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

Does yer man Berkeley not tell us more about the phenomenon of human consciousness than he does about the material world?

Which is fair enough - he dismisses the material world. But what I mean is, his musings are concerned with a world strictly bounded by what goes on within our heads and have no application or relevance to the physical world. This boundary is only now being breached by the neuroscientists who are establishing consciousness as a by-product of physical phenomena.

But his scepticism was certainly profoundly useful...especially as an inspiration to one of my own philosophical heroes, Hume.

Nice essay, though.

Thanks for your kind words Edward.

However Berkeley speaks primarily of the external world, and hardly mentions the psyche or human consciousness at all.

This was what baffled his contemporaries and I see it can still be surprising now. He has little or nothing to say about the business of consciousness precisely because everything (what you refer to as "the material world", B might prefer to say "the real world" or "the world of things") is, in consciousness, presented to us directly; outside consciousness there is nothing.

To put that another way, consciousness is the medium in which all things exist, and matter, of which things were supposed to be made, does not enter the equation at all. However, we cannot perceive minds, only their contents (real things) so there is not much we can say about minds; we only know we are minds because we perceive things ("ideas"). How those minds exist remains a mystery outside the range of our perception.

Berkeley therefore did not waste time wondering "what sort of thing" a mind could be; it simply is of another order to such "things" as we can perceive or even conceive of. His activity was in the world of education, health, politics, economics -- in fact it would be exactly the reverse of the truth to say "his musings are concerned with a world strictly bounded by what goes on within our heads and have no application or relevance to the physical world".

He was taken up wrongly because he persisted in using the word "ideas" to cover not only private thoughts but also all public things -- anything perceivable. Perhaps he has himself to blame for this misunderstanding, but it doesn't detract from his logicality.

I hoped I could get away without putting such a longwinded caveat into the entry. What do you think?

Actually...maybe a section on 'Misunderstandings of Berkeley' might be a good idea.

To clarify what I meant: Yes, he was concerned with matters of the real, human world. What we might loosely call 'society'. What I meant was more like that he wasn't concerned with the nature of matter - the province of the material sciences - but with our perception of matter. Thus his philosophy is of little application to the physical sciences. Nothing wrong with that. His concerns were simply elsewhere.

There *is*, however, danger in misinterpretation:
Since the world isn't real and it's only my ideas that count, then I'm entitled to my own, unverifiable reality. In my reality, the impossible may be possible. The only test I need satisfy is 'Well, it's what *I* believe!' I've been banging on about this in the Freedom From Faith Foundation's conversation.

Or am I missing it by a mile?

A mile or a mile and a half, I'd say . . .

The deity is absolutely a necessary part of Berkeley's world. We are not at liberty to alter the deity or his works to suit ourselves.

To say "he wasn't concerned with the nature of matter - the province of the material sciences - but with our perception of matter. Thus his philosophy is of little application to the physical sciences." brings two responses. First, whose philosophy ever is "of useful application to the physical sciences"? In fairness, is any scientist bound by duty to a philosopher's words, other than scientists working to a religious or similar agenda?

Secondly, Berkeley did solve some problems in optics; his first two books were on maths and his third, his first important philosophical work, was "An Essay Towards a New Theory of Vision" which combined his immaterialism with some good scientific observation and theorising, including the questions of how we perceive distance and why the moon appears bigger when it is near the horizon. His answers were novel, but they were good and stand up still.

I should be able to put that in non-deistic terms, all the same:

We are not at liberty to choose what we want to perceive. Our perceptions are given, not voluntary on our part. Nor are we really at liberty to choose what we want to believe. We only believe what we can't avoid believing.

There is no doubt we often fool ourselves. That doesn't give us the right to.

Hmmm. Yes, the division between Science and Philosphy is an interesting one, which I touched on with a theoretical particle physicist friend at the weekend. I'd have said that some philosophical ideas - such as empiricism and logical positivism - were directly relevant. They allow scientists to say 'Hang on. Let's get back to first principles....'

So...was Berkely's scientific work unrelated to his philosophical - as. say, Chomsky's linguistics to his politics?

I'm not sure I understand this deity notion at all. Or, rather...I *think* I understand it, but see no use for it. Is it perhaps equivalent to 'the sum total of physical laws' - in which case to call it 'deity' seems to me to stretch a historical concept somewhat. But then since Berkeley was led to the church, he presumably saw some intelligence in it (the deity, that is, if not the church)

The definition of philosophy: 'The voluntary acquisition of headaches without the preceding consolation of alcohol'

Looks like you were answering my deity question while I was still asking it. We can't choose what to perceive....because it just is.

But isn't that the same as saying 'because it's what's out there in the material world to be perceived'?

But isn't that the same as saying 'because it's what's out there in the material world to be perceived'?

Bingo! Got it in a nutshell.

God is the physical world. For Newton the physical world was inert, for Berkeley it was buzzing, active, and contained all intelligence within it. Which is present theory closer to?

Yeah...point taken. I just don't see why it has to be called God. It leads to the dangerous misunderstanding: 'Since it's all in our minds anyway, we are free to construct whatever God we choose'.

But I guess that's not Berkeley's fault.

Thanks for the education.

I am putting here (above) what I take as the conclusions of Berkeley's revolutionary theory, not what Berkeley said himself. Berkeley would have been careful not to go in for pantheism: Spinoza had got a bad name by doing that. But it was a sort of sleight of hand on his part, I think, to go with the church and be revolutionary within it.

He wasn't the first to do that either. There was a band of "spirituals", people whose devotional habits were centred on private reading and meditation, that existed within both Catholic and Protestant churches in the dangerous days of the 16th and 17th centuries. They called themselves "The Family of Love" and managed to cover their tracks so well that it is hard to say who was and who wasn't a member. It is quite possible that they metamorphised into The Society of Friends, viz the Quakers.

Berkeley also recommended passive consent in political matters, and wrote political pamphlets on this. The government was to be accepted whether you agreed with it or not; there was plenty you could do whatever your situation to make things better without becoming violent.

The Church of Ireland (to finish this ramble) has had a tradition of allowing very heterodox views. In the 1950s there was a C of I clergyman preaching undiluted Buddhism from the pulpit. You have to ask for it very unmistakeably to get thrown out.

To answer 'Since it's all in our minds anyway, we are free to construct whatever God we choose' it is perhaps only necessary to show that a human mind cannot exist in isolation. It can become alienated, but that is a pathological state.

We are (I suggest) no more free to construct our individual mental basis, than to rearrange the order of colours in a rainbow

I was going to ask about Berkeley and Spinoza. I'm still troubled by this 'God' idea. Is it an alternative to or a reinterpretaion of the old CofI God? I have trouble with it also in modern theology and personal belief systems. I have the feeling that people are uncomfortable with abandoning old superstitions and would rather stretch this familiar God idea into something that more resembles rationality. The difficulty lies in all the baggage the retain. I could understand it more if Berkely had become a Unitarian Universalist.

>>We are (I suggest) no more free to construct our individual mental basis, than to rearrange the order of colours in a rainbow

Agreed. I think I'm beginning to understand why Berkeley is lumped in with the empiricists. I've previously been puzzled as to the connection between his immaterialism, Locke's materialism and Hume's plain old down-to-earthness.

It occure to me that reality is in some senses a social construct. Empiricism requires sensory impressions to be indepentley verifiable, no? We agree amongst ourselves what the colours of a are, what number the voltmeter is pointing at, etc. It remains possible that we can individually perceive things that aren't real (I've done so myself - but that's a long story.)

I wonder what Berkeley would have thought (or maybe he did think?) about Islamic theology. One view is that Allah is the underlying reality of all things, which can trully be perceived by himself. This is sametimes called 'greenness' - hence the spiritual relevance of the colour green. To some, scientific endeavour is an Islamic duty because it scratches away parts of the surface to let the green shine through.

Salaam aleikum!

Well our science is greatly indebted to the medieval arabic world; they invented chemistry, and algebra and everything else beginning with al (though they didn't invent alcohol they gave it its name).

Berkeley couldn't have become a Utilitarian universalist, the terms and the time weren't right. I think he went along with the church the same way he went along with the government--it's there so use it, it's too hard kicking against the pricks. However it is very tendentious to ascribe motives to anyone, particularly after a long interval.

My own attitude to religious language is, it's not about nothing, but it's not easy to say what it is about. I follow Wittgenstein in most questions (A1024156 is my homage). However I also think that what you have to say should also be sayable without relying on religious language. Wittgenstein's attitude was (he said) he was not religious, but he couldn't help seeing things from a religious perspective. Nobody has a right to expect another to accept religion.

In fact I think that invoking the supernatural is a short cut, a lazy option. All successful religions, I suspect, sail as close to atheism as they dare, but actual atheism is such a hard path to follow that it hasn't ever survived long. The Buddhists tried it, but they now have their pantheons too.

Berkeley is in with the empiricists because he was most influenced by Locke, and in turn had a profound influence on Hume. And despite the anti-materialism, he really is a thorough-going empiricist--he takes nothing on authority, relies entirely on his senses. His senses didn't show him undistinguished matter, so out it went.

I accept that there are times we can perceive things that aren't real. But we confidently expect that everything has, or will have, an explanation; our language is structured in this expectation. If reality is a (social) construct, though, it is not therefore plasicene (limitlessly mouldable) (ible?).

Ah...now I wasn't implying a social constuct in the sense of cultural relativity. Reality is reality. I mean that the empirical test of reality is that everyone is perceiving the same thing.

Well thank . . . goodness for that.

Yes, in science repeatability and demonstration is essential. Wittgenstein is particularly good on questions of a person claiming to perceive what others can't. It amounts to requiring a private language, which is logically a non-starter.

Of course if he can teach another person to percieve what no one has spotted before, he's a hero, like F M Alexander.