Atla wrote: ↑Sun Aug 06, 2023 11:17 am
Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Sun Aug 06, 2023 10:53 am
I think it would be pleasant if we all started talking about the issue without resort to dependent and independent as the reigning adjectives.
Because realism in contrast to some non-realisms is actually saying that things (out there) influence, due to their nature, what we perceive.
So there is a relationship. If we frame realism as say 'absolute mind independence', it starts to sound like things and perceivers have nothing to do with eachother, EVER, let alone via causal chains, and that's not realism. It's just that realism mean that things, out there, can be known, to varying degrees via appearances BUT that does not mean that our experience of the things, out there, is necessary for their existence: like the Moon is still there when we aren't looking according to realists, for example.
Things having no connection to minds in perception (an -ism I haven't hears of yet)
and
Things continue to exist even when not perceived (realism)
have been conflated
now
for what feels like many lifetimes.
I'm ready to reincarnate as a squirrel.
My growing suspicion is that VA has never ever considered the kind of realism you are talking about, because it is based on indirect perception. Maybe he's not even capable of considering it.
To VA, realism = naive realism (and maybe some close variants of naive realism). He cannot conceive of said relationship, because a relationship is between two things and VA only sees one.
I mean he may be right when he sees PH as some kind of naive realist, but that's about it.
If we take the classical Newtonian world of causes we have no action at a distance (sort of). So, in realism we have objects outside us and sometimes we interact with them.
Interact is another word I'd prefer or the now dead 'dependent' and 'independent'. I mean, dead as in don't beat a dead horse. Instead of it being dead because we concluded the matter, I think it's dead because it (or they) have been conflated and equivocated (equis!!) so many times.
So, in realism, there are causal chains and in perception the causal chains are coming from things and we tend to believe that they say something about those things.
Now we have qm and frankly I don't think we know all about action at a distance yet. Realism can absorb at least the 20th centuries qm, but now perhaps there are some interactions at a distance.
Is the quantum Zeno affect in migrating birds a kind of direct realism? The magentic fields which are a part of the earth affecting but really touching directly, interacting directly with magnetic-sensitive radical-ion-pairs in the birds retina.
They might experience it something like sight, but in a way it's not like there's an object out there (only) since the magnetic fields are everywhere (on earth) and the bird is immersed in them. There you might have direct realism.
Or not, we still have the mediation of neuronal messages. Though the eyes can be argued to be part of the brain....ah.
The whole mind indepedent realism thingie is not saying there is no interaction. It is saying that stuff outside of us, it's existence isn't enlivened by our existence. The Moon could go on when humans are no longer present.
Another word that I think is better to include: persists (and words built from it).
Things can persist when not perceived. In that sense they are independent.
Non-realism, of the ontological not the epistemological type, is saying something more, than things are dependent on us. It is saying that things are not external. Not that they are internal. The whole realist model is gone. Phenomena become the real.