To argue that the press has a duty to provide only certain facts in order to protect democracy contradicts the idea that the freer the press — Hanover

I don't see this implied in the article you linked.

I don't really understand, sorry

But say a community finds (B) to be more parsimonious — frank

If you can measure how parsimonious a model is, then it wouldn't matter much what a community thinks. I think in this case, it's probably provable (not by me) that A is more parsimonious than B, because it takes fewer bits to describe a universe where A is the case than B.

why can’t I say it is reality itself that is distorted, — Mww

Because when someone talks about something being distorted, it's *relative* to something else. In this case, it's generally taken as *relative to reality*. Reality isn't distorted relative to itself. Perceptual experience may be (and frequently demonstrably is).

The Direct Realist argues that just from knowing an effect it is possible to know its cause. Whether seeing a billiard ball at rest on a billiard table and directly knowing its prior state — RussellA

This thread has been full of direct realists completely making up thoughts that indirect realists must have, but this is a great example in the opposite direction. Why in the world do you think direct realists think that?

How would you know unless you sometimes see reality as it is? — jkop

we know because we know that image isn't animated. You can print it on a piece of paper and have a visual experience of seeing it wooshing around, while knowing that it's not really wooshing around.

All experiences are created by the brain — jkop

Wonderful, we agree on that very central point. That sentence is what "indirect realism" means to me.

objects of perception exist outside the process — jkop

I have no problem with this either.

The fact that you see things that aren't there means... you aren't just seeing raw reality as it is. That's an oversimplistic view, given these types of illusions. There's clearly *more than just reality as it is* involved in our experience of vision.

The experience is created in the brain, and isn't just a raw channel to reality-as-it-is. If it was, this illusion wouldn't work.

we do? https://images.app.goo.gl/cD15bqprQLBHiYek9

What about the other illusion i mentioned? The one that doesn't involve a physical change of light, and must only happen in the brain.

I've said that if the assumption is that perception as such distorts reality then the scientific understanding of perception, which is based on perception, cannot be trusted. — Janus

Ok well the scientific understanding of perception is very aware of the illusions I mentioned, so does that mean science is inherently self refuting?

But then I'd argue that the direct/indirect distinction is based on a false intuition about what a "direct" interaction could be. — Count Timothy von Icarus

For me, it's really simple: when I was a little kid, I thought I opened my eyes and there was just -the world-. Later, I learned that I open my eyes and light hits my retina and my retina sends signals to my brain and my brain does a whole lot of stuff and crafts my visual experience.

The former view point is what I now reject. My experience, of sight or of smell and so on, is an experience entirely created inside my head. The data for the experience comes from outside, but the experience is crafted inside. And that's why I don't agree with "we experience reality as it is ".

You can't compare faith in god with a 'reasonable confidence' in a quotidian matter, for reasons spelt out ad nauseam earlier in this thread. — Tom Storm

Sure you can compare them. Not only can you, you SHOULD. You should be able to clearly articulate why confidence in one thing is more reasonable than confidence in the other, and you should be able to articulate that, I think, without just resorting to arguing about the definition of faith.

I think it's completely reasonable for you to say "they aren't the same thing", I just don't think the argument about why they're not the same thing relies on defining faith in a super narrow way such that they're only tautologically not the same thing

My point is that 'faith' is best used to describe certain people's justification for gods. To use 'faith' to describe plane flight or crossing the road is a rhetorical tool used by apologists who like to equivocate on language to help them smuggle in their ideas. — Tom Storm

I don't think it's some sneaky rhetorical tool. The dictionary defines it in ways that have nothing to do with gods. Do you think your narrow use of the word is the norm or are you trying to promote a new norm?

If someone says "I believe X", it makes sense to me to say "X is incoherent, so I'm gonna go with not-X".

But in any case, indirect realism doesn't necessarily rely on "distortion" per se, BUT there's clearly distortion in human perception. There's obviously optical distortion - like sticks looking bent in water - and then there's distortion that happens in the brain. https://www.jagranjosh.com/general-knowledge/hermann-grid-illusion-is-it-an-illusion-or-hallucination-1659171065-1 Most people see grey dots appear at the intersections here, is that the kind of distortion you mean?

And why does that mean the scientific understanding of perception is incorrect? I'm pretty sure the scientific understanding of perception is aware of these illusions, these distortions.

So, if the claim is that perception is indirect, against what coherently conceived directness would we be contrasting it? — Janus

There might not be any coherent conception of directness. I don't understand why that would be a point against indirect realism, rather than direct realism.

what kind of distortion are you talking about? For example

I don't think it's necessarily the case that an indirect realist MUST agree with the distortion claim.

I also don't think it's the case that if there is distortion, that means the scientific account is wrong.

Both of those arguments seem to be leaps of logic to me.

How does this differ from the direct realist claims that the scientific picture of the world is accurate? To me, indirectness suggests distortion—if there is distortion then we cannot rightly assume the scientific picture of perception is accurate. — Janus

I'm not seeing the logic of all the pieces here personally

If the world is as it's perceived, there is no room for the world to be anything else. — hypericin

And if you're okay with direct realists just assuming that they're perceiving the world as it is, you should be equally okay with indirect realists just assuming they're perceiving the world through their senses and their brain is creating their experience of the world. If direct realists just get to assume they are right, so do indirect realists. If indirect realists cannot just assume they're right, neither can direct realists.

I don't see a difference here in the applicability of skeptical questioning.

I don't see that direct realism really gives you absolute certainty either.

A direct realist thinks they're directly perceiving the world as it is, an indirect realist believes they're experiencing the world through representations built up out of sensory data that comes from the real world, and both of those views as far as I can tell are equally vulnerable to the same types of skeptical questions

but what makes "swimming" an inherently biological activity, such that a machine mimicking it doesn't count as "swimming"?

Why is it invariably a no? Why is it inconceivable to imagine a machine that can swim pretty much like other swimming being swim? We already have machines that walk like humans walk.

Yes but the important question isn't "is it like that now?", the important question is, "Is that necessarily the case in principle?"

Is it in principle possible or impossible that some future AI might be sentient or have a mind of its own?

But shouldn't the AI Knowledge Expert System be able to present with the correct definitions at the press of the button instead of quibbling about them? — Corvus

Presenting someone with a correct definition will look like quibbling to a person who is using the word a different way. It's not like the AI described itself as quibbling -- don't forget the principle of untrustworthy narrator.

Materialism poses its weight on the concept of matter, stating that material stuff is the essence of existence. Everything else, including consciousness, has to be explained in terms of attributes of the physical world. Mind is only an epi-phenomenon due to the complexity of some material things — Pez

There's a lot of philosophy about this, it's normally anti-materialists who insist that all materialists must consider consciousness epiphenomenal, actual materialists have a wide range of views on that question.

Yeah, that's all true

I wouldn't know, I haven't made a single comment about textures this whole thread.

I wouldn't suppose that representational or UI views of perceptual experience require modelling the 3d structure of a texture to feel it, although I do think we general model 3d structures but at a much higher scale than the grit of sandpaper

If you like, the model does not have to be perfect - "as-it-really-is" - only adequate. — Banno

Sure, and I think the model is definitely adequate. No disagreement from me there.

You took a quote of someone's, and changed their words, to say something about their beliefs. That's not a serious thing to do.

you clearly didn't come here to say something serious. Are you getting what you came for?

Looks like you've modified that quote, so... you're the only person saying something to the contrary.

Our eyes are what provide us with sight, not what prevents us from seeing reality. — Leontiskos

Is anybody saying something to the contrary?

oh, I guess to me that's pretty much fundamentally what "faith" always (or almost always) means. Faith in your family and friends, but also religious faith - you're trusting your religious leaders to be telling you what they believe to be true, and you're trusting them to be competent to know what the truth is.

I'd even go a bit further than that. I haven't looked at most of the evidence for the scientific statements I believe. If you put in front of me most of the evidence for relativity, I'd be unqualified to judge if that really supports or contradicts relativity.

Religion and science both involve trusting people, first and foremost. They have that in common. What they don't have in common is why they trust the people they trust.

A lot of people like to set science and religion apart as of they are direct enemies, and religion is based on faith and science has nothing to do with faith.

I'm gonna take a controversial position as someone who is anti religion and pro science, and say that I think that's a misunderstanding, the average persons scientific belief IS largely faith based, but it's based in epistemically better faith than religion.

They are both faith based, but the two types of faiths are as different as faith can be

At the very least, it's fairly easy to prove that *most philosophers* are realists about the world

https://survey2020.philpeople.org/survey/results/all

Accept or lean towards non-skeptical realism
79.54%

That may not satisfy the full sentence in question, but it's at least a start towards it.

Just to clarify exactly which part of the Molyneux Problem page I'm referring to :

In 2003, Pawan Sinha, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, set up a program in the framework of the Project Prakash[8] and eventually had the opportunity to find five individuals who satisfied the requirements for an experiment aimed at answering Molyneux's question experimentally. Prior to treatment, the subjects (aged 8 to 17) were only able to discriminate between light and dark, with two of them also being able to determine the direction of a bright light. The surgical treatments took place between 2007 and 2010, and quickly brought the relevant subject from total congenital blindness to fully seeing. A carefully designed test was submitted to each subject within the next 48 hours. Based on its result, the experimenters concluded that the answer to Molyneux's problem is, in short, "no". Although after restoration of sight, the subjects could distinguish between objects visually almost as effectively as they would do by touch alone, they were unable to form the connection between an object perceived using the two different senses. The correlation was barely better than if the subjects had guessed. They had no innate ability to transfer their tactile shape knowledge to the visual domain.

I think that's super fucking interesting, because it goes against my expectation and probably the expectation of most sighted people. I would have thought the sight of a circle and the physical feel of a circle were unmistakably related, and yet newly sighted people fail to connect them like that.

which does seem to bear a non arbitrary relation to reality wrt shapes and spatial relationships. — hypericin

I agree that it seems non arbitrary, but I was a little bit surprised to learn that blind people who later gain sight have literally no expectation of what they're going to experience when they see basic shapes like squares and circles. So I would actually question the ENTIRE experience of sight, not just colour.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molyneux%27s_problem

But intuitively I do understand what you're getting at.

Yeah, I don't think the phrase "perceive the world as it actually is" is a meaningful sentence as well - perception is always inherently from a perspective. There's not even in principle a way to perceive the world as it actually is.

However that doesn't mean it's meaningless for him to explicitly say that for his theory - perhaps it's worth explicitly distancing the theory from Naive Realism, and more explicitly saying "these experiences are built up for us, they aren't just raw reality", even if it's strictly true that there's no actual way to perceive the world that way.

Yeah, I see why you would. Some people are only having a discussion on the semantics of what it means to "see", and other people aren't, or at least are convinced they aren't (some might argue that they are, they just don't see it).

For me, it's all about experience and qualia.

I'm partial to the UI view:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman#:~:text=MUI%20theory%20states%20that%20%22perceptual,have%20evolved%20to%20perceive%20the

MUI theory states that "perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world." Hoffman argues that conscious beings have not evolved to perceive the world as it actually is but have evolved to perceive the world in a way that maximizes "fitness payoffs".

Talking about time travel as a realistic scientific possibility seems... far fetched to me. But I do love conversations about different models of time travel in fiction.

For me, in fiction, there are 3 basic models of time travel:

1. One univerese, you can't change the past, just re-enact it. This is like 12 monkeys. When you go into the past, you can certainly do stuff and feel like you're making choice, BUT those choices are already necessarily part of that past - your actions during your time travels are a necessary part of the past and were already a part of your history, you just didn't know it.

2. One universe, you CAN change the past. This is probably what most people imagine when they talk about time travel. Pretty sure Back to the Future was like this. When you go back to the future, the future you go back to is different from the future you came from, because the past is different now.

3. Parallel timelines. When you go back to the past, you're not going into your OWN past, you're jumping into a parallel universe that's the same as your universe, but in the past. You can make choices in this universe that are different from the past of your own universe, BUT your own universe is still chugging along into the future without being affected by these changes. There are actually some REALLY interesting things you can say with this type of time travel. The Avengers End Game movie kind of had a model of time travel like this.

Those are the basic models, in my view. Some movies are kinda inconsistent with which model they choose. Some movies sort of mix-and-match. The recent film The Flash actually has an interesting model, that's sort of a combination of 3 and 1, with intersecting timelines which turn into spaghetti when you mess with the past.