idealist/subjectivist needing help here

Here is a conundrum I’m trying to work out. It appears within idealist/subjectivist paradigms, and wouldn’t be a conundrum at all within to physicalist/objectivist paradigms. So though one quick and dirty solution to the problem would be to reject idealism/subjectivism, I would like, being an idealist/subjectivist myself, to resolve it while keeping my philosophy. Needless to say, if you are a physicalists/objectivist, this is not a thread for you (unless you actually do have the solution I’m looking for, or just want to comment diplomatically).

To begin, let me just say that technically, this problem is not fatal to my idealism/subjectivism. It could go on functionally, but only by embracing some rather unwelcome absurdities - namely, that objects and other things typically presumed to persist in existence with some measure of permanence don’t exist, that as soon as we stop experiencing things, they cease to exist.

Berkeley resolved this problem by positing the existence of God. Though we may avert our eyes from the objects that surround us, and thereby withdraw the support they would otherwise depend on for their existence, God is always watching. He watches everything always. So every object in existence always exists in virtue of God’s omniscient ever-watchful eye.

I don’t depend on a god for my idealism/subjectivism, so I’m left wanting for an alternative account. I have hitherto found it trivially simple to appeal to cognition and belief in order to explain how, when we avert our eyes from some object, it persist in existence. That is to say, even when we aren’t looking, we still believe, and that belief has just as much power to support the existence of the believed as does our senses.

But now the conundrum hits me: it is hardly any solution at all to say that cognition fills in when our senses abstain since cognitions are just as fleeting. What happens, in other words, when we aren’t think of the objects in question? The use of the word ‘belief’ is a sleight of hand here since grammatically it gives off the impression of something permanent. We don’t cease to believe in X when we aren’t consciously thinking of X. Thus, we tend to think of belief as this permament mental entity or state that remains even when our thoughts on it are absent. But what troubles me now is that this only makes belief an abstraction, not some mental entity in addition to, or another form of, conscious thoughts. To say that I believe X even in those moments when I’m not thinking of X is not to refer to any actually existing mental state or entity, but rather to refer to a tendency or regularity - namely, the tendency/regularity of bringing a particular thought to consciousness and deeming it to be true. So if belief is not much more than an abstraction, it becomes difficult to argue that it actually exists as a mental state/entity, and is therefore equally difficult to appeal to when accounting for the permanence of the objects to which they refer.

Now, as I said, there is one very trivial solution to this problem, but it is as absurd as it is trivial, and therefore a last resort. That solution is to simply concede that no object is permanent, that they dissappear as soon as our experiences of them (whether that’s sensation or cognition) do. I don’t like this though. My preference has always been to preserve and defend as much common sense as I can in my metaphysics. It would be ideal if I could posit a world based on the principles of idealism/subjectivism but as approximate as possible to the common manner in which we sense, think, and experience our world.

The most promising approach I see is to focus more on the content of our beliefs in permanence as opposed to the permanence of the beliefs themselves. For example, though my belief in the existence of my car comes and goes as I bring it into and dismiss it from my consciousness, what that belief says is that my car is permanent. So it isn’t so much the presence of my beliefs (qua conscious thoughts) that determine the existence of my car, but what those beliefs posit. The problem with this approach, however, is that my idealism/subjective (like any idealism/subjectivism worth its salt IMHO) does not discriminate between a mental state or entity and the intention of that state or entity - there is no duality in idealism/subjectivism. So what one says of the belief must also be said of its intention or content. If my thoughts about my car’s existence come and go, so must the intention or content of those thoughts (i.e. what they say). I have a feeling, however, that this is not quite the right analysis, that somehow we do not have to say that just because the thought comes and goes, so does the intention/content, that somehow the intention/content has different logical consequences than the thought itself, like the difference between content and form, and somehow this can be worked out without compromising the monism that is idealism/subjectivism.

I can’t quite put my finger on it though. Somebody help me out here.

Descartes had a similar problem, and he solved it the same way that Berkeley did. The fact is that there is a limited set of solutions to your problem.

Even when you are in the act of gazing at your car, memory is crucial to your belief in it. It’s not just when you are thinking back upon it. Without memory, the sight of your car would would be of a brand new experience at every moment. Like super-alzheimer’s. If you can rely on memory for “present” experiences, why not for past ones?

The bit-torrent of data we receive in everyday life is neither experienced nor understood without buffering, and part of that buffering is the capacity to that the pattern of light we see when we look at out car is very similar to the pattern of light we saw a barely-perceptible moment ago.

A god would allow us to trust our senses, yes. So would reason, according to rationalists. But the glue that actually does bind experiences together for us is memory (and pattern recognition - but that involves remembering the patterns) - even in the “present tense”.

Memory is not an abstraction - it’s a process. Stimulus/perception is cause and effect. A + B = C. I think you need a mental calculus. You need a process.

Or not.

The sleight of hand is in thinking that belief is a mental process. Thinking and perceiving and feeling, maybe, but belief isn’t. Any more than knowing. They’re relations to (possible) facts.

There’s no continual mental operation churning away reminding me that I believe the floor will support me and that all dogs are mammals and that Jimmy Carter was president of the US and that Sherlock Holmes’ brother was called Mycroft. I have a mental model of the world potentially available to me to check things, and if I want to I can formulate it in terms of beliefs. Given that people can lose almost all of their brain activity and regain it without completely losing their mental models, I’d guess that it’s in some way physically structured in the neurons of the brain. I don’t pretend to know, and that doesn’t help an idealist anyway

Thanks both for your suggestions, but they both boil down to the same thing: storage. Both memory and our beliefs/mental models are, as OH rightly pointed out, somehow stored in the brain. But that I have to refer to the brain for this account necessarily requires that I step outside my idealism/subjectivism and into physicalism to a degree. This is not to say my idealism/subjectivism has no place for the brain, or physicality, but that the place it takes makes it difficult to account for the conundrum I’m puzzled over.

Here’s the problem: the only way memory (or any mental state/entity that’s ‘stored’) can account for the permanence of things is if they too were permanent as subjective experiences being consciously felt. My idealism/subjectivism accounts for the reality of anything by the fact that they are experienced. Even if memory is somehow stored, that storage implies that it go into a ‘latent’ state, a state in which it is not currently being experienced. Thus, the support it would otherwise lend things in the world for their permanence would be withdrawn.

Maybe I’m on the wrong track, gib, but could you be drawing a too-robust and unnecessarily arbitrary line between that of which we are conscious and that which we are not? Every datum has to be consciously felt? This is not true even of our direct observations - we can, for instance, recall data that we were never fully aware of under hypnosis or suggestion. Which is to say that even our direct experience has latent elements.

Interesting question. Sensory experiences recur and last varying periods of time. Storageis a metaphor based on embodied experience of putting things in containers. Permanance as a concept is based on duration, another sense content. If you keep to experience and avoid making a causal inference, is there really a problem?

What problem? You haven’t stated a problem.

Resolve what? Why don’t you read what you write.

Which philosophy is that? You haven’t said what it is nor stated what the problem is.

Solution to what? Why don’t you read a good old British novel, Dickens perhaps. It will help organise your language.

WHICH PROBLEM!

What “it” are you referring to? Is this a long-winded joke or a naturally occuring farce?

Is this the problem you’ve forgotten to mention? How would I know? should I make a guess?

w h a t p r o b l e m ?

Goodbye.
But might I suggest George Borrow, “The Romany Rye”, to you. The standard of english is excellent and after reading it you will find your texts less likely to crumble from the off.

You do make a good point here. It so happens that in my theory, a conscious subjective experience corresponds with any physical event. Even ‘storage’ (however you want to define that physically) is an event when you think of it in terms of the activity of the subatomic particles keeping the structure together. The only caveat, at least with respect to human memory, would be that the experience is not ‘ours’ per se (and this way of speaking falls out of my theory’s lingo - whereas what you say may make more sense to you: that it is ours but unconscious). I will think on this further. Thanks for the suggestion.

Well, the problem is that permanence seems to presupposed a continued existence even when sensation has ceased. The only way it doesn’t is if for every object whose permanence is in question, there is some ongoing sensory experience of it that lasts the full lifetime of the object (this is why Berkeley needed God’s eternal ‘seeing’ of everything).

Why don’t you read what I wrote. Oh wait…

…you didn’t.

Subjectivism is not so black and white. Enough said?

It’s not a problem if you stick to sense contents which come and go or last for varying durations. That’s all there is. Hypotheses about cause and/or substance or God’s seeing are sense contents themselves.

Do you check anything you write? Leaving aside your relentlessly awkward grammar, couldn’t you see that you weren’t adequately making the point you wanted to make? Now then, what are you going to do about it?

JJ - gib is a longtime poster here. It’s possible that those who are not familiar with his thinking may not quite get his point, but many of us did, I am sure. I found his post completely intelligible.

I respectfully request that you lighten the fuck up.

JohnJones,

Anybody who is familiar with George Berkeley would know exactly the problem that gib is referring to. Berkeley said that, “To be is to be percieved”. And the problem, I gather from just a brief scan, is whether the objects of our experience cease to exist when we cease to percieve them.

John, you cut quite a comical figure, in my mind. You are startlingly condescending and disdainful, like with a wag of your wrist and a wrinkled nose----but you are being that way about a problem that nobody who has ever studied the history of philosophy could fail not to recognize.

It’s not difficult to me:
"But now the conundrum hits me: it is hardly any solution at all to say that cognition fills in when our senses abstain since cognitions are just as fleeting. What happens, in other words, when we aren’t think of the objects in question? "

The first philosophy forum rule:

1. Show courtesy and respect for all who post here.

That includes good-faith reading of an OP.

Thanks all for coming to my defense. I anticipated that someone like JohnJones might come along and point out the round-about way I explained the problem, but I also expected he would at least read through the whole post before complaining that it makes no sense. Then he would see that it does get explained even if in a meandering way.

I’m not sure I follow. You seem to be saying that all the relevant concepts can be reduced to sense data - even ‘permanence’ and ‘God’. I won’t argue with you on this point as I think there is some reasoning behind it, but I would point out that reducing everything to sensation is not the same as accounting for the permanence of things; rather it is only a way accounting for the meaning of ‘permanence’. What does ‘permanent’ mean? It means those sensory experiences one has of things persisting for some duration. But by that very token, it means that the great majority of things which the physicalist/objectivist takes to be permanent (for example, the Moon) aren’t really permanent, for they cease to be sensed, and even thought about, quite frequently and for long periods of time.

The senses don’t say anything about what the object is. What is it that tells? Whatever it is and how much of it there is will determine the limitation of the perpetuation, continuity, and permanence.

Since it is by means of an experiencing structure that sensory signals are translated, giving a sense of continuity with its continual use, it might do well to look into how this structure is formed. How much of ‘self’ is involved there? If the structure can be deemed illusory in some manner, then the make up of ‘you’ within it would be as well; if the continuity would be snapped, the illusion of the experiencing structure, the ‘you’, would collapse, and everything would fall into something else. Who knows what that would be?

But thought knows every trick in the book to maintain itself and would be the judge in determining things. The experiencing structure will be denying or accepting whether or not it, itself, is an illusion and so always find a way to survive.

I think we just tend to presume too much.
I don’t think we can know about permanence with absolute certainty.
We can make theory and use it. But if we consider it as something absolutely solid reliable and permanent, we become just like religious fanatics.

THE PROBLEM is in wanting something (especially our own existence, knowledge, capacity/ability, etc) to be absolute, permanent, and so on, IMO.

What’s wrong with being honest and admitting that we don’t really know?

I don’t know if something exists or not when I’m sound asleep and I don’t care. either.

If someone is too sure about things we don’t really know, I just think the person is a religious believer of some sort, and I usually don’t try to offend the core belief (other than in a place/occasion like ILP) because these fanatic believers can become violent.

I don’t think anything is permanent. Even materials are changing and they have limited life span. (Many atoms can be stable, but I guess they too have life span just like some particles)

As an information processing system, I’m not simply geared for many things.
Even simple basic self-awareness requires memory and pattern recognition (as Faust has mentioned about a bit different matter).
Now, any “delay” in signal processing can act as an memory in an information processing system. And a simple comparator for the delayed and current signal can make up the pattern recognition system.
But can these be permanent/absolute? I don’t think so.

Sure we do and I wonder why that is. Most likely because we cannot experience anything from a standpoint where thought is not there all the time telling us how to approach the understanding of the nature of our existence.

Ironically, the continuance of the identity of your existence is maintained through one huge presumption: the presumption that there is a ’you’ there as an entity that is going around thinking and discovering everything on its own. It is that presumption that has to be fully examined they say, but it is created by thought and all thought can do is create the predicament. It cannot be used to resolve it.

Thanks everyone for coming to my defense. My OP was somewhat meandering in its explication, and I anticipated someone like JohnJones coming along to point it out, but I expected at least that he would read through the whole post before commenting that it made no sense. I think if one does that, one finally gets the point I’m driving at.

Sensory perception is information. In that sense, it ‘tells’. What does it tell? It tells of exactly that which is sensed in the way it is sensed. If I see a dog, my sense of sight is telling me “There is a dog there”.

I’m not sure how the rest of your post relates to the topic at hand.

You hit on a very interesting point, Nah. How do we know that things persist in their permanence when we are, for instance, asleep?

This reminds me that it really ought to be science and its facts that I worry about accommodating in my theory, not so much physicalism/objectivism. I’ve always thought that my idealism/subjectivism has a place for everything - every interpretation of what we sense and every theory of reality, including physicalism/objectivism - even if those interpretations/theories conflict with that which just is my idealism/subjectivism (I know that might seem paradoxical, but I’ll just leave it at that unless you really want me to explain it better). The difference between accomodating my theory to science rather than physicalism/objectivism is a significant one for me. Whereas most physicalists/objectivists probably would support some conviction in the permanence (not necessarily eternal permanence, mind you) of objects, science does not. Science - good science - concerns itself only with what is sensed and what is empirically verified. The permanence of objects, especially when we aren’t looking (as when we’re asleep), is more a matter of metaphysics than science. It’s all too reminiscent of Hume and his relegating ‘cause’ out of science and into metaphysics. I’ve found, over the years in thinking on these matters, that there is a whole slew of concepts that, if the physicalist/objectivist isn’t careful, are assumed to belong to science. When they are in fact found not to, and found to belong to metaphysics instead, I end up seeing it under a different light. Rather than being something my theory is obliged to accomodate, it becomes something my theory can ‘relegate’ (so to speak) to its proper place - that is, as one of several, possibly conflicting, interpretations or theories of reality and what we sense, which my theory need not accomodate necessarily.

All that being said, I don’t know if I’m 100% satisfied with this, but it is something to think about, and that’s all I ask. Thanks.

Are you sure biological consciousness is necessary? If you’re going to doubt continuity, isn’t it also worth postulating that your bed and wallpaper experiences things? Not one observer keeping everything going, but everything observing itself?

I think I’m going to call this philosophical manoeuvre “the Inverse Berkeley”.