In the physical realm, a lot of things seem to be determined. Even assuming some indeterminism at the quantum mechanical level, the effect of this on macro events seems to be minimal. The amount of force and spin you put on a bowling ball guarantees whether how many pins will go down. If we are physical systems, should we not expect our actions and decisions to be determined in much the sameway that bowling balls are? We are more complex than bowling balls, butwe are simply "meat computers" then isn't it highly likely that determinism is true?
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I think it is highly likely. But is that so bad? Determinism is what guarantees that the natural world is relatively stable, that our artefacts work, that our skeleton and muscles get us to the fridge when we want a beer, that moral education generally produces moral adults (see following post). If my mental life is also deterministic then so be it. It certainly doesn't appear to me to be so. That, presumably, is because I have no epistemic access to the ultimate sources of my mental life. Only proximate sources and a rough and ready folk-psychological theory of them. But that is OK.
David,
I think the question is is if things are deterministic all the way through including one's mental life. I can't tell from your answer where you stand on that question. Only that it appears to you that your mental life is not determinist.
It may not matter to some people if their actions are their own or not....they would act the same in either case. On the other hand there are others who will deny responsibility for their actions if they are convinced they are not in control of their own choices.
If someone were to say that they were not in control of their own choices, and they were using those words with their ordinary meanings, then I think that would be prima facie evidence for a mental illness of some sort, a kind of schizophrenia perhaps. Alternatively, they may be expressing what they think is a consequence of their belief that mind is deterministically physical. But that would be to conflate two very different levels of description of the mental. I think there need be no incompatibility between the ordinary claim that we control our choices and the scientific claim that our minds are physically deterministic.
There are acquaintances of mine that pretty much told me that they did the things they did because that was the way they were. I don't think they saw the distinction you're drawing.
How were they wrong?
Morning BM. Yes, I think lots of people would say this. One could interpret 'the way they were' to include just desires, inclinations, preferences, etc. But one could also interpret it to include a natural or educated inclination to consider possible actions from a moral standpoint and to choose accordingly. I think such a reflective disposition counts as part of 'the way one is' just as much as the more basic drives do.
When I've questioned their morality, they've told me, "Oh bmiller, that's just the way you are".
So they agree with you. Their electron collisions produce different moral decisions than mine. Perhaps they consider that yes, they make choices, but only in the same way that one chooses to fall when he's pushed.
Isn't making a considered choice rather like pushing one's self?
If making a considered choice is like pushing oneself, then isn't any choice made like pushing oneself? Considered or not? So there is no essential difference between the 2 other than how the electrons happen to collide.
No. Unconsidered choices likely 'go with the flow' of base desires. Considered choices may well go against the flow. That requires effortful 'push'. But what does it matter if at some level of description the difference is in mere electron collisions?
Unconsidered choices likely 'go with the flow' of base desires. Considered choices may well go against the flow. That requires effortful 'push'.
Your electron collision "flow" pushes you to think you are making moral decisions while other people's electron collision "flow" push them to make different moral decisions.
But what does it matter if at some level of description the difference is in mere electron collisions?
If that's the case, then I think you're right that it doesn't matter in a moral sense. That's just the way the cookie crumbles as they used to say.
You say, Your electron collision "flow" pushes you to think you are making moral decisions while other people's electron collision "flow" push them to make different moral decisions.
Yes. Except I'm not using 'flow' and 'push' to express a causal relationship between the physical (electrons etc) and the mental (desires etc). Rather, I'm using 'flow' and 'push' to capture metaphorically aspects of our mental and emotional lives as we subjectively find them. Thus I say unconsidered choices all too easily 'flow' from base desires and that considered choices must often 'push back' against this 'flow'. I hope everyone would agree with this. The terms 'choice', 'considered', 'desire' are part of the ordinary language we use to express our mental world. The term 'electron collision' is not. It's in the theoretical language by which we account for the physical world. Quite what the relation is between them we don't know. I'm materialist enough to think there must be some such connection. But I don't think of it as a causal connection. Much more like the Kantian link between the 'appearances' and the 'things in themselves'.
David,
Don't the 'things in themselves' give rise to (or cause) the 'appearances'?
If all actions are entirely deterministic then also all our actions determined for us regardless of how it appears to us.
I'm trying to re-phrase what you're saying to see if I understand correctly. It appeared to me earlier that you were advocating this position with remarks like "Is that so bad?". Now it appears that somehow you think that our desires influence our actions, which seems to imply that our desires are somehow not subject to physical determinism, but rather disrupt that physical determinism.
In the early Kant, yes they do. The later Kant realised that cause was itself an appearance, so he backtracked. Or so my understanding of Kant goes!
You make a good point! I guess I have to say that what goes on in our physical brains doesn't cause our mental life, rather it is our mental life but described in a hopelessly low-level way that doesn't help our understanding of ourselves much. The worry is that the determinism of the physical percolates upwards to our mental lives even though our subjective grasp of mental life is that it is indeterministic. If indeed it does then I am asking, What of it? It seems we cannot escape our everyday folk-psychological way of talking about ourselves, which is probably a good thing. I certainly would not want to say that there is something about the mental that disrupts physical determinism, as a Cartesian dualist maybe has to. I would say that desires must be 'appearances' of something going on in brains and those somethings may lead to actions. Hopefully the path from desire to action goes through something installed in our brain by moral education and whose activation 'appears' as moral reflection. My project is thus to rescue the moral life from the thought that determinism in the physical makes nonsense of it. So I'm interested in topics like the biological basis for morality in evolutionary psychology.
My project is thus to rescue the moral life from the thought that determinism in the physical makes nonsense of it. So I'm interested in topics like the biological basis for morality in evolutionary psychology.
I think it's great that you want to preserve the idea that there is such a thing as real objective morality in your philosophy but what if you conclude that you can't? Is that what your "What of it?" is getting at?
To my mind, if physical determinism is all there is, then it makes perfect sense that you may think you are making moral decisions but the fact of the matter is that the laws of physics made you think that as well as everything else you think and do. Even the illusion that you are trying to figure out how to reconcile morality with physical determinism.
To me it looks like trying to escape this strange loop is hopeless due to basic assumptions. Maybe one of the assumptions needs to be replaced, or maybe you see some apparent contradiction in alternatives that aren't really there.
What if I can't? Well, I write stuff here looking for compelling criticism of these ideas and I haven't been persuaded by counter arguments yet! Of course, moral reasoning floats on top of consciousness and that phenomenon always remains to be subsumed under a materialistic theory. But I don't think any of what we are talking about is illusory. It's the way things appear for creatures like us. Matter in motion under the laws of physics isn't making us think, it is us thinking. The inescapable appearances are the real. So I'm not trying to escape the strange loop, merely live and think within it. A bit like the ant on a sphere figuring out he's on a closed two-dimensional surface.
David,
You mentioned that your background was technical. Software if I remember correctly right? Or was it mathematical, or both? Or do you have a background in physics and/or engineering?
Hi BM. All of those in a way. Starting with a maths degree I worked in physics research building data acquisition and machine control software.
Ah, that's why I couldn't remember exactly. It was all of the above ;-)
The reason I asked was to see if you had taken any formal physics courses. If so, then you should be familiar with free body diagrams. For instance a block on an incline used to to calculate force vectors related to gravity, the normal force, and the resultant force components related to the angle of the incline. Like this one.
The genius of this is reducing, in concept, a physical block and a physical incline to a single point with a number of force vectors in different directions making it easy to calculate the magnitude of the resultant force and hence it's motion. One can ignore all other attributes of the block and get a somewhat accurate prediction of it's motion. It doesn't matter what the thing is: ball, block, box, human on skis, as long as it's treated a matter in motion we can make that prediction. Although not a new idea, this abstraction of only what is necessary to predict and account for motion is what moved the scientific revolution along.
But now I have to amend what I said above about it not mattering what the thing is. The human on skis is animated and so can decide to change the forces. For this reason, the physicists of the modern era specifically excluded animated things from their predictions. The intentional motions of animated things screw up the calculations, so if the motion of animated things are to be calculated at all, they must be treated as inanimate objects and reduced to a point with force vectors.
It's an observation that a physics student (who stays awake) finds himself wondering about. What would one conclude if one was conducting a billiard ball experiment and it didn't match the diagram because one of the billiard balls decided to move? It would completely flummox the physics experimenter because it is outside his trained world view that things can move on their own. Engineers, who actually make things work by training would be the ones to discover there was a mouse in one of the billiard balls (maybe you can guess my training ;-)).
The point is that physicists are trained to ignore things that cannot use the (necessarily limited) abstractions they have devised to practice their craft. It seems then that some philosophers (or perhaps physicists practicing philosophy badly) have taken those abstractions and read them back into all things including the things that had been specifically excluded from physics study of matter in motion in the first place. Later physicists, scientists and philosophers, ignorant of or indifferent to the philosophical foundations of their field went along with it and that is where we are now and from my perspective why the strange loop exists.
The motion of all things are accounted for deterministically by the laws of physics.
Humans are a thing and they move.
Therefore human motion is accounted for deterministically by the laws of physics.
Humans are motivated to action by morality which appears to them non-deterministic.
But human action is a form of motion and therefore is accounted for deterministically by the laws of physics.
There are several ways to come to terms with this situation.
1. Accept all the premises and conclusions but still try to reconcile them. In other words continue travel the strange loop like Sisyphus and his bolder.
2. Accept that you've been fooled by your moral intuition. You may think you are making moral choices, but that is merely a feature of reality that you've now discovered is wrong.
3. All human action is physically non-deterministic and so exclude all animate action from the realm of physics.
4. Some human action is physically non-deterministic and some is physically deterministic.
I favor #4.
I think you are saying that we have a puzzle here because some reasonable looking premises appear to be inconsistent. Can we adjust the premises to bring them into consistency? My position is that they are not inconsistent at all.
What aspects of the living/animate/human world do you think are impenetrable to natural science?
Are you a reader of Ed Feser perhaps?
Yes, I read Feser's blog.
My position is that they are not inconsistent at all.
I guess I misunderstood. My understanding was that you thought physical determinism was true for everything in the universe so then humans' moral decisions must be too. But that fact seems inconsistent with our human experience which, to us, seems like we are in control our moral decisions, not blind laws of physics.
I'm probably wrong about the 4 choices? What are some others?
I tend to think of contemporary physics as a theory of the things in themselves. Particles, atoms, photons etc are beyond the senses so not in the appearances. We humans operate in the everyday world of the senses, the appearances. The things in themselves can be (theorised as) deterministic (if there's enough of them and they are warm enough that quantum effects average out) but the appearances, especially our mental world (the appearances to us of what's going on in our heads) can be indeterministic. I daresay a real Kantian would dismiss this as a perversion of Kant!
OK, thanks for laying out your theory. That clears up a lot of my confusion.
Are you ready for some questions?
By all means. Fire away.
The first questions regard Kant's "appearances" and "things-in-themselves" theory. I know that you know more about it than I do, so I'd rather find out from you than read that thick book of his :-)
I think it's uncontroversial to suppose that what we have going on in our heads when we perceive something is not the real thing itself. Otherwise I'd have a pretty large head filled with houses, trains and other people. So I can accept the basic argument that we don't directly experience the "thing-in-itself"(nuoma) but instead directly experience the "appearance" (phenomena) of that something. Therefore, since we cannot directly know the nuoma, we can know nothing about it, correct? If that's not the case, then I assume we can know something about it after all from the phenomena although not everything.
If the former case is true, then it seems to me that the nuoma is not only irrelevant for anything humans think or do and unnecessary for any theory involving humans, but also unknowable if these nuoma really exist or not. They seem ad hoc, but he must have had a reason for postulating these unknowable things-in-themselves. I wonder what the reason was other than an ad-hoc way to avoid idealism.
I think his theory also assumes that we gain knowledge via our senses (an ancient Greek theory) but only knowledge of appearances. We only know of the senses and their relationship to certain organs in the body by the phenomena appearing in our mind or to remain consistent, the "appearance" of senses and organs, the source of which is unknowable. I don't see how this escapes idealism full stop.
On the other hand, if the theory is that our sense data (and intellect) can tell us something about the "real" thing but not everything, I'm comfortable with that.
Does Kant, or your theory hold that we can know "nothing" of the reality of things via sense and reason or that we can know some things, but not everything via sense and reason?
First, let me say that I haven't read CPR either, just a bunch of secondary sources.
Yes, Kant says we cannot know the 'noumena', the things in themselves, only the 'phenomena', the appearances they make to us. The big idea is that our minds don't conform to the things in themselves but rather the other way round: the appearances are imposed on the noumena by the categories of the mind. This is why it's a species of idealism. But unlike Berkeley's idealism there is something independent of mind, viz the noumena. Yet they are utterly unknowable, as if they were behind an impenetrable screen on which the appearances are projected. My own view is that we can make tentative guesses as to the noumena. This is what fundamental science does. I have long puzzled over the status of so-called 'scientific knowledge'. Not the empirical stuff but the theoretical ideas. It's clearly not knowledge in the ordinary sense and its revisability casts doubt on its 'truth'. But it seems to fit neatly into a Kantian framework, I think.
I can't get past the assertion that there are things that exist that are unknowable. If that were true how could one even know of them? It sounds like they are just conjured up from Kant's imagination and in that case his phenomena are more real than his noumena. Yes, it is different from Berkeley's idealism, but only by adding this unknowable feature that does no apparent work other than to distinguish it from Berkeley. Seems to violate the law of parsimony.
The fact that you think we can make guesses about the noumena using science as a tool indicates that you are on the same page as me. If the noumena were truly unknowable all guesses, scientific or not, would have the same chance of being correct. Zero chance.
But maybe I'm wrong about that. Why do you say fundamental science can help us make true guesses about "things in themselves"?
I think Kant would say that truth lies wholly within the empirical. One can verify a claim only by examining the appearances. He says that our attempts to go beyond the empirical, ie, to do metaphysics, must lead us into contradiction. The noumena lie beyond truth. Our guesses about the noumenal must be judged by other criteria, such as consistency and mathematical elegance.
Why would we be guessing about something that is defined as not being able to be known and lies beyond truth? We already know the answer to any guesses if we believe the theory. Unknown. I like consistency and mathematical elegance as much as the next guy, but I have no idea how they are relevant to this topic from what has been said. What can we possibly be guessing about? Can you see why I'm perplexed?
Also what is meant by saying the "truth lies wholly within the empirical"? I'm beginning to think Kant has a very different definition of "truth" than I have in mind. Not so sure what is meant by "empirical" now also. To me, truth is related to knowledge in that what we think about reality corresponds to reality. So, to me, that statement means that reality lies completely in the empirical and so if it is true and I believe it is true I have knowledge it is true. But if it is true and actually corresponds to reality then it means that noumena are not real and that I have knowledge the noumena are not real.
BTW, noumena are not empirical and so it seems he is doing metaphysics but perhaps badly. Just because he contradicts himself doesn't necessarily mean all metaphysicians to that.
Well, if we don't know we tend to guess, don't we? We are guessing about the source of the appearances---what explains them. Think of the ideas in theoretical physics. Particles in a superposition of states, entanglement, wavefunction collapse, the origin of mass in the Higgs boson. Are those empirical, ie, experiencable? No, We will never know if these ideas are right in the way we can check the truth of The cat is on the mat by going and experiencing. Think of them in the same light perhaps as the doctrine of Divine Simplicity. For us the empirical is the real. You will give me short shrift I think if I say No, the really real are fundamental particles, or whatever. Nevertheless, what we have discovered, ie, our empirical investigation into nature, points beyond the empirical, just as Revelation does.
Well, if we don't know we tend to guess, don't we? We are guessing about the source of the appearances---what explains them.
Yes, I agree with you. But if you actually believe Kant's theory, you shouldn't be guessing because you'd already know the answer. It is defined as unknowable. To me it is akin to someone saying they believe in triangles having 3 sides and then speculating that perhaps if we do this or that, squint just right, blink, etc or make a lucky guess, we'll find out they may actually have a different number of sides. It seems like an incredible waste of one's time.
That's why I think Kant's theory is not useful as a basis for the other things you mention. We speculate about a Higgs boson because we are trying to explain the physical reality of things in motion. According to Kant, that only means we are trying to explain phenomena, not noumena. Noumena do not have mass, nor move in space nor collide with things nor influence things in any possibly detectable way, because all of those properties or actions are things that we can empirically detect, which is the opposite of what noumena have or are capable of.
Nevertheless, what we have discovered, ie, our empirical investigation into nature, points beyond the empirical, just as Revelation does.
I agree that there is more to reality than just the empirical but that just means the empirical method is not exhaustive. I'd go so far as to say that believing the empirical method itself to be a valid way of knowing reality depends on non-empirical reasons.
Noumena do not have mass, nor move in space nor collide with things nor influence things in any possibly detectable way. Nor do wavefunctions!
I'd go so far as to say that believing the empirical method itself to be a valid way of knowing reality depends on non-empirical reasons. I don't follow. The empirical method is just having experiences. Having experiences almost by definition is acquiring knowledge. You see the cat on the mat and you know the cat is on the mat, if you've kept off the LSD. Where do reasons come in?
Are you saying wavefunctions are noumena? If they are intelligible and you know what they are then they violate the definition of noumena.
I don't follow.
The "empirical method" is a theory about how to gather data and make sense of it. Philosophers argue about how or even if we have experiences much less if those experiences give us any true knowledge.
I'm struck by how wavefunctions etc play a role in theoretical physics analogous to the noumena in Kant's theory, in that they both are unknowable, that is, inexperienceable. That is what I am emphasising. For Kant the appearances are the sensible, the empirical, the knowable. I think he takes this as axiomatic. There is no attempt to analyse the meaning of 'knowledge', for example.
How does one distinguish between the knowable and the unknowable without defining 'knowledge'?
For someone with no sense of smell the smell of coffee is unknowable. Pigeons are tetrachromatic so we trichromats can never know their gamut of colours.
I don't see how the last response answers that question of how can one claim to know the difference between the knowable and the unknowable without defining knowledge.
Without a definition of knowledge your examples wouldn't make sense. To illustrate, one can just substitute a different concept for knowledge.
For someone with no sense of smell the smell of coffee is silent. Pigeons are tetrachromatic so we trichromats can never hear their gamut of colours.
Without a definition of knowledge or sound those statements seem equally valid.
Let's talk about wavefunctions. Do they exist?
We have to start somewhere with givens. Do you want me to define what colour is? All I can say is a certain kind of visual sensation. Then you will ask what 'visual' and 'sensation' mean. We are English speakers after all.
But "givens" must have a definition don't they?
Do wavefunctions exist? I would think that on a Kantian perspective they are beyond the real/imaginary distinction. They are neither true (real) appearances nor false (imaginary/illusory) appearances. They aren't appearances at all.
I don't follow the wavefunctions answer. Do they exist? In my mind I see that as a yes or no answer.
Try this lecture from Dan Bonevac.
OK. Listened to it.
Do you agree with it?
I didn't see any definition of knowledge. I saw a distinction between a a priori vs a posteriori knowledge, but not a definition of knowledge itself.
What is your's?
Also no info on this question:
Do waveforms exist?
A quick read on another form of idealism. It seems like an airtight theory if you suppose some of the assumptions of the pre-moderns and moderns.
I suggested the video thinking that Bonevac could convey the Kantian Big Idea better than I could in a few comment lines. He puts this over without having to define knowledge.
I'm very attracted to the idea. In biology there is the concept that each species has an 'umwelt'. That is, the totality of information from its environment that it is sensitive to. For example, unlike us, a bacterium does not sense the gravitational gradient at the Earth's surface but it does detect chemical gradients and behave accordingly. The thought is, Why shouldn't there be a human umwelt?
Regarding wavefunctions. Well, they clearly don't exist in the ordinary sense relative to our possible experience, so my answer is No. However, it's not entirely clear what 'existence' means in this context. This is why I like the Kantian idea of an 'existence' (note scare quotes) beyond our experience. Parallels here with religious thought. David Tong seems to believe in their reality, or the reality of quantum fields, at any rate.
I'm afraid I have never been able to make much sense of Berkeley. I'm one of those philistines like Dr Johnson. My loss I guess.
I like Bonevac's presentation but I don't think it's a plus that "He puts this over without having to define knowledge." If people have different basic definitions then they will reach different conclusions and be unable to communicate their ideas to other people.
Here is the starting point in Western philosophy regarding the concept of knowledge. AFAIK
However, it's not entirely clear what 'existence' means in this context.
See what I mean regarding definitions?
I'm afraid I have never been able to make much sense of Berkeley.
I don't see Berkeley being that much different than Kant from Bonevac's presentation aside from the fact Berkeley's theory is more parsimonious. Kant is saying all we really have access to are ideas the same as Berkeley, except that Kant labels these ideas "appearances". Appearances of "unknowable things" seems to be an incoherent concept. I don't think either Kant or Berkeley have it right.
Sure, but wheeling out a dictionary definition is not going to help. Kant's predecessors thought that the mind conformed passively to things outside the mind, telling us what existed and did not. Kant's radical inversion is to say that the mind actively 'manufactures' the appearances out of the things in themselves in conformity to itself. So there is room for a divergence of the appearances from reality. But we think of the appearances as telling us what exists. Hence we need another term for the reality of the things in themselves. They belong in a distinct 'realm'.
Note that you understand sufficiently how 'appearance' and 'knowable' fit together to appreciate that 'appearance of an unknowable thing' is incoherent. The appearance is the knowing.
Sure, but wheeling out a dictionary definition is not going to help.
Starting with any definition is better than none if someone wants someone else to understand what they're talking about. Isn't that how you started out learning about math? With the definition of terms?
The appearance is the knowing.
Please see what Socrates has to say about that in the link. It's not that long of a read and is easy to follow.
Did you follow my explanation of why a definition doesn't help?
I began math by learning to count. No explicit definitions there!
S is telling us that knowledge involves memory? Sure. But Kant is concerned with the acquisition of knowledge, not its recollection. Someone with eyes shut and ears blocked is not going to acquire any memories. Or language for that matter.
Back to Berkeley. My problem is that I just cannot shake off the idea that if I step out in front of the big red idea coming down the road that will be the end of all my ideas. What kind of idea can do that? Berkeley's system is too parsimonious in my view.
Actually no, I don't follow why the definition of knowledge doesn't help. Kant's theory just tells us we only have ideas in our head. Some ideas come from sense data and some don't. But what makes those ideas knowledge or not.
If you started by counting marbles, I bet someone explained to you the difference between the marbles and the number. You really want to resist defining things. I wonder why?
I apologize. The link did not contain the full dialog. This one does: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1726/1726-h/1726-h.htm
But Kant is concerned with the acquisition of knowledge, not its recollection.
I disagree. How can someone have knowledge if they cannot remember it. I think Kant would concede that having knowledge means having it at one's disposal. Regarding language. Merely hearing and seeing does not give someone language or cats and dogs could talk.
What kind of idea can do that?
If you believe Kant, you are already committed to being run over by an idea. He just calls the idea an "appearance" but the real thing has no physical reality.
Well, we are not making much progress with our discussion of knowledge! I have just checked my copy of Roger Scruton's 140 page Kant: A Very Short Introduction. The index has 6 mentions of 'experience', >10 of 'empiricism', but no mention of 'knowledge' or 'belief' or 'memory'. I conclude from this that to explain Kant, Scruton feels no need to elaborate beyond our usual intuitions regarding knowledge. And nowhere does Kant deny that we have memory. It's just that he has nothing of interest to say about it.
Kant's system is not as impoverished as Berkeley's and Kant himself draws a clear distinction between the two. For Berkeley there is nothing outside mind. Not so for Kant---it's the bus in itself that does for me in myself, not my idea of it.
Well, we are not making much progress with our discussion of knowledge!
Agreed. I don't want to force you to talk about something you don't want to talk about. But the way I see it is that if we don't know what we're talking about we don't know what we're talking about.
Not so for Kant---it's the bus in itself that does for me in myself, not my idea of it.
Doesn't Kant say explicitly that you can't know anything about the 'bus-in-itself'? How then can you know it did you in? I'm not a Kantian, so I'm allowed to jump out of the way of a bus because I believe the bus has mass and momentum enough to really smash me. The Kantian knows that space and time (and therefore mass and momentum) are all only ideas that appear in his mind. So it's the mass and momentum of his ideas that kills the Kantian.
Not at all. Go back to Hume. We know (yes, know) from sad experience that momentous objects aren't good for soft-bodied creatures like us, regardless of any theorising we might do as to why. Kant says we can only know the appearances of things not the things in themselves. Unlike Berkeley he does not deny things outside the mind. Do you see the difference?
Hume said we can't know that causes and effects are related and we only assume they are due to habit of mind.
momentous objects aren't good for soft-bodied creatures like us, regardless of any theorising we might do as to why.
I agree with your conclusion.
And that's why I think the idealism of both Kant and Berkeley are wrong as well as Hume's scepticism. We don't live our lives as if we don't know buses aren't really physical and won't really run us down. Either because it might not happen this time (Hume), or because the bus is just an idea and it isn't physically there at all (Berkeley) or the bus that we perceive to be physically there really isn't physically there, only a non-physical bus that looks like a physical bus (Kant).
To be fair though. I'm sure each philosopher has good arguments for convincing you he is right.
We don't live our lives as if we don't know buses aren't really physical and won't really run us down.
May be better to say that no one lives their life like this for very long.
I think you have confused the discussion by introducing the term 'physical'. Even in Berkeley's system minds make a distinction between physical and non-physical---after all, B's world looks to its denizens just like ours and we make that distinction. The term that's usually used in this context is 'mind-dependence' versus 'mind-independence'. Everything in B is mind-dependent. In Kant the appearances are mind-dependent but the things-in-themselves are mind-independent.
I did a bit more work on B. Haven't looked at him for ages. There is a very good article on him by Geoffrey Warnock in The Oxford Companion to Philosophy. I thoroughly recommend the latter. B just about makes sense now!
Both fall under the category of idealism. Both tell us all we can know is what goes on in our mind in the form of ideas including space and time and the things that populate space and time. Those ideas do not exist in an external world outside of mind. So space and time and all the things that populate space and time are only ideas and have no reality in an external mind-independent world. It follows that the momentum of a bus that could flatten us is just an idea and has no reality outside our minds. I think we can say that both B and K agree on that much. When I spoke of the physical, I meant space, time and they things that populate space and time which, again, I take both of them to mean ideas of the mind.
Using Bonevac's projector analogy, they both think there is a projector and all one can see is the screen. B speculates that since that's all we can see, that's all that matters while K speculates that there is some mysterious unknowable film feeding the mechanism. But if it's really true that all we can know is what's on the screen, I don't see how it makes a difference. Maybe I could be a great philosopher too and claim the projector is fed by fairy dust or demon sweat.
Bonevac's projector metaphor works in his account of Kant by modelling the mind's transforming the noumena (the DVD, say) into the appearances (images on the screen). There is no place for such an analogical device to explain Berkeley's system. There are no noumena to be so transformed. Everything starts and ends in the mind. So the two schemes, though both idealisms, are very different, as Kant was keen to emphasise.
I thought I remembered Bonevac used the projector as part of an explanation for B as well as K. Plato and Aristotle as well although for them it would be more like a camera.
So the two schemes, though both idealisms, are very different, as Kant was keen to emphasise.
Sure he was. But in both cases when the bus flattens you it's the idea you experience, not the bus.
Indeed, though perhaps better to say that the idea, and all the concomitant mental goings on, is the experience.
Just like virtual reality.
Are we then simply ideas and not physically real?
If by 'physically real' you mean mind-independent then Berkeley says Yes, we are just ideas in the mind of God. Kant would say No, our bodies are mind independent noumena which we can think of but not know of as they are in themselves. You pays your money, ...
By physically real I mean extended in space and time. Having mass and momentum etc.
But all of that are simply ideas and are not real (things as they really are).
So it seems that to Kant we don't only not have a real physical existence, we don't really exist as ideas either. If we aren't even ideas, then I guess we don't exist at all.
I know I have ideas, so noumena can't be ideas.
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