[ExI] Red

[Ben Zaiboc]

I told Brent I'd read more about Steven Lehar's theories, and get back to him.

I've read enough about Lehar's ideas now. I found his website, and began reading it. Didn't get far at all.

He seems to be adept at creating straw men and demolishing them.

The very first piece:

'The Epistemological Divide'
"The scientific investigation into the nature of biological vision has been plagued by a persistent confusion over a central philosophical issue, which is the question of whether the world we see around us in visual consciousness is the real world itself, or whether it is merely a perceptual replica of that world in an internal representation.

In other words this is the question of Direct Perception as opposed to Indirect Perception"


This is, at face value, flat-out false. There is no such confusion, certainly not amongst neuroscientists.

But, give him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe I was misinterpreting what he means, so I asked myself:
What is 'direct perception' supposed to be, if it's different to 'indirect perception'? (I wasn't at all sure).

Further searches turned up that it means the idea that we can understand what enters our sense organs /without processing the data/. 

That's not only obvious nonsense (otherwise why would we need all those maps in the visual cortex, with all the extensive processing they do?), but conventional science doesn't support or even suggest it. Doesn't even /hint/ at it.

I wasn't misinterpreting his words.
Not to put too fine a point on it, Lehar is lying about this. Or at least badly deluded. Whichever, he's not telling the truth.

There is no confusion, or even two conflicting models here. Direct perception doesn't exist, and no neuroscientist thinks it does. That's a fantasy in the minds of certain philosophers.

If 'direct perception' was a thing, we wouldn't need to learn to see, and we know that we do need to learn to see. As far as I know, all animals do. Certainly cats do.

We know that kittens, raised in an environment with no horizontal lines, are, after a certain age, incapable of seeing horizontal lines.
(https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/brain-food/201404/the-cat-nobel-prize-part-ii)
The extra processing of the primary visual data from their eyes has never been learned (they can't see horizontal lines at birth, this is a skill that needs to be learned, together with many others), so they tend to walk straight off tables, etc., because they literally can't see the edge (tragically, they can't learn to either, after a certain age, a few weeks I think). This one experiment alone disproves the idea of 'direct perception'.

This was discovered back in the 1960s, there's no controversy or conflict over the implications of this work, it's mainstream science. There is no such thing as 'direct perception', and nobody who actually studies (as opposed to pontificating about) the neurobiology of perception thinks there is. Nobody can 'see', in the sense we commonly mean, at birth. Light enters the eyes, but we have no idea what it means. Watch babies over time, and you can see them learning to make sense of what comes into their eyes (and all their sensorium, bar a few hard-wired responses, like the grasping reflex).

Lehar then goes on to describe a view of perception that's already an accepted one, presenting it as something novel and at odds with mainstream science. We KNOW that, for example perspective is an 'illusion' of a kind and we know exactly how it works. We know why the sky appears like a bowl above us, etc. None of this is new or controversial.
His ideas about neural resonance are less clearly mainstream, but strike me as more like another way of looking at the same thing than a genuine new idea, and certainly not any kind of challenge to what we know about how brains work (I already mentioned brainwaves in an earlier post. They are interesting, but not significant).

If Lehar approaches the subject in this disingenuous (or at least ignorant) way, I don't need to read any further. It would be a waste of time.

The main point that I take from all this, from Lehar's statements, and from Brent's own posts, is that /if someone is going to form an opinion on something, they should make an effort to learn what the rest of the human race has already established about it, especially what science has learned about it/ (Science being our best way of determining how the world really works).

You've heard the phrase 'standing on the shoulders of giants', I presume. Try it, instead of ignoring the giants and straining to see what's going on from 3 feet above the ground. You're guaranteed to get a much better result.

Don't misunderstand, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with challenging orthodox knowledge, I'm saying don't do it without knowing what it is. Your arguments will bear much more weight if they address real points instead of imaginary ones.

Learn some biology, and especially some neurobiology, before forming an opinion on how brains work. Please.

Philosophy on its own is useless. Worse than useless, unless it's based on actual facts.

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Ben