Bo,
Actually, I never thought Berkely was quite serious in his proposals, -I was
under the impression he just wanted to put the cat among the pigeons. When I
argue that only subjectivity is 'provable' (or more accurately, tends to
withstand DIS-proof -as Popper), I'm not arguing that therefore only
subjectivity is 'true', merely that 'knowing' by logical means is grossly
limited..logically. So when I argue for subjectivity, I'm actually arguing
for a subjectivity which is not limited to my present 'viewpoint' (or
'percipient-perspective' as I call it), but for a sort of open-ended
subjectivity which encompasses all the perspectives which may be potentially
available to me.In other words, I've sort of subsumed 'objectivity' into
this notional 'subjectivity', which is somehow akin to Hegel's notion of the
universe striving to understand itself.
So, an argument for mysticism, then?
And this is related to the notion that (and I'm not sure who first brought
this up):-
'experience presupposes an experiencer (mind).'.......why? - I mean, why
divide the experience and the experiencer? - it might be a useful
distinction at times, but as several people have pointed out, reification of
the concept is a fallacy, -it's a contingent, rather than absolute, fact.
There's an interesting essay on this by the psychologist RL Gregory : "The
Evolution of Eyes and Brains: A Hen-and-Egg Problem", in which Gregory
points out that, from what we know about evolution, we could not have have
evolved eyes before we had the neural circuitry to process their output, nor
could we have evolved such circuitry in advance of the existence of eyes. So
they must have evolved in tandem, as it were. In the same way, we don't
actually have to assume that the existence of a 'reality' must precede the
experiencing of it, and from there we can postulate that the growth of
experience may be synonymous with the growth of reality...so it does sound a
bit like Berkeley, after all!
Peter Lennox
Hardwick House
tel: (0114) 2661509
e-mail: peter@lennox01.freeserve.co.uk
or:- ppl100@york.ac.uk
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