Berkeley's Idealism | Philosophy Tube

George Berkeley was a philosopher who denied the existence of the physical world – an Idealist! If you’re studying A-Level philosophy you’ll need to know this important bit of metaphysics!

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Recommended Reading:
Berkeley, Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous

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[morganj]

Wow, seeing 4-years-prior Olly and comparing him to current Olly.... just goes to show he's been hot this whole time.

[Aleph_Null_Audio]

Thank you! I've been saying for years that science is not concerned with veracity but verisimilitude. This is why newtonian physics is still taught even though we know it's not "true": it allows us to make good predictions about the future over a fairly broad scope of spacetime.

[FerHering]

Have you read Borges' "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"? There, Borges, imagines a world where this idealism is considered common sense and materialism (something doesn't need to be perceived to exist) is heresy. Also, besides that the whole story is a astoundin, he imagines everything, from how are their idealist lifes, to the kind of language they have.

[HeavyMetalMouse]

I suppose my main complaint with Idealism is - why does the universe seem to act as though it continues to exist while it isn't being observed? If things which are not observed/observable do not exist, then why does assuming they -do- continue to exist seem to give us the right answer when predicting future behaviour of systems? Further, if the tree in the quad doesn't exist when nobody can perceive it, why is it there when we -do- look? If the lack of experience of it means it doesn't exist, then someone goes there, what decides whether or not there's something there to observe when someone tries?

Invoking an Omnipresent Observer seems to trivialize the idea. If it is impossible for a thing to ever not be observed, then what does it even mean to say that something only exists when observed? The net effect is that things continue to exist.

[tahrimamon]

"if to be is to be perceived, and if you can change the way you perceive, you can literally change the world"

[CGSRichards]

Whatever form Plato is now, I bet he's pissed.

[Pfhorrest]

On that last note about "change the way you perceive and you can change the world", it might be important to distinguish (as wasn't commonly done in Berkeley's time, but modern psychologists do) between perception, which is an active interpretive function, and sensation, which is just the passive reception of sense-data from the world. You don't, strictly speaking, sense the tree in the quad, but rather a pattern of colors and smells and so on. Interpreting those colors and smells, you then perceive, in those patterns, the tree. Berkeley's idealism really seems to mean "sense" when it says "perceive", but you can't voluntarily change the way that you sense, only the way that you interpret those senses, i.e. perceive. You can change the way you perceive in the modern sense of the word "perceive", but not in the word sense Berkeley seems to use.

[finnleyconnellan]

How does god exist if there is nobody there to perceive him? If he only exists because he perceives himself it seems a bit of a stretch, why couldn't a self aware invisible apple exist?

[periodicgaming]

Well, as some who loves quantum mechanics and quantum physics, the idea that something doesn’t exist until it is observed doesn’t seem too odd to me.

[Clawdragoons]

I feel as if there's some pretty substantial equivocation going on here. You talk about whether an apple which can't be seen, smelled, felt, tasted, or experienced in any way exists, but you see what I said there: I said "can't be" - an apple which isn't currently being seen might still be see-able, an apple which isn't currently being tasted can still be taste-able.


If there were an object which has no properties which allow it to interact in any way with our world, directly or indirectly, then it is an interesting question to ask whether or not it exists, and I could see the argument going either way depending on how you looked at it. But that's a very different question.


As a point about "God perceiving everything, thus everything maintains existence" - I feel as though even if you totally accepted the idealism argument, God is still unnecessary for things to keep existing. Take the tree, unseen in the quad. Perhaps you are far enough away that you can't perceive it with your traditional senses, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't have some effect on you, or that it couldn't. The tree, for instance, releases oxygen, which is mixed into the air and may at some point affect any point on earth. It's very existence shapes the currents of the air and the way individual molecules fly about. It exerts a gravitational pull that permeates the entirety of the universe, even if unbelievably faintly.


Sure, most of these effects are indirect, but then so is sight - we don't directly observe objects, we see light that has reflected off of it. At the atomic level, we never truly touch another thing. In short, it may be impossible to perceive objects, or it may be impossible not to perceive them. In the former case, the argument becomes unfounded because we haven't the slightest experience with perception, and in the latter case, the conclusion regarding a god becomes wholly unnecessary.

[christophercheck]

The problem of subjective reality is one of the underlying justifications for the scientific method.

Publishing your methodology forces you to allow other people, with different subjective experiences, to observe the same phenomena in an independent context. That (and the idea of any sort of collective knowledge) allows us to smooth out the subjective differences in our lived experiences.

I'm also reminded of Wittgenstein's example of semantic games, wherein not only do words mean different things to different people, but even to the same people in a different context. Our own subjectivity applied to ourselves, undermining our own past (or future) experiences of the objects around us.

[madikrieger]

Love the way you explain things so clearly. Thanks for devoting your time to such an interesting matter!! Super helpful and appreciated.

[TheBrunarr]

Idealism doesn't imply that there aren't objective truths...if I say that I'm an idealist that is synonymous with saying that idealism is objectively true.

[conorb]

It's annoys me how he is called one of the "British philosophers" when he is Irish.

[imsh]

It seems like a contradiction to ask someone to imagine an apple without mass or volume and is undetectable in any way, because then it's no longer an apple, because apples are defined as having mass and volume (among other things).
Also, in science the working definition of existence is pretty much to be detectable. So to ask one to imagine something that exists but isn't detectable seems to me the same thing as saying 'imagine something that exists, but doesn't'.
It's also quite a leap to say that just because to be something has to be detectable, it has to be detectable by human beings.

[Sam_on_YouTube]

I can imagine the supersymmetric weakly interacting twins of the particles in the standard model. Those may not exist and may or may not have any way to detect them. But through the use of mathematical models of string theory, many physicists have imagined them.

[nichande]

I think there's three other answers to where material things go if they're not perceived.
1) So long as we exist we are always perceiving even if it isn't brought to conscious clarity and distinctness. This was argued by Leibniz: the windowless monads perceive all other monads while in existence however weakly. It isn't as if our sense organs stop working when we aren't paying to attention to some thing, it's precisely the activity of our senses and imagination that produces these ideas passively or actively. It's just that our minds are attuned to detect certain phenomena relevant to us and filter out the rest.
2) Space and time and causality are not empirically real in themselves. The Kantian position but which I think has some physical credibility today. When we ask about something not perceived we usually mean like the past in time or something at a distance in space not immediately perceived. But if space time are phenomenal then these things are in existence somehow instantaneously as if already happened (logical fatalism) and as in 1) perceived by us at all times.
3) Occasionalism which was influential in Islamic philosophy. Not only is causality not real in itself but all things and events are unique instantaneous moments created and recreated according to god or whatever you believe in. Change is illusory. The world actually does disappear altogether without the intervention of an acting force like god or Schopenhauer's will (voluntarism) which alone makes things happen and seemingly interact. Schopenhauer said the universe began with the opening of the eye.

[undinebrand]

thank you for bringing back my motivation to study for my exams. I loooovee how you explain things!

[HxHDRA]

As my new favorite game Person 5 expressed "If you want to change the world, all you have to do is just look at it differently..."

[xBogdan]

If you imagine an apple without visualizing its color, shape, weight, smell, then you are imagining its definition. It is still possible. Its like imagining a round square.