The Idealist View of Reality - Professor Keith Ward

hello you will know that I'm not Lord plaintiff and I'm sorry to say he's still unwell and I'm the fill-in professor now and I gave one lecture already a fall that I'm going to give and they're based on my little book that I published last year called the evidence for God we're part of my argument there is that evidence isn't the sort of thing that scientists look for publicly available stuff that you can't deny and that you can form theories about in measure rather the evidences of a rather different sort and in my first talk I talked about art and morality and a particular way of seeing our two morality as conveying or communicating or mediating some transcendent depth or reality which could be called a spiritual dimension to our music not everybody sees them that way I do and lots of people do and it's a way of approaching ideas of God which is quite helpful if you don't like God very much and in our culture lots of them don't like God because they think God is also interfering busybody I remember somebody who said God was like a pig snuffling at the edges of the universe I'm going to tell you who that was but it was was all television rather remarkable things so he was Jewish he thought it was very remarkable things - so if you have a nasty idea of God like that then approaching God the idea of God through experiences of beauty in art and experiences of moral obligation and demand and attraction in morality that gives you more of an idea I think of God as the source of object of values that we experience and I argued that as a philosopher I think all knowledge begins with experience good old empiricist position but you'll have to interpret experience and it I held it's wrong to interpret experiences just experience of physical objects and nothing more so there was nothing in reality but physical properties and that interpreting experience as communicating objective in values is a very sensible way to talk about experience because experience is nothing like the real world why not well I'm going to go into that today today by my talk is called the idealist view of reality and I'm going to say what our deal ism is I am an idealist as a philosopher I actually remember the first philosophy book I read when I was quite young was called the idealist view of life by Radha Krishnan who was the Spalding professor of Eastern religion and ethics at Oxford and later became the president of India and I think that books obviously been influential because here I am a priest of the Church of England and an idealist horror well what is an idealist I think the easiest way to go into that is to contrast idealism with its philosophical opposite its philosophical opposite is materialism that's another word there's often misinterpreted a materialist in philosophy is not somebody who accumulates lots of cars and jewels and is interested in material things and the fear is this somebody philosophically who says there is nothing but material things that's all there is there are various sorts of materialists very hardline materialists what you call reductive materialists think that there really is nothing but whatever matter is I mean that's a problem what is matter I think if you ask your physicists they probably say that we don't talk about that but we do know that matter is a form of energy but there are all sorts of matter eternally dark matter and all sorts of things we haven't ever thought about so it's hard to put limits on what matter is but supposing you think it's electrons and photons I mean it's not it's something smaller than that or something fuzzier than that hmm but anyway whatever it is a hard line reductive materials will say everything what you think what you feel your consciousness everything in the world reduces ultimately to lumps of matter in various complicated arrangement now there are respectable philosophers who take that view the most famous ones are the church lunch in America and Daniel Dennett I think he's very well-known and they really take that view which I just serve finding credible to begin with but I read the new scientist every week for my sins I think perhaps it's an interesting volume but it's full of reductive materialists it's quite extraordinary and I read a book review in the latest issue of new science which said oh this this book that I'm reviewing it has such a view of science that actually it even might let in the supernatural that was obviously a criticism which I think I thought was actually a good thing but they wrong so that's a reductive Machaerus but you can be a non reductive materialist and that would be a person who's as well there are thoughts and feelings and consciousness they do exist and there are values like values in art and music things which are of value and which really do exist but then and they are emergent phenomena they spring out of material things and couldn't exist without them so this sort of a merchant reservist they're often called these days expansive or enriched natural ists that's the way they like to describe themselves and they they will say well yes values exist but if there weren't brains and people who valued things there wouldn't be any values so that values are solely epiphenomena they depend upon material things couldn't exist without them and probably the only causal factors in the universe are material factors that is things like photons interacting with other subatomic particles those are the causal things in the universe Minds for example don't cause anything let's just look at those two assertions for a moment because really is there much reason to believe them well there's some reason to believe them but I don't think very much so take the first run nah nothing they could exist there couldn't be anything without matter without material particles the most obvious way of saying this is that couldn't be minds without brains when my old colleague Richard Dawkins my very old colleague Richard Dawkins actually takes it for granted that that can't be an intelligent creator of the universe because you can't have intelligence without mind and you can't have minds without brains so obviously there couldn't be a Creator who didn't have a brain well babe all of us really think she takes that for granted now I just want to put the question why not what what's wrong with the possibility I'm not proving anything here I'm just saying how can somebody say there's nothing but matter and if there is if there are things called consciousness in minds they have to depend upon matter where does the have to come from where do they get that from how do they prove that it's just a Doppler really it's an absolute dog room it's it's a faith of the worst sort that is to say there's not much evidence for it I mean you can say that I've seen lots of material things well okay good good have you never seen an immaterial thing well let's take a simple example a law of nature are there any laws of nature what about the inverse square law the law of gravity what about that is that a material thing ah no no it's not a material thing ah but you see you might say and laws only exist if there is matter and laws just tell you how matter behaves so laws of nature describe how matter behaves but in modern physics that is no longer true in modern physics my colleagues in Oxford anyway tell me that this universe will have a universe of space and time and all of the matter in it all the matter is in space and time obviously and that's where it is and space and time originates from something beyond space and time and it originates from what is called the quantum vacuum that is where energy is at its lowest possible state it's not nothing it's a whole host of different sorts of energy in more or less equilibrium but there are fluctuations in this equilibrium and they produce a little part the subatomic particles which spring in and out of existence anyway they are the whole universe and Masur and everything in it originates from something else beyond matter the quantum vacuum and how does the quantum vacuum manage to fluctuate it fluctuates in accordance with quantum laws with the laws of quantum physics now it follows that these people who are absolutely brilliant mathematicians and physicists they really think in they're not doing theology they're doing mathematical physics they really think that matter originates in accordance with laws of nature quantum laws which must have existed before there was any matter because the matter comes into existence in accordance of the condom laws so it can't be true that they think the laws just describe how matter acts on the country the laws tell matter how it's going to act and the laws actually create matter now some of our colleagues like to talk very misleadingly about these days we believe in the bootstrap theory of the universe and the bootstrap theory is the universe pulls itself into being by its own bootstraps but in other words out of nothing you get creation out of nothing but it's not nothing you've got the quantum vacuum is extremely rich a lot of stuff there and we don't even imagine what sort of stuff it is it's not matter anyway it can't be and the laws of quantum physics and they're not matter either and they exist in order to produce the universe so modern physics has got itself into a state where it cannot be materialistic that's the irony of materialism that materialists think they're being scientific but quantum physicists say well actually Mathers is a very mysterious sort of stuff and it originates from something beyond the material let me take another example that that examples just say there are laws of nature they're real according to quantum physics they bring the universe into existence even so they exist where do they exist that's the question they're not just descriptions of how matter behaves because they bring matter into existence and make it behave in certain ways so where could there be what sort of reality could laws of nature be and that's why I think hard line materialism is a non-starter but I really do think that I don't see how physics could cope with materialism at all what it says well a we don't know what matter is is dark matter dark energy it's a form of energy but you know we can't put limits on the sorts of images aura and that's the clue you cannot put limits in advance on the sorts of things that exist you just have to find out right you can't say oh they can't be non material things you have to look and see you think nunim well I think there are lots of non measure things I mean the most obvious one is your consciousness but then you may say oh you're just begging the question because consciousness couldn't couldn't exist without brain so my question knows why not because quantum physicists say laws can exist without the universe so why couldn't you have consciousness without a brain and I'm not interested in whether consciousness does exist without a brain or not because that's that's not my point it's just that it could you could have a view not watching television you could just see Everest now you could just see you feel a bit odd if you did but you're just sitting and suddenly you see Mount Everest but you wouldn't be there all I'm asking you is that conceivable could it possibly happen well we have dreams we have daydreams some people do see things you know I can't see or they say they do so why is it impossible that's my simple question really how could you be amateurs who says there's nothing but matter how could you know that how would you find out that there was something immaterial something not made of matter well not by looking because when you look you see matter so if you want to see something non material you can't observe it you'd have to come by means of a theory of some sort that you have to say well the reason matter behaves in the way that it does is because of laws of nature and they are not material and they're not just descriptions because they say they make it true that matter will be of a certain sort that there will be super strings or quarks or whatever there are they are brought into existence in accordance with these laws the other little example from physics I want to take and I think I've mentioned it briefly last time is the multiverse theory a lot of physicists accept the multiverse theory um and that theory is that there are many perhaps an infinite number of different universes and different space times and if there are then if you ask the question really we say well there are a huge number of other space times where are they the answer has to be nowhere it has to be because they're not in space because space is a as Einstein correctly I'm Marv you put it space is a relationship between objects such that in one universe every object is spatially related to every other object you can get there by walking if you've got an infinite length of time so that's a universe is where every space is connected to every other space but another universe is another place where you have everything connected to everything spatially in that universe but nothing in that universe is connected spatially to anything in this universe you cannot walk from one universe to another you cannot physically get from one universe to another it follows that if there are two different universes neither of them are anywhere right they can't possibly be anywhere they absolutely cannot be in a space because space is a relationship between events in one universe so there are many spaces on the multiverse theory and even worse than that there are many times now this is really a mind bender you think I can just get my head around saying there are different spaces so there are things which could exist we could never find out it's actually really but you could say there are things which do exist which are not spatially connected to anything in this universe so they're not anywhere they're certainly not in space not anywhere at all you say I can just imagine that but now I'm going to tell you as a quantum physicist would there are things which are not in time as well every universe that exists is not in time so if it asks the question when does it exist does that exist now the answer is no did it exist yesterday no would it exist tomorrow no oh so it doesn't exist yes it exists but it doesn't exist at any time well surely it must exist at the same time as something no it doesn't because time is a relationship between events in a universe if there's another universe they may be time in that universe that probably is but it won't be related to this universe temporarily at all so how can you distinguish between two different universes if neither of them are in space all time then you can't say they exist now and you can't say they exist over there well the only way you can do is and the philosopher Leibniz said this quite a long time ago the only way you can do it is by defining a universe in terms of the relation the internal relationship between events in universe so universe is a connected set of events connected in special contingent way now when I say contingent I mean it doesn't have to be that way two things are related to one another but they don't have to be related like that so space is a relationship between things like that we know it's spaces and time is a difference or a relationship one thing after another but not everything needs to be spatially or temporarily connected to everything else and any physicist who believes in the multiverse theory thinks there are millions of things which are not spatially or temporarily connected to anything else so they're saying there are millions of things which don't exist anywhere and they certainly don't exist now now how paradoxical do you want to get you can't get much more paradoxical but it's obviously true you just have to live with it right there live so how can somebody say I know that everything must be material that there can't be anything which is not in space I mean physics just says you're wrong I'm sorry that's just a defect of your imagination you're just not imaginative enough and that's what's wrong with materialism lack of imagination you just can't think of what sorts of things there could be do you know the stumped Tom stop our play which misquote with intentionally misquoted Shakespeare there are more things in my philosophy Horatio than there are in heaven and earth well that's right there probably are one and then idealist certainly has more things in philosophy than there are in heaven and earth because we idealists have things which are not in space or time and don't exist anywhere and suddenly don't exist now when we have lots of them so they are little bit right can we say any more than that so the first thing is it's a possibility it's an unduly parsimonious ontology to say everything has to be material this now has to be about it you could of course be little less hard-headed and say well it doesn't not everything has to material it just happens that everything is material okay so that's a sort of a lesser claim it's not a necessity it's just it's a matter of fact there are no non material things well do we know everything about what exists you know fifty years ago we didn't know about dark matter and now it's supposed to be the majority of stuff that exists in this universe and we know virtually nothing about it and any decent scientist would say it's true we know virtually nothing you know the story about Newton he said I feel like child on the seashore throwing a pebble into the sea Newton didn't even believe in gravity now that's an astounding fact Newton actually said he invented gravity in case you can't remember he did invent gravity but in principia mathematica his great work which propounded the laws of gravity the laws of mechanics he said anybody who thinks that there could be action at a distance must be insane what is gravity if it's not action at a distance Newton said I don't know what he privately thought but he didn't put in the Principia he did put in another book that he wrote but he privately thought is that God arranges it all so that things like the moon and the earth can have action at a distance but because God is coordinating their activities but he didn't really think it was possible to have action in distance he just recorded that it happened he didn't pretend to understand it now that's real science you don't have to understand everything you have to be able to come up against a simple neat elegant mathematical description of as many things as possible and that's what you do but you don't understand it so again what I'm appealing to here is the fact that a materialist view is a limitation which is not merited by modern science and before 1925 if anybody had talked about quantum physics they wouldn't have been believed in fact in 1925 when continent mechanics was first formulated it wasn't believed an Stein never believed it the one thing that Einstein never believed was things like things in quantum physics like haslund works principle of indeterminacy you probably know one of the most famous quotations from Einstein God does not play dice with the universe he was a determinist not on scientific grounds but just on dogmatic grounds Emilia's thought everything has to be determined because that's the best sort of universe that could be because everything is causally connected to everything else in predictable ways and the universe has to be like that now nobody's going to mock understand for believing that but he was wrong he spent the last years of his life trying to prove his view that indeterminacy was not correct now he might have been right in the next year somebody may say oh I've just discovered something he was right so I'm not saying he was wrong yes I am what what I'm saying is he is believed by most quantum physicists to have been wrong because indeterminacy just is a fact about quantum physics and that means it's no problem no not no conferences most crumbs and physicists think that indeterminacy that is a lack of determination is a fundamental feature of our universe that you can never in principle predict exactly when a radioactive atom will decay you can give a probabilistic estimate of a time the half-life at which you will decay but you can't in principle you just can't ever predict it it's not just you can't predict it it actually doesn't have I mean the principle you determine see what it says is so-called fundamental particles like electrons or photons do not have they do not possess at the same time both position and momentum velocity so it could roll them out electron you're talking about something which does not possess both a position somewhere and a velocity it's going at a certain speed now you say how could that possibly be all I says well that's what most businesses think there are and of course what they say is that electrons aren't particles at all actually so little about it too you say well if you're somebody who thinks electrons are little particles which go rather nucleus of an atom sorry you're obsolete you're out of date they're not so what are they well I don't know what they are nobody knows what they're they're actually when they're not being observed wave functions and a wave function is something which if you square the amplitude of a wave you find the probability of finding electron if you make an observation at that point it's only a probability it might not be there it might have gone to Starbucks it might be anywhere but and that's truly that's what they say so that a wave function is one electron actually is when it's not being observed now this is where idealism looms its horrible head there's a difference between reality when it's being observed and reality when it's not be observed now again this is totally mind-bending but it is this is quantum physics if any of you have seen Jim al-khalili an excellent series on television about quantum mechanics and we seem that I mean it's a very good very good he's obviously a very good quantum physicist and I'm season for good and that's what he says things when they're observed are completely different from things when they're not being observed so electrons and there are experiments to prove this but I'm not going to go into this region plea leave who want to see the but the experiments but they are it is a proof that there's a proof of experimental proof of this that electrons have a location a position and their particles are that busy when they are observed by a human mind but when they are not being observed they are wave functions they aren't particles that's why they don't have particular position than momentum because they're not particles at all they are wave functions and I've told you what a wave function is even if nobody can understand it it's something which the square of its amplitude gives you the probability of finding an electron so are they real well again I tell you I read the New Scientist and in this week's issue it says yes somebody's just done an experiment which shows there really are wave functions well but maybe they have but this is one of the great disputed points in quantum physics there are hundreds of disputed parts I mean it's not it's not a set of the subject it's in its infancy but it's it is what physics actually is state of the art physics tells you that we don't know what's real so our particle is real but we just can't get the information on them just say where they are and what speed they're going at the same time but products are real know that's that's what Einstein thought you said there really are particles we just can't get the information or our wavefunction is real so wave functions are mathematical constructs really fuzzy things where you say it's called superposition that electrons actually are in lots of places at the same time until you see them is that real and I have to know the the state of play at the moment is that's huge disagreement about which is real our particle is real but we just can't get the information or our wave functions real and particles are how wave functions appear to us now this brings observation into philosophy and with a vengeance and I want to refer briefly to a book by Stephen Hawking called the grand design his latest book a couple of years old aha and in the grand design Stephen Hawking actually says this I'm just saying what Stephen Hawking says I'm not making this up myself he says because of the two-slit experiment and what's called the delayed choice experiment again I'm not really going to go into that because of these experiments we have to say that objects only exist as we see them when we see them they don't exist in that way when we don't see them now in a way this is quite familiar you know the example I always take is here we are a number of solid objects sitting in a room wearing clothes of different colors and in three dimensions obviously now any physicist will tell you that is not what is in this room when there's nobody in it oh absolutely image is asleep all right so if you're going to sleep which will be longer you all go to sleep solid objects wearing kind of clothes in three dimensions do not even exist now the person who first set this philosophically well perhaps not first but most famously was Bishop George Berkeley who is buried in my College in Oxford have said good morning to him when I go into annoyance he never replies unfortunately but he might be there but he hasn't got a body so I can't see him anyway there's George Berkeley and George Barth is challenged to empiricist philosophers like me all knowledge begins with experience right so that's where we start then George Buckley's challenges well all right all your knowledge witness with experience and your experience is of solid colored three-dimensional objects that's what your experiences are now when you imagine going out of this room or everybody falling asleep in this do things still look the way they look when you are looking at them and buckling pointed out that actually there's no way of telling for a staff right because the only way you could find out if things look the way they look when you look at them is by looking at them but if you want to find out what they look like when you're not looking at them there is no way of discovering you cannot do it but it's actually worse than that it's not just you can't tell we can show that they don't have the properties that have when we look at them in other words the mind creates those properties out of what well wave functions so you take colors for yourself that's the most obvious thing any color is just an electromagnetic vibration at a specific wavelength that's what it is so it's not a color until that wavelength hits the rods and cones in your eyes that passes electrical stimuli to your brain and in about 30 different parts of your brain is enormous ly complicated the idea of a color appears in your consciousness but the color is just in your consciousness it's not in reality so if you're not conscious that color is not there there is something there it's an electromagnetic wavelength that's what's there and we know there are lots of those that we can't see anything else or violet or anything infrared is outside the range of our vision so that we can't we can't see that we only see certain electromagnetic wave s and we see them as colors but now really colors there aren't any colors there furthermore the world is not in three dimensions according to a lot of physicists including the inventor of super string theory for example and according to Stephen Hawking the world exists in 11 dimensions and if you ask the question well why can't we see them then the answer is they rolled up very small right that's so there you are is it totally mind-bending but it's what physics says there are 11 dimensions there's some dispute about how many dimensions there are but that need to be a level from mathematical purposes that sort of comes down to to make super strings do what they have to do they have to do in 11 dimensions now one way of curbing right is that this is just a mathematical construct it's not real but most physicists don't like thinking they're just talking about mathematical constructs because they're just mental constructs you know they're they're not what's real but that's what we have to say about observation as well unfortunately so mathematicians construct reality in one way 11 dimensional wave functions and they're not solid of course there are a few I've said you don't have colored clothing but also you're not solid you're mostly empty space when James Jean said that long ago but in atoms which we are made of atoms there's mostly empty space so that's what we are so solidity is simply how we see a lot of empty space with little blobs of energy in it and we see it as solid stuff so what we see isn't what there is what you see is not what you get so the word we can show in physics if you take physics seriously we could show that the world is not the way it appears to us and if you ask the question well what is it like let me just quote a very famous French Nobel Prize winning physicist Berner to de-spawn yeah and he says the reality with which physics now deals is a veiled reality it's a reality with a veil drawn over it we can't imagine it we can't fully understand it but our mathematical symbols which contain some very strange imaginary numbers are very mathematical tricks that people play they work the Madden race works without that konchem mathematics you would not have mobile phones and you do have no life those so it works and there are lots of other ways it works as well I have friend who has to my amazement become a billionaire by inventing a quantum cryptography machine right now quantum you know what cryptography is it's things which allow on computers you know it stops you hacking into other people's stuff and it is an ongoing thing well the banks are bought that which is having bought what he invented and that is a quantum cryptography machine now what is that the way he describes it is this it operates in more than one reality at the same time it operates in two universes at the same time so it's very fast okay so really well how does it operate in two you notice I have got a slider charger but the banks are bought it you know I'm going to try that on next week so I just invented a silver quantum machine well so we're talking about a strange world here it's based on the principle of some fun a superposition that is that fundamental particles so called we now know they're not particles really fundamental particles exist in many places at the same time so a quantum computer for example could use all these different bits of all these different universes you might call them to do parallel computations so these things work now my point is this right you say where am I going with all this well is to say matter isn't what it used to be and it used to be pretty straightforward you think it's lumps of stuff and they've got mass and they've got position and they've got velocity and that's what everything is made of but that's all collapse whatever there is out there does not at the same time have location and velocity that's two of the things gone jelly have mass well no it's the Higgs boson as we now all know which gives mass to particles and the Higgs boson is an infinite field through which particles pass and gain mass on the way I'm not making this up I'm just crushing Stephen Hawking and anybody who was interested in quantum physics so the philosophical point behind this is if you ask what is real it doesn't look as though materialism is a going concern even though it's very fashionable in philosophy and it looks as though mind is much more important to what we call reality than you might have thought in fact the reality that we see that we think here we are people in a room this reality would not exist at all without minds so it's not the case that this reality would exist and then the mind is some sort of almost superficial extra item which is just produced by the brain that's not the case it's that this whole reality wouldn't exist as we experience it without mind so what Stephen Hawking says at the end of all this it's a very readable book oh nice pictures in and what he says at the end of all this is we think that we are products of history there's been a long history of the universe and we have come along at the end or well perhaps not the end but further a long time after the beginning anyway but he says the truth is that our minds have constructed history history hasn't constructed us we have constructed history and there are quantum physicists luck John Wheeler very famous quantum physicist who says actually the Big Bang didn't exist I'll tell somebody thought of it that is a rather extreme view but an idea who said that's just what I've been waiting for right the Big Bang wouldn't exist unless somebody thought of it and that's somebody guess what was God so without some mind and it's not going to be my mind you know John wheelers sounds fantastic because if how could some human mind bring the Big Bang into existence well complicated ways of trying to explain that but the fact is that it's much more straightforward because they know it's true the Big Bang as we think of it happening we imagine it happening so we as it were imagine we were there we have computers to draw pictures which we can look out and save a little bit like this perhaps that's all a construct of our minds but there is a reality behind what our mind constructs and that reality itself exists because it is observed by a cosmic mind and there's the idealist view there is one supreme mind without which material things could not exist and what I've been saying is look nobody can deny that controversy's works it's the most beautiful predictable fantastically elegant theory that's ever been conceived by the human mind but what it tells you if you believe it is the world is nothing like what we can imagine it's really weird so what is reality really we don't know well that's a bit of a disappointing conclusion but that don't know entails also that it is mind like that it we can't even think of reality of matter of material universe without thinking of a mind which conceives it and that's idealism idealism is the view that matter depends upon mind for its existence let me try to state that rather carefully matter the existence of solid particles having a location in space and appearing to us as colored solid etc that those things would not exist without mind and I think that is true there would not so if you say what would exist without mind we don't know but it's something very weird perhaps is beyond our imagination Martin Rees who was the astronomer roll has said recently will never understand reality exception that human one just can't understand it well if that's true at least materialism can't be true because materialists claim to understand reality and say it's got to be like this however most philosophers and I think of a manual account when I say most philosophers write Immanuel Kant was still a standard set text in all British universities the world over probably said that well reality is mind like he called it no ruminal remember he distinguished phenomenal reality how things appear from no terminal reality from the Greek mouths which remind mind like reality and if you remember that you see Kant was an idealist he was Saudia that without mind there can't be a material world now we now know I would submit in our case that there wouldn't be a world like the one we see without our minds the idealists expands this and so there wouldn't be a reality at all without mind now I think that helps to explain how values can really exist so let me devote just so a few minutes that to saying how it helps in my last talk I said well values are in morality you have a sense of obligation here's something which I feel I ought to do its objective I don't make it up it impresses itself upon me and that's something that appears to be part of objects of reality but it's not physical what how could it exist at all laws of nature the same as I've said how can they exist with a material universe at all and similarly in our experience of beauty of what is communicated through art and through the beauties of nature if that's objective does depend wholly upon me how how can beauty exist well if you think as an idealist of a cosmic mind which makes reality real because reality becomes a way of expressing the nature of mind my mind's needs to be expressed you have nothing you have in mind which just exists on its own without being expressed just as our bodies express our characters so the universe expresses the mind of God this cosmic mentality and if you think of it like that then you can say well a value let's start with a human case something you value something you think is valuable is your thought of a state which may or may not exist but which would be good if it did exist so a value is most easily conceived of as a thought of something that it would be good if it existed that's a very mental property it's not it's not a physical property philosophers call it intentionality intentionality is the property of a thought something that exists in a human mind which is a thought of the future or of something which may or may not exist that's the intention of a thorez about something intentionality is about nerves thoughts are about things Bartley again said this I mean he said thoughts are things that exist in human minds they do exist but they don't just exist as present realities like a glass of water I mean so that's a glass of water that exists that's what it is but it's not about anything she's like what's that glass of water about it's not about anything if it was a work of art however this was a work about there probably is someone then you might say what's it about what's the meaning of it what's the point that why I do that I was feeling up when I know I would say that my son is an artist and he does things which means something I'm sure that wonderful please do not like to say I can't see the meaning what's it about so I was about something that sense of a bachelor's is a mental property it's only mines which can be about anything or they can make things which are about something like thoughts my I'm just losing you know electromagnetic vibrations from but actually they're about something well as though I think they are anyway so that's intentionality so a value you can conceive intelligibly as the thought of a mind and if there is a cosmic mind the mind of God then the thoughts in the mind of God can be those things which appear to us as values Beauty truth goodness yes moral obligation it is true after all that moral obligation is the voice of God we may mistake that pose we may think the things are obligatory when they're really not we're very familiar with that but at least you can see how there could be real objective obligations if these were the demands or the ideals of a mind which had created the universe in order that somebody might help to realize those ideas so again this is not a variable more view of God you're not saying God is a person who has a small source of weird ideas that he might or might not tell you about you're thinking of a mind which conceives ideals which it becomes a human duty to help to realize compassion and justice and you're thinking of a mind which creates the universe in which it is a human obligation to strive for beauty and for the patterning of sensory experiences so they create meaning in the minds of those who observe them and that makes sense of art immorality and not only that it makes sense of laws of nature too so what's a law of nature well if you could think of a cosmic mind which formulated ideas of how the universe was going to go then it's obvious that you could have laws before there is a universe fact you'd have to so that makes sense of that I have to admit that I I say this quite often to conferences of scientists quantum physicists in particular and they don't get it I must admit this that because it's not physics see I've gone beyond physics and conferences of physicists don't like people going beyond physics they do like to think the physics can explain everything really so if it's not a physical explanation they don't really think it's an explanation at all so there's that question if you say are well the reason the universe is the way it is and reason that you have moral obligations and a sense of beauty etc the reason you have these senses that experience mediates some more profound reality beyond it that can't that's not a physical reason it doesn't count as an explanation so there's the big question for an idealist is idealism and explanation of anything it doesn't tell you like the law of gravity tells you exactly how objects are going to believe behave it doesn't enable you to predict anything but I would make this distinction between two sorts of exploration I think there are more than two but I'll end by just distinguishing two nomological expedition and Axia logical explanation Namah logical explanation is law like explanation and scientists usually use this they say I will explain why water boils at the temperature does by in terms of a law which tells you when liquids turn into gases and why they do so so it's a lower life expression giving laws of how physical things behave and that isn't that is a form of explanation of course very very important but there's also axial logical exploration Axia is the Greek from Valley an axial logical explanation is explanation in terms of value you say the reason this happens is because somebody valued it and wanted it to happen and it's a perfectly good explanation so if you say I miss an embarrassing question but why did you come here today don't answer that but part of the explanation and it'll be an explanation is I wanted to hear something about idealism you agree that would be an explanation I wanted to know what idealism was but you're not talking about laws there there's a law that made you come here you're just saying this was something I thought would be worthwhile and I did it for that reason so it explains why you're here I'm most human affairs are explained in terms of value to understanding another person you have to understand what they value what they think is worthwhile and what what makes them think they can get it by doing what they're doing humans aren't really good at that but it's still an axial logical explanation so why can't you have an axial logical explanation of the universe it's not going to tell you anything about gravity it's not going to have you to predict anything it's not law like but it says the universe exists because some mind conceived good things that could only come about through the existence of this universe and created the universe for that reason that's the value now of course to believe that you have to believe it it is a value might be a big leap for some people and but it makes sense as an exploration it doesn't have to explain everything but it adds to your understanding of the universe the universe exists in order to produce moral values values and beauty and things that human beings can strive for and I think that is a form of exploration so I conclude this morning's lecture by saying idealism says that there is an ultimate axial logical explanation of the universe that adds to our understanding and whereas if you start as a materialist and you say somehow consciousness comes about accidentally from material particle getting together but there's no reason for it and we don't know how it comes about explanation seems to have failed at that point whereas if you look at an axial logical explanation you can say the whole development of the brain and the central nervous system and life on Earth and perhaps in many other places too came about in order to realize values of moral striving creative understanding of beauty those are the sorts of things that are of ultimate value and maybe the universe exists in order to realize those well I think that would add a very important external element and that's what our deal ism is matter exists to realize the unfolding of the nature of mind there is no hard problem of how mind comes out of matter there are lots of problems about the brain of course but it's not a problem to say without a material world Minds could not communicate they wouldn't be able to have friendship or any of the relations that people have so there's my case for idealism with a little bit of physics thrown in but it's really philosophy that I have been talking about and in my next talk we're going to talk about a special sort of knowledge which adds to this set of experiences which mediate something beyond experience and its knowledge of persons both in oneself and in others and that's another dimension of experience which is transcendent which goes beyond the sensory but it has to come through the sensory so they are I think we've got ten minutes for questions or comments if you'd like to make them you

Channel: Gresham College

Views: 46,173

Keywords: gresham, gresham college, gresham college lecture, gresham lecture, gresham talk, divinity, gresham divinity, divinity lecture, theology, theology talk, christian theology, deism, idealism, empiricism, philosophy, religion, religious philosophy, keith ward, professor ward, gresham professor, Professor (Job Title), Reality (Quotation Subject)

Id: qCoemRRI3A8

Length: 54min 25sec (3265 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 17 2015

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Amazing video! Don't quite know how I missed this one...

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Someone please clip the segment from roughly 10min for duration 2min. (If I make time, I'll try to be more specific.)

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It's hilarious! (For the right reasons.) Much respect for Prof Ward.

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