But there is only one tree in that picture.

Exactly.

You are playing around with definitions. A naive realist would say that what the person is perceiving is "really" the tree as it is, without any interpretation... But I just gave you the fact that the brain is doing stuff (that is the interpretation), so it is indirectly accessing the tree, as it filters through that process.. which by the way, if I haven't stated it, is a human process

Is the brain perceiving the process, then?

Right, that’s how naive realism would say it. How would an indirect realist say it?

I know how the biology works. The question can be answered in the form X perceives Y.

I want to know the answer to the question “Who perceives what? For the indirect realist. I want to see if we can examine these objects and their natures.

No problem at all. Yeah, I’m not sure how one can have direct access to a world that does not exist. I’m concerned strictly with the tree as it is perceived by human beings, though.

I still don’t know why we’d add the qualifier “exactly as it is”. Do you believe we are viewing the trees exactly as they are not?

Perhaps you’re a naive realist. Suppose the following image is accurate.



Which tree do we perceive? And who is perceiving that tree?

Yes, we’re not viewing a representation of the tree. We need not include the “thing in itself”, which considers the tree independent of any perception of it. I refer you back to my previous posts.

If they were recognized and enforceable within a particular legal system then they would be limited by jurisdiction. Natural rights are supposed to be universal, but there is no universal legal system. In any case, natural rights are supposed to precede and transcend legal systems.

I wouldn’t posit any noumenon, personally. And I reject the view that sense data creates a tree because neither the perceiver nor the perceived can be instantiated, subjectively or objectively.

Direct realism is simply that we are seeing a tree. This need not entail that we apprehend all properties of the tree just by looking at it.

The perceiver is required in order to formulate any theory of perception. If I leave it out there is no perception. I only which to understand from indirect realism the point at which the perceiver ends and the perceived begins, and whether something lies between them.

Why would I leave ourselves out of the picture?

It means that anyone can observe the same properties if they were so inclined. These things would be the objects and systems we measure. Properties describe these things.

I suspect an “objective property” is one that is public, available for anyone to measure. With this one needn’t eliminate an observer.

From my own standpoint, the necessary and sufficient cause of human perception is the human perceiver, and I would hold that the human perceiver is the beginning of every causal chain regarding human perception, including seeing green trees. Perhaps one can formulate a better causal chain from this starting point, whether green trees are sufficient/necessary conditions to seeing green trees, and so on. But the cause will no doubt precede any subsequent effect in your arrow of time.

But for now, “from whom, and upon what, is this activity directed?” is my central question to the indirect realist.

Suppose that if the perceiver is not perceiving something directly he is perceiving nothing. There must be something upon which the activity is directed.

For direct realism, the perceiver directly perceives the world, and thus we are able to distinguish between the perceiver and the things upon which he is directing this activity.

For the indirect realist, the perceiver directly perceives sense data, ideas, impressions, representations, models, sensations—internal flora and fauna indistinguishable from the perceiver himself—leaving us no distinction between perceiver and perceived. So it’s like saying we perceive perceptions, we see seeings, or we feel feelings.

In order to answer the question of what we are directly perceiving, one must posit something that is not the perceiver to find it. Since indirect realism is unable to do so, indirect realism is redundant.

I think it can go too far. For instance the amount of time spent peering into dust, and smashing bits of it together to see what falls from them, has been time wasted, in my opinion.

The direct and indirect realist differ in respect to what they directly perceive. For the direct realist, we directly perceive all that’s in our periphery. For the indirect realist, we directly perceive some kind of sense data. So I doubt they would both agree that they directly sense the color green.

I’m not sure a direct realist position entails the argument that just by knowing an effect we are directly able to know its cause. Would you explain?

My issue is that these models are nowhere to be found, so I am unable to say anything of the sort is constructed, at least until such models can be instantiated. The representational theory of perception, that we are constructing models of reality and viewing them, implies that something is viewing the representation—but again, this viewer needs to be instantiated. This is why I ask the indirect realist to reify this model and reify this little viewer so we that we can better understand their natures. What are these models? Who is viewing these models? Who perceives what?

Until then I would prefer to say that the perceiver is modified, for instance by ingesting hallucinogens. He sees things differently than he usually would because he himself is different than he usually would be. I think this approach would better describe the difference in character of phenomenological experience between veridical experience on the one hand, and illusions and hallucinations on the other. In other words, if we describe how the perceiver and not the perceived are different, we’ll come to a better understanding of illusion and hallucination in general.

Anyone who understand taxation to be immoral has to contend with Liam Murphy and Thomas Nagel’s argument against “everyday libertarianism”, which they describe as the common inclination “to feel that what we have earned belongs to us without qualification, in the strong sense that what happens to that money is morally speaking entirely a matter of our say-so”.

According to the authors this is a “conceptual problem”, later viewing it condescendingly as a confused delusion. They explain:

“There is no market without government and no government without taxes; and what type of market there is depends on laws and policy decisions that government must make. In the absence of a legal system supported by taxes, there couldn’t be money, banks, corporations, stock exchanges, patents, or a modern market economy—none of the institutions that make possible the existence of almost all contemporary forms of income and wealth.

It is therefore logically impossible that people should have any kind of entitlement to all their pretax income. All they can be entitled to is what they would be left with after taxes under a legitimate system, supported by legitimate taxation— and this shows that we cannot evaluate the legitimacy of taxes by reference to pretax income.

The Myth of Ownership
Murphy and Nagel

In following their reasoning one can end up at a cross-road, maybe a dead end. There is no government without taxes, and no taxes without government. There is no market without government, and no government without a market. At what point on this circle should we jump on and jump off?

They explain in the following passage:

The tax system is not like an assessment of members of a department to buy a wedding gift for a colleague. It is not an incursion on a distribution of property holdings that is already presumptively legitimate. Rather, it is among the conditions that create a set of property holdings, whose legitimacy can be assessed only by evaluating the justice of the whole system, taxes included. Against such a background people certainly have a legitimate claim on the income they realize through the usual methods of work, investment, and gift— but the tax system is an essential part of the background which creates the legitimate expectations that arise from employment contracts and other economic transactions, not something that cuts in afterward.

The circle is squared. The tax system is not an “incursion on a distribution of property holdings that is already presumptively legitimate”. It is not something that cuts in after our transactions and takes our property. Rather, the tax system creates the “legitimate expectations” that, like a feeling, “arise from our transactions”. The system is in the background, just there, perhaps everywhere, providing us all with the conditions that create a set of property holdings, like nature itself. So who cares if they take your income? In fact, your pre-tax income was never yours to begin with.

We can first contrast “everyday libertarianism” with Nagel and Murphy’s “everyday statism”, the feeling that what we have earned belongs to the state without qualification, in the strong sense that what happens to that money is morally speaking entirely a matter of the State’s say-so. In doing so it makes clear that there is a competing property claim between everyday libertarianism and everyday statism. Whose income is it?

The authors state that it is “logically impossible” that someone should have entitlement to their pre-tax income. Without a system supported by taxes there wouldn’t be markets and income in the first place. The question-begging character of Everyday Statism begins to reveal itself upon a cursory glance at history.

It isn’t true that the tax system is not an incursion on legitimate property holdings. It is, in fact and in practice, “something that cuts in after”. In America for example, the 16th amendment, which gives congress the right to levy income taxes, didn’t arrive until the 20th century. Until then “pre-tax income” was just “income”, and income in the form of remuneration distributed between consenting adults was a legitimate property holding, and a legal one. The government “cut in” to the distribution of legitimate property holdings by giving themselves the constitutional right to do so.

If there is no market without a government, why was the second law of the United States a tariff? Why would they lay duties on imported goods if there was not already a market? We know why. There was a market, a distribution of wealth, of property holdings, and the government was willing to restrict the market in order to get some of it, to pay debts, to fund wars, or otherwise to take from people their income in order to benefit the state.

The conceptual and moral problem for Everyday Statism is this: the tax system is an active and ongoing incursion on a distribution of property holdings that was already presumptively legitimate. It is not an essential part of the background. It is something that cuts in afterword, imposed upon the background, and upon all dealings which have heretofore been legitimate.

In your first post you’ve already explained quite well where you think the issue lies, and I’m satisfied by your definitions of direct and indirect realism: “It’s about whether the properties of whatever we're going to call the perception are given by the external world (directly), or via the internal world (indirectly)”.

The only difference between us here, I think, is when I write of perception I do not include the “actions toward it (speech, interaction, etc)”, “reciprocal action”, like conversing about trees, which are no doubt “given” by “the internal world”. These to me are not acts of perception, though I suppose that’s debatable. I am only speaking of raw, sensory experience, acts such as seeing, hearing, smelling, and so on.

I do not dismiss that “anything happening inside the body as not the object of [my] questions”, but I deny that anything happening in the body is the direct object of perception, “the perceived”. Rather, these are the actions of the body, “the perciever”.

Anyways, I hope that clarifies.

The reason I wanted to conceptually remove the perceiver from the man—in your example, the brain—and place it on a table is to imagine if it can perceive.

The brain in a vat, for example, assumes the brain is a perceiver that can still perceive even if removed from the rest of the body, but then goes on to include in the scenario some sort of life-suspending liquid and electrical inputs, to act in the place of the body. In this I think they show that the rest of the body is required for perception to occur, but rather than admit it, they attempt to disguise it by replacing it with some synthetic organism.

But I’ve seen real brains in vats and would be speaking nonsense if I said either of them still perceived. Brains cannot live, let alone perceive, on their own. So perception is an act of an organism, brains and all.

I appreciate the background. Consider me a representative of the Charvaka school.

Yes, but from different perspectives, and here the matter of perspective is significant, surely. Nobody will say that an image of a grimacing face is the same as the first-person experience of pain, would they?

You’re right. No one would. But the pain is no doubt contingent on some physical aspect of the being that experiences it, and therefor that aspect is visible from both perspectives. Unfortunately the person does not have transparent skin and his eyes do not point inward, so it is no wonder he seeks another’s input.

No you’re not. You’re seeing an external image of an inner process. If you were in pain you would see your expression of pain in the mirror, but you wouldn’t see the pain in the mirror.

I have been conditioned to believe that the act of seeing and that which sees is the same thing. I can see my eyes at the same time I use my eyes to see. Seeing and pain are activities of the very same body that stands before the mirror.

It’s moved on since Locke and Berkeley too. Then again I just read a book called “The Case Against Reality” by a prominent cognitive scientist utilizing much the same arguments. If analytic philosophers were able to think about anything other than words or sentences now and then, they might notice that it hasn’t really moved on.

If there is no distinction between perceiver and perceived then it seems to me indirect realism is redundant.

You see a reflection of the eye in the mirror, but you do not see the act of seeing.

Sure I do. I am seeing. I see myself. Therefore I see myself seeing.

It’s true; I do assume that perspective because I can witness both perceiver and perceived from outside their relationship, and see only direct interaction. But I also assume it subjectively because I can find no intermediary between me and the rest of the world. Whether through thick-headedness or naïveté, I cannot pretend that that is not what is occurring and assume some other relationship.

Depends what you mean by 'mediate'. Again, if you don't want to make a distinction between conscious mediation and subconscious mediation then the distinction between direct realism and indirect realism will be irrelevant. The distinction is very much about such a distinction.

I’m trying to distinguish between the perceiver and what he perceives. Perception is either mediated by the perceiver, and thus direct, or it is mediated by something else, thus indirect. I think this problem can be illuminated by answering the question, “who perceives what”?

What does the perceiver directly perceive? When I see a photo of a tree, I indirectly perceive the tree, but directly perceive the photo, for example.

Anything internal is me, though. What else mediates it?

In my mind the “internal stages” are a part of the perceiver and thus mediated by him. I don’t see why we need to include some other intermediary. If there is no intermediary the perception is direct.

I’m staring at a flower pot right now and I fail to recognize any impoverishment in what I perceive, nor how memory is informing it. I’ll look into it, though.

Yeah I assumed sense-data, ideas, representations, or whatever else is posited as a perceptual intermediary exists within the perceiver for the simple reason they cannot be found anywhere else. If you can suggest a better location I’m all ears.

I have no satisfying answer to the argument from illusion. But if perception is decidedly direct, it seems to me that any hallucination or illusion is the result of some act or reflex of the perceiver and not of the perceived. I don’t think any of this precludes direct realism.

You’re right. I also challenge them to instantiate who and what are the objects of this relationship.

For me, a thing only perceives modifications of itself. And as the self is self-identical, there is no intermediary. If a bomb goes off two feet away from you, but it doesn't alter your body in any way, you haven't perceived it. That's my suggestion anyway.

That’s where I’m at too.

It was my understanding that for indirect realism there is a perceptual intermediary between perceiver and perceived. If there is none then the distinction between direct and indirect realism is redundant.

I know that’s not what you’re saying. I just want to know what John is directly perceiving to the indirect realist. If John is not directly perceiving the tree, what is it that he directly perceives?

Then who or what perceives the tree?

I suspect that he directly perceives all of the above, and everything else within his periphery.

So what does the indirect realist perceive?