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July 9, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:09:24
5219 The History of Philosophers Part 21 - Bishop George Berkeley

For those who don't know, I've been working on a truly epic History of Philosophers series - I'm on episode 21, which I've decided to release to everyone.If you would like to access the whole History of Philosophers feed, please subscribe below:https://freedomain.locals.com/support/promo/UPB2022

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Hey there, it's Def.
So if you don't know, for quite a while now I've been doing an entire history of philosophers, and it's a pretty powerful, amazing series in my own humble opinion, and I've gone through all of the greats and some of the less known philosophers.
I've gone through the Buddha, I've gone through some of the theologians, St.
Aquinas, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, of course, and this example is the 21st in the series.
It's George Berkeley, an Irish
Theologian and philosopher.
And if you want to get a hold of the History of Philosophers series, you can subscribe at freedomain.locals.com.
You can use the promo code, all caps UPB2022, and you get a free month.
You can download it all, see if you like it, and cancel at no obligation, no charge if you don't like it.
But I hope you will try it out.
And this is the 21st in my series on the History of Philosophers, some of my greatest work.
And this is George Berkeley.
Here we go.
All right, well obviously after some time away we are back to the history of philosophers.
Remember, history of philosophers, not history of philosophy.
We are up to George Berkeley who was, I guess, one of Ireland's most famous philosophers from 1685 to 1753.
And we'll give a little bit about his life and then we'll get into what he was on about and why.
And one of my central life frustrations, just by the by.
So he was born in 1685 near Kilkenny, Ireland.
He graduated from Ireland's most famous university, Trinity College, Dublin in 1704.
And of course, during his education, the new empiricism and in many cases mysticism of Locke and Descartes, respectively, was imprinted on his mind.
So three years after he graduated in 1704 he became a fellow of the college and then a couple of years after that he was ordained as a minister of the Anglican Church and then in 1734 he was appointed Bishop of Cloyne.
So, Berkeley is considered an empiricist, often thrown in the same epistemological bag as John Locke and David Hume.
And, of course, like a lot of innovative thinkers, his greatest works were written in his twenties.
He was a bit of a Renaissance man, writing on medicine, mathematics, economics, physics, and so on.
And he was a big fan of tar water.
Which I think is, I guess, interesting and shows the state of medicine at the time.
So, before we get into what he had to say, which is really quite remarkable and baffling in many ways,
We have to unbaffle it right that's sort of the purpose of this is to tell you not just what the philosophers thought but what was the environment they were thinking it in and what they were trying to Rescue what their emotional biases were because you know when you when you see someone who says something pretty wild You have to ask what's their emotional driver?
When you see someone, particularly when you see philosophers argue for things that are completely counterintuitive, completely counter to common sense, you have to ask them what's driving them.
Now, of course, we don't know for sure, but there's some pretty good clues and indications.
By the time George Berkeley comes along, right, late 17th to early to mid 18th century, we've had a couple of hundred years of the scientific method.
Now, you really can't overemphasize enough what a wild thing this was for the world.
The scientific method is a tiny fraction of a percent of the entirety of human
Thought, human experience, human history.
It's absolutely tiny and yet its effects on consciousness, its effects on man's perception of his own place in the universe, its effects on man's control over the universe have been so profound.
You and I can't think really, we really can't imagine what it was like before science.
When people believed that they lived on a flat disk, often at the center of the universe, with God's eye
Staring at you the whole time and the entire purpose of your life was to gain entrance to heaven We I mean obviously my fundamentalist Christian friends my Christian friends We can all understand that from an emotional perspective.
We can't understand that from a physical perspective We can't understand things like
Not knowing the laws of gravity.
We can't understand things like not knowing that we live on a sphere.
We can't understand things like thinking that the sun rotates around a fixed earth.
We can't imagine what it's like to genuinely believe that you are the center of the universe and the entire purpose of the universe is the salvation of your soul.
That's gone.
And science took it.
It sounds kind of negative, like science stole something.
But we now know, of course,
That we are an M-class planet on an indifferent star rotating around one of a hundred billion galaxies with no center to the universe, and that we are largely an accident of biochemistry combined with the strictures of Darwinian evolution.
And we can't undo that knowledge.
And again, some people still hold to the old ways of thinking, but for the most part we can't undo that knowledge.
And I mean this really was the argument that the devil offered to Jesus.
You know, give up your soul and you can have the whole world.
You can have the whole world.
You can own and control everything in nature if all you do is give up your soul.
Now the way that this has worked in reality is really kind of bone-chilling.
Science has given us control over nature, but at the cost of our souls.
And by our souls, for those of us who are more secular, by souls I mean our sense of meaning and purpose and virtue.
We traded our morals for electricity.
We traded our spiritual journey for cars and planes.
We traded our meaning for power over nature.
We now understand, and accurately so, the natural forces.
And by understanding them, and by obeying them, we can control nature.
We traded conversations with God for podcasts.
Because it's the technology that allows the podcast to work that has stripped us
Of our God-given ethics.
We traded virtue for power over the material world, which is the ultimate satanic bargain.
Give up your virtue and you will gain riches and power.
And without a doubt, having science and engineering and the free market, which are all material, right?
The free market is about the movement of goods.
And services, but it's material.
And the arguments for the free market are generally arguments from efficiency.
And so by eliminating virtue, we opened up the sort of twin poles of the 20th century and 21st century.
And the twin poles of the 20th century and 21st century are that we have
Not just unprecedented, but to the past, to the people in the past, unimaginable power over nature.
I think of this occasionally.
I don't know if you have this thought.
I think of this occasionally, that you're someplace warm and you order a cold drink.
You go, you're filling up gas.
You go into the convenience store.
It's like a billion degrees outside and you get a cold drink.
And I think, okay, in the past, like before refrigeration,
The Freon mechanism of keeping things frosty.
Before all of that, imagine if you lived in a warm place.
Somebody would have to sprint down a mountain with a block of ice.
and that would like they'd have to climb up there get the block of ice sprint down to where it was warm and hopefully deliver it to you before it got too cold or maybe they'd have to go really deep into a cold lake to get to the thermocline cold down below just to get a cold drink like just to have a drink different from the temperature that you're living in that's wild i mean the amount of luxury that we have
is astounding.
You know, I mean I think of the Indian food sort of famously spicy.
Now why is it famously spicy?
Because a lot of times the spices had to cover up the taste of meat that had gone off.
Having an orange in England, right?
Just having a banana in Scotland, it's incomprehensible in the past.
So we have a power over nature
That was completely unguessable by people in the past.
They had the sense it was coming.
They had a sense it was coming.
That the world was coming into focus and you can't look at both things at the same time.
Until UPB.
Like you can't look at both, you can't look at the world accurately
Without your morals blurring out and becoming ghostly, right?
You look at the world, like you know how it is, right?
If you close one eye and look at your nose, the nose, you know, it's a little blurry, but fairly in focus.
But the distant stuff is all blurry.
You look at the distant stuff and your nose becomes, you open both eyes, you get the two ghost noses on either side of your face.
Don't focus on them too much, you'll go a little nuts.
Oh, they're in the way!
What my daughter refers to as the snozzle chunk is in the way.
So you either look at the world accurately and ghost your morals, or you look at your morals accurately and ghost the world.
This is the, really the horror of modern existence.
That we have gained the world but lost our souls.
We've gained power over nature and lost meaning, morals and purpose.
The reason for this, of course, is quite simple and horrifying, of course, given the body count of this failure.
The reason for this is quite simple.
That we have never taken science, reason, and empiricism to the questions of morality.
And people will say, well, you know, this
To the benefit of man, reciprocal altruism and so on, but none of those are absolutes.
And if you're going to say, to the benefit of X, and there's no collective X, there's no such thing as to the benefit of man.
We are a striving ecosystem of competition and virtue and immorality and predation and respect for and violation of property rights.
So, if you're really good at stealing and you don't have a conscience, then what's good for you is stealing.
So, for the good of man is an abstract
Abstract thing.
I mean, it's like saying, for the good of lions.
Well, for the good of each individual lion is to get a meal.
And for the good of the lion that comes across a female lion with offspring from another father who's dead, what's best for that lion is to kill the offspring and mate with the... right?
So, there is no such thing as for the good of man.
They're for the good of individuals and they can be expressly and explicitly in wild conflict with each other.
But we know that in nature, theft and other immoralities, what we would term immoralities, theft is a perfectly viable strategy for the gaining of resources.
I mean, hyenas, in a sense, will work to come in and steal what the lions have killed, and there are even crustaceans that will steal each other's shells, or shell collections, and birds that lay eggs in other birds' nests, and therefore steal the resources designed for those birds' offspring.
I mean, so, it's all over the place, right?
So the same rigor and strictness that have been applied to science, to mathematics, to engineering, which has given us the modern world, has, prior to UPB, not been applied specifically to the question of morality.
The question is why?
Why?
It drives me crazy!
Why?
When people saw, as they did in Berkeley's day, how incredibly accurate science was at describing the world, it was an amazing phenomenon.
Again, post-science, like post-validation of science, we really can't understand what this sunrise was in human consciousness to burn away the fogs of mysticism and superstition and ignorance and provide a clear and accurate view of
The world.
I mean, I used this in one of my novels, but I do remember it as a little kid.
You know, I'd seen globes with continents, and I remember looking up at the sky, looking at the moon, and looking at the shadows of the lunar, quote, seas, and thinking, well, that's the world.
That's the globe that I've seen.
I was looking at the world.
I'm not sure exactly where I imagined I was, but I was looking at the world.
I mean,
People believed that the sun was a chariot of fire pulled by a god.
And that the weather was punishment for immorality.
Well, of course, we're back to that now, right?
Weather is a punishment for the greed of capitalist CO2 production.
So, that fog of ignorance
Around the nature of the world, of natural forces of the universe.
was crippling to our minds and we lived in a truly deluded fog bank of superstitious imagination.
We lived in a dream.
The universe was a dream in terms of its contradictions and its animism, right?
I mean, there were druids in the British Isles who believed, genuinely believed, that every tree was inhabited by a young attractive female ghost called a dryad.
You cut down a tree, killing the dry out, kicking her out of her home.
Wild stuff.
Wild stuff.
And then when science came along and burned away these fogs of superstition and ignorance and delusion, imagination, projection, when science yelled into humanity's ear and awoke us from the midnight fever dreams of superstition,
It killed our morals.
Because the source of morality was God.
And the source of people's knowledge about the physical world was often the Bible or other religious texts.
And you believed you did not live in a universe of facts and things.
You believed in a universe of purpose, judgment, and morals.
The purpose of the universe was the moral instruction of your soul.
You weren't just a hanger-on to inevitable blind physical forces that accidentally produced you.
No, no, no.
The entire universe was created for you, for your moral instruction, that you were the center of the universe's attention, of God's attention.
And taking that away, which is the advancement of knowledge, of course, right?
And it's a good thing to know where you are and where you live.
But it took away meaning, it took away morals, it took away purpose, it took away specialness.
And we're just a bald ape with pretensions.
And this has been incredibly frustrating for me over the course of my life.
We say science is incredible.
Mathematics is beautiful.
Engineering is amazing.
And it is.
I mean, isn't it nice having fresh water that you can turn on a tap?
Isn't it nice having warm drinks on a cold day and cold drinks on a hot day?
Isn't it nice to have temperature controlled in your environment?
Yeah, isn't it nice to have enough food?
Isn't it nice to have antibiotics?
Yes, all wonderful medicine.
Gosh, until the 19th century, as you know, it was more dangerous to go to a doctor than stay away from a doctor.
So we get the universe and we lose our soul.
And this of course was predicted in the Bible.
The devil was going to come and say,
Give me your morals and I will give you power.
That's exactly what happened.
We lost our religious morality, which is to say we lost our morality, and what did we gain in return?
Power!
Comfort.
Ease.
And that power, this is Roman's argument from my novel The Future, that power, that comfort and ease made us weak, made us fragile, made us tremulous, made us neurotic.
That we gave up our morals for the sake of air conditioning.
And now we can't walk in the heat without melting.
We end up neither with power nor with morals.
The power over nature weakens our spirits, weakens our capacity to have resolution.
And of course losing our morals eliminates our capacity for sacrifice.
Sacrifice for what?
To what?
No purpose for sacrifice.
The only sacrifice is in the propagation of our genes.
And even that has fallen away as birth rates plummet.
So, I mean, this is one of the things, by the by, that drove me mad, and drove me to feverish heights of intellectual ambition, which is to say, we can't return to the fog of ignorance of the medieval mindset.
We can't return to pre-science.
It's not possible.
And why should we?
Why would we?
Science is accurate and true, and we can't sacrifice science to regain morality.
We can't sacrifice reason
To gain ethics based upon command rather than ethics based upon philosophy.
So the philosophy of science has taken our ethics.
Can we not have a philosophy of ethics that doesn't take our science?
You understand?
It's a big project.
It's a big plan.
It's what I've been up to.
To take philosophy and bring to the fog of ethics the same rigor, reason, and empiricism that produced the power of science.
That's UPB.
And UPB was one night.
One glorious, terrible, terrifying, bladder bursting night.
As I said, I wouldn't get up even to pee till I'd solved it.
But in order to expend the effort, you have to understand the problem.
And the problem was I was so sick and tired of either seeing the world clearly and losing virtue or seeing virtue clearly and losing the world.
I don't like those trade-offs and there should be no reason why they should exist.
And UPB is so simple.
Theft cannot be universally preferable behavior because it contradicts itself to propose that.
Theft being universally preferable behavior says that everyone must steal and be stolen from.
Everyone must want to steal and be stolen from at the same time.
But if you want to be stolen from, you're not stolen from.
Honestly, it's that simple.
Now, there's Humean stuff, the is-ought, I get all of that, that's a little more tricky and we'll get to that because Hume is coming up very shortly.
But why can't we have the same power and clarity and reason and empiricism and accuracy in ethics as we have in science?
We've mapped the entire world.
We've mapped the solar system, we've mapped the galaxy, we've mapped the universe.
We figured out which galaxies unimaginably distant have black holes at their centers.
We've discovered in solar systems unimaginably distant planets that are more suited to supporting carbon-based life forms than ours.
We found twin stars, neutron stars, we've seen the star shreds of supernovas scattered across space.
We've traveled outside the solar system by proxy.
We've seen vivid photos under the sulfurous clouds of Venus of its rocky landscape.
We've got maps of Mars Olympus, the largest mountain on Mars.
We see the swirls of Jupiter's red eye.
We've got photos of Pluto.
But we can't figure out why rape, theft, assault and murder are self-contradictory.
We've had an instinct for these ethics for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.
Tens of thousands of years.
They've been codified, enforced.
Countless people have had their hands hacked off or been hung or tortured or put in stocks or imprisoned.
For tens of thousands of years.
We can't figure out why this is the case.
Why?
Why did it take so long?
Why did people not say, wow, science, reason, and evidence.
That's fantastic at understanding the natural world.
Rape, theft, assault, and murder.
Find out why they are self-contradictory.
Find out why they can't be universally preferable behavior.
The science of ethics has always been consequential, biological, utilitarian, greatest good for the greatest number.
Doesn't exist.
Doesn't exist.
So it's, it's been frustrating for me that it had to wait for UPP for people to say, you know, science has been around for 500 years, like half a millennia, made unimaginable strides forward in easing the human condition, right?
Science has been around for 500 years.
I mean, modern science and Baconian science, post 16th century science.
500 years people have seen the steady erosion of morals with the granting of fairly satanic power over the natural world and you know if you look at mushroom clouds Oppenheimer and Nagasaki you can see that not to mention COVID.
So why why why why haven't people just sat down and worked it out?
Well I mean I think one of the main reasons is that you would have been
I mean, I assume mostly killed and your papers burned, right?
Because having foggy morals is very good for those in power.
Having foggy morals means that you can make up the morality of the moment and command people with eternity for that which is only convenient for the pursuit of power in the moment.
You can claim something is eternal and moral and universal and good when it is in fact only a brief weapon you use in your ever-expanding and addictive pursuit of power over others.
So when you take away the demonic power to reshape morality on the whim of the moment, well, that's the major weapon of those in charge, right?
Morality.
So I imagine it took the internet and, you know, maybe a certain amount of moral and martial courage to come up with the argument.
So,
George Berkeley was, like most clergymen, was facing the power of science.
And there was this general concern, right?
The astronomer who presented a model of the solar system to the Pope, the Pope asked him, where's God in this equation?
He said, God is not necessary for this operation.
God is not necessary.
Now, the pushing back of God
from the push marble hand of intervention in the natural universe, the pushing back of God.
The laws mean God
We cannot intervene, right?
If we say that the laws of physics were created by God, then the laws of the universe, the physical laws of the universe, must be the good.
And since God cannot do evil, can God interfere with the natural laws of the universe?
If everything God's created is good, and the natural laws of the universe are good, and interfering with the good is the bad, and God can't be bad, then God can't interfere with the natural laws of the universe.
And this is where deism comes from, the idea that God created it, wound up the clock, set everything in motion, and then doesn't intervene.
God was being pushed back from the natural universe and people felt their morals going with him.
The old joke, I'm sorry to be so reductionist, but the old joke of the kid who loses at baseball or soccer and then just takes his ball and goes home, well now no one can play.
The further you drove away God from the operations of the natural universe,
The further you drove away morality.
Nietzsche saw this coming in his own rather demented way.
That when you exit God you exit virtue.
Now you can't exit virtue because we're programmed for it.
Because virtue is universality and consistency.
We only survive by following those principles like all higher animals.
So you don't remove
Morality, when you remove God, you weaponize it in the hands of the elite.
Because they can then redefine it at will, at whim.
Like, postmodern is not anti-truth.
It's anti-sacrifice, it's anti-consistency, it's anti-restraint on those in power.
Because if there are principles larger than those in power, then you have something to work towards, which is the universalization of those principles.
But if you end up in a post-truth universe, people still have an instinct for morality, but that morality can be reshaped for the whim in the moment, right?
That's why people can say when it comes to abortion, my body, my choice, but then say people should be forced to take a vaccine, right?
Because they can just reshape morality in the whim of the moment.
So George Berkeley was facing this.
Exit guard means
The subjectification of morals, which means the reshaping of morals in the moment by the elite to control the masses, which is why totalitarianism was a 20th century phenomenon.
When Darwin, which we'll get to, right?
When Darwin removed God from the alchemy of life, then that was really the death knell.
And we've been living in this death knell for over 150 years now.
When Darwin finally removed God from the alchemy of life, he said that life and who we are requires not God.
And you have a model of life which formerly always required God.
Look at the complexity of the human eye.
It's like finding a watch in the jungle.
You don't imagine the watch has assembled itself accidentally.
When Darwin explained through evolution how something like the eye or the brain or the liver or the kidneys, how they came to be, then God was removed from the alchemy of life in the same way that God had been removed from the solar system.
God is not necessary to the equation.
And we were turned into mammals with malleable morals.
Mammals with malleable morals.
A very dangerous thing.
Which is why you get totalitarianism.
So, I mean, in a sense you could somewhat afford the state when you had universal morals through religion.
When morals are malleable, shaped for the power of the moment, you can no longer afford these kinds of hierarchies.
So, just destroy everyone.
So,
George Berkeley was seeing morals disappear with God, and the major purpose was to rescue God from science.
The major purpose was to rescue morals from mechanics.
And as Hume pointed out, there is no ought in the is.
There's no ought in the universe.
Now of course, for religious people, for Christians in particular, universal morals are the entire ought of the universe.
It's like, honestly, it's like, well saying there's no ought in a Shakespearean play.
There's nothing that says you ought to say that.
You ought to say this.
You know, Exit Pursued by a Bear, one of the most famous stage directions in theater history.
Right?
There's no reason why.
Hamlet should say, to be or not to be, that is the question, whether it is noble in her mind to suffer the slings and arrows, outrageous fortune, to argue against a sea of troubles, and by opposing end them.
There's no reason why you should say that.
It's like, well, no, there is a reason, which is that that's a script.
The purpose of Shakespeare is to write a play which you have to speak.
Now, you can mess around with the environment, but you can't change the lines.
And if you do, it's no longer Shakespeare.
You can say, based on Shakespeare, whatever, right?
But it's no longer Shakespeare.
So there's an ought in Shakespeare, which is you ought to say these lines.
And if you don't, it's not Shakespeare.
And that was the universe.
You ought to pursue heaven.
You ought to be virtuous.
You ought to avoid temptation and evil.
And that's the purpose of the universe.
The ought and the is were the same.
If you pay someone to build you a house, then he ought to build it.
And the house ought to follow your specifications.
If he builds a swimming pool and tries to charge you, you say, well that's not a house.
You ought to build the house, because the entire purpose of this operation is for you to build the house.
The house is the result of the ought of you commissioning a house.
And that was the universe.
The universe was created as a moral classroom for mankind.
The ought and the is.
The ought precedes the is.
The is only exists because of the ought.
The house only exists because of the commission.
So, when you removed God from the universe, you did remove the ought from the universe, and trying to get that back has been a flailing hundred and, well, five hundred year journey.
So Berkeley saw God leaving, and saw morals leaving, and saw the danger of that.
Would perceive that, theologically, as a satanic action.
The offering of power over the world
In return for the giving up of objective and universal morality, which results from faith in God.
And Berkeley, being well trained in satanic temptations, as a theologian, would say, well, if you give up your morals for the sake of the devilish temptation for power over the universe, you end up with power over the universe, but you will end up with no power over yourself.
Because when you don't have anything to strive for, you don't have anything to sacrifice for, you don't have anything to suffer for, then everybody gets a participation trophy, you're perpetually comfortable and you become weak.
So the more you gain power over the universe, the more you lose power over yourself.
Which is why people tend to be so neurotic and triggered and they don't have any self-restraint, they don't have any discipline, they don't have any maturity, they don't have any
Dignity, really, scream and cry, right?
Because the more you gain power over the universe, the more you lose power over yourself, because you don't build up any resistance, you don't build up any strength.
There's no stoicism left.
All suffering, then, is hell.
All right, so hopefully that's enough for a background.
Let's dive a little bit into George Berkeley.
So, I mean, everybody has this idea or thought as a kid, right?
Am I seeing or am I creating, right?
When I close my eyes, do things disappear?
Right?
When you close the fridge door, does the light stay on?
Does the light stay off?
When I turn around, does the universe get created when I see it?
And this is
A pretty big question, and we all experiment with this as a kid.
I, of course, I remember as a kid turning my light off and shutting my eyes at the same time, hoping to see my room half in light and half in darkness.
Of course, the eye processes 30 frames a second, so to speak, whereas the speed of light is unimaginably faster than that, so that was never going to happen.
But, you know, don't you try this thing?
I remember trying, of course, it was the 70s, right?
So I remember
Trying to, my first album, my first little 45, I don't remember how I got it, was a song called The Things We Do For Love by a band, 10cc, which has some pretty good songs.
I'm Not In Love and so on, right?
So, or Cry, Godfrey and Cream, Cry, I think that was one part of 10cc.
Good song.
But of course it was, telekinesis was the thing, so I remember
Listening to Things We Do For Love and then that click click click at the end as the needle went around the record and got stuck close to the label.
And I remember working really hard to try and lift that needle with my mind and put it back in its holder or put it back to the beginning of the song.
You know, like the click of eight tracks when they just go back to the beginning.
I had the album Out of the Blue on eight track and it would just get kind of stuck.
In a loop.
Eight tracks.
You could just program them to go back to the beginning after they played the album.
So that you could loop in.
So you experiment with these things, right?
I mean, if you have any kind of curiosity, you experiment with these things.
You, when someone's talking to you, you close your eyes to see if they stop talking, right?
Do they vanish?
Do things vanish?
So you get that, right?
Everybody plays around with this kind of stuff.
Who's got half a brain as a kid, right?
We're all empiricists and little explorers and scientists, which is right and good.
So, Berkeley had two big issues, or two things he was concerned about.
The first was,
How do we know for sure that the material world exists?
Right?
This is simulation theory.
And how do we know that the empirical material world exists?
That's number one.
And number two was, as I talked about, science pushing God to the periphery.
Science pushing God further back in time, further away from the solar system, and as the result, to lose the morals, to lose the meaning.
Now, I mean, that's the most charitable interpretation.
Another interpretation is that you have a priestly class that has a lot of obedience because the priestly class tells the commoner, who often can't read, what morals are, and therefore you have power over people as the messenger of God.
You have power over people, and as God recedes, you're losing power over people.
So that, you know, I don't know which one was his motivation, probably will never know, maybe there's something in his writing that I haven't read, but either he was concerned that people were going to lose their morals and you'd end up a tyranny, because morals could be reshaped according to the wind of the moment, or he was concerned that he was losing authority over people who gave him money and obedience because
As God took morality and went home, so to speak, the power went out of the priesthood, right?
So, Berkeley had the goal, and this is not made up, right?
This is explicitly stated in the text.
Berkeley wanted to bring God back to the heart of humanity, back to the center of humanity.
So if we remember that our brain never touches reality directly, right?
When you touch something, you touch a book, you touch yourself even, when you touch something your brain is not touching it.
Your brain is simply receiving electrical images or electrical impulses, sorry, from your senses.
Your brain never sees the tree.
Your brain reassembles
Impulses from your eyes and your optic nerves into the image of a tree Your brain cannot touch reality directly There's no little pseudopod that comes out from your nose from your brain like a tentacle and caresses things Your brain is in a skull prison surrounded by cerebral fluid and He's like a king paralyzed on a bed Who cannot visit the kingdom but can only receive messages with information about the kingdom
You can't see things directly.
You're not listening to me directly.
Your brain is not listening to me.
Your brain is simply processing impulses from your ears and auditory nerves and so on, right?
So we are encased in a skull prison.
We are a king paralyzed on a bed.
He cannot see his kingdom directly.
He cannot visit people.
He cannot talk to them directly.
He can only get send and receive messages.
Right?
The sending of the messages, go touch this thing.
The receiving of the messages, you've touched it, right?
It's like, you know, we all live 50 milliseconds in the past because it takes 50 milliseconds for our brain to process information.
So everything that's occurring to you has a tiny lag, right?
Now, one of the central problems of philosophy is how can we know the truth if we can't directly perceive the world?
That's one of the problems.
The other problem is how do we so accurately understand the world if we can't perceive it directly?
Right?
Even children have little problem differentiating dreams from reality, dreams from the waking world.
So the first problem is, how do we understand things so, like, how can we understand things accurately since all we receive is impulses, electricity, and messages, right?
I mean, when you think of the matrix, right, that sort of green drippy kanji code, right?
Well, I mean,
The world is reassembled from electricity and nerve impulses, right?
We assemble a view of the world from a bunch of biochemical and electrical processes of our senses mapping onto our minds.
You think of the Mafia Don in prison, that he has to have all these coded messages in his letters and so on, right?
He can't control his gang directly.
And this is us, right?
We're getting all these coded messages.
So the first thing is, how can we know the truth, given that we can't, the brain can't directly perceive the truth?
That's number one.
And number two is, well, we do it really accurately, so there's got to be some mechanism by which it works.
So here's, let's take an example, right?
So you look at a piece of fruit on the table.
You look at an orange or a peach.
Let's say you look at a peach on the table, right?
So we look and we say that's a peach.
But it's not, right?
I mean, technically, our brain is simply assembling electrical impulses.
I know it's more than electricity, but just for the sake of brevity.
Your brain is assembling electrical data in the image of a peach.
You see the shape, the color, you can reach out and touch the texture, you can bite into it and get the juice, and now my mouth is watering, and you can process everything to do with the peach.
It can be incredibly vivid and accurate, but your brain never touches the peach.
Your brain has no idea what the peach tastes like directly, because the brain is not touching the peach, it's the tongue.
And the taste buds that assemble the taste of the peach and deliver it to the brain.
So he said, we don't see the world.
We see our recreation of the world.
He called them ideas, not quite the same as platonic ideas, which exist beyond the senses and sometimes in opposition to the senses.
But Berkeley said, we've got these mental entities called ideas.
You think you're looking at things, you're reassembling sense data into an image in your head.
Now, he said, this is basically John Locke's argument, although I don't know whether John Locke would really go for it in that kind of way, but if we don't experience reality directly, then how do we know for sure that it exists?
If everything, like, can you imagine this, right?
So imagine there's this paralyzed king on a bed, getting all of these
messages about his kingdom.
Oh, grain production is up.
Oh, there's a fire in this forest.
Oh, there seems to be troops gathering on the southern border and all this sort of stuff, right?
Now, he can't ever go and check any of this himself because he's trapped in his room.
You can't move him from the bed.
His bones are brittle or some ailment, right?
You can't move him.
Can't move the bed.
And, in fact, the king has spent his entire life in this room.
Now, we can imagine, of course, that there could be some elaborate hoax.
That people just want to drive this king mad.
He's not actually a king, he's just some guy.
And they tell him he's a king, they tell him there's this kingdom, they tell him all of this, all these, you know, the southern mountains are glistening beautifully this time of year, your majesty, and here's a message from somebody who wants to marry you, and here's a message from a foreign king that he wishes to engage in a peace treaty or trade treaty, like, you get all these messages, now he's never
Never gone out of the room.
He doesn't know anything about the kingdom directly.
He only has the messengers, right?
So how does he even know this kingdom exists?
You sort of follow where I'm coming from, right?
It could be an elaborate hoax, right?
Like a Truman Show, a simulation, a matrix kind of thing, right?
So, I mean, in generally, in philosophy, this is called the Veil of Perception Problem, right?
So...
Berkeley said something pretty wild, and people wrestle with this, right?
Number one, how is it possible for us to know the peach directly?
It's not.
Number two, how is it possible that our knowledge of the peach is so accurate?
Right now, for me, the way that I approach this very briefly is that
Our senses are the highest possible form of our knowledge.
We cannot put the peach in our brain without killing our brain.
We cannot take our brain out and wrap it around the peach without killing ourselves.
There is no higher standard of truth.
Like, once you eliminate
immaterial consciousness from your equation, then there's no higher standard of truth than the senses and reason.
Empiricism, the epistemology of the accuracy of the senses combined with rationality, that's the highest possible standard of truth.
Now, if you say, oh no, no, no, there's a higher standard of truth
then that which there isn't there's no higher standard of truth than reason and evidence reason and evidence reason being things have to be rational and consistent because that's the way the universe is and evidence being the evidence of the senses if something is rational and validated by the evidence of the senses
That's truth.
There's no higher standard of truth.
And if there is no higher standard of truth, then you don't ever see that as wanting.
You don't ever see that as being short.
Now, if you have supernatural knowledge, if you have immaterial consciousness, if you have Plato's forms, if you have a God who knows everything, every atom, right?
Then you say, well, reason and evidence fall way short of omniscience.
Yeah, yeah, I get that.
For sure.
But that's like saying that a guy who's seven feet tall is really short because the ideal human being is infinitely tall.
Well, if the ideal human is infinitely tall, everyone's short.
I mean, everyone's infinitely short.
So if you have a standard called omniscience, then mere somewhat fallible and faltering human reason and empiricism
Falls short.
Of course, right?
If you have a standard of truth that says you have to know every atom of the peach in order to know the peach, and your brain has to merge with the peach to know the peach, it has to crawl out of you.
Okay, if you have a standard of...
Knowledge called insanity, or perfection, or idealism, or platonic forms, or new amenal realms, or God's knowledge.
If you have a standard of knowledge infinitely higher than reason and evidence, then reason and evidence can always be criticized.
But if the very highest standard of knowledge is reason and evidence, well...
So, I mean, it's like this.
In a court, right, if you have ten witnesses, you have video evidence, and you have a confession, then that person is guilty, right?
A guy standing over a body, got a smoking gun, ten people saw him shoot him, that's video evidence, and he's confessed.
He's guilty.
He shot the guy, right?
Like, there's no question of that.
It's not even proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
That's a hundred percent proof, right?
However, if you say,
That you can't convict anyone unless you know his entire life story down to the last detail, the victim's entire life story, the life story of every single one of the witnesses, and you know the movement of every atom and you know the origin of the gun and you know which
Mine the metal in the bullet came from and how it was mined and its exact distance and its travel like if you said you had to know absolutely everything you had to be omniscient about the crime and if and that that's that's that's how you will know if the person's guilty.
then everything else will be almost infinitely short of that and you will never be able to convict anyone because you have a standard of guilt that is attainable only by a god and is never attainable by a human being and therefore you'll always have reasonable doubt if you don't need the if you don't know the exact location in the earth where the metal came from that formed the bullet you don't know the exact traveling of that metal
and you don't know the exact proportion of various metals in the bullet and where they all came from you can't convict someone well then you can't convict anyone ever because you'll never know all these things so when you have a highest standard of truth called reason and evidence asking for something more than that is
An absolutely insane standard designed to inflict doubt where there's no need for doubt.
It's a form of control.
It's a form of making people uncertain.
So that's my answer, right?
If you say, the most beautiful woman is a 10, right?
Oh, she's a 10, right?
Most beautiful woman, right?
And then you say, well, no, actually, the standard is 10 billion.
Well, then the woman goes from a beautiful woman down to a hideous woman, right?
Because 10 out of 10 billion is infinitesimally small.
So if 10 is the top standard, then 10 is the most beautiful.
But then if you say, well, no, it's actually 10 billion.
Then 10 is no longer a good number, right?
You've just redefined everything.
And so if you say truth is reason plus evidence, yep, done and dusted, that's the highest standard, no higher standard.
But then you say, well no, it's omniscience.
It's like, okay, well you've just moved the goalposts and you've just rendered human perception irrelevant in the pursuit of truth.
And what you've done is you've made truth subjective, because we're never going to get all of that stuff, right?
So, so he says, Berkeley says, the veil of perception problem, right?
So the way I say is that the veil of perception problem is when there's something between you and what you perceive, right?
And there's some higher standard that could be the case, right?
But I say there is no veil of perception problem, because reason and evidence is the highest possible standard of truth.
Right?
I mean, if you're marrying a woman, you will remove her veil to kiss her, but you won't remove her skin to kiss her.
God help you, right?
So the skin is the woman, right?
So he says, Berkeley says, okay, you're looking at this peach.
The peach isn't causing your perception of the peach, right?
That's not, I mean, the big problem of where light comes from.
And people thought that the eye shot out beams and then they bounce back like sonar.
They didn't really understand that light comes from the sun and bounces off things, or the moon, I guess, reflected from the sun.
It bounces off things and that's what goes into our eyes.
He said the tomato is not the cause of your ideas.
The tomato and your ideas are the same thing.
Right?
Your perception is the tomato.
There's no tomato that causes your perception.
Your perception is the tomato.
And this has, of course, some pretty strange results, as you can imagine.
So if your perception of the tomato is the tomato, then when you are no longer perceiving the tomato, the tomato does not exist.
Right?
When you are no longer perceiving the tomato, even when you blink, the tomato does not exist.
Your perception of the tomato and the tomato are the same thing.
There is no tomato outside of your perception.
So, according to Berkeley, existence is perception.
For the material world to exist, it has to be perceived.
So the materialist philosophy says there's stuff out there.
It's physical.
It's material.
It exists independent of your consciousness.
And when you die, the world doesn't die.
When you blink, the world doesn't cease to exist.
And Berkeley says, nah, the only genuine substances are ideas, minds, perceptions.
I mean it's kind of confusing because he says, oh sure, physical objects exist, but they're not anything extra over and above the ideas or the perceptions in your mind.
Right?
There's no essence in the material, there's only essence or existence in the mental.
So then of course the problem is, you say to someone,
Okay, close your eyes.
I'll stop talking.
Do I cease to exist?
Now, he would say, of course, well, the other person closing their eyes is, you are now perceiving the other person closing their eyes, and therefore they continue to exist.
They've closed their eyes, but they know that you're, they've got a mental image of you, and therefore you kind of foggily exist as a mental image.
So, I mean, you end up with these countless crazy problems, right?
But remember his goal is to bring God back to center stage, to bring God back to the center of existence.
So then it's pretty easy to prove that material objects continue to exist when you don't perceive them.
Of course you can make this thing up that says everything ceases to exist when you stop hearing it or seeing it or perceiving it, but it's pretty hard to sustain, right?
I mean, again, you can will everything into a matrix, but as I've sort of talked about in the past, and you can get this at essentialphilosophy.com
The problem of we are in a simulation is the problem of infinite regression.
It's turtles all the way down.
Because if we are in a simulation created by an external god or an external demon or external entity, then that external entity might also be in a simulation.
Their simulation is that they create a simulation from us and then they also, you can just keep layering up these simulations to infinity, which requires infinite
We're good to go!
I don't know, machines that want to use my human electricity as batteries or whatever, like the Matrix style.
If I'm in a matrix, then the people who are controlling me are themselves not in a matrix.
So then you admit that there's an existence that is not simulated.
And if you, if you have no proof of the simulation and you already accept that there's an existence that is not simulated, then Occam's Razor says our existence is not simulated, right?
What does Berkeley want to do with this idea?
I mean, it's nuts, right?
It's kind of crazy, the idea that you close the fridge and the inside of the fridge ceases to exist, and then you open the fridge and it, poof, materializes again, right?
I mean, that's nuts, right?
I mean, it's crazy.
And you can't live that way, right?
You couldn't live that way.
Because what you would do is you would say, well, getting food is a lot of work, so I'll just summon food with my mind.
I'll just call food into existence with my mind.
But you can't do that, right?
So you have to act like material objects exist independent of your consciousness and have properties that are not subjective.
Right?
Otherwise you'd pick up, I don't know, you'd pick up cow poop and you'd eat it saying, I'm going to believe this is cheesecake, right?
But then you'd get sick and die, right?
So you have to act as if material world is objective and has universal permanent properties and so on, right?
Otherwise you can't live.
So he says okay so it's true that everything exists as an idea in the mind and to exist is to be perceived.
Perception is existence.
And then he says but there is a constancy to things in the universe.
We can't deny that and to deny that would be to die.
So how can we explain this?
Well the way that we explain this of course
Things only exist when they're observed.
Things continue to exist when we are not observing them, when you and I are not observing them.
So how do they continue to exist?
Ah, that's because God observes everything all the time.
God observes everything all the time.
To exist is to be perceived.
Things exist when human beings don't perceive them, therefore they must be perceived by something else.
That something else is God.
So there's a limerick about this, right, that was written by Monsignor Ronald Knox, and he said, there was a young man who said, God must think it exceedingly odd if he finds that this tree continues to be when there's no one about in the quad.
Reply.
Dear sir, your astonishment's odd.
I am always about in the quad.
And that's why the tree will continue to be, since observed by, yours faithfully, God.
So, anyway, that's the idea.
Now, the arguments for and against this, I hate to say they're kind of immaterial, but to me they're kind of immaterial.
Now, what Berkeley says though, he says, okay, come on,
Think of an object that exists with nobody perceiving it.
Right?
So imagine a bush that continues to exist even though nobody is observing it.
And no, he says because you call to image the bush in your mind and therefore the bush exists.
So, I mean, it's a logical trick, right?
Elephants only exist because people perceive of them, and therefore, the moment you're thinking of an elephant, the elephant exists.
So he's asking for a contradiction based upon his own premises, which is not fair, right?
Not a right thing to do.
I mean, it's begging the question, right?
Things only exist because we perceive them.
And you can't conceive of something without perceiving it, at least as a definition in your mind, and therefore you've created it.
Right, so things only exist because we think of them, and you can't think of them without them existing, therefore my argument is right.
Eh, not great.
Because you can think of definitions of things without thinking of things in particular.
Right?
Is he saying that... I mean, when I think of a forest, I'm thinking of a definition.
I might picture something in my mind.
But that doesn't mean every type.
And when you picture a forest, I picture not evergreens, not palm trees.
I picture deciduous trees, because those are the forests that I grew up in.
Right?
So, yeah, it's not, you know, we have concepts without categorical content, like without specific content.
That's the whole point of a concept, is that it is not there.
So, the other thing, of course, is that people have hallucinations.
People have hallucinations.
How do you know the hallucinations are false?
If you have a fever dream and you believe that there is a man floating in your room because you're having a fever dream, you're having a hallucination, maybe you're on drugs, well then by this definition there would be a man floating in your room.
And therefore there's no such thing as hallucinations, there's really no such thing as dreaming, which of course there is and we certainly know that there are hallucinations.
So that's a problem as well, that he can't process the problem of hallucinations, of visions, of dreams, and so on, right?
So that's a fairly big issue if you can't explain hallucinations or madness, which is certainly a phenomenon that exists.
So he says, well, the things in the natural universe are more vivid than the things we conjure up with our imaginations.
And here's the thing too, like, I mean, I write fiction, I write poetry.
Does Arlo exist?
Does Alter exist?
Does Roman exist?
Do Tom and Reginald exist?
They're incredibly vivid in my mind.
I know their look and feel down to the last detail.
I've skated into their innermost thoughts.
Things that they've never told anyone.
Does Wendy exist?
The characters that I've created.
Do they exist?
Does Nakhayev, the Russian revolutionary, does he exist from revolutions?
They're incredibly vivid.
I mean, they're more vivid to me.
I have stronger memories of those characters than I do some of my friends of many years in the past.
And I certainly have a more detailed knowledge of those characters than I have of any of my friends.
Do they exist?
Because when you're an author, the characters tell you everything.
They can't hide from you.
You're the author.
You can go to their innermost thoughts, their innermost drives, their innermost desires, their innermost fears, things they've never told anyone.
You can perfectly scan them as the author.
You're omniscient with regards to the characters as an author.
So I know those characters better than I know
Many people in my life.
They're more vivid to me in many ways, certainly than people I haven't seen for a while.
So, do they exist?
There's certainly ideas and very vivid and powerful ideas in my mind.
Do they exist?
And so that's a problem.
Do the characters, did they cease to exist when nobody was reading my books?
Like think of Just Poor Mary and Farmer Jigger and Lawrence and Kay and Lady Barbara and someone.
So I wrote that novel 30 years ago and it sat in a drawer for many years.
Now people are reading and listening to the novel.
Do those characters cease to exist?
And now that somebody's always reading one of these novels, do those characters now exist?
Because they're in people's minds?
My vision of Lady Barbara is probably slightly different from yours.
Which one exists, right?
So he also says that
The real and the merely illusory differ because real things, they have a kind of consistency, regularity to them and so on.
They're governed by objective physical laws and so on, whereas illusions, dreams, hallucinations, they tend to be kind of random and come and go and so on.
That's not much of an answer either.
I mean, we've all had those boring dreams, which pretty much are the same as waking life, where things follow universal laws.
How do we know those aren't true?
So, again, I understand what he's doing is he's got to bring morals back.
And how do you bring morals back when science is driving God to the periphery of the universe, deeper into the past and further away from mankind?
Since Christianity is based upon miracles and science says that miracles are impossible, what happens to all of the moral teachings of Jesus if he was just a man and not the Son of God?
We know he was the Son of God because he came back from the dead, walked on water, wine, loaves of fishes, loaves and fishes and so on, right?
He performed miracles.
Science says those miracles are impossible, in which case Jesus would then have to be
A powerful teacher of morals, but not the Son of God.
But if he's a powerful teacher of morals, but morals only exist because God exists, and if Jesus was merely a man, then we listen to his teachings as if he's a persuasive dude, but not because he has the ultimate authority of being the Son of God.
He cannot command us.
Because God can command us.
The Son of God can command us, but a teacher cannot.
A teacher can only exhort.
He becomes like Socrates.
He cannot command us.
Because if every time you need morals, you run back to God, you don't get to UPB.
And that's the problem.
God has lost credibility for many people as a source of morals.
Amoral advantage seeking is the best that Darwinian quote morality can provide.
And that gives the most power to the worst among us.
To have a conscience was a hallmark of moral authority in the past.
Now morality has become amoral, power-seeking, which means that those with the least conscience gain the most power, flushing society down the gulag sewers on a regular basis, and coming.
So, he wanted to bring God back, to bring morals back, and to resist the offer of the devil, to gain power over the universe by giving up God-given morality.
And then we gain power of the universe, we lose power over ourselves.
And by gaining power over the universe and losing power of ourselves and losing morality, what happens is we end up under the power of dictators.
Right?
This is what God does.
This is what the devil does in particular.
The wages of sin is death.
We can give up our morality, which means turning morality over as a weapon and a tool for the rulers.
We gain power over the material world.
We lose power over ourselves because we become soft.
And then we lose our freedoms to the manipulators of morality known as modern rulers.
And we end up neither with virtue nor with freedom.
The devil gives you power and takes your soul.
Now in his own way in my view Bishop Berkeley was fighting that enormously but he lost and because UPB is ignored we continue to lose.
All right, next up, we've got, oh, he's the big dude.
He's the guy, in a sense, my nemesis, my challenger.
David Hume, 1711 to 1776.
We are going to go deep into the Humean dichotomy of ought and is.
But I hope that this is helpful to you, of course, if you find this series to be of value over and above your donations, which I really appreciate.
Freedomain.com forward slash donate.
Thanks so much.
Get ready for the next one.
Bye!
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