It's on JSTOR, but I don't know where a legal copy is. I actually can't tell from JSTOR's TOS whether it's legal to post it here.

You don't see the problem between claiming that you can't make the distinction between two things, and then making that very distinction?

Like I say, subjective indistinguishability does not entail that I cannot successfully make the distinction based on what I know hallucination to be, what I know about it from experience, learning, and so on. There seems to be something very wrong about the question "how did you figure out that such a distinction exists?" I'm not prepared to start telling stories about how I once recovered from a hallucination and thereby "figured out" that hallucinations really are different from perception. — jamalrob

You don't have to tell a story. Your theory entails that there exists a distinction that you have to make in order for the theory to make sense, while at the same time the theory itself claims that you cannot make this distinction. So no 'stories' are required: you cannot make in intelligible how in principle you can make the very distinction you are required to make. In other words, it does not matter what story you try to give, because you have locked yourself out of making one.

What if there really is no such metaphysical distinction? That is a worry for a certain kind of sceptic or his victims, but not for me. Again, I don't mean to be too blasé, because you're a serious interlocutor, but I just don't see the problem. — jamalrob

This bewilders me. You can't just make claims and then deny that you're responsible for the consequences of them. I'm again only using what you have said. It is not as if some outside source, the 'skeptic,' is criticizing you. If your theory does not make any sense on its own terms, that is indeed a problem for your theory, and it can't simply be dismissed by saying 'I don't see the problem.'

In other words, it's not, again, like there's some lingering doubt, 'what if I'm wrong about the distinction?' It's that precisely the way you've made it rules out the possibility of determining there is one to begin with, yet you yourself are committed to claiming there is one.

I guess I pretty much agree with everything he says, but on the other hand I think this discussion, and Tarski-style theories of truth, were obviated several years earlier than this paper was published by the advent of Montague Grammar. Montague showed formally precisely how the divide between the 'building block' and 'complete sentence' starting points could be navigated, by demonstrating that meaning could be built in tandem with syntactic structure according to a few simple syntactic and semantic operations.

The result is that on the one hand the 'meaning' of each word can only be given in the context of the whole sentence (so for instance, if a predicate is a functional mapping form individuals to truth values, it in some sense only 'has meaning' or is of interest insofar as it takes an individual as an argument to get a truth value), but on the other hand, each sentence only has its 'meaning' as a result of syntactically and so semantically composing the parts together (you can't get to the truth value without putting the individuals and predicates and so on together). And it's not some wishy-washy thing either, how that works is spelled out in almost annoying formal detail.

That of course allows notions like 'reference' to be given precisely the treatment that Davidson wants them to be given, and in a way, shows for a small fragment of English how this is actually done. By looking at Montague's work we can see how a proper name contributes to the truth of a sentence without a prior notion of reference, and then we look back on it and say 'what that does, that's basically what it turns out we meant by 'reference'.'

PPS. This is such a bitch to read. Would rather read a division of Being and Time any day! — StreetlightX

I agree, I really don't like the writing style of analytic philosophers during this period. It's bizarrely elliptical, and makes casual reference to a whole web of formal and technical literature while at the same time never bothering to give examples or spell anything out formally in the paper itself. It's sometimes difficult even to locate the main points they say they're going to make in the abstract, in the paper itself.

You haven't answered my question, though.

Put it this way. You have claimed there are two metaphysically distinct, but phenomenologically identical, types of experiences. The question then arises: how did you figure out that such a distinction exists?

In other words, you are putting stock in a theory that requires you to make a distinction that, according to that very theory, you are incapable of making.

Knowing there's a difference between hallucination and perception doesn't depend on my being able to tell the difference when I'm hallucinating. — jamalrob

The problem is not that you can't tell the difference between the two when you're hallucinating. The problem is that according to your own account, you cannot tell the difference ever, even in principle. Do you see? It might help if you walk through how it is you figured out in the first place that there were two such types of experiences. I know what led you to that conclusion, but now think back a bit on how, given what you've sid, someone possibly could have discovered such a thing.

I don't want to be "the realist". — jamalrob

Then don't defend a realist position.

No, let's give you the fact that there's a difference. Now, how did you figure this out? That is, how can you, the realist tell the difference between two kinds of perception, when by your own admission you cannot tell the difference? What led you to believe there were two different types of experiences?

I guess there's a sense in which I'm not really that interested in the first two points. I think I want to bypass the second one entirely, because the comment was more in passing, and in any case I'm not sure that 'embodied' is anything but a hoo-ha word. The stakes of the argument or what points are to be made are just unclear to me, and I can't see the debate being productive.

As for the first, okay, it's fine. If your target really is the lumpen neuroscientist or whatever, that still leaves the problem that your examples: Hume, Russell, and Ayer, don't hold this view on any plausible reading of them. Roughly, I think Hume is a sort of skeptic in the Greek sense, and that Russell and Ayer are ultimately Millian phenomenalists more concerned with logically analyzing perception, breaking down perceptual objects into 'logical fictions' constructed out of complexes of sense data and their dispositions. None of them to my mind are indirect realists in quite the way you suggest. And as I've said, even Descartes, who is supposed to be the representative realist par excellence, never said that we don't perceive tables and so on. He entertained the notion as part of hyperbolical doubt, but then abandoned it.

B(i), by the way, is not my view: my view is that, in the sense the philosopher is interested in perception, we do not perceive anything.

The third point is the really interesting one. I really don't want to post walls of text about this because it just obscures everything. I just want to say to begin, that your take on it seems to fundamentally misunderstand the nature of the criticism being made, from a dialectical point of view. You seem to think the problem is that hallucination, and the admission of the phenomenological indistinguishability between it and veridical perception (between which the direct realist is, as you recognized, forced to draw a metaphysical distinction), yields some sort of lingering doubt on the part of the direct realist that any given thing, or everything, might be unreal in the sense the realist is interested in. But that is not the problem. This is not about certainty. It is about the realist's most basic claims being fundamentally incoherent by their own lights. It is not as if the realist leaves himself open to lingering doubts, but that's okay because we don't require certainty. No. It is that the realist's positions literally do not make sense when juxtaposed. The criticism is taken to be a devastating one in that if it obtains, direct realism cannot.

With that said, I think it's best to go back and forth about it rather than try to unpack the criticism itself all in one go. So I'll start by asking this. You claim that there is a difference between two sorts of experiences: one is ostensible perception, the other actual. However, you also claim that in principle these two are, or can be, phenomenologically indistinguishable. Let's make the reasonable assumption that if you ever were to tell the difference between them at some point, this would require some phenomenological difference, somewhere, in order to do so.

So now the question is: how can you tell the difference, if you can't tell the difference?

But if your 'real' body was generally invincible in daily life, but damaging your 'virtual' body had terrible, painful consequences, you'd take liberties with your 'real'
body, not the virtual one. (And so functionally, the 'virtual' one would begin to take its place as 'real').

I don't think philosophy offers relief just in the sense of relieving boredom. If boredom was the only problem life wouldn't be so bad.

If you were from the non-Matrix world, you might say so. But then, they would tell you you're in error about not being in a 1990's metropolis.

If someone likes philosophy, they should study it. If they don't, they need not fear they will end up as intellectually impoverished copier repairmen, or drudges doing dreary, third-rate workmanlike tasks in the astrophysics or quantum mechanics laboratory. — Bitter Crank

Well, the world is such that you end up a wage slave no matter what you do, probably. Professional philosophy is dehumanizing in its own way, and so is astrophysics. But philosophy itself can sometimes offer substance and relief, whereas astrophysics cannot. Or so I want to claim to you.

I never said it was better. I said it was more edifying. Special sciences are, if you like, more useful. Or, in other words, there is a difference between the person who knows the value of wasting time, and the person who insists time ought not to be wasted. The latter is a worker -- he has a job to do, and utility. But then, dildos have jobs to do as well.

My point is that the people living in the Matrix are no more in error about anything than people living outside of it. We already live in a Matrix, if you like, whether plugged in or not (all reality is virtual reality).

I still say there is a sense in which philosophy demands and rewards thought in a way the special sciences don't. In the special sciences, first and foremost you have work to do. It may take more brainpower than flipping burgers, but ultimately it's the same kind of thing. The special sciences aren't serious about questioning their own foundations and history and so on. They lack a certain self-awareness and edification. Husserl speaks of the spiritual emptiness that attends them, which is what drove him to be a philosopher rather than a psychologist or mathematician.

Except, as I said, in both cases the causal story is already the same. Remember, you are still in the 'real world' and subject to its causal influence while in 'virtual reality.' Yet, someone who was born in opposite-land would say the same thing about VR.

In my opinion philosophy is edifying in a way that other avenues of inquiry are not. The special sciences are by comparison 'workmanlike' and approximate labor, whereas philosophy more properly involves 'thinking.' It's possible to do a job in a special science, but not really to think in the interesting sense.

But it would be just the opposite: unplugging would be going into the 'fake' world. You see?

You might be right, but I don't know what exactly you're referring to. Some examples would help. What analytical prejudices? And where does he claim that they're necessary? What's this myth that he allegedly created about how the world as he knew it came to be? — Sapientia

So, for example, Kant thought that (Aristotelian) logic was complete, and so derived a table of categories that were necessary to all thought on the basis of the sorts of tables logicians would draw up. That is, in a way, all he does, with various disciplines.

Who cares if the computer in front of you is "real" or "virtual?" — TheWillowOfDarkness

Realists.

I spent a long time reading Kant, and ultimately I think I have no major sympathies with him.

If you want an extremely reductive dismissal of his work, here is how I feel about it: it all consists of taking analytical prejudices and claiming that they're necessary. This is so insofar as the 'common wisdom' of the age is taken to be something that arose necessarily, and so the prejudices that underly it have to be traced backward and declared the ultimate source of all things (since the way we see things now is therefore the way they must always be seen). In short, Kant is the 'mythologizer' par excellence. His business was creating etiological myths about how the world as he knew it came to be, like the story of Jacob and Esau and the red soup, and how what must have happened in order to reach that state therefore had to have a divine or permanent status.

I think there is really little else to say about him.

But if you were born 'plugged in,' and saw 'unplugging' as the exception, the roller coaster we deem 'real' would be the 'virtual' one, and vice-versa.

But they're not causally mediated in a different way. In both cases, you hit your 'skin' with certain stimuli, and the result is that a spatial 'environment' is created for you. All that's happening is your 'skin' is being hit with different things.

I think the way the point is characterized isn't so important as long as the point is understood that there is no metaphysical difference between the two. Whether one wants to say that this is because wha we consider virtual is in fact 'realer' than we admit, or conversely to say that what we consider real is 'more virtual' than we admit, is a rhetorical matter that might affect how one interprets the consequences of this lack of a divide, but I don't think it mars the original point.

To say that natural space 'surrounds' virtual space is to treat virtual space as if it were a little piece of natural space. But when you control your character, you are not going anywhere in 'natural space.' It's a category error.

Well, for one thing, the simulation breaks down in systematic ways when you poke holes in the hardware, in either case.

Our natural waking perception is in a way 'designed,' too. Of course there's no person or group of people who purposefully made it some way, but nonetheless its features act as if designed, as if the affordances it allowed us were constructed by some sort of demiurge. And what our perceptual systems allow us is based on eons of coagulated prejudices: every 'natural' fact is just an old, calcified 'tradition.' So in that sense the 'world' built up for us is a kind of elaborate simulacrum or puppet show that is 'intentionally' sensitive only to a small number of qualities. In our naive state we just take this puppet show at its word; when we do philosophy, we begin to see its architecture, and notice that it does not make sense on its own terms. In that sense, the world as perceived is unreal.

I don't understand what you mean in the second paragraph. What does knowing it is a simulation have to do with anything? You still interact with it in the same way as 'real life' -- that's the point. And further, a mature neuroscience and psychology can describe to you exactly how your 'natural interface' is achieved as well. It is too, if you like, a simulation. Or, you could say that the video game is real. The point is, they are not in principle phenomenologically different, and there is no reason to consider them metaphysically different.

Your linguistic considerations still don't take us from P2 to the negative conclusion C1. This is because you have not shown P3, the Phenomenal Principle, to be true. What you have done, I think, is supported a weaker formulation: — jamalrob

Is this the indirect realist's conclusion? It certainly isn't if we're talking about people like Russell and Ayer. And certainly someone like Descartes never claimed that we do not see tables -- rather, he claimed that we saw them mediately, that is, via something else seen immediately, which are ideas presented to the mind. Note that even in your opening Hume quote, he says 'nothing can ever be present to the mind...' This does not mean that we do not perceive tables (Hume was ultimately a skeptic on this question, it seems to me). It means that they are not 'present to the mind' in the way that a direct realist thinks: rather, they are seen mediately, if at all. Insofar as the rest of your post is predicated on this historically dubious claim, you need to answer this before continuing.

Can you explain how the direct realist's position is in conflict with this kind of mediation? Positions that fail to acknowledge it are not those I am defending, and emotional attachment has nothing to do with it. And I think I have already shown how we can hold perception to be direct while remaining consistent with--perhaps even dependent on--a description of the particular way that perceivers get geared in to their surroundings. I do think this can be called a direct realism, but I don't care if the label is not entirely appropriate. I'm not here to defend "common sense realism". — jamalrob

You really need to have your feet held to the fire abut hallucination in order to see this. You cannot make your position live on promises.

Well, I made a point of describing conscious inferences in perception in my last post, so I am not claiming that inference has no place at all. What I object to is the idea, again expressed here, that this conscious inference is a special instance of a process that goes on all the time, for the most part unconsciously. Didn't you just backtrack on this point anyway? — jamalrob

What exactly does it matter whether it's conscious or not? We know it's happening, in either case.

It is not a vague feeling. It is simply the case that indirect realism is associated with, sits most easily alongside, and is most sympathetic to a cognitivist, mechanistic, passive, dualistic conception of what it is to perceive. — jamalrob

Why, exactly? The fact that perception occurs via a perceptual medium doesn't seem to me to implicate anything about perception not being active, embodied, or whatever hip word you want to use. This is obvious from the fact that playing video games, which the realist does not want to describe the same sort of directly perceptual metaphysical import to as non-video-game seeing, operate pretty much the same way, as embodied, sensitive to the environment, relying on affordances, and so on. It seems to me that all these things are precisely what don't need any sort of direct, or realist, account to make sense. Just the opposite, they shift the focus to the process of experiencing itself, rather than putting all the weight on the object that the direct realist believes perception is there just to give us information about. Getting objective information about some external thing, indifferent to the medium by which this happens, is not at all what perception is like or about. Hell, we spend a good portion of our lives nowadays looking at electronic screens with purposely projected interfaces; even for the direct realist, much of what we live in is a projected sensory simulation. The indirect realist rightly points out that this is not metaphysically different from ordinary situations. That is, we in no sense began to lose touch with any reality when we began to look at computer screens more often.

Yeah, I'd call them all analytic on any reasonable historical understanding of the movement. Austin maybe never made any grandiose claims, but Ryle did (they just disagreed with previous ones, is all). And Russell, like Carnap, as interested in deducing the logical structure of the entire world as well as all of math, logic & language. And Wittgenstein of course believed that he solved all philosophical problems in ~70 pages. I'm not sure any philosopher ever has made that sort of claim besides him.

Well, I can think of situations where getting beaten by someone who wasn't doing it for the pleasure of it would be worse. For example, suppose you're a child and your parent is beating you from a position of authority, believing it to be for your own good, and doing so unimpeachably in the eyes and moral standards of the community. That's a hell of a lot worse situation, because you still take the beating, only the beater is blameless and liable to do it again without reproach. Such is the way of all 'torturing angels...'

Alright, bye.

Are you saying that if someone beat you, it would make you feel better to know they feel guilty about it, or something? You're getting beaten either way.

Causing people harm is what villains do. What does it matter whether they take pleasure form it? The harm is the same.

I don't understand what you mean by 'pure' or 'absolute' pleasure and pain.

No, that isn't the case. If it were just the pain that is caused, then whether or not pleasure was derived from the pain wouldn't effect how evil the action is perceived, but this isn't the case, as I pointed out, pleasure being derived from the action compounds the evil. This indicates that pleasure isn't absolutely good, in itself, but the circumstances by which it is derived are relevant to its determination as good or bad, and where most cases in which pleasure are derived are neutral or good, not subtracting from the pleasure as a good, it is also possible for pleasure to be seen as an evil, depending on how it is derived. — Wosret

I don't see why that 'compounds the evil.' If someone's getting hurt, then the bad thing about that is that they're getting hurt.

But, since the ideas of the intrinsic goodness and badness of pleasure and pain, respectively, are dependent on the (arguably) erroneous ideas of the absolute purity of pleasure and pain, I am still not satisfied that you have answered the question as to why we should think that pain and pleasure are really, as opposed to merely ideally (or by mere definition), intrinsically bad and good respectively. — John

I don't know what you mean by absolute purity, or by the distinction between ideal and actual pleasure and pain, but so far as I can tell nothing hinges on it or makes reference to it.

To support an ethic of hedonism would be to say that pain and pleasure really are 'the good' and 'the bad' respectively, and that this fact trumps any other ethical considerations. — John

Yes, that is the idea.

You can of course maintain that pleasure is always good in all causes, regardless of how it is derived, but this would be a quite controversial opinion, in my view. — Wosret

If it is controversial, I think it is because of confusion. If, for example, one gets pleasure out of causing others pain, then this is not a bad thing on behalf of the pleasure one receives, which is still intrinsically good; it is precisely bad because of the pain, which is intrinsically bad (notice if you take away the pain, resulting in a 'victimless crime,' the intuition that the act is bad goes away, even if the pleasure remains -- hence, it is not the pleasure that is bad).

Of course it is perfectly possible for an intrinsic good to be an extrinsic bad (or in my preferred way of speaking, an efficient cause of a bad). But notice that it is then an extrinsic bad only in virtue of causing pain.

So, can you provide an argument for why we should think that there is anything at all that is intrinsically good or bad? — John

To be intrinsically good or bad, something has to be good or bad by the very standards that it sets up, in such a way that it couldn't possibly not be good or bad. Pleasure and pain meet this requirement, since by their own standards they are good or bad, and not because of anything further. The very standards they set up, in being felt, are such that they feel good and feel bad, and since feeling is all that is at stake with them (since they are just feelings), this is the same as being good/bad by the very standards they set up (the only ones that matter).

Which one didn't? Carnap is the analytic philosopher par excellence, and his magnum opus was The Logical Structure of the World...

(maybe that would have been a better example than a scintillating scotoma). — jamalrob

I think, in the case of the scintillating scotoma, or an after-image or color patch, that a de re reading is also intelligible. That is, since you only refer to the object seen qua visual impression, I think it can be true to say 'there is an x such that x is an after-image and I see x.' I don't think objects in the wide sense have to be 'located' anywhere in particular, and it's perfectly fine to treat things in the visual field as objects and talk about them that way. That is not the same as seeing a face in the clouds: when someone says this, they're not committed to there being any face at all, except metaphorically; but I think you are in some sense committed to saying there is an after-image (look, it's right there). The after-image and scintillating scotoma are not supposed to be extra-visual objects in the first place, like a face is.

I see no reason, other than philosophical prejudice, not to say the same about splotches of color and so on in every case. Here, of course, you often do have to take a sort of abstract and artificial view of your own perception to say something like 'I see a red patch of color' and mean it, but that's fine, there's no reason to rule it out on that account. Day to day though, I would say people don't do this sort of thing very often -- it usually happens when something's wrong with your eyes or you for some reason are relaxed and curious, and want to take an objective distance toward your own experience.

It is this distinction that I am claiming is missed by the indirect realist, who thereby finds that all we ever see is faces in the clouds, where some correspond to real objects and others do not. — jamalrob

I need to clarify a few more things here. De dicto and de re readings of these verbs can be distinguished, but that doesn't mean they're mutually exclusive. Suppose again I say 'John is seeking a unicorn.' That can be true de dicto: he has his 'sights' set on finding some unicorn or other; it can be true de re: there is some unicorn (say, Charlie), and John is seeking him; it can be true both: John is seeking Charlie, and since he knows Charlie is a unicorn, he has his sights set on finding a unicorn, too; it can be true de re but not de dicto: John is seeking Charlie, but doesn't know Charlie is a unicorn, and so he is seeking an x such that x is a unicorn, but does not have his sights set on finding a unicorn; and it can be true de dicto but not de re: John has his sights set on finding a unicorn, but not on any individual in particular (rather he just wants to find some unicorn or other, he doesn't care which).

The reason this is important is because it is possible to see something de dicto without seeing anything de re. If I shut my eyes and imagine a house, I can with propriety say on the de dicto interpretation, 'I see a house.' This can be true, even if de re there is no x at all such that I see x: I don't see anything in this sense, since my eyes are closed. But the reverse is not true: you cannot see something de re without seeing something de dicto. It is true that I might see a church de re, and not see a church de dicto: I only see a barn de dicto. But nevertheless, it is impossible, given that I see something, that I do not see something de dicto. So in this respect, the indirect realist is perfectly correct. And they are perfectly correct in claiming that it is possible to see 'the same thing' in one sense regardless of whether you are hallucinating or not, and regardless of what the object 'actually' is.

Because the de re sense is privileged (certainly by realists), faces in clouds, hallucinations, and shrinking tables are thoughtlessly taken to be objects of perception rather than in various ways constituting perceptual experiences (in the same way that the pain constitutes a pain experience rather than being an object of awareness in a perceptual sense). — jamalrob

It depends on what you mean by 'objects,' but okay. And certainly phenomenalists like Ayer are far more sophisticated and subtle than this crude criticism would suggest. I also think, as I said, that it is possible in analyzing your own experiences to objectify them and make of them de re objects. And of course, it's perfectly intelligible to speak of the experiences themselves as such objects.

But I don't think direct realists make that claim. Their point is that the sense in which one sees something shrinking, or sees a face in the clouds, does not permit the indirect realist to say that one always only sees a perceptual intermediary, precisely because, as you say, it does not entail that ‘there is an object such that it was shrinking and I saw it.’ — jamalrob

Okay, yes, I agree with this. But I'm not sure the hypostatization of the sensory intermediary in these cases is really what's crucial about indirect realism insofar as it's a criticism of direct realism. In other words, the fact that the indirect realist's positive thesis is incorrect doesn't really help the direct realist in any way, who will be beset by the same problems.

But what does "mediated" mean here? It all hinges on how one characterizes the fact that we see faces in clouds or hallucinations or mirages: if perception's being mediated means that it has its own properties that can be studied independently of the properties of whatever is perceived, and is perspectival, partial, subject to error, and relative to the perceiver's specific evolved physiology, his cultural milieu, his motivations and affect, and so on--if this is what "mediated" means then the direct realist can happily agree that perception is mediated. — jamalrob

I'm not so sure he can. You may think he can, or want very badly that he can because it would make you more comfortable with the position, but these are not all the same thing. Usually trying to account for mediation leads direct realists into incoherencies that invite dreaming arguments, and so on.

First, I don't think it's true that we are often met with indeterminate impressions. — jamalrob

It doesn't matter how often it happens. That it can happen, period, is a problem for the direct realist. And of course you can make it happen once you figure out how.

Are there really times when what we see is inchoate and meaningless? — jamalrob

Yes.

But after reading what you say about unconscious inference, I suspect that you have more sympathy with this view than I at first thought: — jamalrob

'Inference' is misleading, in the sense that I think there's no transference from one sort of thing to another. In brief, I do not really think there is such a thing as perception as philosophers talk about it. If you like, direct realism could be an attempt to logically deduce what qualities perception must have if it is to exist, and it rightly criticizes indirect realism for not sticking to those qualities. But then, since direct realism is internally incoherent, this shows that perception is internally incoherent.

If I had to pick a word, I would say that objects are projected, not inferred or perceived or anything like that. If I could speak with more liberty, I would simply say, there are no objects. Period. There are experiential movements, some of which settle into more or less regular patterns. There is nothing they are 'about' or 'aim at.' They contain their telicity internally, in pleasure and pain.

So I'll return to the possibility that you mean "inference" metaphorically, to describe what the brain is doing in perception. Does this mean that unconscious brain processes can, like inferences, be mistaken? Does the use of "inference" mean you think there is something analogous to inference carried out by cognitive modules in the language of thought, as in computationalist theories? — jamalrob

It doesn't even matter. Even if we move the goalposts, the fact remains that sometimes you do literally infer what you are perceiving consciously, as when trying to figure out what a certain smell is. That in most cases the process isn't a conscious one seems to me metaphysically irrelevant. You have a lot of work to do in order to see anything. Sometimes it's conscious work, sometimes not -- so what?

As might now be clear, I didn't mean passive in the Cartesian or Kantian sense, as opposed to the active synthesizing of the manifold by the understanding. I meant it in Gibson's or Merleau-Ponty's sense, as opposed to the constant probing movements of a perceiver in an environment, relative to its affordances for action. Indirect realists imagine a passive sensory receptivity borne by a single static eye, the stimuli from which are only then worked up into perception by an active cognition--because for the indirect realist, the perceiver as bodily subject or situated organism is passive, its only relevant positive activity taking place behind the veil and in the head. — jamalrob

Honestly, I don't see how an indirect realist in any way, shape or form is less able than a direct realist to talk about, account for, or ascribe importance to active understanding and affordance in this way. I suspect this is more of a vague feeling of the 'character' of the positions that doesn't amount to much.

You say that the "remove"--the separation of mind and world or subject and object of perception--becomes apparent when perception breaks down. I would say rather that there is only such a remove when perception breaks down (or in "snapping out", etc.). — jamalrob

There are two theses held by the direct realist, both of which I think are wrong. These are that experience is:

1) teleological, aims naturally at something outside of it, and sometimes fails to hit its target;
2) normative, has a 'job to do,' and so sometimes can 'fail at it.' Furthermore, there are 'right' and 'wrong' ways to perceive (there must be, since there is a way the world is, and a way it's presented, and since these are separate, the latter is good only insofar as it somehow hooks up with the former)

We can talk about why I think these are both wrong, and why so much of the mistaken realist metaphysics depends on them; but I just wanted to say that this is where your 'snapping out of it' language comes from, and the only background against which it makes sense. I suspect what is at work is taking certain phenomenological or practical qualities of experience and mistaking those qualities for metaphysical ones -- that because, for example, some perception is felicitous or useful, it therefore is not just that, but further 'real' (insert some story about how there are evolutionary pressure to make perception 'good,' and so on).

That, of course, is more deeply Cartesian than anything you criticize.