That is basic Heidegger actually — Tobias

Yes, two post-Kantian centuries after – out of the context of Berkeley's "to be is to be perceived" and so, while your analysis has merit, Tobias, it's besides the narrower point at issue here (for me at least).

You misread your concerns into Berkeley, Count. Maybe I do as well ... but I take the Bishop's words at face value; it's been a few decades or more since I've read (and dismissed) him. Kant, Fichte, Schelling & Schopenhauer (and, help me :groan: even Heidegger too) make far more sense to my naturalistic pragmatist way of thinking than the Bishop's "subjective idealism".

[delete post]

That long sentence of which this was a part was meant as a joke. If you took that goblygook seriously, see your mental health professional :razz: — jgill

That's quite an interesting statement there!

What if you could develop an IQ test consisting of only jokes, a rich variety of jokes (from slapstick humor to deep philosophical ones) and we could assess how many of them a person gets/understands? The rule would be simple: the more you laugh, the higher your IQ.

Scholars of the highest class, when they hear about the Tao, take it and practice it earnestly.

Scholars of the middle class, when they hear of it, take it half earnestly.

Scholars of the lowest class, when they hear of it, laugh at it. Without the laughter, there would be no Tao. — Tao Te Ching

:lol: G'day mate!

Warning: High risk of eMotional Daaamage!

I don't think I'm reading my concerns into Berkeley at all. I'm not particularly amenable to Berkeley's overall system. I do think he hit on something very significant about the limits of knowledge though.

Re: Spirits vs Ideas


Ideas are objects of minds. They only exist as perception:

This perceiving, active being is what I call mind, spirit, soul, or myself. By which words I do not denote any one of my ideas, but a thing entirely distinct from them, wherein they exist, or, which is the same thing, whereby they are perceived; for the existence of an idea consists in being perceived.

Spirits

A Spirit is one simple, undivided, active Being: as it perceives Ideas, it is called the Understanding, and as it produces or otherwise operates about them, it is called the Will.

Hence there can be no Idea formed of a Soul or Spirit: For all Ideas whatever, being Passive and Inert, vide Sect. 25. they cannot represent unto us, by way of Image or Likeness, that which acts.

Now, the way he gets ideas to interact with spirits is certainly open to plenty of criticisms, but it doesn't fall victim to infinite regress, nor does it rely on a circle of self-perception per .

Idealism does not entail anti-realism. Berkeley thought rocks and chairs existed. They were just mental objects. Thus, idealism can work fine with science... — Count Timothy von Icarus

Yes, indeed. And it's peculiar that in a mental world we all share the same explicit descriptions of biology, nature, and physics. One example could be our internal organs, such as the existence of a set of lungs or the intestines underneath our stomach.

When a dissection is performed, everyone agrees that they see the same thing inside.

This leads to 2 conclusions:

Either there is a larger mind that creates these precepts (for us to follow) so that we may unanimously agree on physical nature.

Or, the physical world does indeed exist, without some pre-arranged collective unconscious conspiracy, where we are deciding to agree with each other how the physical world will look.

Even microorganisms seem to share an equal awareness of their environment. The forces of nature (gravity and electromagnetic, etc.) seem to behave consistently throughout the environment.

This purely mental world does not show any profound inconsistencies in both the mental and physical aspects of reality.

Still, we have not shown a disproof of "Esse est percipi", we have merely used inductive reasoning to say that our mental agreement about the world is proof that a larger, physical world exists.

Ideas are objects of minds. They only exist as perception: — Count Timothy von Icarus

So you are saying that you perceive your ideas? That they are before your mind in much the same way as your seeing this screen, or hearing a song?

The forum is presently dominated by fools... — Banno

Reduced to philo-foolery by apathetic mods.

Are you offering to mod? Not a job I want.

The forum is presently dominated by fools with little to no grasp of basic philosophical or logical notions and yet with thoroughgoing confidence in their opinions; by those who have failed to learn how to learn. — Banno

You refer to that guy in the mirror?

Ideas are objects of minds. They only exist as perception:
— Count Timothy von Icarus

So you are saying that you perceive your ideas? — Banno

Read my dear. He/she says they are perceptions. How can you perceive a perception? That would be a perception. Logically conclusion: ideas are no perceptions.

Husserlian Intentiionality.

We are not simply ‘conscious’. We are, more accurately, ‘conscious of something’.

Stating ‘to be’ is ‘to be perceived’ seems like one of the most stupid things I’ve ever heard tbh. Maybe there is a bit more depth to that line than I’m aware of though?

The dualist spirit. If my toe is in pain, it's the toe of which I'm conscious. A part of self consciousness, like the dog is conscious of pain in the toe or tail. Consciousness about that pain (like me talking about it now), is awareness. Awareness of the awareness is self awareness. Which isn't to say that the self is awareness.

Sure, the models change. But this is unproblematic for the realist. Because, the models, be they theoretic or phenomenal, are not reality. So the fact that they change is not particularly puzzling.

But for the idealist, there is no such remove between the phenomenal and reality. So, when the rose colored glasses are worn, the idealist is committed to say that reality itself changes. When such a result is arrived at, it is time to discard the theory.

The forum is presently dominated by fools with little to no grasp of basic philosophical or logical notions and yet with thoroughgoing confidence in their opinions; by those who have failed to learn how to learn. — Banno

It must be a comfort to be in such good company!

Are you offering to mod? Not a job I want.
8h — Banno

Nah, I enjoy the nonsense almost as much as the philosophy. Words are pretty.

But for the idealist, there is no such remove between the phenomenal and reality. So, when the rose colored glasses are worn, the idealist is committed to say that reality itself changes. When such a result is arrived at, it is time to discard the theory

This is simply not true. You are conflating realism and idealism as the same things. They aren't. History shows plenty of cases of proto-physicalist anti-realism (ancient religions have this quite often), while many idealist ontologies are realist.

If you read Berkeley or Kastrup you will find realism explicitly stated. You may find the way they ground realism lacking, but it is most certainly there. When you take off the rose colored glasses in Berkeley, the world doesn't change, you just don't have tinted glasses on. Chairs and rocks are real, they just aren't material.

It's not like Sankara, where Maya is actually an illusion.

I'm certainly not saying that, but that is essentially how it works in Berkeley. Like I said, he is relatively silent on the idea/mind interaction, so it's not totally clear how the mechanics of this work outside of God's meditating role. He does have a section somewhere where he says minds don't take on the attributes of ideas when they are interacting with them (e.g., minds don't become colored when seeing red). There is an idea/spirit dualism here somewhat similar to the physical/mental divide.

It's a fairly incomplete system, partly owing to its age I'd say, since there are similar types of oversights in Locke. Newer systems have the benefit of knowing a few centuries worth of critical questions they need responses to.

By the way, while Berkeley is realist about ideas, he still represents "subjective idealism," in that ideas only exist insomuch as they interact with minds (but they are not within minds as solipsism postulates, see the quotes above in this thread).

Not all idealism is subjective idealism. Kant, by many scholars estimation, represents a sort of blended idealism. The noumena are not in our minds, there is a sort of dualism in Kant. We only see objects as our faculties allow us to. That said, he also denotes how these faculties are, in at least some places, shaped by logical necessity. Thus, the categories of the faculties have an epistemological as opposed to solely psychological status.

Kant's version of idealism is not without some apparent contradiction. In response to this we get forms of "objective idealism," most influentially, Absolute Idealism. People sometimes deeply misunderstand Absolute Idealism as taking Kant to the conclusion that the noumenal doesn't exist. This isn't the right frame. The Absolute encompasses all possibility. It does not contain a subjective/objective split, because it stands above and encompasses both.

Absolute Idealism centers around how universal reason dictates the coming into being of the world, and a real world at that. However, this world is premised on self-positing Spirit, and so there is no ontological divide between what is experienced and the objects of experience, both obtain within the Absolute.

For an excellent breakdown of this, Gary Dorrien's Kantian Reason, Hegelian Spirit is extremely cogent and provided a lucid overview of many points of view in the scholarship on this. It's mostly towards the end of the second chapter of you can snag a copy.

It looks at philosophy through the lens of theology, but it a great overview of the philosophy in its own right. Also a rare book covering German Idealism that is so lucid that the audio version is actually usable, although it still requires a playing it at like .9 speed, rewinding, and pausing a lot.

A fine exegesis! So we can note that Berkeley erred in failing to differentiate one's perceptions from one's conception, and move on?

There is the physical world and there is the mental conceptual world. We perceive both. Our eyes can be directed inwardly and outwardly. The perception of the physical world depends on our ideal world, while the ideal world is structured by physical structures. Both worlds can resonate with one another. Reality is actively shaped.

It must be a comfort to be in such good company! — hypericin

I've been a member here a long time, but I post only very occasionally. My perception is that the level of discourse on this site has declined. I'm not sure if it's recent or if it's been happening for a while. Is this true? Or did my perspective change? If it's true, what can be done to improve it? — hypericin

11 months ago! How time flies.

You are conflating realism and idealism as the same things. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Huh? I am?

When you take off the rose colored glasses in Berkeley, the world doesn't change, you just don't have tinted glasses on — Count Timothy von Icarus

I still don't see how this case is resolved for Berkeley. The world is real, and mental, and we access it via phenomenal perception. No reference may be made to a material reality which underwrites the perception. So, is reality rose tinted or no?

:up:

:100:

Huh? I am?

Yes. The objections you are making only apply to certain types of idealism, namely those forms of subjective idealism embracing epistemological relativism or solipsism. These are fairly uncommon because writing them is self-defeating (if you don't think your audience exists, why bother?)

In philosophy, the term idealism identifies and describes metaphysical perspectives which assert that reality is indistinguishable and inseparable from human perception and understanding; that reality is a mental construct closely connected to ideas.[1] Idealist perspectives are in two categories: (i) Subjective idealism, which proposes that a material object exists only to the extent that a human being perceives the object; and (ii) Objective idealism, which proposes the existence of an objective consciousness that exists prior to and independently of human consciousness, thus the existence of the object is independent of human perception.

So, in objective idealism, ideas are still ontologically basic, but there is no question about them not being real when you aren't thinking about them.

So, is reality rose tinted or no?

No. Berkeley dedicates much time to illusions and hallucinations because these are the obvious objections to his system. His main point is that the world appears to work according to a set of natural laws (physics, biology, etc.). God gives us these laws for our instruction. While God could make an animal live even while its heart is stopped, he wouldn't do so because the laws are for our edification. The laws of science hold in Berkeley and so we can infer from them how colored glasses work.

I get where you are coming from though. If you take Berkeley as being solipsistic, then the world should be changing, like you say. But here you have to remember that God is at the center of Berkeley. God is omniscient. God perceives all ideas at all times, and so these ideas have definite properties. The problem is partly with Berkeley, who wants to make his clever argument against materialism on purely philosophical grounds, but then ends up pulling God in to avoid the problems his refutation of materialism has created for him in maintaining realism. Later Idealists handled this much better IMO.

God is also extremely involved in allowing basic "physical" interactions to occur at every level in Berkeley.

This set up was not popular. I think it's fair to say Berkeley's critique of materialism had more interest than the specifics of what he replaced it with.

So, in objective idealism, ideas are still ontologically basic, but there is no question about them not being real when you aren't thinking about them. — Count Timothy von Icarus

So really I was conflating realism and materialism.

Berkeley dedicates much time to illusions and hallucinations because these are the obvious objections to his system. — Count Timothy von Icarus

I wonder how Berkeley would respond to this question: how do I know that the red I see is the red God sees? For all I know he sees blue when I see red, or he hears an electric guitar when I hear the violin. So I might be hallucinating my whole life, and yet the world appears entirely self-consistent. Must he dogmatically insist that God ordains that everyone perceives in the same way?

Similarly, how could he address animal perception? It is very unlikely that animals perceive the same way subjectively that we do. Must god simultaneously perceive in the manner of every sentient creature? Or must Berkeley insist that animals lack subjective experience?

It seems that Berkeley has replaced the dualism between material and perception with a more ad hoc dualism between mortal perception and God's perceptions.

Helmholtz accepted this reasoning, and likewise argued that since the information about the external object is transformed beyond recognition on its way through the nervous system, what we end up perceiving is strictly speaking the internal effect rather than the external cause: — Joshs

It seems to me that Kantianish idealisms are parasitic upon the 'manifest image' of common sense. The notion of sense organs and a nervous system is part of this manifest image. When a thinker like Kant tries to throw space into the bucket of the manufactured or dream-like, he forgets that it's only our typical pre-critical experience of bodies in space with their sense organs that makes a 'processed sense-experience' vision of the world plausible in the first place.

It seems to me that Kantianish idealisms are parasitic upon the 'manifest image' of common sense. The notion of sense organs and a nervous system is part of this manifest image. When a thinker like Kant tries to throw space into the bucket of the manufactured or dream-like, he forgets that it's only our typical pre-critical experience of bodies in space with their sense organs that makes a 'processed sense-experience' vision of the world plausible in the first place. — jas0n

I think that’s Zahavi’s point in the article you’re quoting from.

“ For Husserl, there are, in short, not two ontologically different objects, the appearing (intra-mental) object and the physical (extra-mental) object. Rather, there is only one appearing (extra-mental) object that carries categorically distinct but compatible sensuous and theoretical determinations. This is also why the findings of science and everyday experience, the scientific image and the manifest image, do not have to contradict each other. They can both be true according to their own standards. More generally speaking, the difference between the world of perception and world of science is not a difference between the world for us and the world in itself (falling in the province of phenomenology and science, respectively). It is a difference between two ways in which the world appears.”

It seems that Berkeley has replaced the dualism between material and perception with a more ad hoc dualism between mortal perception and God's perceptions.

Yeah, that's a fair criticism. I've always found Kant's analysis of, in his words, phenomenal/noumenal dualism much more interesting.

He tows a fine, arguably at times incoherent, line between objective idealism and subjectivism, but the insights about how conciousness constructs out world are still brilliant, even today. They also have been surprisingly well confirmed by modern cognitive neuroscience.

This seems surprising at first, but is less so when you realize his categories of cognition map to logical distinctions which themselves sit at the center of how we think the world works based on the physical sciences. The connection between the logical and the actual is, on the one hand, unsurprising, evolution should have equipped us with a sense of "how things work," but on the other hand is one of the 'deeper' findings in the physical sciences from my perspective.

The connection between the logical and the actual is, on the one hand, unsurprising, evolution should have equipped us with a sense of "how things work," but on the other hand is one of the 'deeper' findings in the physical sciences from my perspective. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not sure that it goes much deeper than a set of presuppositions concerning the object that became crystallized as the basis the inseparable relation between logic, mathematics and modern science with Galileo and Descartes. The ‘ actual’ has been pre-figured such that it conveniently lends itself
to the language of logical
formalism.

“Thus what can be shown to have the character of constantly remaining, a constitutes the true being of beings which can be experienced in the world. What enduringly remains truly is. This is the sort of thing that mathematics knows. What mathematics makes accessible in beings constitutes their being.”(Heidegger 2010)

Heidegger explains that the fundamentally undiscussed ontological foundations of empirical science since Descartes are based on his formulation of objective presence.

“Thus the being of the "world" is, so to speak, dictated to it in terms of a definite idea of being which is embedded in the concept of substantiality and in terms of an idea of knowledge which cognizes beings in this way. Descartes does not allow the kind of being of innerworldly beings to present itself, but rather prescribes to the world, so to speak, its "true" being on the basis of an idea of being (being = constant objective presence) the source of which has not been revealed and the justification of which has not been demonstrated.
Thus it is not primarily his dependence upon a science, mathematics, which just happens to be especially esteemed, that determines his ontology of the world, rather his ontology is determined by a basic ontological orientation toward being as constant objective presence, which mathematical knowledge is exceptionally well suited to grasp.”(Heidegger 2010)

“Thus the being of the "world" is, so to speak, dictated to it in terms of a definite idea of being which is embedded in the concept of substantiality and in terms of an idea of knowledge which cognizes beings in this way. Descartes does not allow the kind of being of innerworldly beings to present itself, but rather prescribes to the world, so to speak, its "true" being on the basis of an idea of being (being = constant objective presence) the source of which has not been revealed and the justification of which has not been demonstrated. — Joshs

To quote Morris, there's a meaning there but the meaning there doesn't really mean a thing.