I think you are missing the point that the self is not 'in there' to begin with but more like an avatar within a conversation. — plaque flag

This is where we will never agree. There is more to life and the world than language. Things happen that aren’t talked about. I don’t need a language or a community of people to interact with to have experiences.

Yes, I understand that this is what indirect realists argue. — Jamal

But you take issue with it? You seemed to accept it in the case of feeling cold. I feel cold. I feel pain. I taste a sour taste. Why can’t the same kind of thing be said in the case of hearing and seeing?

It’s not the case that if we see images then we don’t see the tree, just as it’s not the case that if I feel pain then I don’t feel the fire. These things aren’t mutually exclusive.

How you could possibly know though ? If 'external' impossibly gestures toward whatever we don't 'experience' ? — plaque flag

I don’t know, but I’m inclined to believe that scientific theories such as the Standard Model give us the best approximation of the nature of the external world, and the world it describes is very unlike the world as it appears to me.

I see the tree, not an image of the tree. — Jamal

This is where I think direct and indirect realists talk past each other.

Do you understand what is meant when we say that the schizophrenic hears voices, and that these voices are “in his head”?

The indirect realist argues that this exact same thing happens in the case of veridical experience. The only relevant difference is that in the case of veridical experience the voices-in-my-head are triggered by external world voices rather than by spontaneous brain activity.

You’re welcome to describe veridical experience as hearing external world voices. It makes no real difference to the epistemological problem of perception.

But I think you’re really describing how you feel the arctic air. — NOS4A2

Sure, it’s perfectly correct to describe it this way. As I have said many times, this semantic argument makes no real difference.

You can say that the schizophrenic hears voices that aren’t there or you can say that the schizophrenic doesn’t hear voices because there aren’t any. Both are correct ways of talking that simply utilise slightly different meanings of “hear”.

The indirect realist just argues that the sense of “hear” that is used when we say that the schizophrenic hears voices is the sense that is correct when we consider the directness that concerns the epistemological problem of perception.

I think it’s important, given that it’s the epistemological problem of perception, to distinguish between sensation and cognition.

Even if we grant that sensations are directly “of” external world objects, our cognition is directly “of” sensations, and by virtue of that indirectly “of” external world objects.

The problem concerns the relationship between the nature of sensations and the nature of external world objects.

There is always an intermediary inserted into the logic. In this case it’s “experience”. It cannot be that a perceiver is experiencing the cold weather. That is too direct of a relationship. Rather, the perceiver is experiencing himself experiencing the cold weather. He feels the feeling of cold before he feels the weather. It’s entirely redundant. — NOS4A2

The claim is that we directly feel cold and by virtue of that indirectly feel the Arctic air, or directly feel pain and by virtue of that indirectly feel the fire, or directly see a red sphere-like shape and by virtue of that indirectly see the apple.

I don’t think anyone would disagree. — Jamal

But many appear to disagree when it comes to the quality of visual experience. They claim that the shapes and colours that constitute images are more than just a causal consequence of electromagnetic stimulation; they “resemble” the mind-independent nature of things.

There can be no talk of resemblance between how something looks and how something is, if the latter means beyond perception. It’s not comparing like with like. That kind of talk secretly or unknowingly depends on the notion of something’s having an appearance without an appearance.

Now you may say: Exactly! And that’s why the direct realists are wrong, and I’ll say no, that’s why the indirect realists are wrong, because they misinterpret direct realism. And as always, I wonder which direct realists you’re thinking of. So it goes. — Jamal

That’s the direct realism that indirect realism was arguing against. Howard Robinson calls it phenomenological direct realism. It’s the direct realism that Locke addressed in his distinction between primary and secondary qualities. It’s the direct realism talked about here:

Consider the veridical experiences involved in cases where you genuinely perceive objects as they actually are. At Level 1, naive realists hold that such experiences are, at least in part, direct presentations of ordinary objects. At Level 2, the naive realist holds that things appear a certain way to you because you are directly presented with aspects of the world, and – in the case we are focusing on – things appear white to you, because you are directly presented with some white snow. The character of your experience is explained by an actual instance of whiteness manifesting itself in experience.

As Robinson noted, faced with arguments and evidence that showed the failure of this kind of direct realism, direct realists retreated to “semantic” direct realism, which although keeping with the naive realist’s way of talking, lost the substance of that traditional view, and this modern view isn’t actually inconsistent with indirect realist theories like that which posits sense data.

Or am I wrong about my 'image' of my characterisation of direct and indirect realism ?

Of course I'd be wrong about direct and indirect realism 'directly,' because language is how we refer to our world. — plaque flag

You don’t appear to be using the terms “image” and “directly” in a manner that concerns the epistemological problem of perception.

This does not seem entirely accurate. Problems have to be articulated and understood. Solutions need to be articulated and understood. With what? Language. — Richard B

These are two different claims:

1. I talk about external world objects
2. The nature of external world objects is given in my experience

Yes, both these claims require language to state, but they don’t mean the same thing.

If x is representative of y then x by definition informs us about what y is like, no? — Jamal

Only if the representation is one of resemblance. This is why I don’t like the term “representation”. I don’t think experience resembles the external world at all. I think it is a casually covariant consequence, nothing more.

Given my body, being in a particular temperature will cause me to feel cold. That cold feeling doesn’t “resemble” a low temperature. I don’t even know what that could even mean. And I’m not entirely sure what it would mean to say that the cold feeling “represents” a low temperature. It’s just a consequence, and one that wouldn’t follow were my body or brain sufficiently different.

Why should I be accurate, seriously ? — plaque flag

You don't have to be, but if you're not then you're wrong in your characterisation of direct and indirect realism.

What really matters are linguistic norms. — plaque flag

That doesn't seem accurate. The epistemological problem of perception concerns the extent to which perception informs us about what the world is like. That doesn't seem to have anything to do with language at all.

Direct realists argued that we can trust that perception informs us about what the world is like because the world and its nature presents itself in experience. Indirect realists argued that we can't trust that perception informs us about what the world is like because experience is, at best, representative of the world and its nature.

They are all trying to estimate the state of some external node. To exactly the same extent that we can say that external node is 'square' we can say it is 'green'. Both are just ways of describing our estimating its state in ways which dictate appropriate responses. — Isaac

What’s the actual physics of this? What mechanical process counts as “estimating external states”? Obviously you don’t believe in anything like an immaterial mind, so I assume that you believe that everything is a physical event?

I would say that “estimating external states” is itself just the firing of certain neurons.

So what all perception reduces to is an external stimulus influencing sense receptors which in turn trigger the firing of certain neurons and then sometimes a bodily response. That is perception at its most fundamental.

But given the mostly deterministic nature of such physical processes (I say mostly because at the quantum scale it is stochastic) it doesn’t make much sense to describe the firing of certain neurons or its response as being correct or incorrect. One can only say that it’s adaptive or maladaptive. But with this it really makes no sense to talk about seeing the world “as it is”. There’s just neurons firing in a useful way, and it’s not a given that there’s just one useful way for neurons to fire in any given situation.

I didn't limit the description to overt responses. — Isaac

Then what covert response counts as seeing red? Perhaps the firing of certain neurons?

No where is there a state of affairs which some other part of the brain can detect as being 'an experience of red'. — Isaac

I’m not suggesting that. I’m suggesting that seeing red just is the firing of certain neurons as a response to external stimulation, comparable to feeling pain just being the firing of certain neurons as a response to external stimulation.

Simply declaring it doesn't have anything to do with subsequent activity is begging the question. I'm claiming it does. I'm saying that, since we don't have any locus for a 'representation' of red (and yet 'red is meaningful, as in the ripe berry), our best theory is that it is our response that constitutes 'red' (our reaching for the word, our eating the ripe berry, our categorising according to our culture's rules...), and that absent of any of these responses, there's no 'seeing red' going on at all.

You counter that you think you see red without any response at all, and that because you think it, it must be true. — Isaac

I can see without any overt response recognisable by other people who might be around. I am quite capable of sitting still, saying nothing, and seeing the objects in front of me. It just isn’t the case that I’m blind, or that nothing I see is coloured, unless I do or say something.

If you can't accept this then our fundamental viewpoints are so diametrically opposed that we're never going to agree.

I counter that we don't have an apparent mechanism, nor locus for such a thing and looking at the way the brain works doesn't seem to allow that (it seems to go straight from modelling aspects (likes shade and edge) to responses (like speech and endocrine system reactions).

Then what’s this and this?

So it's a crucial issue of semantics. Should the psychology admit internal representations, as well as external representations and internal brain shivers? — bongo fury

I think it’s a non-issue. I feel pain. I feel the fire. Both are correct ways of talking. The painting is made of paint. The painting is of a woman. Both are correct ways of talking. I speak into my phone’s microphone. I talk to my parents over the phone. Both are correct ways of talking.

And I've mentioned before that I don't really like the word "representation". Pain isn't a representation of fire, it's just a consequence of that kind of stimulation. The same with smells and tastes and images.

To eat the red berry and not get sick because it's ripe. — Isaac

So someone who doesn't eat the red berry can't see the red berry (correctly)?

I disagree with this. I don't need to eat something to see it. I'm asking you to explain what it means to see something's colour correctly. That has nothing to do with any subsequent activity.

All you seem to be saying is that if someone sees something correctly then they will do this. I'm asking you to make sense of the antecedent.

Yes it is, because indirect realism posits this 'representation' of the object (which we have no cause to consider even exists) to which we respond. — Isaac

You appeared to accept this in the case of pain. Putting my hand in the fire causes pain. That pain is not a property of the fire, but an inner, physiological state. It is because of that pain that I am made aware of the fire and respond accordingly, pulling my hand away. The person with something like congenital insensitivity to pain doesn't feel pain when putting their hand in the fire and so is less likely to, or at least slower to, react.

Why are you unwilling to extend this principle to other sense modalities such as smell, taste, or sight? Do you think that there's some fundamental difference between nociception and photoreception (beyond the trivial case of it being a different sense receptor responding to a different stimulus)?

You'll have to quote a direct realist saying such a ludicrous thing for me to believe this isn't just a straw man. — Isaac

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/perception-problem/#NaiRea

Consider the veridical experiences involved in cases where you genuinely perceive objects as they actually are. At Level 1, naive realists hold that such experiences are, at least in part, direct presentations of ordinary objects. At Level 2, the naive realist holds that things appear a certain way to you because you are directly presented with aspects of the world, and – in the case we are focusing on – things appear white to you, because you are directly presented with some white snow. The character of your experience is explained by an actual instance of whiteness manifesting itself in experience.

This is the position that indirect realists argue against. Instances of external world properties do not "manifest" in experience. It is just the case that external world properties are causally responsible for experience, and the qualities and properties of this experience are qualities and properties of the experience, not of the external world stimulus.

Our modern scientific understanding of the world, along with the arguments from hallucination and illusion, have shown that the naive realist conception of colour (and other) experience as described above is untenable.

The subsequent argument over whether or not we should describe perception as "seeing representations" or "seeing the external world stimulus" is an irrelevant issue of semantics. It's like arguing over whether we feel pain or feel the fire. These are just different, equally valid, ways of speaking that mean slightly different things with an emphasis on one aspect of perception or another.

I think that we can apply such concepts, and I think we can do that now with pigs being treated badly in processing plants. The baby could be hungry or in pain, yes. Why not ? So could the pig. "We should stop creating pork this way, because pigs suffer, because it's wrong to cause unnecessary suffering." — plaque flag

And when we say that the baby is in pain or scared or hungry, what are we referring to? What does it mean for it to feel something?

What does it mean to attribute pain ? — plaque flag

I’ve given my answer. Pain is a type of experience that occurs irrespective of any overt expression recognisable by other people.

Does immateriality add anything? — plaque flag

I’m not sure what you’re asking here. If experience really is immaterial then the claim that experience is immaterial is true. But again, at this point I’m not really arguing this point. I’m happy to say that consciousness and experience is reducible to brain activity.

So assume in some post-apocalyptic wasteland the only thing to survive is a newborn baby. Given that it has no sense of self and no language it isn’t conscious and can’t feel pain or be hungry?

I don't think the self makes sense as a present-at-hand object. It's temporally stretched, socially constituted. It's more of a dance than a dancer. — plaque flag

I’m sorry but I don’t do well with metaphor.

What I will say is that I don’t need a second person for me to be conscious. It is both logically and physically possible for me to be the last man alive.

It's not too outlandish to think technology will become powerful enough to know our socalled insides better than we do. — plaque flag

Yes, that’s implied by my assumption here that consciousness is identical to a particular kind of brain activity.

If you want to pretend that 'pain' has a different grammar than it does, we can try to play that game and see what happens. — plaque flag

I’m suggesting that we assume that what we think of as first person experience/consciousness is reducible to brain activity. I wasn’t assuming anything about the grammar of “pain” at this point.

I just think immaterial references don't make sense — plaque flag

We’re assuming brain states here, not immaterial stuff.

That's roughly how we learn to use "headache" and "pain" -- in terms of what implications are thereby licensed — plaque flag

People have headaches even if there’s no aspirin. We invented painkillers because of pain.

Why not ? — plaque flag

Because we wouldn’t need to. We’d just look to their behaviour. But behaviour isn’t enough. There really is stuff going on in people’s heads that we don’t know about, and when we ask about things like pain we’re asking them to tell us about this stuff going on in their heads.

To be sure, the grammar of the word 'pain' could change, but currently (as far as I can make out) it's more about behavioral dispositions than brain states. — plaque flag

If that were true then we wouldn’t ask people if they’re in pain. Or for related feelings, whether or not they’re happy or sad or have a secret crush.

I can understand not believing in non-physical mental phenomena and “raw” sense data. I can’t understand this devotion to the idea that words can only refer to some publicly verifiable activity.

As I mentioned in the other discussion, I take aspirin because I’m in pain. It just isn’t the case that taking aspirin is being in pain. If it were that simple then I’d just never take aspirin and live a pain-free life.

If that disagrees with Wittgenstein then Wittgenstein is so self-evidently wrong that I struggle to believe that anyone believes him. I can only assume that you’re all just pulling a prank on me.

The grammar of 'pain' would allow for anomalies like reports of pain that were not accompanied by the expected brain activity. — plaque flag

That’s true of every word in every circumstance. I can report that it’s raining when it isn’t.

Immaterial private referents are problematic. — plaque flag

Assume for the sake of argument that first person experience isn’t immaterial or private. Assume that it is reducible to the physical. The feeling of pain is identical to a particular kind of brain activity. Is this a problem? Can the word “pain” refer to this particular kind of brain activity?

and the latter because it seems to posit some kind of ultimate reality that we are approximating towards which is similar to the problem of mind-independence in that since it cannot be known we cannot know we are approximating towards that reality, and therefore we have no reason to claim our knowledge has any relation at all to that notion. — Moliere

Is it a problem that we only know about black holes by observing the effect they have on light and matter?

What he meant is that the crime of falsifying business records is a misdemeanour, but the indictment says that because they were done to commit or conceal another (unspecified) crime, they are felonies. The indictment doesn’t specify what this other crime is.

I do find it strange that he wasn’t indicted directly for this other crime.

One potential crime would be a violation of federal campaign finance laws — Bragg has no jurisdiction over federal proceedings. The Department of Justice does, but it has already passed on this case, as has the Federal Election Commission. — yebiga

There’s a New York state law against committing a crime to benefit an electoral candidate and I believe Bragg alluded to that in his statement. What isn’t clear is if that law can apply to a federal election, and is likely the best target for a legal challenge so I wouldn’t be surprised if the charges are reduced to misdemeanours. But even misdemeanours should be prosecuted.

Well yes, one might take it to be analytically true that a prediction is future-referring. — sime

Then what else is to be said?

But in that case, the future-contingency of the prediction cannot mean anything about the world in itself — sime

Not sure what you’re saying here. Is it just that predictions don’t talk about the world as it presently is? That is, as you say, analytically true. Not sure how that entails that they don’t talk about the world as it will be in the future.

As a matter of interest, do you consider ChatGPT's responses as future-referring? — sime

If it says something about the future then yes.

What makes B a future-referring proposition, in contrast to A that is merely a present observation? — sime

The fact that they mean different things, with the first referring to the present and the second referring to the future.

Well, certainly I can accept that the word "future" has sense to you, as it does to me, but one can dispute that the word has reference — sime

I think it quite straightforward that it refers to the future.

The set {all things inside this box} is not the same as the things inside the box. The set could be empty. Just like the set {6,7,8,9} is neither 6, 7, 8, nor 9. The set {all things which are both A and not-A} has no members, one ca refer to the set, but one cannot refer to the members of it, since there are none. — Isaac

If I say “the thing inside your box has wings” and there’s nothing inside your box then this phrase doesn’t refer to anything. Or if there’s more than one thing inside your box then it’s ambiguous as to whether or not it refers to anything. But if there is a single thing inside your box then it refers to that thing, and is true if that thing has wings and false otherwise.

Much like the phrase “your oldest brother is older than you”. Even though I know nothing about whether or not you have a brother, I am in fact referring to him if you have one.

I don’t need to see something or know something about it to talk about it.

That 'red' is a label given to a property in the external world and when we correctly see red, it is that we are detecting that property. — Isaac

What does it mean to correctly see that property? I don't think it correct that 500nm light looks the way it does to us. I don't think it correct that 500.5nm light looks exactly the same. I don't think it correct that 400nm light looks different. I don't think it correct that 1nm light doesn't look like anything. It just happens to be that, given our physiology, things look the way they do (or don't look like anything).

And it’s not incorrect that things look different to something with a different physiology, e.g. the colour blind or the human tetrachromat or animals.

It is that we are detecting a property of the external object, not that we actually possess a copy of that same property in our own brain. — Isaac

What does “detect” mean? If it just means “responds to” then it isn’t inconsistent with indirect realism.

And phenomenological direct (naive) realism says something exactly like this. They don’t just say that we respond to external world objects. They say that external world objects are as they are seen, e.g. that the colour property in the experience is the colour property of the apple. And they don’t just say that a copy of the property is in the experience, but that the exact token instance of the property is in the experience. That’s what they mean by experience being direct. If it were a copy then it would be representative realism, i.e. indirect realism.

We understand pain not because we have access to each other's private experience's through language but that it is a concept that allows through its nature a public shared conceptualization. — Baden

I would say we understand pain because we experience our own, and we’re smart enough and sympathetic enough that we assume that other people experience much the same thing. We’re very good at projection.

But let's take it a step at a time, do you agree with that much? — Baden

No, I think that when I talk about what I am feeling I am referring to what I am feeling, and that you cannot feel or see or smell or taste my feelings. They are hidden from you. That's why you have to ask me what I am feeling, or thinking.

if you have a locked box that I can’t look inside, the phrase “the hidden contents of your box” refers to the hidden contents of your box.

I don’t understand why you and others think I must be able to see something to talk about it. The blind can talk about things just fine.

then there's something wrong with firstperson experience as a metaphysical concept. It's as elusive as the meaning of being. — green flag

I wouldn’t say it’s elusive. I’d say that my first person experience is the most self-evident thing there is to me. And I have no reason to believe I’m special, so I assume others have it too.