Objective Realism vs Subjective Idealism - Open Topic

[Consul]

Even if nothing existed but mental subjects and mental items (ideas, impressions, images), they wouldn't be mere objects of thought in the sense of being nothing but figments of fantasy. On the contrary, if subjective idealism were true, they would constitute reality—a wholly mental reality, but a reality nonetheless. If something is a mere object of thought, it is nothing in itself; so there are only the thoughts about/of it (and the words, concepts, images, or pictures representing it). Existing mental subjects and mental items, including thoughts, are something in themselves, so there is more to them than my/our thoughts about/of them.

If subjective idealism were true, then why would subjects exist? Where would they come from?

I don't know, but Berkeley's worldview is both idealistic and theistic; so human subjects are created by the uncreated divine subject.

"Subjective idealism, a philosophy based on the premise that nothing exists except minds and spirits and their perceptions or ideas."
—Encyclopaedia Britannica

This is Berkeley's idealism, but subjective idealism can go one step further by claiming that both physical substances (bodies) and mental substances (souls/spirits) qua mental subjects are nothing over and above bundles of "perceptions or ideas", i.e. complexes of mental items or mental occurrences (experiences). For example, David Hume writes that "the soul, as far as we can conceive it, is nothing but a system or train of different perceptions." According to this antisubstantialist idealism, a mental subject is "only a system of floating ideas, without any substance to support them." (Berkeley)

Note that this is not Berkeley's view, because he believed that "I myself am not my ideas, but somewhat else, a thinking active principle that perceives, knows, wills, and operates about ideas", and that the words "mind, spirit, soul or myself"…"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."

I think it's plainly incoherent to postulate subjectivity without subjects. A mental subject is ontologically irreducible to "a system of floating ideas", because all nonsubstantial mental items or mental occurrences are ontologically dependent ("parasitic") on mental subjects. There can be no subjective experiences without experiencing subjects which are different from their experiences.

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"In specifying the idealist’s commitment in these terms, I am assuming, what I have been tacitly assuming throughout, that the idealist accepts the common-sense view of the ontological structure of the mind, which takes experiences, thoughts, beliefs, emotions, and other concrete items of mentality to be, and to be irreducibly, the token states, acts, and activities of persisting mental subjects. Strictly speaking, this is not the only option available. Some philosophers, following David Hume, reject any fundamental ontology of mental subjects and construe individual minds as nothing more than organized collections of appropriately related mental items. The idealist’s reductive account of the physical world does not itself prevent him from adopting this view: he could take the sensory organization to play the central role in the constitutive creation of the world, but think of the minds on which this organization is imposed as composed of nothing but sensory experiences and other mental items. Even so, the view seems to me to be clearly mistaken. My main objection to it is not the one that is most commonly made, that the Humean has no satisfactory way of defining the unity of the mind—of specifying what it is for different mental items to belong to the same mind. In fact, I think that, by exploiting the fact that total experiences are extended in time, and the fact that successive items in a stream of experience mereologically overlap, it is possible to construct an adequate definition of the unity of the mind in purely Humean terms.

My main objection to the Humean position is the more basic one, that the very notion of subjectless mentality is unintelligible. Thus, I can no more understand how there could be a thought without a thinker, a belief without a believer, or an experience without an experiencer, than I can understand how there could be speech without a speaker, or motion without something that moves."

(Foster, John. A World for Us: The Case for Phenomenalistic Idealism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. p. 204)
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