As you should expect, given that I'm a naive realist. Another theory of perception would have to be well-supported, have good reasons for belief, be plausible etc. for me to change my view. I won't be holding my breath. — Terrapin Station

You do realize that Berkeley is proposing a form of naive realism? He is actually giving you theory to justify your belief and refute Locke's veil of perception.

On what grounds do you dismiss him so flippantly?

You do realize that Berkeley is proposing a form of naive realism? — Jamesk

Yeah, and Cheetos are really broccoli.

Are you going to engage in a constructive argument or are you happy with just trolling?

Terrapin Station Rocks are just ideas, man~

No one better give me grief about this — MindForged

Excuse me, I'm not just an idea of yours. How rude. :D

Excuse me, I'm not just an idea of yours. How rude. :D — jorndoe

No you are not an idea, you are a mind / spirit. Thinking beings are different to unthinking objects. I still haven't worked out which category Terrapin Station belongs in.

Come on, now. You can't be so unintelligent that you believe that not agreeing with something amounts to not understanding it, can you? — Terrapin Station

When it's a sound argument, and one disagrees, it is obviously a matter of misunderstanding. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to recognize that.

The basic problem most people have, is that they imagine that what Berkeley is arguing means that ‘the world is all in my mind’. But if that were all he was saying, then nobody would have read his works, and there would be no debate — Wayfarer

Others reading his works and debating would all be ideas in his mind.

Idealism logically and inexorably leads to solipsism.

His argument could be better paraphrased as ‘all our knowledge of the world comprises ideas’ - that what we take to be independently existing objects are in actual fact ideas in the (not necessarily my) mind. It does sound incredible, but it is exactly that incredulity that Hylas, the sceptic in his dialogue, brings to Philonious, only to see all his apparently sensible objections refuted. — Wayfarer

This explanation isn't any better. All there are are ideas, not independently existing objects, like you and your internet forum post. "Your ideas" (your forum posts) only exist because they are my ideas.

You miss the point. God acts as the guarantor of all ideas. Objects exist independent of YOUR mind because they are always held in Gods mind.Again, intelligent beings do exist as minds / spirits and are mind independent.

Are you going to engage in a constructive argument or are you happy with just trolling? — Jamesk

Put that mirror down, son.

When it's a sound argument, and one disagrees, it is obviously a matter of misunderstanding. — Metaphysician Undercover

It shouldn't take a third-grader to realize that just because you think that something is true, it doesn't imply that others agree, hence it's still unbelievably unintelligent to think that not agreeing amounts to not understanding. It's not as if not agreeing can be consistent with understanding only when everyone else thinks that something is false. That would be a comically ridiculous take on that.

God acts as the guarantor of all ideas. — Jamesk

Yeah, positing a magic genie makes the view a lot more reasonable.

Yeah, positing a magic genie makes the view a lot more reasonable. — Terrapin Station

Finally we are getting somewhere. The question is does positing a magic genie provide a better explanation than positing a material substratum that has equally mysterious properties as the genie.

Locke says that material objects are supported by a material substratum. Until today science is dealing with the mysterious nature of this substratum and we still remain on the wrong side of the veil of perception and so only have indirect knowledge of any true nature beyond our limited sensory perception.

Berkeley says 'ballix to material substratum, God is the support for all objects in the world. By accepting Gods role we can be sure that we directly perceive objects as they are. There is no veil of perception, we can be naive realists once again after Descartes pulled out the rug.

The point is that the metaphysics of the quantum physics are as equally mysterious as the metaphysics of God so what reason do we have for choosing one over the other?

You miss the point. God acts as the guarantor of all ideas. Objects exist independent of YOUR mind because they are always held in Gods mind.Again, intelligent beings do exist as minds / spirits and are mind independent. — Jamesk

Your explanation of "mind" is inconsistent. We can't be mind independent if we are part of another mind.

A better explanation is realism. There is a shared world that is represented in unique, yet similar, ways in unique, yet similar, minds.

You have to use the notion of realism - that there are external causes to your experiences, ie God - to prevent idealism from collapsing into solipsism.

positing a material substratum — Jamesk

Not a substratum. Material is all there is--well, material, relations of material and motion of material. We're not positing things we don't observe.

All that exist are minds and ideas. The metaphysics of our minds and of God are beyond our understanding but Berkeley doesn't seem to imply that our minds are 'parts' of Gods mind. Unfortunately because we can only know ideas, and minds are not ideas, we cannot really know anything about minds. We cannot form an idea of either our own minds or of God's.

Like I say Berkeley doesn't really explain how God does it or even why he does it but shows us where it is happening, which is everywhere.

Materialism also relies on a belief in the causal powers of objects, it is the objects existence that causes us to perceive it. Hume undermined this belief and showed all we know is constant conjunction, Berkeley anticipates Hume's refutal of causal power in objects. All causation is from God.

You are positing their mind independent existence. You posit their existence when they are not being perceived. So they exist as part of a material substratum which you cannot perceive.

You are positing their mind independent existence. — Jamesk

You observe their mind-independent existence.

Aside from that, mind is material too.

You observe their mind-independent existence.

Aside from that, mind is material too. — Terrapin Station

Firstly observation and perception are mind dependent. A mind must be present in order to do these things. Mind independent perception is a contradiction in terms.

Secondly, you say that mind is matter by which I can only assume that you mean the brain is matter. For Berkeley,as with Descartes minds and spirits and souls are synonymous, we have little enough empirical evidence of 'minds' and none what so ever about spirits or souls so your claim that minds are material is highly problematic.

All that exist are minds and ideas. The metaphysics of our minds and of God are beyond our understanding but Berkeley doesn't seem to imply that our minds are 'parts' of Gods mind. — Jamesk

No. That's what you implied when you said:

Objects exist independent of YOUR mind because they are always held in Gods mind. — Jamesk

Unfortunately because we can only know ideas, and minds are not ideas, we cannot really know anything about minds. We cannot form an idea of either our own minds or of God's. — Jamesk

Yet we do have ideas about other minds and of God's.

If minds are not ideas then minds are objects - material.

Nothing you have said falsifies anything I have said. You don't want to have a discussion. All you want to do is to continue to spout your fundamentalist claims and hope they stick to something.

How did Berkeley differentiate ideas that are just sensed (ie. the objects of perception) from those that are abstracted? It seems that the notion of "material" is a further step abstracted out from bare perception.

Isn't Hume's arguing against the self via Berkeley's skepticism of the material very similar. The material fits in the same vague category as the self, a higher up abstraction from a series of sense perceptions.

Firstly observation and perception are mind dependent. A mind must be present in order to do these things. Mind independent perception is a contradiction in terms. — Jamesk

The same old idiotic confusion from poster after poster here:

You observe their mind-independence. You don't non-consciously observe anything. If you're observing something, then obviously there's an observer, but you'd have to be in the market of not being capable of feeding yourself to be confused whether you're only observing the observer per se.

It's like you screw in a lightbulb that is hand-independent. You don't hand-independently screw the lightbulb in. You're not only screwing in the hand-screwing.

You walk on a sidewalk that is foot-independent. You don't foot-independently walk on the sidewalk. You're not only walking on your own foot-walking.

This is so simple that a toddler should be able to understand it, yet poster after poster here is confused (yet arrogant about it).

And the only way you'd have little empirical evidence of a mind is if you don't have one, which may very well be the case given how confused you appear to be.

It can't possibly be that idealism rests on such a moronic confusion. I refuse to believe that the entire history of idealism in philosophy is a parade of short-bus candidates, but maybe so.

The same old idiotic confusion from poster after poster — Terrapin Station

James K is actually just repeating what Berkeley argued, not that it is true. Folks are just trying to be charitable to Berkeley.

The ad hominem is probably warranted because some have used it against you in this thread but it'll only get worse if we carry on.

I think it's a problem--and I consider it dishonest--when we pretend that we don't think something is stupid when we do think that. That's one way we end up wasting so much time with this sort of nonsense in the first place.

And no, I don't think that something isn't stupid just because it has a long history of respect. Just look at religious beliefs.

James K is actually just repeating what Berkeley argued, not that it is true. Folks are just trying to be charitable to Berkeley. — Nils Loc

Thanks but look again at the title of the thread and the questions asked. I clearly state that I want to compare between the two theories and see whether Berkeley''s argument is as sound as it seems. I am not being charitable to Berkeley, I am just defending him (along his own lines as you pointed out) against the ungrounded attacks, I can argue against him as well but everyone else seems to be doing that just fine.

I thought that we would have some proper philosophical discussions here but some people are more into trolling.

A "proper philosophical argument" requires that (a) you actually present an argument, not just a set of claims, and (b) you don't just give up when objections are made, you don't just give up when people don't acquiesce after a step or three. You need to be able to defend against a whole series of objections, objections to attempts to defend against objections, etc.

Attempts to base the reality of the physical world on appearances has traditionally led into problems. One example being that of Berkley’s need for an all-perceiving ego. — javra

I think 'ego' is incorrect terminology here. An all-perceiving mind/consciousness, perhaps; but not 'ego' which is 'one's sense of oneself'. My counter-proposal to Berkeley's would be that this factor is actually provided by 'mankind' in the general sense; that in human form, the Universe knows itself. 'A scientist', said Bohr, 'is simply an atom's way of looking at itself'.

You do realize that Berkeley is proposing a form of naive realism? — Jamesk

Actually not naive realism, but Berkeley is categorised as an empiricist. His argument could be paraphrased as depending on the observation that we cannot go beyond the content of experience, and that experience requires a perceiving subject.

This is so simple that a toddler should be able to understand it, yet poster after poster here is confused (yet arrogant about it). — Terrapin Station

The reason for your aggravation/aggression, is because your native sense of what is real is being called into question. It's annoying, but that's what philosophy aims at doing. You haven't actually got to the point of the critical analysis of your own perceptions and conceptions, which is the activity of philosophy proper. You might argue that that's what 'science' is for. But science acts on the basis of a limited sub-set of experience, which is built on the basis of axioms and exclusion of many factors which are not tractable to precise measurement. But in this case, the subject matter is one that is not itself measurable or analytical in scientific terms, as it is a consideration of the nature of 'lived reality', not reality as observed 'from the outside', as a matter of scientific fact. But you have so thoroughly and completely internalised that scientific perspective, that you look at everything from inside it, without being aware that you're doing it. You here you have to look at your spectacles, not just through them.

I happened across an interesting video animation in The Atlantic which talks about the way the mind constructs reality. I disagree with the author's use of the term 'hallucination' - I think what is happening much nearer in meaning to Schopenhauer's 'vorstellung' which is usually translated as 'representation' or 'idea'.

"The world is my idea" — this is a truth which holds good for everything that lives and knows, though man alone can bring it into reflective and abstract consciousness. If he really does this, he has attained to philosophical wisdom. It then becomes clear and certain to him that what he knows is not a sun and an earth, but only an eye that sees a sun^ a hand that feels an earth ; that the world which surrounds him is there only as idea, i.e., only in relation to something else, the consciousness, which is himself. If any truth can be asserted a priori, it is this. — Schopenhauer

I think 'ego' is incorrect terminology here. An all-perceiving mind/consciousness, perhaps; but not 'ego' which is 'one's sense of oneself'. — Wayfarer

Yes, it was written in haste. I here intended “ego” in what I understand to be its Latin sense. But, even so, I acknowledge this could still become ambiguous more quickly than not. To clarify:

Berkeley supposes some being that perceives and that via this faculty is all-perceiving.

I was alluding to a possible argument that this very concept is self-contradictory. In summation: To perceive is to have a point of view from where perceptions occur, yet the very presence of a point of view would entail that some things are not perceived—thereby precluding the possibility of perceiving everything in a simultaneous and eternal way. Otherwise, devoid of such point of view, omni-perception as a hypothetical could maybe be denoted as consisting of all perception from all co-existent point-of-view-endowed beings simultaneously. Yet Berkeley specifies a being that governs all by perceiving everything as singular point of view. Something that to me is self-contradictory. As it is, I don’t currently care to more formally argue this out. But I do deem it to be a problem with the consistency of Berkeley’s overall paradigm.

Notwithstanding, I agree with your post.

:up: Excellent point, I hadn’t thought of it that way.

If you believe you can posess the truth, there is no point in examining the subject. More relevant is the question: does one ever know the truth, or is it unobtainable? It seems unlikely that anyone will ever synthesize ideas of value from examining the outer world only incidentally without seeing past the circular cause and effect ecosystem of animal existence.

Its unfortunate, but theism gains the greatest insights in fields such as philosophy and mathematics for good reason. Subscribing purely to materialism and pop culture existentialism looks great on the outside but is fruitless.