Late Night Thoughts on Berkeley and Aliens
Few philosophers are
credited with such a fundamental assumed error as 17th Century
‘immaterialist’ Bishop George Berkeley. To be is to be perceived, said Berkeley
infamously. Without a perceiver to perceive no object of perception can exist:
there is no mind independent world of which true or false assertions can be
made. In his later writings this ‘to be is to be perceived’ becomes something
more Platonic. Berkeley does not explicitly renounce his older formulation (as
far as I can discover) but I think that in later works such as Siris ‘to be is to be perceived ‘takes on the more Platonic/Parmenidean
form of ‘to be is to be thought’. The thinker is an essential moment of the
thing thought. This is a solution which has presented itself to certain
problems in Quantum Dynamics. What Berkeley insisted again and again and what
his critics have never quite grasped is that his position is easy, intuitive,
and restores to us the common world of sensation AGAINST the abstraction of
philosophers! Locke thought that there were secondary qualities (feels, smells
etc.) which exist only in the perceiving subject as well as primary qualities
(such as mass, velocity, extension) inhering in a mysterious, unknowable
‘substance’ of which he said it was a ‘something he knew not what’. This raises
the specter of epistemology. If the object of knowledge is something outside of
and essentially different from mind how is that we can come to know it?
Berkeley with his lucid common sense points out that this mysterious ‘other’ to
mind performs no philosophical function but to alienate us from the world of
common experience and thus from each other and, even more disastrously, from
nature itself. The ‘real’ world is not the ‘out there’ world but the world as
we perceive it. This proposition sounds relativistic in its implications but
Berkeley showed quite decisively that it was not. Nor is it ‘against science’
but in fact puts science on the firmest basis on which it can be put. I know
and Berkeley knew that this sounds counter-intuitive but this is because
Locke’s position has sunk so deeply into our scientific culture that we take it
for obvious even though it is not and, in fact, is the greatest enemy of
science ever conceived![1]
Am I saying Berkeley was right and all other philosophers wrong? No, there is
no reason to say this at all: Berkeley may have been wrong about all kinds of
things (not the least of them tar-water!).[2]
Berkeley was not stating a philosophical principle but a meta-philosophical or
meta-critical one. He was pointing out that at bottom all philosophy and all
science are trying to render experience intelligible.
The more they succeed in giving the world an intelligible form, a structure that
thought can apprehend, the more ‘idealized’ the world becomes. Any scientific
endeavor that succeeds shows the
underlying unity of mind and world. A science that succeeded totally would show that between mind and
world there was no ultimate difference. There is an ‘out-there’ world only to the extent that science fails in its
endeavor and leaves something out of its formulations.[3]
The unity of mind and the real is the foundation of any scientific discourse
and indeed it is strange that people who trumpet ‘reason’ and ‘science’ as
cultural signifiers are so opposed to this idealistic insight for in doing so
they are opposing their own position!
Of course they are
worried the idealistic principle has theistic implication which it clearly does
though again it is strange that people who insist so strongly on the universal
validity of reason do not want reason to be embodied in a universal, subsistent
principle. I think such people need to start ignoring the lazy target of
American fundamentalism and start engaging with real theology. That is for
another post however. To see what Berkeley is driving at though (and in point
of fact I don’t think Berkeley’s insight found full or
perfect expression in his own writings) we might consider a thought experiment.
Cultures, from time to time, impose fundamental re-descriptions of reality on
other cultures as we have done to the indigenous peoples of this country. Nothing
about US makes us immune from the same process. We might imagine a race of
alien conquerors who land on earth and replace OUR scientific conceptions with THEIRS.
At first we don’t quite know what to make of their biology. Parts of it remind
us of Darwin but others are difficult to assimilate to our own concepts.
Children, though, will pick it up easier than we can because the aliens are
teaching them in their missionary schools and they have to sink or swim in that
environment. In a couple of generations the alien biology will be the ‘objective
truth’ which corresponds to ‘reality as it is itself’. Further, winners write history
and Darwin, far from being a universal genius, is now an obsolete bungler like
Lamark or Aristotle.
We might want to say
that of the two biologies, the Darwinian and alien, one corresponds to reality
and one does not. One has to be true and the other false. This latter is not in
fact true for theories can overlap in their claims or one can be valid in one
domain but invalid in another. Still, we might want to retain the assumption
that in spite of what anyone or anything thinks
the mind independent world is one way and not another. Not that you will ever
succeed in conceiving the world as it is apart from your mind for you must be
thinking about it to conceive it with your thoughts subtracted. The notion of a
world that is NOT a world for some kind of thought or sensibility is one to
which you will never attain. Notional structure is for a knower and if there is
no knower there is no notional structure. Indeed, to revert to Berkeley’s
earlier formulation, without sensibility there are no sense qualities. There
may be extension in some sense I suppose but even extension has the unity of
two terms and that unity is not for extension itself but for what feels it. Subtract thought and
sensibility from things and you don’t really have a thing but a mystery like Locke’s
substance or Kant’s noumenon. Thus,
it is difficult to see how for a clump of matter there is anything like ‘the
truth of Darwin’s theory’ for a theory is constituted in relations and for a
clump of matter there are no relations. The world of ‘dead matter’ is not only
indifferent to what this or that theory says about it, it is indifferent to any theory whatsoever. For a dead clump
of matter there is no standpoint for
which anything is one way or another. Thus, if all Darwinists are replaced by
alien biologists there are no Darwinian processes in nature for there is nobody
for whom there could be such processes.
Berkeley
would not be the least bit bothered by this though for he has no ‘out there’
nature to worry about. The key reason for this is that Berkeley has a much
keener grasp of sensation than so called ‘empiricists’. As he points out in one
of his later works, Alciphron,
sensation is a complex language with grammar and syntax. As we learn to employ
the language of sensation with all its subtle interconnections we develop laws
and general conceptions about the order and flow of our own sensibility. This
notional structure is at the same time the order of nature so that as we
develop the knowledge of one, we develop knowledge of the other. Sensations in
order are the sentences of which the book of the world is composed. We can
learn to read that book with increasing sophistication as if interpreting a
musical score. There are some implications to this Berkeley may not have fully
considered. Our putative aliens may have different sensations than us: in that
case their theories might well be different than ours yet valid for their
sensory process. Human sensibility might constitute one universe and alien
sensibility another. These two universes might mesh in certain ways but clash
in others. Berkeley, though, does believe in a universal sensorium: that of God.
If he is correct about this there IS in fact one way the world is for there is
one subject to perceive all events in their total order. God would know which
biology was true, ours or the alien one because he would know the proper order
of all sensations as their creator. He would know in which way each theory fell
short and every way in which they could mutually enrich each other and produce
a deeper synthesis. If God intended for us and aliens to communicate he could,
without a doubt, create in us comparable sensations that would allow us to
share worlds. Meeting aliens might actually be an interesting way to test Berkeley’s
theory on the matter. If it turns out that we CAN talk to them about biology
that might be a significant piece of evidence that we were MEANT to.
Of course there are more internal perspectives at play
than us, God and possible aliens. Animals have a way the world is for them so
in that sense there is a truth about animals that we might discover by learning
about them. We might share THEIR world and that would be a form of biology far
more interesting than just manipulating gene sequences for the sake of
agribusiness. Nor do we know how far down ‘perspective’ or ‘what-it- is-likeness’
really goes. There may be some kind sensibility in the smallest unit of matter
or indeed, the universe taken as a totality might have some sensation of
itself. Another man, who was probably just as right as Berkeley, was the German
philosopher Leibniz. He conceived the universe as made of discreet units of
perception he termed monads and between these monads there was a pre-ordained
harmony by which they could interact (in a rather peculiar way we need not go
into here). If there is such a harmony, if we can not only master our own
perceptual language but that of others, communion is possible with other
creatures and possibly with the universe itself. The world then becomes WORTH
INVESTIGATING not just for crass commercial motives but for the higher aim of
communion between subjects (for all substance is now subject). Science is
liberated from servitude to militaries and corporations and is restored to its
own proper dignity. Further, on Berkeley’s view, animal pain becomes a
significant piece of evidence that we are meant to share a moral world with them
and perhaps even to refrain from eating them to the extent that this is
possible. The truth is however, that the English speaking world did not take up
its greatest philosopher and so we have barely begun to work out the moral and
spiritual implications of his position beyond what he himself developed in the
brief span of 68 earthly years. At any rate, his position has the advantage of
showing us how pantheism, animism and theism might all in fact be true and that
would certainly be of some aid in allowing humans who are animists, pantheists
and theists to get along.
[1] Science
has had great difficulty in grasping the nature of its own achievement for,
like Religion, it is looking at itself in terms of a representational scheme
inadequate to its true content. Thus, Darwin is taken to have ‘destroyed
teleology’ even though evolutionary biology is the most rigorously teleological
project ever developed. Further, ‘atomic physics’ is taken to have overthrown
the ancient account of phusis even
though the modern ‘atom’ bears no resemblance whatsoever to the solid
corpuscules of Epicurus and Hobbes. The atom as we now understand it is a dense
hive of internal and holistic relations. It is an entelechy and its discovery is the utter overthrow of atomism not
its confirmation. Beneath the atom may, for all we know, lie strings and on no
explanation of them that I can fathom are strings anything like material
objects as ordinary reflective consciousness conceives them.
[2]
Though pine resin (i.e. tar-water) was not the panacea Berkeley claimed
indigenous Americans had noted its medicinal properties. They seem to have passed
this information on to the good Bishop of Rhode Island! I am told on good authority indigenous people regard
pine tar as healthy and medicinal even today.
[3]
Which in any given human or any given culture it must, of course, do. The unity
of mind and reality is a direct intuition for God but an aspiration for us. WE,
must always leave something un-intelligized. But this un-intelligized something
is not the raw husk of some external substance as in Locke but the potency, the
material for further thought! The
science of God is the objective pole of this aspiration and we approach to it
asymptotically in every raid we make on ignorance. That this remains tragically
incomplete in our finite lives is a consideration in the question of the soul’s
immortality but that again is another post. Of course another question lies at
the top of the scale which is whether universal and objective mind is an
adequate account of the first principle or whether there is a ‘God beyond the
god of idealism’ as certain Neo-Platonists and their modern followers might
claim. That seems to me an open question though such a principle is ABOVE
thought not BELOW it and cannot be approached through an abandonment of
reason.
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