Below is part quote and part paraphrase from the section “The Perceptual Level as the Given.”

Some philosophers, most prominently David Hume, have denied the existence of the perceptual level entirely. They start at the level of sensations and try to infer the perceptual level. This is a dead end, and they fail. But this is a self-imposed failure.

Question: Is this necessarily a dead end? Imagine working on object-recognition or edge-detection algorithms for Computer Vision or Robotics. Wouldn’t that enterprise depend on getting sensory input and detecting entities from it? (Perhaps there’s a bootstrapping concern here that I’d benefit from discussing.)