14-1: Esse Est Percipi

We've probably all heard the proverbial question,"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it still make a sound?" But rarely ever do we hear the answer. According to Georges Berkeley, it wouldn't make a sound—it wouldn't even exist at all. He argued that something needs to be perceived in order to exist. Fair enough—it's a perspective that we can imagine, but never prove, just like Descartes' own thought experiment.

Acknowledging Berkeley's theory that everything is only an idea is perhaps necessary to understand why he equated existence with perception. It's much easier to refute the existence of something that isn't really there. Berkeley believed that the world was comprised of ideas—even the sensations that arise from interacting with those "ideas." We are fooled into believing that things have substance. Our group wasn't particularly intrigued by Berkeley's idealism, as anyone who grew up in a society that values empiricism and measurement would not. It doesn't quite resonate as well today as it might have in the 18th century. We wondered if immaterialism and idealism really did prevail then, and if it did, how it affected people's lives. In the end, it doesn't really matter if what we believe to be objects are really just ideas—they'll always be objects to us because that's how we interact with them. Even if all matter was just an "illusion," it wouldn't be any less real to us.

In a way, Berkeley's philosophy is still relevant, but not in the metaphysical way that he posed it. We all see things tinted by both the cultural and personal definitions we give them. What exists in the foreground of one's life may only exist in the background of another's, quietly, unnoticed. Unlike in the 18th century, we now have the advantage of science proving our existence, with objective terms such as volume and weight. These, too, can be seen as only ideas, as nothing more than numbers on a page. But we know better.

(Schodinger's cat is a thought experiment in which a cat placed within a box with a flask of poison that could randomly shatter is thought to be both alive and dead until one observes the state of the system by opening the box. Most of the interpretations of this thought experiment have to do with perception, such as the Copenhagen Interpretation, which explains that the system only becomes definite when it is measured—esse est percipi, as Berkeley says.)

DQ: If it could somehow be proven that all objects were only ideas, would it change how we value objects?
FQ: George Berkeley's philosophy can be classified as _____________.
A: Idealism and immaterialism