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oh SNAP this video got featured. Ace.
Thanks to whoever made that possible!!

This was my essay question:
Explain Berkeley's so-called immaterialism. Can Berkeley's position be defended today? What can we learn from his immaterialism?

I surmise Berkeley's position as the following deductive argument:

1.1.1 Physical experiences in the world can be reduced to perception of sensory input.

1.1 Physical experiences can be summed up as ideas.

1.2 Ideas exist only in the mind

1. All we can know of the existence of things, are those ideas we have about those things.

C. Existence itself is only in the mind.


Berkeley asserts that since all existence is defined only in perception, perception is a necessary precursor to existence of any type. He explains away former existence by simply attributing it to the perception of another mind, namely the mind of God. This is a cunning dodge of potential refutation, by asserting that those things we regard as existing outside our perception, are included inside God's perception.

However, viewing the objective world as a mere perception of God is problematic. God is a being he supposes to exist, though he cannot ratify God's existence through his own perception, because of course this would be to say that unless God itself was being perceived, it would not exist. This point of view would create some tricky problems by trying to define Gods own existence by its own perception.

Another problem with Berkeley's argument is that it commits the fallacy of equivocation. Berkeley equivocates the perception of an object with the object itself that is being perceived.

It is fine and well to say that the concept of an apple is something that exists in the mind, but how can the perception exist, without something to perceive? It would follow then, that whether or not the object being perceived truly exists as some material object outside of the perception, the Apple remains as something that can still be meaningfully referred to as an object.

Though perhaps through our sensory perception, intuition and reflection, we will never fully understand the nature of the objective reality that lay outside our ideas, we can certainly make some reasonable inferences through example that approximate the existence of this reality in a reasonable way.

The fact that two or more people can perceive any given object or person or concept in different ways suggests that there is certainly a level of creative thinking involved in perception, a method by which we compare the observable qualities of a given object to those qualities we have previously observed in other objects. Differing personal life experiences, differing levels of knowledge and differing quality of observation can reasonably explain why various people can have a different perception of any given object.

To make no separation between the object itself, and our perception of that object, defining any concept of common existence becomes problematic.

Immaterialism is a useful place to start; it entertains a level of doubt more radical even than Descartes 'cogito', trying not to make any assumption based on experience, and operates on reason alone, but it is not an end in itself. Berkeley's argument cannot reasonably explain or define existence beyond a very personal understanding of it, and thus is an insufficient philosophy to deal with existence as a broader philosophical concept.