Well, for my taste you put too much weight on the synthesizing of the manifold, and not enough on the environment. — jamalrob

Do you know what the proper interpretation of Kant's view on this matter? Did he think the environment was structured in a way related to the manifold and how the perceiver categorizes it?

t's to do with what 'an object' is defined as. Imagine the world consists of just an heterogeneous soup. That's all there is, one object. — Isaac

So Parmenides, but a soup instead of a sphere. It's weird how philosophy eventually circles back around to its roots, in modern drab. Or maybe Thales? Soup is watery.

The idea that there is a real world out there, but the objects in it and their properties are dependent on our models of them. B — Isaac

I think Michael has also supported this version of realism in past discussions, but I'm not sure I understand. How are real objects dependent on our models of them without it being anti-realist?

Aye I think that's roughly where I stand. — jamalrob

I was too focused on arguing against naive realism to realize that before. Hmmm, I might be convinced by your approach.

I think jamalrob is arguing that how an object looks, tastes, feels only applies to perception. There's no such thing as what an object looks like without someone seeing it. The indirect realist goes wrong by assuming there is, and then proposing the additional mental intermediary. But there's no need for the intermediary if the act of seeing is what something looks like.

If that sort of argument works, then the debate is rendered moot. There's still a realist question of what objects are independent of perception, but they aren't like perceptions.

I think the article is quite clear on that. It's a way of thinking about things that does a horrible injustice to the way we perceive the world. — jamalrob

I mistook your critique of indirect realism as a defense of direct realism, even though you briefly mentioned some correlationist stuff at the end. So if I understand you correctly, within a correlationist understanding of the empirical world, we do have direct awareness. But it's a relational one, because that's how perception works.

There isn't a veil of perception hiding us from the world, there is just the empirical world we all live in. The transcendental stuff outside of humans is another matter, and we can't use perceptual talk to reference it.

So what exactly is the distinction the indirect realist is supposed to be making that the direct realist wants to deny? That's what I'm still not getting here? — Isaac

From what I recall of similar arguments in the past, the conversation always faltered over the meaning of "direct" and "realism". It would inevitably run aground on semantic disputes.

Maybe Harry was right and we should have tried to agree on the definition of terms first. My bad since I started this thread.

Why would you expect direct perception to produce faithful reflections? — jamalrob

That's the basic position of direct realism. And why are direct realists at pains to defend directness? Because of epistemological concerns that indirect realism raises.

Because

That's so far from my position I'm not sure how to address it. — jamalrob

Because you're not a direct realist. I don't know why you defend it.

I think you go wrong here. What exactly is modified? Taking you at your word, you mean the perception is modified. I don't know what this means. The perception is the result of, or is constituted by, modifications of light, electrical impulses, and so on, but that doesn't say anything about a modification of perception or experience as such. Is there a raw, unmodified perception? — jamalrob

It means the perception is not a faithful mirror of the object, and therefore can't be direct. If we're not aware of objects as they are, then we don't have direct awareness.

and...? — Banno

Let's take tool use. I know how to use some tool. But the tool doesn't solve my current problem. Upon thinking over the situation, I realize that if I combine use of this tool with another tool in the right way, my problem is solved. The combining of the two tools to fix the problem isn't something I learned. It's novel. And we see animals do things like this when they figure out how to get to get at some food for the first time.

The ability to solve problems, assuming it's not just trial and error, means having some conceptual understanding of the world that can be manipulated in novel ways.

and...? — Banno

There seems to be more going on in your cat's head than you allow yourself to believe.

It's a common misunderstanding. — Banno

A question is whether your approach to belief can explain all of your cat's behaviors. Animals need to problem solve and adapt to a changing environment. Deep learning has been very successful in limited domains involving lots of data to train on and fixed domains. But animals don't always have that luxury.

Returning to the matter of red and blue, red doesn't have a phenomenal quality even though we seem to describe it as such, it's actual property if you will is to codify (stand in for) the discriminatory properties of the brain when "triggered" by electromagnetic radiation of particular wavelengths and intensity. We cannot experience light, all we can experience is the way in which cells behave. — Graeme M

And it's here that an unbridgeable divide opens up between those who are convinced of the hard problem and those who think it isn't a hard problem.

Either one finds the kind of explanation in your post convincing for explaining consciousness, or one finds it lacking. And yet presumably we all have color experiences.

And what I proposed is not behaviourism. — Banno

Well, it walks like a behaviorist and talks like one. A more hip, modern one, but when you say:

In treating beliefs as what is taken to be the case, we stop treating belief as a thing and start seeing it as a way of behaving. — Banno

My behaviorist alarm is triggered. And then you wish to empty my head of all the mental furniture!

I don't agree with behaviorism, and I think there's a lot more going on in the brain than being able to move about.

That's my belief, right or wrong.

Maybe. — jamalrob

If the direct realist is committed to defending naive realism, then yes. On of my biggest difficulties with this debate over the years is the meaning of "direct realist". When I go read about it on SEP or watch a YT video discussing it, the understanding seems to be a defense of the naive view. But on here, it's very nuanced relational stuff, where I'm no longer sure what is direct or sometimes even real about it.

Isn't it? Isn't that precisely how a neural network does learn, by reinforcing specific outcomes? — Banno

I think animals do more than what the current neural networks are capable of. And that that would be form concepts about the world. For animals, this would be non-linguistic. It's conceptual in different way, maybe based on combining related images and smells and what not to make inferences about the world, particularly novel situations.

That's a sad story. — jamalrob

IMO, your argument works better if you jettison the indirect/direct distinction as mistaken by both camps, which I think you've been saying in a way.

If we must find a place in my cat's neural network for his taking the floor to be solid, it will be evident in such things as his capacity to make his legs work in such a way as to walk across the floor, to jump, run, and otherwise to engage with a solid floor. — Banno

Overall good post, but here I sense a problem. What gives your cat confidence the floor is solid so that it moves its legs confidently across it? It's not the ability to move legs confidently. There must be some other neural network that provides confidence in your kitchen floor, corresponding to past experiences from which the cat gained the belief in solidity of that surface or surfaces like it in general.

Compare that to when your cat is not confident in something, such as hiding when hearing a strange person.

Back when Banno would start one his famous 100 page discussion about apples or chairs on mountains.

That's a surprise. I seem to remember having pretty much the same debate with him since I joined the old forum. — jamalrob

At some point in the distant past, the idealists corrupted my mind, so as a compromise I started arguing for indirect perception.

Coming from the guy who's been making the same arguments for at least 5 years. — jamalrob

I deleted that part, as it's a bit unfair. But some people do take perceptual relativity seriously.

No, I think that's wrong. The widely known fact that dogs don't see colours as we do does not put a dent into anyone's conception of perception. — jamalrob

Maybe not dogs, but birds and insects do, since they can see colors we can't. As for dogs, there is smell and those big ears they have.

So it would seem that the direct realists are defending a correlationist view of perception, while the indirect realists think perception is like a simulation the brain creates consisting of color, sound, taste, smell, various feels and awareness of the body. Think of it as the Star Trek holodeck, except that the color, sound, etc. is merely representative of light, temperature, sound waves, the body, etc. The sticking point being the brain is where the magic show takes place.

But both agree that the real world (transcendental) is a bit different than how it appears to us.

Is there actually a naive position that is somehow corrected by the idea that perception happens from a perspective and in a certain way? — jamalrob

The default common sense view of almost everyone going about their daily life, and everyday language would be that naive realist position. The world is (usually) at it appears to us.

Perhaps what the salient parts of the disagreement are depend on what camp you're in? A difference that looks different from both sides. — fdrake

Which raises the question of what exactly the direct realists are defending. If it isn't a direct awareness of the object itself, but rather a relation or process, then ...? Presumably they're defending something of consequence different from what the indirect realists are defending.

And that would likely relate to not having a veil of perception between us and the world.

Actually it seems like Reid had a more nuanced view of color which sounds more indirect (or relative), unlike the primary qualities of shape and size. Here's a SEP description of color realism along with philosophers who have supported it:

Color Primitivist Realism is the view that there are in nature colors, as ordinarily understood, i.e., colors are simple intrinsic, non-relational, non-reducible, qualitative properties. They are qualitative features of the sort that stand in the characteristic relations of similarity and difference that mark the colors; they are not micro-structural properties or reflectances, or anything of the sort. There is no radical illusion, error or mistake in color perception (only commonplace illusions): we perceive objects to have the colors that they really have. Such a view has been presented by Hacker 1987 and by J. Campbell 1994, 2005, and has become increasingly popular: McGinn 1996; Watkins 2005; Gert 2006, 2008. This view is sometimes called “The Simple View of Color” and sometimes “The Naive Realist view of Color”. — Color (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

That's a caricature of indirect realism's critics. — jamalrob

Unless they happen to be color realists. Thomas Reid was one if I recall correctly.

It seems to me that in order to say that the brain gets stuff "wrong" is implying that you know what is "right". How did you know what is right or wrong if not using your brain - directly or indirectly? — Harry Hindu

Usually in context of illusions, you investigate further. If you walk five miles through the hot desert to the oasis and it isn't there, then you know your brain tricked you.

but that a perceiver is in an active relation with its environment, in which perception depends on both. — jamalrob

Wouldn't that be true for both direct and indirect realists? So when most people see red, that means they have a direct awareness of the object's reflectivity?

Part of the problem is that every time I've seen direct realism introduced, it's stated as seeing objects as they are instead of some mental representation. If we see objects as they are, then knowledge is not a problem.

I'm not sure where the "active relation with the environment" fits in with direct realism's certainty versus indirect's reliance on inference.

Exactly! Our senses don't lie. Our interpretations of what we observe are the problem. A bent straw in water is exactly what you are suppose to see given that we see light, not objects. — Harry Hindu

Our brains could have evolved to correct for that, if it had been advantageous enough. Our brains do corrections for lighting conditions, and of course sometimes our brains get angles, lighting or motion wrong. Thus the various visual illusions.

The image on the retina is 2D, so the brain has to be making some inferences about depth as it produces the perception.

That would be misleading, as Dennett doesn't believe that. — InPitzotl

It would be, "I could not have done other than write this, but I still had a choice!"

I dunno, maybe fdrake can explain things better. — jamalrob

Red things are red, but only to certain perceivers. — jamalrob

Red things being red only to certain perceivers is the same thing as what the ancient skeptics were saying. Honey isn't sweet, it's only sweet to tasters. Sweetness isn't a property of the honey, it's a property of tasting. "I am sweetened".

So there are no red things. I agree, it's a relational property of perceivers. Color isn't a property of objects.

Therefore, when we perceive a red fire engine, the redness is not a direct awareness of the object, since objects have no color.

Don't give in to the thought: well then we can't say that fire engines really are red. Reject it. Banish it forever. — jamalrob

You can if you care about which properties are real (mind-independent), and which ones are created by the perceiver. Isn't that what science tries to do? How can we say the fire engine is really red if we know visible light is only a small part of the electromagnetic spectrum, and if we had eyes that could see other parts, it might not look red?

Part of the ancient skeptical argument was noting that animal senses differ from our own. So no, we can't just say the world is how it appears to us, since it can appear differently to other animals.

Anyway, I care about what's real, to the extent we can know.

That's why I think that your approach (and unenlightened's approach, and jamalrob's approach) seem to sidestep the substance of the disagreement. — Michael

There seems to be a strong temptation on this forum to think that if only the terms can be used the proper way, the philosophical issue goes away. I take it that's Wittgenstein's shadow cast large over these sorts of disagreements.

However, the nature of perception has persisted as an in issue in philosophy across many time periods, cultures and languages, so it probably can't be resolved by just figuring out proper linguistic use, since it's a problem of perception, not language.

Indirect realism is much more historically specific, and has its roots in specific ways of thinking about what it means to perceive, what it means to be a person at all. — jamalrob

The problem of perception in general goes back to ancient philosophy, and it's not limited to the Greeks.

They Cyreneacs used the skeptical arguments around perceptual relativity to say that we can only know the sensory impression and not the external cause. Therefore for them, the proper linguistic use was "I am sweetened" instead of "The honey is sweet". Or "I am whitened" instead of "The table is white".

Indirect versus direct realism may be historically specific, like the current debate over consciousness, but the wider problem of perception is not. As soon as people started asking philosophical questions, perception became an issue. Or maybe because of issues with perception people started asking those kinds of questions.

I wish to be annoyed more.

The reason for the "venerable folly" of indirect realism is because illusions and hallucinations raise the possibility that perception isn't what we naively take it to be. Of course you can say that "seeing" used properly means only veridical perception. But that doesn't address the issue.

The possibility that perception is something other than direct awareness needs to be dealt with. Insisting on using language correctly won't make the issue go away because, as Michael pointed out, the language is based on a naive realist understanding, which could be mistaken.

Discussions like this on the forum rarely get off the ground because we individuate instances of perception differently, and people with intuitions that perception is model based have a habit of concluding that the representational varieties of indirect realism are the only way forward; even when the representation/modelling that constitutes perception itself is a direct relationship between body and environment — fdrake

What would constitute indirect for a direct realist? Going back to the neural implant, let's say when you close your eyes the implant receives radio signals from a camera mounted on a robot moving about some environment. The implant translates that to electrical signals the brain can interpret as images, and the result is a visual perception of what the robot camera is recording.

The reason for brining that up is to ask whether any possible process of perception could be indirect for a direct realist. Because if the answer is none, then the direct realist is playing a word game.

ou previously said that the thing that emerged was "complex and novel", now you're claiming it's so fundamental and obvious it can't be ignored. Which is it? — Isaac

It's complex and novel when saying it emerges form the physical. It's fundamental and obvious as someone who is conscious.

Seems a bit dodgy to me!! — Graeme M

For a genuine p-zombie, it would seem that way.