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savageorange comments on Realism : Direct or Indirect? - Less Wrong
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Indirect realism may have some use value but its formulation strikes me as dishonest, as only primary sensory experience can be confirmed to exist by the experience itself. All other facts about the world are subject to uncertainty.
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I'm having difficulty seeing what you mean. It seems, while awkwardly phrased, a straightforward proposition with much evidence and little counter-evidence behind it. What seems dishonest about its formulation to you?
a lot hinges on what "know" means there. It may be that various intermediaries are involved in perception, but if doesn't follow from that the intermediaries are known instead of the object of perception -- it s a peculiar use of "know". Ordinary language seems ambiguous on the topic - does one watch a football match, or a TV, or a football match on a TV?
Also the scientific picture involves information being transmitted along a chain. so long as the transmission is accurate, the information is more or less the same at each stage, so there is no stage that is more informative than the others.
Thanks for pointing that out; I had interpreted that 'know' in the same sense as the "know" in 'carnal knowledge'.. information derived from maximally-direct contact. The wikipedia description certainly seems somewhat self-referential. I might have committed QED since I'm clearly an 'indirect realist'.
Do you intend to imply that the transmission -is- accurate -> non lossy? Even within the context of executing a single experiment, I'd have to disagree.
All of the evidence that could be produced would just be a subset of one experiences. If a means of transmission is only reliable to a certain limited extent then the media transmitted could approach the limits of that channel's reliability, but never surpass it.
And.. the description implies that is not the case?
What you have said seems like a straightforward consequence of indirect realism.
To put it another way:
If dishonesty is occurring, what, exactly, is being concealed?
The primary nature of first person experience.
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Nope, that's exactly what is explicitly claimed.
Direct realism should reference the reality of one's most direct experiences and not a concept that can only be understood indirectly, the "external world," through direct experience.
I assume you mean indirect realism, since that's what that quote is about.
Am I to take it, then, that you would approve of a statement revised to read:
I meant direct
So, right at the beginning of this thread, you meant 'direct'. And you never corrected this misunderstanding, even after I repeatedly talked about indirect realism in my replies?
Actually, error free communication can be established over any channel as long as there is some level of signal (plus some other minor requirements).
But perhaps I'm misunderstanding the point you are making?