Hi Derrick

Thank you for inviting me to join the debate, you must know of my own interest in representationalism. Unfortunately I only had time to skim the long debate that precedes, but I have some points to make on your initial argument at the head of this thread.

Your entire argument (with which I of course agree) is based on a representationalist assumption and thus is sure to ring hollow to a dogmatic naive realist. I presume you are familiar with my Cartoon Epistemology?

http://sharp.bu.edu/~slehar/cartoonepist/cartoonepist.html

I thought the tall thin guy made an irrefutable case, but the little fat guy always had a rejoinder, even if we see it as absurd. This is a paradigmatic issue, like, for example, the belief in God. At the end of a long debate with believers, no matter how conclusive, the believer always ends with "Yes but I know He exists!" Because that is not their *conclusion* after a chain of logical reasoning, that was the *initial assumption* with which they came to the debate in the first place! That is a "fact" that they see as *self evident* and they are puzzled how anyone could possibly challenge it. And so it is with naive realists, who begin with an absolute certainty that the world in their experience is real, and they will go to no end of articulations in order to justify that view by logic. After you've heard their arguments long enough, you can almost predict the objections they will raise. For example your Point 1) One's vision is dependent on visual information traveling from one's eyes to the visual areas of one's brain, and then being processed, yes that sounds irrefutable, but the naive realist would quietly assume the proviso "yes but what I am seeing is not the end product of that causal chain, I am seeing the root cause of that chain, the objects reflecting light, directly in my experience!" and thus the entire argument collapses from the outset *for them*, and we are left befuddled as to how anyone could possibly not understand the causal chain of vision. I suspect the preceding debate above is replete with examples of this paradigmatic impasse, and let me guess: After all the debate, has any naive realist been persuaded? The REAL debate is the paradigmatic issue itself, and that, you will find, is not open to debate. That is their initial assumption, the rest is a rationalization of that assumption.

One fine point in your initial point 2) requires some refinement. Yes the world of experience is always in the past, but it is also in the nature of experience to predict the future, as most clearly evidenced in the phenomenon of *smooth pursuit* eye movements. When watching a moving object, or even one swinging back and forth periodically, your eyes do *not* track the past position of the object lagged 100 ms into the past, your mind picks up on the predictable motion, and points your eyes into the position where it knows the object will be in 100 ms, and thus they are tracking the *present* position of the moving object as seen into the *future* from the *past*. And THAT is why we don't notice that our experience has a temporal lag. (If the object moves in an irregular or unpredictable trajectory then your eyes do in fact lag in their tracking). This fine point somewhat muddies the otherwise clear chain of your logic. For a more complete exposition check out the Plotting Room Analogy:

http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/webstuff/book/chap1.html#PLOTTINGROOM

You will never convince the naive realists, especially the dogmatic ones who feel compelled to wade in to these debates, but these debates are not as futile as they might seem, because of the much larger number of "lurkers" who witness the debate from the sidelines, some of them have never heard these arguments before (this stuff is not taught in school, not in psychology, philosophy, nor neuroscience!) so they are the ones most likely to be persuaded.

As to the intuitive power of the naive realist instinct, check out the History of the Epistemological Debate...

http://cns-alumni.bu.edu/~slehar/webstuff/consc1/consc1a.html#hist

You may be surprised to discover that this is an ancient debate that has gone round and round in futile circles for centuries. It is the single central core issue in the science of perception, which will continue to be befuddled and confused until this issue is finally resolved.