This is an excerpt from my talk with Monistic Idealism. We discuss Idealism, Berkeley, and his new livestream series Idealism Forever. -P
Penjammin: That's the part that stood out to me there. Would you explain to people why is it that they wouldn't know that their experience of this physical world (on a dualist or materialist view). . . why should they think that it is not as the world actually is? It seems like common sense that, “Hey, there's a bus coming. I see a bus coming. That means that there's a bus coming.” And they would take [that] as just a direct correspondence between the actual world and what they observe. But Locke and others have said that maybe that's not the case. Why is that?
Jordan / Monistic Idealism: Great question. Um, so Berkeley answers this. Reality is experience. If that's what an object is (just an experience) and if I'm experiencing it, well, then I am perceiving reality the way it really is. But if you think the world is physical or material, or you're a dualist and you think it's more than experience, then How could you ever know? would be the question. You're putting yourself in a skeptical scenario. So you have your experiences, but you're saying there's a world beyond your experiences. You're saying there's more. There's this physical world out there, beyond all of our experiences. And so the question is, well, how would you actually know that? I mean, you couldn't you couldn't appeal to your experiences because you're saying reality is more, [that] it's somehow different. But if you're an idealist, you can say, yes, reality is what I'm experiencing. And that's the point George Berkeley made. He said, if you are an idealist, now you really can affirm common sense, right? But if you're not an idealist, now you're not affirming common sense, because you've put yourself in this skeptical scenario where you're not really sure if anything you're seeing is really real… because the physical world is different than experience. So how do you really know?
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Also Jordan made a fun video version of this episode with illustrations.
Penjammin grew up in a labyrinthine cavern. Later he ran with the wolves, enjoying life in the sweet scent of his game, until pirates landed and… (see “about” above). Get his eletters at penjams.com/subscribe.