Bored, Idealism, Berkeley

Perception and reality: are the things that we perceived really they are? Or are the things we percieve are not what they are?

This is nonsense and really should be talked about or even thought about by anyone because thinking about these things tends to give one headaches, but I can’t help it. Sometimes, especially when I’m bored with the routine of everything like waking up in the morning, coffee, shower, dress, go to work, teach, wait for payday; go to church on Sundays, a bit of holidays here and there etc. I cannot help but wonder or even hope that there must be something more to this hmmm…we call reality.

Our perception or our sense of reality or everything all around us tells us that we are in a material world. Our environment is composed of materials whether they are solid, liquid, gas or plasma or what have you. We move in a material world made up of matter; we could sense or perceive them: touch, feel, hear, taste, and smell and we can even think about them. But this materiality is really illusionary. We all know that solid objects or material objects are really just empty spaces; in fact it is 99.99% space. Our intuitive idea of a solid matter is that it is so dense with material or particles but that is not true in the atomic and sub-atomic level. In fact, as we go deeper and deeper into subatomic particles, everything breaks down even observation. What is perceived as particle is also wave and these changes as they, these sub-atomic particles are observed. I heard Sen. Miriam Santiago during the impeachment trial of the Chief justice commented that the presence of the cameras in the trial changes the behavior of the participants; they become showy: the observer changes the behavior of the observed.Anyway, there is, in a sense. something illusory about what we call reality.

Anyway, I am not going into the quantum stuff…

I am thinking about something weirder: philosophical idealism. Idealism was a reaction to the rise of materialist philosophy espoused by Newton and Locke, to name two of its great proponents. The idea of materialism is that everything is matter. Newton believes that the world or reality is made up of matter and that is ruled by mechanistic physical laws that put order in everything. Locke on the other hand theorizes that everything we know is derived from our experiences of the material world hence his famous dictum “tabula rasa”: the mind is a blank slate from which our experiences are written on. This tabula rasa thing that perceives the mind as a passive agent was the dominant thinking about epistemology since the Greeks until Immanuel Kant, with his Copernican revolution theorized that the mind is not a blank slate but rather it has a prio ri knowledge or transcendental knowledge that organizes experience to generate knowledge.

Anyway, the problem of materialism is how we experience reality; there is a gap between the material and the mind: the veil of perception. Here is an example:
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I see a computer. My eyes see the computer. So, first the image of the computer goes into the organ of perception, the eyes. Then it travels into the network of heurons or transmitters into the brain or the mind from which the image of the computer is finally seen. So, the computer that I see is in the mind. The image or the thing, the computer that I see is a construct of the mind—an idea. We don’t see object; we see the idea of the object!

Are we seeing the computer? The question here is here: are we seeing a computer or the construct of our mind of a computer. There is a possibility that our image or idea of a computer is not the real computer; we could not know, maybe it is different from our idea of the computer (confusing ha). Simply put, our ideas and perception of the world is constructed inside our mind, and we could not tell, even we would not be able to tell whether what we see is in, any way like, or resembles the reality outside our perception. Is our idea of reality the same as that of outside of our ideas?

George Berkeley proposes that since matter cannot be perceived by the mind, but only ideas, it is untenable conjecture (or just a guess) to presume that there is material substance outside our mind. Everything is mind dependent. “To be is to be perceived.” Simply means that it is the mind, or perceiving that gives existence. Of course the question is if I close the door and I could not perceive the room does this mean that the room cease to exist? No, according to Berkeley your perception of reality or our ideas are produced by God. “God perceives everything at all times, so the closed room still exists, even without us perceiving it, since it is perceived by the mind of God.

Crazy but mind boggling.  Anyway, please do not think that I believe or accept all of these philosophical stuffs they are, like science fiction, a sort of head ache inducing entertainment for me.

Anyway, I think lunch will help hehehe...