Direct Realism and Perception

[EQV]

This is a continuation of the thread by the same name at the previous forum site. The original thread can be found at the link below:

EDIT: unfortunately I am not able to add links to my posts

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@Michael - you wrote:

On the monitor

The crux of my point was that these are non sequiturs :

A1. Our minds are “directed” towards X
A2. Therefore, we have direct perception of X

B1. Our cognitive operations are “answerable” to X
B2. Therefore, we have direct perception of X

This is shown to be so when X is “the world beyond the monitor”.

So direct perception must be explained in some terms other than A1 or B1.

On the science of perception

We’re just going around in circles meaning different things by “direct perception”. Given what naive and indirect realists mean by “direct perception”, indirect realism is the scientific view of perception. As above, it’s not about A1 or B1. It’s about phenomenology and the ontological separation between experience (and its qualities) and distal objects (and their properties). That’s all it means for our experience of distal objects to be indirect.

On the structural “mirroring”

It’s “accounted for” by the fact that distal objects and their properties are (usually) causally responsible for first-person phenomenal experience, and if the cause changes then the effect often changes. The colour I see is determined by the wavelength of the light (and my biology), so when the wavelength changes to a sufficient degree the colour I see changes. But differences in biology can entail that a greater degree of change in the wavelength is “hidden” because it does not affect a change in the colour seen, hence this colour being an epistemic intermediary.

On the alleged non sequiturs:

I don’t think I’ve ever argued in the form you’re attributing to me. My claim isn’t “our minds are directed toward X, therefore we have direct perception of X.” It’s that the kind of cognitive directedness we actually exhibit in successful inquiry — where our claims are genuinely answerable to how things are, where we can be wrong about the world and recognize that we’re wrong — already presupposes a mode of cognitive contact with reality that your framework struggles to reconstruct. The question isn’t whether directedness entails direct perception as a deductive consequence. The question is what account of perception best explains the directedness we manifestly have.

You keep insisting that I need to explain perception in “some terms other than” directedness or answerability. But I’d push back: what I need to explain is how knowledge is possible at all, and any account of perception is answerable to that larger question. If your account of perception makes knowledge inexplicable or reconstructible only through a circular inference, that’s a mark against the account, not an irrelevant consideration.

On “just going around in circles”:

I don’t think we’re merely using “direct perception” differently. I think we have a substantive disagreement about what perception is, and the terminological dispute reflects that. You’re operating with a picture on which perception is fundamentally a matter of having phenomenal qualities present to consciousness, and the question is whether those qualities are properties of distal objects (naïve realism) or properties of mental intermediaries (indirect realism). I’m questioning whether that framing — experience as the having of qualities, with the question being whose qualities they are — is the right way to carve the problem in the first place.

On the view I’m advancing, perception isn’t primarily the “having” of qualities at all. It’s an act of awareness in which an object is presented through a complex of sensory content, where that content functions not as the object of awareness but as the medium through which the object is given. The sensory qualities are real, and they are “in” the perceiver in a straightforward biological sense, but they aren’t what perception is of. The distinction isn’t between naïve realism and indirect realism as you’ve framed them; it’s between accounts that treat sensory content as the terminus of awareness and accounts that treat it as the vehicle.

This isn’t just a verbal difference. It generates different predictions about the structure of perceptual experience. On your view, perceptual error is a matter of mental phenomena “erroneously seeming” to be distal objects. But that characterization already presupposes that the natural, default interpretation of perceptual experience — that we’re encountering things in the world — is a kind of systematic illusion that needs to be explained away. On my view, the natural interpretation is basically correct, and perceptual error is a matter of misidentifying which worldly features are being presented, not of mistaking mental items for worldly ones. The phenomenology of error supports this: when I discover that what I took to be a snake is actually a rope, I don’t revise my belief that I was perceiving something in the world. I revise my belief about what worldly thing I was perceiving.

On causal explanation of structural mirroring:

You say the structural correspondence between experience and distal objects is “accounted for” by the fact that distal objects are causally responsible for experience, and that changes in the cause produce changes in the effect. But this is a causal-correlational account, not an account of cognitive access. It tells me that my experience reliably covaries with worldly conditions. It doesn’t tell me how I ever get from “my experience has this structure” to “the world has this structure.”

Consider your own example. You say the color I see is determined by the wavelength of light and my biology, and that differences in biology can mean that changes in wavelength are “hidden.” Agreed on all of that. But now ask: how do you know that? How did you come to know that wavelength and biology jointly determine perceived color, and that some wavelength differences are hidden from certain perceivers? You arrived at that knowledge through inquiry — through physics, through comparative studies of color perception, through reasoning about the relationship between stimulus and response. And that inquiry involved understanding the intelligible relationships between wavelength, biological structure, and perceptual response — not merely having further phenomenal experiences that covary with those relationships.

This is the point I keep pressing because I think it’s genuinely unavoidable: your own account of how perception works — the causal story, the biological mediation, the structural mirroring — is itself a product of understanding, of grasping intelligible relationships that hold in reality. And that understanding cannot itself be reduced to the perception of structured mental intermediaries without triggering the very circularity I’ve been pointing to. You need a mode of cognitive access that gets you to how things actually are, not just to how your mental phenomena are structured, in order to even formulate indirect realism. The question is whether your framework can account for that mode of access or whether it quietly relies on something it officially excludes.

[EQV]

@hypericin

@hypericin

You keep reverting to talk of intentional target. But we previously agreed that intentional target has little place in the discussion. If when reading a translation of Homer, Homer is our intentional target, then there can be no relation between “direct object of perception” and “intentional target”. There can be no perception less direct than our perception of Homer.

The Homer analogy was poorly chosen on my part — it introduced more confusion than clarity, and obscured the point I was trying to make. But the failure of the analogy doesn’t discredit the idea I have been defending, which is that the question of intentionality is unavoidable if we want to settle the DR/IR debate. So I don’t agree that intentionality has no place in the discussion – I think it’s the crux of the debate.

@hypericin

In your breakdown of levels of analysis, which number(s) do you think the brain’s models fall under? I, and I assume most IRists, believe that these models are the objects of phenomenology. And so they straddle 7-10, in their third person, causal description, and 11, in their first person experience.

It sounds like you are advocating for the reduction of phenomenology to computation. I’m very skeptical of this, but I’d be interested to get your perspective before going down that rabbit hole.

@hypericin

Either these models are the objects of perception of level 11, and so IR is true. Or, I’m not sure what you think these models are doing, and why you believe they exist.

As I said in my previous post, I think these models are part of the causal infrastructure that makes perception of distal objects possible. They are the vehicle not the content. They realize intentionality, they don’t terminate it. They are how we see, not what we see.

@hypericin

None of these other requirements (many of which sound more at home in computer graphics than neurology?) are themselves perceived. But qualia are.

As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t think it’s correct to say that qualia are perceived. Objects are perceived, not “objects + qualia”. Qualia are not thematized independently of objects within ordinary perception. When I see a red apple, I don’t see “redness” as an object in its own right alongside the apple. The qualitative character is an aspect of how the apple itself shows up within experience.

You can, of course, reflectively foreground the qualitative character of experience — “what a vivid red!” — but I see that as a second-order act of attention over-and-above the baseline act of perception. Treating the reflective case as revealing the true logical order of the pre-reflective case is a significant philosophical move that needs its own justification.

@hypericin

Qualia are perceived, and are required to perceive distal objects. But distal objects are not required to perceive qualia. Therefore, the perception of qualia is logically prior to the perception of distal objects.

Your argument runs:

(1) Qualia are perceived.

(2) Qualia are required to perceive distal objects.

(3) Distal objects are not required to perceive qualia.

(4) Therefore, the perception of qualia is logically prior to the perception of distal objects.

Premise (3) depends on premise (1), and I’ve already explained why I reject (1). That said, it might be worth saying a word about hallucination.

In my view, hallucination occurs when the perceptual system misfires causing an experience that purports to disclose a worldly object but fails to do so. Notice that we can only identify hallucination as hallucination against the background of a norm set by veridical perception. The hallucinator experiences something as though it were a public, spatially located, persisting object; the experience has the intentional structure of world-directedness built into it, even though in this case nothing in the world answers to it.

So even when perception breaks down, it breaks down in the mode of world-disclosure. The directedness toward mind-independent objects is so fundamental to the structure of perceptual experience that even its failures take that form. So the phenomenology of hallucination doesn’t demonstrate the logical priority of qualia, because even here it the qualia are presented as an aspect of something else – only this “something else” doesn’t exist.

This is why building a theory of perception on the hallucinatory case gets things backwards. Hallucination is intelligible only as a privation — a falling-short of what perceptual experience is constitutively structured to achieve. It’s parasitic on the veridical case in the same way a counterfeit is parasitic on genuine currency: you can’t explain what a counterfeit bill is without first understanding what genuine currency is and does, and the existence of counterfeits doesn’t show that all currency is "really just worthless paper.”

I think the indirect realist faces an underappreciated problem here. For the IR, veridical perception and hallucination have the same proximate object — a mental model or structured quale-complex — and the difference is merely that in the veridical case this model happens to have an appropriate causal history.

But then the directedness of experience toward the world becomes entirely epiphenomenal to the analysis: it drops out as a mere seeming, a user-illusion generated by the model, doing no real explanatory work. It seems like the IR is committed to saying that what the experience is of, in the most fundamental sense, is the same in both cases — the model — and the world only enters the picture as a distal cause.

But that makes it deeply mysterious why perceptual experience has the phenomenological structure it does — why it presents itself as disclosing a public, mind-independent world rather than as the inspection of an internal display. The DR has a straightforward explanation: experience has that structure because, in the normal case, that’s exactly what it’s doing.

@hypericin

cientific understanding is never identical with what it attempts to grasp, it is always an approximation. This is why science never ends, it is constantly being revised. And there is seldom a single universal understanding. 100 different physicists might have 100 different understandings of color charge, at various degrees of accuracy. Some may be entirely wrong. Only numerical distinctness between reality and understanding can support this diversity.

Yes, understanding is always revisable, approximate, and diverse. But partial understanding of X is not the same as possessing a numerically distinct copy of X that happens to resemble it. It is an incomplete grasp of X itself.

This talk of ‘grasping the same intelligibility’ across mind and world isn’t some extravagant metaphysical thesis – it’s the minimal condition for knowledge to be possible at all. This becomes clear when you try to deny it.

If understanding and reality are always numerically distinct, then assessing whether a model corresponds to reality requires cognitive access to reality independent of the model. But on IR, all cognitive access runs through numerically distinct models. So checking correspondence just produces another model needing its own check — a vicious regress. Unless you stop somewhere and say: “Here, our cognitive activity genuinely reaches reality itself.” But that stopping point is just the identity I’m pointing to.

This is why your own formulation presupposes something akin to my position. Every time you say perception “captures some structural features of the object,” you’re helping yourself to a cognitive grasp of the object that can’t itself be just another representation awaiting further verification without falling into regress.

The diversity and fallibility you cite are fully accommodated on my view — each knower grasps the same intelligible structure partially, from a different angle, with different degrees of adequacy. Error is the failure of an intended cognitive act to reach its target, not the possession of a low-fidelity model. On your account, it’s unclear how error differs from success, since in both cases all the subject has is a model, and whether it “matches” is precisely the question that can’t be settled from within the model itself.

The same applies to perception. That different organisms perceive differently and fallibly doesn’t entail that none perceives the object itself — it entails that perception is a partial, perspectival, species-specific disclosure of something real, not a sealed-off confrontation with an intermediary.

[Wayfarer]

This discussion has been carried over from here

[AmadeusD]

@EQV

But that makes it deeply mysterious why perceptual experience has the phenomenological structure it does — why it presents itself as disclosing a public, mind-independent world rather than as the inspection of an internal display. The DR has a straightforward explanation: experience has that structure because, in the normal case, that’s exactly what it’s doing.

Some pretty serious issues here imo.

There is a pure non sequitur between
“Why does experience feel the way it does?” and a conclusion about that, because its the easiest explanation. I think that’s lazy and likely my biggest gripe with DR thinking. It just stops at the easiest possible train station to get off at. Totally unsatisfying, and does not explain much of experience, to me.

You’re right, it is mysterious. That’s why there’s questions. How is it possible I can experience an apple that isn’t in my mind, where I experience everything I experience?
DR-ing wont do it to answer that question, though, because there is nothing claimed by DR which gets the apple into my experience. It sits outside my mind, and there is stays until the DRist comes and literally hand-waves it into experience. Some find this satisfying - I think its both unsatisfying, unphilosophical and unable to explain the facts of what eyes, rods and cones do. That is an hurdle that must be overcome for any theory - This is where Michael’s biggest pressure is as I see it and it is the one thing no one has attempted to address beyond hand waving in years on TPF.

How does the apple get into my mind? “You look at it” begs the question, so wont do. You need to explain. (not you, you - whomever).

[Michael]

@EQV

On the view I’m advancing, perception isn’t primarily the “having” of qualities at all. It’s an act of awareness in which an object is presented through a complex of sensory content, where that content functions not as the object of awareness but as the medium through which the object is given. The sensory qualities are real, and they are “in” the perceiver in a straightforward biological sense, but they aren’t what perception is of. The distinction isn’t between naïve realism and indirect realism as you’ve framed them; it’s between accounts that treat sensory content as the terminus of awareness and accounts that treat it as the vehicle.

I say that perception of pain mediates perception of the fire burning my skin.

You say that pain is the medium through which you have perception of the fire burning your skin.

This is a distinction without a difference. If sensory content is a medium as you say and if sensory content and its qualities are ontologically separate from mind-independent objects and their properties as you say then indirect realism holds. Without the constitutive aspect of naive realism, there’s no longer a meaningful sense in which the relationship between sensory content and mind-independent objects is “direct”.

Whether to call pain an object or a mode of perception is irrelevant. The epistemological problem is the same regardless; perhaps mind-independent objects and their properties are nothing like sensory content and its qualities, and perhaps some of our sensations are not caused by “appropriate” mind-independent objects, even if they seem to be — like with phantom pains.

[hypericin]

Hey there, sorry for the long pause. Something else took my attention, and also frankly I needed a vacation from the topic.

@EQV

If understanding and reality are always numerically distinct, then assessing whether a model corresponds to reality requires cognitive access to reality independent of the model. But on IR, all cognitive access runs through numerically distinct models. So checking correspondence just produces another model needing its own check — a vicious regress. Unless you stop somewhere and say: “Here, our cognitive activity genuinely reaches reality itself.” But that stopping point is just the identity I’m pointing to.

I think every DRist falls prey to this misunderstanding. How can a brain “capture structural features of the object”? There is one and only one way: the brain builds a model of the structural features. That’s it. There is nothing else a brain can do. You keep wanting to say that the brain directly reaches out and grasps its object. But this is very vague. How can a brain do that, operationally? It cannot.

Your concern has been that this places the perceiver behind a sealed wall of models. Seeing is believing, but if seeing itself is a model, then we never grasp reality itself? This is correct, and is exactly what allows for radical skepticism. Skepticism arises because we do not have direct contact with reality, and so the models we construct in reality’s stead can be (radically) multiply realized. Skepticism is a result of the structure of perception, and would not be an issue if we could somehow grasp reality directly.

Rather than this impossibility, at some point we assume that if multiple models are in agreement, they are accurate. If I see a rock, feel it, if others see it and feel it, that there is a rock is overwhelmingly likely. But never certain.

@EQV

But the failure of the analogy doesn’t discredit the idea I have been defending, which is that the question of intentionality is unavoidable if we want to settle the DR/IR debate. So I don’t agree that intentionality has no place in the discussion – I think it’s the crux of the debate.

We can intentionally target the objects of intention. We can intentionally target perceptions themselves. We can intentionally target Homer. So what can intentionality tell us?

You keep saying that distal objects “are the target of perception”. But this is not always the case, qualia are as well in some contexts. When we smell a flower, listen to music, the qualities of perception itself are the intentional target. So, what is the significance of objects being the target of perception, some of the time?

@EQV

It sounds like you are advocating for the reduction of phenomenology to computation. I’m very skeptical of this, but I’d be interested to get your perspective before going down that rabbit hole.

I do. Either phenomenology is free standing, or it is reducible to computation, or it is reducible to physics. I find computation to be by far the most attractive of these options. But as you say, this is a rabbit hole we had better not descend unless we have to.

@EQV

You can, of course, reflectively foreground the qualitative character of experience — “what a vivid red!” — but I see that as a second-order act of attention over-and-above the baseline act of perception.

I thought you had agreed earlier that perception of qualia is not a introspective act. There is no intermediary step between hearing a chime and perceiving the sound of a chime.

@EQV

Premise (3) depends on premise (1), and I’ve already explained why I reject (1).

Rejecting my argument on the basis of rejecting the premise Qualia are perceived feels quite thin. Most everyone would agree with this premise. Even if you believe that this perception is reflexive, this does not contradict the premise.

@EQV

But that makes it deeply mysterious why perceptual experience has the phenomenological structure it does — why it presents itself as disclosing a public, mind-independent world rather than as the inspection of an internal display

I’m not seeing this deep mystery. The function of perception is to disclose information about the external world. It is how we interface with the world. What function would it serve if it were presented as an internal display?

Whereas, I have not seen you address the typical hallucination argument. Hallucination and veridical perception can be in principle identical. Yet, in one case it is perception of the world, in one case it is not. There is therefore no room for us to perceive the world directly. If the two experiences are indistinguishable, that one of them is of the world cannot be a part of the experience itself.

[MadLad]

@hypericin

I think every DRist falls prey to this misunderstanding. How can a brain “capture structural features of the object”? There is one and only one way: the brain builds a model of the structural features. That’s it. There is nothing else a brain can do. You keep wanting to say that the brain directly reaches out and grasps its object. But this is very vague. How can a brain do that, operationally? It cannot.

The simple answer is that any given perceiver is more than a brain. A perceiver can grasp an object operationally by using his hand, for example. There is neither need nor evidence of any model when such direct access is available to a perceiver.

[EQV]

@hypericin

Hey there, sorry for the long pause. Something else took my attention, and also frankly I needed a vacation from the topic.

Not a problem. Engaging in these kinds of discussions can take a lot of energy.

@hypericin

I think every DRist falls prey to this misunderstanding. How can a brain “capture structural features of the object”? There is one and only one way: the brain builds a model of the structural features. That’s it. There is nothing else a brain can do. You keep wanting to say that the brain directly reaches out and grasps its object. But this is very vague. How can a brain do that, operationally? It cannot.

You’re smuggling in an assumption and then presenting the consequences as if they were a discovery. The assumption is: knowing = neural modelling. If you start there, then sure, you get the veil of models, you get radical skepticism, you get the whole package. But that identification is precisely whats at issue. I’m not denying the brain does complex processing — of course it does. What I’m denying is that the cognitive act of understanding or judging is identical with that processing. The neural activity is a necessary condition for knowing, not the knowing itself.

And look at what happens at the end of your own argument. You say “if multiple models are in agreement, they are accurate.” But that’s a judgment — its an inference from convergence to probable truth. On your own account, that judgment is itself just another model. So what grounds it? Another model? You’ve either got a regress or you’re quietly helping yourself to a rational grasp of evidential relations that your framework officially says is impossible. The convergence criterion only works if the person applying it can actually understand what convergence means and judge that it obtains. Thats not model-building, that’s rational insight into sufficiency of evidence.

Skepticism isn’t a discovery about the structure of perception. Its a consequence of a theory that identifies cognition with modelling and then wonders why it can’t get outside models. Drop the identification and the problem dissolves — not because we magically leap outside the brain, but because knowing was never “being inside” anything to begin with.

@hypericin

You keep saying that distal objects “are the target of perception”. But this is not always the case, qualia are as well in some contexts. When we smell a flower, listen to music, the qualities of perception itself are the intentional target. So, what is the significance of objects being the target of perception, some of the time?

When you say “qualia are the intentional target when we smell a flower,” I think you’re misdescribing what’s actually going on. The flower is the target. The qualitative character is the medium through which the flower shows up for you. You can of course make that medium itself an object of attention — but now your doing phenomenology, not smelling flowers.

@hypericin

Either phenomenology is free standing, or it is reducible to computation, or it is reducible to physics. I find computation to be by far the most attractive of these options. But as you say, this is a rabbit hole we had better not descend unless we have to.

Those aren’t the only options though. Phenomenology could be irreducible to computation and irreducible to physics and not “free standing” in whatever sense you mean by that. It could be, for instance, that conscious acts are emergent — dependent on but not reducible to their physical and computational substrates. The fact that you need a brain to be conscious doesn’t mean consciousness is what the brain computes, any more than the fact that you need a chessboard to play chess means the game is the board.

The trilemma you’re setting up smuggles in a pretty strong reductionism as a background assumption. If “free standing” means something like substance dualism, then sure, I’d reject that too. But the live alternative is that phenomenology names a level of activity — experiencing, understanding, judging — that supervenes on computational and physical processes without being identical to them. The acts have their own internal normativity (eg. you can misunderstand, you can judge on insufficient evidence) that isn’t capturable in purely computational terms, because computation as such doesn’t have norms — it just runs.

So I’d actually push back on the framing itself before choosing a door.

@hypericin

I thought you had agreed earlier that perception of qualia is not a introspective act. There is no intermediary step between hearing a chime and perceiving the sound of a chime.

There’s no contradiction. I’m distinguishing two things:

1. The qualitative character that’s present in the act of hearing the chime. This is not introspective. You hear the chime and it sounds a certain way — bright, resonant, whatever. The quale is there, operative in the act, without you needing to do anything extra. We agree on this.
2. Making that qualitative character itself the topic of your attention — “wow, what a lovely tone.” That’s a different act. You’ve shifted from hearing the chime to attending to how it sounds to you.

In (1), the distal source is the object and the qualitative character is the medium through which it presents itself. In (2), the qualitative character has become the object. Both involve qualia, but the cognitive orientation is different. The first is world-directed, the second is reflexive.

So when I said “second-order act of attention” I wasn’t saying qualia require introspection to exist in experience. I was saying that making them thematic — treating them as objects in their own right rather then the medium of perceiving something else — does require a shift in attention. That shift is what gets misdescribed when someone says “the quale is the intentional target of smelling the flower.” No — the flower is. The quale is how the flower shows up. You can redirect attention onto the showing-up itself, but now your doing something different.

@hypericin

Rejecting my argument on the basis of rejecting the premise Qualia are perceived feels quite thin. Most everyone would agree with this premise. Even if you believe that this perception is reflexive, this does not contradict the premise.

It’s not thin, its a disagreement about what “perceived” is doing in that sentence. The word is ambiguous between two very different claims:

(a) Qualitative character is present in perceptual acts. (b) Qualia are objects of perceptual acts.

I accept (a) without reservation. But your argument needs (b), and (b) is exactly what I’m denying. When I hear the chime, there’s qualitative character — nobody’s disputing that. But the distal source is the object perceived, not the quale. The quale is the manner of presentation, not a second thing I’m also perceiving alongside the chime.

“Most everyone would agree” isn’t really an argument here. Most everyone would agree because in ordinary speech “I perceive the redness” is a perfectly natural thing to say. But philosophy is precisely the business of noticing when ordinary speech papers over a distinction that matters. And this one matters, because if you read (a) as (b), you’ve already reified qualia into mental objects — and once you’ve done that, the veil-of-models conclusion follows almost automatically. The work is being done by the ambiguity, not by the argument.

So no, I’m not rejecting some obvious truism. I’m rejecting a specific philosophical reading of it that you need but haven’t defended independently.

@hypericin

I’m not seeing this deep mystery. The function of perception is to disclose information about the external world. It is how we interface with the world. What function would it serve if it were presented as an internal display?

Whereas, I have not seen you address the typical hallucination argument. Hallucination and veridical perception can be in principle identical. Yet, in one case it is perception of the world, in one case it is not. There is therefore no room for us to perceive the world directly. If the two experiences are indistinguishable, that one of them is of the world cannot be a part of the experience itself.

You say “what function would it serve if perception presented as an internal display?” But that’s actually my point. On your account, perception is the inspection of an internal model. So why doesn’t it present that way? You’re saying: “of course it presents as world-disclosing, that’s its function.” But function doesn’t explain phenomenology here — it just relabels the puzzle. You’ve told me that it’s useful for the model to feel world-directed, not how an internal model generates genuine world-directedness rather than a mere illusion of it. On the IR picture, the felt transparency of perception — the way experience seems to “open onto” the world — is a trick. And I think that’s a real cost that deserves more than a shrug.

On the hallucination argument: the move from “the two experiences are indistinguishable” to “therefore neither one is directly of the world” doesn’t follow. It only follows if you assume that the full identity of a perceptual act is exhausted by its subjective character — by what it’s like from the inside. But why accept that? A veridical perception and a hallucination can be phenomenally identical while being different kinds of acts — one successfully intends its object, the other misfires. The fact that you can’t always tell from the inside which one you’re in doesn’t show that the successful case isn’t genuinely world-reaching. It just shows that introspection isn’t infallible, which… fine. Nobody promised it was.

Think of it this way: a perfect counterfeit is indistinguishable from real currency to me. That doesn’t mean real currency isn’t really money. The identity conditions of the thing aren’t reducible to my ability to discriminate.

[EQV]

@AmadeusD

How does the apple get into my mind? “You look at it” begs the question, so wont do. You need to explain. (not you, you - whomever).

The question “how does the apple get into my mind?” is doing a lot of heavy lifting here, and I think its doing most of it by smuggling in exactly the picture I’m challenging.

Notice what the question presupposes: that the mind is a kind of container, and that for you to be aware of something it has to be in that container somehow. But that’s not a neutral starting point — that’s already indirect realism dressed up as a naive question. You’re asking me to explain how DR works on IR’s terms, and then declaring victory when I can’t.

The DR point is different. The mind isn’t a box that things need to get into. Awareness is an activity — its structurally world-directed from the start. When you see an apple, your cognitive operations (attending, patterning, grasping intelligibility, affirming what’s there) intend the apple. They dont produce an inner apple-copy for you to inspect. There’s no transit problem because theres no gap to transit.

Now — you’ll say “but rods and cones! neural processing! there’s obviously a causal chain!” And yes, of course there is. Nobody denies that. But you’re conflating two different questions: (1) what are the causal conditions that make perception possible, and (2) what is the object of perceptual awareness. The fact that photons, retinas, and neural activity are causally necessary for seeing the apple doesn’t mean that what you see is photons, retinas, or neural activity. The causal story tells you how you got into a position to be aware of the apple; it doesn’t relocate the apple into your skull.

IR’s mistake is treating the causal intermediaries as the objects of awareness. Thats the real hand-wave — it just asserts that because there’s a causal process, what you’re aware of must be the end-product of that process rather than the thing that kicked it off. But that inference is a non sequitur, and its the one I’d like to see the IRist actually defend rather than treat as obvious.

[EQV]

@Michael

This is a distinction without a difference. If sensory content is a medium as you say and if sensory content and its qualities are ontologically separate from mind-independent objects and their properties as you say then indirect realism holds. Without the constitutive aspect of naive realism, there’s no longer a meaningful sense in which the relationship between sensory content and mind-independent objects is “direct”.

Its not a distinction without a difference. If pain is the object of perception, then what I’m aware of when I touch the flame is: pain. A mental item. And then I have to infer that something in the world is causing it. That’s your picture, and it’s the standard indirect realist one.

If pain is the medium of perception, then what I’m aware of when I touch the flame is: the fire burning my skin, through the pain. The pain is real, its mine, it’s biologically in me — but my awareness doesn’t terminate at it. It goes through it. These are not the same account of what the perceiver is aware of. One says I’m aware of a mental intermediary and must reason my way to the world. The other says I’m aware of a worldly situation presented under a sensory mode.

You can reject the second picture, but you can’t just stipulate that it collapses into the first. That’s the very thing under dispute.

Furthermore, I think your phantom pain example actually illustrates my point rather than yours. When someone has a phantom pain, they don’t just “have pain.” They percieve their (absent) limb as hurting. The experience is of a bodily condition, its just that the relevant body part isn’t there anymore. The intentional structure — awareness directed at a worldly state of affairs through sensory content — is preserved even in the error case. What goes wrong is which worldly state is being presented, not that a mental item is being confused for a worldly one.

And you’ve again left the circularity point untouched. You know about wavelengths, biology, phantom pains, and causal chains because you understood intelligible relationships through inquiry, not because you inferred outward from the structure of your phenomenal states. Your own account of perception — the whole causal-scientific story — was achieved by the very mode of cognitive access to reality that your framework can’t reconstruct. I’ve raised this several times now and I haven’t seen you engage with it directly. If you think there’s a way to account for how you arrived at indirect realism without presupposing the kind of cognitive contact with reality that indirect realism offically excludes, I’d genuinely like to hear it. Otherwise I think we might be at an impasse.

[AmadeusD]

@EQV

Notice what the question presupposes: that the mind is a kind of container, and that for you to be aware of something it has to be in that container somehow.

I think this is a convenient misreading of an idealisation.

How does it get into my experience, is hte better version - perhaps I should have stuck with it. But yeah, your objection to the use of Mind doesn’t square with what I’m saying/asking/supposing.

@EQV

You’re asking me to explain how DR works on IR’s terms, and then declaring victory when I can’t.

I suggest this indicates the DRist cannot continue on the facts. These are philosophical claims - we have experiences, we cast our eyes to things, and we know how sight works in humans. If this is an obstacle, then perhaps the DRist is actually precluded from continuing their claims.

@EQV

They dont produce an inner apple-copy for you to inspect.

They literally do. That’s why I’m now a bit more confident in the above suggestion about preclusion. The DRist tends to just ignore what we know about eyes to say we cast them on something, and ouila - awareness of it. That is, imo, missing several pieces of the puzzle and inadequate conceptually anyway.

@EQV

The fact that photons, retinas, and neural activity are causally necessary for seeing the apple doesn’t mean that what you see is photons, retinas, or neural activity.

It does if you adequate parse the words you’re using. So, I’ll try another sentence I think its cleaner:
When I cast my eyes toward an apple, my mind recognizes the data set triggered by that activity and creates an accurate representation of that apple based on the general structure of neural processing in connection with sensory input.

Now there’s no ambiguity, and the causal gap is obvious. If you disagree, that’s fine, but your initial wording appears to make assumptions about how words can be fit into theories. I just want to be explicit.

@EQV

The causal story tells you how you got into a position to be aware of the apple; it doesn’t relocate the apple into your skull.

Exactly. Accepting this precludes DR. Nice.

@EQV

what you’re aware of must be the end-product of that process rather than the thing that kicked it off.

That is not a mistake in any sense.

@EQV

But that inference is a non sequitur, and its the one I’d like to see the IRist actually defend rather than treat as obvious.

Its factual. The DRist literally ignores it, and just says “yeah, yeah, but that’s direct”.

The claims made here are unsupported in and of themselves, let alone based on any reasoning.

[EQV]

@AmadeusD

ts factual. The DRist literally ignores it, and just says “yeah, yeah, but that’s direct”.

The claims made here are unsupported in and of themselves, let alone based on any reasoning.

We’re close to talking past eachother here, but let me try once more on the core point.

You say “they literally do” produce an inner apple-copy. But that’s exactly what’s at issue — you can’t just assert it as fact and move on. Yes, the visual system processes information. Yes, there are neural representations in a functional sense. Nobody disputes any of that. The question is whether the object of your awareness is the neural end-state or the apple. Pointing to the causal chain doesn’t settle that question, it just restates it.

Here’s the move you keep making, and I keep flagging, and you keep not addressing: “there is a causal process between the apple and awareness, therefore what I’m aware of is the product of that process rather than the apple.” That’s the inference that needs defending. You keep treating it as self-evident but it isn’t — its a substantive philosophical claim, and a contentious one. Lots of very serious philosophers reject it. Telling me its “factual” is not an argument.

To see why it’s not obvious: your auditory system causally processes sound waves through a complex chain — eardrum, ossicles, cochlear fluid, hair cells, auditory nerve, cortex. Does that mean you hear neural activity rather than the car horn outside? The causal intermediaries are real. That doesn’t make them the object of experience. The whole question is about the relationship between causal mediation and object-awareness, and you can’t just collapse them by fiat.

If your reply to this is another round of “its just factual, the DRist ignores the science,” then I think we’ve probably exhausted what we can do here. But I’d genuinely like to hear an actual argument for why causal mediation entails object-replacement. Thats the load-bearing claim in your position.

[Michael]

@EQV

When someone has a phantom pain, they don’t just “have pain.” They percieve their (absent) limb as hurting. The experience is of a bodily condition, its just that the relevant body part isn’t there anymore. The intentional structure — awareness directed at a worldly state of affairs through sensory content — is preserved even in the error case.

I don’t understand you at all.

In this case there is the painful experience of a hurt limb but no hurt limb, and so the painful experience of a hurt limb is nothing more than a mental phenomenon. Absent any other information — e.g. if I’m blind and don’t know that my limb has been amputated — I might erroneously infer that I have a hurt limb.

This is the phenomenology and epistemology of indirect realism, and that you’re trying to twist this into direct realism is precisely why we haven’t gotten anywhere in over a month.

So yes, we are at an impasse.

[EQV]

@Michael

So yes, we are at an impasse.

Yes, but let’s be clear about where it resides.

Your argument here is: in the phantom limb case there’s no hurt limb, therefore the experience is “nothing more than a mental phenomenon.” But if your saying that both the qualia and the intentional structure — the very aboutness of experience — are just mental items, think about what follows.

If directedness itself is just one more qualitative feature of a mental item, then no experience is ever genuinely about anything — its all just mental items with various properties, some of which we call “directedness” but which don’t actually direct you beyond themselves. And then you’re stuck: you can never get from the mental item to the world, because even the apparent about-ness that would orient you toward the world has been absorbed into the mental item.

You’ll respond “causality is what moors perception to the world”. But causality gives you covariation, not comprehension. Something more is needed to get from “my states reliably track worldly conditions” to “I understand how things are.” Otherwise, the familiar problem reasserts itself: how do you know that causality moors perception to the world? Appeals to causality quietly smuggle in the very thing I keep asking about.

Thats not a problem I’m inventing for you. Its the problem that has dogged representationalism since Descartes. I think your position inherits it, and I haven’t seen you address it.

But I think you’re right that we’ve reached diminishing returns here, so I’m happy to leave it.

[Michael]

We both seem to agree that mental phenomena is either reducible to or emerges from neural activity, and is ontologically independent of distal objects and their properties.

So I don’t know why you think the issues you raise above are uniquely a problem for me and not also for you. What does it mean for some of this mental phenomena to be “of” or “about” those distal objects, how does this obtain, and why do you think that my position denies this? As I’ve said before, indirect realism is only concerned with phenomenology, perception not being direct in the way that the naive realist says it is (i.e. in the constitutive sense), and the epistemological implications. I could have all the same first-person phenomenal experiences even if none of those distal objects exist (e.g. with phantom limbs or disintegrated apples).

You might ask how we can know that the first paragraph is true if it is, but then that’s a problem for both of us (and science in general). Suffice it to say, the scientific evidence supports the first paragraph, and so indirect realism is the scientific view of perception.

[Ludwig]

@EQV

If directedness itself is just one more qualitative feature of a mental item, then no experience is ever genuinely about anything — its all just mental items with various properties, some of which we call “directedness” but which don’t actually direct you beyond themselves.

Think about how a signpost points beyond itself. We have learnt what a signpost is and what it means, and we know how to respond to it. We “follow” the signpost if we want to get where it points and go the other way if we don’t. The answer is, “aboutness” is shown by acting appropriately in the light of our wants and values.
The “aboutness” of our perceptions is not inherent in our perceptions, but is shown in how we behave.
Or is that too simple?

@Michael

I could have all the same first-person phenomenal experiences even if none of those distal objects exist (e.g. with phantom limbs or disintegrated apples).

It is perfectly true that if we are limited to our current perceptions in cases like these, we are stuck. Well, perhaps it would be more accurate to say that we believe, by default, what they seem to be telling us. That’s a result of how we are defining our problem.
We find out that our dreams are not real when we wake up.
We realize that the foot that seems to be hurting us is not there by, perhaps feeling for it and finding nothing there. (Neither vision nor touch work on their own. They work together.)
The problem is that artificial narrowing of our thought to the immediate present. But perceptions are evaluated in a wider context.

@EQV

how do you know that causality moors perception to the world?

Not by examinging our perceptions more closely, but by considering them in a wider context - and by experimenting, not merely observing.

[EQV]

@Ludwig

Think about how a signpost points beyond itself. We have learnt what a signpost is and what it means, and we know how to respond to it. We “follow” the signpost if we want to get where it points and go the other way if we don’t. The answer is, “aboutness” is shown by acting appropriately in the light of our wants and values.
The “aboutness” of our perceptions is not inherent in our perceptions, but is shown in how we behave.
Or is that too simple?

The signpost analogy actually illustrates the problem rather than solving it. A signpost only “points” because someone already understands what it means — the directedness isn’t in the physical object, its in the interpreter. So if you say perception is like a signpost, your just pushing the question back: what makes the interpreter’s understanding directed at the right thing?

And then you say aboutness is “shown in how we behave.” But what makes a behavior count as appropriate? If I see a bear and run, that response is appropriate precisely because my perception is about a bear — an actual dangerous thing in my environment. The aboutness has to already be in place for the behavior to count as fitting. So you can’t use the behavior to explain the aboutness without going in a circle.

Or put it this way: if aboutness just is behaving appropriately in light of wants and values — what makes those wants and values about anything? You’d need another layer of appropriate behavior, and then another, and you never actually land on genuine directedness toward anything. Its turtles all the way down.

So no, I wouldn’t say its too simple. I would say it presupposes exactly what it’s trying to explain.

@Ludwig

@EQV

how do you know that causality moors perception to the world?

Not by examinging our perceptions more closely, but by considering them in a wider context - and by experimenting, not merely observing.

But notice what you’ve just conceded. You can’t know that perception is moored to the world just by way of raw experience. You need to “consider them in a wider context,” run experiments, make inferences. In other words, you need acts of understanding and judgment that go beyond anything perception hands you directly.

So the aboutness of perception — its genuine contact with reality — isn’t something you find in the raw experience. Its something you have to affirm through a further rational act. Thats actually my whole point. The experiential qualities of perception, taken by themselves, don’t get you to the world. You need insight and judgment to close that gap. And those aren’t more experiences — they’re cognitional acts of a fundamentally different kind.

[EQV]

@Michael — a few things.

First, I don’t actually agree with your first paragraph in the way you’ve framed it. That perceptual experience depends on neural activity — yes obviously. That mental phenomena is “ontologically independent of distal objects” — maybe, depending entirely on what you mean. The neural process is its own event, sure. But the cognitive act that occurs through that neural process — the act of understanding, of grasping how things are — has a normative structure thats essentially relational. It’s answerable to how things stand in reality. That answerability isn’t an optional add-on you can slot in later, it’s constitutive of what understanding is. So no, I don’t grant that we’re starting from the same place.

Second, and this is why I keep pressing — the problem is not symmetric. On my account, intentionality is structurally basic. Awareness is always awareness-of; sensory content functions as a medium through which objects are presented. You don’t have to reconstruct world-directedness out of materials that lack it. On your account, you absorb intentionality into phenomenal character — “aboutness” is just another feature of a mental item — and then you need to reconstruct genuine world-directedness from the outside, via causality and inference. That reconstruction is what keeps failing, for the reasons I’ve laid out. So no, its not “a problem for both of us.” Its a problem generated by a specific theoretical commitment that I don’t share.

Third — “indirect realism is the scientific view of perception” is doing way too much work in your argument. Science tells us that perception is causally mediated by neural processes. Agreed. It does not tell us that the perceiver is therefore aware of neural intermediaries rather then worldly objects. That’s a philosophical interpretation of the science, not a scientific result. The neuroscientist studying color vision is studying how the visual system enables awareness of environmental features — she is not concluding that we only ever see our own brain states.

[Michael]

@EQV

she is not concluding that we only ever see our own brain states.

This is why we’re not getting anywhere. I’m not saying that I only ever see my own brain states, just as I’m not saying that I only ever smell or taste or feel or hear my own brain states; I’m saying that a) I see colours, that b) these colours are mental phenomena, and that c) I possibly see a material surface that reflects various wavelengths of light (not just in the intentional sense but in the literal sense that I see it only if it exists).

(a) counts as direct perception, because the colours I see are constituents of the experience.

(c) counts as indirect perception, both because the material surface I see isn’t a constituent of the experience and because it is mediated by (a).

The epistemological worry is that (a) can be true even if (c) is false, e.g. if I’m hallucinating or if I’m dreaming or if I’m a Boltzmann brain or if subjective idealism is true.

This is all there is to indirect realism. All your talk about intentionality and normativity and answerability is a red herring, as we went over before with the person who watches the world through a screen. None of this stuff is excluded by indirect realism.

[EQV]

@Michael

We’ve been through this before. If “constituent of experience” just means “what my awareness terminates at” — what I’m aware of — then you’ve already decided the question in favor of indirect realism by definitional fiat. You’ve built it into the framing and then announced that the distal object can only be reached indirectly. I’m contesting that framing, not ignoring it.

Regarding intentionality and normativity being “red herrings” — you keep saying they’re compatible with indirect realism, but you havn’t shown how. Compatibility is a claim that requires an account. How does awareness that terminates at mental items ever become genuinely answerable to how things are? That question isn’t a red herring, its the question your framework needs to answer.