Thank you for the time you took to respond
No, thank you for your response and input.
I understand the basic tenets of your view, although I think that logical necessity is missing from all of the metaphysical options, and pragmatic efficiency and intersubjective agreement favours constant external objects
But constant external objects, if they exist, are not the same thing as experienced objects (visual experience, as there are no external analogs for non-visual experiences, with non-visual experiences being subjective reactions to rather than visual depictions of external objects), because experienced objects cease to exist when they are not experienced and external objects, if they exist, exist regardless of experience or subjects of experience.
If this is true, then the pragmatic efficiency, let alone intersubjective agreement (as this can be nothing but multiple experiencers having relatively similar experiences, without the necessity for the existence of external objects) of experience based on the presence of external objects begs a causal relation between the external object and the experience 'of' the object. They are two different things, and the expediency of the existence of the second (the experience 'of' the object) depends somehow not just upon the existence but the speed with which the first (the external object) creates a mental copy of itself within an experiencer.
But how does it do this? In common methodology of the process of perception, the distal object (the external object) cannot fit (non-destructively) inside the skull (if it is larger than a skull) and brain, and the percept (a particular person's visual experience of a thing it believes to be the distal object (Direct Realism) or a mental representation or simulation of the object (Indirect Realism) is believed to "come from" or "out of" neurons---so the external object does not directly create the percept: according to psychophysicalism, neurons within the skull do that.
But if Phenomenalism and Idealism are false, and external objects are made out of something that is not experience nor the act of experiencing at all, then it cannot use its own substance as the source of something it substantially and essentially is not. It cannot pull experience out of or from itself, as experience is not to be found before the fact within itself. The existence of subjective experience must be explained. If it does not magically pop into existence ex nihilo, then it must pre-exist in some form before it is the actual personal experience of a particular person. If external objects are made out of something that cannot also form the personal experience of a particular person, then there is no logical connection between the external object and the experience of a person. For one thing, we cannot experience external things: we can only believe they exist (even if in truth they do not).
phenomenal_graffiti wrote: the very notion that something can be created by that which it is substantially and essentially is not is a magical concept, because the supposed creator (the external model or even a process in the brain itself) is creating something whose substance previously did not exist before it is 'created'.
It's stated as a logical requisite, but I don't see any requirement to accept it... could you elucidate?
As stated above, the very existence of experience, or of experiencing, must be explained. If it does not pop into existence (origination or existence ex nihilo), or if it is not created wholly without the use of pre-existing material and substance (creation ex nihilo), then it eternally exists. But it arguably cannot be created by non-experience, as non-experience is simply that which is not experience nor experiencing itself. Non-experience, or non-mentality (as "mentality" in the philosophy of mind is not just "thought", but subjective experience per se) cannot produce that which is not itself (experience) from itself, as experience (which exists by being experienced) is not a pre-existing part of non-experience or non-mentality. They are two separate things.
It's just... I don't buy it. As I see it, certain chemicals can affect and even create perception/experience, for example.
The chemicals are made up of experience, as they are experienced. We do not and cannot experience chemicals made up of non-experience, so the chemicals that we know affect and 'create' perception and experience are experiential in substance. We do nothing but experience, and we are composed of nothing but experience, and the objects of perception are made up of the experience of the subject. We have no experience of the opposite of experience, but somehow believe that it exists. It's paradoxical. We can't experience it, yet incredulously claim we know it exists or that we know what its qualities are like based on something it is not: experience.
I don't follow how "act of experiencing" can be a substance. You have a verb/process, and a noun. It seems to be a category error.
The term: 'the substance of the act of experiencing' is simply a play on 'the substance of experience'. The act of experiencing, or 'experiencing' is a verb, as something that one actively does, but it is in a sense a thing: the act of experiencing is simply experience itself, and it is a substance in the sense that it is a palpable thing. In fact, it is the only thing that is known through experience to exist, as all 'substances' ( wood, steel, cloth, etc.) are ultimately experiences.
PG wrote: The point being, there is no actual relationship, save random chance, between the external model and the percept (visual perception 'of' the external model) that supposedly mimics it, precisely because the external model does not give of its very substance to form the percept.
Does an object give of its very substance to form a shadow? Or is there no relationship besides chance between the two?
Interesting analogy. The object, however, does not give of its substance to form its shadow, as a shadow is simply an area, external to the object, where light cannot reach because the area is obstructed by the object. The shadow does not "come from" or "out of" the object: it is an aspect of the area behind the object . The relationship between an object and its shadow does not exist by chance, but the methodology of that relationship is not the same as the implied methodology of the relationship between an external model and the percept. The external model is supposedly mimicked apparitionally by the percept whereas a shadow is an outline of the object, and the external model, if the appearance of the percept and its similarity to the external model (as we could perceive the external model directly) is not a matter of random chance, should play a direct role in the very existence of the percept beyond just a remote flipping of the force switch between the external world and the central nervous system. In the case of the latter, the very relationship between the external model and the percept hinges (in psychophysicalism) upon the pre-existence and pre-existing potential for performance of something within a skull, not the external model itself.
PG wrote: We, however, are composed entirely of experience, and the nature of our reality is such that everything that is known to exist (that is, that which is known to exist because it has been sensorially experienced) is known to exist precisely because it is experienced, and it appears only as someone's experience of it.
I know I have a television in the next room. I'm not experiencing it now. If you don't think I know that, then I don't think you should use the "know" that I highlighted above, or the following perfect tense (has been... experienced). If I do know that, then memory plays some role in things; in which case, how far removed are we from continuous objects?
The point is not that you must constantly experience a thing in order to know that it exists. I am not using the term "know" in this sense or for this reason. The point is that that which is we known to exist independent of belief and speculation (with such belief and speculation taking the place of sensory experience due to the inability to sensorially experience that which the person believes exists) is known to exist only because it has been experienced. You know the television exists, regardless of whether or not you experience it in the future, because you experienced it in the first place.
There is primary (visual) perception (as I am using the terms) in the sense of directly experiencing something by standing next to it and looking at it (e.g. one may have primary perception of the Grand Canyon, or the Taj Mahal, etc.) and there is secondary perception, or the experience of something second-hand, through television, photographs, or even abstractly in the form of a pencil drawing of the object. There is a tertiary perception, or cognitive perception, in the formation of a mental image or imagination of the object in the absence of primary and secondary perception or if the concept is invisible or inconceivable, their is at least tertiary auditory perception of the concept by hearing a word that refers to the concept or a weaker form of secondary perception in terms of seeing the word on a piece of paper, in a book, or on a computer monitor. Presumably, we come to know of the existence of something through primary, secondary, and tertiary perception or we simply do not know that a particular concept or object exists at all, even if it objectively does. If something is not primarily, secondarily, or tertiararily (if that is a word) perceived, it simply is something that never comes into the mind at all. Knowledge, then, begins not only with those things that are directly experienced (or as Russell might have put it: immediately acquainted) but with those things that come to mind.
I use the word: "know" in conjunction with "existence" only in terms of the existence of primary, secondary, and tertiary perception and how these three together consitute knowledge itself.
We all make predictions all the time, thousands of times a day, using the "rule of thumb" of constant external objects. The computer that you use to communicate on works (perhaps I should say 'nominally') using abstracted theories of physical matter, while none of its transistors are observed - millions of unobservable, unexperienced operations take place each second just for you to read this. I hope it's worth it Given the remarkable predictive power that it affords us, what reason do we have not to accept it? Ultimately, the substance of experience will turn out to be identical to the substance of matter, except with a different name. I suppose if you're going for panpsychism, that's an angle.
But these transitors, if they exist, would only be experiential transitors (phenomenal transistors) made up of the substance of someone's experience of them. We do not and cannot know if they actually exist independent of experience. It is quite reasonable that they could (with this reasonableness applying only to phenomenalism and reflective idealism), but it may be that objectively they do not, and only form from disparate psychic stuff in the form of the experienced transistors and the person staring at them (they come as a set). Or they may exist when we are not looking at them in someone else's mind (note to Quetzalcoat: the god-matrix again). The salient point is that they do not necessarily require external analogs of themselves in order to exist, precisely because the external analogs are not the experiential transistors.
The existence of the first (the percept) is caused by a process independent of and regardless of the existence of the second (the external object, if it exists), particularly if the second does not or cannot use part of itself to form the first. If the substance of matter is in fact nothing but the substance of experience with a different name (rather than the reverse, which, if matter is held to be non-mental, is impossible)---then and only then can it rationally be said to create or have anything to do with the existence of experience at all. If it is something that is not experience (qua experience itself) and as such cannot be used to form any experience, then it is not experienced (i.e. it is unavailable to primary and secondary perception, and exists only in tertiary perception as letters strung into particular words or terms). If it is not experience nor made out of the substance of experience, it cannot be known (although it can be believed) to exist at all (as we only know of existence through experience and with experience)---much less can it be said to matter (no pun intended) in the content and nature of our experience.
The only defensible position, in insistence that there be external models or analogs of the content of visual perception is not panpsychism but phenomenalism, as noted by Moreno.
J.
