Berkeley's Idealism

[genkaus]

I guess this is the point where my neo-Platonic thinking starts to kick in. We clearly have a much different understanding of the abstraction. I think like an artist in this regard.

To make an abstraction, an artist selects generalized features representative of a particular thing or class of objects. This process results in a visual or auditory prompt that calls to mind the object represented. For example the artist extracts the visible outline and color impressions of a person to make a portrait. The portrait, as a symbol, prompts the mind to form a mental image of the person they represent. The symbol is an abstraction.
The exact opposite of an abstraction is a form. A form is that from which particular physical examples are abstracted. Forms are not vague abstractions extracted from many examples. Instead the various particular embodiments (abstractions) are each cruder versions of fuller and more comprehensive ideal forms.

I think it is when you started talking about forms that you either lost me or went off the tracks yourself.

There are physical concretes which we can perceive. We generalize certain features from those concretes to create abstractions - such as an artist generalizing the outline and color. So far, we are on the same page.

Then you go ahead an talk about forms of which those abstracts are cruder or incomplete embodiment. If a concrete is taken as an embodiment of an abstract, then the form would be an abstract's abstract. However, instead of understanding it as something derived and understood through the abstract (as abstracts were derived and understood through concretes), here you presuppose their existence and define abstracts according to them. That seems to me to be presupposing idealism.

In Panentheism (or at least the kind I advocate) creation simply means formally causing something to exist. Because distinct entities have no definitive demarcation that separates them physically, their perceived relationship to the properties and qualities of a form allow us to recognize when any given thing can be considered part of a class of objects.

Since perceptions are all what are required to create abstracts, perceived demarcation is quite enough to classify distinct objects

This does however open the door to Idealism which is a concept I find problematic for the reasons we’ve been discussing.

Actually, the door was opened the moment you talked about forms being the ideal and complete versions of abstracts.

And that is why I started the discussion. By reducing everything to operations of the mind, Idealism fails to address why physical relationships are even required. It seems to me, physicality somehow constrains mental activities. When some of the more strident members here talk about their belief that science will someday explain conscious experience, I find it more than a bit naïve. Such materialists are essentially claiming that conscious experience is produced by classical electro-chemical processes. That also is a self-refuting position, similar to Idealism. If conscious experience emerges from physical events, then some kind of proto-consciousness must be already present.

How do you come to that conclusion? You'd need to explain it a bit better on how it is self-refuting.

So I see a form-substance relationship extending throughout the totality. While they can be distinct aspects of reality, they can never be truly divided. Every substance has a form and every form has a substance. This is why I posit the existence of a pan-psychic medium, which I consider a primal substance, as something that embodies ideal form. This is both a top-down and bottom-up approach. While it is possible to view reality from either direction, top-down being Idealism and bottom-up being Materialism, I do not see how either can be complete without the other.

The critical difference between bottom-up and top-down approach is that the bottom-up approach is more or less self-evident. Our percepts are self-evident and the abstracts derived form them are therefore justifiable. The ideal form and any knowledge of it, however, is anything but. Further, every known abstract has its root in those percepts and nowhere any invocation of the ideal form is required to trace the its origin.

So, your options here are to view abstracts as derived from self-evident percepts - the epistemological consequence of this position being use of reason, or to view it as a crude version of an unknown ideal form - the epistemological consequence being faith.

However, there are consequences to holding beliefs in the ideal form, especially, when you consider it to hold primacy. In any conflict between the abstract derived from the percept and that viewed a crude version of ideal form, you'd necessarily subscribe for the latter - one for which there can be no justification. To hold that position rationally, you must first justify that it is possible to view reality that way - which would require knowledge of existence of the ideal form - which would require that you start from the bottom-up (the self-evident part) and show that there can be an ideal form.