Abstract objects like concept exist in different way to material objects like houses. You need to think about different modes of existence.
See? you make the switch right there. âHow an object looksâ becomes âan objectâs lookâ. These subtle and deceptive grammatical equivocations turn the quality or description of an object like an apple into its own object, âan appleâs lookâ, which does not exist.
With this technique you can abstract the object and move around its abstraction in your imagination, as if the object and its look could be in two different positions in space in time.
No, nothing called âan objects lookâ exists, but it makes clear the rhetorical techniques keeping indirect realism afloat.
This has nothing to do with grammar.
Mind-independent objects have properties that cause sensory organs to be stimulated in such-and-such a way, which cause the brain to behave in such-and-such a way.
The colours we see and the pain we feel are not properties of these objects, but mental phenomena that occur when the brain behaves in the appropriate ways. The science is clear on this, so unless you can respond with scientific evidence to the contrary, Iâm not going to keep arguing this further.
You have shifted the argument from âthe mind is emergent from the brainâ to âdirect perception of objects is emergentâ. The direct perception of objects is a theory, not a phenomenon to be explained, so this just seems like a category error. Emergent properties are real, if they are not what are we even talking about? The mind is real, what of it?
The reason Iâm arguing that the mind is emergent from the brain is to appeal to this principle, which should be made explicit:
If A is emergent from B, A inherits all the fundamental limitations of B.
Emergence is not a magic sauce that allows A to do what was not already a latent capacity of B. If Life(2) can be implemented, that is because Life(2) was already a latent capacity of Life(1). Whereas no special configuration of cells can produce colors. Lack of color is a fundamental limitation of Life(1). If some Life(c) displays color, we know it is not emergent from Life(1).
The upshot is, if the brain cannot directly access the world, then so long as the mind is emergent from the brain, no appeal to emergence can magically afford direct world-access to the mind.
âDepends onâ, as in emerges from? Then fine, the argument still holds. The emergent still is what it emerges from. Or âdepends onâ the brain like the brain depends on the heart? Then you will need to explain what you think the mind actually is.
I only want to say that it is possible, without providing a full account of normativity. That it is possible is provided by the casual connection between models and the world. A full account is not my responsibility, and would only create another debate surface to argue about.
No, this doesnât help your cause at all. That world directed norms and inference can function in the face of profound indirection invalidates your objection. We donât need to discuss how norms operate despite indirection if we already know from real world examples that they do.
I shouldnât say that it is irrelevant to the epistemology of perception. Only that it is irrelevant to this question, because it is orthogonal to it. A perception can be about the most indirect of all targets, even Homer. Like normativity, indirection is no barrier for perception to be about the indirect target. And conversely, that perception is about something is no barrier for that something being epistemically remote.
So why keep bringing it up?
Both of these claims are non sequiturs:
- If some distal object is the intentional object of our perception then we have direct perception of that object
- If we do not have direct perception of some distal object then that object is not the intentional object of our perception
A computer model might be a model of an apple but it is not the direct presentation of that apple. Similarly, our perception might be of an apple but might not be the direct presentation of that apple.
So these continued appeals to intentionality are red herrings. They neither prove direct realism nor disprove indirect realism.
The problem is that your principle â âif A is emergent from B, A inherits all the fundamental limitations of Bâ â appears to be wrong.
Consider: can an individual water molecule create a vortex, or freeze into ice, or be shaped into a snowman? No. Can a single transistor execute an arbitrary program? No. Do individual Life(1) cells move? No, but Life(2) gliders can. In these cases the limitation of the individual components is not a limitation of the higher-order systems of which they are a part.
Perception is something that occurs at the level of the coupling between the whole organism and its environment. The brain is merely one part of that larger dynamical coupling. So to argue that direct perception is impossible because the brain is trapped behind the skull simply begs the question about what kind of limitation the brain imposes. You havenât shown that direct perception is impossible, youâve simply asserted it on the basis of your prior belief that the brainâs âskull-boundednessâ is a disabling limitation. But thatâs the very thing under dispute.
To say that the mind emerges from the brain is not to say that the mind is identical to the brain, nor that it reduces to the same explanatory level. Emergence normally indicates a relation between levels of organization: the lower level provides the conditions of possibility for the higher, but the higher possesses its own intelligible structure and its own set of explanatory categories.
From the standpoint of the phenomenology of perception, reason and action, the mind is not a thing alongside the brain. It is the set of operations through which a subject experiences, inquires, understands, judges, deliberates and acts. These operations have an intentional structure: they are always directed toward objects in the world. A neural description explains the conditions under which those operations occur, but it does not replace the description of the operations themselves.
Once that distinction between levels is clear, the claim that âthe emergent still is what it emerges fromâ no longer follows. The higher-level pattern depends on the lower-level manifold, but it is not reducible to it, because it introduces a new intelligible form of organization. And it is precisely at that higher levelâthe level of intentional acts of perceptionâthat the question of whether perception is direct or indirect must be addressed.
This is a pretty remarkable double-standard.
When I say perception is world-directed, you demand an operational account of how thatâs possible given the brainâs constraints. But when your own framework faces an analogous explanatory gap â how do you get genuine normativity from causal model-management? â you wave it off as ânot my responsibilityâ.
You canât have it both ways. If âI only want to say itâs possibleâ is an acceptable response to the normativity challenge, then âI only want to say itâs possibleâ is equally acceptable as my response to âhow can the brain directly access the world?â The whole dialectic collapses into mutual hand-waving.
And âcausal connection between models and the worldâ doesnât even gesture at an answer. A thermostat is causally connected to room temperature. It doesnât make normatively authoritative judgments about how warm it is. Causal connection is necessary for normative authority, sure. But it isnât sufficient, and the question is what the additional ingredient is. Thatâs not a side debate â itâs the central issue.
Youâre actually making my point for me. Particle physics works precisely because the indirection is bounded. Notice: the physicist directly perceives the instrument readouts â the cloud chamber tracks, the detector data, the screen â and then applies rational judgment to infer what produced those signals. The inferential chain terminates in acts of direct perception (of instruments) plus normatively governed judgment.
Now try to run this on your picture. The physicist doesnât directly perceive the instrument readouts â they perceive a model of the readouts. And the judgment they exercise is âpurely internal.â So the grounding that makes particle physics epistemically successful â direct access to the observational base plus genuine rational authority â is exactly what your framework dissolves.
Youâre pointing to particle physics as proof that indirection is fine, while quietly helping yourself to the two things (direct perceptual access and genuine normativity) that your own position undermines.
I keep bringing it up because itâs the place where our dispute has to be decided.
You keep conflating two different kinds of âaboutnessâ that have been disambiguated multiple times now. There is a clear difference between the structure of direct and indirect intentional acts. You keep saying that âindirection is no barrierâ while overlooking the fact that the indirect is founded on the direct, and that there is nothing analogous to the VS screen in ordinary acts of perception.
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We seem to have reached the point where weâre mostly just repeating ourselves now. I think weâve each done a nice job of making the commitments and implications of our respective positions clear. Iâm open to continuing the discussion if you feel that there is some new ground to cover. Otherwise, I think weâve probably reached the point of diminishing returns.
The argument isnât âintentionalityâŚtherefore directnessâ. Itâs âindirectness has intentional structure A. The structure of perception doesnât conform to structure A. Therefore, perception is not indirect.â
So your argument is:
A1. If we only have indirect perception of apples then perception has intentional structure A
A2. Perception does not have intentional structure A
A3. Therefore, we do not only have indirect perception of apples
I donât know what âstructure Aâ is and so have no reason to accept either A1 or A2.
Whereas my argument is:
B1. If we have direct perception of apples then apples and their properties are constituents of first-person phenomenal experience
B2. Apples and their properties are not constituents of first-person phenomenal experience
B3. Therefore, we do not have direct perception of apples
B1 is true by virtue of what both naive and indirect realists mean by âdirect perceptionâ and B2 is true as established by the science of perception and the argument here.
As you have previously rejected naive realism I assume that you accept that B2 is true, and so clearly B2 is not inconsistent with your comments about the intentional structure of perception. So if you reject B3 then you must reject B1, but to reject B1 is to just mean something else by âdirect perceptionâ.
I think it makes sense to say that we have direct perception of appearances. But we have no perception of objects (the grounds of appearances).
This may solve the dispute, though some argue it merely pushes the problem away.
It has everything to do with grammar. The use of nouns indicates that there exists persons, places, or things to which these words refer. Yet no person, place, or thing can be proven to exist under the rubric of indirect realism and phenomenology. The fact that my arm hurts does not mean that there exists inside my body a âmental phenomenaâ called âpainâ, so anyone concerned with philosophy might as well speak of what actually does exist and apply their methods to those, like my arm and whatever biological components or foreign objects are causing it to hurt. Should the law of parsimony have any bearing on the matter, and we are refusing to mislead ourselves, direct realism wins out as a better basis on which to apply our thinking.
So my gripe is that these nouns donât refer to what they claim they do, are empty, and have no ontological grounding in reality. As such, indirect realism and its taxonomy of mental phenomena is false wherever it claims to be anything other than abstract and figurative.
I know thatâs a tough pill to swallow, so I understand why youâd want to avoid the argument.
The word âheadachesâ refers to headaches, which are a real phenomenon. I really do have a headache; itâs why I take paracetamol, and in taking this paracetamol this headache goes away. We also know through scientific study that headaches are explained by the right kind of neural activity.
If your theory denies any of this then your theory ought not be taken seriously. None of this can be refuted by demanding that I open up my skull and point to where you can see or feel my headache.
The only legitimate philosophical dispute concerns which of these is true:
- Headaches are reducible to this neural activity
- Headaches are emergent physical phenomena that supervene on this neural activity
- Headaches are emergent non-physical phenomena that supervene on this neural activity
The above is true not just of headaches but of all pains â even those described as âa pain in my footâ â and of all pleasures.
The ontology of smells and tastes and colours is of the same kind as headaches, albeit of different modalities (olfactory, gustatory, and visual respectively).
Itâs one thing to say that colours are properties of apples and so unlike headaches, but itâs another thing to say that headaches arenât real or that their reality does not depend on what the brain is doing. The latter just isnât worth me addressing.
The logical impossibility of Direct Realism
Direct Realism, whether Phenomenological Direct Realism (PDR) or Semantic Direct Realism (SDR), is a logical impossibility because of the nature of time.
Both PDR and SDR agree that there is a temporal causal chain from the information leaving any object in the world and the information entering the mind of the observer.
I have proposed the same idea several times over several years, but without feedback addressing the basic idea. I will be interested in how Direct Realism can defend the Achilles heel of Direct Realism and demonstrate that it is logically possible to directly know, rather than infer, any immediately prior link in a temporal causal chain.
The fundamental problem with Direct Realism is made clear using the analogy of a game of snooker. At one stage in a game of snooker the snooker balls may be at rest. Using the laws of nature, and knowing the state of the snooker balls at the present moment in time, it is logically possible to predict the state of the snooker balls in the immediate future but logically impossible to predict the state of the snooker balls in the immediate past.
Therefore, using the laws of nature, it is logically possible to predict an effect (an immediate future of the snooker balls) from a known cause (the present state of the snooker balls) but logically impossible to predict a cause (an immediate past state of the snooker balls) from a known effect (the present state of the snooker balls).
Generalising, using the laws of nature, it is logically possible to predict an effect from a known cause but logically impossible to predict a cause from a known effect.
Direct Realism requires a temporal causal chain of cause to effect where information entering the mind of the observer is the final link in a causal chain. But it is logically impossible, knowing any link in the causal chain, to predict a previous link in the causal chain.
But Direct Realism requires that the observer can know, rather than infer, a preceding link in the causal chain, which is a logical impossibility, making the concept of Direct Realism a logical impossibility.
Any past event is to be remembered and inferred, not predicted.
You donât predict your teenage experience when you are an adult. You remember and recall.
The immediate past cannot be predicted sounds more like a grammatical problem, rather than logical one.
Can you see the sound of music?
Thanks for the feedback.
Yes, time is relevant in that we can remember the known past and try to predict the unknown future.
As regards the analogy of a game of snooker:
There is a stationary snooker ball on the table. Person A enters the room and cannot know its prior position. Person B has been present in the room, has seen the game, has a memory of the game, and so can know its prior position.
Person A cannot know the prior position because there is no information internal to the ball about its prior position. Person B can know the prior position of the snooker ball because they have information external to the ball.
As regards an observer of a snooker ball:
The observer sees something. All the information the observer has comes from what they see. They cannot transcend what they see. They cannot see themselves seeing. As the saying goes âthe eye cannot see itselfâ. Therefore, the observer is in the same position as person A, as they can only know information internal to the snooker ball, and there is no information internal to the snooker ball about its prior position.
As Gregory Palamas wrote in the 14th C., âIt should not have escaped them that the intellect is not like the eye which sees other visible things but does not see itself.â
You are welcome.
Perception is not just via seeing alone, and prediction alone.
Perception takes place via all possible sensical organs and mental operations.
When seeing the snooker balls, the perceiver also can hear the sounds, smell the air in the room etc.
The perceiver not just sees the snooker balls, he / she can also imagine, and infer the position of the balls in the immediate past, as well as predict them after the ball hit another ball.
It would be a mistake to assume perception is only limited to simply seeing and predicting.
Yes, but the same problem applies to each of our five senses.
There is a temporal causal chain from any object in the world to our perceiving it in the mind. This applies to all our five senses, whether sight, touch, hearing, smell or taste.
Just considering sight, given any link in the causal chain, it is logically impossible to know the previous link, as there is no information within a link about the link that preceded it.
The same for touch, given any link in the causal chain, it is logically impossible to know the previous link, as there is no information within a link about the link that preceded it.
The mind is separated from the world by several temporal causal chains, none of which enable us to directly know any link in the chain that preceded it.
For example, person A enters the room, sees a snooker ball at rest, and cannot know its prior position because there is no information internal to the ball about its prior position, whether information about sight, touch, hearing, smell or taste.
Person B may have been present in the room, has seen the game, has a memory of the game, and so can know its prior position. but this is because they have information external to the snooker ball, not internal to it.
I agree. The perceiver can infer the position of the snooker balls in the immediate past.
This is the position of the Indirect Realist. The Direct Realist says that they can know the position of the snooker balls in the immediate past.
You donât need to see the link. The link comes from your reasoning and inferring.
Where the cause is not visible, you use inference to find the link for the best possible cause for the effect. Where the cause is visible, the link can be reasoned out from the effect directly.
To find the cause for your existence, I donât need to see you being born. I see your writing posts in reasonable manner, and I can infer that you were born sometime in the past.
Your birth happened in the past, but my inference on your birth for the cause of your existence now must be 100% correct without witnessing your birth in real.
The folk who didnât see where the snooker balls were positioned before hitting, doesnât mean the snooker ball was not existing or came down from the sky. It just means he didnât see them. Failed perception doesnât mean the objects didnât exist. Lack of data doesnât mean the reality doesnât exist.
I am still trying to understand what IR DR points are. Perception operates with the whole body senses, reasoning, imagination, memory and inference where appropriate. It is not just seeing something, and missing to see it or cannot know it because something happened in the past.
If the object was visible, it is seen, reasoned, inferred and thought, and understood. If not visible, then reasoning and inference will still be working on the situation or objects why they are not visible.
The DR believes that tables and chairs exist in the world exactly as we think about them in our minds.
The IR believes that something exists in the world but not necessarily tables and chairs as we think about them in our minds.
The DR says that they know what exists in the world regardless of any reasoning or inferring.
The IR says something exists in the world, for which reasoning and inferring is needed.
You enter a room and see a snooker table mid-game with a snooker ball at rest.
The IR uses reasoning and inference to imagine the position of the snooker ball immediately prior.
The DR is effectively saying that they can know the position of the snooker ball immediately prior, which is an untenable position.
Information travels along a temporal causal chain from something in the world to a perception in the mind, which is the last link in the causal chain.
Knowledge about any link in this temporal causal chain is insufficient to give knowledge about an immediately prior link, because any link can have more than one cause.
The DR is effectively saying that knowledge about any link in this temporal causal chain is sufficient to give knowledge about an immediately prior link, which is logically flawed.
The IR uses reasoning to infer about what is in the world. The DR believes that they know independently of any reasoning or inference what is in the world because of a misunderstanding of the nature of the temporal causal chain from something in the world to our perception in the mind.
Arenât both the case depending on the situation of the perception at the time? In some situation yes, on others no.