As an aside, this is why I think my example with the apple is actually a stronger argument than the argument from hallucination. — Michael

But this argument does not survive any casual intermediary at all, since everything casual takes some amount of time. For IR to be substantive I think it needs some plausible notion of directness to contrast with. Here effectively no relationship beyond physical collisions can be direct.

I won't bother to do it but I could post a digital painting and a watercolor painting where you couldn't tell which was which. Your 'consumption' would be the same. The digital could be printed and again your experience would be the same in terms of medium. — praxis

I was pointing out that the method of consumption of real and faux meat is also the same.

For synthetic meat to be comparable, it would need to be nearly indistinguishable from meat (like a chicken leg for example) in experience and nutrition. More significantly, the methods used to create it would need to be comparable. — praxis

That indistinguishability is not there yet, but close. The methods used to create it is not comparable, but neither are the methods of creating digital and physical art. It is the technique that is similar.

Let’s quickly disambiguate the word “perception.” At minimum we need to distinguish (i) the sensory episode (experience), (ii) the act of grasping/identifying what is going on (understanding), and (iii) the commitment that something is the case (judgment). — Esse Quam Videri

But this just sounds like the standard IR picture: we experience sensations (i), on the basis of these we perform cognitive operations (ii) to arrive at judgements about the world (iii).

In that sense, the intentional object is the distal apple as it existed at the time the light was emitted (the apple-at-t0, not the apple-at-t1). — Esse Quam Videri

So then does DR entail a metaphysical commitment to eternalism? IR implies no such commitment, the BMO simply does not match the DO. Whereas, if there are not two objects, then perception in this case seems to involve time travel.

As I understand it, the apple argument is just a weaker form of the argument from hallucination. Weaker, because you can still say that the distal object is in the past. Whereas in hallucination there is no distal object at all. So then the DRist has to bend over backwards to say that hallucination and vertidical perception are fundamentally different process, in spite of the fact that the object as it appears can be (in principle) precisely identical in both cases.

. The question is whether being conscious of phenomenal character entails being conscious of a brain-modeled object as an object. — Esse Quam Videri

BMOs are not objects in the everyday sense, so I don't think objecthood is the appropriate condition. Rather, I think the question is whether the BMO satisfies the requirements of an epistemic intermediary between the subject and object.

Your photograph analogy is helpful, but I think it quietly shifts the issue. A photograph is itself a public object that can be inspected, re-identified, and treated as the intentional terminus of an act. — Esse Quam Videri

It is true that the analogy does this. But this is not the thrust of the analogy. The photograph is meant to show that having an intermediary does not mean that "you only see the intermediary". We still see the subject, because the photograph discloses the subject, and there is an appropriate casual connection between subject and photograph.

If we were literally aware of BMOs as objects, then we should be able to distinguish (even in principle) “what the BMO is like” from “what the distal object is like.” But phenomenologically we don’t encounter two objects—an inner one and an outer one—we encounter one object as appearing. — Esse Quam Videri

Exactly, phenomenologically we encounter one object. This is the illusion IR aims to dispel. We already agree that phenomenological features of the object as it appears do not inhere in the distal object. But this is a contradiction: if there is only one object, that object must support all the features it presents as having.

P1: In perception, one object appears phenomenologically
P2: This object as it appears has qualitative features, like redness
P3: Distal objects do not support qualitative features like redness
C1: Therefore, the object as it appears (the BMO), cannot be the distal object.
P4: Distal objects are the target objects of perception.
C2: The object as it appears (BMO) must be intermediate between subject and distal object

You want to say that qualitative features are relations. That might be a valid metaphysical perspective. But this is not how they appear to us, phenomenologically. Phenomenologically, they are properties of the object as seen. The object as seen, the BMO, is object-like, has qualitative features, and cannot be the distal object.

Saying “normativity is correspondence” is like saying “truth is correspondence”: it redescribes the target rather than explaining how such correspondence is possible or intelligible for a subject. — Esse Quam Videri

Normativity is obviously a significant topic, and it is not fair to ask the IRist to solve it. Rather, we need to demonstrate that IR is consistent with normativity. Broadly, correspondence grounds truth, and failure of correspondence error. It is possible for the subject to establish this correspondence, or lack, because the DO and BMO are casually connected, and therefore epistemically connected. The subject does not live in a walled garden of BMOs.

Most of the time, the model of the world given to us is good enough, and we take it for granted that the BMO corresponds with the DO, at least in the relevant ways. When inconsistencies arise, within the BMO, between BMOs, or between BMOs and our prior understandings, we need to use reason and evidenc to determine what world and self conditions could lead to the constradictions we observe.

The actual conditions and mechanisms of how this works is beyond this topic, and I don't claim to have definitive answers.

If the subject is unaware of the offset, their judgment can be mistaken, but that doesn’t show the object perceived is an inner intermediary. — Esse Quam Videri

If the object perceived is not the distal object, and it is not an inner intermediary, then what is it?

Vegetarian meat is a poor analogy because both the method of production and consumption are fundamentally different from non-vegetarian meat. — praxis

Method of production maybe, but consumption?

While the technique might be similar in digital vs. Analog painting, the medium of the product couldn't be more different. 1's and 0's, vs paint and canvas. Whereas, vegetarian meat and meat are still ultimately textured protein and fat.

I think the analogy is apt: two categories that neither fully belong to one another, nor are fully distinct. There is no "ultimate answer" to either question: "is a digital painting a painting?", "is vegetarian meat, meat?" The answer is determined by how the categories are defined, nothing more.

The institutional degree; or
An image purposefully made by applying paint to a medium. — AmadeusD

A painting is an institutional degree??

Under the second definition, iconic caution signage on the freeway would be a painting.

The fourth option is that BMOs belong to the causal implementation of intentionality rather than being the objects of intentionality. They enable us to see, but they are not what is seen. — Esse Quam Videri

Except they are seen. Not in the sense of perceiving a distal object, but in the subjective sense. An example of the "casual implementation of intentionality" is the refraction of light through the lens of the eye. This is part of the casual story, but we are unconscious of it. You are lumping such processes with what we are very explicitly conscious of, a category mistake.

Otherwise we’d be forced to say that we see neural models (or retinal stimulations), rather than the world those processes disclose. To me, that seems like a clear category mistake. — Esse Quam Videri

Not "rather than". Perception is mediated by neural modelss, such that we see the world by way of the experience of neural models. Just as we see the subject by way of seeing the photograph. Not "we only see brain objects".

For me, it comes down to whether normativity is reducible to causation. I don’t think it is. — Esse Quam Videri

Normativity is another question. Given the nature of perception, how is normativity possible? This doesn't seem particularly problematic in IR: normativity is correspondence between BMO and DO. Epistemic problems exist, but they are real, not artifacts of IR. Radical scepticism cannot be ruled out. Whereas DR faces the familiar problem of error cases.

Are you arguing that normativity can only be satisfactorily explained in DR?

Treating phenomenal character as an intermediary object is exactly the indirect realist move I’m resisting. — Esse Quam Videri

But phenomenal character is not the right intermediary.

Your key argument has been that phenomenal character as-such is insufficiently object like to serve as intermediary between subject and distal object (DO). But it is not quite phenomenal character that does the intermediating. Rather, the brain-modeled object (BMO), which has phenomenal qualities as attributes, plays this role. The BMO is the object as it appears to you, including but not limited to it's phenomenal qualities.

That there is a BMO, distinct from the DO, seems clear:

BMO: has colors, tastes, feels
DO: has no such qualities

BMO: may be inaccurate or erroneous
DO: has no capacity for inaccuracy

BMO: has no casual properties
DO: has position, mass, volume

BMO: may be imagined independently of DO
DO: resists imagination

BMO: alters or disappears with changes in the subject
DO: indifferent to changes in the subject

BMO: There is one for every observer aware of the DO
DO: There is only ever one.


I see three responses: there is no such thing as BMOs. BMOs are the same as DOs. BMOs are also insufficiently object like to serve as intermediary. None of these seem appealing. Do you agree with one or more, and/or is there a fourth response I'm missing?

So phenomenal qualities cannot function as objects standing between subject and world because they do not exhibit the characteristics required to play that epistemic role. — Esse Quam Videri

The fundamental difference seems to be how to schematically model perception. You (from my perspective) strip the mental object of its object like characteristics, retaining only bare phenomenality, and inappropriately assign those objective characteristics to the distal object itself. I (from your perspective) inappropriately reify phenomenal qualities, which are relations to distal objects, not objects in themselves, into pseudo objects standing between subject and object.

Indirect realism:
Subject -----> mental object (with phenomenal qualities) ------> distal object

Direct realism:
Subject ---- (phenomenal qualities) ----> distal object

Do you agree with this picture?

On Talbott’s view, this marks the core limitation of naturalism as it is usually conceived: it attempts to reduce context-driven, interpretive behaviour to physical causation alone. That is the conflict in a nutshell. — Wayfarer

This doesn't seem right. A naturalist isn't restricted to casual explanations only. So long as any contextual, interpretive explanation can ultimately resolve to a casual explanation.

Looking at the behavior of playing chess. A naturalist might explain the how in terms of the neural architecture that supports this ability, and the dopaminergic reinforcement that drives the behavior. And the why, in an analysis of game playing, that it fosters social connection, reinforces hierarchy, and most importantly it is a platform for learning. Each of these in turn might be subject to a how and a why analysis. Eventually, the whys will resolve to hows: to a discussion of adaptive advantage, and how such advantage propagates across generations.

A naturalism that was restricted to purely casual explanations would be hopeless! This seems like a cartoon straw man.

That story can explain why certain representations work, but it doesn’t obviously explain aboutness—why representations are of the world rather than merely correlated with stimuli in ways that happen to be useful. After all, reptiles and birds of prey have survived for millions of years without any concern for whether their perceptions or internal representations are true. That preoccupation seems uniquely human, and it is not clear that evolutionary biology, as such, is equipped to explain it. — Wayfarer

What is this supplementary "aboutness" which supposedly demands explanation? For a perception to be correlated to stimulli in a way that happens to be useful, it must disclose something about the world. Whether or not the organism consciously considers the stimulli as "true" or not, a signal derived from the world cannot be useful if it does not inform. A bird of prey does not consider the metacognitive question "are my perceptions true?" Yet, it is critically important that it's perceptions are accurate in the ways that are relevant to it.



We and only we are able to ask the metacognitive questions "are perceptions true? are they real? how can they be about the world?" Such questions can only be posed by language. Only language can carve out concepts like perception, and then that these concepts themselves as objects of consideration. If you believe naturalism can explain language use, then it can explain such questions.

When I listen to music, I am still directed at something: sounds unfolding in time, with rhythm, pitch, and structure. Suspending concern with instruments or sources does not turn the experience into a free-floating phenomenal item. — Esse Quam Videri

What you are directed at is phenomenal experience unfolding in time. The rhythm, pitch, and structure are features of the phenomena, not a distal object. There are numerous candidates for distal object: speakers, player, band/creator, cd/lp/mp3 file. All of these are components of our causal understanding of the phenomena, but none of them somehow supersede the phenomena.

Imagining is paradigmatically an experience as of something—just not something presently existing. In that case the object is "irreal", not absent altogether. — Esse Quam Videri

Not necessarily. I can imagine the sound of chiming, without imagining any specific distal object (wind chime, door bell, phone, mp3 clip) realizing it. I can imagine the phenomenal experience of redness, and I "see" red in my minds eye, not attached to any object at all.

The question is not why organisms care about environmental cues, but why experiences are given as of something at all—why questions like “what is it?” arise from within experience itself. — Esse Quam Videri

What does this mean, "arise from experience itself". When I hear a chime, I might wonder, what is making the noise. But by no means is this wonderment somehow embedded within the phenomenal experience of chiming itself. It is something extra: given this experience, this chiming, I am led to wonder, "what made it"?

***

You want to argue that phenomenal experience is derivative of what is primary in the perceptual act: object direction. If it is derivative, then this disqualifies the phenomenal as intermediary between subject and object. I have presented several counterarguments.

* Phenomena with unknown object (chiming). The object must be explicitly inferred from the phenomena
* Phenomena where distal object is secondary: music
* Phenomena where distal object is unreal or absent: imagination

But what positive arguments do you have that the phenomenal is derivative? Earlier, when we were discussing ammonia, you claimed that the mental act "I am smelling something sharp and pungent" was introspective, and therefore secondary and derivative. But this is not introspection, it is articulation. Given the phenomenal experience, "pungent and sharp" translates it into words. That is secondary. But the phenomenal experience, the sensation that we might later describe as "pungent and sharp" is not, it cannot be. It is that which we describe, and that which we wonder about the cause.

If I am missing the main arguments please forgive me, feel free to quote yourself from our or other discussions.

Losing awareness of the object is not the same thing as phenomenology becoming the object of perception. It shows only that object-directedness can be bracketed or backgrounded, not that it was absent or secondary to begin with. — Esse Quam Videri

When I listen to music, I'm not in any way directed at a distal object, which I then bracket or background. The phenomenal music itself is the "object". The way the music sounds, it's specific phenomenal qualities, constitutes the musical experience.

When the observer hears the chime, that the chime presents as something is a consequence of the brain's organization of experience. Environmental sounds are " of something" because they are environmental, and the brain "tags" them as such. Environmental cues don't arise on their own, and it is important for survival to identify their origins. This is distinguished from internal experiences, such as imaginationary imagery, which are not of anything at all. They might conceptually represent objects, but they do not point to actual distal objects.

So, it does not seem that phenomenal experience is intrinsically object directed. It is only so when it is specifically an environmental cue. But there are phenomenal experiences such as music and imaginations that are not environment cues. These latter seem phenomenal on their own, without pointing to an object. And so, if phenomenal experience is able to float free of an object, it cannot be a secondary derivative of an object directed perceptual event, as you want to say.

. I would argue that meditation and music don’t undermine this structure; they presuppose it. — Esse Quam Videri

How does meditation and music presuppose this? When I listen to music, or meditate, I lose awareness of the object, and focus on the phenomenology. The phenomenology becomes the first-order subject of perception, the object secondary, if it is present at all. And so your idea of object-first perceptual structure must explain this. It certainly receives no support from it.

We are able to flexibly attend to phenomenology, or to object. But our attentional stance does not speak to the epistemological relationship between phenomenology and object.

. That is to say, the object-that-is-chiming is presented as determinate in existence, but indeterminate in sense or meaning. — Esse Quam Videri

When we hear environmental sounds we have an impicit, hard-wired understanding that these sounds represent something. Our interest as organisms is in what the sound is of. But you seem to be elevating this biological and contextual feature to a philosophical importance it does not have.

The world-directedness of perception is a stance. It is a default, but it is not exclusive. One can take a meditative stance, and focus on the phenomenology, not the object. Or, in other contexts the phenomenology itself is what is important, and what we are attuned to by default. I already mentioned music as an example of this.

The point is that the phenomenology and the object are distinct. The fact that we, organisms in a threatening world, are object-oriented does not obviate this.

The phenomenology of the event is such that the chiming is presented as of something else. The observer hasn't yet identified what this "something else" is, but they've clearly grasped that the chiming as-such is not it. The chiming is not presented as a self-standing object of perception, but as the manner in which some other (yet to be identified) object is presented. — Esse Quam Videri

You are conflating "self standing object" with "self standing object of perception". The chiming is the latter but not the former. Chiming indicates something it is not, a doorbell or chime. Yet it can be discussed, contemplated, appreciated on its own, independent of object.

The best example is music. People don't spend thousands of hours and dollars on music because of some distal object it might represent. The music itself, the phenomenology, is what is attended to and enjoyed.

What is directly perceived?
DR: doorbell (D) as-chiming (Ch)
IR: chiming (Ch) — Esse Quam Videri

Can you "directly perceive" D without knowing you perceive D at all? This seems to strain any notion of directness. The observer knows they perceive Ch. If you ask them what they perceive, they would reply, "a chiming sound, I'm not sure what it is." But they do not know they are perceiving D, a doorbell.

Either, your notion of directness must surmount this disjunction, so that both are directly perceived. If so, you are working with a very different notion of directness than we are. Or, you must deny (as I suspect) that Ch is perceived at all. But, this contradicts how we speak of, and understand, Ch. You are forced to refute this folk understanding that would say, "I perceive a chiming sound". But I have not seen this explicitly done.

But I think there is a bit more to be said about how and why the debate arises and why one position or the other is more attractive to adherents. — Ludwig V

For sure. Couldn't it just be that we tend to favor one perspective over the other in our daily lives? That one of them is viscerally lived, while the other is more intellectual abstraction? I am an indirect realist. Perhaps as a reflection of introversion, I tend to think of myself as a conscious subset. I am the entity residing behind these eyes. I am these thoughts, I am the self which undergoes sensations and feelings. Only at rare moments do I have a more holistic conception of myself. Maybe I am just unenlightened.

Perhaps those with a more integrated default feeling of selfhood tend towards direct realism. How about you?

Sorry, away for a few days. What stands out about this (excellent) breakdown is that neither interpretation is obviously wrong or incoherent. Now, I'm wondering if this entire debate hinges on the question, "what counts as the subject?"

Subject-as-organism: Nothing inside the organism can mediate between the organism and the world. These interior features are a part of the organism that does the perceiving. Direct realism follows.
Subject-as-conscious-subset: The environment of this subject is an environment provided by the brain. The brain itself, in particular phenomenal states, stand between this subject and the world. Indirect realism follows.

Neither of these perspectives on the subject is intrinsically wrong. Am I the organism, or the conscious agent? They are both valid ways of looking at what counts as the subject. And so neither direct nor indirect realism is intrinsically wrong. If so, the debate will never end until both sides understand this fact.

This brings up an interesting point. There are some questions which are not subject to one definitive answer, call them "Type A" questions. I.e. Is the bag heavy? Which coordinate system should be used? Is the picture of an old or young woman? It is wrong to insist on one answer to Type A questions.



Then there are "Type B" questions, where errors indicate misunderstanding or mismeasurement: How much does the bag weigh? Which coordinate system is being used? Is the picture also of a squirrel? It is wrong to allow for multiple answers to Type B questions.

I suspect direct/indirect realism is a Type A question. But how do we know? In general, how do we know if we are dealing with a Type A or Type B question?

Indirect realism requires more than ontological distinctness and reflective attendability; it requires that phenomenology be what perception is of in the first instance, and that access to the world be achieved by way of it. — Esse Quam Videri

Lets examine the case of ambiguous sensory input.

You are in a friend's apartment while she is away. You hear wind chimes. You are puzzled, the apartment is on the 10th floor. Could that be her phone? No, she wouldn't leave it behind. Ah, it must be her door bell. You open the door, and indeed someone is waiting.

Do you agree that in this case:

* The phenomenology, the sound of wind chimes, is ontologically distinct from the distal object, the doorbell.
* Awareness of the phenomenology is distinct from, and prior to, awareness of the distal object.
* Awareness of the distal object occurs through awareness of the phenomenology, by way of inference.

To be clear, you would not argue that there is no ontological intermediary between the emotion and the observer? Plainly, the voice and body of the angry person is that intermediary, right? You are claiming that, unlike the body, phenomenology lacks the capacity to fulfill the role that the body plays in my example?

An inferential process does not by itself introduce an intermediary object of awareness; at least, not in the way required by indirect realism. — Esse Quam Videri

Why not? If there is an inferential process, there must be something upon which the inference is made. The precise characterization of the ontological status of phenomenology is difficult to resolve. But does indirect realism need to make this characterization? I say it only needs to claim that phenomenology has ontology, distinct from the distal object it stands in relationship to. And, that it can be attended to, distinctly from attendance to the object.

Seeing something as blurry or sharp, red or orange, looming or distant are not things you perceive first and then infer the object from. They are ways the object is given—features of the perceptual episode that can be thematized only upon reflection, not items that perception is directed at per se. — Esse Quam Videri

Might you be confusing the phenomenological impression of immediacy with actual immediacy?

For instance, consider an angry person. Their jaw is clenched, their brow furrowed, their face is reddened, their speech is loud and clipped. When a (neurotypical) observer sees an angry person, they don't think to themselves, "Hmm, these facial features, this tone of voice, is signaling anger to me". Rather, the anger appears immediate. Only on introspection can the observer articulate how they apprehended anger. But, this does nothing to disprove the ontologically indirect relationship between the observer and the anger. The observer apprehends anger only through apprehension of physiological cues, whether or not this apprehension is consciously visible to the observer.

A "mode of presentation" cannot do that job. To say that phenomenal experience is a mode of presentation is to say that it characterizes the presentation of something else. This makes it derivative, non-intermediary and non-inferential. — Esse Quam Videri

Is there an example you can give of this kind of "mode of presentation"? A TV is a "mode of presentation" of something else. Yet it also fulfills all the criteria for indirect realism you outlined.

The question is whether this "something" is an "object" or a "mode of access". — Esse Quam Videri

I'm not sure why this is the question. Suppose we conclude that phenomenal experience is a mode of access. What is changed?

I look at a stone. I am aware of the stone, and I am aware of the visual experience of looking at the stone. Either awareness can be discussed. Ontologically the two are clearly different.

The indirect realist would then claim that the awareness of the visual experience is prior to the awareness of the stone. That awareness of the stone occurs secondarily, by way of, awareness of the visual experience . Is this move invalidated if the visual experience is deemed a mode of access?

The very fact I can talk about your headache is proof I am not talking about something available only to you. — Hanover

It is available to me directly, and to you, indirectly. To me, it is immediate, to you, it is accessed through discourse and behavior and your own prior experience of headaches.




.

That commitment raises questions about how such items are individuated and talked about. At some point in the discussion it was stated that sensations do not satisfy public criteria for "objecthood"—re-identifiability, persistence conditions, or independent checkability— and, therefore, are not best understood as entities in any robustly ontological sense. — Esse Quam Videri

And yet, I can talk about my headaches just fine (which is not talk of behaviors, norms, etc). Whereas, ChatGpt simply cannot. ChatGpt can perfectly reproduce the verbalization of someone talking about their headaches. But, it cannot talk about its headaches, because it has none.

If I can talk about my headaches, and ChatGpt cannot, there seems to be something I have that I am talking about, that ChatGpt will always lack. If that something can be discussed, and it is mine alone, this seems enough to talk of this something as an entity, if not a physical "object".

Because the word "understanding" has more than one sense. Having the experience may be necessary for empathetic or imaginative grasp, but not for semantic competence. — Esse Quam Videri

But in this sense, ChatGPT understands "headache" just as well as we do, at least in the purely verbal domain. But this cannot be the relevant sense in a discussion on direct realism, can it?

How could something that you've described as being "essentially private" serve as a standard for correct and incorrect use in an essentially public practice (language)? — Esse Quam Videri

The sensation is private, but the associated behaviors (furrowed brow, clutching the head, expressions of distress) are not. These behaviors, like the word 'headache', indicate the private sensation without being it.

Words that refer to private sensations are comprehensible because we all share these (presumably similar) experiences. By linking past experience with another's present behavior, it is possible to understand what headache means. Whereas if someone had never experienced a headache they might never understand what people are complaining about.

Do you agree with this last point? If sensation-words don't refer to private experience, then why does it seem that having the private experience oneself is necessary to understand the word?

Oh please. FDR and Lincoln, two of our greatest Presidents, went far beyond Trump in terms of suspensions of civil liberties and executive overreach. — BitconnectCarlos

Yeah, during the civil war and WW2. Is that what the Trumpies are saying these days?

The Treasonous Tard is creating his own civil and world wars that us plebs must now suffer through. You must be proud.

So when you say "my headache" and you mean the actual pounding you're feeling right now, how am I to know what you're talking about other than how you use the term consistently with others who I have seen use the term, which must be related to behaviors and the use of other terms I am already familiar with. — Hanover

How do you distinguish the case of someone who knows the behaviors and rules surrounding the use of the word "headache", who can use the term competently, without having ever experienced a headache, from someone who does have the experience?

The meaning of "headache" is surely not the behaviors. Someone can be perfectly stoic about their headaches, yet still have them. The meaning is the experience. Which is epistemically private, but not strictly private, since others have the experience, and we infer they have the same experience, rightly or wrongly.




@frank

As you can see, we approach and answer these questions in significantly different ways. What do you think of this? — Esse Quam Videri

Let me push back a little.

A representation is something that can be assessed for correctness, truth or fidelity. Raw sensory qualities are not the kinds of things that can be correct or incorrect; they simply are what they are. — Esse Quam Videri

Compare this with words. "Dog" represents dogs. Yet, the word "dog" in itself, is not correct or incorrect. It simply is what it is. But, when placed in a larger context, for instance, pointing to an animal, and uttering "dog", then the word can correctly indicate the animal pointed to, or not.

Similarly, the smell of ammonia, in and of itself, is neither true or false. Yet, when it is experienced in an environment, the smell can correctly indicate ammonia, or not. Ammonia might be the wrong phenomenal smell, as happens sometimes with long covid. Or it might be hallucinatory.

Ordinary perceptual judgments are about things in the world (“that rag smells of ammonia”), not phenomenal qualities (“there’s a sharp, pungent, acrid scent in my olfactory map”). The former are typically referred to as “perception”, the latter as “introspection”. Introspection is second-order, reflective and derivative with respect to ordinary perception. — Esse Quam Videri

Hmm, this is not how I experience odor. The smell itself is what hits me first, viscerally and immediately. No introspection is needed. If the smell is a familiar one, I might identify it quickly, so quickly that it might even seem immediate. But if I haven't smelled that smell in a long time, it can take significant mental effort to identify it. Occasionally, I won't be able to at all, and I am left frustrated, wondering what that smell reminds me of.

Do you not relate to this?

(The third disagreement seems to follow from the second).

The first is count is the supposition that there is a useful way in which there is a "flower-as-it-really-is" or the "flower-in-itself". This idea relies on it making sense to talk of a flower seperate from our interpretation and construction of the world around us, a flower apart from our comprehension of the world. But our understanding is always, and already, an interpretation, so the "flower-as-it-really-is" or the "flower-in-itself" is already a nonsense. — Banno

Of course every understanding is an interpretation. But this does not obviate the distinction between the world as we perceive it, and (our understanding of) the world as it is. We perceive the flower as looking like this, and smelling like that. We understand the flower to typically take this physical form, to have this life cycle, to grow in this climate , to treat that disease, to attract these insects. The fact that these understandings are interpretations adds nothing. These are our interpretations of how the flower is. But to also understand the phenomenal presentation of the flower as how the flower is, is the misunderstanding at issue.

The second count is the misdirection in thinking that we see the result of the causal chain, and not the flower. We do not see the result of the causal chain, as if we were homunculi; rather, that causal chain just is our seeing the things in our world. — Banno

Yet we discuss both, which is your gold standard. How the flower appears to us, and what the flower is.

No homunculi. An object can phenomenologically appear to us in a certain way, without there being a literal gnome in our heads watching an internal monitor.

And secondly, we do not "experience the world" passively, in the way supposed. We interact with it, we pick up the cup, board the ship, and coordinate all of these activities with others. We do not passively experience the world, we are actively embedded in it. — Banno

Experience is active in that it is an active mental construction, which is indirect realism. But it feels like a passive window to the world, which is the naive realist illusion. All these actions you describe are irrelevant, we are not talking about them, we are talking about perceptions.

Out of curiosity, which of three propositions above would accept, if any? Does the distinction between casual and epistemic mediation as laid out above make sense to you, or would you qualify it in some way? I’d be interested to get your thoughts. — Esse Quam Videri

I think I understand this distinction between causal and epistemic mediation, and I like it. At first blush, I accept all three propositions. Quickly, using the smell of ammonia as a grounding example:

(1) Phenomenal qualities represent aspects of the world. — Esse Quam Videri

The smell of ammonia represents that there is ammonia in the world. The relation smell of ammonia -> ammonia is symbolic, represented with the one way arrow characteristic of symbols. The smell of ammonia points to ammonia, without the smell being a part of the ammonia itself. In the same way, "dog" points to a doggy, without the glyphs "dog" being in any way a part of the doggy itself.

(2) Ordinary perceptual judgments are judgments about phenomenal qualities. — Esse Quam Videri

True.

When I smell ammonia, I am judging that this particular phenomenal quality smells like ammonia to me. NH3 doesn't in itself smell like ammonia, it has no intrinsic smell. It is the way that smell manifests to me phenomenally, that sharp, unpleasant, pungent reek, that I associate with ammonia.

When I say ammonia is stinky, I am complaining specifically about the phenomenal quality of that smell. Not the NH3 itself. It is the phenomenal quality that makes me recoil. If the phenomenal quality were pleasant to me, I would not complain, despite NH3 being identical in either case.

(3) Our knowledge of the world is inferred from such judgments. — Esse Quam Videri

True. The smell of ammonia in itself tells me nothing about the world. I have to had experienced the smell, paired with knowledge of the substance producing it. Only after this learning event has occurred, can I infer, from the smell, the proposition "There is ammonia nearby".

To me this is all fairly straightforward. Where do you object?

That’s why I’m hesitant to say that the “primitives of perception are hallucinations of the brain.” That description already assumes that phenomenal character functions like a photograph—i.e. as the thing perceived instead of the object—whereas both Banno’s point and my own have been that phenomenal character causally constrains perception without being its direct object. — Esse Quam Videri

When you look at a photograph, you really are looking at its subject. And you are looking at the photograph. You are looking at the subject, by way of the photograph. This is indirection. We experience the ship too, by way of its phenomenal character.

Do you dispute that we experience its phenomenal character? We certainly talk about the way the ship looks, the way it sounds, the way it smells, the way it feels, all the time. Not just how it operates.

Do you dispute that looks, sounds, smells, feels belong to the brain? That they are not found on the ship itself, but are properties of the brain, which are causally constrained by properties of the ship?

If you agree with these two, its hard for me to see how this does not map to a photograph. We experience the photograph, and we indirectly experience the subject, which causally constrains its manifestation on the photograph. We experience phenomenal character, and we indirectly experience the world object, which causally constrains how phenomenal character manifests to us.

And causally speaking, there's where we can rest. The difference is not in the causal chain, but where one spreads one's Markov blanket.

So, and here we can reject much of the account Michael has promulgated, since causal mediation does not entail indirect perception. — Banno

Causal chains are not the real claim. As you, @Hanover and others point out, there are innumerable causal steps between an observer and any act of perception. If the claim was just "there are causal steps in between" it would be quite weak. Indirect realism, as @Michael points out, is aimed at naive realism, and so the target it attacks is the illusion of direct perception. The direct/indirect distinction this claim relies on is quite tricky, and the fact that people don't clearly grasp it is why this discussion is interminable. (I'm still working it out myself, which is why the topic is still interesting to me even after that huge thread a few years ago).

The physical world offers ample examples of this illusion. First, what it is not: consider looking at yourself in the mirror. It appears to you that you are directly seeing yourself. That is because you are. The mirror is an extra step in the causal chain the light undergoes, one designed to allow you to see yourself. That extra step doesn't mean you really aren't seeing yourself directly. You see yourself directly, with aid of a mirror.

Now, consider looking at a photograph of yourself. If you were naive to photography, it might be shocking to look directly at yourself, captured in a small flat square. You are not. When you look at the photograph, you are in fact looking at a square of cellulose or plastic, not yourself. But you are still looking at yourself indirectly, because there is still a causal connection between the surface of the photograph and your features.

Hopefully this example brings some clarity to the indirect realist claim. We experience the world through something it is not, phenomenal representation, just as you can experience your appearance through something you are not, a photograph. It only appears to us that all the sights, sounds, smells, shades that comprise the world, are the world. They are not, they don't belong to the larger world, but instead the world of the mind. The primitives of perception: colors, sounds, scents, are constructs of brains, and may manifest differently to different brains, almost certainly so across species. But crucially, these constructs are causally connected to the world. How they appear at any moment is causally connected to the world they are about, just as the photograph is causally connected to your appearance.

The world is real, and we are causally connected to it, through an indirect relationship like the relationship between a photograph and the subject it captured.

...the blanket is only causally isolating. Information flows across it, but that does not lead to epistemic confinement. The organism’s perceptual capacities are attuned to environmental states across the blanket; perception is an interaction spanning the boundary, not an encounter with an inner surrogate. What is perceived is the ship, not a mental image that stands in for it. — Banno

Indirect realists wouldn't generally disagree with this, except for the last sentence. Both are perceived. Indirect realism doesn't deny perception of distal objects, but direct realists seem to want to brush aside perception's mediation.

When you see a flower on TV, you are seeing a flower (in the veridical case). And, at the same time, you are seeing pixels. These two "seeings" are related: you see the flower by way of seeing pixels. The pixels represent how the flower would look if it were physically in front of you.

This same relationship holds for perception itself. You see the flower in front of you, and you are seeing
its mental representation. "See" here is used in two senses to describe two components of the same act of perception. You see the flower by way of seeing its mental representation. The mental representation is how the flower looks, to you.

refusing to accept a Cartesian picture in which perception must either be inner and certain or outer and inferential. — Banno

Perception is both. You don't know if the flower you are seeing on TV is real, but you know you are seeing a pixel image that looks like a flower. You don't know if you are truly hearing your mom's voice, but you do know that you are hearing something from your phone that sounds like her. You don't know if the mental representation you experience is truly of a flower "out there", but you do know you are experiencing the mental representation.

This does not mean we should all run and be radical skeptics. It does mean that perception is always structured as an immediate/mediated relationship, between representation and represented, between what is multiply realizable and what just is. Everyday tech objects that allow indirect perception (TVs, telephones) mirror the built in indirection intrinsic to perception (and so two layers of indirection are involved in their experience).

In contrast, when the bred and rue people draw their lines, aren't they consistent? (They always say true things about bred and rue.) Aren't they saying meaningful things? (We have no trouble understanding what they're getting at.) It seems there's a dimension missing from the art comparison, and it has something to do with "the right sort" of concepts. — J

The bred and rue concept is in one sense perfectly aligned with the world. They drew a line, a feature of the world. The concepts of bred and rue consistently sort the world according to this feature. Everything on one side is bred, everything on the other is rue. But we want to say that they chose the wrong feature. Wrong how? Some words we might use: Useless. Meaningless. Arbitrary.

But these words are subjective, meaning that their truth values are relative to subjects. They refer to properties of subjects (goals, meaning, intention), not of the objective world. What is useful, meaningful, and intentioned to one person, might be useless, meaningless, and arbitrary to another.

Tellingly, these same three complaints are the complaints one might make of bad art. Bad art is Useless, it doesn't do anything, it evokes no emotion or thought. It is Meaningless, it is all surface form, with no deeper message. It is Arbitrary, it does not cohere into a larger whole, rather its components were haphazardly plucked from the grab bag of genre-appropriate parts.

This suggests a significant parallel between the evaluation of art and concepts.

You can't say to an exponent of the theory of entropy, "Well, that's just your opinion. I like my theory better." — J

This is a notion of subjectivity that is empty of content. Lebowski's "Well that's like your opinion, man." Real subjective evaluation involves the sort of judgements l outlined above. If the theory of entropy is just the models expressed by the equations, then that might lack subjectivity. But, what is entropy exactly? Is it a feature of the universe? Is it a consequence of observers with limited information? Is it statistical? There are multiple coherent interpretations. How to choose? I think, in additional to looking a objective alignment (they all can align, in different ways) some subjective, aesthetic criteria must come into play.

Someone who declared, for instance, that all European art (including music, literature, et al.) from 1700 to 2000 was bad art would be told something like, "You must not understand how 'art' is used." — J

This is the same conflation that was endemic in the art thread. I'm perfectly free to call all European art bad art. What I cannot easily do is call it all non-art. To do this, I must be using a bad concept of art, which draws the line between art and non-art using criteria that fail for reasons like arbitrariness, meaninglessness, and uselessness.

We can agree on all this, but remain troubled about where the idea of "mismatch" could even arise. This circles back once again to whether there's a "world" -- our world, not a perspectiveless world -- which exhibits privileged structure. — J

I think privileged structure exists. But concepts don't perfectly capture it.

Coloring books are a good analogy. The numbered regions are not arbitrarily chosen; they align with the structure of the drawing. Yet, they are not intrinsically a part of the line drawing, they are something added on top. They are a tool, helping the user digest a complex picture into discrete, easily managed parts. There is no limit to the choices that could have been made, someone else might have subdivided the line drawing in different ways, and choose different colors. And every set of choices involves compromises, obscuring important differences, grouping things together that shouldn't be. No set of choices are absolute, none capture all the features of the line drawing. That is because colored regions cannot map perfectly with line drawings, they are not the same sorts of things.

Yet two of my favorite philosophers, Peirce and Habermas, insist we should regard communication as in principle converging on truth. — J

Even if this were true (our current hyper-communicative era suggests otherwise), there is not necessarily one truth to converge upon. "Which truth?" can as much a cause for disagreement as "which is true?" Especially since the two questions cannot easily be distinguished in practice.

Writing that book is indeed hopeless. But (and we shouldn't stretch the titular metaphor too far) the book Sider wants to write is a book about our world, which he believes can permit of objectively better and worse ways of being described. — J

Sider wants to nail down the core concepts once and for all. My main argument here is that forming concepts is as much art as it is science. "Existence" is just one example.

This is not to say that anything goes. There are better and worse concepts, as there are better and worse paintings (as we had discussed not long ago!). But this ranking doesn't mean that:

1) There is any limit to the number of "good" paintings, or concepts. And
2) We can ever, even in theory, agree on what the good and bad paintings, or concepts, are and aren't.

Not only the creation, but the ranking of both, in part, is subjective.

Subjectivity implies perspective. And perspective is intrinsically creative. You cannot do what Sider wants with creative subjects. Doing so is obviously absurd for paintings, less obvious for concepts. but I think it is the same problem.

Would you be open to modifying that to say "already contains intrinsically subjective aspects"? I'd be fine with that, especially if we bear in mind Sider's idea that "objective/subjective" may not carve at the joints anyway. — J

Yes, that is better statement. Not subjective all the way down, but a fusion of subjective and objective. I'm curious what Sider has in mind instead of the objective/subjective dichotomy. I suspect the subjective is ignored?

To the extent that a philosopher wants to identify themselves with the scientific project -- and many do -- then they too will try to approach the "view from nowhere." But they needn't. — J

Yeah, I think this approach is very problematic. Not only because subjectivity is a part of life that is of great interest to us sentients, but that as soon as we use concepts (which we always do, inescapably), subjectivity re-enters the picture. Reality is aconceptual. I think biology is a great example, nature doesn't care about our concepts of species, life, etc. It is what it is. We apply concepts onto it, in order to try to make sense of it. But this, the conceptualized world, is no longer reality, but rather a perspective on reality. Reality always escapes our concepts. Reality doesn't live in neat, labeled buckets, the way we want it to. Reality isn't conceptual, our minds are. And so dealing with concepts is dealing, at least in part, in minds, whether acknowledged or not.

So to summarize (I hope I'm not getting too repetitive, I'm fleshing this out as I go):

The world isn't structured in concepts. Our minds structure the world as conceptual. This is perspective, a creative act. Because of the mismatch between world and concept, there is no perfect set of concepts. This is true of "objective reality", but doubly true of "subjective reality". Here, philosophy must construct concepts and perspectives on concepts and perspectives themselves.

The space of "good, aligned" concepts is endless, including the meta-concepts we are discussing now, and we will never stop arguing about them. :wink:

We have no chance of getting to it if we continue to understand naturalism in terms of objectively causal processes which treat subjectivity as something added onto an objective world. — Joshs

I mean, in truth, it was. There was once a time when consciousness didn't exist. Time passed. At some point, reality started experiencing itself. If "added" is not the right term (after all, who or what added it?), consciousness at least arose from an unconscious world.

And so, if consciousness arose from unconscious processes, we can in principle describe how this happened. The trouble is, unconscious reality only has a third person perspective, while consciousness only has a first person perspective. We simply lack the cognitive tools to cross this perspectival gap, as we have never crossed it before.