Is it possible to perceive a world which is external to our perceptions?

[UndercoverElephant]

We can't know the thing in itself. That sounds Kantian, and I thought you were Kant's admirer.

Yes. I only defended direct realism as a demonstration of what would be neccesary as a defence of direct realism. Kant's position is anti-realist with respect to external objects because for Kant physical objects are phenomenal and the external world is noumenal.

Why do you believe that it is not realism, if it accounts for an objective reality beyond observers?

The question is not whether or not there is a reality out there - it is whether or not our perceptions of it are anything like the thing itself. Being anti-realist with respect to the perception of physical objects doesn't force you to be a Berkelyean idealist with respect to the whole of reality. The problem is that the reality beyond observers isn't physical, not that that it doesn't exist at all. i.e. the "real world" isn't made of things like the physical objects we directly perceive.

 

[Mercutio]

But I didn't percieve a chair, I percieved a person. That was as clear to me as that I'm percieving a monitor right now.
If I know that I am percieving a monitor, then I knew that I was percieving a person.

Oh, no! You have opened up the rabbit-hole!

You perceived a person, which was clearly a chair, but which was not a chair in reality, no matter how person-positive you were certain it was. Geoff then said "Then for you, direct realism cannot be defended. But since indirect realism cannot be defended either, you are left with anti-realism." But it is, by the same logic as the chair/person, quite possible that the choices he sees are purely illusory, that he sees realism and anti-realism where in fact those are only chairs that he sees as people!

But I, myself, seeing this problem, may only be perceiving an illusion myself, another metaphorical person, as it were, that is actually a chair that I cannot know is a chair!


It's chairs all the way up, or turtles all the way down, I forget which.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Kevin,

Perhaps noumenal reality is 11-dimensional is composed of 1-dimensional vibrating strings. Perhaps it's even weirder than that. We wouldn't want to get our spatio-temporal chair-filled world mixed up with those things, should we? QM gives us many reasons to doubt. There's no backwards causation in normal phenomenal reality. But there may well be in the world of the entities of QM, whatever they are (which is far from clear). I think it is perfectly reasonable to claim that noumenal and/or quantum reality transcends human experience, including mind, matter, space and time.

Geoff

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Kevin

But if our perceptions are only of human-assembled "representations" we have no justification for being 99.99% certain those representations are anything like what really exists. We are 0% certain of this.

How do you justify that statement? If I was 0% certain that my "representations" corresponded to "what really exists" I'd never be able to get my pants on in the morning.

It sounds like you are using "what really exists" to refer to some kind of Ultimate Reality, not to everyday matters of where I need to put my feet in order to get my pants on. If so, you've got some explaining to do about where you get the idea from and how you plan to support it.

We have no idea what "reality in itself" is like. NONE. All we know is how it appears to us, and it appears to us as a blurry combination of material and mental.

At first glance, sure. At first glance a lot of optical illusions appear to be things they are not, too. First glances are not terribly reliable.

If you stopped getting reality-in-itself mixed up with your perceptions of it you would stop trying to explain mind in terms of matter and stop getting stuck in logical loops.

We're certainly stuck denying the same claims over and over again. I'm not sure that's evidence that we are the ones stuck in a loop though.

 

[Z]

I've done that about fifteen times so far. Indirect or representational realism claims that we are indirectly aware of objects in an external world. In other words what we are directly aware of is a representation - the objects we perceive are mere representations of "real objects".

At this point, some clarification is necessary. Are we referring to 'real objects' in the naive, common-sense sense? Or are we referring to Platonic ideals, that the 'real world' is a reflection of a Real World of ideals?

If the former, I think we can agree that what we perceive is merely a representation of real objects.

The problem here is that we are claiming that "the world in itself" is the same as our representations.

Are we? I didn't catch where we said that. All we said is, that the world we perceive is a representation of the real world. That doesn't say they're one and the same, I'm afraid.

But why should the world-in-itself be anything like the representations of that world in the mind of a human?

It may not be - in fact, it often isn't. Look at the bent stick problem again. Yes, there's a real stick. Yes, there's really water. But where is the bend? Not in the stick - only in the perception of the stick. So our representation isn't true to reality, and we know this.

There's two problems actually - the first is it is inherently dualistic...

I'll agree with that one... as long as those defending/defining indirect realism insist on something within viewing these representations, rather than simply accepting an internalized representation - a hard concept, and one I haven't yet figured out how to translate to language.

...and the second is that if perception is indirect then we have no way of knowing what it is we are representing. We've got the representations mixed up with the things-in-themselves.

Wrong. We do have some way - not the best, but some way - of knowing what is being represented: we compare via language our perceptions with other people. We have to take a few things on faith, of course... but there are no metaphysical positions that don't.

And maybe Joe Schmuck on the street has his perceptions confused for the things themselves, but those of us with a little education under our belts know better. For example, I marvel at the beauty of flowers, then wonder what they really look like (for example, the UV coloring on them). I know they have more light-reflective properties than I can detect, and I'm ok with that.

 

[Z]

Kevin,

Perhaps noumenal reality is 11-dimensional is composed of 1-dimensional vibrating strings. Perhaps it's even weirder than that. We wouldn't want to get our spatio-temporal chair-filled world mixed up with those things, should we? QM gives us many reasons to doubt. There's no backwards causation in normal phenomenal reality. But there may well be in the world of the entities of QM, whatever they are (which is far from clear). I think it is perfectly reasonable to claim that noumenal and/or quantum reality transcends human experience, including mind, matter, space and time.

Geoff

Congratulations. You just graduated Advanced Woo 301.

 

[UndercoverElephant]

Wrong. We do have some way - not the best, but some way - of knowing what is being represented: we compare via language our perceptions with other people. We have to take a few things on faith, of course... but there are no metaphysical positions that don't.

What use is this? That's just another persons perceptions. Comparing yours to theirs gets you no closer to things-in-themselves. You are still confusing your perceptual representations with reality itself.

 

[Z]

Geoff, we can be largely certain (though I doubt 99.999...% certain) because we are alive. We survive, thrive, and successfully manipulate the world we perceive. That world is the real world, for us.

Even if we're brains in vats, the world we perceive is our real world, because we can neither know nor manipulate, in any way, any other world.

And the world we perceive is physical, down to the atomic level, and beyond that might be something else entirely... but it still obeys rules. They're just all new rules.

 

[Kevin_Lowe]

Perhaps noumenal reality is 11-dimensional is composed of 1-dimensional vibrating strings. Perhaps it's even weirder than that. We wouldn't want to get our spatio-temporal chair-filled world mixed up with those things, should we?

Sure, why not? Isn't the whole point of such theories to try to find a way of consistently describing every aspect of our chair-filled world, including the quantum aspect?

QM gives us many reasons to doubt. There's no backwards causation in normal phenomenal reality. But there may well be in the world of the entities of QM, whatever they are (which is far from clear). I think it is perfectly reasonable to claim that noumenal and/or quantum reality transcends human experience, including mind, matter, space and time.

It would be reasonable if you had evidence. Got evidence? Or is it just an idea you like because you think you can squeeze immaterial minds into a gap in it somewhere?

 

[Z]

What use is this? That's just another persons perceptions. Comparing yours to theirs gets you no closer to things-in-themselves. You are still confusing your perceptual representations with reality itself.

What use is this? It's the only way we have to learn what reality is like, numbskull.

Let me emphasize this:

Comparing our perceptions to the perceptions of others is the only means we have to learn what reality is really like.

There is no other way.

 

[Roboramma]

When I pick up a ball and hold it out I know that if I let it go, it will fall.

I know this based on observations throughout my life, and the reported observations of others.

I also admit that I might somehow be mistaken about the ball, but that I'm pretty certain that I'm not.

Is the ball real? Well, that depends on how you define the word. But it's still going to fall. I'd say that any definition of real that doesn't necessarily include the ball is useless.

So what does our imperfect perception tell us about the real world? It tells us about how things relate to other things and to ourselves. I know that if I open my curtains in the morning, light will come into my room. And it does. That seems reason enough to believe that when I made that prediction about the real world that I had more than 0% certainty about that aspect of it.

In other words, if there is a real world that is behind the things I see and experience, then I understand it well enough to make predictions about the things I experience. If it isn't related to my experience at all, I really don't care about it.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

It's chairs all the way up, or turtles all the way down, I forget which.

And don't forget the Monitor in the Middle.

~~ Paul

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

Speaking on behalf of Quantum Mechanics, I must announce that it has rejected the role of Gap-God. It does not want to be used as the escape route to Ultimate Reality. It asks that in the future, all proposals for its use be presented mathematically, with no cutesy-wootsey interpretations layered on top.

~~ Paul

 

[hammegk]

Let me emphasize this:

Comparing our perceptions to the perceptions of others is the only means we have to learn what reality is really like.

There is no other way.

I suspect several billion people would disagree.

 

[Bodhi Dharma Zen]

What would be "reality itself" after all? A chair is not what I see, yet, it is what I see. If I touch it, smell it, sit on it, focus on its aesthetics properties, talk about it... all Im doing is relating to the chair, to myself, and this, and all we can think, and what we cant think of, its what can be called "reality itself".

Words and concepts are the real problem here. Philosophy should tackle language problems, not create more.

 

[Paul C. Anagnostopoulos]

I suspect several billion people would disagree.

They would? You mean they think introspection is useful?

~~ Paul

 

[cyborg]

I suspect several billion people would disagree.

And I suspect that an infinite amount of people disagreeing wouldn't change *****.

 

[hammegk]

They would? You mean they think introspection is useful?
~~ Paul

Your words, not mine. Should an individual have an "interesting" subjective experience, may I say 'numenous', the hallucination vs reality problem becomes personally interesting.

And I suspect that an infinite amount of people disagreeing wouldn't change *****.

Nor would a like number agreeing.

 

[cyborg]

Nor would a like number agreeing.

So you made a fallicious statement for what purpose now?

zaayrdragon makes an appeal to reality by eliminating inconsistencies in our perceptions, you make an appeal to everyone arguing about it endlessly?

That kool-aid did not pass the taste test.

 

[Z]

I suspect several billion people would disagree.

They are welcome to do so.

But show me how many of those several billion people learned everything they know without anyone to show them anything.