Jay asked:

What is it we immediately perceive in perception? Is it the intersubjective, material world as naive
realism posits?

Or what is the relation of what we immediately perceive to the purported external world?

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It depends on how old you are. And chances are that what you perceive in perception is stale news
once you know you've perceived it. But I suspect that what you mean by 'immediate perception' is
actually sensation.To make sense of this issue, you need to keep these two items clearly apart.

Sensation is what your nerves bring in. You see a light; you feel a pain: this is sensation. Some
sensations (well: most of them) require further interpretation: this is where perception comes in.
Perception is evaluation of sensations.

Let me explain in this in a simple example. When you hold an apple in your hand, the shape, the
weight, the smell, the colour: all these are for the time being sensations. But by itself this would not
make the apple recognisable to you as a fully-rounded object. Perception is therefore the composition
of several sensations into a single perceptual unit.

Now when I say that the 'news' of this is stale by the time you are aware of it, what I mean is that this
perception is not sourced exclusively from the outside. You could not recognise an apple unless you
had an 'apple' memory. So when your perceptual faculty brings the apple stimuli together, it doesn't
just simply rely on them without question: you are put (so to speak) 'on hold' while the contents of
your memory are examined to verify the stimuli. It's quite fantastic, actually: let's say 69% of the apple
you 'see' matches exactly what's in your memory, while the other 31% are new: then what you see
will actually be a composite of 'remembered' and 'real' stimuli. The reason it happens this way is
because images are extremely labour and space intensive; your brain could probably not assemble a
good representation from just the 'factual' data in a time stamp useful to you (you know how long it
takes to bring 50 gigs into your computer!). So the compare and match process serves for speeding
up your recognition of that object.

Finally my remark about age: many types of stimuli are repetitive, as you get older, many of them
might even be identical. In a very real sense, then, when you see something for the 50th time, your
perception is not going to be bothered going through the 'expensive' routine of deciphering and
constructing a stimulus for the 50th time, but just replays it from memory.

Now I should give you some references, but most books in this branch are so damned difficult that I'm
reluctant. But to make a start somewhere, perhaps you should browse through Donald Hoffmann,
Visual Intelligence(Norton). But be warned! This is a subject that, once you get a taste for it, won't
ever leave you alone!

Jürgen Lawrenz

Sydney