A walk down memory lane...

I recall perception, I have perceived...? Memory read error.

If you think that perception does not produce just knowledge, but also emotions, choices, answers, art, action, life, communication, progress, spirituality, meditation, history, dream, love...yes, perception is something very limited, but great enough to fill our life with the whole infinite universe of inner life.
Since perception is human, involves our human condition and happens over human time, we can even connect the idea “to be is to be perceived” to Heidegger’s philosophy of being and time.

To be, is to be perceived". — chiknsld

So I exist a 1000 times?

Sartre'sThe Look:

The mere possible presence of another person causes one to look at oneself as an object and see one's world as it appears to the other. This is not done from a specific location outside oneself, but is non-positional. This is a recognition of the subjectivity in others.

(Wiki)

I have found this to be a profound truth. Especially in certain dangerous activities.

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This quotation needs context and attribution to be meaningful - who said it, why did they say it, what do they say it means, what do their critics say it means, why is it significant. This page would be a good starting point for considering those questions.

"To be, is to be perceived" — chiknsld

If so and if, however, it doesn't make sense to say "perceiving is perceived", then "perceiving" cannot be; therefore "to be" has to be other (more) than "to be perceived". :eyes:

The problem with Esse Est Percipi is that it is too passive. One also acts upon the world. While @jgill's look shows that others exist, it's what you do that makes you who you are.

To perceive or be perceived, there's no question. 1000 people perceive me. All different perceptions. Im a 1000 people.

Even for realists, existence is predicated on perception (seeing is believing kinda deal). For a realist, perception (sense-and-instrument-based detection) is the sine qua non of being/existence.

Question to realists: How do you all tell the difference between nonexistent things and unperceived things? Perhaps your explanation will state that there's a world of a difference between unperceivable (nonbeing) and unperceived (hidden being).

Here things start getting interesting (re: unperceivable $\rightarrow$ nonbeing i.e. esse est percipi)

If you think that perception does not produce just knowledge, but also emotions, choices, answers, art, action, life, communication, progress, spirituality, meditation, history, dream, love...yes, perception is something very limited, but great enough to fill our life with the whole infinite universe of inner life.
Since perception is human, involves our human condition and happens over human time, we can even connect the idea “to be is to be perceived” to Heidegger’s philosophy of being and time. — Angelo Cannata

Hello Angelo :) Ah, it seems you find much joy in the story of life. What about someone living in abject poverty such as a third world country or someone with a terrible disease who is suffering everyday? Does their perception allow them to see the same beauty that you find?

For a realist, perception (sense-and-instrument-based detection) is the sine qua non of being/existence. — Agent Smith

The commonest version of ontological realism holds the there are true statements about things that are not presently being perceived.

If to be is to be perceived, then there are no truths about the cup sitting unwatched in the cupboard. Such a view is not realism.

If to be is to be perceived we would be empty shells, living in the dream-like reality of others only. This emptiness might be compensated by the manifold appearance of the shell but also their shells would be empty according to our perception. Esse=percipi would be equivalent to 0=0=inf.

I think that the experience of suffering confirms what I said:

perception does not produce just knowledge, but also emotions, choices, answers, art, action, life, communication, progress, spirituality, meditation, history, dream, love... — Angelo Cannata

Emotions, choices, answers and so on are not always joyful things. Even love includes experiences of suffering.
I didn’t say that life is all joy and beauty. Rather, I wanted to say that framing life in the concept of “perception” can make us blind about the whole universe that is in life and in perception.

No, you cannot say that you are a 1000 different people, but you can say that nobody knows who you truly are, not even yourself.If a 1000 people meet you, that creates a 1000 perceptions,not a 1000 different people. I am coming from a perspective that we live in a objective world but cannot experience it, we just experience perceptions of it. You therefore cannot even know yourself to the fullest. With this I want to propose another question: Why do we feel well when we do something that we "THINK" is correct and vice-versa. We cannot know the absolute GOOD or BAD but we have an intuition(?). Does everybody have its own values and acts according to them, but has to adapt them to society to fit in and live amongst others? We know that we need others to survive, but we dont agree with people(which is good). To what degree should we transform our own values(not the ones that are forced upon us) to get along ehit each other?

am coming from a perspective that we live in a objective world but cannot experience it, we just experience perceptions of it — Tusmuertos3

But as you are yourself the object behind the perception you know who you are cause you are who you are. You are the Ding an Sich. The body an Sich.

Im a different person to all people. So in a way I'm 1000 persons.

Sartre'sThe Look:

The mere possible presence of another person causes one to look at oneself as an object and see one's world as it appears to the other. This is not done from a specific location outside oneself, but is non-positional. This is a recognition of the subjectivity in others.
(Wiki)

I have found this to be a profound truth. Especially in certain dangerous activities. — jgill

A very intriguing idea :) Thank you for sharing.

"To be, is to be perceived"
— chiknsld
If so and if, however, it doesn't make sense to say "perceiving is perceived", then "perceiving" cannot be; therefore "to be" has to be other (more) than "to be perceived". :eyes: — 180 Proof

"To be" entails something greater than perception? Interesting :)

↪chiknsld The problem with Esse Est Percipi is that it is too passive. One also acts upon the world. While jgill's look shows that others exist, it's what you do that makes you who you are. — Banno

Perception is the sense awareness of the environment that starts within the mind and then pushes outward. But action must be accounted for as well? Yes, this seems reasonable to me.

Even for realists, existence is predicated on perception (seeing is believing kinda deal). For a realist, perception (sense-and-instrument-based detection) is the sine qua non of being/existence.

Question to realists: How do you all tell the difference between nonexistent things and unperceived things? Perhaps your explanation will state that there's a world of a difference between unperceivable (nonbeing) and unperceived (hidden being).

Here things start getting interesting (re: unperceivable →→ nonbeing i.e. esse est percipi) — Agent Smith

This sounds like a profound idea! Berkeley seems to avoid this trap by saying that there must be an ultimate, omniscient perceiver who perceives all. If we get rid of this ultimate perceiver, we would still have trouble proving that anything exists beyond perception.

I had a pleasure reading everyone's comments. Unfortunately, I'm feeling a bit under the weather, but don't worry I am still here...perceiving... :snicker:

@Banno

This sounds like a profound idea! Berkely seems to avoid this trap by saying that there must be an ultimate, omniscient perceiver who perceives all. If we get rid of this ultimate perceiver, we would still have trouble proving that anything exists beyond perception. — chiknsld

Is it a profound idea? It doesn't look like one to me. :chin:

1. To be is to be perceived
2. To be perceived is to be.

2 is problematic for the simple reason that hallucinations are real (certain mental illnesses would lose their cardinal symptom e.g. schizophrenia with its 3^rd person auditory hallucuinations if we endorse 2).

In other words, both realists and idealists must subscribe to 1 which is esse est percipi.

The choice: either concede that everything perceived is real (2) [if one sees a dragon during a drug trip, the dragon is real] OR esse est percipi (1)

Perhaps the realist can respond that they choose 2 but they make an exception of mental illnesses like schizophrenia. The question then is how are we to tell the difference between what is real and what is a hallucination? Perception is neutral (both the real and hallucinations are perceived) i.e. there's nothing in perception that could help us in this matter.

Everybody can't be hallucinating! That's how, the realist might claim, we can differentiate the real from hallucination. Yet cases of mass hysteria have been documented. Then there are hypothetical scenarios like The Matrix in which everyone is experiencing an illusion (what they perceive is a simulation, not real).

The long and short of it: Option 2 isn't viable i.e. the realist too must agree that esse est percipi.

I dunno if all I said makes sense though, it's a confusing world, ja?

1. To be is to be perceived
2. To be perceived is to be. — Agent Smith

Hardly. To be is to be and to be perceived is to be and be perceived while in the state of perception allowing one to realize one is being perceived, even as perception - being uncaused - shifts from one being perceived to another awaiting perception in order to be.

To be is to be and to be perceived is to be and be perceived — jgill

What's a tautology?

Perception is the sense awareness of the environment that starts within the mind and then pushes outward. — chiknsld

Sense awareness....to be aware by means of the senses? If to be aware means use of the senses, how can awareness begin in the mind, which has nothing to do with the physical senses?

If the senses cause us to be aware of that which is already out there in the environment, why would the mind push out what just came in?

What is it that the mind is pushing out? Action? What’s going on between that which comes in by means of the senses, and that which gets pushed out by means of the mind?

I've never seen Bishop Berkeley's argument refuted satisfactorily. Generally, the take I've read in philosophy surveys and papers on epistemology and ontology is that, like Hume's attack on induction, it cannot be fully refuted. However, whereas plenty of ways around Hume's challenge have given us relative amounts of pragmatic hope in inductive inference, Berkeley's argument is seemingly impossible to address.

Why is this the case?

Because idealism, physicalism, dualism, etc. do not flow purely from deductive logic. Arguments for and against each always rely on empiricism, from the datum of experience. Experience always occurs in our subjective, first-person world of mental objects, and so it cannot refute Berkeley. Attempted refutations of the bishop always seem to reduce to so much argumentum ad lapidem.

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against alarge stone, till he rebounded from it, ‘I refute it THUS.’

Of course, the experience of the reality of objects that makes us so sure they exist is necessarily phenomenal. You feel the certainty of the rock you kick as experience. Arguments against Berkeley from science will always have the relative weakness of being arguments from this sort of experience.

The reason they still appear work for some people is that people often mistake the complexity and mathematical rigor of an abstraction as an indicator of its validity in a premise. So, the famous rock stomp is laughed off, but appeals to quarks and leptons seem sound. In the end though, these entities are multilevel abstractions made to explain the results of the subjective experiences of scientists reading instruments. This makes them essentially the same phenomenological sort of experience as kicking a stone.

To be sure, quarks were proposed first as purely abstract entities, entities that did not really have being. They follow from the logic of the mathematics of symmetry. However, the symmetries in question were derived by observation.

Hardly. To be is to be and to be perceived is to be and be perceived while in the state of perception allowing one to realize one is being perceived, even as perception - being uncaused - shifts from one being perceived to another awaiting perception in order to be.

It does not proceed from logic that being exists without perception. The entire reason idealist ontologies have been around for so long is because empircle evidence can't ever tell you that being exists without perception. This is true by definition, since empiricism requires observation.

Further, it is arguable that we can't truly conceive of being without perception in the same way we can't conceive of a square circle. We can say the words, but do they have meaning?

How does the absence of thought enter thought as a concrete mental entity for us?

Arguably all thoughts about being sans perception are simply thoughts that take on a third person viewpoint. But isn't this viewpoint just a common type of abstraction, something that is itself part of the first-person experience of mental life?Thus, these are thoughts about a mental abstraction experienced in first-person subjective experience, not thoughts about pure noumena.

This issue is an even larger problem for a physicalists because one cannot posit the existance of a non-physical point of view, something like a God's eye point of view that observes all "as it is." That would be inventing something non-physical that exists. So, they have to start talking about being for non-living physical systems, e.g., "what being itself is for a nebula." Of course, physicalists often do posit a God's eye view and are just unaware of this supposition.

So, it appears that being without perception might fail Hume's argument from conceivability.

But even if you say, "sure I can think about pure being, unfiltered by perception, the noumena is in my mind right now," your argument still has the problem of begging the question. It assumes the very thing it sets out to prove. Even if being can occur without perception, it does not follow that it must do so (necessity versus contingency). What you need is evidence that being does exist outside perception, but such evidence is seemingly impossible to produce.

The issue of evidence is sometimes handwaved by saying our sense of logic is just the result of evolution and this sort of difficulty is merely apparent for us, due to cognitive deficiency. This argument also fails.

Appeals to evolution are appeals to science. However, if logic doesn't hold, then we have no reason to trust the logical/mathematical reasoning of science, nor our rules of inductive inference in the first place, in which case why would we deny first person experience its primacy in being when it is the only thing we can be sure of?

What you need is evidence that being does exist outside perception, but such evidence is seemingly impossible to produce. — Count Timothy von Icarus

If there was no being inside the perceived, outside perception, we could just as well spend the rest of our lives dreaming.

Yup. Now this fact is often put forth as a refutation of Berkeley, but it doesn't work unless you misunderstand his position.

This sort of epistemological problem is universal. Asserting an external world doesn't somehow erase the major quandaries in epistemology that have dogged us for millenia. You can be a physicalist and still be troubled that you can't prove you're not a brain in a vat. Physicalists, dualists, and idealists all have to concede that the universe, complete with all our memories and the evidence of its history, could have actually sprung into existence just 12 minutes ago, and we'd all be none the wiser. These problems aren't unique to idealism.

Idealism does not entail anti-realism. Berkeley thought rocks and chairs existed. They were just mental objects. Thus, idealism can work fine with science. Science is just the description of how phenomenal objects relate to one another. Its predictive power is in no way reduced in idealism.

Idealism also does not entail solipsism.

One of the weakest common counter arguments to idealism is: "if the world is mental, how come we can't will ourselves to fly, or will ourselves out of death." This never made sense to me. Can you will yourself to not feel sad when a loved one dies? Can you will yourself to remain perfectly calm at all times? Do you never get distracted or fall asleep without deciding too? Experience does not dictate that mental = controllable.

For a modern version of idealism, this book is quite good:



The attacks on physicalism are well organized and delivered very well, although they aren't particularly novel. The competing idealist ontology laid out is sort of "meh," though. It uses disassociative mental disorders as a key analogy and I don't know if it really works. It's also a little too hawkish on the findings for contextuality in quantum mechanics from what I understand, although he worked at CERN so he has more familiarity than I do I'm sure. He also sells information ontologies short and doesn't represent them very well. But, the reason I bring it up is because it shows an ontology based on modern science that avoids solipsism, is realist about external objects, and retains idealism.

The book appears to be interesting. Im not sure though if the "main barrier" to the widespread acceptance of idealism is about to collapse. Idealism lacks a massive nucleus and it appears to me that there is no difference between the dreamt world and the world of wakefulness.

Neither am I convinced that a major inflection point in modern intellectual history is close at hand. Though it might offer useful information about a dualistic view, tying together ideas and physics.

I swore off TPF some weeks ago - tired of the never-ending, ridiculous anti-realism and anti-science screeds. (You do realize that 90% of ALL of the world's anti-realists are contributors to this forum?)

But I found myself laid up for a few days with a bad knee, and having read every book in the house, I found myself fishing around for a distraction. Aargh, I should have known better.



I find idealism to be ridiculous, and here's why :

There are only two positions to take - the transcendent exists or it does not exist. Physicalists call the transcendent "matter" which implies a world of wood and steel and dirt existing external to our bodies, and that will go on existing even if all humans died tomorrow. Idealists gag on this notion - "How dare a filthy world of meat and dirt intrude on our saintly world of the mind?" So they rename the transcendent "mental" and think they've accomplished something. Moving deck chairs on the Titanic.

And it seems you agree :

Idealism does not entail anti-realism. Berkeley thought rocks and chairs existed. They were just mental objects. Thus, idealism can work fine with science. Science is just the description of how phenomenal objects relate to one another. Its predictive power is in no way reduced in idealism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

The only alternative is to deny the transcendent and admit to solipsism.

If one is going to claim that the transcendent does not exist but somehow avoid solipsism, then one must explain the source of quale (sense impressions). And why the moon doesn't cease to exist whenever we close our eyes. And how other minds can exist. Berkeley tried to get around this by positing an uber-observer (God). Doesn't do away with the transcendent for us humans though.

... it shows an ontology based on modern science that avoids solipsism, is realist about external objects, and retains idealism. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not having read this work yet, I wonder if you might shed a little more light on this idea. Is it just another attempt to rename "matter" as "mental"?

So for me, it's not that idealism is wrong, just unnecessary.

Not having read this work yet, I wonder if you might shed a little more light on this idea. Is it just another attempt to rename "matter" as "mental"? — Real Gone Cat

What is this matter you speak of? I find it ridiculous to elevate the way we think about the world (as consisting of wood, steel and dirt) and somehow proudly proclaim that that must be how the world is apart from us. Come to think of it, such a claim is the height of idealism. "I experience the world as such and such and therefore it is such and such".

What I also find interesting is that these kind of metaphysical questions, "what is really really real? as opposed to what is real", seems to be all the rage on TPF these days. Why would you want to affirm the real reality of wood steel and dirt, over just its reality whether it is in the end mental or physical? The only reason I can think of is to make the claim that a third person analysis is a more accurate description than taking into account first person experience. I have the hunch this metaphysical gambit is played to be able to argue some sort of reductionist move. I doubt that works though.

The problem with Esse Est Percipi is that it is too passive. One also acts upon the world. While jgill's look shows that others exist, it's what you do that makes you who you are. — Banno

I do like this notion... "esse est percipi" prioritizes an observer over and above the inner life of the observed. It also prioritizes a detached look at things. What if we just transform the sentence a bit. "To be is to be used", or "to be is to be of use". Is a broken cup still a cup?

What is this matter you speak of? — Tobias

Don't be silly. The point is that idealism is unnecessary. It adds nothing to understanding. Does it render science moot? Count Tim doesn't think so.