We can't both be experiencing smells "as they are" considering how viscerally different our experiences are. — flannel jesus
This is more of a conceptual distinction, I think what you call an "experience" I would call a "reaction" that is distinct from the smell as such. — goremand
The experience I call "blue", the qualia if you will, doesn't have to be assigned to the things I assign it to. The qualia you experience as blue, I could experience as green. My whole colour wheel could be rotated with respect to yours, and I would still have a fully in tact, self-consistent and useful sensory experience regardless. — flannel jesus
MUI theory states that "perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world." Hoffman argues that conscious beings have not evolved to perceive the world as it actually is but have evolved to perceive the world in a way that maximizes "fitness payoffs". — flannel jesus
MUI theory states that "perceptual experiences do not match or approximate properties of the objective world, but instead provide a simplified, species-specific, user interface to that world." Hoffman argues that conscious beings have not evolved to perceive the world as it actually is but have evolved to perceive the world in a way that maximizes "fitness payoffs". — flannel jesus
yeah, if anything smell seems more acutely to be experienced in a way that's entirely distinct from reality-as-it-is even than sight. Smell is ENTIRELY an experience built up for us by our brains. — flannel jesus
which does seem to bear a non arbitrary relation to reality wrt shapes and spatial relationships. — hypericin
In 2003, Pawan Sinha, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, set up a program in the framework of the Project Prakash[8] and eventually had the opportunity to find five individuals who satisfied the requirements for an experiment aimed at answering Molyneux's question experimentally. Prior to treatment, the subjects (aged 8 to 17) were only able to discriminate between light and dark, with two of them also being able to determine the direction of a bright light. The surgical treatments took place between 2007 and 2010, and quickly brought the relevant subject from total congenital blindness to fully seeing. A carefully designed test was submitted to each subject within the next 48 hours. Based on its result, the experimenters concluded that the answer to Molyneux's problem is, in short, "no". Although after restoration of sight, the subjects could distinguish between objects visually almost as effectively as they would do by touch alone, they were unable to form the connection between an object perceived using the two different senses. The correlation was barely better than if the subjects had guessed. They had no innate ability to transfer their tactile shape knowledge to the visual domain.
I'm concerned primarily with the experience of it all - if a direct realist says "I see things as they really are", I don't see that as some opportunity for a semantic argument, to me it looks like an unambiguous statement about their visual experience - my visual experience matches reality as it really is. And, for entirely non-semantic reasons, I think it's false. I don't think I'm saying it's false because I mean some obscure thing by the word "see", I think it's false because I think our visual experience is simply not reality as it really is. It's something else. It's a construct. It's a construct that's causally connected to reality, but it's not just reality-as-it-is. — flannel jesus
Either you're experiencing reality as-it-really-is, OR your experience is something subjective and crafted for you by your brain. — flannel jesus
The process of smelling, or seeing, or whatever, involves physical interactions with real things, and I'm a realist so I think those things are real and those physical interactions really happen. And then I think when that becomes an experience, that experience isn't just raw-reality-as-it-really-is, it's an experience concocted for you by your brain. — flannel jesus
Is there something similar for smell or hearing? — Banno
Either you're experiencing reality as-it-really-is, OR your experience is something subjective and crafted for you by your brain. — flannel jesus
‘We have eyes, therefore we cannot see’ would be almost too much for a Pyrrhonist to swallow. — David Oderberg, Hume, the Occult, and the Substance of the School
Yeah, I don't think the phrase "perceive the world as it actually is" is a meaningful sentence as well... — flannel jesus
Our eyes are what provide us with sight, not what prevents us from seeing reality. — Leontiskos
Is anybody saying something to the contrary? — flannel jesus
This is a fiction. — Leontiskos
The confluence of the senses ("common sense") and their registering is not preceded by any form of decision-making. Others have pointed to the infinite regress at play in this. — Leontiskos
Presumably if the eye sees objects, then the ear also hears objects. — Leontiskos
It seems to me that we should be consistent and either talk about media (light/sound) or else mediated objects (the object which is seen/the object which is heard). — Leontiskos
Distinguishing direct from indirect realism is not a matter of terms — Leontiskos
The glove is a fine example. Here, indirect touch or feel makes sense — Banno
Is there something similar for smell or hearing? — Banno
I don't agree with that at all. Of course you feel the sandpaper - 200 grit is very different to 40 grit; a fact about sandpaper, not about nerves. — Banno
There's a window of decision between receiving data and having an experience of the data. — AmadeusD
We experience representations, not objects, in terms of sight. — AmadeusD
I'm not sure, you could think about the sunset itself having the quality of being beautiful, as we do of people.
You feel the differential effect of sandpaper of varying grit on your nervous system. — AmadeusD
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