CHAPTER 3: Reality and Being

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CHAPTER 3 Reality and Being
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Introduction

• Metaphysics is the attempt to answer the
  question What is real?
• You might think that reality just consists in
  physical objects. But what do we say about
  goodness, justice, or God? Or economic forces?

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Metaphysics so what?

• Identifying what is real is important.
• If we say that something is real, then we are
  saying that it has importance, actuality, and
  power.

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The Search for Reality

• Perhaps we can never say what reality is, as the
  question might be meaningless.
• If so, perhaps we cannot say with certainty which
  aspects of the universe around us are real.

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3.2 Reality Material or Nonmaterial?

• Materialism Reality as Matter
• Materialism is the view that matter is the
  ultimate constituent of reality.
• Both eastern and Western philosophers have
  accepted this view.

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Eastern Materialism The Charvaka Philosophers of
India.

• These philosophers ridiculed the spiritualism of
  their countryman, and were referred to as
  Lokyata, which means those who go the worldly
  way.
• Believed that since all we know is what we
  perceive through our senses, and what we perceive
  is material, then all that we can know is
  material.

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Western Materialism.

• Democritus believed that reality could be
  explained in terms of matter, with the smallest
  pieces being atoms.
• People lost interest in Democritean materialism
  as they were more interested in working out how
  to lead a good and happy life. But a growing
  interest in the scientific method in the
  seventeenth century led people back to being
  interested in materialism.
• Hobbes, for example, thought that our mental
  states were states of our material brains.

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Objections to Materialism

• The basic objection to materialism lies in
• its difficulty in accounting for human
  consciousness.
• Consciousness is always intensional and it is
  subjective. It also has no apparent location,
  mass, or volume.
• So, if materialism is to be acceptable it must
  reduce consciousness to physical states. But it
  seems that consciousness has features that cannot
  be reduced.

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Objections to Materialism

• In addition to this, it seems that the elementary
  particles from which the universe is composed are
  not matter as traditionally conceived, but more
  like energy, or fields, or probability waves.
• To some extent materialists have adjusted to
  these findings by revising what they conceive of
  as matter.

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Objections to Materialism

• But Werner Heisenberg in the 1930s held that we
  cannot tell whether a particle has a definite
  location until it interacts with an observer.
• This seems to show that on its most basic level
  the world is intertwined with the mind.

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Idealism Reality as Nonmatter

• Modern atomic theory has pushed some philosophers
  to claim that reality is more than matter.
• Some philosophers have held that we live in a
  purely nonmaterial world the universe is only
  mind and idea.

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The Development of Western Idealism

• Idealism is the view that reality is
• comprised only of minds and their
• ideas.
• This view is as old as the ancient Greek
  Pythagoras, and was formalized by Plato, who held
  that the individual entities that we perceive
  around us are merely shadows of reality.
• This fit in well with the views of Augustine, who
  held that the only enduring world was the
  spiritual, the world without matter.

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The Development of Western Idealism

• But the founder of modern idealism is George
  Berkeley, who claimed that the conscious mind and
  its ideas are the only reality.
• Berkeley argued that our experience of the
  external world consists of the sensations of our
  senses (e.g. cats, flowers, rocks, houses,). So,
  all that exists are the sensations and the ideas
  that we experience and the minds that experience
  them.

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Subjective and Objective Idealism

• Berkeleys views has elements of both.
• Berkeley held that things are mind-dependent
  this is the subjective element of his view.
• Berkeley held that not all of the contents of our
  minds are the same some are within our control,
  and some are not. Those that are not are uniform
  and consistent this consistency comes from God,
  for Berkeley.
• This second aspect of Berkeleys idealism is its
  objective aspect, for now certain parts of
  reality are independent of ones mind.

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Eastern Idealism

• Indian philosophy has housed many idealist
  philosophers, such as Vasubandhu, whose views
  were in many ways similar to Berkeleys.
• Vasubandhu held that we only perceive sensations
  in our minds, and that only minds exist.

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 Objections to Idealism

• Do idealists commit the fallacy of
  anthropomorphism, projecting a human faculty onto
  the nonhuman universe?
• Objections to Subjective Idealism
• It might be that subjective idealists fail to
  distinguish between my perception of a thing and
  the thing itself.
• Why should we believe that perceptible things are
  mere collections of perceptible qualities?
• Why not just distinguish between perceptions and
  their objects?
• Subjective idealism doesnt really answer the
  question of how things are so much as it
  dissolves it.

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Objections to Idealism

• Objections to Objective Idealism
• Do we need an explanation, such as God, for the
  continuity of (e.g.) the classroom? Also, why
  believe that Gods mind is intelligible to us?
  How can we distinguish between our perceptions
  and Gods perceptions?

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What do you think?

• What do you think is real? How do you
  understand this question?
• Are economic forces real? In what sense?
• What would it be like to live in an idealist
  universe? Would it be any different from the
  universe you live in now? Could this universe be
  an idealist one?
• Do you think that idealism gives us a reason to
  believe that God exists? Why, or why not?