I'm so glad Helen's book FINALLY came out! Tell her congratulations for me! And tell her good luck on rectifying your irrationally low credence in idealism. ;)
Let's see if I can do my part...
Totally agreed that most people should not read Berkeley as an introduction to idealism. You won't understand him until you've read Kant and Hume and Descartes and...basically you need to know about the history of philosophy to appreciate him, and even then he's an acquired taste. He can be rather in your face. Plus, people are so Cartesian in their thinking (even today) that they can't seem understand that he's not advocating for solipsism.
But...
Berkeley turned out to be right about Matter—science has cut up reality into teeny tiny pieces in its investigation of supposed "things in themselves" and has found a strange quantum world, not the fundamental building blocks materialists had been hoping for. Yet we're still hanging on to that very old materialistic reductive-mechanistic belief system.
Idealism isn't quite so antithetical to the modern view of science as people think. Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and Erwin Schrodinger are considered by some to be idealists.
As for "neural functioning clearly gives rise to our conscious experiences", I wouldn't say this is at all obvious or clear. Things are very much up in the air! :
Huh. Yes, there’s definitely public interest in Berkeleyan idealism; I reviewed Ross Douthat’s recent book of apologetics a few months ago, and he hangs quite a few arguments on it, or tries to. Non-theistic idealism is an interesting move; congratulations to your spouse!
The first quote talks about building blocks and cites Strawson who advocates Russellian monism, where there is a fundamental distinction between relational properties and the relata which have purely intrinsic properties—these relata are what philosophers call “quiddities”, which in Russellian monism are identified with basic qualia. Does the book address the idea of ontic structural realism where there are no quiddities of any kind, either physical or phenomenal, just networks of relations? This could still be compatible with a kind of idealism, like some of the “mind-only” schools of Buddhism whose views on the “emptiness” of all phenomena have a pan-relational flavor: https://dharma-rain.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Hua_Yen_Buddhism_Emptiness_Identity_Inte.pdf
I'm so glad Helen's book FINALLY came out! Tell her congratulations for me! And tell her good luck on rectifying your irrationally low credence in idealism. ;)
Let's see if I can do my part...
Totally agreed that most people should not read Berkeley as an introduction to idealism. You won't understand him until you've read Kant and Hume and Descartes and...basically you need to know about the history of philosophy to appreciate him, and even then he's an acquired taste. He can be rather in your face. Plus, people are so Cartesian in their thinking (even today) that they can't seem understand that he's not advocating for solipsism.
But...
Berkeley turned out to be right about Matter—science has cut up reality into teeny tiny pieces in its investigation of supposed "things in themselves" and has found a strange quantum world, not the fundamental building blocks materialists had been hoping for. Yet we're still hanging on to that very old materialistic reductive-mechanistic belief system.
Idealism isn't quite so antithetical to the modern view of science as people think. Max Planck, Werner Heisenberg, Niels Bohr, and Erwin Schrodinger are considered by some to be idealists.
https://www.essentiafoundation.org/can-a-physicist-embrace-idealism/reading/
As for "neural functioning clearly gives rise to our conscious experiences", I wouldn't say this is at all obvious or clear. Things are very much up in the air! :
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2016.00902/full#B174
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/375004857_An_evidence-based_critical_review_of_the_mind-brain_identity_theory
Though less well known, similar debates are going on in biology concerning the origin and definition of life:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610721000365?via=ihub#bib47
The views here parallel those in consciousness studies with reductive eliminative physicalists such as Sean Carroll arguing that life doesn't exist!:
https://bigthink.com/life/life-does-not-exist-the-deceptively-tricky-task-of-defining-life/
Some things to think about. :)
Huh. Yes, there’s definitely public interest in Berkeleyan idealism; I reviewed Ross Douthat’s recent book of apologetics a few months ago, and he hangs quite a few arguments on it, or tries to. Non-theistic idealism is an interesting move; congratulations to your spouse!
The first quote talks about building blocks and cites Strawson who advocates Russellian monism, where there is a fundamental distinction between relational properties and the relata which have purely intrinsic properties—these relata are what philosophers call “quiddities”, which in Russellian monism are identified with basic qualia. Does the book address the idea of ontic structural realism where there are no quiddities of any kind, either physical or phenomenal, just networks of relations? This could still be compatible with a kind of idealism, like some of the “mind-only” schools of Buddhism whose views on the “emptiness” of all phenomena have a pan-relational flavor: https://dharma-rain.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Hua_Yen_Buddhism_Emptiness_Identity_Inte.pdf