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Originally Posted by grant hutchison
Joe Durnavich, on the other hand, seems to be sitting somewhere over towards direct realism, a view which should constrain him to strict behaviourism and the "non-representational side", when it comes to the investigation of consciousness.
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There may be some utility in labeling my view of perception as "direct," but my views don't fit into any of the traditional categories. The Wikipedia article on direct realism starts:
"Direct realism is a theory of perception that claims that the senses provide us with direct awareness of the external world. In contrast, indirect realism and representationalism claim that we are directly aware only of internal representations of the external world. Idealism, on the other hand, asserts that no world exists apart from mind-dependent ideas.
These all have the inherent model of:
world ---> senses ---> my perception or awareness
The traditional bickering among philosophers is over whether the "senses" part provide full, partial, or no access to the world.
I disagree that there are such things as "senses" that stand apart and "provide me with awareness." What might those be in regards to vision: the eyes? V1? V2? V4?
Instead, I think what is fundamental and the substrate of all we can talk about on this subject is life itself being lived in the world. That is, us grinding through our daily lives trying to do the best we can, to enjoy it the best we can.
Take a tennis player returning a serve. That's the "substrate" here. To talk of vision is simply to talk of how available optical information was taken advantage of to successfully return the serve. She has to keep her eyes on the ball and continually position her body to be at the proper location by time the ball reaches her. She has to swing her racket at a particular angle and at a particular speed. There are all sorts of feedback loops comprised of her, the racket, the ball, and the light at work here. They are "guidance systems" that guide on optical information. (By "information" here, I mean "differences" however those may exist in the environment.)
It doesn't divide up cleanly into a "senses" and "faculty of awareness" or whatever. The eyes, brain, muscles, light, and ball are all part of a single physical system. To talk of "senses" is to talk of aspects of her achievement and not to talk of specific organs.
We can as well talk about other aspects of the serve-return as the proprioceptive system or the haptic system, and so forth.
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So I'm confused by his apparent acceptance of some brain states that correlate with entities in the outside world, even though he doesn't like the word "representation" for these brain states.
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Consider the dynamics in our tennis player serve-return example. Quadrillions of "states" occurred. None of them are inherently more relevant than the others. There is no one "brain state" that will explain the matter to us.
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That seems to move him back to the broad philosophical church of representationalism. It's getting harder for me to see where his objection to our position lies, apart from in the straw-man of Cartesian dualism.
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Why does the tennis player have to train for years to do her job well? Does saying something along the lines of "she forms the right brain states" really say much? Does she learn to visually take in the arena and "tile together" everything into a single inner brain state, for example? In the wider, dynamic context, on the other hand, we may discover that repetitive practice conditions her to track the ball with the fovea of her eyes so that (1) she does not have to subtract out irrelevant background information, and (2) so that the retino-neuro-muscular system has a clean signal to track on in guiding the body to where the ball is going to be. In the dynamic view, that our vision is so gappy and incomplete is suddenly seen as an advantage, as a strategy nature employs to make the most of the resources available.
It's in the dynamic view where we seem to get our first foothold on the topic of perception.