What you're claiming doesn't make any sense. Your account is literally indirect. You are claiming that mediated perception is direct. You aren't even making Banno's argument.

I don’t see how absorbing light into the eyeballs counts as indirect. Maybe you can explain it.

The "medium" you want is a total red herring. We have experience as the medium. What we experience is data. Data comes from somewhere. This is not hard to grasp.

It’s hard to grasp for me. Experience is the medium? Is it anything like traditional mediums like light, clay, air, or paint, where some sort of tangible substance is required?

Which means what?

As far as I know light provides information about an object's composition, temperature, motion, shape, texture, or distance by revealing how it emits, absorbs, reflects, or refracts different wavelengths of the electromagnetic spectrum. We’re limited to visible light, but that proves to be good enough here on earth.

It's not a false analogy because it's not an analogy; it's the literal topic of discussion. Under what conditions is direct perception satisfied? Is it direct perception if I see an object through CCTV? Why or why not? If I see it through my phone's camera? If I see it through a periscope? If I see it through a pair of binoculars? If I see it through a pair of glasses? Even the direct realist must accept that some of these count as indirect perception, and so if your account cannot suitably exclude these then your account fails. Earlier you said that our perception is direct if "our senses are in direct contact with ... the wavelengths in the light ... affording us information about those distant objects", but this does not suitably exclude those situations which everyone ought agree is indirect, e.g. with CCTV. You've gone too far in the opposite direction after your previous attempt left you unable to directly see anything other than light.

No, I agree, looking at something through a cctv camera on a screen counts as viewing that something indirectly. I’m fine with that. But the “distal object”you’re actually, directly viewing is the screen and your surroundings. So you’ve gone too far in pretending the images on that screen is the “distal object” you’re perceiving. The question remains, what does the screen, the light it emits into your eyes, and all of your visible surroundings in whatever room you’re watching this screen supposed to represent in your analogy?

Your first account entailed that we only have direct perception of proximal stimuli, e.g. light, because these are the only things in direct physical contact with our body’s sense receptors. This defeated your own claim that we see distant objects.

No, I said the light comes from distant objects and afford us information about distant objects, not mental phenomena. My other point was we directly see the “mind-independent world”, which is where the conflict is. You say we do not see the environment. Light is of one and not the other. These two points you have yet to address.

Your second account entailed that we have direct perception of the basement when watching it on CCTV because our body’s sense receptors are in direct physical contact with the light that “affords us information about” the basement. This is both vapid — as even most direct realists will accept that we only have indirect perception of the basement when watching it on CCTV — and makes use of the very same folk psychology that you keep denying; what is this “information about the basement” and can you point to where in the light and the body this thing exists?

It does not entail anything of the sort. You’re grasping onto false analogies, as I’ve already said. Yes, your analogy involves the indirect viewing of the basement, but I can go into the basement and perceive it directly, and even look at and point to the camera. Moreover, you explicitly said your account of perception does not require a little man viewing screens, yet here you are using analogies of men watching screens. Why is that, I wonder? If you want to continue with these analogies, you might as well try to explain what your screen is supposed to represent, what your man is supposed to represent, and get on with it.

The information is frequency, direction, intensity, etc. and yes, we can touch light.

If you're going to argue that "first-person phenomenal experience" is a meaningless phrase then all you have left is a physical object being moved by the matter and energy that it comes into direct contact with (and by its own internal energy), and so the concept of this physical entity — whether rock, plant, toad, or human — "seeing" some distant object makes no sense. This object no more "sees" the distant object that sent light its way than it "feels" the distant object that threw a ball at it.

That’s not true. Some physical objects can act without external forces pushing them around. On the other hand, all you have is words and analogies.

You're still not explaining what it means for a biological organism to "see" a distant object. If eliminative materialism is true then there is just skin and bone and muscles and organs, with sense receptors absorbing energy and converting it into other forms, often causing the body to move. So how do you get from "the rods and cones in my eyes are reacting to electromagnetic radiation" to "I see the distant object that reflected the light", and what does the latter even mean without reference to first person phenomenal experience?

I don’t know whether eliminative materialism or true or not. What I know is is that none of the things you claim are there are not. So why do you believe in them?

You’re starting to conceive of body parts in a void again, or maybe it’s a vat. I believe that only human beings engage in human seeing and human beings are more than eyes, rods, cones, brains. So my concept of perception is holistic. And I believe all descriptions of seeing are wrong or incomplete unless they include the entirety of the entity, all of its organs, and every moving part involved in the act of seeing.

As for “first-person phenomenal experience”, that phrase is a meaningless piece of casuistry that serves as the idealist’s placeholder for that human organism. You see from a certain elevation, for example, as determined by the height of your organism, not by anything called “experience”.

You’ve gone from defining direct realism in such a way that we only directly see light to defining it in such a way that we directly see World War II when watching a documentary on the History Channel.

Yes, we directly see the environment. That includes the things in that environment. That’s what the idealists call the “mind-independent world” and is the only thing under discussion in the debate. But the question is what are we directly seeing. I say the mediums that come into direct contact with the eyes, and are in fact absorbed by them. Indirect realism postulates sense-data, representations, and so on. We can examine light. We cannot examine sense-data.

But that’s why these little metaphors and analogies are fallacious. If you want to say we’re indirectly watching wW2 but directly watching the TV you can easily prove it by pointing to the TV, turning it on and off, and so on. Can you do that with “first-person phenomenal experience”?

Just a clarifying point: Are you saying that the astronomer looking through a scope (or, lets go further: having generated an image from mathematical data) is in direct contact with the objects lets say lightyears away? Can you explain that? It seems to be the key example of indirect contact to me (and so dovetails into a perceptual account more generally). Just want to be sure that's what you're saying..

No, it’s clear from what I wrote that we interact with the environment around us directly, not indirectly. For instance your eyes are in direct contact with the light from that generated image.

This does not dovetail into an indirect perceptual account at all because we do not have anything like computer generated images or telescopes in the brain. In my opinion the indirect realist ought to stop leaning on metaphors and analogies using “mind-independent” examples and finally tell us what medium they are interacting with directly in their brain. What is the telescope or computer screen supposed to represent in your analogy?

You're still not explaining what it means for a biological organism to "see" a distant object. You're an eliminative materialist so there are no mental phenomena or first-person subjective experiences, just skin and bone and muscles and organs, with sense receptors absorbing the electromagnetic or kinetic or chemical energy they come into contact with and converting it into other forms, often causing the body to move.

That you want to be both an eliminative materialist and a direct realist (about distant objects) strikes me as being entirely inconsistent. You could maybe get away with this if you limited direct realism to touch and taste — as you did before when you tried to explain direct realism in terms of the body being in direct physical contact with the object perceived — but it just doesn't work when you include sight, hearing, and smell, where somehow the body’s reaction to proximal stimuli counts as “direct perception” of distal objects.

It’s not inconsistent because the rest of the world is full of mediums through which to view, hear, and smell distant objects. Dealing with those mediums counts as direct perception of the world because our senses are in direct contact with those mediums, whatever information they afford us, and those mediums are features of the environment. The molecules in the air, the wavelengths in the light, the soundwaves in the water, come from the distant objects, affording us information about those distant objects.

On the other hand, you can’t show any of the mediums you deal with directly, and your words appear to have no referent that we can examine one way or another. You speak of things and places and their features as if they existed and expect others to believe the same, even impugning them as children or uneducated if they don’t. In fact, we have to take drugs or fall asleep or have our wires crossed in order to experience the things which are sure to lead us to indirect realism, and I don’t think being in those states counts much as a reliable description of anything, to be honest.

And it seems as if this coloured object exists beyond the body, but it is in fact a feature of the phenomenal experience that emerges from brain activity and does not extend beyond the body. Similar to how when playing a VR game it seems as if there's a monster standing 100 feet in front of you.

We’ve looked and nothing of the sort has emerged from brain activity. Everything does in fact indicate that any given environment and things we can see are external to the body, features of the environment, not of anything called “phenomenal experience”, which is neither place nor thing so ought not the be treated like one. VR games also exist beyond the body, and the fact that we put headsets over our eyes ought to indicate this, so is not similar in any way.

But it doesn’t seemingly do that. Rather, it looks like objects are already colored.

Projected outside beyond the body. That’s not what science believes nor is there any evidence for that.

Then what are you coloring and shaping if not something in your skull? Are you playing with the light in there?

The distant object.

But you color it and give it shape, no? even though you cannot reach it?

We aren't watching things occur in our skull, just as when I feel pain I'm not touching something that occurs in my skull. You're misinterpreting the grammar.

Then what are you watching when you point your eyes towards distant objects?

Without reference to first-person experience, how do you even make sense of what it means for an organism to "see" distant objects?

I don’t doubt we view things from a certain place in space and time. I just doubt that we’re watching things occur in our skull.

Does this biological organism have anything in his body called “phenomenal experience”? “Color”?

What does it mean to say that this biological organism "directly sees" some object located 100m away from it?

It means there is no mediator constructing imagery in the head, and that we are in fact seeing the environment.

Like I said, whatver it takes to keep the fantasy alive.

You knew this but something something Hitler.

Phenomenal experience does in fact exist and some of our words do in fact refer to it and its qualities. All you seem to be saying is "let's pretend otherwise".

Indirect realism tries to explain its own theory with a cascade of morphology, usually by way of verb-to-noun or adjective-to-noun nominalizing. So with each and every coining of a phrase we are introduced to new things and places by meeting new nouns and noun-phrases, but never by observing anything different.

Two types of nouns are particularly dubious. There is the necessary setting or environment where phenomena is said to occur— “awareness”, the “mind”, or “phenomenal experience”—and then there is the phenomenons themselves, often treated as discreet objects—qualia (Lewis), impressions (Hume), sense-data, perceptions, representations (Kant), and yes, experiences. (You seem to present “phenomenal experience” as a place one time and a thing in another). Not a single one of these things and places can be confirmed to exist, however, because not a single one of them have been found or observed. At any rate, to do so would be to utilize the method of observation indirect realists are busy at work in undermining. But places and things are how we are left to speak about them, I suppose? Sorry, but we’ve looked in heads and there are no such things.

It's the way children and uneducated adults intuitively think of perception and the world (hence the term "naive").

With no sense allowed, any inquiry into human understanding is precisely that much lacking in the evidence, leaving a sense-sized hole in each one. Not only does it undermine one’s own faculties, but privileging the intellect while undermining the senses as fallible is to give away the plot entirely. There has to be an ulterior motive involved in discrediting one faculty while retaining undue faith in the others. This is evident in the moniker “naive realism”, the idea that those who trust their senses are of the unwashed, unphilosophical masses, who are still tied up in Plato’s cave.

She dedicated it to him upon winning it. You didn’t know that?

Did Vemeer dedicate it to him and finally give it to him? Then the analogy is a stretch, but I guess anything will keep the fantasy alive.

The sour grapes who live over there wouldn’t give it to him if he stopped world war 3, but they would give it to Obama for actually nothing. That’s how meaningful that prize really is. In my opinion, it’s time to come up with a new one, one that isn’t tied to the elite sensibilities of a class who has led the world down the path of ruin. No one cares what they think anymore.

Looks like Trump has a Nobel Prize, and the Euro and Aussie pols do not. What have they been doing with their time in office, I wonder? Probably making it difficult to speak and think with their ever-encroaching legislation.

Right, you’re stuck in metaphor and analogy. You cannot describe perception without falling back on the first-person reports of medical conditions, genetic defects, sleep, and drug abuse, or wherever there is no evidence of any objects of perception at all.

Where in time and space is this something you dream about? Where in time and space is this something you hallucinate? Where in time and space are the colours the synesthete sees when listening to music?

In the head.

The suggestion that you're watching your own mental activity is the Cartesian theater in a nutshell, my friend. How can you be a realist if mental activity is what you're watching?

How are you dreaming about something? How are you hallucinating something? How are you thinking about something?

Because the appropriate areas of the brain, e.g the visual cortex, are active.

A "how" question requests a description of an action or state, in this case how you are viewing the activity of a cortex. It wasn't a "why" question. For instance, I see something by moving my eyes in its direction, whereupon the light from that object goes into my eyes, and so on. This can be done in excruciating detail. So how are you seeing the activity of the visual cortex? Can you provide any detail at all?

It doesn't necessarily involve eyes, but most of the time it does.

Seeing something doesn't require looking at something, just as hearing something doesn't require pointing one's ears at something. We see something if the visual cortex is active in the right kind of way, and we hear something if the auditory cortex is active in the right kind of way, and we think about something if the relevant areas of the brain are active in the right kind of way.

This is like asking where the objects I dream or hallucinate appear. It's a nonsensical question. There is just the occurrence of mental phenomena, with qualities described by such words as "pain", "pleasure", "red", "round", "sweet", "sour", etc.

Seeing something is when the visual cortex is active in the right kind of way. One needn’t have any eyes for this. So when you see something without eyes, where in time and space is this something you see, and how are you seeing it?

The activation of these cortexes is seeing, just as the activation of other areas of the brain is thinking and is feeling pain.

Now that we know seeing doesn’t involve eyes, where do the objects of perceptions appear, and how are you looking at them?

Then how do those cortexes see?

Is it your position, then, that sensing doesn’t involve sense receptors?

Dreams and hallucinations can be coloured (or "have colour" if you prefer), and people with synaesthesia can see colours when listening to music. This is because seeing colours (or even coloured things) is what happens when the visual cortex is active in the right kind of way, regardless of what the eyes are doing or what objects exist at a distance. This is also why cortical blindness is a thing, where the eyes react to stimuli as normal but the person doesn't see anything.

None of this entails a homunculus. That's a tired and lazy strawman.

Dreaming and hallucinating is not “seeing”. There are no eyes or receptors of that type in the brain. That’s just the figurative language of someone who cannot even see his own ears, let alone the imperceptible, mental actions occurring inside his own body.

The homunculus critique still stands unless people stop claiming that they can see the events occurring behind their eyes or somewhere in their brain. If you can see the events occurring in the brain, you have to explain how you can do so with no senses receptors in there. The problem is, though, if people cannot see the events occurring behind the eyes, they cannot see what the indirect realist is claiming they are can.

You don't need to believe in non-physical mental phenomena to accept that experience is something the brain does. We see and hear things when the visual and auditory cortices are active, regardless of what things caused this to happen (whether internal to the body or external). If the visual cortex is active in the right kind of way we see colours, even if our eyes are closed and we're in a dark room, e.g. if we have chromesthesia and are listening to music. However you choose to "cash out" these colours they are evidently not the "direct presentation" — in the philosophically relevant sense of the phrase — of something like an apple's surface, and are the medium through which we are made aware that something (probably) exists at a distance (either reflecting light or, for those with chromesthesia, vibrating the air).

I’ve never seen a color in my life. This is because colors are adjectives. I have only ever seen colored things, like apples. And the reason a green apple appears different than a red apple is in the apple itself, because of chlorophyll levels, for example. The little patterns that show up when I close my eyes can be explained by biology, as the random firings of an organ that often deals with light, but it’s still a necessary fact that I’m just looking at the back of my eyelids.

So why do I need to say colors are in the brain, and act like the brain paints colors on a thing, and a little viewer is in there peering at the final results?

Individuals have different bodies and never occupy the same position in space and time. One might have degeneration of the retina and so is unable to interact with the environment the same as someone who doesn’t. None of this entails some other medium, especially a fuzzy one called “experience”.

So then no medium, it’s just that you view the world as if you were sleeping or on drugs?

The indirect realist simply argues that this sort of indirect perception of apples happens even without the visor and its screen.

If there is no visor or screen, through which medium are you viewing an apple indirectly?

If you just mean to say that (most of) our sense receptors are situated on the outside of our body and react to things that exist outside the body then, to be blunt, no shit.

It was part of a larger argument. Their direction and the fact that they interact with the environment allow anyone to explain how we can see an apple, for example, while it precludes you from doing the same. You have no way to explain how you can see a perception, or some other mind-stuff, and are resigned to illustrating diagrams of apples in thought-bubbles floating around a head.

What do you mean by senses "pointing" outward? The physics and physiology is just nerve endings reacting to some proximal stimulus (e.g. electromagnetic radiation, vibrations in the air, molecules entering the nose, etc.) and then sending signals to the brain. If there's any kind of "motion" involved, it certainly does appear to be towards the head.

Senses have a direction that tends toward the outside of the body. It’s why we have those holes in our skull where our eyes, nose and mouth are, so they can better interact with the environment. It’s why you turn your head towards something or open your eyes in order to see it better. This simple common sense ought to inform one of what it is he is seeing.

Do you dispute that looks, sounds, smells, feels belong to the brain? That they are not found on the ship itself, but are properties of the brain, which are causally constrained by properties of the ship?

I dispute it because none of us have seen, smelled, tasted, or heard our brains. Sensing is an act of the body, no doubt, but the things or objects upon which we perform this act are out there, in a wholly different place and time from ourselves. It’s the reason our senses point outward, after all, towards ships or what have you.

The basic direction our senses point ought to eliminate the idea that we see sights or smell smells or taste tastes. I can extend my arm outward, point at what I’m seeing, and see both my finger pointing at the ship, and the ship itself. One can surmise, using every capacity of judgement he has, that he is not pointing inward towards his brain. Nonetheless, there is always a wide variety of verb-to-noun derivations and mind-things to replace the ship with. Perceptions, sensations, “phenomenal characters”. Se we stop speaking about ships.

Since the entire skeptical effort amounts to the claim that a person is only privy to what goes on somewhere behind the eyes and not before them, we get the infinite regress coming to all these discussions: who or what is looking at these sights and sounds? And so on and so on. There is no answer.

Common sense is just too difficult to ignore. The lights we see, the compounds we smell, the soundwaves we hear—these come from the boat, are properties of the environment outside of the mind; and the relationship with these properties is absolutely direct, so direct that we absorb them into our body.

But our eyes don’t (usually) touch apples “directly”, yet direct realists claim that we see apples directly. So although there is ambiguity in what the word “direct” means in the context of “direct perception”, it clearly isn’t about our sense organs being in physical contact with the so-called object of perception. If it were that simple then direct realism (at least with respect to sight and hearing and smell) would have never been in consideration at all.

There is, so it is claimed, direct perception of distal objects even though there often is some third physical intermediary (light, air) between our sense organs and said objects.

The “object of perception” is the entire periphery and environment. That is what we see. An apple isn’t an “object of perception” because that would exclude everything else. I’m not sure why people exclude everything else in these discussions but I expect it is to help their arguments.

At any rate, our eyes contact the light that bounces off an apple “directly”. We can touch an apple “directly”, smelll it, taste it, and even consume it entirely. None of that is “indirect”.

The entire Venezuelan diaspora is cheering, while anti-Trumpism, in cahoots with China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran, wag their crooked fingers. That good moral crowd is fine with narcoterrorism and the theft of the Venezuelan people so long as it and the mass migration that came from it didn’t affect them. It’s glorious to watch.

It did affect the United States, however. Her enemies used Venezuela as an oil depot, robbing the Venezuelan people from that precious commodity, and to no surprise anti-Trumpism raised no suspicions when these enemies were taking Venezuela’s oil. Venezuelan criminals were entering into the US illegally under the cover of the diaspora. The regime there used the drug-trade to profit and sent them directly to the US. Hezbollah helped to turn Venezuela into a hub for the convergence of transnational organized crime and international terrorism. All this should serve as a good reminder of what kinds of goods Trump’s enemies are left to defend.

By contrast, the direct realist thinks that in the regular case, it is the ship that you are perceiving. They standardly try and keep the relevant mental state in the picture, they just think you're somehow looking through it to the ship. In the same way as if I look at the ship through a telescope I am looking at the ship 'through' the telescope and not looking at a telescope, the direct realist wants to say that some of our mental states - those involved in seeing and touching primarily - are akin to telescopes or windows. They are involved, but they enable one to see through them to the world, rather than themselves being the objects of perception.

So, crudely, I take indirect realists to think we're looking at pictures of the world and (the current crop) of direct realists to think we're looking through windows onto the world.

I’m wondering if you could clarify something as I am not up on the literature, but consider myself a direct realist. In your analogy, what entities are looking through windows, and what are the windows? Because when I look at a perceiver there is nothing between him and the rest of the world. His eyes touch the light and atmosphere “directly”, for lack of a better term.

Trump is just “defending our institutions”. I thought that would be right up your alley.

Remember this?

Just look at what a quarter of the US Navy is doing in Venezuela: what on Earth is the objective? Likely the objective is just to throw spaghetti at the wall and see what would stick.

Now you know. And the Venezuelan diaspora are elated.

Maduro isn’t the legitimate leader of that country, and your high-horse leaders just sat around and let him repress his citizens, as they’ve done all over the world. So much for “defending our institutions”. And it probably hurts knowing that the exiled opposition leader in Venezuela dedicated her Nobel peace prize to your favorite president last year, isn’t that so?

We ought to remember that we don’t just see ships, we also see everything else in our periphery. This fact seems to be rarely mentioned and for some reason we’re supposed to consider objects in a void. That’s just not how it works.

All seeing must be direct, that is, there has to be some environment or medium that is viewed without something else in the way, or you simply won’t see at all. The indirect realist simply doesn’t know or doesn’t want to say what that environment or medium is, or with what parts of his body he views it with.

It looks like some people won’t be getting their drugs this week!

Nicolas Maduro's heavy-handed rule in Venezuela is finally ended by Trump