I think I understand your position.

I suppose each position can be viewed as degrees of realism. If I am to use the aforementioned phrases (as it is, in itself), you think you perceive the world as it somewhat is, or as it sometimes is, whereas the indirect realist thinks he perceives the world as it isn’t.

That's all very well. But what if the privileges are themselves the result of exploitation? Or what if the privileges are used to exploit people? Then, right-minded people at least would accept. It does happen, surprisingly often. I think the point is that everyone deserves prospects and opportunities.

If someone’s lack of prospects was the result of exploitation or injustice, and not, say, by choice, then I would gladly accept a set of principles that would increase his prospects at the expense of my own. In my mind, he would be deserving of my support.

In our current bureaucratic trajectory, though, we do not differentiate between the deserving or undeserving, and do so according to more trivial factors such as class or tax-bracket.

Would you be willing to accept a set of principles that increases the prospects of others, even if it means having fewer opportunities yourself

I would not because it is immoral; such an arraignment is premised on the exploitation of those who accept the principles. The arraignment is also unjust insofar as it does not consider those who are deserving or undeserving of the prospects and opportunities you mention.

Right, but the direct/indirect realism discussion is also commonly framed in terms of whether we directly perceive real objects or whether we instead directly perceive a representation or other perceptual intermediary (and only indirectly perceive real objects). I reject that we perceive a mental representation and say that we directly perceive real objects.

As stated earlier, I think the naive realist position is based on the misguided notion that when we perceive a real object we perceive the world in itself (or somehow identify the perception with the object). A perception that is identical with its object is not really a perception at all; it is the object.

The indirect realist opposes the naive realist position, saying that we do not directly perceive a real object but that we directly perceive only a mental representation of the real object.

I reject the direct realist notion that to perceive a real object is to perceive the world in itself (or that our perceptions are identical with the perceived object) and the indirect realist notion that we directly perceive only mental representations of real objects. Instead, I say that our perception of real objects is direct (in a non-naive sense) because perceptions are mental representations.

Thanks for the explanation. A question arises regarding the misguided notion of naive realism, that to perceive a real object is to perceive the world in itself.

The qualifiers “in itself” or “as it is” confuse me to no end, and to be honest I have never seen a naive realist affix these phrases to statements about an object of perception, at least in common language. It makes me think that in order to see an object “as it is” I must see it from an infinite amount of perspectives at the same time, that in order to really see an object I must also see what I cannot possibly see, for instance the back of an object while looking at the front of it, or what it looks like if no one was looking at it, and so on.

So the question is: If we’re not perceiving the world in itself or as it is, what are we perceiving?

I’m not even aware of his arguments. Got one on hand?

If the video’s title was “Trump exposes Pecker” I might be more inclined to watch, but I’m not going to fund their grift with a viewing.

Yes, to me, internally representing the world begets a representation of the world, something that represents, models, or stands for, the environment. We have a space in which representing occurs (internally), and presumably this representation or act of representation (sight) is the intentional object.

I could be completely wrong; that’s just how I always understood representationalism.

The representation is the condition for seeing something, not some thing that you see.

The condition of the body, I presume?

I’m curious because as far as I know representations prohibit us from seeing the world, and I’m interested in how you can see (or represent) around them.

“Watch this propaganda as delivered by this anti-Trump cabal.”

Projection indeed.

MeidasTouch was a liberal American political action committee formed in March 2020 with the purpose to stop the reelection of Donald Trump in the 2020 United States presidential election.[4][5][6][7] The SuperPAC aligned with the Democratic Party in the 2020 United States presidential election, the 2020–21 United States Senate election in Georgia, and the 2020–21 United States Senate special election in Georgia.[8][9][10]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MeidasTouch

A fundamental law of anti-Trumpism is the continuous presence of a racket composed of privileged but panty-waisted group of beneficiaries working behind the scene to both take Trump down and to benefit from the adulation they receive for doing so.

It’s par for the course. For instance, there is an off-the-record Zoom call between people working across different television, print and digital media outlets where lawyers and legal pundits collude to attack Trump legally and propagandize to their followers politically, all of which helps their podcasts, substacks, and commentary careers.

The group’s host is Norman Eisen, a senior Obama administration official, longtime Trump critic and CNN legal analyst, who has been convening the group since 2022 as Trump’s legal woes ramped up. Eisen was also a key member of the team of lawyers assembled by House Democrats to handle Trump’s first impeachment.

The regular attendees on Eisen’s call include Bill Kristol, the longtime conservative commentator, and Laurence Tribe, the famed liberal constitutional law professor. John Dean, who was White House counsel under Richard Nixon before pleading guilty to obstruction of justice in connection with Watergate, joins the calls, as does George Conway, a conservative lawyer and co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. Andrew Weissmann, a longtime federal prosecutor who served as one of the senior prosecutors on Robert Mueller’s Trump-Russia investigation and is now a legal analyst for MSNBC, is another regular on the calls. Jeffrey Toobin, a pioneer in the field of cable news legal analysis, is also a member of the crew. The rest of the group includes recognizable names from the worlds of politics, law and media.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/23/anti-trump-legal-pundits-calls-00153300

Why would the brain represent the world to you if you weren’t to view the representation?

How do you distinguish between veridical experience and hallucination? It certainly wouldn't make sense to say that you can distinguish them because the English word "see" should only be used for veridical experience.

I would confer with others or seek more information otherwise. If they see the same thing it is a good indication I am not hallucinating. I certainly wouldn’t seek confirmation from the phenomena of my hallucinations.

By definition, if I have to infer some X then I do not have direct knowledge of X, so I don't understand your argument here. Are you asking how inferences are even possible? Are you calling into question the very scientific method?

It was not an argument, it was a question. Usually we have direct knowledge of the grounds, evidence, and arguments to make inferences towards one conclusion or another. I’m just wondering what direct knowledge or evidence derived from mental phenomenon can lead one to believe there is a proximal stimulus that causes the cortex to generate an auditory experience, and further, that that experience represents mind-independent objects.

If both hearing and hallucinating are the activities of the auditory cortex, and the voice is merely the product of this activity, there seems to me no way to distinguish between veridical experience and hallucination, whether it arrives from an appropriate proximal stimulus or not.

If one only has direct knowledge of the voice as the cortex has constructed it, how does one infer whether there is a proximal stimulus of the cortex or not? It seems to me there must first be some direct knowledge of a proximal stimulus that is not merely the product of the cortex.

According to what you mean by “hear”, but what you mean isn’t always what others mean, and certainly isn’t what they mean when they say that the schizophrenic hears voices.

You can tell me what you mean by “hearing” and “voices” and I’m willing to adopt your definitions. If you think hearing doesn’t involves the use of ears and that a voice isn’t the sounds from the larynx, then what are they?

The claim “I hear voices” in the case of hallucination is not true, though. It’s not that I demand that you should make true claims, implying some restriction, I’m just explaining why I cannot believe the claim. You need not restrict your theory to true claims, but I wager it would help your case, not to mention it would better help those who hallucinate.

For those who claim we do not have direct knowledge of mind-independent things, it just boggles my mind why they’d appropriate the language used to describe those things and interactions to describe mind-dependant things and interactions. It’s curious why they’d use the terminology used to describe that which we have no knowledge of, to describe that which we do have knowledge of. I think it’s an indication that indirect realism is a little more naive than it is letting on.

I’m fine with them saying it. But I’m not fine with the indirect realist saying it, especially if accuracy is any concern.

What would be your motivation for wishing to retain the language used to describe the interactions of distal objects and the sense organs to describe mental objects and the mental organs?

A voice, though, is the sound released from the larynx. To hear a voice is to have that sound affect the ears. Since neither of these things and events are present in a hallucination, to say “I hear voices” is to mischaracterize the experience.

One can distinguish between between two different hallucinations by simply describing how they are different. One might be audible or visual, for example.

Unfortunately, when it comes to words like "see" and "hear" and "smell" and "taste" we don't (as far as I know) have terms that can be separated out in this way, and so Banno conflates the meaning of "see" in "I see colours when I hallucinate" and the meaning of "see" in "I see a cow". Indirect realists are using the former meaning when they say that we see mental images.

“Hallucinate” would be a better verb than “see” when comes to such events. “I am hallucinating voices”, for instance, doesn’t imply that the sound of a voice is hitting the ear, and recognizes that some bodily activity is producing the phenomena.

Here's the point, again; one does not see the representation; seeing is constructing the representation.

Why would someone construct a representation if he wasn’t to perceive it? It seems to me if we accept the assumption that biology performs such a task, indirect realism follows.

I'd also say there's no "distal object" -- that this is a conceit of indirect realism.

I’m with you on that. I think the use of “distal” to describe objects in the world is used to get around the inherent question begging of the position, to contrast the rest of the world with mental objects before having to prove mental objects exist in the first place. Mental objects are afforded primacy as the true and known object while the sun, for instance, is relegated to the status of the unseen and unknown, “distal”. At any rate, it’s a silly piece of jargon.

I think we’re all aware of the arguments from illusion and the argument from science. Searle addresses these in his so-called "Bad Argument". Both fall prey to the fallacy of ambiguity; there is some ambiguity with the verb "see", for example. In the case of hallucination there is no object of perception. If there was, it wouldn't be a hallucination. So we're confusing the object of perception with perception itself.

The experience of pain does not have pain as an object because the experience of pain is identical with the pain. Similarly, if the experience of perceiving is an object of perceiving, then it becomes identical with the perceiving. Just as the pain is identical with the experience of pain, so the visual experience is identical with the experience of seeing.

https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783110563436-003/html?lang=en

I don't agree with Searle's positive account of perception, all this about "intentionality" and whatnot, but we at least need to try to move the arguments forward instead of reiterating them.

Computers are one thing, organisms are quite another.

It is true that organisms perceive. It is untrue that brains do. It isn’t even conceivable that brains perceive. Even the brain-in-a-vat scenario requires things external to the brain to mimic the reality of a body.

Bodies are required to keep brains alive and functioning, but conscious experience is to be found in the brain activity. When there's no (higher) brain activity there is no consciousness, e.g. those in a coma or in non-REM sleep.

Brains are required to keep bodies alive and functioning, as well. In either case, bodies and brains grew together as one organism, one object, all of it inextricably and intimate linked together into a single object. Conscious experience, perception, or whatever other activity is impossible if one or the other is missing or deceased or uncoupled. That’s a brute fact we ought to consider, in my opinion.

The only thing a disembodied brain can do is rot. So brains do not think or experience or perceive. Only bodies do. And the body is, conveniently, the only thing standing between your perceiver and other objects in the world.

The attempt to dismiss the rest of the body in the act of perception is clearly motivated by something other than scientific inquiry, and it would be interesting to find out what that motivation is.

The toe is the trigger. It's where the sense receptors are. But the sense receptors are not the pain. Pain occurs when the appropriate areas of the brain are active.

When we put a brain on a table it’s impossible to say the brain feels pain or experiences, therefor it is just untrue to say brains feel pain and experience. Much more needs to be added to the equation in order for pain or experience to occur in the first place. How much more needs to be added to the equation is an important matter of debate, and would make a good thought experiment, but I wager the organism needs to be relatively complete. Organisms are so far the only objects in the universe that can be shown to feel pain and experience.

Mind or experience or whatever other spirit dualists postulate cannot occur with one single organ. So the dividing of the body into pieces and parts technique of philosophy of mind doesn’t serve us as well as it might in biology and anatomy.

I don’t doubt the brain is involved, but clearly the toe is as well. I’m just wondering the biology of “experience”, for instance how far from the brain it extends.

Then wouldn't experience be limited to the prefrontal cortex, or does it extend to the toe?

If I stub my toe, injure my toe, and feel the pain in my toe, is it your position that I am feeling it in my prefrontal cortex?

Missing from your image is the organism's body, which I assume would encompass both the pain and cognition. Is the "I" that feels pain the organism or the organism's cognition?

The alleged felony crime is falsifying business records, repeated 34 times, all of which happened after the election. Now we are left to wonder how such book-keeping can be said to influence an election that happened in the past. The alleged crime Trump intended to conceal, according to Bragg, was a misdemeanor long past its statute of limitations.

Actually, the crime you're alleging is what the Clinton campaign did when they funnelled money through Perkins Coie to fund the Steele dossier, which they then hid as "legal fees". They also lied about it for years. Clinton and the DNC got fined by the FEC for their efforts. Of course, as is typical with a 2-tiered justice system, none of them were held accountable for what you call a crime.

Trump breaks another record: the first former president to face a criminal trial. The supposed federal crime is that Trump never reported payments to Michael Cohen as “hush money”, or some such nonsense. He signed the check wrong? Who knows.

At any rate it’s another non-crime. It’s so hard to make sense of any wrong-doing on the part of Trump, while the anti-Trump weaponization of the justice system seeks a desperate win before the election. So desperate are they that they tried to use the famous Access Hollywood tape as evidence. :lol:

This is too weird, even for me.

Those are your words.

I never said what you claim I did. I kindly withdraw.

You’re imaging things, friend.

None of that is contrary to what I said.

You said the evidence to the contrary was obvious. What evidence to the contrary?

“That narrative”.

What evidence to the contrary?

Write the word “self” on a label and stick it to any one of the options you’ve provided. The entity upon which that label finally sits is the self, and in every case it is the human individual in its entirety.