This cannot be a good thingā¦
should you choose to break it down even further, then yes. but if you do believe your senses respond, (as most do), then all you have proven is that things do exist while you are there.
existence is always!..something always existsā¦if there is nothing then silence existsā¦if youāre looking to the physical nature of things then everything that Berkely said is more-less true.
Thereās a difference between percieving and knowing, and also knowledge and knowing. If youāre not there to experience something you would agree that it doesnāt mean it didnāt happen. It only means that you donāt know!..you can āthinkā you understand, and āthinkā you have knowledge of what happened, and his basis is that until you experience you cannot know.
As for thinking though, I do agree with berkley because you are what you think! Thought is who you are, if you think of kicking back and drinking a beer, yet youāre at work and you canātā¦youāre your thought because youāve already placed yourself in the situation. Your thoughts are the only thing that says who you areā¦even before your personalityā¦disagree?
The physical is only as far as man can go, because he fails to recognize that heās limitless. Intelligence is wide spread, wisdomās been spread even further, but knowing and experience through practical measures and not knowledge is looked down upon. Which is the greater teacher? Book? word? or experience?..therefore existence in berkleys point of view is only based soley on experienceā¦but if existence is based on knowing, and not experience, then my starting statement will always standā¦
that existence is ALWAYS!!!
no, you havenāt proven anything other than you believe your senses percieve things as existingā¦ you could be nothing more than a brain in a vat being poked and prodded by an evil scientist (reneās evil demon) to believe you exist and are sensing thingsā¦
if you do believe, then you do believeā¦ but that isnāt proof of existenceā¦
-Imp
730
āexistence is always!..something always existsā¦ā
but what about when you stop percieving it?
how do you know it exists then?
-Imp
If you stop percieving then you can only know!.. if you stop trying to make an image of something then you would only know it is what it is. So if you let go of your thoughts you know what and how you think!
lets pretend you are deaf, numb, blind and lost your tongue and nose in a freak accident and for the sake of being argued against, just go with the notion that you cannot percieve beyond your 5 senses. Does nothing happen around you? Your brain works meaning you have thought, knowing that you once had all the senses but no longer. Your memories remind you what color is and what it feels like to touch something but you cannot do it no longer. You have knowledge of something that according to berkely, does not exist. You once had it, now no longer. Something must now be missing. It cannot be your mind because that was not dammaged, only your senses. What must have been removed was something that your senses had once percieved. You know they exist, but now no longer to you. Therefore there is such thing as existance because if all perception is gone but memories of things remain intact, something that was once in existance must be gone.
IT WAS THERE BUT NO LONGER TO THE MAN WITH NO SENSES MEANING IT IS THERE TO THOSE WHO DO PERCIEVE.
āBut how does one know to begin with, except through the means of perception?ā, asks an empiracistā¦
In my humble opinion, it is virtually impossible to know everything about any one given thing. Hence, in order to allways have a accurate as possible of a view on some given thing, one must constantly be learning/percieving/examining/etc. it. If you quit attempting to keep on lpercieving something, you are left with a view (of that specific thing or object) that will soon become āoutdatedā.
Let go of perception, and youāve just let go of learningā¦faster than Donald Trump can make $$$ by saying, āYouāre Fired!ā. 
And, in my humble opinon, mankind has recently created a very special name for to describe this type of personā¦a narrow-minded, naive, & arrogant person. Why? Because the only efficient means by which we make any realistic sense of anything, is through the sensory organs.
ā¦again, this is just my personal opinions.
^^I feel what youāre sayingā¦
ā¦and understand your perspectiveā¦
But is percieving something the only way that you learn? or is that the only way we learn now?..Experience is the greatest teacher ever!
Experience through the senses, not perceptionā¦Because if you percieve something before you can experience it, it has the tendency to be more or less what you expected. If you go into every situation with a fresh being, not knowing inately, than you can only know what you experience.
Babies know what light is from birthā¦how?..they donāt have any words to describe what it isā¦and theyāve never percieved what light is, yet they tend to just know what it is donāt they?? They tend to know what their mothers arms feel likeā¦they donāt have words to describe it and theyāve never percieved it eitherā¦now you can say that itās a genetic thingā¦but if youād never learnt about genetics you would say that they just know right?
What Iām saying is everything āshouldā be outdated to you once youāve experienced it, because you can never experience it like the first time ever again. Iām saying something totally unorthodox, Iām trying to tell you to forget how a flower smells, in that way when you smell it again itāll be like the first time. Memory and perception make things seem to lack luster in realityā¦you might remember how something made you react through memoryā¦and you might imagine how something will affect you through perceptionā¦but experiencing something new everytime is the only way you can knowā¦
What i meant by the memory and perception thing was that if you could feel something but now no longer, like what you were touching was taken away, obviously, something must have been in existance because it is no longer there.
no, this requires a āyouā, āsensesā, and the ability to ābelieveā. Quite a few assumptions for proving things exist.
or platoās cave?
anywho, quite frankly it doesnt matter if berkeley was ārightā or not. his ideas obviously canāt be proven (given their nature), but canāt be disproven in the slightest either. what we perceive is all we can ever know, and its therefore somewhat pointless to go beyond that, as it can never in any possible way effect us in meaningful way. thus, what we perceive may as well be truth, though we should still keep in mind that it is what we perceive, not absolute. absolute is therefore irrelevant. all that matters is our perception and the existance of perceptions (I donāt know about you but I perceive the existance of other perceptions).
basically, just a lengthened version of āyou can never know anything, you can only think you know.ā
that being the case, if Iām making some huge philosophical plunder, let me know.
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when you make one, you will knowā¦
-Imp
Iād like to toss something out here that has to do with what we think of as perceptions. It seems like so far what has been discussed is taking into consideration the five ānaturalā senses that we as functioning human beings are born with. But what about the numerous ways that the human race has been able to extend these senses? Through technology in particular. One no longer has to be in the forrest with the tree, one simply has to have some kind of sensory device which in turn translates changes in the environment (the tree falling) and transmits that data to an observer miles away. Or the sensory device need not even be anywhere near the tree, it might be miles away, but pick up disturbances in the air. And so indirectly, we know that there has been some occurrence far away that has affected something far off. I donāt know that any of this fundamentally changes anything in terms of knowing or not knowing. But what interests me most about this I suppose is that because things work in a certain way, because a tree might fall, which might cause a badger to run away, which might cause a rock to fall, which might cause a landslide, which might crush my house, the cause and effect relationship between everything makes (to me anyway) for an interesting complication of the original idea.
Thoughts?
The extension of the senses isnāt really an extension at all; the senses were kind of already extended.
i.e. (and this ties into the cause and effect idea) the shifting assortment of previously static particles causes the surrounding air particles to vibrate, causing more air particles to vibrate, etc., until the pressure surrounding our ear drum changes, send a nearoelectrical signal to the rest of the brain that eventually (supposedly) gets to perception.
This is no different than detecting the trees fall with a sensory device miles away or seeing its effect in your chaos theory sort of way. All the interactions are just as complex.
The question is ādo things exist outside of their perceptionā; tree-falling example is kind of distorting what it means to perceive; we can never perceive āthingsā, only their effects, and then reconstruct the concept of the āthingsā from that. As the effects are all we perceive, do the āthingsā exist outside of their effects.
On top of that, effects fall into the āthingsā category as well, so we get locked in this conceptual paradox; the nature of perception becomes as distorted as general relativity at the beginning of time. How do ultimately perceive these effects? Is it in fact external effects that weāre perceiving? For cause-and-effect to hold, we have answer either no or God exists. Or that cause-and-effect is not true, at least not in an absolutist sense. Iām currently of the last opinion but welcome arguments for the other two or another option.
Imp:
depends what you mean by āknownāā¦ it doesnāt seem to me āto knowā is any different than āto perceiveā. āto knowā has nothing to do with what is right or true, as we can never know if what we, um, know is THE truth. Of course, as this is an all encompassing to statement (neverā¦what), it implies the truth of itself, thus is self-contradicting. Besides, how can I predict such a thing? Anyway, I get around this by saying there is no truthā¦ not like nothing existsā¦ just that, there is nothing but perspective, never right never wrong, so we are left to give our own impressions of our perspectives, which in turn is riddled with its own contradictions and axioms and what have you (though i think this may be a misunderstaning of this āperspectivesā thing)ā¦ anyway if you know of a way out of this i would love to hear it.
anyway I used that statement simply because anything more fundamental (at least in a logical sense) starts becoming meaningless.
As for the cause thingā¦ you were right about that. I wasnāt really being serious. Just the whole āyou always have axiomsā bitā¦
platoās cave and brain in a vat:
are there any significant differences, besides brain in a vat taking the cave just a little bit further? are the points the same?
Yesā¦ Thanks for the clarification! The whole tree in the woods thing makes me think too tangiblyā¦ so maybe another way to put it would be whether or not something can exist completely independently of anything else. That is, can there be a something without essentially another something to āwitnessā it. Even if those two somethings are, for the sake of argument, two simplest possible somethings, and they are able to interact with each other in some way in a cause effect relationship?
Iām assuming that perception is itself a cause effect relationship between systems, and so is not itself fundamentally different than two particles affecting each other.
the point of questioning the reliablity and veracity of sensory perception is the same
-Imp
^^so because you have no senses to know that itās there means itās not there?..
aight look at thisā¦Your back is turned and somebody is sneaking up to you with a gun pointed to the back of your headā¦now your senses donāt know that the person exists behind you, so does that mean they donāt exist?..Everything exists, the fact that you donāt know through your senses tells you that it isnāt thereā¦but if you start using whatās not there as your information then you would see that nothing is out of existenceā¦Man depends on their senses because thatās all we know, only when you elevate to what you donāt know can you learn, not through percieving elevation but through experienceā¦Then you would see that depending on whatās not there is also under the use of your sensesā¦ not the ones on your external body, but the ones on your internal bodyā¦Mind-Heart-Soulā¦
i think you may have missed my point. I meant that you say have a plastic cube, you can touch it, but cannot see it so if someone takes it away you wont know.
You are blind and deaf in a room with just a plastic cube. You can touch the cube but cannot see it. after some time, someone tells you(sign language) to put it down. they take away the box. the next time you try to reach for it, you cannot touch it. you cant feel it because it was taken away. I use this as an example because something WAS there. You cant take away nothing. Your senses percieve whatever they are supposed to do like smell is to smell stuff. If your senses once sensed something, but no longer. Something was in existance, at least to you, but now no longer. The cube was there but now no longer. The box was therefore in existance because if everything was a lie of your senses, it would still feel the cube. Likewise, you are deaf and blind with nothing in a room. someone brings you a cube. your touch sense now percieves that something is there. There was nothing but now there is something. Things exist because if they didnt, this senario would be true. something was there, taken away. there was something in existance before it was taken away and left existance, at least to you
^^on the contrary, I get everything that youāre sayingā¦and you did realize at the end what I was about to sayā¦lolā¦
Existence to you is what āyourā senses and perspective is based on, does that mean it doesnāt exist to somebody else?..The answer youāre looking for is your existence, not existence on a wholeā¦
Your existence you say is through your immediate senses, so where does your immediate senses tell you that you come from?..your mother right?
So iām going to give you an example I used beforeā¦ Thought is an invisible thing intangible to all your immediate sensesā¦yet when you pick up a pen and write your thoughts on paper it becomes tangibleā¦Same with everything else. All exists, you determine when something exists to youā¦you determine your existenceā¦and as I said at my entrance into this threadā¦
EXISTENCE IS ALWAYS!!..