| | I wrote (to Cal),
Your entire argument rests on the fallacy of the stolen concept. Before you can talk about what "works in practice," you need to identify what exists in reality. Not at all. That it works in practice just means that thanks to this system we don't run into walls or fall into the water, that we can find food etc, in general: that we can survive, just as the results of evolution work in practice. Compared to our perception, the perception of a worm is no doubt very primitive and simple. Nevertheless it works in practice, it's good enough for the worm, and to reach that conclusion we don't have to compare the model in the "brain" of the worm with reality. Let's be clear on what is meant by your "model" version of perception. If it simply means that the brain automatically integrates sensations into a coherent form of perception, which is Rand's view, then this process does not involve constructing a "representation" of reality. The direct object of your perception is reality, not its representation. This does not, however, imply a naive-realist theory of perception, according to which the so-called "secondary qualities" are out there in the object. All it says is that we perceive reality in a particular form, which can vary from perceiver to perceiver, depending on the nature of its sensory apparatus. The worm perceives reality in a different form than we do, but it still perceives the same reality. It's just that its senses don't give it the same amount of information that our senses do and don't allow it to make the same kinds of discriminations. The senses of a blind or color-blind person do not provide as much information as those of a normal person, but both the visually impaired and the normally sighted still perceive the same reality. There is no such thing as a perception of reality that does not occur by a specific means and (therefore) in a specific form--no such thing as what David Kelley calls "diaphanous" perception.
If by "direct perception," you are thinking of it in this sense, then you are, of course, correct. Awareness absent a specific means of awareness is an oxymoron. But just because we must be aware of reality by some particular means and in some particular form does not imply that the direct object of our awareness is not reality, but a representation of reality. What we are directly aware of is not our form of perception but the object of our perception through its form. For example, if I look at the planet Mars through a telescope, what I see is not the telescope's "representation" of Mars, but Mars itself through the telescope. If I were to draw a picture of Mars, that would be a representation of Mars. I wrote,
You cannot say, "Well, we don't know what really exists, but we have the ability to make a representation that works in practice." That very statement purports to identify what exists in reality, namely, that we are beings of a specific nature with specific abilities and that one of those abilities is that we can make a representation that works in practice. If you couldn't get at the real McCoy, you couldn't say anything for certain, not even that you can make a representation that works in practice, because even that statement depends on your being able to recognize reality for what it is, not simply a representation of it. No, you forget that a system can be self-referential. When we observe that "a system works in practice", this means that according to our model it works in practice (in the model of our world). You are still committing the fallacy of the stolen concept, without realizing it. Observe that when you say that it works in practice "in the model of our world," you presuppose a distinction between 'the model of our world' and 'the real world'--the world outside the model. But you live in the real world--the world outside the model. If it doesn't work in that world, it doesn't work at all--unless you are assuming that reality itself is an illusion, in which case, there would be no distinction between 'illusion' and 'reality,' and the concept 'illusion' would have no meaning. As long as our model is consistent, we may assume that it is a faithful (if not perfect) representation of reality. Still the fallacy of the stolen concept. How did you get the concepts of 'reality,' in contrast to 'faithful representation' of reality without any direct knowledge of reality to begin with? If what you are directly aware of is only a representation of reality, then how do you know that there is any reality that is independent of your 'representation', or that, if reality exists, your representation is in any way consistent with it? It is the fact that these models in general work so well and seamlessly that we become the victim of the user illusion: we tend to forget that the model is not reality itself, that there are necessarily layers of interpretation and modeling between the model in our brain and that what's "outside there". "Work so well and seamlessly"? How do you know, if you don't have direct access to reality in order to validate that conclusion? Your theory that we don't have direct knowledge of the world, because our awareness is subject to "layers of interpretation" must by your very own theory be subject to "layers of interpretation," rendering it unverifiable. How do you know that your interpretations accord with the real world, if you can't perceive reality independently of the interpretations? I wrote,
Similarly, you couldn't know what an optical illusion is if you couldn't compare it to that which is not an optical illusion--i.e., to the real world. In short, your argument is self-refuting, because it presupposes the very thing that it denies. The silent assumptions in this kind of reasoning are 1. that if a system is not 100% reliable it's useless and 2. that a system can't be self-referential. No, the assumption is that it can't be self-referentially inconsistent--that you can't logically deny what you are presupposing. Although the extended model may influence our perception, the models may sometimes be at odds with each other. Example: my moon domes. My extended world model tells me these are craters, but my perception model stubbornly tells me they are domes. That's a judgment you're making as to the nature of the craters themselves. It has nothing to do with your perception of them, which is a direct observation. Qua perception, it is neither true nor false; it is the judgment that is true or false. Direct perception of reality? Come on... Optical illusions are interesting, not while they would tell us that we can't know anything or some such nonsense, but while they can give us some insight in the mechanisms of perception. Malfunctioning (other example: illness) can be a useful research tool which can give us more insight in the mechanisms that are usually hidden to us in the smoothly operating organism. An optical illusion arises only because an object's appearance is at odds with our expectations. The bent stick in water "looks" bent to us, because we are accustomed to seeing sticks out of water, which only look bent if they actually are. If you inhabited a medium in which straight sticks looked bent (to our eyes) but felt straight, they would "look" straight to your eyes, because you would be accustomed to seeing them in that form, so you would judge them without a second thought as being straight. There would be no illusion. In the same way, we do not judge objects at a distance as being smaller than they actually are simply because they appear smaller. There is no optical illusion there. An optical illusion is strictly a function of our expectations.
- Bill
(Edited by William Dwyer
on 1/20, 11:23pm)
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