h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Good article!

I see an inherent conflict when accepting Immaterialism. If we accept that matter does not exist, and that the only two ways for something to exhibit existence is to either perceive or be perceived, then the only thing that can be perceived is perception itself.

I'll submit to the idea that the perceiver can, in fact, be nothing more than 'mind'. But that which is perceived doesn't necessarily have that attribute. In any event, with the 'object' removed from the scheme, all that remains is perception. This would reduce everything to the 'eye of the beholder', eliminating everything beyond a subjective standpoint.

Pardon my delay Ariston.

Yes, that seems to be the upshot. Everything is subjective. The fact that certain things hold together for long enough for us to make calendars and things is, to Berkeley, something to be grateful for.

"The eye of the beholder" does not imply isolated or solipsistic experience. See my entry on Rainbows A954759.

Another good article. I see that we share similar interests in consciousness and reality.

I found it interesting that you referred to Dennett in one entry and covered Berkeley in another. If I'm not mistaken, Dennett uses his model of Multiple Drafts to imply that phenomenology is reduced to nothing more than 'filling in the gaps'. This approach, very Materialist in nature, is very polar to Berkeley's.

I like the contrast.

I don't see it so diametrically opposed at all. You have to go the whole way with Berkeley. Dennett says consciousness makes a coherent narrative out of scraps of input from a (presumably) different coherence; Berkeley says things really are coherent, in the mind of God. The thing that makes Berkeley's theology more attractive than most (to me) is that in it one needn't pretend to know anything at all about God, one just sees the world hanging magically together and one goes wow. The word God is a synonym for the undeniable wholeness of things.

Or as Wittgenstein said, the mystical is: seeing the universe as a limited whole.

I see your point. Didn't mean to imply dissimilarity, more of a juxtaposition.