edit: ( ).

Is that not different to your mind? — Moliere

Yes, when you put them side-by-side but I am still not sure what the latter really means in terms of being aquainted with the world.

So how does the indirect realist account for error about perception, if not another intermediary? — Moliere

To me, there are basically just sequences of experiences and we can be erroneous about what experiences will happen next, or what experiences accompany each other. That is all. And recognizing errors itself involves some sequence of experiences.

To me it seems like it's much more elegant to simply say we can be fallible — Moliere

What if two people see the same object in two different ways due to an illusion, yet they are both directly aquainted with that object?

I'd believe that if we recreated the conditions for creating perception then we'd produce the same results, but I don't believe anyone really knows those conditions. — Moliere

Well I think we agree here.

there is no direct link between most things in the world and our experience of them. This is, in fact, the hard problem — AmadeusD

I am not sure I would say that the hard problem is the crux of the problem - if anything, the hard problem probably presupposes indirect realism. It's also an interesting question whether indirect realism is a construct that can be applied to things that don't have experience.

using arguments like this seems to me to entirely side-step the question, and assumes that the very concept of 'direct'ness is somehow intensional and not something which can be ascertained 'correctly' seems both unsatisfactory, and under-explanatory. — AmadeusD

Well yes, I think it's difficult to ignore steps of mediation in the chain of events leading to experience, especially under a notion of indirect realism defined by the idea that perception is governed by experiences or representations different from the objects-in-themselves. I guess under that definition I could equally ask whether anything could count as direct which seems quite difficult imo under modern understandings of science and partly why I wasn't sure what people were meaning by direct realism.

I don't think it's a matter of knowledge as much as an interpretation of what we know. — Moliere

Well alright, but then I think I would be interested in whether you would think it acceptable for an indirect realist to call you an indirect realist, since you are not necessarily contradicting their beliefs at all as far as I can tell.

I don't know why I'd prioritize ipseity over the object... the sacrifice of fidelity to our intuitions. — Moliere

Some interesting thoughts here.

Rather, I can't see how we'd be able to tell the story about retina, photons, or brains without knowing -- rather than inferring -- about the world. — Moliere

Not sure I agree. I don't see the contradiction in the idea that there are things that happen beyond our immediate perceptions which we create stories to try and explain even if we cannot definitively know anything in a perfect way.

Else, "retina, photons, brains" are themselves just inferences about an experiential projection in a causal relationship with a reality we know nothing about, but just make guesses about. — Moliere

Well all of our knowledge about the world is enacted within experiences which are not identical with things in the outside world beyond those experiences.

The only problem with this view being that we do know things, so it falls in error on the other side -- on the side of certain knowledge which rejects beliefs which could be wrong, when all proper judgment takes place exactly where we could be wrong. — Moliere

I am not sure I understand.

There's a difference between being able to accomplish something, and knowing something.

I'd liken our neuroscientists to medieval engineers -- they can make some observations and throw together some catapults, but they do not know the mechanical laws of Newton or its extensions.

It's more because we're ignorant of how this whole thing works -- even at the conceptual level, which is why it's interesting in philosophy -- so I wouldn't believe it without more. I'd think the person was making some sort of mistake along the way, in the same way that I thought about the Google employee who thought that later iterations of ChatGPT are conscious. — Moliere

I really don't think its as complicated as you make out. The only way information gets into our brain and cause sensory experiences is by stimulating sensory receptors. The light hitting my retina is causing patterns of excitation at any given time. If artificially exciting them in an identical way did not produce the same results it would seem inexplicable to me. Why wouldn't it? To me that is an unnecessary skepticism.

Rather, we directly interact with the world as a part of it -- the world interacting with itself, in the broad view. — Moliere

I would ask whether anything could ever count as indirect under this view. On the other hand, if you think of the fact that we, as parts, can be decomposed into parts then there are parts which mediate eachother's interactions with the rest of the world... visual cortical states, sensory states on the retina, photons travelling in the air. I can maybe in some sense interact with patterns in the outside world but not without those patterns appearing on the surface of my retina through photonic interactions and then the correlations appearing in cortical states. If that information is about something that has happened on the surface of a car 30 feet away then I do not see how there is not mediation there which leads from events at the car to what I see.

and all that seems to justify doubt that were some scientist of consciousness to claim they have a brain in a vat which is experiencing I'd simply doubt it without more justification. It's entirely implausible that we'd stumble upon how to do that given the depth of our ignorance. — Moliere

I am not sure I agree. Our experiences are a direct result of stimulation at sensory boundaries so I do not see an immediate biological or physical reason to suggest that artificial stimulations couldn't produce the same experiences in a brain in a vat scenario. Neuroscientists can already cause familiar experiences by artificially stimulating sensory receptors or brain cells.

Nevertheless, we don’t know what goes on under the hood, yet we rise to the occassion of making it comprehensible to ourselves, in some form, by some method. Representation is merely a component which fits into one of those methods. — Mww

so we throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks — Mww

Yup, definitely agree with your sentiments in this post! I think this applies to all our learning. All we have are "stories" that are constructed and enacted in experience and we argue about their merits.

Representationalism makes perfect sense metaphysically, which just indicates an logically necessary method describing how our intellect works. — Mww

It depends what you mean by representation I think. You can have very minimal notions which do not do very much work or richer notions which are just unrealistic imo. I think representation is an idealized concept arising from meta-cognitive capacities (another idealization). But what is most fundamental is that the brain is in the business of 'what happens next?', most of this business being hidden from us because of the trillions of parameters in neurons that are hidden from us.

Because of this complexity, intelligible notions of representation are difficult to sustain imo simply because the brain's ability to track or enact 'what happens next?' is far more complicated than our metacognitive ability to track it (which is embedded within that, obviously). Our own notions of representations will constantly come up against fuzziness and exceptions to rules. All this suggesting that what we think of as representations are redundant to whatever is going on underneath the hood. The representations we do make up and are intelligible to us are idealizations that cannot possibly precisely describe what the brain, or even our own experiences actually do. It is not some essential nature in experiences which lead to what happens next but the trillions of parameters in neurons, which are much more complicated and noisy than our metacognitive abilities.

Imo, our notions of representations are not things in themselves but inferential. No experience has an innate representative quality; instead, I infer that an experience has features that seem representation-like. Again, I don't think the notion of representation is impossible or something to be shut out, just it has to be quite weak.

Yes, I agree though I don't know if there is necessarily a dichotomy here. I think what you call modeling still relies on some underlying processes which is pretty much still very mechanistic or algorithmic... even maybe reflexive. Seems to me that what the brain does next always is a mechanistic consequence of whatever physical state it occupies immediately beforehand. "Expectations" in attention are mediated by the modulation of neuronal membrane activity - where is the representation explicitly in this other than a useful metaphor? At the same time, there are neuroscientists out there who will characterize our most basic hardwired reflexes in terms of modeling as you say. This kind of thinking is probably reflective of my view that I don't think representations are inherent.

I talk about neurons a lot but I think even on the level of experiences, I was convinced by the types of analyses from the likes of Wittgenstein's philosophical investigations that representation cannot be pinned down here either and experience is even somewhat mechanistic as a flow of one experience to the next which can sometimes seem completely involuntary, unanticipated, inexplicable.

I don't think so, no. Maybe? but also maybe the only way to do so is to envat the brain in a body that lives a life. — Moliere

See, for me I do not see why it would not be the case for the brain to have the same experiences if the sensory inputs were the same. I don't think a body would matter either as long as the sensory inputs mimicked those it would have had from a body.

Banno — Moliere

Aha, I have had one or two conversations with Banno involving his deflationary notion of truth.

I mention this because it's a contender for realism that I'm still wrapping my head around, but it's definitely different from the old in/direct debate. — Moliere

Fair enough.

"outside world" is the part I'd question. There is no "outside" world -- the old external world of philosophy -- just as there is no "internal" world, at least metaphysically. I think these are turns of expression meaning something other than the ontological implications -- that I exist, that I interact with my perceptions and only my perceptions, and these perceptions interact with objects outside of me that I make inferences about. — Moliere

I agree basically, that I am just using it as a phrase distinguishing my experiences from whatever is beyond that boundary. To a brain, that would be I guess what is beyond its sensory boundaries; but then you can make boundaries everywhere in the world, from cell membranes to populations of cells to ecosystems, etc.

I am my perceptions, and my perceptions are of objects, and therefore there's a direct realtionship between myself (perceptions) and objects — Moliere

My only issue is that perceptions clearly do not have a mapping to things out in the world that is straightforward. They are constructed in the sense that they involve learning via neurobiological processes which are often characterized in terms of statistical inference.

I think I'd say perception is an activity, and just like any activity -- like nailing boards or riding a bike -- we can make mistakes. These mistakes do not imply we are separate from the world, though, but rather that we are part of a world that interacts with us (disappoints us) — Moliere

It seems like maybe there are semantic issues at play; I think maybe your notion of "direct" is more loose than others would have who would use things like illusions as an argument for indirect realism.

In that thought experiment the BiV has to have the same experiences. That's the whole idea. — Moliere

Yes for that thought experiment, but what I am talking about is the question of whether if you artificially stimulate sensory receptors of a brain with identical DNA to you in a way which is identical to the history of organic sensory stimulations you have personally encountered in your life, it will have the same experiences as you have had.

But that does not mean that metaphysically perception exists in the head. — Moliere

What is your alternative? Through an extended mind framework where the mind encompasses the body and environment, etc?

if perception is an intermediary between myself and the object, and all experience is perception rather than the object, then I'm not sure why there couldn't be another intermediary between myself and my perception -- a perception of perception. — Moliere

It depends what you mean by object here. My instinct is to interpret object here as in some hypothetical object in the outside world. From my point of view, perception and myself are essentially not distinguishable. What you commonsensically would call your self are just sensory experiences pretty much imo.

it could just be a direct link between me and the world. — Moliere

I guess the main arguments against this is illusions and misperception.

models that are populated by sensory input? — frank

I am not exactly sure what you mean by this but the picture I was painting I wasn't necessarily implying anything about representation. I am a bit agnostic about representation in the sense that I don't think you need the concept of representation to explain how the brain works but I am not necessarily adverse to using this concept, especially as it is so intuitive. I just am not necessarily sold on the idea of some kind of inherent or intrinsic, essentialistic representations with intentionality in the brain. Neither do I think we should take it literally when neuroscientists attribute representation to the kinds of correlations that they detect in particular experiments.

I've taken up the "direct" side, but only lightly. Others' have been doing the heavy lifting. — Moliere

So you don't believe the brain in a vat could have the same experiences? To be honest I am not entirely sure what direct realism means. I assume people here just mean it in the sense that the objects of perception are experiences and they are direct. If that is the case then I am not sure I think that it is necessarily incompatible with the kind of indirect view of also representing something else out in the world. I would kind of agree with both but I don't have a strong opinion because I am disinclined against realism. I think the notion of indirect realism is kind of a functionally useful way of talking about the brain though. I feel like it is implied by models in neuroscience, even if minimally or if one doesn't want to attach too much metaphysical implication to it. It is implied that the brain is learning a model of the outside world and separated from it by a boundary. At the same time, the brain is clearly able to do what it does independently of whatever is going on beyond its boundaries; it does not need to make a comparison of what is going on in the brain with the outside world. The model the brain carries of the world does not therefore need to be explicit, and in some sense is a concept more useful to the neuroscientist trying to understand the brain, than the brain itself. The brain is just spontaneous self-organization; there is no inherent fact of the matter about what it represents. Neurons just blindly change their chemical membrane properties in response to inputs.

Sorry, I am not following what you've said at all. So you're an indirect realist or a direct realist?

If you divide it by 0.5 you get two of them, bizarrely — bert1

Its how many half-pizzas you get in one pizza.

The brain is certainly crucial in enabling this dynamic interaction, but it is the whole brain-body-environment system that constitutes the basis of perceptual experience. The various neural subsystems - from the cerebellum to the sensory and motor cortices - work in concert with the body's sensorimotor capacities to enable us to grasp and respond to the affordances of our environment. — Pierre-Normand

In the sense of physical chains of events, then maybe it is trivially the case that what the brain is doing and perceiving relies on what is happening in the body and outside environment. But at the same time, surely all that is required for percept(ual experience) is what is going on at sensory receptors. All this affordance stuff is still going on inside our heads. We could be brains in vats artificially having our sensory receptors stimulated and experience the same things as if outside of the vat.

What I said for sensation also is the case for action induced by motor-neurons. What matters is the pattern of behavior of those neurons. There is no access to how those neurons affect the world beyond it until we get feedback at sensory receptors. The learning of the causal connection between them is then done by the neurons in our head.

Edit: Added additional paragraph, ( ).

Rest in Peace!

Such behaviour would then be far less subjective than what such camps would like to admit. — jasonm

It may be an objective fact that everyone hates murder. But this is no more objective than a fact of one person liking murder. So I don't see how anything is being made less subjective in your comparison. All that it suggests is that there is something in common in human brain functioning that leads them to agree on something.

That's fair. I didn't actually think you were making an argument, I just didn't know where you were coming from. To me it looked like you had misunderstood the intention of my quote.

There is no fact of the matter as to whether perception is direct or indirect, they are just different ways of talking and neither of them particularly interesting or useful. I'm astounded that this thread has continued so long with what amounts to "yes it is" and "no it isn't". — Janus

Amen, ha

I'll just point out there are some nice, accessible lectures on youtube from the philosopher Banno cites, Gillian Russell. Highly recommend taking a look!

I'm having trouble following your posts. — fishfry

I just don't understand what the intention of your initial comment was. From my perspective it doesn't follow from the rest of the thread I was following.

I indicated in my post. — fishfry

That would suggest you are implying information is randomness; the original point of my post presupposes this is not necessarily the case.