I would agree that if you see a beautiful woman it's probably because there's something that looks to you as a woman, and a beautiful one. But then there's no real sense, beyond this, in insisting that this something is a beautiful woman. All you can say, even objectively if you can get the concurring opinion of several people, is that this something looks like a beautiful woman. What it is, you still don't know, except that it should be something that looks to you as a beautiful woman.
EB
I didn't mean to complicate matters by introducing a subjective element into the problem. Replace her with a bowling ball. <damn something sounded so not right about that>
I didn't address this aspect of your post. Why do you?
I'm over here. The ball is over there. I submit that I see the ball. You disagree. You think we merely see a mental image (or percept) of the ball. My view is that you're narrowing what it means to say that we see something. Science might show the processes of vision such that the brain never reaches out and touches the ball but rather light streams in to us. That (to me) doesn't change anything, for that's apart of what it means to even say we saw something.
You can't walk around making the claim we don't really see anything outside our minds. People will think you're crazy. When you start to dodge objects in your path and you explain that your movement was due to doppelgänger mental images giving you a video with a setting tuned to human distortion, well, just sayin', it's better to just say you see the thing (just like they do). You can explain how we see, but don't deny that we see, nor deny that we see what we do.
I wouldn't dispute what it is that we mean when we say that we see a bird on a tree. We certainly mean just that, that there's a bird, a tree, the bird is on the tree, and we're looking at that, and that's what we see. That's what people mean and they also usually believe that this describes the reality of the situation, accurately. No dispute here as to meaning.
Yet, we've moved on a bit since the language and the vocabulary we still use today in our everyday lives were settled. We now have a much more sophisticated understanding of what human beings are and, as a consequence, of what it is that human beings typically do. For example in terms of what they do when they look at things. And there's no doubt in this respect that although we say we see things and think we see things, the reality, as we now believe it is, is much more complicated.
And there's nothing much to add.
You replied to something I didn't say (about the subjectivity of your "beautiful woman" example) and you didn't reply to what it is I did say. So, I will only repeat myself, changing the example from the more subjectively charged "beautiful woman" to the more objectively pedestrian "tree".
Here it goes again: I would agree that if you see a tree it's probably because there's
something that looks to you as a tree. But then there's no real sense,
beyond this, in insisting that this something
actually is a tree. All you can say, even objectively if you can get the concurring opinion of several people, is that this something
looks like a tree. What it
actually is, you still don't know, except that it should be something that looks to you as a tree.
And, crucially, there's no doubt that my description is much more accurate than your "I see a tree", and more realistic than "This is a tree".
That's what I meant.
Oh, and it would help if we drop this fascination with the brain being the person. I don't see percepts, even should it might be the case my brain senses them. I see the rock, the ball, and the girl.
Sure, no issue here.
EB
