But mostly, I believe that the dispute between direct realists and indirect realists concerns whether or not we have direct perceptions/perceptual experiences of real world objects
— Luke

I also believe that a real world object is not part of a perception, and that only a representation of a real world object is part of a perception. I don't have physical (real world) objects in my mind; only representations of them.
— Luke

It would have been good if either this, or your other conception of the conflict, were actually agree upon in the first pages of this thread. Read together, these two passages end the dispute. — AmadeusD

It is almost as if @Luke has become a radical indirect realist!

Ironically, I disagree. Objects *are* part perception. But perception is a process, what we are actually, directly aware of, the perceptual experience, merely represents the object.

I believe that a perception is equivalent to a perceptual experience. My brain and nerves are not what I have perceptual experiences of, so I would not include these as being part of a perception. (Your diagram indicates that the brain generates the perception, and that the nerves transmit the perception, so maybe you agree.) — Luke

You are conflating perception and perceptual experience. A "perceptual experience" is not a perception when you are hallucinating, dreaming, etc. There is nothing you are perceiving, you are only experiencing. I call a "perception" the overall process that connects real world objects with the perceiving self, and "perceptual experience" what the self actually subjectively experiences.

Is this a disagreement on terminology, or substance? If terminology, what other word could fill the role I am giving "perception"?

You seem to believe that the dispute between direct realists and indirect realists concerns whether or not we have direct awareness of our perceptions/perceptual experiences, instead of direct perceptions of real world objects. In fact, you appear to agree that we have direct perceptions of real world objects. — Luke

No!

The dispute is over whether perceptions allow direct or indirect awareness of real world objects. Perceptions can be directly of real world objects, by contrast with cases like photographs. But as I made very clear, in my conception of perception, we are not directly aware of everything that makes up a perception. We are only directly aware of perceptual experience.

The conversation is not progressing. I will try a different approach.

Here is a diagram of my conception of perception. Which parts do you disagree with?

A perception happens when an object in the world directly (touch, taste) or indirectly (smell, sight, hearing) stimulates nerve endings
— hypericin

It's unclear to me how you are distinguishing direct from indirect here. — Luke

Object perception in smell, sight, hearing are indirectly mediated by molecules, light, and sound waves respectively. But to be clear, this is not the indirection we are discussing.

I agree. However, the typical contrast for the indirect realist seems to be that a perception is, instead, directly of a representation. — Luke

Who is the typical indirect realist here?

How does the lack of awareness of a perceptual experience differ from the lack of a perceptual experience? — Luke

There is no difference.

I'm not sure why you are getting hung up over "awareness of perceptual experience". We already agreed that the self is aware of perceptual experience. When I say, "the self is only directly aware of perceptual experience", to point out that the self is *not* directly aware of what the perception is *of*, nor any of the other components of perception, would you have me say, "the self is only directly perceptual experience"? The "aware of" is necessitated by English.

why you seem to consider the perceptual experience itself to be insufficient. — Luke

As I pointed out in my last post perceptual experience is only one part of perception:

A perception happens when an object in the world directly (touch, taste) or indirectly (smell, sight, hearing) stimulates nerve endings, which transmit information to the brain, which (somehow) produces the perceptual experience. — hypericin

Perceptual experience is a necessary but insufficient condition for perception. If the perceptual experience is there but other parts are missing, we have things like dreams, hallucinations, and nerve misfirings.

the perceptual experience or representation is directly of worldly objects — Luke

For a "perception to be directly of worldly objects " makes sense to me by contrast with the case when the perception is mediated by other objects, i.e. a photo of an apple vs an apple.

Whereas I would call the perceptual experience the perception, you want to include an additional step and call your awareness of the perceptual experience the perception. — Luke

I think it is clear that the perceptual experience is not the perception. A perception happens when an object in the world directly (touch, taste) or indirectly (smell, sight, hearing) stimulates nerve endings, which transmit information to the brain, which (somehow) produces the perceptual experience. the only part of this process the subject is directly aware of is the perceptual experience itself. All the rest of it, the brain's interpretive processes, the nerves, the way the object stimulated the nerves, and above all the object itself, are parts of the perception that must be inferred, as the subject is not directly aware of them.

That is the question I think we are answering: "does perception afford the subject/self direct awareness of the world?", not "is perception considered as an abstract entity in some sense directly of the world?"

Of course that's 'the way it is', because I merely stated a consequence of what you're arguing for. If you believe that touching fire is not directly perceiving fire, then there's not much more I can say. — creativesoul

You are not making arguments, but merely appealing to common sense. There are venues where appeals to common sense carry some weight, this is not one of them.

Sure, and perceptual experience might also include, and/or be affected by, expectation, environmental conditions, and other stuff too. — Luke

Everything is affected by other things. If X is affected by Y, we don't generally say that X is X and Y

If you agree that our perceptual experience is not of a representation (i.e. is not of itself), then what do we have a perceptual experience of? Odour molecules? — Luke

Yes, The experience is of odor molecules. The whole point is we have no direct awareness of what experience is of. This is very obvious in the case of smell; until recently we didn't know odor molecules existed at all. All we are directly aware of is the smell, by way of which we are indirectly aware of odor molecules.
.

Here is an example of disqualifying us from directly perceiving by using our biological machinery and how they work as reason.

Makes no sense to me.

Touching the fire, on your view, is not directly perceiving the fire. Nonsense. — creativesoul

Yup. That's the way it is, your common sense opinions notwithstanding.

Right, so those parts of sense which are not attended to, not conscious, are not representations, but are presumably unconscious physical, neural effects. — Janus

No, you are missing the distinction between "not attended to" and "not conscious". Think of looking at a painting. You are aware of the visual gestalt of the whole painting, but you can only attend to an aspect of it, maybe the main theme of the painting. Then you can choose to focus on other details.

If most of the data is never brought to consciousness it does not seem apt to refer to it as "representation"; who is it being represented to? — Janus

Perceptual experience represents the world to conscious awareness. We are aware of a gestalt of perceptual experience, and can choose to attend to a tiny slice of it.

Since language and knowledge are inherently representative, I can't see how we could have language and knowledge without representation. — Janus

I was referring to perceptual experience as representation. I changed "representation" in the quote to perceptual experience for clarity.

It could be said that a perceptual experience simply is a representation. However, I made the weaker assertion that representation is only involved in a perceptual experience, because language and knowledge can also form part of a perceptual experience. — Luke

This is not necessarily weaker, just different. It seems more accurate to say that perceptual experience is a representation, and that language and knowledge might be stimulated by the perceptual experience, or might not, depending on whether we attend to it . After all, we receive a torrent of representative perceptual experience all the time, and most of it is unreflected upon. Only a small fraction receives attention, and anything like linguistic content.

Perceptual experience without language and knowledge is still perceptual experience. But language and knowledge without perceptual experience is just language and knowledge. Logically, language and knowledge is something that may be added onto perceptual experience, while the representation constitutes it.

This is not nitpicking, these distinctions are crucial to the discussion. If knowledge of an object is part of the perceptual experience itself, it may be considered as immediate as the representation. But if it only follows/stimulated from the representation, then this seems implausible

Moreover, if a perceptual experience is a representation (or is a representation plus language), then we do not have a perceptual experience of this representation. — Luke

Agreed

...

I'm confused about what would it take to qualify as direct perception to those who argue for indirect.

Anyone here have an answer? — creativesoul

I have an answer no one has given yet that I think is the correct one: lower organisms that do not use representational perception perceive directly.

Think of an amoeba, light hits a photo receptor, and by some logic the amoeba moves one way or the other.

If you regard this as "perception", then this is direct perception. If however perception for you entails the kind of representational perception we use, where the brain generates a virtual world for the centralized decision maker to evaluate and respond to, then perception is inherently indirect.

Perception need not entail recognition or identification of objects. We can have a perceptual experience of an object (e.g. for the first time) and be unable to identify the object. — Luke

My position is that perceptual experiences necessarily involve representation, but that we do not perceive a representation. — luke

When you smell something you cannot attribute to an object, the only thing you are aware of is the phenomenal experience of the smell, which is exactly the representation of the odor molecules to conscious awareness.

In your account, when we smell this unidentifiable smell, you say the perception involves a representation, but we are somehow unaware of this representation. We aren't aware of the object, and we aren't aware of its perceptual representation. What is it then that we are aware of?

True, perceptions are of many things. I'm not sure what your point is though. — Janus

Am I being that unclear? My point is not that perceptions are of many things. My point is that perception is not just "seeing an object", you have to at least conceptually recognize both phenomenal awareness and object awareness.

My position is that perceptual experiences necessarily involve representation, but that we do not perceive a representation. Instead, the representation helps to form the perceptual experience, which is then directly of its object. — Luke

What exactly are we doing then, when we smell something but are unaware what it is?

I would not class an hallucination as a perception because nothing is being perceived. — Janus

Perceptions combine the phenomenal experience of hallucinations with something being perceived. Hallucinations prove that perceptions are not unitary.

The point is not whether you confuse hallucination with reality, nor how much acid you've dropped. The point is you can't lump together awareness of objects with sensations, because hallucinations are subjective sensations without awareness of anything. Perceptions are both of these.

For me saying that we see representations is more problematic and less parsimonious than saying we simply see things. — Janus

If we simply "see things" how do you account for hallucinations?

That we are aware of representations as well as the thing is more obvious with other senses such as smell. When you smell a lemon, you are aware of two things: that a lemon is nearby because you smell one, and the subjective sensation of smelling a lemon. Each of these two can occur without the other: you can be aware of lemons nearby without smelling them, and you can smell lemons without lemons being nearby, in the case of phantom smells. Any account of smell and any of the senses has to acknowledge these two distinct things.

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That is, your perception would not be of a representation of the odour molecules; your perception would be of the odour molecules themselves. — Luke

Smell allows perception of a cake, or odor molecules. What the conscious self is directly aware of, is not the cake, not the odor molecules, but just the perception, the nice smell. The nice smell is a fiction, it does not exist anywhere outside of your head, even though our brains are arranged to make it seem as if perceptions are windows into the world.

Conscious self -> perceptions -> world.

The conscious self only directly experience perceptions, manifesting to it as phenomenal experience/qualia, which are the the illusions which allow the conscious self to interface with the world. I call them illusions because they present to the conscious self as if they themselves were the world. To accept this illusion is to be a naive realist.

Not because I'm not wanting to call the whole baseball experience an experience, but because when you list out all the direct experiences that are part of that experience -- all the qualia and first-person thoughts - it's still just a bunch of internal, immediate stuff. — flannel jesus

What makes all the internal, immediate stuff more than a hallucination or dream is that you are in fact experiencing a baseball game... via all the internal, immediate stuff.

I don’t think colours and sounds and smells and tastes “map” to objective features at all, and certainly not in a sense that can be considered “representative.” — Michael

I say that colors, sounds, smells, and tastes "map" to objective features in the same way that mathematical functions map from one domain to another. So the optical nervous system in a sense "maps" from 450nm light to subjective blue. Color represents kinds of light in the same way signs represents the signified, without being representative in the sense I think you mean.

The connection between distal objects and sensory precepts is nothing more than causal, determined in part by each individual’s biology. — Michael

If it were nothing more than causal, if that's the most we can say about it, it wouldn't be of any utility.

The “objective” world is a mess of quantum fields, far removed from how things appears to us. — Michael

That characterizes the world at one length scale, one that is not ours. The way we perceive the world is a perspective, one of infinitely many possible, tailored by evolution to represent as much as possible the slice of reality that is relevant to us. It is no more "wrong" or "illusory" than it is "objectively correct". If it were merely wrong or illusion, it would not be of any use.

Futher to my previous post, if I want to use the word 'experience' to only refer to those raw things we have immediate access to, the qualia, then I would say we don't "experience" a baseball game at all.

We experience the visual qualia, and we experience the series of thoughts which include the thought "I'm watching a baseball game" and "this game is fun / this game sucks" and etc. — flannel jesus

But then, you are kind of left with no word at all to describe your relation to the baseball game. There are plenty for what you are talking about: "phenomenal experience", "sense data", "qualia", your own "raw experience". These all mean more or less the same thing, afaict.

I don't want to say "you don't experience the baseball game", when you see it live, and even on TV. In both cases, you are causally connected to it in a nontrivial way, you think and feel about it, you have internal representations that map to objective features of it.

Your way of speaking seems to suggest a self locked in their own personal world. I have sympathy with the semantic/non-naïve direct realist intuition that we are in fact connected to the external world, and I agree with @Michael that epistemologically it and indirect realism are equivalent. I just differ from semantic realism in emphasizing the deeply mediate nature of this connection, the fact that there is truly nothing "direct" whatsoever about it.

↪hypericin These words are too abstract for me, an example might help. — flannel jesus

Consider the experience of watching a YouTube video of a man telling a story. Your mind is transported to the world of the story, it is what occupies your attention. But your experience of the story is indirect. More direct is your experience of the man and his voice, as you experience the story via his voice and gestures. But this experience is still indirect, what is even more direct is your experience of your computer making sounds and images, as you experience the man's voice and gestures via your computers monitor and speakers.

Within this framework, the indirect realist says that this is still indirect, that there is a fundamental, bedrock, direct layer of experience. Of course, this is subjective sensory experience, because you experience every aspect of the world only via sensory experience. — hypericin

An experience had via a more direct experience.

So then I agree that there is no such thing as "indirect phenomenal experience", "indirect qualia", but there is "indirect experience", right?

Your analogies are all about things that aren't *experience itself*. A TV isn't experience itself. A baseball game isn't experience itself. I think you misunderstood the words you quoted from me. — flannel jesus

You seem to be using the word "experience" and "experience itself" as if they only meant "phenomenal experience". There are other kind of experience, right?

If Jodie had told you herself, instead of hearing it from Bob, or if you went to the baseball game and saw it live, instead of watching it on TV, then these would be direct perceptions, right? — Luke

I would experience Jodie's words directly, instead of via Bob, and the game directly, instead of via the TV. But these events would still be experienced by me via my phenomenal experience of them, so in that sense they are experienced indirectly.

In the cases of hearing about Jodie from Bob, and watching the game on TV, there are (at least) two levels of indirection: the explicit one of the examples, and the implicit one that indirect realism points out.

The word "direct" and "indirect" don't really seem to apply to experience itself to me - experience is experience, it's fundamental, it's nothing else other than itself. Direct and indirect can be words we use to categorize casual chains that lead to experience, but not experience itself. — flannel jesus

Disagree. Applying direct and indirect to experience is the only way I've seen to make sense of this question. Casual chains lead to a mare's nest of problems and ambiguities, this way is intuitive and easy to understand.

To indirectly experience x is to experience it via a more direct experience. To directly experience x is to experience it without an intermediary experience.

The best example might be TV. When you are watching something, say a baseball game, you are experiencing it, but only indirectly, via the direct experience of the TV itself. The baseball game is casually connected to the TV, the features on the TV map to features of the game. Yet, what you experience is not the game itself, but in fact a representation of it.

Once you understand that, the claim indirect realists are making becomes clear; all of experienced reality stands in relation to phenomenal experience as the baseball game stands in relation to the TV. It is a bedrock layer of direct experience via which everything else is experienced(a positive claim, not mere negation of direct realism).

What inference(s) are you making? — Luke

In "perceptions of the world", that a perception is indeed "of the world", and not a hallucination, must be inferred. Because, this information is not contained within the perception itself.

It seems like you've labelled experiences without an external cause as "direct" and experiences with an external cause as "indirect". That's kind of just stipulating that perception of real-world objects is indirect, which is begging the question. — Luke

No. An experience of heat on my skin is direct, not because it doesn't have an external cause (there may be a match an inch from my skin), but because the experience has direct phenomenological content, and is not subject to doubt. I may doubt the cause, but I cannot doubt the feeling of heat itself. Whereas, if Bob told me what Jodie said this morning, I may indeed be aware of what Jodie said this morning, but only indirectly. What I am directly aware of, my actual experience, are the words Bob told me.

This I think is the essence of the direct/indirect divide. And the indirect realist claims that there is no direct experience of objects, because all such experience must be via phenomenal experience, which is the bedrock, most direct kind of experience, and the directness that is in contrast to the indirectness of object experience.

We are aware of our perceptions. I take issue with your distinction between direct/indirect awareness. — Luke

We are aware of our perceptions? But you've been saying, and just in this very post, that

You don't perceive your perceptual experience. — Luke

We are aware of our perceptions, but we don't perceive our perceptual experience? The latter just seems like a more awkward, less grammatical form of the former.

You agree that we can both perceive objects, and have awareness of perceptions in themselves? This is most clear with senses other than sight. So when we are tasting a pickle, we are perceiving the pickle, gaining awareness of the pickle, via taste. But there is also the sensation of taste itself, the salty, tangy experience of tasting a pickle.

If unconscious inference makes something indirect, then all knowledge is necessarily indirect, because concious awareness itself is undergirded by an extremely complex manifold of inferential processes, computation, and communications. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I agree, My argument wasn't "unconscious inference makes something indirect", I just wanted to challenge the sort of naive claims we see here, "we just see the tree".

In order to establish indirectness, I think we need to demonstrate that we are aware of objects via our awareness of sensory experience. If, in the same way we experience a person's voice via experience of a phone and its speaker, we experience objects via sensory experience itself, then I think indirectness is established. Experience of objects would be unambiguously indirect, happening only by way of experience of something which is more direct. Moreover, it can be argued that perceptual experience is itself direct: not only does it not occur by way of any more direct experience, but it it is uniquely not the subject of doubt. I can doubt anything about what I experience, except for the fact that I am having this experience.

What I am disagreeing with are ideas such as that my seeing a tree is an inference. — Janus

We don't see various shapes and hues and then, through some concious inferential process decide that we have knowledge of a chair in front us. We just see chairs. — Count Timothy von Icarus

We certainly don't "just see" trees and chairs. What we see are very incomplete visual details of one angle upon the tree and chair. Then, we use this information, coupled with expectation, context, and prior experience with the visual categories of "tree" and "chair" to make the seemingly instant determination that there is in fact a tree or chair in front of us.

The fact that this mostly or entirely occurs without conscious awareness does not belie the fact that there is an incredibly complex inferential process at work. One measure of this complexity is the daunting task of implementing this logic in a computer. It is so difficult that it had to wait for AI, which applies immense computational resources to automate algorithmic development itself, before it could be satisfactorily done.

Compared to what other sort of perception? It's as direct as you can get. — Luke

"Direct" does not mean "as direct as you can get". "As direct as you can get" may still be indirect. What is it compared to? The directness of the perceptual experience itself.

The dispute is about whether our perceptions of the world are direct or indirect; it is not about how we know or whether we know that those perceptions are veridical or not. — Luke

The dispute is over whether we directly perceive objects or not; it is not over our knowledge of our perceptions. Our knowledge about (the veridicality of) our perceptions is not our perceptions. — Luke

How can "perceptions of the world" be "direct", if the "of the world" must be inferred from the perceptions, and other context? In direct realism, we perceive objects themselves, not the proxy of perceptual experience. How can we perceive objects themselves if even the object's existence at all is not a part of the perception?

What is the distinction between direct and indirect awareness? — Luke

I think the distinction is clear. The feeling of heat on my skin, feelings of anger or contentment, the sound s and feeling of playing the drums, are all direct. My awareness of the exact temperature from my thermometer, my awareness of what Jodie said, via Bob's telling me this morning, and my awareness of your thinking on this subject, are all obviously indirect.

This talk of "awareness of perceptions" is just another of your attempts to push our perceptions back a step — Luke

You will have to provide a convincing argument that we are not aware of our perceptions. On the face of it, perceptions are exactly what we are (directly) aware of.

Another super annoying thing. I hate how when you quote, the quote goes wherever the cursor happens to be. 95% of the time this is in the middle of a sentence, and I have to fix it manually. Doubly annoying on mobile. I think it would be great if the quote always went on the bottom. Then, in the 5% of the cases where I actually want it somewhere else, I can move it.

Probably a "dev" thing, I know.

On my (high end) android at least, it's like, tap the ellipses... nothing happens, tap it again... maybe in 5-10 seconds, the edit pencil will show up. Tap that... nothing happens, tap it again... if you are lucky, in another 5-10 seconds, you can edit.

This is consistent, independent of connection speed.

How do you reply to this argument from hallucination? Nothing logically prevents us from hallucinating in a way that appears identical to the real thing. Any object O you perceive may either be real, or hallucination.

You either have faithful perception:
P of O

or hallucination:
P (of false O)

But which one of these is the actual case is unknown to the perceiver. All the perceiver knows is P.

Therefore, that we are in the everyday, veridical case, P of O, cannot be a part of the perception P itself. It must be an inference (We are wide awake and alert, O is consistent with memory and environment, others acknowledge O). Similarly, if we are hallucinating, we only know that by inference as well (We are delirious, O is incongruous, no one else acknowledges O).

In short, that what we experience is real, is an inference, not a perception. We are indirectly aware, via inference, of the realism of the world, and only directly aware of perceptual content.

My reply was that this isn't a perception at all, because it excludes any representation (and, more simply, because objects are not identical with perceptions). You can't have a perception without a representation — Luke

Reading this, why wouldn't you conclude: perception is inherently indirect?

Since it makes no sense to talk about experience of perceptions, then it makes no sense to say that experience of perceptions is direct. — Luke

No problem. Lets say then, experience, including perceptual experience, is direct.

It seems odd to speak of simple organisms making inferences, conscious or otherwise, since the term usually applies to the deliverances of rational thought. — Janus

You and others (i.e. @Leontiskos)confuse inference with logical inference.

inference:

something that is inferred
especially : a conclusion or opinion that is formed because of known facts or evidence — Merriam Webster

Given representations (R), perceptions (P) and objects (O), direct realists believe that R are part of the mechanics of P and are subsumed under P. — Luke

Indirect realists also believe this. Perceptions of objects are representations of these objects, and so our perceptions of the object is indirect, because we perceive via representations.

Your position is this:

A direct perception is: P (excluding R) of an O.
An indirect perception is: P (including R) of an O. — Luke

Perceptions are representations, and so there isn't really "P (excluding R) of an O", unless you are talking about corner cases, such as flashes in the eye, tinnitus, etc.

The sensory information that an organism receives from its environment is a perception. You are basically saying that our perceptions are direct. — Luke

Experience of perceptions is direct. Experience of objects is indirect, this happens via perceptions.

Good. I was going to lump you with Michael, so I'm glad you agree. — Leontiskos

Wait, what am I supposed to be agreeing with? I suspect that I ought to be lumped.

<Machines make inferences from sense data; humans are like machines; therefore humans make inferences from sense data> — Leontiskos

Really? There was a time when inference was the exclusive provenance of humans. Have the tables turned to the point where to suggest humans infer as well is to inappropriately conflate them with computers? I don't think so. Humans are still the predominant inferrers, computers only do so with titanic difficulty, and have only lately started to catch up. It is no accident that the ai revolution started almost a century after computers.

Or in other words, do we agree that indirect realism has the burden of proof, and that direct realism is the default or pre-critical position? — Leontiskos

That it is the position prior to actually thinking about the subject, I agree. But this absolves you of no burden.

Well, if you plop a child down in front of a Disney movie, do they require special skills of interpretation and inference to enter into the story? — Leontiskos

Absolutely.

A word is a sound, and so without the sound there is no word, but it does not follow that (conscious) interpretation or inference is occurring. It is the same, I say, for images and other sensory inputs. — Leontiskos

We are indeed not aware of the bulk of the inference and interpretation we do. But that doesn't mean it's not happening.

Okay, and so it is not a window, but is instead a set of data that, if interpreted correctly, can lead to knowledge of the real? — Leontiskos

Yes I think that's right.

There's a very odd use of "inference" in Michael's account. — Banno

@Michael's usage seems entirely appropriate. The knowledge that there is a tree in front of me is not a given, transmitted directly into my brain. The only thing about the environment that is a given to any organism is the sensory information it receives from it. What else can an organism do with this information but infer things (consciously or otherwise) about its environment?

I think we see (if we are close enough to identify them) what the distant objects are. The way you are putting it seems confused to me, and liable, if taken seriously, to breed further confusion — Janus

What seems confused to me is this strange instance that seeing is this primordial thing, resistant to all analysis, such that "I think we see what the objects are" is somehow remotely adequate. Never mind what we actually understand about perception, that is

scientism — Leontiskos