We can't both be experiencing smells "as they are" considering how viscerally different our experiences are. — flannel jesus

What would be the problem with just saying the fly, dog or human has a different reaction to the same smell?

That's a good question, but seems incredibly unlikely to me.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/we-all-experience-smells-differently-from-one-another-180948156/

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. The smell/sight/sound/whatever is just the sum of information picked up by a sensory organ. So if me and a fly pick up on the same information, it is the same smell, and our different reactions are irrelevant.

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

I think it's an important distinction. 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.

Which illustrates that distinguishing between the experience of senses and the things being sensed is, I think, a meaningful, useful distinction to make.

You say maybe our smell experiences are the same, maybe our reactions are just difference, and I say maybe you're right, but also maybe you're not right, and I think most likely they're not the same. I think it's not just likely, it's well beyond likely that different living things have different experiences of smell, and they can't all be experiencing reality as it is if that's the case

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

I am a functionalist about mental properties, so talking about "digust" or "experience" is fine but "qualia" is a good way to lose me completely. I don't believe there is a color wheel to rotate, that idea is a mistake.

Ok, we don't have a whole lot to talk about then.

Maybe not but it's helpful that you brought it up explicitly. Reading this thread I really felt like I was missing the point of what people were discussing.

Yeah, I see why you would. Some people are only having a discussion on the semantics of what it means to "see", and other people aren't, or at least are convinced they aren't (some might argue that they are, they just don't see it).

For me, it's all about experience and qualia.

I'm partial to the UI view:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_D._Hoffman#:~:text=MUI%20theory%20states%20that%20%22perceptual,have%20evolved%20to%20perceive%20the

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".

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

Conceptually at least, it seems we could not be further apart on the issue of perception. I believe we can only perceive the world as it is and argued as much in my thread about Illusionism:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/14459/on-illusionism-what-is-an-illusion-exactly/p1

Critical for me is the distinction between perception, which is pre-propositional, and interpretation, which is the generation of propositions.

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

I agree with this, apart from "perceive the world as it actually is"; there is no such way of perceiving.

Yeah, I don't think the phrase "perceive the world as it actually is" is a meaningful sentence as well - perception is always inherently from a perspective. There's not even in principle a way to perceive the world as it actually is.

However that doesn't mean it's meaningless for him to explicitly say that for his theory - perhaps it's worth explicitly distancing the theory from Naive Realism, and more explicitly saying "these experiences are built up for us, they aren't just raw reality", even if it's strictly true that there's no actual way to perceive the world that way.

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

Smell is akin to color perception, rather than sight as a whole, which does seem to bear a non arbitrary relation to reality wrt shapes and spatial relationships.

Whereas, sight/smell is to reality as sign is to signified. Both are correlated to what they represent, and yet both are completely arbitrary. Moreover, the relationship is one way: signs point to signified, smells point to their chemicals, and colors to their wavelengths, yet there is no smell in a fragrance, no color in light, no sign in the signified.

Dies that make sense?

which does seem to bear a non arbitrary relation to reality wrt shapes and spatial relationships. — hypericin

I agree that it seems non arbitrary, but I was a little bit surprised to learn that blind people who later gain sight have literally no expectation of what they're going to experience when they see basic shapes like squares and circles. So I would actually question the ENTIRE experience of sight, not just colour.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molyneux%27s_problem

But intuitively I do understand what you're getting at.

Just to clarify exactly which part of the Molyneux Problem page I'm referring to :

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 think that's super fucking interesting, because it goes against my expectation and probably the expectation of most sighted people. I would have thought the sight of a circle and the physical feel of a circle were unmistakably related, and yet newly sighted people fail to connect them like that.

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

Why not neither? Must we choose one or the other, or could we suspend our judgment here?

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

I think, in order for this to make sense, you must at least be able to talk about real things in addition to experience. Perhaps, in a round-about way to grant the point for philosophical purposes, we could say individual experience does not have an accessibility relation to reality, but language does and this is what allows us to speak truly on the matter -- that is, through language use we have a direct realism through successful reference.

That's not raw-reality-as-it-really-is -- but it's real, and one step, and it's what allows us to talk about real things and real experiences as distinct categories in the first place.

Wow, crazy. It is hard for me to think beyond the idea that shapes can only look the way they do. For taste and smell it is easy, substitute any for any other, shift the whole palette, swap in totally new ones, and you still have consistency. But shape? Can you and I be walking around seeing circles where I see squares? It doesn't make sense, we would report different things, and one of us would feel corners where there should not be. Can you imagine any other visual shape that would work in place of a circle? I cannot.

As a confounding factor, these people must have massive visual-cognitive impairment; not only did their visual systems not get to develop normally, they must have atrophied badly over the years. I don't know how much that might play into the result.

Is there something similar for smell or hearing? — Banno

I doubt in English or any natural European language, as we only understood the mechanisms of smell or hearing very recently, while the mechanism of feeling (touch) was always very obvious.
Maybe in some constructed languages there is a distinction for smell and hearing.

Either you're experiencing reality as-it-really-is, OR your experience is something subjective and crafted for you by your brain. — flannel jesus

I am reminded of David Oderberg's quip:

‘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

Our eyes are what provide us with sight, not what prevents us from seeing reality. One could say the same thing about subjectivity.

Yeah, I don't think the phrase "perceive the world as it actually is" is a meaningful sentence as well... — flannel jesus

Then the indirect realist who says that "We do not perceive the world as it actually is" is talking nonsense, and this has of course already been pointed out in this thread (namely that many indirect realists presuppose the coherence of the "view from nowhere").

Our eyes are what provide us with sight, not what prevents us from seeing reality. — Leontiskos

Is anybody saying something to the contrary?

Is anybody saying something to the contrary? — flannel jesus

"Either you're seeing reality as it is, OR your sight is something subjective, crafted by your eyes."

Looks like you've modified that quote, so... you're the only person saying something to the contrary.

- That's cute.

you clearly didn't come here to say something serious. Are you getting what you came for?

- I made a point and you ignored it, so I was thinking the same thing. (Your either-or model is untenable.)

You took a quote of someone's, and changed their words, to say something about their beliefs. That's not a serious thing to do.

- If you can't carry the 1 then I guess that's that. If I were quoting you I would have used the quote function.

This is a fiction. — Leontiskos

Absolutely not, per the majority of what i've put forward in this thread, completely ignored.

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

It is precedent TO the 'decision-making'. This has been shown by experiments subsequent to Libet, also. There's a window of decision between receiving data and having an experience of the data.
Unless you can outline how our physically indirect system of sight grants us direct experience, there is no way around this fact. THe fiction is the particularly perniciious habit of ignoring the empirical facts when discussion perception. This has been ignored.

Presumably if the eye sees objects, then the ear also hears objects. — Leontiskos

This goes directly to my attempts to use these words usefully, instead of ways that are useless for this discussion. If 'seeing' is done by the eyes, then 'to look at' means absolutely nothing in contrast to the experience of representations (which is unavoidable, making the distinction the fundamentally important one in this discussion.. more on that below). We experience representations, not objects, in terms of sight. That seems inarguable, and therefore there is no way to pretend what we see is the object. No one but philosophers posit this, anyway, and so we can be fairly sure there's hide-the-ball going on. Obviously, hiding hte ball here is the process between the object/light/refraction/photoreception/electrical impulse/synaptic activity/experience. There are at least five obstacles to the direct conception of sight.

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

This is getting there, but if your position is to take the 'thing-in-itself' are genuinely un-speakable, im unsure where to go. We must be able to refer to ab object to be able to speak of the 'media' objects can 'aim' at our sense organs. That said, I think your distinction here is at least much, much further toward reality than is a pretend notion that objects in thought (i.e experience) are the objects out in the world rather than some version, at best, of them.

Distinguishing direct from indirect realism is not a matter of terms — Leontiskos

You'll, probably, note on re-reading, that you are not addressing my point at all. Distinguishing anything in a way that has any meaning relies on best-fit terminology and terminology which is consistent, not illogical, and as best we can, exclusive. I have tried to do so - it doesn't touch the concepts. It touches our ability to discuss them and the use of 'seeing' throughout this thread has, on my account, cause the vast majority of dumb quibbling over positions that seem to just be different words to describe the empirical facts, adjusted merely for hte comfort of the speaker. The commitments entailed by avoiding discomfort could be overcome with better words being used, or at least, better use of the words involved.

The glove is a fine example. Here, indirect touch or feel makes sense — Banno

(on your terms) yes, I can see that this is a fine example for you. For me, it's another level of mediation. A different kind, for sure, though.

Is there something similar for smell or hearing? — Banno

Again, the 'data' actually enter the sense organs as-they-are rather than by essentially shadow, as is the case with touch. The space indented into the skin is reflected in the electrical impulses, rather than the actual feel and shape of the object. But, you can know you're touching something via the other senses. You can't know you're seeing something, or hearing something, based on the other senses. There seems to be something unique about touch. With the other four, there is material entering the body by way of light, sound waves or chemicals(smell and taste) physically interacting with the sense organs. Touch works by a kind of inference - which is probably why its so prone to mistake vs other senses that tend to be construed as 'delusive' or 'hallucinatory' if they don't comport with the world around us. We just accept that some people feel cold differently, for instance, but not that we all hear the note E4 differently. There is measurable data input that can be measured without hte sense organs. Not so with touch.

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

You feel the differential effect of sandpaper of varying grit on your nervous system. That can be aberrant, as an example of why this is obviously mediated. You may touch the sand paper directly, but what you experience is not that touch. And that is just a fact about our sense systems. Its not a philosophical argument. For every sense, despite disparate types of input, electrical impulses in the brain are what constitutes an experience subsequent to the sensitivity in question.

I'm thinking its possible you don't deny this, but you're saying that 'well, what else could we possibly experience?" and call that direct.

I can accept that, but just don't think its accurate enough for a proper discussion.

There's a window of decision between receiving data and having an experience of the data. — AmadeusD

Decision does not precede the registering of sense data. 's quip about hypericin's "homunculus" was more pithy and effective in communicating the point at issue.

We experience representations, not objects, in terms of sight. — AmadeusD

Then you've acceded to the option I gave where one speaks about light/sound instead of objects of sight/hearing. In <this post> you seemed to associate sight with objects and hearing with sound (representation), and I was pointing to the incongruity.

I'm not sure, you could think about the sunset itself having the quality of being beautiful, as we do of people.

I was going to say the same thing.

Anyhow, some things have to be reality rather than appearance. The appearances versus reality distinction starts to lose its content if everything known or perceived is appearance.

That the statements "I see stars," after getting bonked on the head and "the car is red," are different is obvious from a naive standpoint, but it becomes difficult to pull the two apart if there is only appearance. Indeed, what's the point of calling things "appearances" at all if they are all we've got? Without a "reality" to compare to, isn't appearance just reality?

This seems like a problem for those particular forms of indirect realism that claim that only appearance is experienced or known, which granted is not many of them.

You feel the differential effect of sandpaper of varying grit on your nervous system. — AmadeusD

Well, no. I feel the different grit of the sandpaper. I don't feel my nerves. I feel using nerves.

That's kinda the point. Feeling only one's nerves would provide you with no information about the sandpaper.