I must contend that most people, likely every philosophy student, at some point in their lives have wondered whether what we perceive actually exists or if we are trapped in some virtual reality resembling "The Matrix." Can we be sure that the things we perceive actually exist? If not, can we justify the belief that they do?
In the following I intend to explain a view that George Berkeley criticizes in his "Of the Principles of Human Knowledge." Namely the view that external bodies exist outside of our minds, his argument against it, and the implications that he draws.
First we must contemplate the theory surrounding an external physical world.
What does this physical world consist of? I actually posed this question to my roommate and he responded, "Well everything around us I guess." That was the end of that. An obvious answer here is the physical world consists of the space around us, all of the objects within it, and each one of these objects having its own set of characteristics. Would you say this to be straightforward? Berkeley would not. For an idealist such as Berkeley, he denies the physical world. This is not to say that he denies the existence of anything at all, just material substances or material substratum. What Berkeley claims here is that the material things found spread throughout this so called physical world, may actually ?appear' to be there but in fact do not exist autonomously. Berkeley believed that the world we live in is not dissimilar from that of The Matrix. Only instead of a computer or machine generating the world we see, Berkeley believes it is God who has created an illusive world for us. The only things real to us are our experiences.
Since Berkeley denies the existence of a world of matter, what kind of things ca ...