You don't just perceive some water; you perceive drugged water, since on drinking it you have other experiences of getting drugged. To say that the water remained drugged is just to say that these regularities in experience obtained, and your example in fact relies on this in order to be coherent.

What would it mean "to perceive drugged water"? You don't perceive the water as being suffused with drugs. Even when you become high you don't perceive the water as such, but you infer that the water had been suffused with drugs.

The idealist would say there is nothing to perceiving drugged water other than perceiving the experiential consequences of water being drugged, which might include an odd color, but would also include feeling funny on drinking it.

Yes but all the idealist can acknowledge as 'real' are the experiences of drinking the water (which are, let's say for the sake of argument, subjectively indistinguishable from drinking ordinary water), of becoming high, and of making the inference "There might have been something in the water".

But that inference is actually inconsistent with radical idealism, because it is inferring the existence of something that had real causal efficacy, but which itself never appeared in or as experience.

Yes but all the idealist can acknowledge as 'real' are the experiences of drinking the water (which are, let's say for the sake of argument, subjectively indistinguishable from drinking ordinary water), of becoming high, and of making the inference "There might have been something in the water". — John

It seems to me that experiences are always subjectively distinguishable, otherwise they are simply the same experience. For example, the experience of drinking regular water is distinguished from the experience of drinking drugged water subjectively - in one case after I drink it I go like "Ahhh! That's refreshing", in the other I go like "Oh wow, whose that beauty my eyes are seeing?"

Not at all. The idealist simply equates the presence of a drug in the water with a certain connection of experiences. No inference to something non-expeirential is required.

But the action of the drug would not be instantaneous.Only if it were would what you say be true.
Also, there is no inconsistency in saying that the experiences of drinking the two different waters would not be the same, and yet that they could be indistinguishable, in other words, that they could be, although not the same, subjectively the same.

Let's say in a meeting room with nobody else around, I dissolve some drug in the water pitcher, not knowing who will be using the room next, just because. You come in for your meeting an hour later and drink the water. You get high and act erratic during the meeting.

Here is the problem. How did the water remain drugged in between my leaving the meeting room and you entering an hour later, if nobody was there to perceive it? All you perceive is some water. Why would it have a drug in it?

For subjective idealism, what connects my perception of adding drug to the water earlier, with your perception of normal water followed by getting high after drinking it, given that there is a gap between perceptions, and I'm not in your meeting to perceive the drugged water?

Realism and objective idealism have a dead simple answer for this. There is a drug persisting in the water in between my experience of adding it, and your experience of drinking it. This sort of explanation doesn't work for subjective idealism. There can't be anything persisting in between experiences (no God, universal mind, or panpsychism to keep it there). — Marchesk

I might be reading this wrong, but your wording seems to presuppose that the water itself persists between your experience and my experience. So we have this half-realist half-idealist scenario where the water persists but the drug doesn't, and you're trying to reconcile what appears to be a (rightly) nonsensical scenario.

So forget any presupposed realism. You experience yourself putting drugs in water. Then I experience myself drinking water and either find myself drugged or find myself refreshed. If the former happens then we say that I drank the same water that you drugged. If the latter happens then we say that I drank a different water.

That the water I drank and the water you drugged are the same (or different) is simply an instrumental narrative that develops according to whatever epistemic conditions are satisfied (and is open to change when new epistemic conditions are satisfied).

But the action of the drug would not be instantaneous — John

So? No experience is instantaneous, experiences last over time. For example, I put the glass to my lips, feel the cold touch of the water, then drink, feel it go down my throat (don't think anything nasty now John), and then into my stomach, and afterwards, I still feel the coldness of the drink in my throat. The experience doesn't last one second, it's always connected and always exists in time, with no crisp boundary to delimit it.

Also, there is no inconsistency in saying that the experiences of drinking the two different waters would not be the same, and yet that they could be indistinguishable, in other words, that they could be, although not the same, subjectively the same. — John

This doesn't make sense. If there is nothing at all by which they can be distinguished, how are they different? If nothing at all is different about the color of one book and the color of the other, than aren't the two colors the same - isn't that, in fact, precisely what we mean by something being the same as something else? We compare them, and upon our comparison find no differences, and hence we say "Aha! They are the same".

But the drug in the water is not experienced; or at least it is not known to subjective experience. Unless the drinker is told she will not know there was a drug in the water; and that may be just one explanatory hypothesis among others for why she suddenly began hallucinating thirty minutes later.

Explanatory hypotheses are always inferences to causal influences that are not known to subjective experience; and so they are always inconsistent with the radical idealist hypothesis itself.

The water would have to be subjected to chemical analysis to discover whether there really were drugs present in it. The water may or may not taste different. But there is no direct subjectively experiential link between drinking the drugged water and hallucinating thirty minutes later. What if the drinker injected what they thought were drugs, but which were not immediately prior to hallucinating. Then they would falsely think the hallucinations had been caused by the injected substance and would not think the water had been drugged at all, irrespective of whether or not they had been able to detect any unusual flavour in the water they had drunk.

But the drug in the water is not experienced; or at least it is not known to subjective experience. — John

Yes it is, by the fact that you feel funny if you drink the water. This is baked into the very example.

What if the drinker injected what they thought were drugs, but which were not immediately prior to hallucinating. Then they would falsely think the hallucinations had been caused by the injected substance and would not think the water had been drugged at all, irrespective of whether or not they had been able to detect any unusual flavour in the water they had drunk. — John

Yeah sure. But that's still subjective inferences they make based on their connected experience. They inject what they expect to be drugs in their veins, and so they expect the drugged sensation to follow, and it does, so they think that what they injected were indeed drugs.

The water would have to be subjected to chemical analysis to discover whether there really were drugs present in it. — John

And what is chemical analysis? It is, say, dropping a few drops of something in the water, and seeing the water turn red, as opposed to staying transparent. The water turning red, we know through our experience, indicates the presence of drugs. It's still reasoning within experience. I don't care if you call this objective or subjective, because as far as I'm concerned, all we ever have is experience, so objective is merely a different species of subjective in my own humble fucking view.

But you don't "feel funny" as you are drinking it. If you did, then the drugged water would be distinguishable from plain water. but you still could not be sure the water was drugged until you analyzed it. There could be some other explanation for your feeling funny".

But you don't "feel funny" as you are drinking it. If you did, then the drugged water would be distinguishable from plain water. but you still could not be sure the water was drugged until you analyzed it. There could be some other explanation for your feeling funny". — John

And analyzing it isn't done experientially no? The results aren't experienced? We just gain mysterious access to them in a flash of insight...

To be sure testing the water does not actually prove there are drugs in the water. But the more tests ( preferably of different methodology) that you submitted it to, the less reason there would be to doubt that there had been drugs in the water.

Don't be silly; I never said, or even suggested, that.

To be sure testing the water does not actually prove there are drugs in the water. But the more tests ( preferably of different methodology) that you submitted it to, the less reason there would be to doubt that there had been drugs in the water. — John

Okay so? What does this have to do with anything? You're like Samuel Johnson disproving idealism by kicking a mental stone with a mental foot >:O

OK, and that other thing would have to have experiential consequences, or else the example could not work by its own logic without begging the question.

How did the water remain drugged in between my leaving the meeting room and you entering an hour later, if nobody was there to perceive it? All you perceive is some water. Why would it have a drug in it? — Marchesk

Once, in Karl Popper's living-room, I asked him why he rejected [idealism], whereupon he banged his hand against the radiator by which we were standing and said: 'When I come downstairs in the morning I take it for granted that this radiator has been here all night' — Bryan Magee

Schopenhauer's Philosophy

So he rejects idealism because he rejects idealism?

That was in the context of a discussion by Magee of why so many people do. His point was that 'even eminent philosophers', such as Popper, reject idealism on grounds which he regards as fallacious, i.e. because they take it to be making claims which it really isn't making. He goes on to talk about how a change in perspective, something like a 'gestalt shift', is required, to understand what idealism is driving at, which I think is true.

The continuity of existence is what we take for granted. But how is this continuity real?

I disagree strongly with this. I don't think there is any shortage of people who understand very well what idealism is driving at. Or rather, what idealisms are driving at, because there are many of them. To think that few people are capable of understanding idealism is to partake of the hubris of those who congratulate themselves that they can see something that others cannot; who like to think so because they like to think they have discovered an arcane secret difficult to divine. This comes out of a desire to inflate the importance of idealism. I've read McGee many years ago, and I think he was one of those hubristic people; a popularizer who entertained an exaggerated opinion of his own degree of philosophical understanding. For me, this comes out very clearly in many of his interviews with contemporary philosophers.

I think the one central tenet of any form of idealism is that being is intrinsically mental; that being is constituted by consciousness; although just how it is constituted by consciousness is variously conceived in the various versions of idealism.

If all idealism were saying is that the way we see things is partly conditioned by the nature of our perceptual organs; then who could disagree with that? That's no world-shattering revelation! But it is a very different thing to go further and to say that being is constituted, rather than merely that the experience of being is partly conditioned, by human consciousness. And to assert the position that being is constituted by a divine consciousness would not be to profess a pure idealism at all, in my book, but could be seen to be as much, or even more, consonant with realism.

But, that's really the point; the argument between realism and idealism is misconceived; to take a position on one side or the other which seeks to exclude the other is just another expression of the human tendency to reify and absolutize, and that seeks to reduce life to a cold abstract formula.

Realism and idealism are the two sides of a counterfeit coin minted by a heartless rationality. If they are not taken in a strong ontological sense though, they are just harmless exercises in imagining the possibilities that can be conceived by the rational intellect; the mind exploring its own capacities for certain kinds of speculation.

I went back and looked at the context of the quote from Magee - it's a bit too long to reproduce the entire section, but it's about the counter-intuitive nature of transcendental idealism. Furthermore, in many of the debates I've had about this subject on this and the other forums over the years, nearly all of the objections to it amount to pretty much what Popper said - that it means "the world exists only in my mind". In fact, I'm sure that my esteemed philosophy lecturer, David Stove, never truly grasped the basic idea of Kant's 'Copernican revolution in thought' and was generally dismissive of idealism on very similar grounds.

If all idealism were saying is that the way we see things is partly conditioned by the nature of our perceptual organs; then who could disagree with that? That's no world-shattering revelation! But it is a very different thing to go further and to say that being is constituted, rather than merely that the experience of being is partly conditioned, by human consciousness. — John

I think it does say that - but what does 'constituted' imply? Does it mean when you look at an object, that 'mind' or 'human mind' is one of its constituents?

(That is what pan-psychism is saying - that what we understand as 'mind' is an attribute of matter itself - Galen Strawson's 'basic things (protons, for example) are loci of conscious experience' - from here.)

But I don't interpret transcendental idealism as an ontological theory, a theory of 'what things are made of' but as a theory of the nature of knowledge. Because of the way in which we know, we see the world a certain way.

The dichotomy between materialism and idealism is a consequence of Cartesian dualism.

The term "Idealism" came into vogue roughly during the time of Kant (though it was used earlier by others, such as Leibniz) to label one of two trends that had emerged in reaction to Cartesian philosophy. Descartes had argued that there were two basic yet separate substances in the universe: Extension (the material world of things in space) and Thought (the world of mind and ideas). Subsequently opposing camps took one or the other substance as their metaphysical foundation, treating it as the primary substance while reducing the remaining substance to derivative status. Materialists argued that only matter was ultimately real, so that thought and consciousness derived from physical entities (chemistry, brain states, etc.). Idealists countered that the mind and its ideas were ultimately real, and that the physical world derived from mind (e.g., the mind of God, Berkeley's esse est percipi, or from ideal prototypes, etc.). Materialists gravitated toward mechanical, physical explanations for why and how things existed, while Idealists tended to look for purposes - moral as well as rational - to explain existence. Idealism meant "idea-ism," frequently in the sense Plato's notion of "ideas" (eidos) was understood at the time, namely ideal types that transcended the physical, sensory world and provided the form (eidos) that gave matter meaning and purpose. As materialism, buttressed by advances in materialistic science, gained wider acceptance, those inclined toward spiritual and theological aims turned increasingly toward idealism as a countermeasure. Before long there were many types of materialism and idealism. — "Dan

I am nearer to a view with the very drab title of 'neutral monism' - that the nature of reality is such that it has both physical and mental aspects, but that one can't be reduced to the other. But I also believe in the hierarchical nature of reality with what we understand as mind is on a higher or deeper level of being than what we understand as matter.

I think it does say that - but what does 'constituted' imply? Does it mean when you look at an object, that 'mind' or 'human mind' is one of its constituents? — Wayfarer

To say that would be silly I think. I don't think it could have any real meaning. That is one of the problems I have with asserting mind as a constituent. Our notion of mind comes from our experience of being mindful. Most of the ways we talk about mind are actually quasi-materialist metaphors, "I made up my mind". " I changed my mind". 'I don't mind", means the same as "I don't object". "I don't object" means there is no barrier, no object in the way.

We think the material world is materially constituted, because we experience it as material. We don't really know what it could mean in any ultimate sense for things to be materially constituted; it is just an idea derived from the materiality of objects. But then, it's like saying "How else could we think of the world as being constituted other than how we experience it, which is as being material, right"? We don't experience the world as being mental; that notion makes no sense ta all. Our experiencing of the world is thought of as mental, but not the world itself. But "mental" in that context just means something like "intangible" in contrast to the tangibility of the things we experience.

We can get our heads into the world, but we simply cannot get the world into our heads. When we get your heads into the world we can speak about the material world and the mind perfectly coherently and know exactly what we are talking about in the ordinary sense, but when we try to get the world into our heads, the ideas 'world', 'material' and 'mind' are reified and turned into incoherent monstrosities.

I think our experience, or at least our thinking about it, is ineliminably dualistic; but I don't think that fact justifies the metaphysical idea of substance dualism. I think the idea of substance monism is even more unsupportable, and in fact is simply not intelligible at all. We just can't reduce reality to any formula, is all; as much as that might disappoint us. I think that is the one really important insight of transcendental idealism.

We think the material world is materially constituted, because we experience it as material. We don't really know what it could mean in any ultimate sense for things to be materially constituted; it is just an idea derived from the materiality of objects — John

But isn't that precisely what materialism says? Isn't that what the whole 'mind and matter' debate revolves around? There was a poster at Online Philosophy Club, and his presentation of materialism was that all that exists, is matter-energy-space-time. That is the updated version of what used to be 'matter'. He believes that evolution is basically a material process, that life is something very like a large-scale chemical reaction - 'chemical scum' was the name given to humans by some leading scientist.

So the characteristic view of materialism is that humans, and everything else, are material entities, the consequence of physical laws, their actions transmitted via material mechanisms, and having material consequences. Furthermore, that is a view that many educated people believe in and defend. That is what I am arguing against, on the basis of various forms of idealism, including Kant's (as far as I understand it. And hey, I've been listening to an excellent lecture series whilst working out this week - recommend it!)

So the characteristic view of materialism is that humans, and everything else, are material entities, the consequence of physical laws, their actions transmitted via material mechanisms, and having material consequences. Furthermore, that is a view that many educated people believe in and defend. — Wayfarer

It's consistent with taking science at face values which explains the universe's development from the Big Bang where there were no minds to star formation to Earth to simple life developing until finally we get to a point where you have complex nervous systems similar enough to our own to call it mind.

The one way around all that is to interpret QM so that it is consciousness which collapses the possible universes into one with the history we observe. Humans or before us, animals, or aliens, or whatever mind collapsed it, it was just a giant probability wave, or something like that.

But isn't that precisely what materialism says? Isn't that what the whole 'mind and matter' debate revolves around? — Wayfarer

I agree it is precisely what materialism says; but since we don't know what it could mean for objects to be ultimately materially constituted; I don't think it means much. Consequently I don't think the "whole 'mind and matter' debate means much either. It's just not very interesting, although it does seem to exercise many minds these days. I have noticed that threads with this and like subjects seem to attract by far the most activity on these and other philosophy forums.

Thanks for the Kant link; I'll have a listen. Bernstein also has some interesting online audio lectures on Kant and Hegel: http://www.bernsteintapes.com/

I agree, its pointless, other than as an academic exercise. I'm curious though if you say that substance monism is unintelligible. Is there a monism which is intelligible?