How to distinguish between, hallucinations, dreams and reality
If we only experience our own ideas, how can we distinguish between what is real and what is imaginary?
Nigel Warburton counters this objection by stating that 'actual ' physical objects present repeated patterns of sensory information in consistent ways. Our understanding of immediate experiences is always in relation to other experiences; the context of an experience is an important factor.
Idealism may lead to solipsism.
This view states that idealism encourages the view that 'I myself alone' exist, as a mind. If everything else is only an entity in my awareness how do I know that other minds exist?
An idealist might argue that the logic of idealism does not exclude other minds. To believe that some of the things in my mind are there because of the influence of other minds makes more sense than saying that these things are somehow caused by mysterious ‘extra-mental things’. When I talk about other minds at least I know am talking about something based on my own experience.
Warburton suggests that social emotions, such as shame and embarrassment would not make sense to a solipsist.
The problem of persistence or of unnecessary coincidences
How is it possible that the things I experience continue to exist in a consistent way if they are only mental constructs? If material objects really exist their behaviour and attributes would obviously be consistent but for an idealist consistency is merely a matter of co-incidence.
Berkeley argued that a 'Universal Mind' (God) causes and maintains everything that exists. Thanks to that Mind, everything that enters your mind doesn't begin to exist only when it enters your mind. It's already in the Universal Mind. And thanks to that Mind, things don't vanish out of existence when you leave the room. This is not a satisfactory argument.
The problem with causality
Like phenomenalism idealism cannot (without invoking God) explain things being caused by unperceived objects or processes.
I think Berkeley does makes some really good arguments.
ReplyDelete"what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations; and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these or any combination of them should exist unperceived?"
None of these are really issues. All you have to grant is that mind extends beyond the boundaries of your personal ego, and that mental objects are real in the very same sense you consider physical objects. That wouldn't be invoking God as much as that would just be granting the existence of the only ontological category you know to exist beyond your individual piece of it. Claiming that there's this whole nonmental world, which you can thus never experience (since you only experience mental things), would be invoking God, since it would be inventing the existence of an ontological category you can never and will never encounter. With that, other egos can exist in the same sense yours does, as dissociated pieces of this world made of a distinct thing that you actually know to exist (killing both solipsism and the potential for p-zombies present in dualism and materialism), and causality would exist in the same way a form of causality exists in dreams (only it would be souped up, along with other regularities, by the fact that reality is bigger than your brain), actual objects would still exist when you're not looking at them in an ontic structural realist sense (being that they are made out of mind like you are, after all), and consistency of behavior would be emergent in same way consistency of our behavior is. No issues. One could easily say that for the materialist/dualist, causality and consistency are also absurdities, since the only answer either can come up with would have to be "well, it just is that way". Patterns and regularities exist in all things, and physics would still work, only the mind/body problem would be completely solved, and there would be no hard problem, nor problem about how a nonmental/nonexperiential world could interact with/produce experience. Even how other minds come to exist would be explained, since mental dissociation has been known to produce alters that think they are individuals and often aren't even aware of each other's existence, so one could just have dissociations in mind producing apparent individuals like ourselves.
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