If mental constructs exist then I guess a fortiori consciousness must also exist.

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Yes, I thought that consciousness "having" an idea ought to be different from conscious qua idea. Unless we are saying that an idea can have an idea?

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If you might stub your toe on it, then it's difficult to see how it isn't. — tim wood

Argumentum ad lapidem (English: "appeal to the stone") is a logical fallacy that consists in dismissing a statement as absurd, invalid, or incorrect, without giving proof of its absurdity.

Ad lapidem statements are fallacious because they fail to address the merits of the claim in dispute. The same applies to proof by assertion, where an unproved or disproved claim is asserted as true on no ground other than that of its truth having been asserted.

The name of this fallacy is derived from a famous incident in which Dr. Samuel Johnson claimed to disprove Bishop Berkeley's immaterialist philosophy (that there are no material objects, only minds and ideas in those minds) by kicking a large stone and asserting, "I refute it thus." This action, which is said to fail to prove the existence of the stone outside the ideas formed by perception, is said to fail to contradict Berkeley's argument, and has been seen as merely dismissing it. — Wikipedia

To add to which, the basic nature of ‘material things’, if that is presumed to be atomic matter, is itself unresolved at this point in history. The apparent solidity of the atom has dissolved into uncertainty and probability; Russell even observes this in his concluding chapter of HWP. Meanwhile the irreducible nature of mind has been restored to philosophy, in movements such as semiotics, quantum baysianism, and many other forms.

So I’m afraid your ‘argument ad lapidiem’ is not going to succeed.

I don't think we have to assume reductionism. Chemical properties emerge from physical systems which have evolved to a certain level of complexity, but chemical properties are not reducible to physical properties. They are undeniably real, and form the basis of further empirical inquiry. So why should consciousness be any different than that?

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I wonder if you misread. — tim wood

It is exactly the point of what I wrote. Do you understand why Samuel Johnson said that of George Berkeley's philosophy, and why his response is regarded as fallacious?

Well, to start with, there's the tile in the southwest corner of my bathroom, and then the tile just to the east of that, and then the tile just to the east of that, and so on, until about 50 tiles later we get to the southeast corner of the bathroom. And then we move a row north and do it all again, and so on.

Or is that not the sort of thing you have in mind?

I'll leave it to someone else to list each grain of sand.

I offer here what I think is an exhaustive listing (i.e., why it might be a short thread).

1) All material things.
2) All other things existing by reference, but not material, as ideas/mental constructs. — tim wood

Just for fun, trying to think of some"thing" that falls outside these two categories...

What about the relationships between "things"? They can be physical or abstract, but either way, seem to be a different type of "thing"? Or maybe not...I am not entirely convincing myself either way, haha.

This should be a short thread that generates little controversy. The idea is to list as many differing kinds of existing/existence/existing things as we can think of. Part of the goal is to identify which things/classes of things may be reasonably said to exist, and also both to weed out unsupportable claims and to rule out "things" for which there is no direct evidence.

Now for some guidelines, all of which are tentative and offered to facilitate reasonable colloquy, and that are amendable for cause.

1) We need a word of convenience to refer to the what it is we shall be listing. The word "thing" irresistibly suggests itself. Being mindful that our usage will inevitably include reference to things not usually either called things or regarded as things - understanding the ambiguity - we adopt "thing" as being merely a pointer word, itself agnostic as to the thing referred to.

1a) Material existence shall be an absolute qualification for existence - the materiality, obviously, being demonstrable. If you might stub your toe on it, then it's difficult to see how it isn't.

2) It must seem as if a lot of things will be almost automatically included into the list of things that exist. The earth, a pencil, brick, chair, airplane, & etc. There's no need to list multiple individuals if they may all be entered as a class. And in this there may quickly emerge a taxonomy of sorts, of existing things. Classes of things, then, supersede individuals, they being included mutatis mutandis in the class.

3) It's possible that some contention may arise as to whether a candidate thing exists, which may include reference to the how of the existence claimed. For example, two, the number, may be claimed to exist, the question of how or in what form then arising. Platonists may claim that two has some super-sensible existence as a Platonic form. For present purpose all such, for inclusion in a listing of existing things, must be listed as ideas/mental constructs - the existence of two as an idea being self-evident, and any claim beyond that being no more than a claim. The test here being demonstrability, and the further from being self-evident the candidate being, the more rigorous the demonstration ought to be. Or in short, the thing either exists self-evidently (which may be subject to challenge), or some demonstration proves its existence, the proof based in self-evident propositions. No Voodoo, no woowoo.

I offer here what I think is an exhaustive listing (i.e., why it might be a short thread).

1) All material things.
2) All other things existing by reference, but not material, as ideas/mental constructs. — tim wood

thats fair. Pencils do in fact exist.

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Do you understand why Samuel Johnson said that of George Berkeley's philosophy, and why his response is regarded as fallacious?

— Wayfarer
Because Johnson did not understand that Berkeley was referring to the so-called "philosopher's substance" and thought instead that he was referring to the stone itself. — tim wood

No, I don't think that's it.

Your OP starts with:

Material existence shall be an absolute qualification for existence - the materiality, obviously, being demonstrable. If you might stub your toe on it, then it's difficult to see how it isn't. — tim wood

which is basically the claim that 'the existence of material objects is indubitable'. But it was just this claim which Berkeley calls into dispute. He does this by claiming that what we think to be stones and other external objects are really ideas and sensations in our own minds. He precisely denies that there are material substances at all.

Samuel Johnson claims to have refuted this by simply kicking against a large rock, exclaiming 'I refute it thus!' But his 'refutation' is said to be fallacious, insofar as it simply assumes that Berkeley's claim is wrong or nonsensical, without offering any real rebuttal of it. (Hence the designation of it as 'argumentum ad lapidiem', the argument from the stone.)

In a more general sense, you're simply assuming a position of common-sense realism, as if that is the sine qua non of philosophy, proper; and then venturing that anything we might care to claim exists, must meet the criterion of being either a material existent, or an idea in the mind.

What you don't see, is the sense in which this realist paradigm is itself a kind of construction, in the sense understood by critical philosophy (e.g. Schopenhauer's 'vorstellung', meaning 'representation' or 'idea'.) Critical philosophy does dare to call into question the existence of what we would normally assume to be real - that is its understanding of what philosophy does. Whereas, you're starting from a pre-critical, or non-critical, stance of naive realism, and challenging others to show what's wrong with it (which I am endeavouring to do).

For example, two, the number, may be claimed to exist, the question of how or in what form then arising. Platonists may claim that two has some super-sensible existence as a Platonic form. For present purpose all such, for inclusion in a listing of existing things, must be listed as ideas/mental constructs - the existence of two as an idea being self-evident, and any claim beyond that being no more than a claim. — tim wood

I think the point here, is that natural numbers are the same for all who can count. So in that sense, they're not 'ideas' in the sense of being 'internal to the mind'; they're not dependent on my mind or yours. But at the same time, they are 'intelligible objects', in other words, any system of numbers or symbols we use, must have a constant referent, otherwise our maths will be wrong. And maths is predictive of reality, so it extends beyond what is simply in my mind or yours, but at the same time, the kind of reality it has is purely intelligible, i.e. can only be grasped by a rational mind.

So what you're really trying to wrestle with in this OP, is the whole question of ontology - of what is the nature of existing things. But you're starting from the unquestioning assumption that what we can sense to be real, is the sine qua non of what exists; whereas, once we begin to acknowledge the reality of such mental objects as numbers and logical laws, then it becomes clear that what we can encounter as an external object might only be one aspect of reality as such, and may not even comprise its fundamental constituents.

So you could just make the top-level class "stuff" and leave it at that.

Or in other words, classes/kinds/types are simply a matter of how we want to conceptualize things, how we want to divide them up.

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A physical relationship? Care to say how that is? — tim wood

Block A is next to block B.

Rope C connects blocks A & B.

Force X effects object Y

Even if it takes language to express the relationship, it does physically exist (right?)...Am I making any sense?

The key phrase is "no material substance." The ideas of stones & etc., are indeed ideas, but the underlying reality of them was not the target of Berkeley's attack — tim wood

Of course it was. I have a BA including two years of undergraduate philosophy, I understand it perfectly clearly, thank you. It is the independent existence of the objects of perception which is precisely what is called into question by Berkeley. What you say is 'the underlying reality' is simply your realist assumption speaking - you haven't gotten to the point of what exactly is at issue, which is precisely the sense in which they have, or do not have, any underlying reality. And Berkeley claims they don't. If you don't find that shocking, or if you think that Berkeley is just playing with words, then you're not getting it.

Maybe I should offer a tentative definition of existence, or at least that which falls out of my two categories above: objects of thinking or sense or some combination, but in combination reducible to either object of thought or sense by parts. — tim wood

Clearly that is what you think, but it is not informed by philosophical analysis.

Don't we need a definition of what it means to "exist" before we can proceed with an inquiry like this? The difficult thing is to get a definition which we can all agree on. If you define "exist" as "being material" then you'll be accused of being a materialist begging the question. So I propose something like "being present' as defining what it means to exist.

There are two distinct ways of being present. One is to be at a certain place, and the other is to be at a certain time. Therefore I suggest that there are two different ways of existing.

Some of the typical categories that seems to come up regularly ...

real and fictional
maybe existentially mind-independent and mind-dependent (qualia?)
spatial (left to right, top to bottom, front to back) and process (starts and ends, comes and goes)
interactees and interaction (and transformation)
self (indexicals) and other
particulars (examples) and generals (abstractions)
maps and territories (models and evidence)

... or some such like.

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As this passage illustrates, Berkeley does not deny the existence of ordinary objects such as stones, trees, books, and apples. On the contrary, as was indicated above, he holds that only an immaterialist account of such objects can avoid skepticism about their existence and nature. — tim wood

So do you accept his ‘immaterialist’ account? Because it certainly seems hard to reconcile with your 1(a).

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How about 'stupidity'? It seems very real to me.