Perception isn’t just visual. Do you agree or disagree? — NOS4A2

Yes, but I'm specifically talking about visual perception. But if you want me to be explicit, then according to your theory of perception, our perception of apples for the five main modalities are:

1. Sight: indirect
2. Hearing: indirect
3. Smell: indirect
4. Taste: direct
5. Touch: direct

So according to your theory, we only have direct perception of apples when it comes to taste and touch; but when it comes to sight, hearing, and smell, our perception of apples is only indirect.

Yes

So if you consider visual perception indirect because there is distance and other objects between apples and the eye, how do you describe perception where there is no distance nor other objects between the sense organ and the apple?

So if you consider visual perception indirect because there is distance and other objects between apples and the eye — NOS4A2

This isn't my claim. This is the consequence of your claim. I am simply pushing you to acknowledge this.

According to your theory of perception we do not have direct visual perception of apples.

So your so-called "direct realism" is very different to what is ordinarily understood by the term.

Again, perception isn’t limited to the visual, as you’ve conceded. Yet you keep limiting it to the visual. While I’ve long conceded that I cannot visually perceive apples (or anything) without light, you refuse to address whether I can still perceive apples without light. The answer to that question is “yes”.

Yet you keep limiting it to the visual. — NOS4A2

Yes, because it's important. This is the proposition under consideration:

1. We have direct visual perception of apples

According to most direct realists, (1) is true. According to you, (1) is false.

If (1) is false then one of these is true:

2. We do not have visual perception of apples
3. We only have indirect visual perception of apples

Therefore, according to you, either (2) or (3) is true.

I believe we have indirect visual perception of apples through the direct visual perception of light. This shouldn’t matter because the problem of perception is whether we can directly perceive the mind-independent world or directly perceive some mind-dependent intermediary. So why are we trying to keep discussion away from the problem?

I believe we have indirect visual perception of apples through the direct visual perception of light. This shouldn’t matter because the problem of perception is whether we can directly perceive the mind-independent world or directly perceive some mind-dependent intermediary. So why are we trying to keep discussion away from the problem? — NOS4A2

Of course it matters. If we don't have direct visual perception of apples then our ordinary understanding of perception is wrong, and there is an epistemological problem of perception. Having the direct object of visual perception be light rather than sense data is a problem for the sense datum theorist, but having it be light rather than apples is a problem for the traditional direct realist.

You're committing an association fallacy if you think that having the direct object of perception be just any mind-independent thing suffices as a solution to the problems of perception.

Then let’s try a different object of perception: the light that has bounced off an apple. How does one indirectly perceive the light bouncing off an apple?

How does one indirectly perceive the light bouncing off an apple? — NOS4A2

By light being causally responsible for but not a constituent of the first-person phenomenal experience that emerges from neural activity in the visual cortex.

I don’t know what a “constituent of the first-person phenomenal experience” is, and whether light it one or not. Can I have an example for the sake of comparison?

Can I have an example for the sake of comparison? — NOS4A2

An example of first-person phenomenal experience? It's what occurs when the visual cortex is active, whether dreaming, hallucinating, or having ordinary waking experiences, and what doesn't occur when the visual cortex isn't active, whether in deep sleep, having one's eyes closed, or suffering from cortical blindness.

An example of a constituent of that experience to be more precise. I’d like to avoid equivocating between “experience” as an occurrence or state of the human body, and “experience” as a space in which things occur.

A couple of quotes on the directness of visual perception.

I can believe just about anything I want, I can desire anything I want. My desires and my beliefs are not tied to my immediate environment in the way my visual experiences are. But when I open my eyes and look around in broad daylight, it is not up to me what I see; rather I am, by the very nature of the visual experience, forced to see the here and the now. This has an immensely important logical consequence: All experiences have the same formal intentional content. This is actually happening here and now or this object with these features exists here and now. ...

Notice that this point holds even when I know that the conditions of satisfaction are not satisfied here and now. I look at the star and know it ceased to exist millions of years ago, but all the same I am seeing it as if the shining of the star were happening right here and now. That phrase "seeing as if" marks intentional content because it fixes the conditions of satisfaction. Because of this presentational indexicality the visual experience always gives us an entire state of affairs, never just an object by itself, but always that this object exists here and now. — Seeing Things as They Are, Searle, 2015. P 65-66.

I'm not saying that the causal story is sufficient to cash out intentionality and epistemic normativity. — Michael

My understanding is that you think the causal/scientific story undercuts naïve realism, and that this is enough to settle the question of whether distal objects are the direct objects of perception.

But it seems to me you’re using “indirect realism” in a purely negative sense: i.e. as simply the rejection of naïve realism. If that’s the definition, then of course anyone who rejects naïve realism is an “indirect realist” by stipulation.

My point is that this doesn’t amount to a positive account of perception. Traditionally, the indirect realist framework is not merely the denial of naïve realism, but a substantive picture on which what is directly given are inner items (sense-data/representations/qualia) and distal objects are known only indirectly by inference. That is exactly what I reject.

So the disagreement isn’t over whether naïve realism is false; it’s whether rejecting naïve realism commits us to the kind of intermediary ontology required by a positive account of indirect realism.

I think your reply is clarifying, and I agree that we’re getting down to the core of the disagreement.

First, I’m not lumping refraction through the lens with what we are conscious of. Of course we are conscious of phenomenal character (color, sound, etc.) in a way we are not conscious of lens refraction. The question is whether being conscious of phenomenal character entails being conscious of a brain-modeled object as an object.

I don’t think it does. The phenomenal character is a feature of the act’s presentation of its object; it does not follow that it is itself an object of awareness with its own identity conditions.

Your photograph analogy is helpful, but I think it quietly shifts the issue. A photograph is itself a public object that can be inspected, re-identified, and treated as the intentional terminus of an act. But the “BMO” you’re positing is not something we can inspect in that way. If we were literally aware of BMOs as objects, then we should be able to distinguish (even in principle) “what the BMO is like” from “what the distal object is like.” But phenomenologically we don’t encounter two objects—an inner one and an outer one—we encounter one object as appearing.

On normativity: I don’t think “correspondence between BMO and DO” is yet an explanation. It presupposes the very normative notions at issue: accuracy, reference, aboutness, and correctness conditions. Saying “normativity is correspondence” is like saying “truth is correspondence”: it redescribes the target rather than explaining how such correspondence is possible or intelligible for a subject.

Moreover, IR doesn’t actually avoid the “error cases” problem—it relocates it. In IR the error is still an error about the DO, and the question remains: how does a subject ever get beyond the BMO to determine whether correspondence obtains? If you say “further BMOs,” you get regress; if you say “inference,” you’ve invoked normativity again.

So yes, I am arguing that DR gives a more satisfying account of normativity—not because it magically eliminates skepticism, but because it treats perceptual normativity as internal to world-directed experience itself, rather than as a relation between an inner object and an outer object that must somehow be bridged.

DR has to explain misperception. But IR has to explain something deeper: how any DO-directed normativity can arise at all if awareness terminates in a BMO. That’s the step I still don’t see made coherent.

There's the negative thesis that distal objects and their properties are not the constituents of first-person phenomenal experience and there's the positive thesis that the constituents of first-person phenomenal experience — those things that the naive realist wrongly believes to be distal objects and their properties — are in fact sense data/qualia/mental phenomena. Then there's the plausible epistemic worry that if distal objects and their properties are not the constituents of first-person phenomenal experience then the world might be radically different to how it appears to us.

Nothing about this prima facie entails that perceptions are not "world-directed" or "answerable to correctness/error".

Traditionally, the indirect realist framework is not merely the denial of naïve realism, but a substantive picture on which what is directly given are inner items (sense-data/representations/qualia) and distal objects are known only indirectly by inference. That is exactly what I reject. — Esse Quam Videri

Consider what you said before:

Strictly speaking, insofar as the apple has disintegrated, there is no direct object of perception during the second interval. — Esse Quam Videri

During this second interval I don't know that the apple has been disintegrated. I still believe that there is an intact red apple 10m in front of me because I am still having the first-person phenomenal experience described as "seeing a red apple 10m in front of me". I am inferring the existence of an intact red apple 10m in front of me from the fact that I am having the "appropriate" experience. The belief just happens to be wrong given that the apple was disintegrated. This same inference from the same kind of first-person phenomenal experience also happens during the first interval, before the apple was disintegrated, and just happens to be right given that the apple hasn't yet been disintegrated.

I agree that during the second interval I will judge that the apple is still there, and that this judgment will be false. But it doesn’t follow that the perceptual episode itself is an inference from an inner object.

What the apple case shows is simply that perceptual consciousness can retain the same sensory character even when its fulfillment condition fails. That is perfectly compatible with the apple having been the object of perception in the first interval and no longer being so in the second.

Your conclusion follows only if we assume from the outset that perception is always “experience + inference to a distal cause.” But that is precisely the indirect realist picture in dispute. On my view, the inference/judgment is a further act that can be correct or incorrect, whereas perception itself is world-directed and can succeed or fail in being fulfilled by what is there.

So the scenario establishes fallibility, not that the apple is always only inferred. Otherwise every case of perceptual error would prove that perception is never direct, which seems like an obvious non sequitur.

I agree that during the second interval I will judge that the apple is still there, and that this judgment will be false. — Esse Quam Videri

Oh, so the observer is unaware of the ten-second delay?

Then that's the problem. The causal and epistemic stories differ.

Yes, exactly! The causal latency introduces a temporal offset. If the subject is unaware of the offset, their judgment can be mistaken, but that doesn’t show the object perceived is an inner intermediary. In my book, it shows only that perceptual knowledge is fallible and requires correct interpretation of causal conditions.

Sounds accurate. If the observer is aware of the delay, then they are aware that they see the apple as is was ten seconds previously. They are under no compulsion to conclude that they only ever see a mental reconstruction of the apple, and never the apple.

Yep. And as you stated in a previous reply, the temptation to reify experience into an intermediary seems symptomatic of a deeply ingrained grammatical habit.

If the subject is unaware of the offset, their judgment can be mistaken, but that doesn’t show the object perceived is an inner intermediary. — Esse Quam Videri

If the object perceived is not the distal object, and it is not an inner intermediary, then what is it?

But it doesn’t follow that the perceptual episode itself is an inference from an inner object. — Esse Quam Videri

I don't understand what this means, or how it relates to what I am saying or to indirect realism. I am saying that during the second interval I see shapes and colours and depths and sizes — described as "seeing an intact red apple 10m in front of me" — and that these are visual properties of the qualia/sense-data/mental phenomena, not of some distal object in the environment — given that there is no appropriate distal object in the environment — and that in seeing these shapes and colours and depths and sizes I infer the existence of an intact red apple 10m in front of me — and I am saying that this is exactly what happens even before the apple has been disintegrated.

I've no clear idea of what you are getting at here. — Banno

That's fair. I'll come back to this when I've got some clearer ideas.

Let's assume that we live in a world in which the air is thick and light has mass and travels at a slow 1m/s. An apple is placed 10m in front of you. After 5 seconds it is disintegrated. After a further 5 seconds the light reaches your eyes and you see an intact apple for 5 seconds.

In those 5 seconds in which you see an intact apple do you have direct perception of the now disintegrated apple? If the apple is now disintegrated then what is the intact apple you see if not an image? — Michael

It is assumed the thing has been at 10m for sufficient time, re: >/= 10s, given the velocity stipulation, otherwise its appearance to sensibility wouldn’t have occurred in the first place, hence no perception at all is possible related to it.

….at 1m/s it will take 10s for the thing 10m away to be perceived, call the time of some event describing the primary condition of the thing to be perceived, t0;
….at t0 + 5s, there occurs an event for which there is a change in the primary condition of the thing, call it t1;
….at t1 neither the primary nor the secondary condition of the thing has made an appearance, nor even that there is a thing at all, hence there is no possible judgement to be made relative to it;
….given d=rt, @10s the t0 thing in its primary condition makes its appearance to sensibility, which is called perception, call it t2;
….at t2, the t1 change in the thing to its secondary condition has endured 5s, and given consistent d=rt, its appearance to sensibility is still 5s away from making its appearance, from which there remains to sensibility only the primary condition of the thing relative to t2, as its perception;
….the change in the condition of the thing perceived at t2 manifests as its own distinct appearance at t1 plus 10s, call it t4, fully 15s after the event at t0;
….without the change in the condition of the thing that appears, there is no ground for change in the judgement of the perception obtained from the event at t0, from which follows necessarily that for the 10s duration between t1 and t4, whatever the condition of the thing at t0 will remain the ground for which judgement regarding the thing is made. Nothing at all can be said with respect to that which never makes its appearance insofar as it relates to experience, while anything at all can be said with respect to mere inference, which regards only the possibility of experience without relation to an appearance.

No, there is no perception of whatever the event at t1 such that judgements relative to the event at t0, in this case an intact thing known as an apple, is superseded by judgements conditioned by different perceptions.

It is absurd to say the judgement related to the only perception there is, re: the thing at t0, is false, insofar as there is nothing at all at t2 </=10s, to negate it. The absurdity, technically the irrationality, resides in insisting the judgements determinable by conditions between t0 and t2 still hold after the time >/= 10s of t1, which is just to say the disintegrated apple didn’t disintegrate, in contradiction with the certainty of its relative appearance.

On what possible ground could one say, at any time before t2, the condition of the apple wasn’t precisely as it appeared? By the same token, on what ground can one possible say he didn’t have the antecedent perception of an intact apple, even after having subsequently perceived an entirely different appearance he already knows is the very same apple, destroyed?

I’m sure I can’t figure out what problem there can be, at least regarding this apple gedankenexperiment, and therefrom, direct realism relative to perception in general.

If the object perceived is not the distal object, and it is not an inner intermediary, then what is it? — hypericin

Let’s quickly disambiguate the word “perception.” At minimum we need to distinguish (i) the sensory episode (experience), (ii) the act of grasping/identifying what is going on (understanding), and (iii) the commitment that something is the case (judgment).

In the apple scenario, the content of experience and understanding can remain continuous even after the apple disintegrates, because the light still carries information from the earlier state of the world. In that sense, the intentional object is the distal apple as it existed at the time the light was emitted (the apple-at-t0, not the apple-at-t1).

If the observer is unaware of the time lag and judges “there is an apple over there right now,” then that judgment is false, because there is no longer any distal object that satisfies it.

On this analysis, nothing requires treating the intentional object as an internal intermediary.

I don't understand what this means, or how it relates to what I am saying or to indirect realism — Michael

As far as I can tell, you are saying that during the second interval you take the shapes/colours/etc. to be properties of qualia, and then you infer the the existence of the apple from them. That's exactly the step I’m rejecting.

Which part do you reject? Colours and shapes as qualia or that I continue to believe that there is an intact red apple 10m in front of me because I continue to see an intact red apple 10m in front of me?

Sorry, I'm not entirely sure what you're saying here. Is there a question? I'll present the argument in full, starting with the naive view of perception:

On [the naive realist] conception of experience, when one is veridically perceiving the objects of perception are constituents of the experiential episode. The given event could not have occurred without these entities existing and being constituents of it in turn, one could not have had such a kind of event without there being relevant candidate objects of perception to be apprehended. So, even if those objects are implicated in the causes of the experience, they also figure non-causally as essential constituents of it... Mere presence of a candidate object will not be sufficient for the perceiving of it, that is true, but its absence is sufficient for the non-occurrence of such an event. The connection here is [one] of a constitutive or essential condition of a kind of event. — Martin 2004

The important points to take from this are:

P1. If I have direct perception of an object then that object is a constituent of the experience
P2. If an object is a constituent of the experience then that object exists
P3. That an object exists does not entail that it is a constituent of the experience

I then consider this thought experiment:

P4. An apple is placed 10m in front of me
P5. The light it reflects travels at 1m/s
P6. The apple is disintegrated after 5 seconds
C1. Therefore, I see an apple for 5 seconds starting 5 seconds after the apple has been disintegrated
C2. Therefore, the apple does not exist during the 5 seconds in which I see an apple
C3. Therefore, the apple is not a constituent of the experience during the 5 seconds in which I see an apple
C4. Therefore, I do not have direct perception of the apple during the 5 seconds in which I see an apple

This then continues with:

P7. If I do not have direct perception of the apple during the 5 seconds in which I see an apple when the light travels at 1m/s then I do not have direct perception of the apple during the 5 seconds in which I see an apple when the light travels at 299,792,458 m/s
C5. Therefore, I do not have direct perception of the apple during the 5 seconds in which I see an apple when the light travels at 299,792,458 m/s
C6. Therefore, either I do not have perception of the apple or I only have indirect perception of the apple during the 5 seconds in which I see an apple when the light travels at 299,792,458 m/s

A first-person, subjective description of oneself and what is occurring in his one’s own body is limited by the mechanics of his own biology. He cannot fully sense what is going on in there, and so has to guess based on the flimsy evidence afforded to what he can sense from deeper within. Pains, itches, and other feelings is but a patchwork of this limited evidence and always requires a second look, at least medically. Until someone can sonogram or x-ray or open us up, we have no clear picture. A fever or pain could be a sign of a greater malady, for instance, of which he may have no clue.

The description of “naive” ought to be afforded to the phenomenologist on these grounds. It is tantamount to self-diagnosis. He builds an entire philosophical edifice upon unreliable evidence: hallucinations, dreams, and the limited periphery afforded by his own biology. It’s why Michael and Amadeus require analogies from what they can see in order to describe what they cannot.