Knowledge, belief & agnosticism (Agnosticism)

by whitecraw, Sunday, March 23, 2008, 21:10 (6087 days ago) @ clayto

'I understand your use of the term 'extreme' view but in what sense could the universe be said to exist if there was no consciousness present to perceive it, directly or indirectly ----- nothing visible, touchable or able to be felt, nothing audible, nothing to be smelt ---- nothing to be apprehended in any way because there was nothing capable of any form of apprehension?' - Couple of points: - First: Berkeley's idealism is an epistemological theory, not a theory of existence; it proposes what we can know rather than what can exist. And it proposes that we can only know 'phenomena'; that is, things as they appear to us in experience rather than as they may [or may not] be 'in themselves' or apart from our experience of them. Only God, whose consciousness is absolute and therefore non-perspectival, can know what things are 'really' like as distinct from their 'appearances'. - Second: There is no sense in which the universe could be said to exist if there was no 'consciousness' present to perceive it. This is because whatever sense such utterances have is dependent on language and its significations. The idea that the universe exists only has meaning within a matrix of signs, symbols and grammatical rules; therefore, without the apprehension of language ('consciousness' in mentalistic or psychologising terms), the very notion of 'a universe' that 'exists' would be utterly meaningless. In other words, the existence of a universe outside our apprehension of it is unsayable (i.e. 'inconceivable' in psychologising terms). - Third: The anthropic principle, as I've pointed out elsewhere on this board, holds only that we should take into account the constraints that human existence as observers imposes on the sort of universe that can be observed; a cautionary note that is as old as Protagoras. It may well be that the universe has the appearance of having been designed with us in mind as its crowning glory; but this may only be a result of the way our minds work or language has developed historically.