Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Kenneth Pearce ( Language and the Structure of Berkeley's World ) argues that, for Berkeley, "bodies" are linguistic constructions built up from our phenomenal experience, and that causal talk, in everyday life and in physics, is an extension of that sort of operation. But Berkeley does not therefore dismiss such talk. The reason is twofold: First of all, to model things this way is useful: it helps us "in the pursuit of happiness, which is the ultimate end and design... that sets rational agents at work" (204). But these ideas are also true , in an important sense: they reflect the underlying reality of "the regular ordering of ideas instituted by God, i.e., the linguistic or grammatical structure of the divine language of nature. Our talk about bodies aims to capture the lexicon of this language, and our talk about causes, laws, and forces aims to capture its syntax" (204).

Let's say "anti-materialists" point to EPR effects  to try to demonstrate that materialism is an incomplete description of reality: E, P, and R devised their thought experiment precisely to show that the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is unsatisfactory, because it implies that "spooky action at a distance" exists, contradicting materialism (as it was then formulated). But when experiments seem to show that there is "spooky action at a distance," then materialists simply say, "OK, well then that is part of material reality as well." In other words, materialism is a completely non-falsifiable thesis, since: 1) To defease non-materialist ideas, materialists say, "Well, show me how (God / angels / spirits / the soul / etc. ) can show up in an empirical, measurable way." (We won't go into the matter of whether that is a good test for truth or not: let's just accept the materialists's challenge for argum...

"Evidence-Indices [e.g., smoke as a sign of fire] may always have been used in an unthinking way by people going about their daily business; but to elevate them into being a reliable basis for theoretical knowledge..." -- David Wootton, The Invention of Science , p. 427 Here we come to the basis of Wootton's extraordinary claims about the Scientific Revolution replacing a world of abysmal ignorance with one that for the first time contains true knowledge: Wootton does not consider what ordinary people do in their day-to-day activities to be thought at all. But this is wrong: To move from an index to what that index signifies is an act of interpretation . In other words, it is thinking. It may not be great thinking, it may not be theorizing, and the move may have become so habitual that the thinker barely notices the thought involved at all. But nevertheless, it is an act of intelligence, and constitutes a genuine form of knowledge, without which the human species wo...

Edward Feser here argues against certain philosophical ideas because they "lead to" certain other ideas. In particular, he rejects a Platonic view of form and occasionalism as a way of understanding efficient causation. In arguing against them, he resorts to this sort of thing: "So, avoiding occasionalism and thus pantheism also requires affirmation of immanent causal power and immanent teleology -- again, Aristotelian efficient and final causes." But if occasionalism or the Platonic theory of forms are, in fact, true, it is no argument against them to say that they lead to pantheism: that would just mean pantheism is true as well! And in any case, there is no inevitable slide from such views into pantheism. For instance, Berkeley 's understanding that the world is God's ideas is not pantheistic: God's ideas are not God! This blog post is my idea, but you can't kill me by shooting it on the server where it resides. As Collingwood noted in Th...

"He registered a dizzy 7.6 mmv over Brodmann 32, the area of abstractive activity. Since that time I have learned that her reading over 6 generally means that a person has so abstracted himself from himself and from the world around him, seeing things as theories and himself as a shadow, that he cannot, so to speak, reenter the lovely ordinary world. Instead he orbits the earth and himself. Such a person, and there are millions, is destined to haunt the human condition like the Flying Dutchman." -- Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins , p. 34 Compare with: “Descartes, Locke, and Newton, took away the world... Berkeley restored the world. Berkeley has brought us back to the world that only exist because it shines and sounds.” -- W.B. Yeats

"For instance, when reading the words on this page, we automatically tend to think that they exist independently from their own side. We do not take into consideration their relationship to ourselves, the factor of our consciousness, or our manner of perceiving them. Holding on to the concept of independent existence, we continue to read without awareness of the interdependence of things. This applies to all phenomena we perceive. However, this appearance of all external objects and of our own person as being independent entities is merely superficial and does not withstand analysis." -- Geshe Rabten and Geshe Dhargyey, Advice from a Spiritual Friend , pp. 41-42

"In so far as realism is merely a protest against subjectivism we can all be realists. If it means to affirm the existence of independent reals outside the realm of experience, and therefore wholly independent of consciousness, it is the old hypothetical realism whose absurdities have so often been shown up in the history of philosophy... "No criticism of idealism has any value which starts out with the assumption that we have, to begin with, two separate orders, called mental phenomena and physical phenomena, or a ' world without ' and a ' world within' and then proceeds to put ideas into the class mental phenomena, the so-called world within, and then to rule idealism out because it has taken the half of reality for the whole. It has no value because it simply begs the question at issue; for idealism is one continued protest against the finality of any such divisions of realities. If one could make any such division of experience into two mutua...

Keshav suggests a world view where " the things outside the mind are describable purely by numbers, and through some magical process, certain sets of numbers trigger certain experiences in the mind."  Notice, first of all, the things " describable purely by numbers" must be numbers. Anything that is not simply a number would need a number plus a statement of whatever it is beyond a number to describe it. So in this view, somehow the numbers outside our brain interact with the numbers that make up our brain and make us see, hear, feel, etc. a world full of sights, sounds, textures, and so on. But numbers themselves are, after all, ideas , and so are the mathematical formulas with which physicists make systems of these numbers. So this view claims that a world of mathematical ideas causes us to hallucinate a world of "physical objects" that really have very little to do with reality. Now this view, to me, really is guilty of all the things Berkeley...

"There are difficulties enough, no doubt, in the way of accepting such a form of 'idealism,' but they need not be aggravated by misunderstanding. It is simply misunderstood if it is taken to imply either the reduction of facts to feelings... or the obliteration of the distinction between illusion and reality... "On the contrary, its very basis is the consciousness of objectivity. It's whole aim is to articulate coherently the conviction of there being a world of abiding realities other than, and determining, the endless flow of our feelings." -- T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics , pp. 41-42

"[T]here is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux. In this flow, mind and matter are not separate substances . Rather, they are different aspects of our whole and unbroken movement." -- David Bohm (emphasis mine)

Let one of the physics greats assure you it is not: "As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter." -- Max Planck

Id asked me about this in the comments of another post. Let us consider the question in the context of a house, since that was the object in the original post. Let us posit a house claimed to be existing apart from all experience, that of humans as well as any universal mind. Now we ask of the person making this claim: "What color is this house?" He will have to admit that it is of no color whatsoever, as color is an interaction between an observer and an object observed. "What is the texture of the house?" we ask. He will have to admit that it has no texture, since a texture is an interaction between an observer and an object observed. (As Berkeley noted, this kind of thing will be very different depending upon whether a human or a dust mite is answering the question: A surface that is smooth to a human might be mountainous to a dust mite.) "What sound will the house make when a rock hits it?" He will have to admit that it is no sound at all, since a soun...

I am reading an excellent introduction to British Idealism: British Idealism: A Guide for the Perplexed . If you are at all interested in this subject, I highly recommend this book. But I do have a minor complaint: the authors repeat the common misperception of Berkeley as having had a "radically subjective view of experience." (The book only treats Berkeley peripherally, as a forerunner of 19th and 20th-century idealism, which is what makes this a minor quibble.) I am writing a paper at present tracing the history of this error, as well as that of the repeated attempts to correct it. (Collingwood is among those who sought to rectify this mistake.) The key oversight behind this misperception, from Hegel onward, has been to ignore the role of the mind of God in Berkeley's metaphysics. I don't intend to summarize the historical work from that paper here. Instead, I offer a metaphor intended to clarify the objective nature of reality as Berkeley sees it: Berkeley...

Let us explore a little further how David Stove got Berkeley so wrong. As you may recall , he summarized one of Berkeley's arguments for idealism as follows: "You cannot have trees-without-the-mind in mind, without having them in mind. Therefore, you cannot have trees-without-the-mind in mind." But Stove had to add a step to Berkeley's argument to make it stupid: "without having them in mind." The actual argument is that you cannot have trees-without-the-mind in mind, period. What Berkeley is noting in the passage Stove cites is that when you attempt to have trees-without-the-mind in mind, you fail . And that failure is inevitable. "Trees-without-the-mind" is a mere abstraction, and to mistake mere abstractions for things that can actually exist is what Whitehead called "the fallacy of misplaced concreteness." "Ah," the materialist-minded may say, "but what about the billions of years before conscious evolved, and th...

"after all, what could be more mysterious, or could be more awe– inspiring, than to find that the structure of the physical world is intimately tied to the deep mathematical concepts, concepts which were developed out of considerations rooted only in logic and the beauty of form?" -- Physics Nobel prize winner Chen Ning Yang The world is a world of ideas.

"Idealism is stupid: Theory of evolution!" "Huh?" "Minds evolved!" "And…?" "Well, they evolved from a world that was totally devoid of mind." "But the idea the world is basically devoid of mind: isn't that just... materialism itself?" "Exactly!" "So you're saying that if we accept the theory of evolution AND assume that materialism is true, then materialism is true. Very convincing."

From philosopher Keith Ward: What idealists maintain is that the ultimate nature of reality itself is mind-like, and that human and other finite minds are the best clues we have to what objective reality is like. The cosmos is not a mindless, unconscious, valueless, purposeless, yet somehow strangely intelligible, mechanism. Such a view is the result of extrapolating a machine-model, very useful in many scientific contexts, to provide the most comprehensive and adequate picture of the real cosmos. Idealists propose that the human mind provides a better model from which to extrapolate to the cosmos as a whole. That is not because the cosmos looks like a very large human person or because there is some large person hovering just beyond the cosmos. It is because human minds play a creative and constructive role in producing the phenomenal world. They seem to point to a level of reality that is not merely phenomenal or an appearance to consciousness. Human minds generate an idea of re...

Blackadder is flummoxed : "I confess I find Oakeshott's statement mystifying. What is self-contradictory about the idea of there being a world of existence outside experience?" This is a tricky question to answer. To an extent, I view it as similar to one of those trick pictures, where you can see either a lady or a rabbit. If someone just doesn't see the rabbit, there is no "argument" you can make that will convince them it is there. (And once they see it, they need no argument.) But perhaps you can give them hints that can lead them to the viewpoint where they do see it for themselves. In any case, no harm in trying. So let us begin by assuming that there is an objective world standing totally apart from experience. If we can imagine that there is such a world with many objects in it, it is surely even easier to imagine such a world with only one object in it. So let us do that: we posit a world containing only one, solid sphere of "stuff" ...

Once the subject-object distinction is taken as absolute, then, as we have mentioned, epistemology becomes a pressing, indeed, I would say, insoluble, problem. Given that situation, it is natural for anyone who has made such a move to think that anyone doing fundamental philosophy must be trying to solve the epistemological quandary in which they find themselves. Therefore, when an idealist claims "Reality is a world of experience," the dualist quite understandably thinks he is encountering an epistemological argument along the lines of, "I can't know about the existence of things I can't know about; therefore, what I can't know about doesn't exist." (This is pretty much how Stove interpreted idealism, and how several commenters here have understood my posts.) But look at (a small part) of Oakeshott's argument: "The view that objectivity signifies independence of experience must be rejected because the notion (which it implies) of a worl...

In the comment section of another post, Hume worries how idealism can survive an encounter with illusions, perceptual errors, hallucinations, the movement of the earth despite its apparent lack of movement, and so on. The idea seems to be that we need some reality independent of experience to correct these errors. We are like children who have filled in tests, and now slip them into a tube in our classroom (the world of experience) and send them off to a reality that is totally outside the world of experience to be graded. Somehow, we know not how, the tests are marked up and returned to us for us to absorb the right answers. This is roughly the correspondence theory of truth: our ideas are true when they "correspond" to some reality that is not ideas at all: although how an idea can "correspond" to something lacking all mental character whatsoever is beyond my comprehension! Of course, the above is not at all how we actually recognize we were in error about w...