First, to echo Banno's question, what would the correlate to indirect, "direct," mean in the context of your claims? — Leontiskos

What would it take to directly see an object? — Luke

I'm afraid I still only have one clear answer: for perception to be "direct", naïve realism should be true. The features of our perceptions must be present in reality, so that barns really look red, and violins sound as they do, independently of an observer. But we all agree this is not the case.

Failing that, it seems we are talking about different things. You must be talking about something other than the relationship between perceptions and reality. Such as, the relationship of two physical bodies when one interacts with the other. Yes, when I touch a chicken, my hand comes into direct contact with the chicken. But that is not the subject of discussion.

What would constitute a direct physical interaction? — Count Timothy von Icarus

What counts as a direct physical interaction totally depends on context. If we are talking about billiard balls in the ordinary way, one ball knocking another is clearly a direct interaction, while a ball knocking another via a third is indirect. But if we are talking about the atomic scale, almost every interaction is indirect.

There is no right or wrong answer independent of context. That is why in this discussion it is crucial to keep in mind what we are talking about: the relationship of perception to reality.

- I don't believe that indirectness implies inaccuracy. — Leontiskos

My simple example above demonstrates that indirectness does not imply inaccuracy. They are separate concepts.

It seems to me that your word here, "indirect," is being asked to do far too much work. — Leontiskos

Maybe so. "Indirect" describes the relationship between sensation and the world. Just like the number on the meter, sensation is correlated to features of the world, casually connected to features of the world, potentially accurate informationally. And yet, it is at a casual remove from what it measures, and completely unlike what it measures.

Is that your theory, or is it something else? — Leontiskos

More or less, yes.

But you are importing a homunculus theory. Most obviously you are doing this by conflating mediation with indirectness, and this goes back to the same idea that reality could not be accurately mediated by sense organs. — Leontiskos

I think it is you that is conflating accuracy and directness.

Consider a photovoltaic sensor. The number on the sensor can be quite accurate. It is mediated by the functioning device, and very much an indirect measure of the light falling on the sensor.

I don't think it's right to say you 'feel' the sandpaper itself, anyway. You feel it's impression on your nervous system, shunted through your nerves, into your brain where it is constructed into an experience. — AmadeusD

Again, instead of violating natural language, I think it is better to respect it, and analysis it on its own terms. To do otherwise plays into Banno's incessant objection, "but we don't feel our nerves".

In order to feel sandpaper:
The sandpaper must contact our skin.
The contact must register with sensory nerves.
The nervous signal must conduct to our brain.
Our brain must translate the nervous signal to sensation.

If this process fails in any step; in the cases of missing the object, nerve damage, brain damage or unconsciousness; the feel process fails. In which case, there is no sensation.

Sensation is separated from the sandpaper by each of the above steps. So, it only makes sense to say we feel the sandpaper, but feeling/sensation is indirect.

Wow, crazy. It is hard for me to think beyond the idea that shapes can only look the way they do. For taste and smell it is easy, substitute any for any other, shift the whole palette, swap in totally new ones, and you still have consistency. But shape? Can you and I be walking around seeing circles where I see squares? It doesn't make sense, we would report different things, and one of us would feel corners where there should not be. Can you imagine any other visual shape that would work in place of a circle? I cannot.

As a confounding factor, these people must have massive visual-cognitive impairment; not only did their visual systems not get to develop normally, they must have atrophied badly over the years. I don't know how much that might play into the result.

yeah, if anything smell seems more acutely to be experienced in a way that's entirely distinct from reality-as-it-is even than sight. Smell is ENTIRELY an experience built up for us by our brains. — flannel jesus

Smell is akin to color perception, rather than sight as a whole, which does seem to bear a non arbitrary relation to reality wrt shapes and spatial relationships.

Whereas, sight/smell is to reality as sign is to signified. Both are correlated to what they represent, and yet both are completely arbitrary. Moreover, the relationship is one way: signs point to signified, smells point to their chemicals, and colors to their wavelengths, yet there is no smell in a fragrance, no color in light, no sign in the signified.

Dies that make sense?

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". — flannel jesus

I agree with this, apart from "perceive the world as it actually is"; there is no such way of perceiving.

Your homunculus is showing... — Banno

Nope, no homunculus, that's just the conscious part of my brain.

I think using the term 'seeing' that way (that you describe) is misleading. If 'seeing' is defined as the entire process, then it's a useless term in this discussion because there's no difference between a 'direct' and 'indirect' version of 'seeing'. — AmadeusD

I think this way is faithful to the way we use the word in everyday life. An indirect account of seeing acknowledges the indirection involved in the process, the direct account for whatever reason does not.

What happens if you reconsider these issues in terms of touch or smell?

It becomes harder to insert a "representation" in those cases. — Banno

Not at all. The feel of sand through your fingers and the smell of a rose are exactly as representational as their visual appearances. They are all ways that your brain presents sense data to you, the conscious decision maker, so that you can then act on it if you decide it's necessary.

If "see" is the act of one's eye falling on/turning to an object, then "perception" must be the further event (i.e experiencing a representation). Otherwise, nothing occurs in consciousness. — AmadeusD

I see "seeing" as indicating the whole process: from light entering the pupil, to the experiential representation. If at any point this process is interrupted then seeing does not happen.

"Perception" is just a more general term, including all the senses, but otherwise similar to "seeing". "Experiencing" is the most apt general language term that points to the subjective representation component of perception.

Representation is constitutive of seeing/perception. It doesn’t also need to be the thing seen. — Luke

Nobody is saying that representation is the thing seen. Following language usage, objects are the things seen. But seeing is indirect. The only thing we experience directly is the representation.

I would say that "seeing objects" and being "mediated by the indirection of representation" are one and the same thing. If you eliminate the mediation (that indirect realists complain about), then you eliminate the seeing. — Luke

So in other words, seeing is inherently indirect.

It’s a bit odd, but maybe just shows that indirect realism on the forum is often not thought through (not all of them think this way)...Thus Luke is right on the mark in accusing some indirect realists of a failure to let go of the mythical view from nowhere. — Jamal

Which direct realists? By not quoting anyone, and just projecting this distorted view onto all direct realists in general, he is totally off base.

This isn't about the sunset itself, this is about the qualia experience of the sunset, which only happens when we experience and focus in on the representation. — flannel jesus

I'm not sure, you could think about the sunset itself having the quality of being beautiful, as we do of people.

But I agree with your point. Some clearer examples.

"I was hit on the head so hard I saw stars"
"Just draw what you see"

The representation built by our brains to present to our conscious self is not just "reality as it really is", and so that's why I can't agree with direct realism. — flannel jesus

But this is naive realism. Direct realists nowadays aren't so dumb as to believe this.

Indirect realists disagree and say that the construction of a representation is not only the act of seeing, but is also the object that we see. — Luke

I would not put it this way. I don't think indirect realists abuse language the way you say they do. To them you see objects, but seeing is mediated by the indirection of representation. The only thing you directly experience (not "see") is perceptions/representations, which, while they map to objects, are themselves entirely not the objects they represent.

Whereas, to the non-naive direct realist (as I understand them), perception is the organism directly rubbing against the world. It contacts the world, and responds to it. There is no such thing as perceiving an object as it is, the concept is incoherent, and so perceptual representations are as direct as you can get. Moreover, logically you must be able to perceive things as they are, in order for there to be the possibility of perceiving things as they are not, in the case of perceptual errors.

Whether this debate has substance or not, or the two positions are equivalent, I'm not certain.

I said that indirect realists demand that you see your house as it is in itself. I was referring to the thing-in-itself in the Kantian sense. See here, for example. Or, as I said earlier, a God's-eye view. — Luke

There is no such demand. To make it would be foolish as perception is inherently indirect, it necessarily involves construction of a representation. God presumably would see some sort of syntheses of every representation possible of the house, Us mere mortals can only see it as we are built to. As @flannel jesus says, this is not a problem, its just how perception works.

None of this touches on the semantics of the word "see", which remains the same in any case.

One mistake I see people making is that philosophical theories don't change the semantic meaning of everyday language. They change the underlying models we use to frame our understanding of things.

Suppose you are an indirect realist conversing with a child who is a naive realist (all of our natural starting points, I think). The child says "I see a tree", and you understand immediately, there is no confusion. You don't mentally mistake him for a indirect realist, nor do you have to mentally translate what he says into indirect realist terms. That is because the semantic content of the sentence "I see a tree" remains constant no matter what philosophy of perception you hold.

Any change in the amount of force needed to define the on/off state (any change in M) requires that B-min(P) also change. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is not how I would define a change in M, and it greatly complicates what should be a straightforward example.

Just considering B-minimal properties:

M: The on-off state of the plate
B-min(P): The binarily discretized pressure on the plate. Only greater or lesser than y is relevant.
deltaM: A change between on off states of the plates
deltaB-min(P): Pressure on the plate crossing the y threshold
Supervenience: No change in on-off states without crossing the y threshold (no deltaM without deltaB-min(P) )

Here, M is perfectly multiply realizable, because B-min(P) is multiply realizable: all sorts of things can apply pressures greater and lesser than y.

While I see why you want to consider changes in y, since it parallels the concern of your op, that goes beyond the simple supervenience relationship of the pressure plate.

Do you agree with how I've laid out these terms?

Suppose that we're only indirectly aware of reality. If so then how are we aware of our perceptions? Aren't we a step away from those too? — Moliere

No, why should we be?

But what if the statement about minds and perception are the same as whether or not our physical bodies really physically touch other physical bodies? — Moliere

What? Explain.

A physical entity is part of the P-Region if and only if it is essential to M. This facet is what rules out multiple realizability. If a physical entity can be removed from the system and it doesn't affect M then by definition it in not included in the P-Region. We are now in a situation where P cannot vary unless M also varies (P is in fact defined in terms of M so that this is the case). — Count Timothy von Icarus

This is not true.

Let M be the property of an object P being able to depress a pressure sensitive plate. You can remove or add matter to P, and M still holds. Moreover, you can replace P with a different material with the same mass, and M still holds.

Supervenience defined by P Regions only says that you cannot change the capability of depressing the plate without changing P. But not the converse.

:fire:

If you are defining superveniance with B-minimal properties or P Regions this is not the case. Any change in P, the (relevant) brush strokes (or their properties) would, by definition, be a change in the experience/aesthetic qualities of the painting. Multiple realizability is sacrificed by using these methods to define superveniance. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Is this really true? While I am unfamiliar with these concepts beyond what you wrote, this doesn't seem right.

To continue my example, paint on canvas is what is "incorporating all the relevant physical 'stuff' needed to explain the physical side of the phenomena we are analyzing.", and the reflectance of the canvas is "just those physical properties that are needed to explain" the impression of the painting. And to use your sort of counterexample, suppose we move a molecule of pigment a nanometer to the left. This changes the relevant physical stuff, and its properties, but just not enough to alter the painting's impression.

Physical reality is so fine grained that there is always room for multiple realizability. Even if it were possible to overspecify a supervenience relation to eliminate multiple realizability, this would go far beyond the intent of "supervenience", which is just to specify the sort of relationship where a phenomenon depends on a physical substrate.

To me, these problems (if they are problems) would be resolved simply by defining supervenience as a relationship where "any change in A must be accompanied by an appropriate change in B". What constitutes an "appropriate change" is domain specific, and is beyond the purview of supervenience itself. Supervenience merely indicates that this sort of relationship holds.

Consider a painting of a :flower:. It shouldn't be controversial that the :flower: is supervienant on the brush strokes that compose it. You cannot change the :flower: without changing the brush strokes. But, you can change the brush strokes without changing the :flower: .

But you say, what if I make a tiny dab of paint? Then, any change at all might happen to the :flower: , or it may change into a :death: , and you can point to that tiny dab as the cause.

But, it is already presumed by our understanding of painting that the dab cannot cause this change. All supervenience says is that a change in the :flower: must be accompanied by a change in the brush strokes. Furthermore to supervenience, we understand the sort of change necessary to change the painting is not matched by the tiny dab. Supervenience does not provide this domain specific understanding, you are asking too much of it.

The mechanical act is not identical because the act of writing B takes longer than writing A — NOS4A2

But the act of saying/typing "I promise to pay you back" is identical in both cases.

Consider these two speech acts:

A: I promise to pay you back
B: I told @NOS4A2 "I promise to pay you back", that sucker believed me!

A and B are doing very different things with the utterance "I promise to pay you back", even though the mechanical act is identical. The question "is it one act or two?" is kind of irrelevant. What is important is that these two things, locution and illocution, are distinguished.

What-if the subject to be shoved off the bridge wasn't the disposable fat man, for whom nobody has all that much sympathy anyway, but a gorgeous woman? — BC

The "Fat Man" does indeed contaminate the problem. I know it was supposed to make convincing that one body could stop a trolley, but it is better to leave attributes unspecified and simply state that the person you are pushing will definitely stop the trolley. The relative values of persons is another, unrelated issue.

In 2017, a group led by Michael Stevens performed the first realistic trolley-problem experiment, where subjects were placed alone in what they thought was a train-switching station, and shown footage that they thought was real (but was actually prerecorded) of a train going down a track, with five workers on the main track, and one on the secondary track; the participants had the option to pull the lever to divert the train toward the secondary track. Most of the participants did not pull the lever

This also contaminates the question. Assuming the participants really did believe what was going on (how could the experimenters plausibly pull that off??), was it moral evaluation or simply anxiety and paralysis that prevented them from pulling the lever?

Right. And it's the same whether the transporter kills the original before the duplicate is created, or after. — Patterner

I think the illusion of teleportation's safety relies on the transporter killing the original before, or exactly as, the duplicate is created. If it kills the original after, then it is pretty clear there are two distinct individuals at that time, and that killing the original is murder.

But logically yes it doesn't matter.

I prefer a shocking twist ending:

You are the fat man

And we're not really killing anybody, because the duplicate is still at the other location, right? — Patterner

This is the crux of the problem. From one perspective, the fact that there is a duplicate of you somewhere else in the world seems to have no bearing on your own self interests, and on whether you consent to being killed. In that moment, that duplicate, even if qualitatively identical to you, is numerically distinct. Therefore, that someone else gets to live your life is slim comfort in the face of the fact that you will be killed.

We may use physical features to identify people in various situations. But my identity is my consciousness. We don't care what Bach or Beethoven looked like, or their fingerprints. Their identities are not about their physical characteristics. — Patterner

It depends on context. Casual acquaintances might identify Bach by his appearance and mannerisms. The police, by his fingerprints. Us, viewing him as a historical figure, by his works and influence. But only Bach might identify himself by his own internal state.

Back to the OP. Would you survive a teleportation? I'm still torn on this, I go back and forth on it in my mind. On the one hand, the new body, and brain, is perfectly continuous with the old. The new body certainly thinks it survived. But did the original survive? Or is teleportation equivalent to the death of the original body?

@Christoffer wrote a story where it turned out that sleep was actually death. Consciousness doesn't survive, a new one is born every morning, with memory intact. This bothered me, I think because if seems like a distinction without a difference. So what if I "die" every night? What if every hour, or every second, I "die". What would be the observable consequence? There would be none at all. And so if there is no observable consequence from this distinction, shouldn't we discard the distinction?

Can this same reasoning apply to teleportation? If the original did or didn't "survive", there is no consequence, since the new one feels it survived either way. And so, does the question even mean anything?

Still, the ways we identify our physical selves - things like looks/physical description, finger prints, and retinal scans - stay the same. Yes, we age, which is change. But there is continuity, which is not illusory. If we don't grant continuity in this, then what is continuity? Is the concept of continuity a sham? — Patterner

There are two related but different concepts here, continuity and identity. Continuity, simply meaning things remaining more or less the same over time, is real. Things really do stay the same. Not perfectly, but many features of a object or person persist over time.

Identity however is a concept that has no actual correspondence in the world. It is a human construct used to conceptually organize the world. In objective reality there is nothing corresponding to identity, which is why it is prone to paradoxes at the edge cases. It is just a concept, it is pragmatic, it does useful work, but it is ultimately a fiction. This is what I meant by "not quite an illusion". "Reification" I think is the word I was looking for. We reify the concept of identity, and treat it as if it were a real property of the world.

There's a self that has always been there. — Patterner

It is no different when it comes to conscious beings like ourselves. "Self" is the reification of identity of human beings over time. You have continuity with your earlier incarnations, features persist. It is quite useful to assign identities to individuals, formalized by naming. But there is no ghostly self inhabiting your mind from cradle to grave, which may or may not be confused and dislocated when the body is teleported. This is just reification joining forces with the dualistic instinct.

Once you abandon this error of reification, all the paradoxes of identity resolve themselves.

. It isn't the office -- it's the commute. — BC

FWIW, I didn't return to office, not because of the commute - I didn't mind, and in fact I was lucky enough to be able to work on the bus - but because I deplored spending such a huge chunk of my life in this building. It made me feel my life was being squandered. All the usual distractions there didn't help.

Working from home, I still feel my life is being squandered. But working outside when the weather permits, in the park or beach, taking drumming breaks, smoking weed or drinking if I choose, working vacations in other cities, all certainly help.

Good questions. I wouldn't quite call it an illusion. Here's the way I think it works:

At any short time interval in your life, say one day, the you of today is mostly identical to the you of yesterday. Therefore, for all intents and purposes you are identical. This is true for successive days as well. We have a series of small changes which we don't regard as relevant to identity. Then, by the transitive property of identity, we regard the entire series as identical. Even though, the yous decades apart are very different.


A---B---C---...Z

A =~ B
A = B
B =~ C
B = C
A = C
...
A = Z

By this reasoning, A (say you as a baby) and Z (say you as today) are the same. And pragmatically, it is useful to regard Z as the same individual as A. In reality, Z really is the spatial lineal descendant of A. And yet, Z is also not A.

I think there is only one way to consistently solve these problems. Identity over time is no less illusory for conscious beings than it is for objects. Just like the Ship of Theseus, there is no fact of the matter as to whether a person is the same person at another time. There is only perception of continuity.

Therefore, when the teleporter accident happens there are two Rikers. Both experience being Riker, therefore both are. Kill one, and he dies like anyone else.

Did I really kill him of is he still alive as Thomas Riker? It seems that if there is no body-soul dualism, the latter is true. But is, in that case, before I kill him, Will's consciousness both in Wil and in Thomas? — Walter

Interesting that you suppose monism and then immediately use explicitly dualist language(consciousness in). You have to be very careful, since dualism is the default, intuitive perspective.

It is easily proven that teleportation is equivalent to death.

Assume teleportation involves the destruction of the original body A and the recreation of an identical body B at a different location.

As far as B is concerned, B is A. But what about from A's perspective? For A, his body is destroyed. Does he really care that a copy is created somewhere else? I say, he does not.

Suppose there is a glitch, and A's body is scanned, but not destroyed. The mistake is eventually caught, and the terrified A is brutally killed.

<--------A's Lifespan--------->
_________________<-----------B's Lifespan--------->
_______________(overlap)


During the overlap, A is certainly not B. After A is killed, does he magically get transported over, becoming B? By what mechanism? No, A's life ends, whether or not a B exists somewhere else in the universe.

If the teleportation fails with an overlap, it fails as the overlap becomes infinitesimally smaller, until there is no overlap at all.

TELEPORTATION IS MURDER!!!!

If I said, "surely you currently believe the earth is round" and you replied "no, I wasn't thinking of it on that moment", your reply would be more wrongheaded than pedantic.

People seldom if ever truly get these definitions "right", which is why we can't merely refer to them. These seem to only weakly support the association of belief with conscious awareness anyway. The strongest one,

A mental state, representational in character, taking a proposition (either true or false) as its content and involved, together with motivational factors, in the direction and control of voluntary behaviour." — Lionino

Still seems to accommodate unconscious beliefs.

What you refer to as cognitive seems to mean neurological, which can be explained mechanistically. — Lionino

Not neurological, I mean it to refer to the information processing capacity of the brain. A belief is an informational state where a proposition is held to be true. This informational state can be instantiated by a human brain, a p-zombie brain, and the right kind of AI. Whether ChatGPT has beliefs is truly hard to say.

it reminds me of "The game" or "You are now breating manually" of 2000s internet. — Lionino

The Game, the movie? Nice, one of my favs. I'm glad I never saw that meme, I had a horrible spell when I was young where I "forgot" how to breathe automatically and so I couldn't sleep for 11 days!

belief is a conscious process — Lionino

5 minutes ago you believed the earth was round, but had no conscious awareness of this belief.