Is anyone going to actually in real life tell a murderer where their friend is in order to uphold some principle of truth telling? The answer is no.

As such, it's a pointless conundrum. Even if we still consider it immoral to lie in such a situation, who cares? Our friend gets to live, and that's what matters, not whether we upheld some abstract principle.

From this we realize that other people's well-being matters more than upholding principles. So yeah, you should lie, be disloyal, blow the whistle, tattle, etc. when the welfare of others comes into conflict with doing the principled thing.

People matter more than principles. We could even make that a principle. Do the right thing except when it harms others. Asimov's zeroeth law for humans.

That's a sort of Wittgensteinian or pragmatic position to take, but it's not realism, since realism is concerned with things as they are, not as they appear to us.

If we can't perceive things as they really are, then direct realism is impossible, since realism is concerned with things as they are, not as they appear to us. But I take it you're an indirect realist.

the selfish gene springs to mind, but when you think about it, examples multiply. — Wayfarer

The selfish gene evolving the meme machine producing the intuition pump, including multiple drafts, but no theater.

I, personally, coined the lovely expression ‘rogue metaphor’ here on this very forum. But nobody noticed — Wayfarer

Do you have an example of a rogue metaphor?

That’s the best you got? Isn’t this a ‘philosophy forum’? I mean, what’s the point of talking philosophy with The Hulk? — Wayfarer

Do you think it's possible for metaphors to be misleading?

Continuing along those lines - if mind is what grasps meaning, then what is it grasping? — Wayfarer

That language makes me squirm a bit. Grasping is a metaphor. It makes it sound like the mind is an animal reaching out to concepts.

I mean it obviously wouldn't be veridical under the BIV or Matrix scenarios. — Janus

Those scenarios were just meant to illustrate what an indirect realist means by being aware of a mental image instead of the physical object itself. And to lend credibility to the idea that it's the brain generated experience that we're aware of when having a conscious perception. Because the senses are performing the same roles as a vat in that they're stimulating the regions of the brain to have those experiences.

What would it mean to say that perception is veridical according to you? — Janus

Empirically verifiable, unless we start out knowing what is the case, such as with BIVs and Matrices.

is just the same as to say that it is thought to be direct or indirect depending on how we think about it, isn't it? — Janus

Depending on one's philosophical interpretation of perception.

You haven't tried to address my point that our knowledge of the brain would be altogether bankrupt if perception were not veridical, — Janus

I didn't say perception wasn't veridical. I said it's not direct when we're conscious of a perception.

It's the experience of dreams that's relevant, because it demonstrates that it's possible to have a perceptual-like experience where the content is clearly mental. A dream tree is an idea in my mind (or however one would prefer to state that).

The brain is central to experience because it's the one component of the organism which is necessary for experience. Remove your eyes and you can still have color experiences. Remove your visual cortex and this becomes impossible.

The BIV and Matrix scenarios are plausible in the sense that we can already stimulate the brain to have experiences that seem real, but which aren't veridical perceptions. This can be done with drugs, meditative states, imagination, dreaming, electrodes in the brain, etc.

But just because it's not amenable to empirical disclosure can't mean that it isn't real. What Dennett argues, is that what we interpret as subjective experience, is really the result of the unconscious competence of billions of cellular automata that give rise to the illusion of the subject. — Wayfarer

Dennett's response to Strawson was that of course he doesn't deny consciousness, he's merely denying what certain philosophers make of consciousness. Which sounds good until you take into account the implications, which is that we're conscious in the same way that a philosophical zombie is conscious.

Paraphrasing:

"Of course colors, sounds, tastes, dreams, hallucinations, inner dialog, etc. exist. They're just not what they seem to be. They're actually just this physical description of brain activity, or the result of this evolutionary process."

That sounds rather like elimination to me. So when Dennett says that yes, we're conscious of seeing a red object, he means that the right sort of color discrimination is going on in the brain. But that misses the point.

If I'm wondering whether a computer program is conscious, I'm not asking about how good it is at discriminating colors. I'm asking whether it has an experience of red, green, etc.

Similarly, when Siri say it's "Brrrrr, 20 degrees out", I don't suppose that Siri feels cold. But if Siri were a robot that could detect temperature similar to us on it's synthetic skin, then I would wonder whether this was just a function, or actually accompanied by experience.

Thanks for that. Dennett's response is typical Dennett:

I would never have dared put Strawson’s words in the mouth of Otto (the fictional critic I invented as a sort of ombudsman for the skeptical reader of Consciousness Explained) for fear of being scolded for creating a strawman. A full-throated, table-thumping Strawson serves me much better. He clearly believes what he says, thinks it is very important, and is spectacularly wrong in useful ways. His most obvious mistake is his misrepresentation of my main claim:

So what theory of the mind do you subscribe to? — Walter Pound

I don't have one. You?

I don't think the mind is a thing. It's the result of brain activity in addition to the context of an animal or human in their environment. So for us that means social, cultural and linguistic contexts in addition to our brain activity.

Oh, i see. That makes sense. I'm not willing to go there.

The "hard problem" of consciousness really revolves around what the nature of consciousness is and if physicalism is undermined by it. — Walter Pound

Yeah, although Galen Strawson in the link I posted above makes an interesting claim about physicalism (distinguishing it from the science of physics) that permits consciousness.

I have long been convinced of the pointlessness of the question 'Is perception 'really' direct or indirect?'; whether perception is thought to be direct or indirect is just a matter of perspective, or different ways of talking about the same thing, isn't it? — Janus

No, I don't think so. Consider a brain in a vat, or Neo in the Matrix. Now regardless of whether we think such a scenario is feasible (whether the vat or Matrix could actually be built), we can conclude that BIVs and Neo inside the Matrix are not perceiving objects directly. Rather, their brain is being stimulated as if they were perceiving objects via their physical organs.

Now the indirect realist is saying something similar about actual perception. Which is that the brain being stimulated via the senses results in a Matrix/BIV-like experience in that it is brain activity that creates consciousness. As such, we're aware of a mentally simulated world.

The direct realist denies this. For one thing, it has skeptical connotations about how we can really know there's a world out there, or even that we're not BIVs with no actual bodies. It also makes idealism an attractive alternative.

And direct realists have their own reasons for thinking representations or ideas are faulty concepts.

But I can't get away from the fact that it's brain activity which results in colors, sounds and what not. The fact that BIV, Matrix or Boltzmann brain scenarios sound plausible (to an extent anyway) and that we have dreams, hallucinations, imagination, inner dialog and what not strongly suggests that all experience is brain generated, and that's what we're aware of. So why would perception be different?

When I'm dreaming, I experience seeing stuff, hearing stuff, my body moving around as if it were actual perception. That's why dream skepticism exists at all, and how sometimes I can be temporarily confused upon waking up as to what's real. I just don't see how the experience is somehow different (setting aside the ridiculous structure of dreams). Only the origin of the experience.

I think that however one views the self- as a real thing or not- will determine how they explain the experiences of color or whatever else. — Walter Pound

I think Dennett would call himself a pseudo-realist about the self. It depends on what kind of stance you're taking, which means what sort of explanation you're using at that moment.

Anyway, you are aware of your perceptions. So, what is this awareness, if not consciousness? — Number2018

Well, it depends on what's meant by awareness. A computer program could be said to be aware of its inputs. A simulation of perceptual awareness could be built into a robot.

That's different from having a conscious perception.

Just found this response to Dennett and others of similar persuasion:

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2018/03/13/the-consciousness-deniers/

I guess it's supposed to complement Stove's Worst Argument in the World with the Silliest Claim Ever Made, although Stove's argument isn't mentioned.

One of these days you'll say something I agree with. ;-) — Terrapin Station

I'm sure one of these days I'll be wrong about something. <insert deadpan face>

Also, this is easy to prove.

Take the totally naive view of vision. It seems like we're looking out onto the world through the eyes. But we know this can't be true. Light comes into the eyes. It's the opposite. But we didn't know this until we had some science of optics and vision.

One thing we'd know for sure is that if we're going to claim that our perceptions do not tell us what the world is like, we can't use perceptions about what the world is like for support of that. — Terrapin Station

Kant, the pragmatists and the ancient skeptics would agree. Hume would agree at least about causation.

I don't think we have to go that far. We can just say that although perception doesn't show us the word as it is, it gives us enough information to infer what the world is probably like. But it takes a great deal of effort, which is why the scientific enterprise came so late in the game.

Sure.

Well, that's what color is, sure. So how are we coding that if things aren't colored? — Terrapin Station

Because photons aren't colored. They are packets of energy having frequency and wavelength, carrying the electromagnetic force.

So how do we know that one perception has things right? Namely, the perception that suggests that the other perception has things wrong? — Terrapin Station

We don't know for sure. The best we can do is come up with explanations that fit all of our perceptions as best as possible.

Thus the ancient skeptics, Hume, Kant, pragmatism, the empiricism of science, that theories are not true but only conditionally supported by observations to date, which could be falsified tomorrow, etc.

Although now that we mention whether it's impossible, what exactly are we coding if not color in our color-coding? — Terrapin Station

How photons of a certain wavelength bounce off objects, or are refracted by air, water, glass, etc. It's a good evolutionary strategy to use that to navigate the world of everyday objects.

Do they perceive them as they are or not. It's a yes or no question, or you can explain why you can't answer yes or no a la "It's not possible to answer that question yes or no because . . . " — Terrapin Station

No, they perceive things as they appear to human beings. But that doesn't stop us from learning about X-Rays and GR and germs and what not. But It might have taken a million years of cultural and technological evolution to get there.

Or it might be that the world isn't colored, it only looks that way to creatures with visual systems which use color coding to detect things by how visible light bounces of it.

Sure, and when you make those observations, do you perceive things as they are? — Terrapin Station

The scientist perceives the outcome of their experiments and observations, which might lead them to suppose that there are large parts of the world we don't perceive, or that the world differs from how we perceive it.

How would we know that? — Terrapin Station

Run some experiment, gather observations, come up with models to explain the experiments and observations. That sort of thing I would imagine.

The claim that you can know that it's not true presupposes that you can know the world as it is (via perceiving eyeballs, ears, nerves, brains, etc.) for comparison, where we can say which part is the world as it is and which is different from that. — Terrapin Station

We know that the scientific account of the world differs quite a bit from the world we perceive. We also know that our perception varies quite a bit, and that there are other organisms who have better senses or can sense things we cannot.

Therefore, we don't perceive the world as it is. We perceive it according to the kinds of animals we are, and as the individual we are in a particular environment.

When I perceive a solid table, I'm not perceiving the mostly empty space it's made up of, or the atoms forming the chemical bonds that make it appear solid to me. I'm also not perceiving the microscopic critters on the table's surface, or all the non-visible light that passes through the table.

I think, "Hmm . . . it rather seems to me like a mistake to think of that as a mistake. — Terrapin Station

You can try and defend color realism - that objects are actually colored like we perceive them to be, but it's a difficult position to maintain. Dennett does go into why that it is. One reason is that the reflective surfaces of objects is not always directly related to the colors we see. Another reason is that organisms with better eyes than us will see different combinations of colors.

If you consider what the sky would look like on a sunny day if we could see the entire EM spectrum, we know that it certainly wouldn't be blue, given all the other radiation that would need to be colored somehow.

That doesn't imply that I'm not a direct realist. Direct realists believe that we consciously perceive the world as it is, directly. — Terrapin Station

But we don't consciously perceive the world as it is. From science we know that it's not true.

It doesn't dissolve the hard problem, though it does indicate that at least everything pertaining to consciousness but the hard problem is solvable.

We can imagine physical mechanisms which discriminate between different wavelengths of light, and we can even imagine plausible evolutionary histories...

The hard question would be, why does our experience of color feel like an experience at all? — VagabondSpectre

Yeah, that sounds correct. And Chalmers arguments for the hard problem escape Dennett's assessment in that book. We still want to know how/why red is an experience.

No, it's the water that is the object of perception in both cases. — jamalrob

Yes, but the feeling of the water comes from us, and we're aware of it in perception. That suggests we're aware of something we might be tempted to call mental when perceiving temperature.

Temperature perception is variable in a way that colour perception is not, and this is expressed in the way we talk and think about hot/cold vs green/blue/red etc. — jamalrob

So would you say that we directly perceive the red apple, but not the cold water, which might feel warm to someone used to ice swimming in Siberia?

But still, it is the things that are green. — jamalrob

Let's try this for temperature. Three people are in a room. One complains that it's hot, another that it's cold, and third that the temperature feels just fine.

Who is right? We can consult the thermostat and all agree that it measures the room temperature at a certain degrees F or C. But what of our experience? Do we suppose that the room itself is either cold, hot or just right?

Of course not. Things feel cold or hot to humans because of the kind of temperature ranges we can survive in, and what the status of our individual bodies are at that moment. If I just walked out of a freezer, the room will probably feel warm.

And we also know from physics that heat is really the amount of energy in a system. It doesn't make sense to ask whether the sun feels hot or space feels cold, absent an animal that can feel hot or cold when exposed to either (assuming it survives).

As such, when we say it's cold outside, that's an experience of our bodies reacting to the amount of energy in the environment. We perceive cold water, but that experience of cold is from us. And thus we can agree with the Cyreneacs and say, "I am cold". Therefore, our perception has a component that isn't in the water itself, since water can't feel cold or hot.

The relational account holds that the leaves themselves are green (under certain conditions etc). This entails that it is not something mental that is perceived, which is your definition of indirect perception. — jamalrob

Well, they are green under certain conditions for the sort of eyes and nervous system I possess. The reason for supposing the green is mental is because it's being generated in the brain, and yet it's not reducible to neurons firing, at least as far as current neuroscience goes.

If the relational account can show that green, taste, etc. are not mental, then Dennett is a long ways toward dissolving the hard problem.

I can't think of a way of saying it more clearly. — jamalrob

Then I don't agree with the point that relational properties means direct perception is the case, because what I'm aware of is dependent on the kind of perceiver I am, and not the object itself.