I doubt it’s possible. I’m sceptical that one can cleanly sort every experience-related bodily mechanism into a “cognitive” category xor a “perceptual” category. Intuitively, for example, I might think of my eyes as perceptual, and the parts of my brain that process visual signals as cognitive, but if all of those bits of my brain were cut out, I’d expect to see nothing at all, not an “unmediated” view of the world — which implies my brain is perceptual as well as cognitive. So I expect the idea of just shutting down the cognitive mechanisms and leaving the perceptual mechanisms intact is incoherent.
(Often there’re also external physical mechanisms which are further mediators. You can’t see an object without light going from the object to your eye, and you can’t hear something without a medium between the source and your ear.)
(Presumably your first “that” is meant to be a “what”?) That question implies a false dichotomy too. The mistaken people might not be mistaken about what anyone thinks unmediated experience is; perhaps everyone pretty much agrees on what it is, and the mistaken people are simply misremembering or misinterpreting their own experiences.
This conversation might be more productive if you switch from Socratic questioning to simply presenting a reasonable definition of “unmediated experience” according to which unmediated experience exists. After all, your true objection seems to be that I’m using a bad definition.
Anybody can be wrong about anything, That isn’t an interesting observation, because it is general. Earlier you gave a specific reason, which you think is empirical, and I think is partly conceptual.
I doubt it’s possible. I’m sceptical that one can cleanly sort every experience-related bodily mechanism into a “cognitive” category xor a “perceptual” category. Intuitively, for example, I might think of my eyes as perceptual, and the parts of my brain that process visual signals as cognitive, but if all of those bits of my brain were cut out, I’d expect to see nothing at all, not an “unmediated” view of the world — which implies my brain is perceptual as well as cognitive. So I expect the idea of just shutting down the cognitive mechanisms and leaving the perceptual mechanisms intact is incoherent.
(Often there’re also external physical mechanisms which are further mediators. You can’t see an object without light going from the object to your eye, and you can’t hear something without a medium between the source and your ear.)
So are people who claim unmediated experience lying?
Or using a different definition of “unmediated”, or confused about their experience, or...
My best guess is that the vast majority of them are sincere. Being correct vs. being a liar is a false dichotomy.
So are they sincerely ,mistaken about that they think unmediated experience is, or about what you think it is?
(Presumably your first “that” is meant to be a “what”?) That question implies a false dichotomy too. The mistaken people might not be mistaken about what anyone thinks unmediated experience is; perhaps everyone pretty much agrees on what it is, and the mistaken people are simply misremembering or misinterpreting their own experiences.
This conversation might be more productive if you switch from Socratic questioning to simply presenting a reasonable definition of “unmediated experience” according to which unmediated experience exists. After all, your true objection seems to be that I’m using a bad definition.
Anybody can be wrong about anything, That isn’t an interesting observation, because it is general. Earlier you gave a specific reason, which you think is empirical, and I think is partly conceptual.