PHIL 100w; Fall 2024

Lecture 5 Transcription

Warning: This transcription was made by a computer, and may contain errors.
Today’s topic is this: Can we perceive physical things, or material things? What do I mean by
“physical things”? I won’t attempt a definition. That’s a difficult question, but I can give you some
examples of physical things. My body is a physical thing. This lectern is a physical thing. That
projector screen is a physical thing. This building is a physical thing, and so on. I’m asking: Can we
perceive physical things like that?

When we talk about perception, we’re usually thinking of all five senses, but philosophers habitually
focus on vision—on sight. That’s what I’m going to do today. So, the question is really: Can we see
physical things?

This might seem to be an easy question. You might be thinking, “Of course, I can see the projector
screen. I can see the lectern. I can see your body.” But it’s not uncommon for psychologists and
cognitive scientists to deny that we can see physical things. Here’s a quotation from the
distinguished cognitive scientist Chris Frith. He says:

Our brains build models of the world and continuously modify these models on the
basis of the signals that reach our senses. So, what we actually perceive are our
brain’s models of the world. They are not the world itself, but, for us, they are as
good as. You could say that our perceptions are fantasies that coincide with reality.
(Chris Frith, Making Up The Mind, Ch. 5)

Chris Frith says you can’t see physical things. What you see are models of the world constructed by
your brain. Now, in his book Making Up The Mind, Frith discusses up-to-date research in psychology
and neuroscience. But the claim he’s making here is actually a very old one, and the arguments for
this claim haven’t changed much.
This is David Hume, a Scottish philosopher writing in the 18th century. He raises the suggestion that
we can see physical things and says:

But this universal and primary opinion of all men is soon destroyed by the slightest
philosophy, which teaches us, that nothing can ever be present to the mind but an
image or perception. (David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding,
section 12)

Hume is saying you cannot see physical things; you can only see images or perceptions. We call this
“indirect realism”. Indirect realists think that physical objects do exist, but we can’t see them. Rather,
we see ideas, as I will call them, which represent the physical objects. You might think that the ideas
are a bit like mental photographs.

Indirect realism is often conjoined with the claim that it’s really ideas that have colours; physical
objects don’t have colours. Similar claims are made about the other senses, but as philosophers
usually do today, I will focus on vision. Here’s Galileo on colour:

I think that tastes, odors, colors, and so on are no more than mere names so far as
the object in which we place them is concerned, and that they reside only in the
consciousness. Hence, if the living creatures were removed, all these qualities would
be wiped away and annihilated. Galileo From Drake, Discoveries and Opinions of
Galileo, pg. 274

So, according to Galileo, bananas aren’t yellow. It’s your idea of the banana that is yellow, and the
idea is something that’s in your consciousness. It’s not a physical thing.

In this lecture, I’m going to explain the case for these strange-sounding ideas. I’ll start with my
favourite argument for indirect realism, called the argument from perspectival variation—or the
argument from changing perspectives, if you like.
I’ll suppose we have a rigid cube. When I say it’s rigid, I mean it’s a cube that isn’t going to change
shape. It’s made of steel, not jelly or mud. Now suppose I hold the cube in front of me, with a flat
side facing me. What do I see? Well, I see something like a square.

Now, if I turn the cube so that one of its corners is pointing at me, what do I see? Something like a
hexagon.

So, here’s the argument: The thing you see changes shape as you move the cube around in your
hands. First, you see a square, then you see a hexagon. So, there’s a change in the shape of the thing
you perceive. But the cube itself, the physical cube, doesn’t change shape as you move it around.
This is why I stressed that it has to be a rigid cube—it’s made of steel, not jelly or mud. The thing
you see changes shape; the physical cube does not. Therefore, the thing you see is not the cube.
So, what are you seeing if you’re not seeing the cube? Well, the idea is that you’re seeing an idea. The
thought is something like this: Light bounces off the cube, is focused by the lens of your eye onto
your retina, and a signal goes along the optic nerve to your brain. From there, it forms something
like a mental picture of the cube. You have in your mind a mental picture of the cube, and it’s the
mental picture you see, not the physical cube itself.

Now, the character of the mental picture depends, of course, on the character of the physical cube,
but it also depends on other things—like the light conditions, the position from which you’re
viewing the cube, and how far you are from it. As you move the cube around, your idea changes
shape. So, the thing you see changes shape as you move the cube, but the physical cube doesn’t.
Therefore, you’re seeing an idea, not the cube itself.

This is an old argument. Here is David Hume’s version of the argument. He imagines that you look at
a table and then walk slowly away from it, and he says:

The table, which we see, seems to diminish, as we remove farther from it: but the
real table, which exists independent of us, suffers no alteration: it was, therefore,
nothing but its image, which was present to the mind. (David Hume, Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding, section 12)

So, the thing you see gets smaller as you walk away from the table, but the physical table doesn’t
change size. Therefore, the thing you’re seeing is not the physical table; it’s your mental image of
it—your idea. That’s the argument.
That’s the argument from perspectival variation. Now, let’s talk about the argument from illusion
and hallucination. This is actually a more common and influential argument, though it’s rather
complicated.

So, we’re going to talk about three different sorts of visual experience: hallucination, illusion, and
veridical perception.

First, there’s hallucination. A hallucination is when your vision tells you that an object is present
before you, but in fact, no object is there. My favourite example of this is Macbeth.

Remember, Macbeth is going to murder the king, and he has a hallucination of a knife in front of
him. He tries to grab it, but he can’t because there’s no knife there — it’s just a hallucination. So,
Macbeth’s vision is telling him there is a knife in front of him when, in fact, no such thing exists.
That’s hallucination.
Next, we have cases of illusion. In these cases, your vision tells you that an object is present before
you, and indeed, the object is really there. But vision is misleading you as to the nature of this object.

A famous example is a straight pencil partially submerged in water, which appears to be bent. This
isn’t a hallucination — the pencil is really there — but vision is misleading you about the nature of
the pencil. Your vision tells you that the pencil is bent, but in fact, it is straight. That’s an illusion.

Finally, there’s what we call veridical perception, which is the normal case when there’s no illusion
or hallucination—your vision is accurately representing the objects before you.

What we’re going to do in this argument is claim that, in all three cases, the thing you see is an idea.
First, we’ll argue that in cases of hallucination, you see an idea. Then, we’ll argue that in cases of
illusion, you see an idea. Finally, we’ll argue that even in the case of veridical perception, you can
only see an idea, not a physical object.

Let’s start with hallucination. When Macbeth has his hallucination, he doesn’t see a physical knife—
there’s no knife there, clearly. But he does seem to be seeing something. If he’s not seeing a physical
thing, he must be seeing something non-physical, a mental thing. What could that be? Well, it’s
something like a mental representation of a knife, a mental picture of a knife. That’s an idea in our
terminology. So, Macbeth is seeing an idea. Or, as he himself puts it:

Art thou but a dagger of the mind, a false creation, proceeding from the heat-
oppressed brain?
In our terminology, what Macbeth sees is an idea. He can’t be seeing a physical knife because there
is no knife there. But it seems that he is seeing something, so he must be seeing something non-
physical—he must be seeing an idea. That’s the argument.

Now, let’s move to the case of illusion. Suppose you’re looking at this straight pencil half-submerged
in water. The argument goes like this: The thing you see is bent—just look at it, it’s bent. The thing
you see is bent, but the pencil itself, the physical pencil, is not bent. So, the thing that you see is not
the pencil. What is it that you perceive? Well, it’s an idea—it’s your mental picture of the pencil.

Now, for the crucial step in the argument. You might be thinking, “OK, I’ll agree that in cases of
hallucination and illusion, what you see is an idea and not a physical thing. But those are
exceptional and rare cases. In cases of veridical perception, surely you can see the physical thing
itself.” So, now we argue that even in cases of veridical perception, you cannot see the physical thing
— you can only see the idea.

Here’s the argument: Suppose I take the pencil and slowly lower it into a beaker of water. At first,
there’s no illusion — the pencil looks straight and is straight. By the time the pencil is half-
submerged, there is an illusion because the pencil looks bent but isn’t. We’ve already argued that at
the end of this process, when the pencil is half-submerged, you are seeing an idea, not the physical
pencil. So, the question is, at the beginning of the process, before the pencil is submerged, are you
seeing an idea or are you seeing the physical pencil?

Look, is it really plausible that at the start of this process, you’re seeing the physical pencil, but at
some point, as I slowly lower the pencil into the water, there’s a switch where the physical pencil is
replaced by an idea? It seems implausible because there’s no perceptible discontinuity in your
perception. Everything seems smooth and continuous. So, it doesn’t seem very plausible that, at
some point in this process, one object of perception is swapped for another. Therefore, it seems that
even at the start of this process, even when there’s no illusion, you are only seeing an idea.

That’s the argument.

Now, let’s talk about colour. In this section, I’m going to consider a couple of arguments for the view
that bananas aren’t yellow. More generally, that physical objects don’t have colours. Then, I’ll discuss
an argument for a slightly different conclusion: a view in which physical objects do have colours, but
the colours of physical objects are completely different from the colours of ideas. On this view,
physical objects do have colours, but not in the same way that your ideas do.

First argument: the argument from other species. Bees’ eyes are sensitive to a different part of the
spectrum compared to human eyes. Bees, as we might roughly put it, can’t see red, but they can
respond to UV light. This was discovered by a German scientist in the first half of the 20th century,
named Karl von Frisch. He did some fascinating experiments — well worth reading about if you’re
interested. Karl von Frisch also discovered the bee waggle dance, which most of you will have heard
of. What von Frisch did was he showed that bees could be trained to distinguish green from yellow.
However, he found that with a red piece of cardboard and a suitably chosen grey piece of cardboard,
it was impossible to train the bees to distinguish between them. This shows that bees, as we might
loosely put it, can’t see red.

This means you can produce a tile that appears striped from the point of view of a person but plain
from the point of view of a bee. And we could do it the other way around too. So, here’s the puzzle:
Is the tile really striped, or is it really plain? It seems that it can’t be both, because “striped” and
“plain” are obviously incompatible properties. Saying something is both striped and plain at the
same time seems like saying something weighs three kilograms and five kilograms at the same time.
These seem to be incompatible properties that can’t go together.

So, is the tile really striped or really plain? Well, we might be tempted to say the tile is really striped,
and the bees just can’t see it because they have defective eyesight. We human beings see the real
colours of things, and the bees are wrong. But how arrogant that is, to privilege our own eyesight in
this way!

Alternatively, we could say the tile is really plain, and we humans are suffering from a collective
illusion. But that seems equally arbitrary. Why should we privilege bee perception in that way?
So, it’s a thorny problem. But the indirect realist has a clever solution. The indirect realist can say,
“The tile itself doesn’t have any colour. Physical objects don’t have colours; it’s the ideas that have
colours.” So, when the bee looks at the tile, it has a plain idea. When a human looks at the tile, the
human has a striped idea. The tile itself has no colour. The tile itself is neither striped nor plain.

And that neatly solves the problem. It’s the ideas that are striped or plain, not the physical objects.

So, the indirect realist can say that physical objects don’t have colours—it’s the ideas that have
colours. When the bee looks at the tile, it has a plain idea; when a human looks at the tile, the human
has a striped idea. The tile itself has no colour, neither striped nor plain, and that neatly solves the
problem.

We can run a very similar argument with variations in colour perception between people. Even
among people who are not colourblind, there is variation in colour perception. Colours look slightly
different to you than they do to me, even if neither of us is colourblind. One way to see this is to
consider what colour scientists call “unique green.”

Usually, if you look at a green thing, it will seem to be either a yellowish sort of green or a bluish sort
of green. Greens are usually either yellowish or bluish. But right in the middle, there is a special
shade of green that is neither yellowish nor bluish. Colour scientists call this “unique green.”

Now, I wonder if I could have a volunteer to help me with this … someone to come to the front?
Ideally? Yes, please.

(At this point, a volunteer named Victoria comes up.)

OK, here we have a website where you can type in a wavelength, and it gives you the corresponding
colour. Now, this isn’t going to be completely accurate because the projector isn’t calibrated, but that
doesn’t matter for our purposes.
Victoria, what I’d like you to do is find the wavelength that looks like unique green to you. So, let’s
start with 500 nanometres. Would you describe that as yellowish-green, bluish-green, or neither?

(Victoria answers that it looks more on the yellow side.)

OK, let’s show this to the audience using the projector so they know what you’re talking about. That
was 500 nanometres. Let’s try 550 nanometres now.

(Victoria describes it as definitely yellow.)

OK, now let’s go the other way—490 nanometres.

(Victoria says it looks blue.)

Back to 500 nanometres?

(Victoria still says it looks a bit yellowish.)

We’re getting close. How about 495 nanometres?

(Victoria says it’s blue.)

OK, let’s try 497 or 498.

(Victoria says it’s somewhere between those two.)

Great! So, somewhere between 497 and 498 nanometres looks very close to unique green for you.
Thank you very much, Victoria!
Now, I’m curious: If this looks very close to unique green for you, could you raise your hand? No one.
OK. If it looks yellowish to you, raise your hand. A few people. And if it looks bluish to you, raise
your hand? Wow, quite a few!

So, what we’ve seen is that Victoria has unusual colour perception. For her, this is unique green, but
for most of you, it’s bluish.

Now, some colour scientists in a lab did a much more scientific study of this. This is the distribution
they got. You can see that most people think that unique green is somewhere between 500 and 505
nanometres, but some people go as high as 515 or 520, and some people go as low as 490 or 495.
Actually, you can see that Victoria is right at the bottom of this distribution, so that fits.

There is clearly a lot of variation in colour perception from one person to another. So, suppose we
find a tile that looks bluish to Ashni but looks like unique green to Ben, and neither of them has
colour blindness. They both have normal colour vision. Then we can ask, “Is the tile really unique
green or not?” Again, this is a puzzling question, like the puzzle about the tile and the bees.

One solution is to say the tile doesn’t have a colour at all. It’s Ashni’s idea that is bluish-green, and
Ben’s idea that is unique green. Ashni and Ben have slightly different ideas when they look at the
tile. Their ideas are slightly different colours.
So far, I’ve been giving you some classic arguments for the claim that physical objects do not have
colours—only ideas have colours. This idea is not new, as I mentioned earlier. It goes back to Galileo.
These arguments are hundreds of years old.

Now I’m going to give a more up-to-date argument, which I’ll call the argument from colour science.
This argument is meant to show that physical objects do have colours, but the colours of physical
objects are very different from the colours of ideas.

The argument starts from a particular theory about what colours are, based on colour science.
Suppose you shine light on an object, and you measure the amount of light you send towards the
object and the amount of light that comes back. We don’t need to be precise about the units here.
The “reflectance” is the number you get when you divide the latter number by the former. So, an
object that gives a lot of light back will have a high reflectance — close to 100%. An object that
doesn’t reflect much light will have a low reflectance — close to 0%. A snowball, for example, will
have a high reflectance, and a lump of coal will have a low reflectance.

Now, the reflectance of an object varies depending on the wavelength of light you use. For any given
object, you can draw a curve representing the relationship between wavelength and reflectance.
Some scientists and philosophers think that the colour of a physical object is its spectral reflectance
profile — this particular pattern of spectral reflectance it has across the spectrum. On this view,
when we say an object is red or green or white, we’re describing its spectral reflectance profile.
We’re describing the sort of curve it has on that graph.

But now, here’s the key point: Ideas don’t have spectral reflectance profiles. You can’t shine light on
an idea — ideas don’t reflect light. So, on this view, the colour of an external object is a totally
different kind of thing from the colour of an idea. When you look at a tomato, you have a red idea,
and the tomato is red. But the redness of the idea and the redness of the tomato are completely
different things. The redness of the tomato is its particular way of reflecting light, and the redness of
the idea is … well, it’s something we all know from experience, but it’s hard to say exactly what it is.
We all know what it’s like to imagine a red thing, for instance — that’s the redness of an idea. On
this view, physical objects have colours, but they don’t have colours in the same way that ideas have
colours.

These arguments that I’ve been giving, with the exception of the last one, have been influential for
hundreds of years. I think it’s easy to see why—they are powerful arguments. But if you’ve followed
me to this point, you find yourself stuck with a challenging puzzle.
So, as you look at me, you have a certain idea in your head — a Tom-shaped patch of colour in your
visual field. That’s your idea. You presumably think that idea corresponds to a real physical object
— my body, which is in front of you. But Hume is asking: If you can’t see the physical object, how do
you know it’s there? Remember, on this view, you can never see physical objects. How do you know
they are there?

It may be that your ideas come from the energy of the mind itself. Maybe all your ideas are just
creations of your own mind. This would make the apparently physical world around you part of an
extended dream, in effect. Or perhaps there is some invisible and unknown spirit causing the ideas.

Some of you might already be thinking that this puzzle sounds a lot like Descartes’ puzzle about the
malicious demon, which we discussed last time. To remind you, Descartes writes:
Descartes’ malicious demon is very similar to Hume’s “invisible and unknown spirit.” While we’re
on this topic, I want to make one quick point about Descartes’ story. In Descartes’ thought
experiment, the malicious demon makes Descartes believe that he has hands, even though he
actually doesn’t have hands. The hands are part of the hallucination. So, in Descartes’ story, the
entire physical world, including one’s own body, is part of an extended hallucination.

The similarity between Hume’s invisible spirit and Descartes’ malicious demon is obvious. However,
there is an important difference: In Meditations, Descartes is seeking certainty. He asks, “Can I be
certain that the story about the malicious demon is false?” Hume didn’t have that ambition. Hume
wasn’t asking for certainty. Instead, his question was, “Do we have any reason at all to think that
physical objects exist? Can we even be somewhat confident that physical objects exist?”

Descartes and Hume both bring this puzzle to light using demons and spirits, but today, we can
make essentially the same point by talking about computer simulations. How do I know that the
physical objects I seem to see around me are not just parts of an elaborate computer simulation?

This is the puzzle.

Here’s one way to see the problem. Consider three statements:

(1) I have hands.

(2) If I have hands, then the story about the malicious demon is false.
(3) The story about the malicious demon is true.

Now, I want you to think about this in the first person. You should be asking yourself, “Do I know
that I have hands?” Don’t think about whether I, Tom, have hands — think about your own hands.

Common sense tells us that you know (1): you know you have hands. There they are, right? You can
see them. Common sense says, “Of course, I know I have hands.”

(2) is obvious because it’s built into the story about the malicious demon. If that story is true, you
don’t have hands — so if you do have hands, the demon story must be false. So (2) is a
straightforward implication of the malicious demon hypothesis, and presumably, you know it.
But here’s the problem: Can you say you know (3) is false? Can you know that the story about the
malicious demon is not true? To know (3) is false, you’d need evidence that it’s false. After all, you
only count as “knowing” something if you have good reason or evidence for it. That’s what
distinguishes real knowledge from mere opinion. But any evidence you might present could have
been fabricated by the malicious demon to trick you. So, you might argue that you have no
conclusive evidence that the demon story is false.

At this point, you seem to be in the situation of saying that you know (1): “I know I have hands.” And
you know (2): “If I have hands, the demon story is false.” But maybe you don’t know (3): “I don’t
know that the demon story is false.” However, we said earlier that it’s irrational to claim to know
both A (I have hands) and “If A, then B” (If I have hands, the demon story is false), while also
claiming not to know B (that the demon story is false). This creates a philosophical problem.

What should we do? There seem to be three options:

I’d like to know what you think. Please go to Sli.do and use the event code 241-4333, then choose
polls. Feel free to discuss with people sitting near you before making your selection. I’m very
interested to see what the poll results will be.

(Class discussion follows.)