Indirect Realism

Indirect realism is the claim that we perceive a model or simulation of the environment. It is the negation of direct realism, which states that we perceive the external world directly. QRI endorses indirect realism.

Introduction

When looking at an object, the natural and intuitive assumption is that what one sees is the external object itself. Indirect realism claims that this assumption is false, and instead, one sees a replica or model of the object, which exists solely inside one's head. Moreover, this principle extends, without exception, to all components of one's experience. In his book The Grand Illusion, Steven Lehar (who has his own QRI research lineage) writes:

But [...] [t]here was another equally profound realization that came to me incrementally in stages, which [...] is the idea that the world we see around us is not the world itself, but an image of the world constructed by our brain. [...]

I still remember to this day the day the answer hit me, because it was a feeling like being struck by lightning! I was sitting in my armchair in my living room at home, asking again and again that same question, when suddenly the answer came to me in the form of a vivid mental image. Suddenly I saw out beyond the walls, floor, and ceiling of the room I was sitting in, out beyond the farthest things that I perceived in all directions was the inner surface of my physical skull! And beyond that skull was an unimaginably immense world of objective reality of which all this here is merely a miniature internal replica! It was no new fact that I had suddenly discovered, you have heard those very same words from me several times throughout this narrative. And yet something very big and significant had suddenly fallen into place in my mind, I could suddenly see clearly a distinction which had eluded me up to this point. The answer to my eternal question trying to disambiguate the world from my experience of it, is EVERYTHING! It is absolutely EVERYTHING in my experience which is a representation in my brain, and there is NOTHING in my experience which is a direct experience of the world itself. [...]

The subsequent sections will discuss which background views on consciousness may lead one to accept or reject indirect realism, as well as possible implications of accepting the concept.

The Assumptions Behind (In)direct Realism

Two possible ontologies for the nature of visual experience. Regular arrows symbolize causality or information flow; the boxes represent the full visual processing pipeline of the human nervous system. The arrow originating from the box in the bottom row indicates that phenomenology reports result from specialized modules reporting on this (temporally smeared) process, rather than being descriptors of a single, well-defined thing. The modified arrow in the bottom row indicates a descriptive label.

While indirect realism is initially unintuitive, once one has gotten used to the idea, it can be difficult to understand why the topic remains a point of contention. Most views of consciousness (such as Dual-Aspect Monism) imply that our visual qualia is based entirely on the input data processed by our brains, which would seem to rule out direct realism immediately. However, direct realists are likely to disagree with a background assumption about the ontology of visual experience behind this argument. Consider the following two views on human vision (see also the graphic to the right):

1. Our brains exhibit visual qualia. Our reports of visual experience are reports of this qualia.
2. Our brains process visual data without constructing visual images. We have a limited ability to report on this process, and "visual qualia" is a term utilized as part of such reports.

The difference between these views suggests that direct vs. indirect realism is primarily a debate about whether visual qualia exists at all (as more than just an abstraction). If it does, it is precisely the representation indirect realism talks about, thus rendering the claim trivial. But if it does not, anything causally upstream of our talk of "perceived images" or "visual qualia" makes a defensible referent for these terms. Thus, since the respective external objects are causally upstream of our reports of vision (and since nothing else in the processing pipeline fulfills a similar role), it is reasonable to claim that what we see are external objects, or, differently put, that we see the world directly.

A realist view on consciousness arguably implies that visual qualia exist (which is why indirect realism is popular in the QRI memeplex), but the converse is not necessarily true. That is, one can be an illusionist and still believe that the brain explicitly constructs an intermediate representation, which is then the referent of "perceived images". Such people will likely take the indirect realist side of the argument, even if they might not use the term qualia to describe visual percepts. In fact, despite illusionist schools of thought being generally influential within neuroscience, representationalism (which is analogous to indirect realism) is the dominant paradigm for visual processing, which implies that consciousness realism is a sufficient but not a necessary condition for indirect realism.

Examples

In The Grand Illusion (the same book quoted in the introductory section, two pages after the previous quote), Steven Lehar describes how indirect realism was perceived by other people, writing that "[...] there seemed to be a near-universal consensus that my idea was either completely and totally wrong, or that it was nothing new, everybody already knew that all along". He proceeds to list five examples of how people would flip between these two ostensibly contradictory reactions, often within the same conversation, e.g. (emphasis removed):

Our experience is the result of electrical activation in the brain? Of course!
What we see in our experience is that electrical activation? Nonsense, absurd!

While the two claims seem almost identical under the "visual qualia exist" view, the "qualia is an abstraction" view renders the first true and the second false, precisely as the responses indicate. A similar principle holds across the other examples provided in the book:

The world of experience appears as a volumetric spatial structure? Trivially obvious!
There are actual volumetric pictures in the brain? Nonsense, totally absurd!

Our brain encodes all of the information content of our experience? Of course, who would argue with that?!
Our brain encodes volumetric spatial pictures? Nonsense!

On the other hand, O’Regan and Noë argue in A sensorimotor account of vision and visual consciousness that visual perception is best modeled as an exploratory activity for which no internal representation is constructed:

Instead of assuming that vision consists in the creation of an internal representation of the outside world whose activation somehow generates visual experience, we propose to treat vision as an exploratory activity. We then examine what this activity actually consists in. The central idea of our new approach is that vision is a mode of exploration of the world that is mediated by knowledge of what we call sensorimotor contingencies.

Then, when visual qualia are addressed later in the article, they simply deny their existence (emphasis added):

In our view, the qualia debate rests on what Ryle (1949/1990) called a category mistake. Qualia are meant to be properties of experiential states or events. But experiences, we have argued, are not states. They are ways of acting. They are things we do. There is no introspectibly available property determining the character of one’s experiential states, for there are no such states. Hence, there are, in this sense at least, no (visual) qualia. Qualia are an illusion, and the explanatory gap is no real gap at all.

As always, note that assumptions about the ontology of consciousness often go unacknowledged, and thus, not all authors arguing for direct realism will articulate the decisive point so clearly.

Implications

An illustration of how the world in your head appears, by Steven Lehar. Notable features of this depiction include (a) the spherical shape, (b) the warped perspective, (c) the changing resolution, and (d) the existence of a replica of the person themselves.

The belief that consciousness is a representation underlies virtually all ideas, concepts, and tools that are developed or endorsed by QRI (e.g., the Resonance Hierarchy, the Pseudo-Time Arrow, the psychophysics toolkit, the hyperbolic geometry of DMT experiences, et cetera). More generally, the entire practice of psychonautics largely relies on indirect realism. However, since indirect realism is also a logical consequence of QRI's philosophical views, it is usually not listed as an explicit assumption throughout this wiki.

Steven Lehar has repeatedly emphasized the importance of indirect realism in his work of developing a model of visual perception. Roughly put, once one realizes that visual qualia is a representation, one can study its geometry and behavior (most notably the properties discovered by Gestalt Theory) to draw conclusions about its computational and even physical architecture. Due to the scope and depth of his research and the explicit and repeated discussion of indirect realism, Steven is often considered the most prominent champion of the principle within the QRI memeplex. Relevant links to his work on the subject are listed in the Resources section.

Direct Realism as Limited Processing

While it is not as common, a different interpretation of direct realism is that the amount of processing performed on visual inputs by the brain is relatively small. Unlike the version discussed above, this version does not depend on one's ontology of consciousness. Furthermore, since it makes a statement about degree rather than a binary claim, it cannot be formally proved or falsified. However, there is a substantial body of research detailing extensive processing during ordinary visual perception (most notably by neuroscientist Stephen Grossberg), and QRI's own research suggests that these mechanisms are often amplified in exotic states of consciousness. Thus, QRI rejects this alternative interpretation of direct realism as well.

Resources

• A Cartoon Epistemology – a comic by Steven Lehar depicting a fictional dialogue between a direct realist and an indirect realist, covering many details of the problem along with implications for the brain.
• Harmonic Gestalt – a far more thorough and technical presentation of Steven Lehar's model for visual processing.
• Slehar.com – his official website, which provides an overview of his work and links to all his published papers.
• An Introduction to Steven Lehar: Bubble worlds and force fields – the first of a three-part series of posts about Steven Lehar by QRI collaborator CubeFlipper.