Thomyum2 wrote: ↑October 27th, 2022, 4:04 pmI think Berkeley's whole point is that there isn't a physical universe at all, only a mental one. I think he would argue that while the physical universe might be irreducible to the
individual mind, it is not irreducible to
all minds (which would have to include the mind of God).
And why would we have to take it as a given that God has created such a physical universe? Couldn't it possible that the universe is actually an immaterial one, but that humans could be mistaken in believing otherwise? In other words, couldn't it be that our limited human conception of matter is not an accurate representation of reality?
After all, in spite of efforts to investigate more and more closely the things we call 'material, we still have yet to substantiate that anything we encounter is actually made of 'matter'. If you look at the current scientific definition of matter, it is simply anything that has mass and is extended in space. These two properties are simply properties of observable objects - how they appear and how they behave to our physical perceptions - they are not evidence of any kind of actual existing 'material' of which the objects are composed.
The question of the existence of matter can be interpreted broadly as the question of the existence of physical entities.
(By the way, there is a distinction between matter as
the sum total of massy elementary particles and all their aggregates and matter as
prime matter, i.e. as the space-pervading
world-stuff or
world-medium, as
"the aether".)
Whether our world is Berkeley's world or not is empirically undecidable, because a world where his theistic idealism/immaterialism is true is perceptually indistinguishable from one where it is false.
The question is whether Berkeley is best interpreted as being an
eliminative mentalist (and thus a
nihilist) about physical entities, or as being a
reductive mentalist (and thus a
non-nihilist) about them.
Eliminative mentalists deny the existence of physical entities.
Reductive mentalists do not deny the existence of physical entities, but only that they are irreducible to mental entities due to not being composed of or constituted by any mental entities.
As far as I can see, most Berkeley experts regard him as a
reductive mentalist and thus as a
non-nihilist about physical entities. Berkeley himself writes that material things such as stones are constituted by "collections of ideas", which is actually an expression of reductive mentalism rather than of eliminative mentalism.
(However, reductive mentalism has absurd consequences. For example, when millions of people see the sun as a collection of visual ideas, then there are millions of suns in the minds of millions of people, because ideas in numerically different minds are numerically different ideas. If "my sun" is a collection of sense-ideas or sense-impressions in my mind, then I literally have a star, i.e. a celestial body, in my mind—which assertion strikes me as ludicrous.)
QUOTE>
The basics of Berkeley’s metaphysics are apparent from the first section of the main body of the
Principles:
—
It is evident to any one who takes a survey of the objects of human knowledge, that they are either ideas actually imprinted on the senses, or else such as are perceived by attending to the passions and operations of the mind, or lastly ideas formed by help of memory and imagination, either compounding, dividing, or barely representing those originally perceived in the aforesaid ways. By sight I have the ideas of light and colours with their several degrees and variations. By touch I perceive, for example, hard and soft, heat and cold, motion and resistance, and of all these more and less either as to quantity or degree. Smelling furnishes me with odours; the palate with tastes, and hearing conveys sounds to the mind in all their variety of tone and composition. And as several of these are observed to accompany each other, they come to be marked by one name, and so to be reputed as one thing. Thus, for example, a certain colour, taste, smell, figure and consistence having been observed to go together, are accounted one distinct thing, signified by the name apple. Other collections of ideas constitute a stone, a tree, a book, and the like sensible things; which, as they are pleasing or disagreeable, excite the passions of love, hatred, joy, grief, and so forth.
—
As this passage illustrates, Berkeley does not deny the existence of ordinary objects such as stones, trees, books, and apples. On the contrary, as was indicated above, he holds that only an immaterialist account of such objects can avoid skepticism about their existence and nature. What such objects turn out to be, on his account, are bundles or collections of ideas. An apple is a combination of visual ideas (including the sensible qualities of color and visual shape), tangible ideas, ideas of taste, smell, etc. The question of what does the combining is a philosophically interesting one which Berkeley does not address in detail. He does make clear that there are two sides to the process of bundling ideas into objects: (1) co-occurrence, an objective fact about what sorts of ideas tend to accompany each other in our experience, and (2) something we do when we decide to single out a set of co-occurring ideas and refer to it with a certain name (NTV 109).
Thus, although there is no material world for Berkeley, there is a physical world, a world of ordinary objects. This world is mind-dependent, for it is composed of ideas, whose existence consists in being perceived. For ideas, and so for the physical world,
esse est percipi."
Source:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/berkeley/
<QUOTE
Unfortunately, the statement that
"although there is no material world for Berkeley, there is a physical world" is very confusing. Aren't "material world" and "physical world" synonyms? If they aren't, what's the difference?
If
materialism is defined in Berkeley's sense as the affirmation of the existence of material entities, then
immaterialism as the negation of materialism thus defined is the denial of the existence of material entities; so immaterialism is the same as
nihilism about material entities. But in fact Berkeley
isn't a nihilist about material entities such as stones and trees, so
there is a material world for him. What
there isn't for him is a
mentally irreducible material world.
QUOTE>
"Given his theory of ultimate reality, we might expect Berkeley to be a nihilist. For how can there be a physical world if the only ultimate entities are minds and whatever occurs or exists within them? How can there be room for a 3-dimensional physical space or for the solid and voluminous objects we locate in it, if ultimately, apart from the heavenly world of God and (perhaps) angelic spirits, there is nothing external to our consciousness? True, given the coherence of God's volitional policies, the course of human experience is thematic, and our physical beliefs serve a useful function in recording the theme. But the utility of the beliefs is not enough to make them true. And on Berkeley's account it seems they must be false. On Berkeley's account, it seems that, while our experiences are organized exactly as if there were a physical world, there is not really one.
However, while there are other points where his position is open to different interpretations, it is certain that Berkeley was not a nihilist. Nihilism was a position which he repeatedly and emphatically disowned. It is true that there are certain quasi-nihilistic elements in his thought. Thus he rejects as incoherent the opinion of 'the vulgar' (the ordinary man) that the sensible objects (the collections of sensible qualities) we immediately perceive by sense have an absolute existence outside the mind. Here he sides with 'the philosophers' (paradigmatically, Locke) in holding that the immediate objects of perception are our own ideas – entities whose esse is percipi. At the same time, he also rejects as incoherent the opinion of the philosophers (again, paradigmatically, Locke) that, beyond the veil of our ideas, there are parcels of unthinking and insensible material substance which (subject to the distinction between primary and secondary qualities) our sense-perceptions represent. Here he sides with the vulgar in holding that the physical world is wholly composed of the sensible items which are immediately perceptible. But in rejecting these opinions, he does not take himself to be rejecting the existence of a physical world, but only to be rejecting certain prevalent but incoherent views about it. He thinks that once the incoherence of these views is exposed, we will see that our ordinary physical beliefs do not require them – see that these beliefs can be retained, without distortion, in his philosophical system. The resulting conception is one which absorbs the physical into the sensible and the sensible into the mental."
(Foster, John.
The Case for Idealism. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982. pp. 20-1)
<QUOTE