This made me think. Are we talking about perception as experience, or perception as neural firing rate (or some other physical correlate)? If I’m the experimenter, and I look at an organism, or a servomotor, I don’t see its perceptions. I can imagine, or project, as Bruce says, different things onto the servomotor. I suppose that amounts to building different models of it, or looking at it from different ‘levels of perception’. If the inside part of the loop are the electrical signals, from the position sensor converting position to electrical signal, to the comparator and amplifier (or other kind of controller) sending the output, as electrical signal to the motor. The motor is on the limit between inside and outside. Outside, there is the turning of the rotor, gears, the output shaft, a bunch of disturbances and loads acting on the output shaft, and we come back to the sensor (potentiometer) attached to the output shaft, measuring the position of the shaft. I stole an image of a position servo from the internet:
Outside | Inside
------------------------------------------------
Atoms & molecules | Atoms & molecules
(metal, heat) | (electron flow, copper wires)
Objects | Objects
(shaft, motor) | (amplifier, potentiometer)
Events | Events
(load increase) | (error increase)
Variables and functions | Variables and functions
(force, position) | (voltage, current)
(btw. the formatting of the table is nicely shown in the discourse forum, not sure how it looks in emails)
So, when we look at a servomotor, we can choose different ‘representations’ to look at. We can see everything, both inside and outside, in terms of low-level physics models - metal composition, electron flow, energy exchange, electromechanical processes, I don’t know, gear grease, etc.
We can separate everything into arbitrary events, or sequences of events and divide them into causal structures. If event A happens, then event B has to follow, and then C cannot happen. If we make a step reference, then it takes 1.5 seconds for the motor to arrive at 95% of final position. All discrete events.
We can make abstract mathematical descriptions containing variables and formulas such as qi, sp, r and so on.
It looks like this “inside-outside” distinction is pretty arbitrary. Limits such as Martin’s “skin bag” aren’t real limits. You look outside of an organism, you see atoms and molecules, you look inside, again atoms and molecules. If you would take a camera and a microscope and point them to your own brain, you’d just see atoms and molecules and tissue and things, just like you see outside.
So, as you say, Observer’s perception is not observable to others. If we are talking about perception as experience, then neither is the observer’s environment.
If we are talking about perception as signals or variables, then maybe it is?