if you model the internal process as fully fledged perception
I don’t know what that means.
We have perceptions. We can also notice the perceptions that we have as perceptions, and take those as objects of examination, as is done here and in some of the other posts tagged “phenomenology”. There is no circularity there, just multiple but finitely many levels.
I’m not doubting the phenomenon where you have some kind of higher level awareness of your sensorium...but I am doubting that strictly speaking , it should be called perception.
It’s OK, according to reductionism, to explain an X in terms of Y , where Y is similar...it’s just that Y needs to be simpler as well.
ETA:
The reason we feel an urge to put sneer quotes around “see” when we describe hallucinatory “seeing” is that, in the sense of intentionality, in such cases we do not see anything. If I am having a visual hallucination of the book on the table, then literally I do not see anything. Since I am “aware of” something, the temptation is to put in a noun phrase to form the direct object of “see.” We compound the ambiguity of “aware of” by introducing an ambiguity of “see.”
It matters for clear communication. It is not relevant to the things the communication is about.
So there is the world in itself out there, the causal effects it has on our sense organs, the processing in the nervous system of the signals from those organs, various aspects of the subjective experiences that (somehow) result; there are also imagined experiences and witting or unwitting hallucinations. These are all different things. But in everyday life these distinctions generally make little practical difference, and words such as “perception” and “see” can be used indifferently to sprawl over different parts of that whole domain. There is no such thing as the “strict meaning” of such words, the ways they “should” be used.
One can say, here [lengthy description] is one phenomenon, and here [another lengthy description] is another: I will for this conversation use [some word] to refer to the first and [some other word] to refer to the second. It is nonsense to say “strictly, [some word] means only the first of these” when in everyday talk it straddles both.
I don’t know what that means.
We have perceptions. We can also notice the perceptions that we have as perceptions, and take those as objects of examination, as is done here and in some of the other posts tagged “phenomenology”. There is no circularity there, just multiple but finitely many levels.
Compare noticing our beliefs as beliefs, being aware of being aware, and the ladder of abstraction.
I’m not doubting the phenomenon where you have some kind of higher level awareness of your sensorium...but I am doubting that strictly speaking , it should be called perception.
It’s OK, according to reductionism, to explain an X in terms of Y , where Y is similar...it’s just that Y needs to be simpler as well.
ETA:
--Searle
It does not matter what it is called, and it does not matter how Searle or anyone else thinks the word “see” should properly be used.
As soon as you say something to someone else, the usage of words matters.
It matters for clear communication. It is not relevant to the things the communication is about.
So there is the world in itself out there, the causal effects it has on our sense organs, the processing in the nervous system of the signals from those organs, various aspects of the subjective experiences that (somehow) result; there are also imagined experiences and witting or unwitting hallucinations. These are all different things. But in everyday life these distinctions generally make little practical difference, and words such as “perception” and “see” can be used indifferently to sprawl over different parts of that whole domain. There is no such thing as the “strict meaning” of such words, the ways they “should” be used.
One can say, here [lengthy description] is one phenomenon, and here [another lengthy description] is another: I will for this conversation use [some word] to refer to the first and [some other word] to refer to the second. It is nonsense to say “strictly, [some word] means only the first of these” when in everyday talk it straddles both.