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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Visual perception is caused by the movements composing th... — Carmelics
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    Home/Perception
    HistoryEditSee Inverse

    Visual perception is caused by the movements composing the retinal picture acting directly upon the soul insofar as the soul is united to the body

    Consciousness & MindPerception
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    1 reason for
    2 reasons against

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
    ?
    • 1.The retinal picture passes to the inside of the head as a pattern of movements
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    • 2.Nature has ordained that these movements, acting directly on the soul, produce sensations
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    • 3.No intermediate perceiver within the brain is required
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Descartes' own pineal gland doctrine requires a mediating locus where retinal movements are unified into a single percept before reaching the soul.
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    • 2.If movements act 'directly' on the soul, the well-documented problem of retinal inversion and binocular fusion remains mechanistically unexplained.
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    • 3.A soul directly acted upon by physical motions collapses the substance dualism Descartes requires, making mind-body interaction conceptually incoherent.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
    ?
    • 1.Malebranche argued that finite souls lack the capacity to read God-instituted correlations between neural motions and ideas without divine occasionalist mediation.
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    • 2.If nature merely 'ordains' that movements produce sensations, the explanatory work is done by an unexplained legislative act, not by any causal mechanism.
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    • 3.Leibniz's pre-established harmony shows that positing direct physical causation on the soul is no less mysterious than the alternatives Descartes sought to avoid.
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    Topics

    PerceptionConsciousness & Mind

    Related

    A soul directly acted upon by physical motions collapses the substance dualism D...Descartes' own pineal gland doctrine requires a mediating locus where retinal mo...If movements act 'directly' on the soul, the well-documented problem of retinal ...If nature merely 'ordains' that movements produce sensations, the explanatory wo...
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    Leibniz's pre-established harmony shows that positing direct physical causation ...Malebranche argued that finite souls lack the capacity to read God-instituted co...Nature has ordained that these movements, acting directly on the soul, produce s...No intermediate perceiver within the brain is requiredThe retinal picture passes to the inside of the head as a pattern of movements

    Similar

    God is the cause of sensible perceptions in the soul whenever correspo...89%Sensible perceptions do in fact arise in the soul when corresponding b...86%Visual perception is not caused by the resemblance between the retinal...85%If visual perception were caused by resemblance between the retinal pi...85%

    Source

    AI-extracted1/3 agreementValid
    SEP: pineal-gland
    View source passageHide passage
    The first remarks about the pineal gland which Descartes published are to be found in his Dioptrics (1637). The fifth discourse of this book contains the thesis that “a certain small gland in the middle of the ventricles” is the seat of the sensus communis, the general faculty of sense (AT VI:129, not in CSM I). In the sixth discourse, we find the following interesting observation on visual perception: “Now, when this picture [originating in the eyes] thus passes to the inside of our head, it st
    Extraction notes

    Validity: Extracted via Max plan + API grounding/validity checks

    Details

    Type
    claim
    Perspectives
    3 (1 for, 2 against)
    Edits
    1 edit