Bishop Berkeley: is there an external world?

George Berkeley (1685-1753)

George Berkeley, born in 1685 at Dysart Castle in County Kilkenny, and Bishop of Cloyne from 1734 to 1753, wrote a philosophical analysis of materialism which has been the subject of controversy since its publication.

Berkeley attacked the belief in material objects that underlay the prevailing scientific model of the world. He argued that there was no basis for a belief in physical objects or an external world, and that we should think of all objects as being mental.

It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects, have an existence, natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. But with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this principle may be entertained in the world; yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For what are the forementioned objects but the things we perceive by sense? And 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? *

Modern philosophers have tended to marginalise Berkeley because his views appear to be radically at odds with the conventional scientific worldview. Bertrand Russell, for example, took Berkeley’s arguments seriously but felt justified in dismissing them.

In one sense it must be admitted that we can never prove the existence of things other than ourselves and our experiences. No logical absurdity results from the hypothesis that the world consists of myself and my thoughts and feelings and sensations, and that everything else is mere fancy. [...] There is no logical impossibility in the supposition that the whole of life is a dream, in which we ourselves create all the objects that come before us. But although this is not logically impossible, there is no reason whatever to suppose that it is true; and it is, in fact, a less simple hypothesis, viewed as a means of accounting for the facts of our own life, than the common-sense hypothesis that there really are objects independent of us, whose action on us causes our sensations.

The way in which simplicity comes in from supposing that there really are physical objects is easily seen. If the cat appears at one moment in one part of the room, and at another in another part, it is natural to suppose that it has moved from the one to the other, passing over a series of intermediate positions. But if it is merely a set of sense-data, it cannot have ever been in any place where I did not see it; thus we shall have to suppose that it did not exist at all while I was not looking, but suddenly sprang into being in a new place. **

In these extracts from his book The Problems of Philosophy, Russell mentions some of the apparent problems of Berkeley’s thesis. It seems natural to one to suppose that, during the time between seeing the cat the first time and seeing it the second time, something exists which one can label as ‘the cat’, even if no one is having sensory experiences involving this inferred cat. However, the fact that positing such an independent entity may seem natural, or convenient, does not constitute philosophical proof.

* George Berkeley, A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, in A.J. Ayer & R. Winch (Eds.), British Empirical Philosophers, Routledge and Kegan Paul 1952, p.179.
** Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, Williams & Norgate 1912, pp.30-36.

guest post: Christine Fulcher on schools

Below is a post by my colleague Christine Fulcher, giving some of her views on education.

The headmaster of my primary school made great play of the fact that he was in loco parentis. He told us that this was how his legal position vis-à-vis the pupils of the school was described, and that this was Latin for ‘in place of the parent’. In other words, he was acting as a substitute parent during the hours we were attending that school. Well, if parents were responsible people, they would not be willing to let other people act in loco parentis in this way.

The fact that education is compulsory is an indictment of parents who want an easy life for themselves with their children out of their hair, rather than what is best for their children. If so-called education were not compulsory and supposedly ‘free’ at point of delivery (but not really free, being paid for out of taxation) then people might be more cautious about bringing children into the world.

As for the so-called ‘right’ of children to be educated: those who create ‘rights’ have their own agendas, which are not necessarily in the interests of those to whom they are giving these ‘rights’. The fact that it is generally in the interests of people to be able to read, write and do basic arithmetic is expanded into the idea of compulsory education, then forced upon children, who have no choice.

If education were not compulsory, a certain number of people might grow up unable to read, write or do basic arithmetic. But this is a lesser evil than that created by making ‘education’ compulsory. Much of modern education does not consist of ‘stuffing children’s minds with facts’, but of stuffing their minds with propaganda. This is not a modern phenomenon. Those who wish to spread any sort of propaganda, religious or atheist, have always been interested in using compulsory education of the young as a means of doing this.

Christine Fulcher

Metachoric experiences

metachoric experience = experience in which the whole of a subject’s visual field is replaced by a hallucinatory one

Our research on lucid dreams, false awakenings and out-of-the-body experiences highlighted the capacity of the brain to generate experiences which provide a convincing replica of normal perceptual experience.

In lucid dreams, the subject appears to be relatively ‘normal’ in terms of cognitive faculties, as evidenced by the fact that he has awareness of his actual state, i.e. that he is asleep and that the experiences he is having are hallucinatory. In false awakenings, the subject appears to ‘see’ a convincing replica of his normal bedroom environment. He may then see monsters or other figures of various kinds, apparently superimposed on this otherwise faithful replica, although in fact the whole of the visual field is of course hallucinatory. In out-of-the-body experiences (OBEs) the subject is typically awake but appears to be seeing his environment from the wrong perspective — often as if from a point of view above his head. Again, the brain appears to be generating a highly convincing replica of the normal environment, visually speaking.

In the case of OBEs, there is also the observation that the hallucinatory state can apparently be entered with little or no awareness that a discontinuity has taken place from (a) actually seeing the environment to (b) hallucinating the same environment, albeit from a different perspective.

These experiences suggested a departure from the previous idea of a hallucination as an isolated area of the visual field which was generated erroneously by the brain, and then somehow superimposed on the rest of the visual field which was generated from actual input in the normal way.

Certain features of our research on apparitional cases — cases where an apparitional figure or object is seen against the background of the normal environment — led us to the possibility that many apparitional experiences, and possibly all of them, were analogous to lucid dreams and OBEs in being totally hallucinatory. That is to say, rather than the experience consisting of normal perception plus a finite hallucinatory element (the two elements being integrated in some way), the perceptual environment is entirely replaced by a hallucinatory one, at least as long as the apparitional figure is being perceived.

In our 1975 book Apparitions we proposed the term metachoric to designate such experiences in which the normal perceptual environment is entirely replaced by a hallucinatory one.

Celia Green
Charles McCreery

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