It seems odd to speak of simple organisms making inferences, conscious or otherwise, since the term usually applies to the deliverances of rational thought. — Janus

You and others (i.e. @Leontiskos)confuse inference with logical inference.

inference:

something that is inferred
especially : a conclusion or opinion that is formed because of known facts or evidence — Merriam Webster

Given representations (R), perceptions (P) and objects (O), direct realists believe that R are part of the mechanics of P and are subsumed under P. — Luke

Indirect realists also believe this. Perceptions of objects are representations of these objects, and so our perceptions of the object is indirect, because we perceive via representations.

Your position is this:

A direct perception is: P (excluding R) of an O.
An indirect perception is: P (including R) of an O. — Luke

Perceptions are representations, and so there isn't really "P (excluding R) of an O", unless you are talking about corner cases, such as flashes in the eye, tinnitus, etc.

The sensory information that an organism receives from its environment is a perception. You are basically saying that our perceptions are direct. — Luke

Experience of perceptions is direct. Experience of objects is indirect, this happens via perceptions.

Good. I was going to lump you with Michael, so I'm glad you agree. — Leontiskos

Wait, what am I supposed to be agreeing with? I suspect that I ought to be lumped.

<Machines make inferences from sense data; humans are like machines; therefore humans make inferences from sense data> — Leontiskos

Really? There was a time when inference was the exclusive provenance of humans. Have the tables turned to the point where to suggest humans infer as well is to inappropriately conflate them with computers? I don't think so. Humans are still the predominant inferrers, computers only do so with titanic difficulty, and have only lately started to catch up. It is no accident that the ai revolution started almost a century after computers.

Or in other words, do we agree that indirect realism has the burden of proof, and that direct realism is the default or pre-critical position? — Leontiskos

That it is the position prior to actually thinking about the subject, I agree. But this absolves you of no burden.

Well, if you plop a child down in front of a Disney movie, do they require special skills of interpretation and inference to enter into the story? — Leontiskos

Absolutely.

A word is a sound, and so without the sound there is no word, but it does not follow that (conscious) interpretation or inference is occurring. It is the same, I say, for images and other sensory inputs. — Leontiskos

We are indeed not aware of the bulk of the inference and interpretation we do. But that doesn't mean it's not happening.

Okay, and so it is not a window, but is instead a set of data that, if interpreted correctly, can lead to knowledge of the real? — Leontiskos

Yes I think that's right.

There's a very odd use of "inference" in Michael's account. — Banno

@Michael's usage seems entirely appropriate. The knowledge that there is a tree in front of me is not a given, transmitted directly into my brain. The only thing about the environment that is a given to any organism is the sensory information it receives from it. What else can an organism do with this information but infer things (consciously or otherwise) about its environment?

I think we see (if we are close enough to identify them) what the distant objects are. The way you are putting it seems confused to me, and liable, if taken seriously, to breed further confusion — Janus

What seems confused to me is this strange instance that seeing is this primordial thing, resistant to all analysis, such that "I think we see what the objects are" is somehow remotely adequate. Never mind what we actually understand about perception, that is

scientism — Leontiskos

For example, if someone is watching a film it is not at all clear that the sounds are more direct than the story. — Leontiskos

To me it is crystal clear. Only by way of the sounds and sights coming from the viewing device do you experience the on screen action of the film. And only by experiencing and interpreting the on screen action do you construe the story. This seems indisputable.

If you say the base level is the sensory experience then that is where the stack of layers terminates, is it not? Or are you viewing sensory experience as a window through which we come into contact with something else? — Leontiskos

No, not a window.

You said my view is not realism because it terminates at sensory experience, not the real. But rather, the real lies on the other side of the stack. Hence, indirect realism, where the stack of sensory experience, and all the indirection that may lie on top of that, sits between the knower and the known.

They may even say that because we often shape and infuse meaning into sounds the meaning itself is more primary than the sounds. — Leontiskos

And what does "more primary" mean? We are talking about experiential indirection, not some nebulous valuation.

<The sense data is related to the intellect as that by which it understands [, not as that which is understood]> — Leontiskos

I guess this sounds about right.

and your position would not have been called realism at all, because it terminates in perception and not in the real. — Leontiskos

No, there is no termination in my view. We can know things though as many layers of indirection as we like (but never with certainty).

So you believe the direct realist would hold that the layer of sensory experience does not exist and therefore the computer layer is most "direct"? — Leontiskos

No, I think something more like sensory experience is not a distinct layer, but just a component part of perceiving the world.

Apparently knowledge of the sandpaper without fingers, nerves, and brain processing would be direct? — Leontiskos

For example, if the indirect realist says that "direct" is as I have described it, this does provide a relevant foil, it's just that the foil is counterfactual and not actual. — Leontiskos

I have tried to provide a better account.

Experience can be organized into layers of varying degrees of directness.

Consider the experience of watching a YouTube video of a man telling a story. Your mind is transported to the world of the story, it is what occupies your attention. But your experience of the story is indirect. More direct is your experience of the man and his voice, as you experience the story via his voice and gestures. But this experience is still indirect, what is even more direct is your experience of your computer making sounds and images, as you experience the man's voice and gestures via your computers monitor and speakers.

Within this framework, the indirect realist says that this is still indirect, that there is a fundamental, bedrock, direct layer of experience. Of course, this is subjective sensory experience, because you experience every aspect of the world only via sensory experience. Whereas the direct realist does not acknowledge this layer, to them the computer in my example would be the most direct layer.

Once we hit page 20 we will surely be able to say what it is we are arguing about. :grin: — Leontiskos

Do we know yet? All I know for sure is the op's arguments are long forgotten

:up:

Another thing to bug the devs about is that it's very slow and difficult to edit a post on mobile. Is anyone else getting that?

I'm not sure what you're arguing for, that there is no real distinction between imaginings and sense perception? — Count Timothy von Icarus

I'm arguing that there is no fundamental difference in the phenomenal character of imaginings and sense perception. That the phenomenal sense of imagining "belonging to you" is just bookkeeping by the brain. Of course, imaginings and sense perception differ in their origination. And the bookkeeping does indeed represent this difference in origination, under normal conditions of the brain.

My larger point is that the ability to produce phenomenal experience is a property of brains, not of the environment, and not even the union of the two. The various mental disorders that produce self-generated phenomenal experience indistinguishable from sensed experience demonstrate this.

Of course, the world as we experience it is the co-creation of world and brain. But our brain's contribution is the "production" of phenomenal experience in response to the environment the body can detect.

But you've seemed to ignore my main point, which is that brains don't appear to "bookkeep" or produce any sort of experience in the vast majority of environments that exist in the universe. Nor do they develop the capability to experience things in isolation. A back and forth between the "enviornment"/"individual" barrier is essential for embryo development and essential for survival. E.g., a radical constriction of sensory inputs after birth leads to profound deficits in mammals, whereas a total constriction of sensory inputs would obviously require an enviornment that is going to kill any animal. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This didn't seem like your most compelling point to me. Of course we require a narrow band of environmental conditions to survive, and appropriate conditions to fully develop neurally. But we are talking humans who developed in normal conditions, not Mary's room, living on Earth, not the surface of the sun.

As to your larger point, I'm not sure. For instance,

Nor do true dividing lines between different "things" seem to show up in the world upon closer inspection. If the mind "constructs" things, it surely appears to construct these boundaries. — Count Timothy von Icarus

This seems as much a matter of perspective as anything, and dependent on the object and timescale. For instance, a rock is quite discrete in human timescales, and quite flowy in geological time. Just as there is no one right choice of timescale, there is no right choice of emphasis on discreteness or flowiness. If there is no fundamental ontological reason for our default focus on discreteness, then why should there be one for flowiness?

Then there is life, which spends much of it's energy maintaining it's discrete form, constantly resisting it's tendency to flow into goo. This inate effort common to all life can no more be ignored than the entropy it is at war with.

And then there is phenomenal experience, most central to this discussion, with which as you intimate something special is going on. How does a perspective which tries to dispense with discreteness accommodate what seems to be the absolute privacy of experience?

Another example, water is flowy at our scale, discrete at the molecular scale, and flowy at the quantum scale. Is any of these very different perspectives on the same thing "right"?

But it is true, I haven't fully grasped your process perspective.

It is kind of annoying that you cannot italicize on mobile. There is room for a tweet icon, but not italics?

Direct realists recognize the difference between phenomenal experience and external world objects. So why do they still claim that perception of external world objects is direct? — Michael

I believe they variously misunderstand phenomenal experience and/or direct/indirect. But I admit I am not sure.

In the context of this debate, there is no such thing as a direct experience of an external world object, since all such experiences are mediated by phenomenal experience.

You seemed to be suggesting that if there is some third physical thing in the causal chain between the experience and the external world object then the experience is mediated. — Michael

I'm not talking about physical things in the casual chain. I'm talking about experiential mediation, not physical mediation.

So for example, if I see your reflection in a mirror, that would be physical mediation of your image; the mirror is a third party in the casual chain between us; but not experiential mediation in the sense I am taking about.

Some more examples of experiential mediation: by directly experiencing a speaker in my phone, I indirectly experience someone's voice. By directly experiencing blips on a radar screen, I indirectly experience the position of airplanes. By directly experiencing words on a page, I indirectly experience an author's thoughts.

And the indirect realist says, by directly experiencing phenomenal experience, I indirectly experience the world.

So when I'm watching at the stadium I have a direct perception of the game? — Michael

In an every day context yes, but not in the context of this debate. But the concept of direct/indirect is the same.

So an experience of an external world object is direct if and only if the atoms that constitute that object are physically touching the atoms in my brain that constitute my experience — Michael

I said nothing of the sort. Experience can be layered, so that something can be experienced indirectly via a primary experience. See my example of the baseball game.

So let's take olfactory experience. Do I smell a rose? Or do I smell the geraniol in the air, produced by the oils in a rose's petals? Must it be a case of either/or, or are they just different ways of talking about the same thing? — Michael

Same thing. Just as, "am I seeing the rose, or am I seeing the light reflected off its petals"?

After that, we should ask if there's such a thing as a correct smell. Perhaps the way a rose smells to me isn't the way a rose smells to you. If there is a difference, must it be that at least one of us is wrong? — Michael

It's hard to see how, if that difference cannot even be ascertained. The closest you could come would be a failure to distinguish. So, if someone claimed roses smelled just like oranges to them, you might surmise that a kind of partial smell blindness was going on. Or, the emotional valence might be off: if someone violently turned away in disgust when smelling a rose, it doesn't seem totally off base to say something might be wrong with their phenomenal experience. Other than that, all bets are off, not only do we have no basis for judging right or wrong, we can't even tell what anyone other than ourselves is experiencing.

This leads on to having to ask if, and in what way, smells are properties of roses. Do our noses enable us to experience a rose's "inherent" smell, or does a rose have a smell only because organisms have noses? — Michael

Clearly the latter.

If the latter then we might then ask if there's a difference between smelling a rose and experiencing a smell caused by a rose. — Michael

The former may refer to the mechanical act of sniffing a rose. The experience may or may not be present.

And finally, is there something unique about visual experience such that noses and smells are fundamentally different (in the relevant philosophical sense) to eyes and e.g. colours. — Michael

I would say scents are analogous to colors. Eyes also relay shape and depth, so it is a richer, more complex sense. Maybe philosophers should talk about scent by default, rather than sight.

Well, the first step is to
explain what it means to experience something directly and what it means to experience something indirectly. Can "direct" and "indirect" be explained without simply being defined as not being the other? — Michael

The distinction is about mediation. Is the experience mediated, so that it arrives second hand, via a more direct experience? Or is there no intervening layer of experience?

Are you watching the baseball game in the stadium, or on TV? In the latter case, the indirect experience of the game is mediated by the direct experience of the light and sound emitting box in your living room.

Note that in most contexts no one knows or cares about the mediation argued for by indirect realists. A lawyer would not argue that the witness did not directly experience the murder because she saw it only via her phenomenal experience of the event. But that doesn't make it any less real.

Realism is the concept in question, after all, its apparent dual nature, right? — Mww

Realism is what both sides agree upon, as suggested by direct/indirect realism.The difference is that it is assumed in indirect, and somehow directly known in direct.

Dunno why it should be that we perceive the world indirectly just because it’s first in a chain of events. — Mww

If there was just a casual chain, it would probably be a weak argument. The fact that the chain traverses "domains" I think strengthens it, but still I think there are better arguments.

First, phenomenology distinguishes between imagined/pictured phenomena and sensory experience. This seems uncontroversial since we do not generally have trouble distinguishing our imaginings and reality, and indeed of we did much of philosophy would need to be reworked. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But is this distinction somehow fundamental, or just bookkeeping by the brain? I think the latter. While I can't visualize clearly, I can mentally hear (audialize?) very clearly, so that the only thing that distinguishes my imagination from the environment is the binary bit of information, such that subjectively I just "know" it is coming from me.

Since we think in terms of sensation (audio and visual for most people) things would get very confusing if the brain didn't do this bookkeeping.

Significantly, this bookkeeping does break down, most famously in schizophrenia, where the internal voice is sometimes perceived externally. But of course there are also visual hallucinations, phantom touch, taste, smell, and hallucinations of body awareness, with psychosomatic and conversion disorders. In these breakdowns, internal and external is (sometimes terrifyingly) indistinguishable.

The question arises, what is the “self”? — NOS4A2

I am referring to that which experiences, from the first person perspective. So nerves, while a part of our body, are not experienced as such.

I think this is part of the confusion of the question. The answer might vary between the first and third person's.

Consider that the human body does not produce any experience unless it is an extremely narrow environmental range; the enviornment is always essential to the processes that give rise to perception. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Thus, on sensory experience I'd tend to go with the relational-dispositional theories, that sensation of say "sky blue" requires both a disposition on the side of the experiencer, and a certain sort of environment. — Count Timothy von Icarus

But this is factually untrue. I can, just by imagining it, picture the color "sky blue", in any environment I might be in. This suggests that the sensation is mine, and I am just fine tuned so that the environment can appropriately stimulate it.

Is the sound of a guitar the guitar's, or the player's? I think it makes more sense to say "the guitar's", but at least the guitar must be appropriately "stimulated" to be heard. But what if the guitar could self-stimulate and play itself?

What, then, of the senses? — Mww

Phenomenal experience is the first person perspective on the senses.

Agreed on the first, but how does the second follow? — Mww

My reasoning is, if the connection between the self and phenomenal experience is direct, and the world is several major casual steps prior to phenomenal experience, involving transitions between multiple domains (sensory input -> nervous signal, nervous signal -> phenomenal experience, to be very oversimplified), then the connection between the self and world must be indirect.

So really my question "against what coherently conceived directness would we be contrasting it" — Janus

Phenomenal experience is direct. We perceive the world via phenomenal experience. The world is first in the chain of events leading to phenomenal experience, and the experience is last. Therefore, we perceive the world indirectly.

Why are you so certain of this? — Banno

Because logically these are the only possibilities.

I put it to you that you also sometimes know how things are - not all the time, and sometimes you are indeed wrong, but sometimes, you get it right - which is to say, you occasionally speak the truth. I hope you will agree with me at least on this. — Banno

Knowing the truth, getting things right, is completely orthogonal to the discussion. If I am an air force captain and my best radar operator tells me so, I can say with confidence that there is a plane at so and so location. Does this mean I know this "directly"? If so, the discussion is moot, everything is direct, "indirect" is a meaningless word.

if you doubt their existence, then they should not stop you walking naked through the local shopping mall. Their gaze can be quite convincing. — Banno

I only doubt it to the extent that I am not absolutely certain of their existence. If I somehow had direct access to their inner lives, I could be absolutely certain.

dreaming of me — Banno

nightmare

Sure, certainty is overrated; but hereabouts, even more so, doubt. — Banno

There's just two possibilities: absolute certainty, or the possibility of doubt. You are placing yourself in the philosophically dubious absolute certainty camp.

You are presently reading this sentence. An empirical fact? Call it what you will, it is... difficult... to see how it might be coherently doubted. — Banno

That is difficult to doubt, because I experienced it directly. What can be coherently doubted is the realism; in principle, I might be in a very vivid dream. In practice, I don't waste my time on such doubts. But because we don't have direct access to reality, the door is open to this kind of doubt. Our experiences are multiply realizable: the familiar realist account might be (and probably is) true, or, we might be dreaming, living in a simulation, and so on.

This situation is not unique to perception. Take the case of other people. Since we only have direct access to people's behaviors, their inner lives can only be deduced, never known with certainty. Our loved ones might be who we think they are, or, they might be p-zombies, aliens inhabiting human bodies, or malignant psychopaths feigning normalcy. Any of these can in theory realize the behaviors we know with certainty.

The point is not to seriously entertain these possibilities, but to recognize the epistemic limitations imposed by our indirect relationships with the world.

I am at al loss here as I don't know what you are trying to say. — Janus

The indirection you mention happens, but it does not seem interesting or relevant to the problem of perception. The interesting part happens when sense data arrives at the organism's body, not before. The indirection in indirect realism happens in addition to the indirection you described.

Indirect realists claim that we see objects indirectly because we can only see their visual representations. — Luke

We can only directly "see" (I don't like this ambiguous usage of "see", I prefer "experience".)

You cannot attend either to objects or to their visual representation when you can only see their visual representation. — Luke

Not true. First, to the indirect realist we see objects in the everyday sense. It's just that everyday seeing involves indirection. Second, indirection does not preclude attention. Again, let's go to the example of a book. When reading a book, do you attend only to the physical shapes of letters on the page? No, you probably never do, and instead attend to words, sentences, and above all their meaning. Even though, only those shapes are directly available to you (I'm traveling in Taiwan atm, and this fact is painfully clear). Anything more you get from the book is your mental (re)construction.

I think this is a pretty good analogy to the indirect realist perspective.

Wouldn't the position of the indirect realist be that we can only "attend to" (or "see") visual representations and are unable to choose otherwise? That is, the indirect realist can only ever directly "experience" or "attend to" or "see" representations and can never directly see objects. — Luke

No, this is a misconception. We see objects, just indirectly. Just as in another sense of indirection we see objects in a mirror. We can choose to attend to objects, or to their visual representation itself (with difficulty, since we are so accustomed to attending to objects).

There is nothing problematic about attending to things that are only available indirectly. When reading you attend to words and ideas, even though only glyphs on a page are directly available. When watching a movie you are attending to characters and action in a fictional world, even though only flickering images in your room are directly available.

Our ordinary perceptions, and against these the seeing things indirectly through tinted glasses, distorting mirrors, telescopes, radar, periscopes and so on make sense. — Janus

This is answering the wrong question: "what is the relationship between the world and the organism's body?" This can be direct, or indirect, per your examples. But this is trivial.

The problem of perception asks, "what is the relationship between perception and the world". In the indirect realist answer, there is an indirection in addition to the (potential) indirection you mention.

I still don't understand the difference. Why don't we "see" representations in the same way? (And why the use of scare quotes?) — Luke

I need to be as clearer here. The verb "see" can have two kinds of targets:

* Things in the world, "I see a red ball".
* Our visual representations of (potentially) things in the world. Of that ball, "I see a red circle in my visual field."

Even though the same word "see" is used, these are not the same operations. We don't see our visual representations in the same way we see objects. Rather, we can choose to attend to the visual representation itself, instead of attending to the object it represents.

To treat visual representations as one object among others is not accurate, and leads to objections like yours, or about homunculi. Both the object in the world and the visual representation (aka perception) are part of the same act of seeing, the difference is in what is attended to. I prefer the word "experience" when talking about the representation, as it is less ambitious.

Did that clarify at all?

both of those views as far as I can tell are equally vulnerable to the same types of skeptical questions — flannel jesus

Why? If the world is as it's perceived, there is no room for the world to be anything else. The only option for skepticism is to be skeptical of direct realism itself. But the possibility of skepticism is built into indirect realism. All we know directly is perception, reality itself could potentially be anything. No need to doubt indirect realism.

My point to Amadeus was that if he denies we have access to the world, to empirical facts, — Janus

I don't see him claiming we have *no* access to the world, just no direct access. Indirection still allows access to empirical facts, just not absolute certainly about those facts: everything could always be a simulation, or whatnot. But absolute certainty is overrated.

I think it is a matter of accuracy or reliability. "Are we able to form true propositions which accurately and reliably get at what truly exists in the world?" — Leontiskos

One thing we can be certain of is that is is not accuracy or reliability. No matter how indirect an information source is, it can still be accurate and reliable.

If you were consistent, you would say we have no access to empirical facts and therefore cannot draw any conclusions at all about perception, the world or anything else. — Janus

Maps, books, the Internet, other people, are all indirect ways of knowing things. For you to be consistent you would have to forego all knowledge that you don't experience with your five senses.

As long as our perceptions are of the world, then we directly perceive the world, regardless of the qualitative features of those perceptions. — Luke

So in your account, qualitative features of perceptions are akin to a perceptual appendage? So for instance, to touch the world I need to use my hand. My hand is mine, not the world's, but this doesn't stop us from saying we directly touch the world. And so the same goes for the qualitative sensation of touching, this is just like the hand, another mechanism we need to touch the world?

You did not answer my earlier question: What is the difference between directly seeing a representation and directly experiencing a representation? — Luke

Really there is no difference. "See" can refer both to the subjective sensation of looking and to the external object. While "experience" only refers to the subjective. I wanted to point out that we don't "see" representation in the same way we see objects.

If representations are not a part of our perceptions, then where do they come from and how do we know about them? — Luke

This makes me wonder if you know what I and others mean by "representation". Perceptions are representations. They are a mapping of features of reality, arriving to us via sensory organs, into a form amenable to awareness.

They are like maps. Maps inform, becase they correspond to real features, but they are radically not those features. If all you had access to were maps, would you be directly aware of what those maps represent?

How can the world possibly be perceived “independently of an observer”? — Luke

Naive realism requires that the qualitative features of perception mirror the features of reality sans perception. But they do not. They only exist during perception, and are features of the perceiver, not the perceived. But these qualitative features are exactly what we directly experience.

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.