Indirect Realism is Not Realistic

[Veritas Aequitas]

I am aware ChatGpt is reasonable familiar with Kant's CPR.

He doesn't understand what Chatgpt does. It isn't 'familiar' with Kant's CPR. It has been given data on it. If asked a question, it can access its data and using algorithms deduce (or try to) conclusions. This is even more distanced from 'being familiar with' when the questions are not the standard ones. IOW when they require interpretation, guesswork.

In a sense it is the exact same situation that BINGai is in, an AI that does scour the internet, was not 'familiar' with Kant before, but now used that scanning to produce in real time to generate and answer. Chatgpt has a library at home. Bing Ai goes to outside libraries.

Neither is familiar. They just have tools they throw at data.

I stated ChatGpt is 'familiar' not have 100% access.
I am using other AIs that that can access any PDF to have 100% of the texts therein.

[Atla]

Then there is the problem within transcendental idealism that causation is seen as a priori, so on one hand noumena can't "cause" phenomena, on the other hand noumena somehow "cause" phenomena anyway.

I see no such problem within indirect realism as causation is seen as universal.

[Atla]

Let's see what else we got, VA didn't bring any argument of his own, so AI will have to step in:

What are the main critiques of indirect realism, from a transcendental idealist perspective?

From a transcendental idealist perspective, which is rooted in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, there are several critiques of indirect realism, also known as representationalism or the theory of perception that suggests we do not perceive the external world directly but rather through representations or mental images. Here are some main critiques:

1. Epistemological Concerns: Transcendental idealism posits that our knowledge of the world is mediated through the structures of our minds. Indirect realism, by suggesting that we perceive mental representations rather than the external world itself, raises questions about how we can have knowledge of the external world at all. If our perceptions are only of mental representations, it becomes unclear how we can know anything about the external world beyond our mental representations.

2. Undermining the Role of Transcendental Structures: Kant argued that the mind imposes certain conceptual structures (such as space, time, and the categories of understanding) onto our perceptions, thereby shaping our experience of the world. Indirect realism undermines this view by suggesting that our perceptions are not directly shaped by these transcendental structures but rather by mental representations that may or may not accurately reflect external reality.

3. Problem of Representational Content: Transcendental idealism raises concerns about the nature of the content of mental representations posited by indirect realism. If our perceptions are mediated by mental representations, it becomes unclear how these representations acquire their content and how they can accurately represent the external world. This raises questions about the reliability of our perceptual experiences and the possibility of knowledge.

4. Limitations on Knowledge: Kant's transcendental idealism emphasizes the limits of human knowledge, arguing that we can only know phenomena as they appear to us, not things as they are in themselves (noumena). Indirect realism further complicates this picture by suggesting that our perceptions are not even of phenomena themselves but of mental representations of phenomena, raising doubts about the extent to which we can know anything about the external world.

Overall, from a transcendental idealist perspective, indirect realism is critiqued for its potential to undermine the possibility of knowledge of the external world and for its implications regarding the nature of perception and the limits of human understanding.

1. Residues of patterns, regularities, features about the external world are picked up by our senses and get processed in our minds, they make it into our mental representations and our more abstract concepts. Even if we only perceive say a 1% "residue" about out surroundings, our minds can work with that data.

2. That's not a problem, Kant was just partially wrong. Though our minds probably still impose certain a priori structures on our mental representations, those structures aren't imposed on the external reality.

3. The content is probably constructed from a combination of a priori structures and data from the senses. By definition it can't be fully accurate. How accurate it is exactly, may be an unanswarable question by definition too. For most people most of the time, it seems to be accurate enough. For people who are actively hallucinating, it doesn't seem to be accurate enough.

(Which brings up indirect realism's important commonplace advantage: when representations are accurate enough, we can just forget about it all and revert back to living life as naive realists, which is the healthy thing to do. Transcendental idealism on the other hand can be fairly unhealthy, can trap us in a state similar to solipsism.)

4. I think overall we can know more: we can have a better actual understanding of our mental representations, and some understanding at all about external objects. Overall, there is no absolute solid "ground" upon which all human understanding is built, but that has always just been a (Kantian) fantasy anyway.