Esse Est Percipi
"To be, is to be perceived". Quite interesting.
Is that all there is to life? Is there more to life or anything beyond the scope of perception? What can we learn from a life that only entails a limited perception of human mind?
Do you think that life is worth more than this?
Is that all there is to life? Is there more to life or anything beyond the scope of perception? What can we learn from a life that only entails a limited perception of human mind?
Do you think that life is worth more than this?
Comments (131)
I recall perception, I have perceived...? Memory read error.
Since perception is human, involves our human condition and happens over human time, we can even connect the idea “to be is to be perceived” to Heidegger’s philosophy of being and time.
So I exist a 1000 times?
(Wiki)
I have found this to be a profound truth. Especially in certain dangerous activities.
If so and if, however, it doesn't make sense to say "perceiving is perceived", then "perceiving" cannot be; therefore "to be" has to be other (more) than "to be perceived". :eyes:
Question to realists: How do you all tell the difference between nonexistent things and unperceived things? Perhaps your explanation will state that there's a world of a difference between unperceivable (nonbeing) and unperceived (hidden being).
Here things start getting interesting (re: unperceivable [math]\rightarrow[/math] nonbeing i.e. esse est percipi)
Hello Angelo :) Ah, it seems you find much joy in the story of life. What about someone living in abject poverty such as a third world country or someone with a terrible disease who is suffering everyday? Does their perception allow them to see the same beauty that you find?
The commonest version of ontological realism holds the there are true statements about things that are not presently being perceived.
If to be is to be perceived, then there are no truths about the cup sitting unwatched in the cupboard. Such a view is not realism.
I think that the experience of suffering confirms what I said: Quoting Angelo Cannata
Emotions, choices, answers and so on are not always joyful things. Even love includes experiences of suffering.
I didn’t say that life is all joy and beauty. Rather, I wanted to say that framing life in the concept of “perception” can make us blind about the whole universe that is in life and in perception.
But as you are yourself the object behind the perception you know who you are cause you are who you are. You are the Ding an Sich. The body an Sich.
Im a different person to all people. So in a way I'm 1000 persons.
A very intriguing idea :) Thank you for sharing.
Quoting 180 Proof
"To be" entails something greater than perception? Interesting :)
Quoting Banno
Perception is the sense awareness of the environment that starts within the mind and then pushes outward. But action must be accounted for as well? Yes, this seems reasonable to me.
Quoting Agent Smith
This sounds like a profound idea! Berkeley seems to avoid this trap by saying that there must be an ultimate, omniscient perceiver who perceives all. If we get rid of this ultimate perceiver, we would still have trouble proving that anything exists beyond perception.
Is it a profound idea? It doesn't look like one to me. :chin:
1. To be is to be perceived
2. To be perceived is to be.
2 is problematic for the simple reason that hallucinations are real (certain mental illnesses would lose their cardinal symptom e.g. schizophrenia with its 3[sup]rd[/sup] person auditory hallucuinations if we endorse 2).
In other words, both realists and idealists must subscribe to 1 which is esse est percipi.
The choice: either concede that everything perceived is real (2) [if one sees a dragon during a drug trip, the dragon is real] OR esse est percipi (1)
Perhaps the realist can respond that they choose 2 but they make an exception of mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The question then is how are we to tell the difference between what is real and what is a hallucination? Perception is neutral (both the real and hallucinations are perceived) i.e. there's nothing in perception that could help us in this matter.
Everybody can't be hallucinating! That's how, the realist might claim, we can differentiate the real from hallucination. Yet cases of mass hysteria have been documented. Then there are hypothetical scenarios like The Matrix in which everyone is experiencing an illusion (what they perceive is a simulation, not real).
The long and short of it: Option 2 isn't viable i.e. the realist too must agree that [I]esse est percipi[/i].
I dunno if all I said makes sense though, it's a confusing world, ja?
Hardly. To be is to be and to be perceived is to be and be perceived while in the state of perception allowing one to realize one is being perceived, even as perception - being uncaused - shifts from one being perceived to another awaiting perception in order to be.
What's a tautology?
Sense awareness....to be aware by means of the senses? If to be aware means use of the senses, how can awareness begin in the mind, which has nothing to do with the physical senses?
If the senses cause us to be aware of that which is already out there in the environment, why would the mind push out what just came in?
What is it that the mind is pushing out? Action? What’s going on between that which comes in by means of the senses, and that which gets pushed out by means of the mind?
Why is this the case?
Because idealism, physicalism, dualism, etc. do not flow purely from deductive logic. Arguments for and against each always rely on empiricism, from the datum of experience. Experience always occurs in our subjective, first-person world of mental objects, and so it cannot refute Berkeley. Attempted refutations of the bishop always seem to reduce to so much argumentum ad lapidem.
Of course, the experience of the reality of objects that makes us so sure they exist is necessarily phenomenal. You feel the certainty of the rock you kick as experience. Arguments against Berkeley from science will always have the relative weakness of being arguments from this sort of experience.
The reason they still appear work for some people is that people often mistake the complexity and mathematical rigor of an abstraction as an indicator of its validity in a premise. So, the famous rock stomp is laughed off, but appeals to quarks and leptons seem sound. In the end though, these entities are multilevel abstractions made to explain the results of the subjective experiences of scientists reading instruments. This makes them essentially the same phenomenological sort of experience as kicking a stone.
To be sure, quarks were proposed first as purely abstract entities, entities that did not really have being. They follow from the logic of the mathematics of symmetry. However, the symmetries in question were derived by observation.
It does not proceed from logic that being exists without perception. The entire reason idealist ontologies have been around for so long is because empircle evidence can't ever tell you that being exists without perception. This is true by definition, since empiricism requires observation.
Further, it is arguable that we can't truly conceive of being without perception in the same way we can't conceive of a square circle. We can say the words, but do they have meaning?
How does the absence of thought enter thought as a concrete mental entity for us?
Arguably all thoughts about being sans perception are simply thoughts that take on a third person viewpoint. But isn't this viewpoint just a common type of abstraction, something that is itself part of the first-person experience of mental life?Thus, these are thoughts about a mental abstraction experienced in first-person subjective experience, not thoughts about pure noumena.
This issue is an even larger problem for a physicalists because one cannot posit the existance of a non-physical point of view, something like a God's eye point of view that observes all "as it is." That would be inventing something non-physical that exists. So, they have to start talking about being for non-living physical systems, e.g., "what being itself is for a nebula." Of course, physicalists often do posit a God's eye view and are just unaware of this supposition.
So, it appears that being without perception might fail Hume's argument from conceivability.
But even if you say, "sure I can think about pure being, unfiltered by perception, the noumena is in my mind right now," your argument still has the problem of begging the question. It assumes the very thing it sets out to prove. Even if being can occur without perception, it does not follow that it must do so (necessity versus contingency). What you need is evidence that being does exist outside perception, but such evidence is seemingly impossible to produce.
The issue of evidence is sometimes handwaved by saying our sense of logic is just the result of evolution and this sort of difficulty is merely apparent for us, due to cognitive deficiency. This argument also fails.
Appeals to evolution are appeals to science. However, if logic doesn't hold, then we have no reason to trust the logical/mathematical reasoning of science, nor our rules of inductive inference in the first place, in which case why would we deny first person experience its primacy in being when it is the only thing we can be sure of?
If there was no being inside the perceived, outside perception, we could just as well spend the rest of our lives dreaming.
Yup. Now this fact is often put forth as a refutation of Berkeley, but it doesn't work unless you misunderstand his position.
This sort of epistemological problem is universal. Asserting an external world doesn't somehow erase the major quandaries in epistemology that have dogged us for millenia. You can be a physicalist and still be troubled that you can't prove you're not a brain in a vat. Physicalists, dualists, and idealists all have to concede that the universe, complete with all our memories and the evidence of its history, could have actually sprung into existence just 12 minutes ago, and we'd all be none the wiser. These problems aren't unique to idealism.
Idealism does not entail anti-realism. Berkeley thought rocks and chairs existed. They were just mental objects. Thus, idealism can work fine with science. Science is just the description of how phenomenal objects relate to one another. Its predictive power is in no way reduced in idealism.
Idealism also does not entail solipsism.
One of the weakest common counter arguments to idealism is: "if the world is mental, how come we can't will ourselves to fly, or will ourselves out of death." This never made sense to me. Can you will yourself to not feel sad when a loved one dies? Can you will yourself to remain perfectly calm at all times? Do you never get distracted or fall asleep without deciding too? Experience does not dictate that mental = controllable.
For a modern version of idealism, this book is quite good:
The attacks on physicalism are well organized and delivered very well, although they aren't particularly novel. The competing idealist ontology laid out is sort of "meh," though. It uses disassociative mental disorders as a key analogy and I don't know if it really works. It's also a little too hawkish on the findings for contextuality in quantum mechanics from what I understand, although he worked at CERN so he has more familiarity than I do I'm sure. He also sells information ontologies short and doesn't represent them very well. But, the reason I bring it up is because it shows an ontology based on modern science that avoids solipsism, is realist about external objects, and retains idealism.
The book appears to be interesting. Im not sure though if the "main barrier" to the widespread acceptance of idealism is about to collapse. Idealism lacks a massive nucleus and it appears to me that there is no difference between the dreamt world and the world of wakefulness.
Neither am I convinced that a major inflection point in modern intellectual history is close at hand. Though it might offer useful information about a dualistic view, tying together ideas and physics.
But I found myself laid up for a few days with a bad knee, and having read every book in the house, I found myself fishing around for a distraction. Aargh, I should have known better.
I find idealism to be ridiculous, and here's why :
There are only two positions to take - the transcendent exists or it does not exist. Physicalists call the transcendent "matter" which implies a world of wood and steel and dirt existing external to our bodies, and that will go on existing even if all humans died tomorrow. Idealists gag on this notion - "How dare a filthy world of meat and dirt intrude on our saintly world of the mind?" So they rename the transcendent "mental" and think they've accomplished something. Moving deck chairs on the Titanic.
And it seems you agree :
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
The only alternative is to deny the transcendent and admit to solipsism.
If one is going to claim that the transcendent does not exist but somehow avoid solipsism, then one must explain the source of quale (sense impressions). And why the moon doesn't cease to exist whenever we close our eyes. And how other minds can exist. Berkeley tried to get around this by positing an uber-observer (God). Doesn't do away with the transcendent for us humans though.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Not having read this work yet, I wonder if you might shed a little more light on this idea. Is it just another attempt to rename "matter" as "mental"?
So for me, it's not that idealism is wrong, just unnecessary.
What is this matter you speak of? I find it ridiculous to elevate the way we think about the world (as consisting of wood, steel and dirt) and somehow proudly proclaim that that must be how the world is apart from us. Come to think of it, such a claim is the height of idealism. "I experience the world as such and such and therefore it is such and such".
What I also find interesting is that these kind of metaphysical questions, "what is really really real? as opposed to what is real", seems to be all the rage on TPF these days. Why would you want to affirm the real reality of wood steel and dirt, over just its reality whether it is in the end mental or physical? The only reason I can think of is to make the claim that a third person analysis is a more accurate description than taking into account first person experience. I have the hunch this metaphysical gambit is played to be able to argue some sort of reductionist move. I doubt that works though.
I do like this notion... "esse est percipi" prioritizes an observer over and above the inner life of the observed. It also prioritizes a detached look at things. What if we just transform the sentence a bit. "To be is to be used", or "to be is to be of use". Is a broken cup still a cup?
Don't be silly. The point is that idealism is unnecessary. It adds nothing to understanding. Does it render science moot? Count Tim doesn't think so.
Except that without ideas our attempts to understand will be in vain.
Who said anything about rejecting ideas? Not me.
Why do you think I have advocated that position?
He uses an analogy to multiple personality disorders. The universe is a mind, granted a very strange one. Objects in the universe are what they appear to be to us, and are ontologically based in mentation. So, while physicalism claims that the physical supervenes on all things observed, the corollary here is less of a positive claim. Things appear to us as mental objects, so why suppose they are something different?
Concious beings are minds disassociated from the surrounding mental substrate. The brain - behavior link is explained by the fact that brains are part of the extrinsic view of another mind. That is, neuroscience gives us a viewpoint of a mind from the viewpoint of another mind, in the same way that behaviorism is also a way of viewing other minds by how they represent in our minds.
It's funny that you say idealism is just extra steps. One of the main arguments in the book is that physicalism is the ontology with extra steps.
I have to agree with him here. Idealism is saying "things are what they appear to be." To be sure, our intuition about how things are is often wrong (optical illusions, the discovery of microbes), but it was observation, something that occurs in the mind, that told us all about bacteria, protons, quarks, etc.
Physicalism is saying, "no, actually what you experience isn't the real deal. You essentially hallucinate a world. The real stuff is the abstract model of the world we use to understand and predict observations. Yes this abstraction is only accessible as a component of thought, but it is actually ontologically basic."
It only appears simpler because it is accepted dogmatically and passed over outside graduate level science courses (and even not commonly then), and in philosophy. Ironically, the big source for new ontologies that compete with physicalism these days mostly come from physicists themselves.
The idealist's challenge is not to tear down physicalism, but to prove the transcendent to be "mental". Otherwise, haughty claims of superiority are nonsense.
Maybe I got you wrong then. What then do you mean that they add nothing to our understanding?
You kind of negate this point with your next sentence.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
We experience the world through minds, so of course things appear mental. If you wear rose colored glasses, everything will "appear" pink. Does that mean the world is pink?
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Really? Who says we hallucinate a world?
Yeah, it's debatable. He might be right though. There is a regular cottage industry of PhDs in the physical sciences presenting new, non-physicalist ontologies rooted in the findings of the physical sciences themselves. "It From Bit," is a popular one with many major variations, including simulation theory, or Tegmark's "the world is mathematics."
Notably, the most popular interpretation of physics among physicists, Copenhagen, leaves the question of "being without observation" unaddressed and in many formulations calls such questions "meaningless." Hardline, old-school 19th Century physicalism is alive and well in the wild, but dead in science. The new physicalism has non-local action, no objective world in some formulations, and a massive proliferation of unobservable dimensions in many others.
It's fine to speculate on the actual nature of the transcendent. But by definition we can never know for sure. Physicalism seems to work fine for most of the mouth-breathers, so what does idealism add? It's just a renaming of the transcendent.
But idealists on TPF would have you believe that physicalists are Neanderthals.
The physical world proposed to lay behind the perceived qualiatic world is just as an idealist world as the directly. If the directly perceived world, the empirical world of the sense, were all there is, what would be the difference between a real person and a dreamt one?
Physical matter is an idea. Without this idea it doesn't exist.
My sentence doesn't negate that at all. Ask yourself, if no experiments could have shown evidence for electrons, would we say they exist? Why do we say the N Rays once proposed by science don't actually exist? Why do we no longer say luminous aether is the source of light?
In each case, it is because of observations. We thought we had observations of the aether, it turned out another theory explained our observations better. Sans observations, there is no science. The observations include the optical illusion, but only through observation can you ever tell that there is an optical illusion. So when you attack the credibility of observation, you're also attacking the credibility of arguments for physicalism and science as a whole. People don't see this connection because they are used to getting third person descriptions of the physical world as a story of facts, but these facts are all derived, at least in part, from observation, and confirmed by observation.
The point about the rose colored glasses is particularly apt. That IS the argument against physicalism. Just reframe it: "if you assume you have an abstract thought model that explains reality, and you interpret all experience using that model, does that mean your model is actually a reflection of reality?"
The rose colored glasses critique applies every bit as well to physicalism, it is just less clear because the latter is a complex system of overlapping abstractions, a "lens" for thinking.
What do you mean with transcendent nature? How things really are?
Umm, your missing the point. Either the transcendent exists or it doesn't. What you call it hardly matters.
Andy Clark, for one:
https://www.edge.org/conversation/andy_clark-perception-as-controlled-hallucination
Donald Hoffman too. It's kind of a mainstream cognitive science view now.
This view is problematic for me because it still implies a split between inner and outer, subjective model vs Thing in itself, Descartes’ veil of appearance regurgitated. Phenomenology dispenses with this dualist residue.
“ For Husserl, the world that can appear to us – be it in perception, in our daily concerns or in our scientific analyses – is the only real world. To claim that there in addition to this world exists a world-behind-the-scene, which transcends every appearance, and every experiential and theoretical evidence, and to identify this world with true reality is, for Husserl, an empty and countersensical proposition.”(Dan Zahavi)
But who does this? I've never run across this claim on the part of physicalists.
By definition, the transcendent is unknowable. The credibility of an observation is just as useless for idealists as physicalists. Can the idealist guarantee that they are having a true thought? What if it's a hallucination as you claim - doesn't that render the observation untrue for both? Or are you claiming observations are always true?
The point about the rose colored glasses was this : we interact with the world as thinking beings. So our frame of reference necessitates that we understand the world through thoughts. "The chair" is a thought in our minds. But that doesn't imply that the actual chair is a thought.
But what is the transcendent?
Then the definition is wrong. Apart from the sense there are ways to contemplate this reality.
Quoting Count Timothy von Icarus
Both make their bones by positing novel wild claims. Otherwise, Clark wouldn't get tenured and Hoffman wouldn't sell books. Is it really becoming mainstream? Do they teach it at university? Maybe, but it's new to me.
These aren’t wild claims. It’s just good old fashioned neo-Kantianism.
“That which through the medium of our senses is actually perceived by the sensorium, is indeed merely a property or change of condition of our nerves; but the imagination and reason are ready to interpret the modifications in the state of the nerves produced by external influences as properties of the external bodies themselves (Müller 1842: 1059).
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:
The result of [scientific] examination, as at present understood, is that the organs of sense do indeed give us information about external effects produced on them, but convey those effects to our consciousness in a totally different form, so that the character of a sensuous perception depends not so much on the properties of the object perceived as on those of the organ by which we receive the information (Helmholtz 1995: 13).
I would interpret the sensation only as a sign of the object's effect. To the nature of a sign belongs only the property that for the same object the same sign will always be given. Moreover, no type of similarity is necessary between it and its object, just as little as that between the spoken word and the object that we designate thereby (Helmholtz )
From the Oxford English Dictionary
From Mirriam-Webster
What is beyond experience is unknowable. We can speculate given appearances, but we can't know.
If you doubt the transcendent, then all is what's in your mind. That's solipsism.
That's exactly the question. Why would that be?
Is it mainstream cognitive science? Could be, I don't know. If so, it needs to get out to the public.
If the approach to understanding the world is largely physicalist on the part of scientists and other thinkers, and if that means we hallucinate the world, shouldn't that have implications? Like the same experiment run twice yielding different results?
Again I ask : What does idealism add to our understanding?
Accepting the dictionary definition (i.e., not mine), it should be obvious to you. Can you know what you can't experience? You can make assumptions based on appearances, but you can never be sure. (As a physicalist, I do happen to believe that appearances do reveal the approximate nature of things-as-they-are, but that's my peccadillo.)
Now the only question that remains is does the transcendent exist or not? If not, then you must accept solipsism.
I don't doubt the transcendence, I doubt that we can't know what we have no knowledge about, paradoxically as that may sound.
You might ask then: is it transcendental still? I think yes.
English language has some nice words. Peccadillo? Ha! :wink:
Why only the approximate nature can be revealed? The exact nature can be known it seems to me.
To be a human being entails having perception. If you do not have perception - say are in a comma, you can't well categorize or think of anything.
On the other hand, obviously others things "are", irrespective of us in some manner, rocks, water, etc. So far as we know, they don't have perception but exist. We happen to give them the characteristics (automatically, not a choice) of "hardness", "wetness", etc.
But having a perception does not entail that one is being perceived. The best one can do is assume another person perceives you - or another animal. But we can't go beyond this assumption to proof.
Who said that science is moot under either physicalism or idealism? Perhaps idealism adds nothing, but you simply accept physicalism as the default position. That is an unphilosophical approach, as philosophy engages and critically examines presuppositions. From my post it shows I think that I find the whole question whether the world is made of matter or made of mind rather moot as any investigation into the 'real' nature of things harps back to premodern metaphysical times. It brackets the subject, but the subject cannot be bracketed since any metaphysical speculation is limited by our human perspective. That does not make metaphysics moot in my opinion but any categorical assumption about what the real actually is, seems to me A. idle because it does not matter to us what it is and B. unprovable.
That is why I would find it more interesting to investigate the assumptions behind something like "esse est percipi", the central role given to perception over action for instance. The hierarchies embedded within the history of ideas says something about our being in the world, but speculation does not.
It's not a wild claim. We've known since the 1960s that only a very small amount of the processes in the brain make it to concious experience. R. Scott Bakker's Blind Brain Theory paper has a good summary of this and analyzes it from an eliminative materialist perspective.
We also know that the enviornment has way more information than organisms can absorb without succumbing to the entropy that threatens to overwhelm all self organizing systems.
For example, memories are not stored sensory data. The brain uses the same areas for memory that it uses to process new incoming sensory data. It creates memories and imagination anew each time. Most of our experience is the product of extrapolation from a small set of incoming data. For example, you don't experience your blind spot, the space is "filled in." So too you don't experience just how terrible peripheral vision is and its lack of color. All of that "filled in" experience is essentially a hallucination, the result of computational extrapolation.
I've admitted to the unspeakable sin of being a physicalist, yes. But that's not the point. Idealism is just another version of physicalism. It renames the transcendent from "matter" to "mental". That's all. Until the truth can be proved one way or the other, physicalism is not invalidated by idealism.
I am amused by the contempt which idealists hold toward physicalism on TPF.
How is this a problem for physicalism but not idealism? If perception is demonstrably different from "what's out there", it still doesn't matter what we call the transcendent. Calling it "mental" still leaves the gap between quale and what causes quale. The hallucination persists.
Ahh probably a defensive reaction... I am always puzzled by the heaps of scorn idealists here receive... You see, it is after all a matter of perspective... :razz:
We learn what things are not by looking at them but by picking them up, turning them around, feeling their weight and texture; but also by making use of them. In short we interact with the things that make up the world, we do not simply observe. And it is in that interaction that meaning is built. One finds out what the ubiquitous cup is, not by just looking at it but by getting it out of the cupboard, pouring the tea into it, drinking from it and washing it up; by sharing it with others; by buying it and breaking it. This of course is "meaning is use".
That's also the seed of truth in existential moto that "existence preceded essence". We have life before that life becomes meaningful. One becomes who one is through one's interaction with the world. One constructs the meaning of one's existence.
This renders the notion of an "inner life" fraught with contradiction. If meaning is found in our interaction with the world, what is left to constitute an "inner" life? Not anything meaningful. That is, some notion of an "inner life" cannot be "carved off" or juxtaposed to an "outer life"; we are inherently embedded in the world. That's the core of the private language argument; that meaning per se is built on our interaction with the world, including with each other.
SO going back to:
Quoting chiknsld
"Esse est percipi" is very much not all there is to life.
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.
Everything in your OP accepts reality a priori
"Being" and "perception" are categories, there is nothing wrong with claiming that these categories are in fact coincident.
Name an argument against solipsism if the world is purely mental
The mind is essentially a function that maps sensory data to the virtual world of qualia. There is no other reasonable way to understand our place in the world.
I'm not as smart as you idealists (and crypto-idealists) to square this circle and conceive of a non-arbitrary terminus to the infinite regress entailed by Berkeleyism (i.e. map (episteme) = territory (ontic), ergo 'there are only maps of maps of maps ... all the way down" à la fractals?). My naturalism is too pragmatic for this conceptual jabberwocky. :eyes:
Quoting hypericin
They do not seem to be not just "categories" in this Berkeleyan context.
Quoting Real Gone Cat
:fire:
Quoting Real Gone Cat
:up:
Quoting Banno
:100: :clap:
No need for an ad infinitum. It's a circle, not a line. A perceiver can perceive itself. Two perceivers can perceive one another.
Quoting hypericin:roll:
@180 Proof ...ok, I take that back.
IIRC, there's nothing in Berkeley's speculation that says 'to be is to be self-perceived'. And even if so, that's mere solipsism, which I suppose pertains to the function of Berkeley's "God" as the Ur-perceiver (i.e. arbitrary terminus à la "unmoved mover" or "first cause" or "necessary being", etc).
It is a good question, one would think they would be more readily admitted here, which in a sense they are, but not as much as one would expect.
Of course, the problem very soon arises as to what you mean by "idealism". Berkeley's notion is not Kant's or even Descartes, etc.
Reality is reality. I've done most psychedelics. It's brain function
It's not solipsism if the self-perceived perceiver believes in the existence of other persons.
To be is to be self perceived... that is interesting no? Being iis purely abstract, it means nothing, I agree. Then the question becomes what does 'being talk' do? I think it is a question, an 'anspruch', it is a limit, how abstract can we go and therefore at the same time a demanding puzzle, can we articulate it? It (en)lights the one that asks this question and points to the one who asks the question of being. For who is it an issue? I would say it is an issue of human being, at least only human being dwells on being. That is basic Heidegger actually. However, even for an ardent physicalist, this points to something, namely, the characteristic of that being that questions its being. So being, the way we use it in metaphysics, is it really so odd to say that being is in the end self perception? Being, is nothing per se, being is an openness or a riddle with which self perception vexes itself. It is a look at the world, a look at the world in which our own face becomes visible. So being as self perception in practice says this: everything in the world we categorize in the same way as we see our own living body.
I am not sure... I actually like many of the posters and I learn a lot from them, though maybe I am easily bewitched by the language of quantum physics, I do not know. Maybe it is just that Kant is forgotten or refuted when I had my guard down.. I do not know. Maybe I am milder at my ripe old age.
Except, your models of the world do not change when you put on and take off rose colored glasses. But your perceptions do. How do you consistently model a world where esse is percepi and rose colored glasses exist?
Models are reflections of reality. Perceptions are also models, and they also reflect reality. But they are perfectly pragmatic, without any commitment to accuracy beyond pragmatism. The physicalist models are the products of very hard work deducing what it is perceptions reflect. As direct contact between minds and reality is impossible, models are all we have. They are not reality. But they may model it more it less faithfully, and capture features more faithfully that what our built in models, perceptions, provide.
That'll be it. In contrast, recent posts feed my inner curmudgeon. Or not so inner. My tongue is bleeding from my biting it. Mention of quantum indicates thread derailment.
It's equally a problem for both as far as arguments for solipsism, being a brain in a vat, being mislead by Decartes' demon, etc. is concerned. The arguments against radical skepticism don't really depend on physicalism vs dualism vs idealism.
The point I was making was merely that, contrary to popular arguments, every critique based on the unreliability of perception made against idealism or dualism applies equally to physicalism. Like I said, there is also an argument to be made that idealism is simply more parsimonious, in that it doesn't have to posit that a set of abstractions that exists within thought are actually a description of what has ontic status.
In terms of explanatory power vis-á-vis the "Hard Problem of Conciousness," idealism has advantages over dualism and physicalism. Variants of substance dualism have to contend with the issues of how mind substance, which is totally different from physical substance, interact. It also struggles with why conciousness only shows up in organisms with complex nervous systems. After all, if mind is not based in matter, why shouldn't pens and cars be concious?
Type dualism gets around this issue with the claim that conciousness is a totally different type of thing, but that physical forces are still ontologically basic. I don't know if this event counts as what most people mean by dualism. Type and predicate dualism have always seemed eminently reasonable to me.
Type dualism basically has the same problem as physicalism: how can you explain how subjectivity arises from physical interactions? But at least here, type dualism has less of a problem because it claims that physics can't tell us why experience is what it is. Physicalism that rejects type dualism requires also explaining this last bit, and here it seems it may face insurmountable challenges. Because in physicalism where conciousness is not its own type, you are asking an set of abstractions, which are experienced as merely one element of mental life, to explain the qualitative experience of other elements satisfactorily. And this, I think, is why you get bonkers theories from this camp, namely the claim that quale don't exist.
This is a fundamentally inaccurate reading of Berkeley. It only makes sense if you just look at the phrase "to be is to be perceived," out of context, and ignore his entire metaphysics. External objects are "ideas" in Berkeley; people are "spirits." Spirits are the things that are of themselves and do the perceiving. Unfortunately, he doesn't really develop how ideas are experienced by the mind in depth, but there is a sort of dualism between ideas and spirits. "To be is to be perceived," is explicitly about ideas, as Berkeley gets into to when he is refuting the idea that spirts are "ideas in the mind of God," or that people's spirits are a part of God. He sticks to Christian orthodoxy here, i.e., spirits (people) are ontic entities separate from God and created by God.
There is no infinite regress or solipsism in Berkeley even aside from the role of God. God's existence at the center of the ontology is also explicitly non-solipsistic.
Paradigms in science shift all the time, and then the previously accepted model gets rejected in the same manner. Luminiferous aether, Bowley's Law, etc. Super gravity gives way to super string theory which gives way to M theory. The world has three dimensions... until it has 11. Physical forces act locally, until instantaneous action at a distance shows up. Information in black holes vanishes forever, until it turns out it radiates out. Same thing because both are attempts to make inferences from experience in a systematic way.
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:
Quoting Banno
:ok:
I didn't realize this thread was 3 pages
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".
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.
[Quote=Tao Te Ching]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.[/quote]
:lol: G'day mate!
Warning: High risk of eMotional Daaamage!
Re: Spirits vs Ideas
Ideas are objects of minds. They only exist as perception:
Spirits
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 .
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.
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?
Reduced to philo-foolery by apathetic mods.
You refer to that guy in the mirror?
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.
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.
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.
It must be a comfort to be in such good company!
Nah, I enjoy the nonsense almost as much as the philosophy. Words are pretty.
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.
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.
Quoting hypericin
11 months ago! How time flies.
Huh? I am?
Quoting 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?
:100:
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?)
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.
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 really I was conflating realism and materialism.
Quoting 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.
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.
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.”
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.
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)
To quote Morris, there's a meaning there but the meaning there doesn't really mean a thing.
What kind of pre-schemarized understanding of the world must be already in place in order for propositional logic to work as a description of empirical reality?
It's trite to say that the attempt results in nonsense. But then, folk quote stuff like
Quoting Joshs
...and I don't know what to say.
Indeed, saying nothing might be the correct response, the way forward.
Think I got that from the Tractates.
You’ll have better luck with Philosophical Investigations.
Here’s you’ll find Witt reiterating Heidegger’s point that logic, as a grammatical construction, is a frame of sense, and the sense of language is in its contextual use.
114. (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, 4.5): "The general form of propositions is: This is how things are."——That is the kind of proposition that one repeats to oneself countless times. One thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing's nature over and over again, and one is
merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.
115. A. picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.”
That quote reminds me of Mach's view to some degree, which features a monistic 'plane' of 'elements' that include what are traditionally called thoughts, body parts, and worldly objects. The scientist can then search this plane for functional relationships.
What role does 'extra-mental' play in the second sentence? Is some kind of transcendental subject (however disembodied and transhuman) still playing an essential role? Given the parasitism mentioned above, it's not clear that a monism is plausible or useful.
I imagine a prisoner in a cell. One of the walls is a paper-thin painting of a brick wall.
This aspect of Wittgenstein's thought, found in the Tractatus[/I], hence predating Heidegger, does continue in the [i]Investigations. The Tractatus concerns itself with setting out the relation between logic and language, and is quite explicit in separating what can be stated from what cannot, without denigration. Hence,
Quoting Banno
But the relation between logic and language is rethought between Tractatus and P.I.
As Ray Monk says “ In Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein had said that philosophical problems arise because the logic of our language is misunderstood. His attempted solution was to produce a correct account of the logic of our language. But when this collapsed, he began to see things completely differently, to question whether there is something that could be called the logic of our language. Indeed, he now takes his own earlier work as a perfect example of how philosophers are misled. For notice that what he says above about 'the craving for general- ity' applies to the author of Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus as much as to any other philosopher. When, in the Tractatus, Wittgenstein had attempted to analyse 'the general form of the proposition', he had fallen victim to the 'tendency to look for something in common to all the entities which we commonly subsume under a general term', thinking that there must be a single form that was common to all propositions.”
“Some Remarks on Logical Form' is interesting as a record of how and why the logical edifice of the Tractatus came tumbling down and with it the whole notion of logical form.”
Much of what is in the Tractatus remains fundamental to logic; the suggestion that the "logical edifice of the Tractatus came tumbling down" is... unsound. Logic proceeds apace, to the greater clarity of language.
We each get to choose our own Wittgenstein. My Wittgenstein is the Wittgenstein of Cavell , Diamond, Conant and the later Baker(and Anthony Nickles too) , who are hostile to readings of him by Kenny, Peter Hacker, P.F.Strawson, Pears and Hans-Johann Glock and who do indeed believe that the ‘logical edifice of the Tractatus came tumbling down’.
He was required to spend much of his time using persuasive communication (due to the mental limits of his peers) but it is possible that his ultimate goal was to create a method for cognitive fine-tuning. The end goal of perception has not been achieved, and we will need to use an even higher order of perception to pass the horizon.