• Brenner T
    1
    To preface, I am new to philosophy as a whole so apologies for obvious gaps in understanding of the literature. As an extension of this preface, the argument presented below was one I made as a high schooler with under three weeks of philosophy readings under my belt... it's accordingly pretty rough.

    In a random philosophy class I took in Junior year of high school the professor introduced Berkeley's Subjective Idealism- df. "a philosophy based on the premise that nothing exists except minds and spirits and their perceptions or ideas." I, being an energetic kid new to philosophy, tried to build some sort of syllogistic argument to rebuke the theory. I was looking through my notes app recently and saw this argument and, after reading it in amusement, wondered if it can be extended as a rebuttal of classical theism as a whole (specifically the theory that there was a conscious being that preceded other forms of perceptible existence).

    Here is a rough outline of the argument I posited against subjective idealism:
    1. According to Berkeley, all that is are ideas and minds.
    2. Ideas are mind-dependent; perceptions require a perceiver.
    3. Thus, according to Berkeley, a mind had to exist before or come to existence simultaneously with ideas.
    4. Non-existence cannot be perceived and something imperceptible cannot be perceived.
    5. Minds have no perceivable structure of their own.
    6. Thus, minds cannot be perceived or perceive themselves (from (4) and (5)).
    7. Thus, all that can be perceived are ideas (from (1), (4), and (6)).
    8. A mind cannot perceive something if there is nothing to perceive (from (4)).
    9. For ideas to exist, a mind had to perceive (from (2))
    10. Ideas exist
    11. Thus, the first mind(s) had to be able to perceive (from (2), (7) and (10)).
    12. Therefore, ideas had to exist before minds.
    13. According to Berkeley, a mind had to exist before ideas (from (3)).
    14. But since ideas exist, they had to exist before minds (from (12)).
    15. Thus, there is a contradiction in Berkeley’s theory.

    I also posited another argument to back this up, which intended to state that a mind cannot exist without some (presumably material/mechanistic) mechanisms for sensory or computational abilities.

    1. To perceive itself, a mind needs some sensory and computational abilities.
    2. Sensory abilities are useless without anything to sense.
    3. The perceiver can only sense their own perceptions.
    4. But to have perceptions it must have some sensory abilities (from (1)).
    5. But sensory abilities are useless without any perceptions to sense (from (2)).
    6. Thus, sensory abilities and perceptions are contingent on each other, and so they cannot arise simultaneously.
    7. Thus, a mind alone cannot perceive itself.

    Obviously rough around the edges but there seems to be some intriguing validity in the conclusion that it make no sense for a mind to exist without there also existing i) something that is perceivable and ii) the ability to perceive/sense. I am curious if you believe theres any validity in the argument against Berkeley but mostly curious if you believe this logic can be extended to rebut classical theism. This conclusion seems to imply that a conscious "God" that arose before all of creation is impossible because a) he would have nothing to perceive and thus have no content of thought or qualia, and ii) he would have no mechanism to perceive or sense.
  • Wayfarer
    22.3k
    This conclusion seems to imply that a conscious "God" that arose before all of creation is impossible because a) he would have nothing to perceive and thus have no content of thought or qualia, and ii) he would have no mechanism to perceive or sense.Brenner T

    Welcome aboard.

    As we're discussing Berkeley, a limerick known to generations of philosophy of students ought to be mentioned:

    "There was a young man who said "God
    Must find it exceedingly odd
    To think that the tree
    Should continue to be
    When there's no one about in the quad."

    Reply:

    "Dear Sir: Your astonishment's odd;
    I am always about in the quad.
    And that's why the tree
    Will continue to be
    Since observed by,
    Yours faithfully,
    God."


    I don't know if the absence of there being anything to perceive would be necessarily a hindrance for God, although there are tropes that the reason anything exists at all, was because He experienced a sense of incompleteness without there being something other than Him to contemplate. (There is an early Buddhist text which presents an idea like this by way of satirising the idea of a personal God.)

    Secondly, quite what 'conscious' means in this context is far from obvious. Many of the aspects of our own consciousness are, in fact, unconscious, as 20th c psychology has shown, in that we can't necessarily be introspectively or directly aware of them, while they still comprise the basis on which our conscious experience is founded. So there is no reason to presume that, were a Divine Intelligence to be real, that the kind of consciousness it possesses would be like that of humans (although hopefully there is some kind of commonality.) Isn't it the case that a conscious intelligence can be self-aware even in the absence of any external stimuli? Consciousness is something that knows of its own being even in the absence of stimuli. As René Descartes said, even if all belief in an external world is suspended, one will still retain a sense of one's own being, 'cogito ergo sum'.

    There's a lot more I might say, because, as it happens, I'm generally an advocate for philosphical idealism, but it's a deep topic, so I'll leave it at that for now.
  • T Clark
    13.8k
    6. Thus, sensory abilities and perceptions are contingent on each other, and so they cannot arise simultaneously.Brenner T

    Sure they can. That's how evolution works. Some little organism 2.5 billion years ago just happened to react in a particular way to a stimulus. That reaction provided a survival advantage and was carried on in the organism's descendants. And now here we are. Minds didn't just appear fully formed by the wave of a wand. They grew up with the universe.

    7. Thus, a mind alone cannot perceive itself.Brenner T

    My mind is here perceiving itself right now. There... and again... Maybe you should clarify what you mean by "perceive.

    And welcome to the forum.
  • Ourora Aureis
    49
    5. Minds have no perceivable structure of their own.
    6. Thus, minds cannot be perceived or perceive themselves (from (4) and (5)).
    Brenner T

    I am not equated with Berkeley's theory, but within this theory couldn't a mind be equated to the perceptions it holds? If all that exists is qualia, then the mind must *be* the totality of such qualia, right? It side-steps the issue with assuming they are seperate and that both must precede the other. (I think your argument works well against the seperated position though).
bold
italic
underline
strike
code
quote
ulist
image
url
mention
reveal
youtube
tweet
Add a Comment

Welcome to The Philosophy Forum!

Get involved in philosophical discussions about knowledge, truth, language, consciousness, science, politics, religion, logic and mathematics, art, history, and lots more. No ads, no clutter, and very little agreement — just fascinating conversations.