:up:

I take it that this quote from Hume could be labeled "indirect realism":

"Let us fix our attention out of ourselves as much as possible; let us chase our imagination to the heavens, or to the utmost limits of the universe; we never really advance a step beyond ourselves, nor can conceive any kind of existence, but those perceptions, which have appeared in that narrow compass."

Despite this quote, Hume never denied we directly see tables, river and trees, even if "we never advance a step beyond ourselves." To have a perspective is to see things from a certain way, anchored to the relevant creature.

The only alternative I could imagine, would be to somehow step outside our bodies and look at objects from no particular perspective and then compare that, to what we see when we are inside our bodies.

As you say, when we see an object, we imagine it has a backside, we can go around and "verify" this.

An important problem remains: what do you say about animals whose sense perception is more acute than ours in certain cases? Such as Eagles in relation to vision, or dogs in relation to smell. Do they experience the world more directly than us?

Actually, what would be interesting to consider is a situation in which we cannot die, no matter what we tried to do.

I wonder how things would play out. Overpopulation would be a big issue. But how would it feel like, knowing that you will always live?

It's unclear to me...

The sense of your life mattering while you achieve things only holds good for a moment in time, afterwards, those that know you will mourn, family and friends, and then they'll be gone too.

Nevertheless, given this is a fact, you might as well do something you find rewarding or interesting, if you can - it's what you make of it, to a large extent.

Death can give a sense of urgency for things you want to do, or finish - and for this reason is excellent motivation. But one should also consider the case, that no evil can last long enough that a mortal has to endure it forever.

I strongly suspect that death itself is literally a non-issue for you (in general) - but it means a massive amount to those close to you - somewhat of a paradox.

Finally, we should consider that, something like 99.999999999999....% of everything that IS, has no consciousness or awareness, so it shouldn't be as strange as we sometimes make it out to be.

And I actually have you to thank for that, it was a discussion with you that made me got my thinking and vocabulary correct on the topic. :up:

To say that indirect realism implies something like, we only have access to our ideas, or we only have representations or arguments along that line aren't convincing.

When someone asks, while pointing at a tree, if they are seeing "directly", one takes it that they are asking about the phenomenon in question and not as a "thing in itself", that's a different question.

For that question to arise, a different question should be asked, for instance: "Do we see the inner nature of objects?" or "Is my experience of this object everything there could possibly be about the object?"

I'm thinking that a dog or a bee have a different perception of the object under consideration, surely.

But that's not an issue of directness or lack of directness. It's an issue of our cognitive configuration.

Absolutely, with the only caveat that we incorporate sub and unconsciousness processes in addition to those that are accessible in experience, through introspection.

Having taken care of that, or at least taking it into consideration, we are left with the original phrases: direct and indirect.

We have direct, but mediated access to objects through representations. What then are we to do with "indirect"? It's not at all clear to me how this word could be used intelligibly, outside of ordinary usage.

Even if someone called themselves an indirect realist, I don't know what that means, and can only suppose they mean mediation. But if lack mediation, we have nothing.

True, but we aren't dealing with the "average person" here, who usually does not care too much about the science stuff, much less philosophy.

It's not mere "philosophy of language" or nitpicking - it's trying to get a better understanding of what people have in mind when they speak about "direct" or "indirect", particularly in this context.

Sure, it's good to see a brain on display, can help remind us that it's intimately related to all these things we encounter in the world. The issue now is, what does that organ do? Is it only meat and empty, or does it play a role in our conceptions and perceptions of things?

It it's empty - only meat - then the blood and bone holding it in, is a minor inconvenience: by being attached to sense organs it gets "unmediated" (pure) sense data.

But if there something more than meat, and sense organs, then there's a lot more to say, in my opinion.



Hah. Don't play coy Mww - if the topic is brought under your territory, I am a mere spectator, despite recent efforts to improve. :cool:

I think it depends on how one takes the initial question. Simple-mindedly speaking, if someone interested in this topic asks "Do I directly see this tree?", they have in mind this object they see and (usually) point to.

And then I ask, what else are you seeing?

Now, if the question is asked, "How do I see this tree?", it may elicit a chuckle to say "with your eyes", but taken more seriously, we'd have to include an extremely complicated mental apparatus without which we couldn't even ask anything.

So the substance, as I see it, is either there is something going in my brain/mind that plays a massive role in my experience of the object, or there is minimal activity going on inside.

This way we avoid dealing with the semantics of "direct" or "indirect", which can cause a lot of confusion.

I think this whole debate is better thought of in terms of "mediated" vs. "unmediated" perception. We run the risk of saying funny things like I indirectly see a tree outside my window.

It could be that I am indirectly seeing a tree, because there is a mirror outside my window blocking a direct perception of the tree, but I can see the object in the reflection of the mirror.

Or alternatively one can say that I directly see a person's love for me, given the way I am treated by said person. But what we strictly speaking see, are patterns of behavior which we interpret as love.

But if we have mediation in mind, we get to the gist of the issue: either we experience things, as images "in a theatre", as Hume says, or we filter said images based in part on "innate ideas", to borrow Leibniz' phrase, or alternatively, one can use a Kantian formulation.

I don't see a coherent alternative.

You are correct. There may be a person now or in the future who may come up with a solution to the problem, we cannot rule this out.

But we should keep in mind that in over 2000 years of philosophy, nobody has yet proven it false, so it is unlikely (but not impossible) to be solved by someone else. We have the same reasoning abilities of the Greeks, not more. Likewise with more recent philosophers.

As Russell discusses - I believe in his An Outline of Philosophy - there are degrees of solipsism, as well as degrees of skepticism.

Probably the most radical - yet most consistent - form of solipsism is the view that, only the immediate present exists, whatever is right now, because, for all we know, 2 seconds ago we might have come into existence, yet we cannot rely on memory to show we existed that long ago.

Yet people who may be attracted to solipsism wouldn't go that far.

As for skepticism, sure, it is quite useful, but the most extreme version, Pyrrhonic skepticism, would have people literally standing on roads ignoring cars that may come your way, because the senses may be misleading us.

In fact, it's even worse, we wouldn't bother standing up, as we might fall.

So yes, both are useful, within certain boundaries. Outside this, they lose usefulness and practicality quite quickly.

I can see that. You have to keep in mind, that the best minds - people like Schopenhauer and Russell, couldn't refute it: it is irrefutable. But that's just a fact about the way our reasoning capacities are constituted, it's like complaining that we can't see more colours in the electromagnetic spectrum - true - but irrelevant.

Now, I for instance, cannot do math beyond the basics, if I see something like 2x=2a or something, my brain hurts. Other people take this to be trivial. Why would I want to create something I don't have the capacity to understand, but others do?

It's a torture - and a nonsensical one. It's more probable that these other people who are good at these things don't depend on me for them to do math, and likewise with super athletes and so forth.

Philosophical topics often do this to people. In your case it's solipsism, for others, it's deep pessimism. To others, it's absurdism, etc. For me, it's the nature of the external world.

However, the distress caused by my bouts of obsession with the topic, is not entirely negative, I try to find the positives in the stress. How utterly strange that such abstract questions - deep ones too - can cause such distress, it's a kind of wonder too.

In your case, you can take it and say, wow, my mind is extraordinarily powerful to be able to create everything. In won't eliminate the problem, but it could help on such occasions.

But as Hume says somewhere, something along the lines of: nature hereby is shown merciful, for what she induces in us (unsolvable problems) are also relieved by her. When we go back to other activities and divert our attention, the problem fades away. When we return to it with this relaxed state of mind, the problem looks cold and distant.

There's something to that reasoning.

Once you consider that there are several problems that arise that are one the same level with solipsism, in terms of being irrefutable by reason, you can mitigate the impact.

One cannot refute strong skepticism. Nor the idea that we live in a simulation, nor can you refute the multiverse, or refute the idea that we are inside the dream of another person and so on.

Multiply the scenarios as you like, and then you can begin to see solipsism lose its importance in terms of impact - if anyone can make up a scenario, an infinite amount of them, out of thin air, how likely is that scenario to be right? Exceedingly small.

While working through Leibniz New Essays on Human Understanding, I randomly decided I needed a bit of a break from the classical tradition, so am re-reading, after a decade:

Being and Time by Martin Heidegger

As for a novel:

Death Within the Evil Eye by Masahiro Imamura

It's interesting that you mention Dennett. I would agree that his views on consciousness being an illusion might lead one to think that he takes a deterministic view. But the opposite is the case. He defends compatibilism.

Yes - the ideas of eliminitavism can lead to the idea of man as machine, yet Dennett is a good liberal, so these things need not be connected. You are correct that such views can lead some to think of human beings as "mere" organisms, but these same people rarely act as if others were disposable insects.

The funding issue is interesting. We are not far from practical limits in terms of experiments we can do, and money is spent on few theories. This is expensive, and popular theories like String Theory or Quantum Gravity, get more funds than others, which are just as promising. Funders should be made aware of this, I don't assume they know this, a lot of the time.

There can be connections of the kind you suggest, but if you follow, say Foucault and his disciples, you will find extremely tenuous, and sometimes imaginary connections all related to obscure notions of "ideology". It's good to perceive structures of power. One should temper this with sober realism: real power structures are often out in the open, as seen in business journals and the like.

If someone is being honest, say, a religious person or scholar, they can use metaphysical arguments for political ends and even do this in good faith, that is, being clear about what goals they may have and what motives fuels them to action.

If someone is concerned with using metaphysics or epistemology to try and figure out what there is fundamentally in the universe, let it be fields of energy, miniscule mental entities or moments of perceptions, etc., then I don't see how politics can enter here in any meaningful sense of the word.

This does not make the latter is better than politically motivated ideas, it simply has a different emphasis in terms of what is covered and what is left out.

This is horrific. We are just dying to race to oblivion, there is no end in sight.

The more this goes on, the bigger the risks of someone making a mistake, which we barely have any margin for.

It was very good and interesting. True, it became difficult and heavy-going in several places, particularly when he becomes repetitive. So, some parts I just skimmed over.

I also sensed that the translation, or maybe even his way of writing instead, did not contribute to ease of understanding.

As to the content itself, in so far as I could see, it was rather persuasive, but didn't do a good enough job at explaining why his account of a veiled reality should apply beyond QM to larger objects.

But quibbles aside, it was nice to see someone trying to develop a philosophical system based on QM, by a person who made important contributions to experiments on non-locality.

@Maw

Just finished The Melancholy of Resistance - it took longer than I would have liked, I lost a bit of focus towards the last 3rd of the book, with the exception of the concluding chapter.

I can only compare it to Satantango, his only other novel I've read. It's hard to pick one, without spoilers, it seems to me that Melancholy is richer in general content than Satantango, and yet, and yet, the way the ending of Satantango went, tuned it from a decent book to a complete masterpiece, essentially focusing on a simple, yet very powerful philosophical idea/literary trick.

I struggled less with Satantango, and I felt it was somewhat more coherent, but again, Melancholy was richer in plurality of ideas... I suppose that Satantango's execution was just too good, so I'd give it the edge.

How does Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming compare with these two works?

I'll probably read one or two easy novels, then go back to a challenging one, then on to Baron - it requires some effort.

Any general thoughts?

We can't help anthropomorphizing. What we can avoid is that in the anthropomorphizing, we actually believe that this machine has cognition, or even cognitive abilities. We have trouble trying to get a good idea of how human being's cognitions works. If we have significant troubles with ourselves, how can we expect to get an insight into something that isn't even biological?

Granted, your point of not playing down the general achievement of these programs is quite correct. I personally don't have a principled problem against "reductionism" - when it works and when it makes sense to apply, let's do so. If not, then we don't.

It's likely that the basic element(s) of the mind is the repetition of something simple, which compounds into something very complex and multi-faceted. But one thing is what we take to be, commonsensically, "the way we (think) we think" and another thing is the way we actually think, which we cannot access in experience. My fear is that we are taking the commonsense approach and concluding that these AI's have cognition.

But I see your point, and it's true, we should be careful. I'm just skeptical about it as something that tells us about intelligence, but I fully admit that it is quite entertaining and useful, when used correctly. But then someone like you knows enough about these things to be on alert.



Yes, that could be a source of optimism, IF people of opposing views are willing to engage in different ideas, instead of wanting to have what they already believe be reinforced. It can also be helpful to get say, a rough outline of general ideas.

I have played around with the previous version - the one currently freely available now, I think the one you are mentioning is somewhat better, but the way it works is very similar, so far as I've been told.

There is no doubt that these A.I.'s are interesting and can be put to good use, we will see how the field continues to develop. But I should mention, as a general comment that, not including ethics, which the machine doesn't have, it is misleading to think of this kind of machine intelligence as anything remotely like what a human being does.

One thing is to sift through vast amounts of data to look for regularities and patterns such that certain results can be given within a parameter dictated by how much information there is for any given topic.

The human mind is different, it forms extremely rich ideas from quite poor sense-stimuli, and forms hypothesis that are often quite substantially underdetermined given the evidence. There is a large role here played by intuition - a faculty we cannot explain well at all - as well as other aspects such as use of the imagination, genuine understanding as well as intentionality, concept formation and several other factors which are just not found in these programs.

It's also worth mentioning that the type of prose it writes - say short stories and the like are also created by methods that include vast accumulation of data and generalizations, which is only a small portion of what we do.

Granted, it may do the things it does more efficiently, because it doesn't need to rely on finite memory, for practical purposes.

So, while the development of these programs is promising, following them too closely can cause one to believe that what the AI does is what human beings do, and it doesn't follow. I hope it manages to develop in a manner which is not damaging to the current climate of misinformation we are living in.

The comment about the competition of power reminds me a bit of Plato's dislike of the Sophists, who argued for the sake of winning an argument, not for any inherent goodness or correctness. I believe we still have that around in philosophy, particularly in the "Deconstruction" tradition, and some aspects of postmodernism generally.

I can understand political philosophy - but philosophy itself being political, is not entirely clear. Some branches are - ethics say, or maybe even some aspect of aesthetics. But I don't see a reason as to why metaphysics, epistemology, logic, language, etc. are in themselves political or about power.

They can be depending on how they are used, but I don't see a necessity to it.

Perhaps you have something else in mind.

So, I am asking what do you think about making sense in the maze of philosophical pluralism? Also, to what extent is philosophy a quest for reason, a search for personal meaning or connected to power balances or imbalances in social structures? — Jack Cummins

It depends on what you mean by "philosophy". If you mean by this word, what "ordinary" people commonly regard as "that's my philosophy", then philosophical pluralism is indeed helpful and enlightening, for the trivial reason that we learn about how other cultures deal with issues similar to ours. And often with issues that aren't ours.

Now, if you mean by "philosophy" the tradition going back to Plato, then it's more nuanced. I'd say it's good to have a "reasonable" amount of plurality - it gives us different options to consider. But going from a reasonable amount to "anything goes" is very different. If we allow an anything goes attitude into philosophy in this sense, then we are severely degrading the tradition, because we are allowing too much garbage in.

Your second question depends on what your interests in philosophy are. But it's legitimate to tackle all those questions.

That I do see rather clearly (in so far as anything he writes can belled "clear"), his conservative stance in terms of being rooted to nature and following a certain tradition rooted in quite worldly affairs.

As I have read him in the past, through Dreyfus' lenses, and latter, through Tallis' eyes, I do think his mentioning of science as one way of the various ways we have to analyze and understand the world is valuable.

He seems to me to gain back some strong quasi-religious dimensions in his Contributions, which is really, really obscure - almost unreadable.

In general though, he would not be the best person for ethics I'd think. But frankly, I know very little of it because it's not my area. So, I'll take your word for it.

That much is sensible. Especially when it reaches to the level of metaphysics and epistemology, knowing a bit of the science of the time really helps understand why they argued things that, absent that context, sound bizarre.

For ethical issues, maybe there's something there.

I suppose this is a matter of personal preference to a large extent.

They did - and it makes sense too, given the recent experience of the war at the time. I believe Arendt eventually forgave him - I don't think she was aware of the extent of his involvement with Nazism though. We know much more of it now.

Quite the opposite. These things should be brought into the conversation, but that is not to say they should be "cancelled". — Fooloso4

I don't care much for the topic. I read these figures because I'm interested in what they say about epistemology or metaphysics.

I don't focus on ethics in philosophy. Not that ethics isn't important, it obviously is, but I prefer to speak about current events instead of frequently abstract discussions of right and wrong.

It's useful to know how much progress we've made in ethical matters, but to focus on what Descartes, Locke or Schopenhauer believed in that we now take to be reprehensible is kind of "so what?" We have burning issues now, what's the point in judging people with standards they did not have, but we take for granted?

It's not at all clear to me that most of us wouldn't have been racists or sexists or imperialists back then, to think otherwise is potentially misleading.

Of course, Heidegger, Camus and others are recent figures, so it makes some sense to discuss this.

And absolutely, I agree with no cancellation.

Yes, that's the sense I now get of Heidegger, of being an oracle teasing of things to come, without giving a full revelation. But the journey is still quite interesting.

Sure - connect those parts of his works to Nazism if you like, or if you find it interesting. Not many of those whom he influenced became Nazis though - so the extra context - which he managed to hide for many years, does clarify his involvement with Nazism. Again, in BT and his lectures on Kant, I don't see much relevance.

To be clear, as mentioned by others here, it is well and good to point out his Nazism - it is important to be aware of this.

But let's not then pretend that Hume, Kant and Hegel were not racists, or that followers of Descartes treated animals like garbage, that Althusser murdered his wife, that Schopenhauer made a woman invalid for the rest of her life, that Camus supported France's massacre in Algeria, that the Ancient Greeks were pedophiles and slave owners, and on and on.

Alternatively, people who already dislike Heidegger, can continue calling him a crap human being and an obscurantist gibberish producer. Ok.

I entirely agree.

What bothers me, is that these threads don't even try to engage in any positive or interesting parts Heidegger may have said. In fact, just by looking at the title of these topics, you already know who dislikes him already.

I don't have any problems acknowledging his Nazism nor noting his antisemitic stances. He was not an ethical person, by and large- maybe a bit of leeway with technology, but also ugly remarks in that aspect too.

I don't think BT has those problems, nor his lectures about Kant. And even his most obscure and famous book after BT, his Contributions to Philosophy, show signs of Nazism that I can see. Other works surely do, as does his personal correspondence and observed behavior.

Yeah, as you know, Chomsky is by far my biggest influence, and even if he actually read Being and Time (he didn't, he read Intro to Metaphysics), I don't think that type of thinking would be persuasive to him.

Doesn't matter. We complement what we may find wanting, or may want to develop independently of those we most respect.

Which I can understand to an extent. Even though the same must be true of, say, Hegel, I currently cannot assign much value to him, but he must have something, given he influenced many.



I don't quite follow. Yes, of course, people use Heidegger in ways they find useful.

Guessing a bit, the point in many of these threads, so far as I can see, is that Heidegger is not only, say, unintelligible or hard to understand, but also that because he was a Nazi, he is not worth reading.

If it's not something like that, then why so much insistence on him being a Nazi? If the point is an ethical one, yeah, he was not a good person.

But if it goes on to suggest that Being and Time, and other lectures are just disguised Nazism, then that too is "appropriating him" for particular ends.

This is, incidentally, not denying that some of his work show Nazi sympathy, like Introduction to Metaphysics and others.

Each work should be valued for its merits and flaws.

He was a piece of shit as a person, I used to be a big fan, am now much less so, but not because I already did not know of his involvement with Nazism. What can be added to this? It's stupid, ignorant, reprehensible, immoral and add all the other words you want.

But when you have a guy who influenced SO many philosophers, of different strands too, from Sartre to Marleau-Ponty, Dreyfus to Gadamer, Rorty to Foucault, Arendt to Zizek, then I'm sorry, there is interesting material in (at least) some of his works. For me, Being and Time is quite special.

I know others have read it and think it total gibberish and mysticism. Fine. Don't call it philosophy if you like. But BT, if not other lectures of his, are important. Nazism surely didn't influence all who followed him...

And this is coming from someone who thinks less of his work than I used to. But, I cannot deny it has value, just like people here get massive amounts of value from Wittgenstein or Nietzsche or Husserl, Ayer, etc. And we all can make arguments for why any of these figures here shouldn't be as influential.

It is what it is.

I mean if one takes into account modern physics, we cannot say the universe is deterministic, it is probabilistic, so strict determinism cannot arise, unless one argues for it in an academic matter.

But, let's entertain the supposition that QM was not discovered, and that we lived in a Newtonian or even a pre-Newtonian universe, what happens?

You get arguments both for and against determinism. I am unclear if any of the classical figures argued for libertarianism, they were mostly compatibilists.

Having said all this, it's kind of irrelevant to the argument of freedom. We are speaking about extremely small portions of matter studied in isolation from overwhelming complexity.

Once you get to the level of human beings, talking about freedom in relation to physics is a massive distortion of the scope of physics.

So is libertarianism plausible? Sure, as is almost any view on this matter, given that by our levels of sophistication, physics and human choices are vastly different domains of life and enquiry.

Here I think being simple-minded or naive may be of some help. What definitions, outside of those given in mathematics, is a complete or at least satisfactory definition of any word?

What is a chair? What is life? What is an animal? What is a thing?, etc.

We soon realize that we can quite significantly expand most definitions way beyond anything given in a dictionary. And more curiously still, we frequently are aware when a person is misapplying a word.

To that extent, what's the use of defining knowledge? Does something significantly change in your view of the topic if it is defined one way as opposed to another?

Given that sticking to JTB's cause more trouble than clarifications, I think the ordinary phrase "he/she knows a lot about X", where X can be almost anything: farming, cars, history, laptops, etc., is quite comfortable and does not bring forth much problems, so far as I can see.

“The general doctrine, generally stated, goes like this: we never see or otherwise perceive (or 'sense'), or anyhow we never directly perceive or sense, material objects (or material things), but only sense-data (or our own ideas, impressions, sensa, sense-perceptions, percepts, &c.).” — NOS4A2

I'm familiar with Locke and Hume, who speak about these things. For Locke what we perceive are ideas which are directly caused by objects. Hume says something somewhat similar but speaks of perceptions instead of ideas.

Such a view as presented here gives the feeling that there is a fundamental difference between objects and our perceptions caused by objects. I fail to see why this implies a veil, as if, somehow, if we did not have ideas or perceptions, we would have a better view of objects.

It seems to me we would have no objects at all. I mean, we know now that colour is caused by reflected light bouncing off objects. In a sense, as pointed out by Neil DeGrasse Tyson, what color the object actually IS, is all the colours combined, except the one we see.

If we didn't have eyes to receive photons, we wouldn't see anything. But then we have to say light is mediated by the eye. But if this is a veil, then we could be seen as implying that a blind person has a better idea of objects, because the objects they perceive aren't mediated by eyes.

Right, there is no self living in the brain viewing experiences and perceptions. So indirect realism is redundant. That’s the basic point. — NOS4A2

I would agree. I think indirect realism is not a clear notion. But I don't see how we get out of the idea of something being mediated.

So, we directly see objects, precisely because they are mediated. That or we say Nagel's phrase that we aspire to a "view from nowhere". I don't see how we get out of the concept that knowledge is necessarily relational.

I always took “unmediated” to mean that nothing else is intervening in the relationship between perceiver and perceived. In other words there is no veil or buffer or experience between man and tree. I could be wrong on that and appreciate any other formulation. — NOS4A2

I mean, it depends on what you consider a "buffer" here. We need eyes (and a brain) to see, we need ears to hear, and so on. Now, some people aren't as lucky, they are born blind or deaf or anything else, which prevents them from getting the information we have by merely having eyes and ears.

Then there's interpretation - you see a puddle of water in the distance, but aren't thirsty now. A few hours later you get thirsty and you start walking towards the puddle - but it continues receding. Now you know you don't have a *puddle* (*=denotes concept), but a *mirage*. Of course, this is done so rapidly, we hardly notice this.

Now, if you don't consider these things to be "buffers" or "veils", then fine.

If we can perceive it we ought to be able to point to it, because for anything to be perceptible (perceivable?) it must have some scope and position in time and space. — NOS4A2

I'm not sure I see the problem. If you and me are next to each other and we are looking at the Empire State Building, I can point to it and say "that's the Empire State Building". I can only assume - all else being equal - that you will see something very similar to what I see. There's no way to literally get into somebody else's head, but, daily experience seems to show we see things similarly.

The problem is, whenever we try to examine the nature of sense-data, experience, impressions, we end up examining a person’s brain or some other loci within the body. We are invariably examining the perceiver in search of the perceived, as if they were one and the same, or one was inside the other. — NOS4A2

If you are interested in how the brain works, that's the topic of neuroscience and cognitive science. You aren't going to find an entity "the self" in the brain, even if such constructions originate there - with interplay with the environment of course.

I think I may be missing something, or probably am missing something.

It's a fantastic question, and a most difficult one to solve, given that we have to assume certain things that cannot be proven: external world, permanent objects, other minds, etc.

At some level all perception is direct. For the direct realist, the man directly perceives a tree. X directly perceives Y. — NOS4A2

I've struggled quite a bit with this formulation, but discussion here and elsewhere makes me want to state this in a different manner:

Most perception is direct (edge cases aside), we directly perceive a tree. But direct perception does not imply unmediated perception. In fact, it wouldn't be possible to have any experience if we did not mediate it, we would be like lumps of clay, capable of no cognition or perception.

So, we can say we have direct mediated perception and differentiate that from direct un-mediated perception, which is sometimes obscurely implied when speaking about "direct realism".

something within the man (the mind, the brain, a little man) directly perceives something else within the man (sense data, representation, idea) — NOS4A2

This is the hard issue, subject to the most varied types of interpretations.

I'd say, we, as human being - biological organisms - perceive sense-data, caused by objects. The "I" we use to denote a self is a "fiction" - in Hume's sense, roughly something we postulate that goes beyond what can be asserted given the evidence we have at our disposal.

But then this "I" is just as fictitious as a "rock" or a "tree." Put rather simply, a bird or a snake does not perceive these things AS "rocks" or "trees" - they lack the relevant symbolic system that allows for human language and concept formation.

That's roughly my take on it, but there's a lot more that could be said...

Yep. We'll have to wait and see to get a bit better perspective on the issue. But regardless extremely reckless behavior.

Maybe.

It is still pure madness to play around with this. The risks couldn't be higher.

I get the idea of sending a message, but, it's pretty wild.

Not that I believe or disbelieve what you are saying, it's just that the longer this drags on, besides more people dying, human error will rise, which is a problem in this war.

It's only circular if you assume you are correct, i.e., that AN is the same as abolitionists fighting against slavery.

The problem is in your assumption. To think you belong in the same boat is quite astonishing.

At least abolitionists were helping living people- you reserve you moral righteousness for those who do not even exist!

I'll let you have the last word here - you obviously enjoy pontificating to those who don't even like children, about how much life sucks.

Enjoy.

US had to crash drone into Black Sea after damage: Pentagon

The US military was forced to crash its MQ-9 Reaper surveillance drone because of the damage caused when it was struck by a Russian jet, the Pentagon says.

“Because of the damage, we were in a position to have to essentially crash into the Black Sea,” Brigadier General Pat Ryder told reporters, adding that the drone was unflyable after the damage.

Ryder said Russia had not recovered the crashed drone.

More info here:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/liveblog/2023/3/14/russia-ukraine-live-news-russia-does-not-recognise-icc-kremlin