One possibility would be colour blindness. I'm sure you can think of others.

Many millennia of being embedded in the world have granted sapiens in particular, and biological sight in general, the ability to receive information from their surroundings, including color. It is because organisms have been in the world and directly interacted with it this whole time that has allowed them to do so.

I wager that had perception been at any time indirect, the evolution of perception would not have occurred at all and we’d still possess the perceptual abilities of some Cambrian worm. But it was because light was there and the relationship was direct that they developed the light-sensitive machinery required to see it.

But yes, it turns out that one tiny problem through genetics or deficiency can hinder that ability. It’s clear to me that color-blindness says more about the perceiver than the objects of perception. Less information is afforded to him on account of his disability.

Yes, it starts from the fact that people aren't happy with the representational model. As @jkop mentioned, direct democracy is one option, but how does that work in societies made from tens or even hundreds of million of people is a problem for direct democracy. Representative government and a democracy already asks a lot from the society to work properly.

It works when there is no longer a republic, nor any people or institution which claims rights and dominion over the lands and the people that reside in them. Unlike fascism, communism, monarchism, or conservatism, democracy cannot work within a republican model. The fact that the model necessitates minority rule necessarily forbids the rule of the people.

If you think so, then likely you will think that any representative body is authoritarian.

If I request someone to represent me, for instance in a court, it requires that they know me and understand my wants and grievances. It is simply not enough, or a bold-faced lie, to say that a person can represent another without even knowing he exists. So it's a mistake to say such a body is representative, for all they can represent is themselves and the people they know.

I don’t have much to add, but it’s reminiscent of Orwell’s essay “Through a glass, rosily”.

Whenever A and B are in opposition to one another, anyone who attacks or criticises A is accused of aiding and abetting B. And it is often true, objectively and on a short-term analysis, that he is making things easier for B. Therefore, say the supporters of A, shut up and don't criticise: or at least criticise "constructively", which in practice always means favourably. And from this it is only a short step to arguing that the suppression and distortion of known facts is the highest duty of a journalist.

Journalism today is the suppression and distortion of known facts, not to mention the propaganda wing of government agencies, corporations, and political parties.

The populist narrative wouldn’t be required if the state was truly democratic. Instead we get a representative government and a vast administrative state, all of which teams with people who want to run the lives of others.

Authoritarianism, and the people’s submission to the will of the state and her benefactors, is forever the modus operandi of those in charge, implicit in the relationship between rulers and ruled, and explicit in the manner with which they carry out its dictates. It couldn’t be otherwise.

Representative government is the rejection of pluralism, of the rule of the people, and an authoritarian system of the highest order. It has merely convinced people that one man can in someway represent thousands, millions, and this is a reflection of their own rule. It’s the greatest stroke of propaganda ever written.

What makes it all treasonous, though, is the promise that authority and the perpetual submission to it is there according to your own will. You chose this. This is what you want.

The reign of the elites is already authoritarian. The treason of the elites and their corruption is what breeds populism, nothing more.

IE, suppose the thing in the world is in fact orange, yet I always perceive it to be blue. It is true that I can never experience the thing in the world as it is, but this is irrelevant to my relationship with the world, as I always perceive the thing in the world to be as I perceive it to be, in this case, blue.

I’m not sure how something can in fact be orange but appears blue, so I cannot suppose it.

I would argue you have to experience the world as it is or else you would not see color. Some surface-level aspect of that thing in combination with the light that bounces off of it makes it blue. And because that color is limited to that object, that it does not bleed beyond its boundary into other objects nearby, makes that the case. All of it affords us information about the environment as it is, not as it is not.

Thanks for the explication.

I would add that the meaning is found in the people of your examples, and that any possible meanings of signs is in direct proportion to their language, insofar as they understand it. This would account for the differing interpretations of the same sign.

But I still hold that the intentions and assumptions of the speaker the do not leave the speakers body and travel in the signs to be conveyed to some listener. The listener is faced with the sign only, and it is up to him to provide it some with meaning. The act of understanding a sign, considering it, giving it meaning, and so on, are very important acts in this exchange and I think they have been largely ignored (as far as I know), at least as it pertains to Speech Act Theory.

Some examples given take the distance between the perceiver and perceived to be evidence of indirect realism. With this they can extend the causal chain and place a veil between the perceiver and perceived. A recurring theme is that one can never experience a thing as it is due to this distance and the things in between one and the other.

But the corollary that we can only experience something as it isn't is replete with its own problems. These accounts often leave out the rest of the sensual periphery, for instance everything else in the field of vision, as in the stick-in-the-water case: the water, the bucket, the atmosphere, the light, the ground, and the myriad other aspects of the environment through which we can experience anything at all.

If these were considered, as I think they ought to be, the relationship between perceiver and perceived would have to be direct, so much so that contact between one and the other is measurable, with much of the perceived entering into the perceiver—the air enters into the nose, the light into the eyes, the sound-waves into the ears, and so on. To say we do not perceive light, for instance, which is of the world, cannot be maintained, especially given how intimate this relationship is. These mediums are invariably of the environment, which would need to be experienced as they are rather than as they are not in order for us to experience anything at all.

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.

The question arises, what is the “self”? I have to ask because you place it behind “multiple domains” of the self itself, for instance the senses, nervous system, and so on, as if they were standing in between the self and the rest of the world.

You quoted the concurring opinion, yet said “the majority said”. Maybe quote what they actually did say, or properly quote who you were trying to quote.

The fact is, Trump was acquitted of insurrection. Conviction requires the concurrence of two thirds of senate, not a majority. No amount of humdrum “majority” talk applies save to convince pliable minds—or one’s own—of some sort of injustice where there is none.

As for the insurrection, it isn’t moot because that narrative is the sole reason why authoritarians are trying to remove Trump from the ballot. It isn’t premised on anything else except for that relic of deep-state dinner theater and the malign voices that proffer it.

The majority said:

Congress must “prescribe” specific procedures to “ascertain” when an individual is disqualified under the 14th Amendment.

You're quoting the concurring opinion. The majority said:

Section 3 works by imposing on certain individuals a preventive and severe penalty—disqualification from holding a wide array of offices—rather than by granting rights to
all. It is therefore necessary, as Chief Justice Chase concluded and the Colorado Supreme Court itself recognized, to “‘ascertain[] what particular individuals are embraced’”
by the provision.

...

The Constitution empowers Congress to prescribe how those determinations should be made. The relevant provision is Section 5, which enables Congress, subject of course to judicial review, to pass “appropriate legislation” to “enforce” the Fourteenth Amendment.

They go on to show that it was, in fact and in practice, Congress who has historically enforced it, including statutes already on the books.

Instead, it is Congress that has long given effect to Section 3 with respect to would-be or existing federal officeholders. Shortly after ratification of the Amendment, Congress enacted the Enforcement Act of 1870. That Act authorized federal district attorneys to bring civil actions in federal court to remove anyone holding nonlegislative office—federal or state—in violation of Section 3, and made holding or attempting to hold office in violation of Section 3 a federal crime. §§14, 15, 16 Stat. 143–144 (repealed, 35 Stat. 1153–1154, 62 Stat. 992–993). In the years following ratification, the House and Senate exercised their unique powers under Article I to adjudicate challenges contending that certain prospective or sitting Members could not take or retain their seats due to Section 3. See Art. I, §5, cls. 1, 2; 1 A. Hinds, Precedents of the House of Representatives §§459–463, pp. 470–486 (1907). And the Confiscation Act of 1862, which predated Section 3, effectively provided an additional procedure for enforcing disqualification. That law made engaging in insurrection or rebellion, among other acts, a federal crime punishable by disqualification from holding office under the United States. See §§2, 3, 12 Stat. 590. A successor to those provisions remains on the books today. See 18 U. S. C. §2383.

So procedures abound.

First, what they said is not limited to Trump. It affects all future candidates. Second, the majority of senators voted to convict Trump — 57 to 43, including seven Republicans. But this fell short of the 2-thirds majority required.

In the view of the majority, each of the of the reasons, including theirs, was necessary to provide a complete explanation for the judgment the Court unanimously reached.

And yes, Trump was acquitted of insurrection as per the constitution.

The court did not determine that it is a hare -brained theory. The issue was whether the states rather than the federal government has the authority to disqualify insurrectionist candidates, not that a candidate guilty of insurrection should be disqualified.

No one is guilty of insurrection, and Trump was even acquitted of it. Yet the whole thing hinges on the stupid presumption that he did. That’s not the only reason why it is a harebrained theory. Nonetheless, a reading of the plain meaning of the constitution was enough to roundly and unanimously toss it in the dustbin.

Repeat all you want. Who cares? The majority mentioned the laws already in place to jail and disqualify insurrectionists from office. Maybe try there. They probably should have mentioned that Trump was already acquitted of insurrection, as well. Maybe a third time will work.

The Colorado Supreme Court and the Maine Secretary of State should not have disqualified Trump from the ballot. They engaged in political, undemocratic, and unconstitutional election rigging, and risked sending national elections into chaos and did so on the basis of some hare-brained theory, which, cult-like, authoritarian minds followed along with. They abused their power for corrupt reasons and 9-0 is a stunning rebuke of their judicial malfeasance.

There is one issue brought before the court and decided by the court. Per Curium. 9-0. And that was whether those who tried to remove Trump from the ballot were wrong in doing so. They were. You ignore it.

“The case hints…”. Sorry, but the case is pretty clear.

Per Curium:

We granted former President Trump’s petition for certiorari, which raised a single
question: “Did the Colorado Supreme Court err in ordering President Trump excluded from the 2024 presidential primary ballot?” See 601 U. S. ___ (2024). Concluding that it did, we now reverse.

(bold added)

Concurring opinion of the three justices:

States cannot use their control over the ballot to “undermine the National Government.”

To allow Colorado to take a presidential candidate off the ballot under Section 3 would imperil the Framers’ vision of “a Federal Government directly responsible to thepeople.” U. S. Term Limits, 514 U. S., at 821. The Court should have started and ended its opinion with this conclusion.

The anti-constitutional, illegal, anti-democratic attempts to remove Trump from the ballot have been denied by all members of the United States Supreme Court. The spin and cope is all yours.

Well, it was a 9/0 slap-down of the unconstitutional and tyrannical attempts to keep Trump off the ballot. Thankfully the justices can all read the plain language of the Constitution.


https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-719_19m2.pdf

https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/04/states-cant-remove-trump-from-ballot-supreme-court-says-00144673

So how is believing that there is no society working out for you?

Quite well. Now I concern myself with the rights of flesh-and-blood human beings rather than for the rights of the abstract concepts in my head.

I hope you realize one needn’t agree with everything an author believes in order to agree on a few points. I thought Marx’s along with Hobsbawm’s account of Encosures was well cited and accurate, though I refute the theory that capitalism (which I find a stupid term) was somehow the cause. And though I find your point valid and agreeable, I’m not sure the debate is entirely settled.

Undoubtedly, the Swedish account you describe is more preferable, morally and economically.

Clearly consciousness extends beyond the brain due to the simple fact that brains aren’t conscious. Consciousness is a direct one-to-one ratio with conscious beings, meaning that it both extends to the limits of, and must be reduced to, the being itself. As a description of conscious beings, consciousness and the being are in fact one-and-the-same.

You’ve convinced me, ssu. It clearly happened because of population growth, which would have followed rather than proceeded the rise in industrial employment and opportunity. Though I still think the enclosures acts were an injustice, and the evicted peasantry were left off with not much else, it cannot be said these acts immediately provided an army of laborers for the factory.

It wasn’t until the 17th century that enclosures became acts of parliament in England.

So What did Marx write that was wrong? I’d be interested to hear a university-educated perspective.

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.

It isn’t trivial if perception involves the body. If perception involves the senses, and the senses are in direct contact with the rest of the world, there is less and less room for the indirect realist’s intermediary.

I’m surprised you’ve never heard it, given your education. Is it your opinion that the enclosures movement had no effect?

It’s out of Marx’s Das Kapital. The Enclosure’s Acts expropriated the land from the peasantry, creating out of a class of peasant proprietors a class of day-laborers forced to work for other men in order to survive.

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch27.htm

So long as the environment is presented under the conditions of voluntary cooperation there ought to be no problem. Voluntary conditions makes of employment a partnership between owners and workers. Should any tangental ethical issues arise, or the partnership is violated, there are avenues one can take to resolve them. He can seek compromise, or, absent that, he can terminate the relationship.

Wherever there are involuntary conditions, however, that's where the real ethical issues arise. Why is one forced to seek out employment? When the factory system came into being in England, an army of workers were readily available because the State had expropriated them from their land. It was either go into the factories and work for sustenance wages or else to beg, steal, or starve. These sorts of conditions, and the conditions of statism in general, are the unethical, unjust, and slavish conditions we now find ourselves in.

I don’t see how the term applies to anything else.

I just wanted to add another question (if you would allow it) regarding the so-called “content” of thought. Can the content only ever describe the thinker more-so than what it is intended to describe?

I argued that the best technology can do is mimic the biological activity. This is for two reasons: technology isn’t biological, so mimicry is all it could ever amount to, but also because the technology is designed to mimic the biological activity, not to be biological activity.

Anything that isn't human cannot do what a human does by virtue of it not being a human being. Whatever sapiens build in their pursuit of artificiality and technology will have to be content with mere mimicry. It's the same with human thought. Although I don't think it could be said that thinking is a strictly human affair any more than drinking and running is, the problem occurs in believing we can apply strictly biological concepts and activities to technological and artificial ones. Do submarines swim? That answer, along with others of the similar themes, is invariably a "no".

not my fault. You elicited the response. The force and content animated me.

Yes, private persons, the unskilled, laymen and those unconcerned with the state are all idiots. There’s that concern for “our commonality” revealing itself for what it really is.

It is certainly true that the Greeks valued civic participation and criticized non-participation. Thucydides quotes Pericles' Funeral Oration as saying: "[we] regard... him who takes no part in these [public] duties not as unambitious but as useless" (τόν τε μηδὲν τῶνδε μετέχοντα οὐκ ἀπράγμονα, ἀλλ᾽ ἀχρεῖον νομίζομεν).[9] However, neither he nor any other ancient author uses the word "idiot" to describe non-participants, or in a derogatory sense; its most common use was simply a private citizen or amateur as opposed to a government official, professional, or expert.[10] The derogatory sense came centuries later, and was unrelated to the political meaning.[11][4][2]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiot

The Greeks had a word for those who consistently engaged in fallacy, and it wasn’t “philosopher”.

Thanks for the input.

But the premise of “doing things with words” still stands out as mistaken wherever it is mostly focused on the so-called acts of the speaker, especially given that communication more often than not involves those who are faced with his utterances. It seems to me we're missing out on myriad acts of a listener: what to do with the utterance, how to understand it, read it, consider it, judge it, respond to it, and so on. Austin himself spends an inordinate amount of time doing this, considering utterances, what they might mean, and how one might respond to them. These acts, such as they are, can be explicated in both physical terms and using Austin's nomenclature of "doing things with words", whereas expressing the words seems far less consequential, even inconsequential, given the physics and biology of these interactions and behaviors.

This is more a question for the Direct Realist. Would they agree that perceiving photons of light entering the eye is what they mean by perceiving the external world?

That’s one part of it, yes. But we also touch and taste things, and so on, so we need not limit our relations to other things to just the light alone.

It just means there are no intervening factors when it comes to perceiving the rest of the world, or that perceiving the rest of the world is not indirect.

Good stuff. Then we share common grounds.

Is the variation in colors a direct perception of internal qualia, and not a direct perception of external objects, such as the light and the things it bounces off of?

For all you know our color wheels could be exactly alike, and thousands of years of evolution might have produced an anatomy very similar, with only slight degrees of variation. Nonetheless, we’d all be seeing nothing if both the objects and lights didn’t afford us the information of the outside world that it does.

Which features would those be?

And yet that seems to be a feature of every definition of direct realism.

I’d be interested to read a direct realist using such a phrase in their arguments, if you know of any quotes. I guess we can say the indirect realist believes he perceives the world as it really isn’t.

True, the photons of light that enter my eye were caused by something that existed in the past, and just because something existed in the past doesn't mean it still doesn't exist in my present.

Whilst the Indirect Realist is more of the position that I see the photons entering my eye which I can then reason to have been caused by something in the past, the Direct Realist is more of the position that they are immediately and directly seeing the external world as it really is.

Yet how can the Direct Realist be immediately and directly seeing the external world as it really is when there is no guarantee that what they are seeing still exists?

I was under the impression, perhaps mistaken, that the direct realist believes he views the external world directly, while the indirect realist views the external world via some internal or mental construction.

Your distinction seems to me to be one without a difference because photons are of the external world, and if so, one is immediately and directly perceiving the external world. And the qualifier “as it really is” doesn’t much pertain to direct realism in the same way as the phrase “as it really isn’t” might pertain to indirect realism.

However, if we're going to amend these accounts of words to incorporate useful delineations, then we 'perceive' directly the representations which we are 'seeing' indirectly, as a result of 'looking at' a object. This seems to cover all three positions presented, and doesn't disturb the empirical facts. An Indirect Realist would see themselves in this, as would a Direct Realist in the way Banno is putting forward that 'seeing' is, in fact, an indirect activity of hte mind regarding an object, and no of an object. I'm quite happy with this, personally, pending any substantial problems being pointed out.

Where does the perceiver end and the mediator begin, in your analysis? In my thinking the perceiver and your mediator, the visual system, are one and the same. Essentially this means there is no mediator. It’s all perceiver.

Ok, so since Hitler never murdered anyone, and wasn't even in the room when anyone was murdered, he cannot be a criminal. All he did was speak words. If we cannot ever make speech illegal, because speech has no power to cause harm, than leaders are rarely if ever war criminals.

It's that or we do make some speech illegal, like giving orders to carry out war crimes, while simultaneously maintaining that speech can never cause war crimes to be carried out. Thus, in one breath we declare the harmlessness of the crime, it's absolute inability to have led to any deaths, and with the other we condemn for speaking then.

He led the Nazi party, which is responsible for millions of murders and war crimes. One doesn’t need to believe speech causes harm and pushes people to do things in order to believe this.

Tell me, when a plant grows, is it the rain that causes the growth, or the sun? When a solar panel charges an RV, is it the sun's light that causes the charging, or the person who put the solar panel out, or the solar panel itself?

I'm curious, can a dog's master calling its name cause a dog to come to him? Or are animals also causally uneffected by words?

If you're unable consider that events have multiple causal elements, or to distinguish between necessary and sufficient causes, you're going to end up with an extremely confused concept of causation.

I’m curious: since the rooster crows before the sun comes out, does the rooster cause the sun to come out?

Is a dog’s master calling his name responsible for if dog runs away? Is the leader who orders a soldier to kill an enemy the cause of him refusing?

Relationships and correlations and the fact that one event occurs before another is not enough to show causation.

I can't help your confusion here. It seems like it should be obvious that doing the same thing to different objects doesn't result in the same effects. Are you equally confused by how you can throw the same baseball (cause) at both a wall and a window and only the window responds by breaking? Why does the same cause have disparate effects?

But you seem to be saying that for words to play any causal role in people's actions the same words should have the same effect on all people. This is like stating that a baseball, if it breaks a window, should shatter everything it is thrown at. Different objects respond to the same causes in different ways.

No, I’m not confused much about the physics. What I am confused about is your suggestion that you can move larger objects with words, like human beings and dogs, but cannot even make a leaf or feather tremble under the might of your voice.

So why don’t we just test your theory? We’re already half way there. You’ve caused my eyes to read your words. You’ve caused me to consider your arguments and I guess you’ve caused me to disagree.. So let’s see it through. We can name any act you think you are able to make me perform and through the power of your words you can make me perform it. Go make me do something silly. Let’s have some fun with it.