In his recent post, Alan Fox mentions Samuel Johnson in defense of the existence of external reality. He is referring, of course, to Johnson’s famous criticism of Berkeley’s idealism as described by Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell:
After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley’s ingenious sophistry to prove the non-existence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satsified his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it, “I refute it thus.”
Johnson’s “refutation” has always struck me as weak and based on a misunderstanding of idealism. Did Johnson think that if idealism were true, his foot would pass through the stone unimpeded?
While I accept (provisionally) the existence of the external world, I also think that an idealism in which sight is illusory is surely capable of manifesting an illusory sense of solidity as well. Kicking the stone proved nothing.
Thus I refute Johnson, though I’m sure I’m not the first to do so.
Mike,
I don’t think anyone here is making that argument.
You may have been misled by Alan when he wrote this:
That isn’t Berkeley’s argument.
In fact, I would suggest that illusions are actually an argument against Berkeley’s idealism. If God is planting sensations directly in our minds, then why not do it in an illusion-free way?
KN,
That doesn’t make sense to me. Are you really claiming that we sense motion, but don’t perceive motion, in the case of those illusions?
Neil,
Okay.
It depends on the perceptual system in question. Some are simple. Others, like the human visual system, are staggeringly complex.
I don’t see how this relates to direct perception. Whether a perceptual system is jury-rigged or not seems orthogonal to its complexity, and its complexity (or simplicity) seems orthogonal to whether perception is direct or indirect.
It might help if you could give a hypothetical example of an indirect perceptual system, compare it to a direct perceptual system, and highlight the relevant differences.
Representations can start out simple and then be tweaked and tuned by evolution into more complex forms.
Pretty much. I’m claiming that we’re aware of having the sensations of the same (or similar) kind that we would also be having in cases of (veridical) perception. Non-veridical perception — hallucinations, illusions, dreams, and perceptual errors — is like veridical perception in having a sensory component, of course. But what I’m claiming is that it’s a mistake to say that veridical and non-veridical perception have something in common — some lowest-common factor — and that that lowest-common factor is what is perceived. Illusions and perceptions have similar content but different objects, and we can usually tell what the similarities and differences are.
(This makes illusions different from hallucinations; the person who is hallucinating falsely takes his or her hallucinations to be real, whereas the person undergoing an optical or auditory illusion is aware of the similarity in sensations — in the mental content — but also of the difference in perceptual objects. So hallucinations are much more difficult for direct realism than illusions are.)
Was KN’s memory of the argument reasonable?
Would you like to give your own summary of Berkeley’s argument?
Does Berkeley’s argument persuade you?
One serious difficulty we need to keep track of is when we’re talking in the first-person and second-person discourse of philosophical reflection and when we’re talking in the third-person discourse of cognitive science.
For I can happily say that I directly perceive the objects in my environment, but that the causal processes which underpin this ability are representational.
Whether we endorse a representational account of what the brain is doing is different from whether we endorse a representational account of what the person (the rational animal) is doing.
We might have good reasons for rejecting representationalism in cognitive science in favor of dynamical systems theory, but that theoretical choice will be driven by different considerations than whether we reject representationalism in philosophy of perception.
The past three hundred years of philosophy of mind have been distorted by confusing these two dimensions or levels. We don’t need to do the same thing.
I’ll note that Gibson distinguishes between perception and sensations, with perception (the acquiring of information) prior to sensation.
It’s been a while since I’ve looked closely at Berkeley’s argument (and I’ve only read and taught Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, not Principles of Knowledge), but my rough sense is that he would say that illusions arise when we make errors in judgment about the sensations God causes in our minds. So God causes in our minds the sensation of the two lines and arrows in the Muller-Lyer illusion, and we mistakenly judge the lines to be of different lengths.
In my view, the objection to Berkeley’s idealism isn’t that sometimes we experience illusions, but that his explanation of perceptual error conflates the distinction between perceptual error and inferential or conceptual error. Mistaking the lines for being of unequal lengths, or seeing dots as moving when they aren’t, or seeing the opossum as a very large rat (which has happened to me a few times!), seems to me in a different class of error than committing an informal fallacy.
More generically: a whole host of philosophers, including both “empiricists” (Locke, Berkeley, Hume) and “rationalists” (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz), emphatically accepted the sensory-cognitive continuum (SCC) — the thesis that there is no difference in kind between perceiving and thinking. Kant was the first major philosopher to insist that there are two distinct capacities involved in empirical cognition, individually necessary and jointly sufficient, and faulted his predecessor for failing to grasp this:
The major problem for philosophy of perception in the post-Kantian tradition has been to explain how these two capacities — understanding and sensibility, or in Brandom’s terms, sapience and sentience — are related to one another. I’m a direct realist about mere sentience (what higher animals have) and sapientized sentience (what we have), in that both ordinary animals and us rational animals perceive the features of objects in our environment. There is no further epistemic barrier between mental contents and the sensed particulars. This is because perception is necessarily embodied; to perceive is to be in a favorable embodied-cum-practical orientation with regard to motivationally salient stimuli in the ambient environment. The occurrence of sensory episodes — sensations, episodes of sensory consciousness — is necessary but insufficient for perception.
But one major difference between the merely sentient animals and us rational animals, with our sapientized sentience, is that we can, by virtue of our rational capacities, step back from our perceptual encounters (when they frustrate our aims) and manipulate our encounters in order to discern the various causal powers at work producing our perceptual encounters — that is, we can inquire.
I’d say that we indirectly perceive electrons.
Synesthesia.
keiths:
KN:
petrushka:
You both skipped the most important part:
I don’t think the distinction makes any sense. Where is the perceiver?
KN,
But we don’t do so willfully, and there’s no reason under idealism to suppose that arrowhead “sensations” should systematically cause us to misjudge the length of connecting line “sensations”. Even if there were, why wouldn’t an omnipotent God compensate for the error by altering the initial sensations so that our final judgment turned out to be correct?
The realist, on the other hand, can explain the illusion handily as the result of a flawed, material perceptual apparatus.
petrushka,
At the end of the perceptual process. I think of the perceiver as being the parts of the brain that act on the “completed” perception. The dividing line is fuzzy, of course, but nevertheless real. For example, the retinal ganglia are clearly on one side, and the prefrontal cortex on the other. The ganglia are clearly part of the perceptual system, and I would argue that the prefrontal cortex clearly is not.
KN,
That puts you at odds with Neil, who claims that (direct) perception is not representational.
For obvious reasons, no one is suggesting that people need to create external representations in order to perceive things. Internal representations are the subject of the dispute.
Let me put in terms of Dennett’s personal/subpersonal distinction — which I like, though I’m not delighted with his anti-realist tendencies (e.g. to view these are mere “stances”).
I think that direct realism as a thesis at the personal level — that there’s no epistemic mediation between perceptual intentional content and the objects of that content — is compatible with representationalism as a thesis a the subpersonal level — that there is causal mediation (and plenty of it!) between the neurophysiological processes on which perceptual intentional content partially supervenes and the physical objects.
So, the absorption and emission of photons by the magnesium atoms at the center of the chlorophyll molecules, in relation with the cones in the primate retina, explains why I see the leaves as green (together with my having mastered the use of the word “green” or some equivalent) — but when I see the green leaves, I do not first perceive my own sensations and then infer or judge that the cause of the sensation is something external to myself, but instead I directly perceive that the leaves are green.
I might need to posit the existence of representations in my brain as part of the causal, subpersonal story but not as part of the epistemic, personal story. Keeping those two stories distinct, and yet also having both of them, is central to my overarching project.
That might be a bit hasty.
It is a standard claim of direct perception that there are no representations. But I think the anti-representation crowd go a bit too far with this. They talk of picking up information. As I see it, information is representational.
I disagree with typical representationist views, such as that we are really looking at representations. However, there is certainly a sense in which perception is itself representational.
I hope that doesn’t muddy the waters too much.
[Hmm, I see that KN has just said what seems to be the about same thing, though in more of a philosopher’s way of putting it.]
Yes, I am terribly verbose! 🙂
I interpret Johnson’s refutation as a rejection of the primacy of mind. The refutation is not philosophical (or scientific), it is active.
In directing blood down the leg, Johnson is compensating for the imbalance of blood flow in Berkeley’s body.
This is interesting! You might be onto something here!
All these years I just assumed that Johnson was an idiot who didn’t get what Berkeley was up to. But now I’m thinking, wait a minute, that doesn’t make sense. Johnson was a smart person, well-educated — it’s nearly certain that he comprehended Berkeley’s argument perfectly well!
So what did Johnson think he was doing?
I’ll ask my friends who work in early modern philosophy and report back!
A similar origin, I think — both are rooted in social interactions and cultural traditions. I think morality, or ethics, is a bit broader than that, though, because it transcends the parochial, local culture, and derives from a more universal human perception of well-being or threat or fear. The eating of children is almost universally considered a horror, but the eating of lutefisk is only a horror in certain cultures. (Not to say that morality itself is universal, but its underlying ethical inspirations derive from a more fundamental, and less arbitrary source than do particular musical tastes)
When someone such as Berkely states triumphantly that his claims are irrefutable, I can only acknowledge that they are untestable.
I’ve racked my brain for a charitable interpretation of Johnson’s “refutation”, but I just can’t find one.
My hunch is that he did it on the spur of the moment, knowing that it would impress his friend Boswell, who — let’s face it — was a bit of a sycophant. Like KN, I suspect Johnson was smart enough to recognize his error, but perhaps only afterwards. By then he may have been reluctant to admit his mistake and disappoint the eager Boswell.
The appeal of Johnson’s action is obvious. Instead of a scholarly disquisition on idealism, we get a swift kick in the stone(s). It’s got a thunderclap quality, like the Zen master’s slap to the head.
And like Thales falling into the well, it also shows an ethereal, impractical thinker (Berkeley) being undone by mundane reality (the kick and the stone).
Too bad it doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
llanitedave,
I know that other people have made that claim on his behalf, but did Berkeley himself ever boast that his claims were irrefutable?
KN,
You perceive that they’re green, but I would argue that you don’t perceive it directly. After all, you don’t interact directly with the leaves, you interact with the photons reflected from them. (Note that is as true at the “personal” level as it is at the “subpersonal”.) If someone were to create and direct an identical stream of photons into your eyes (with a hologram, say), you would still perceive green leaves even if there were no leaves there at all.
This is not just a quibble, because it shows that there really is “epistemic mediation” between you and the leaves. And not just the photons themselves, but your assumptions about their provenance (that they are not coming from a hologram, for example).
Also, you seem to be contradicting yourself. Earlier you said that inference precedes perception:
Now you are saying the opposite — that perception precedes inference:
I don’t think you can make the epistemic story independent of the scientific story.
First, I understand from your earlier comments on “certain philosophers” that you do not agree with naturalizing epistemology by subsuming it under science. Fair enough. But, as with metaphysics and morality, I understand you think that even as philosophy it must be informed by science.
Looking at the cognitive sciences, it seems psychology would be most likely to use terms (types) that were consistent with those used in philosophical epistemology. So we should be able to provide a description of “the same circumstances” which works for models used in both. Then, if psychology used a non-representational model to make successful predictions that contradicted what epistemology said for the same circumstances using a representational model, that would provide criticism for the epistemic model.
Now, you have not referred to psychology; you’ve been relating neuroscience, ie the science of brains, to epistemology. Since psychology uses terms at a different level from neuroscience, comparing predictions between the two levels is not possible in general, since the terms used are not going to be translatable unless one is a reductionist, which you are not, as I understand it.
But even absent reductionism, neuroscience can constrain psychology, in the same way that the chemistry of DNA constrains biological explanations.
If you accept that analogy as applicable to neuroscience/psychology, then my argument can be summarized as follows:
1. Epistemology should be informed by the relevant science.
2. For epistemology, that science is psychology. In particular, epistemology and psychology make predictions which are comparable because they use a comparable vocabulary to talk about people and social situations which would be the terms used in the inputs and outputs of such predictions.
3. Hence epistemology is constrained by the predictions and models of psychology.
4. In some circumstances, psychology is constrained by neuroscience.
5. Hence, in some circumstances, epistemology is constrained by neuroscience.
So there may be cases where one would have to reject a representational model in epistemology because it was inconsistent with neuroscience.
One possible criticism of this is that the term “you” has a different meaning depending on the level of science one using for explanation, eg psychology versus neuroscience. It may not be possible to mix terms like “photons” used in a neuron-scientific sense with terms like “you” a psychological sense.
Another example: Anti-reductionists might say the statement “you would perceive” is trying to use both meanings at once and does not work for that reason.
We’re mixing threads (it’s true I started the mixing) so just to note that my point in the original thread was that it is possible to have knowledge about morality and that differs from knowledge of matters of fact.
When you say “they have the same origin” I am not sure if you are referring to how we know why people do take certain actions in moral situations or how we can know people should take certain actions. I claim knowledge is possible about the should. Now that topic has probably been discussed pretty thoroughly at TSZ; I am not sure if it is worthwhile to get further into it, especially on this thread.
On the other had, if you were referring to knowledge about how people do act, I think the science can help us to have knowledge on this. It seems to be related to our evolution as social animals and subsequent cultural influences. For matters of taste in (say) ice cream flavors, that might also be true at a high level, but I don’t think the details of scientific and cultural explanations would be the same.
Yes, that’s about the direction I’d like to take myself.
A bit of terminology: Peter Strawson, in his 1959 Individuals, introduced a distinction between “descriptive metaphysics” and “revisionary metaphysics”. Here’s the difference: “descriptive metaphysics” merely explicates the basic structure of our conceptual grasp on the world as we experience it, whereas “revisionary metaphysics” proposes changes to that structure (e.g. in light of science).
My view is that we do need both the descriptive metaphysics of everyday experience and the revisionary metaphysics of science, but we must maintain the distinction between them. (This is Sellars’s view, and it’s his contribution to a line of thought that runs from Strawson through Sellars to Dennett’s personal/subpersonal distinction.)
So when I argue for direct realism as a thesis in philosophy of perception, I’m urging that at a claim internal to the descriptive metaphysics of everyday experience. And when I explain how certain parts of that experiential and categorical structure are produced through the massively complicated relations between photons, molecules, neurons, etc., I am drawing on the revisionary metaphysics of science to qualify, modify, revise, and alter the descriptive metaphysics of experience.
That doesn’t mean that the specific assertion, “I directly perceive physical objects” is false, and should be replaced by the assertion, “I directly perceive sensations and indirectly perceive physical objects (e.g. as an inference-to-the-best-explanation or as a highly reliable posit)”.
However, it might — might! — mean that the entire framework within which that claim is true should be superseded by an alternative conceptual framework within which no claim like that occurs, although there are analogous claims such as,
So I would say it is the case both that
(1) “I directly perceive physical objects located in space and time” is true in the descriptive metaphysics of everyday experience
and
(2) “there are causal transactions between motivationally salient stimuli in the environment, the sensory organs whose proper function (as shaped by past natural selection) is to detect changes in those stimuli, and the neurocomputational processes that causally mediate sensory ‘input’ and behavioral ‘output'” is true in the revisionary metaphysics of science.
which does, of course, raise the extremely hard question as to whether (2) is, in some difficult-to-analyze sense, “more true” than (1)? (Sellars thought that it was — in fact, he though that scientific realism just was the view that (2) is “more true” than (1). I’m just not so sure.)
I’m not convinced.
I don’t accept that there is a We inside us, even if there are layers and domains of cortex devoted to talking about greenness, and moralness and meness.
Talking about perceptions has great social utility for hunter gatherers. It allows sharing information vital to safety and to food acquisition. Syntax enables sharing information about times and places not available to immediate perception.
Being able to talk to ourselves seems to be a side effect of the social utility.
But I’m not convinced there’s anything added by surreptitiously adding in an homunculus to do the perceiving.
Reality is necessarily a social construct. Individual brains can be and frequently are defective. I mentioned synesthesia. Others have mentioned optical illusions. There are also hallucinations, auditory, visual and sensory defects, Even without formal science, we become aware that perceptions need to be socially confirmed. From talking about perceptions we build informal models about what is real.
BruceS,
I like your argument for why epistemology might be constrained in some sense by neuroscience. But I think it’s going to be more complex than that.
For one thing — and this is a crucially important point that is, surprisingly, only just now getting some serious attention — in attention to the personal-level of epistemology, psychology, and other forms of self-understanding (art, literature, etc.), there is both the sub-personal story of neuroscience and molecular biology, etc. and the supra-personal story of economics, politics, culture, and so on.
I’m not one of those philosophers who treats the personal as “foundational” in any strong sense or as “original,” certainly not as “autonomous”. Though I do take the understanding/explanation distinction fairly seriously. So any understanding we develop about the personal — about meaning, intentionality, consciousness, etc. — is going to be severely constrained by, and continually revised in light of, the explanations we generate at both the neurocomputational and sociocultural levels.
There are two temptations to be resisted here, I think. One is to say that the personal is “foundational” to the other two, in that causal explanation is itself an activity undertaken by rational agents, and so the account of rational agency has a methodological priority over all causal explanations. (Non-philosophers are not going to encounter this view very much, but there are hints of it in the mind-first view that gets defended at Uncommon Descent. It’s a prominent view within the academic humanities; it’s how we sublimate our science-envy.) The other is to say that meaning, intentionality, and other personal-level concepts are mere epiphenomena, or fossils left over from previous stages of inquiry, and we should leave them behind as we develop better and better neurocomputational and/or sociocultural explanations. (If you reverse the “emotional polarity” on the second view, you get the familiar worry that neurocomputational and/or sociocultural explanations are “dehumanizing” or “alienating”.)
But neither view is I think, quite right. Both views correctly distinguish between the kinds of self-understanding mediated by philosophy, literature and art from the kinds of causal explanations produced the natural and social sciences, but they draw the wrong inferences from this distinction. Rather, thinking that understanding has methodological priority over explanation is consistent with thinking that explanation has ontological priority over understanding.
That is, we can accept that, if neurocomputational and sociocultural explanations conflict with traditional sources of self-understanding, then those explanations have a default (but defeasible) authority over traditional sources of self-understanding. And we can affirm that while at the same time accepting that we wouldn’t even have any deep knowledge of causal mechanisms, whether subpersonal or supra-personal, if it were not for our cognitive interests as embodied, finite, rational beings capable of norm-governed, collaborative empirical inquiry.
On the OP — I asked a friend of mine who works in Leibniz and Newton what he knew about “the Johnson incident,” and all he knew is what we all know — that, so far as we can tell, Johnson thought that Berkeley was attacking common sense.
I find this extremely difficult to believe, because Berkeley clearly, obviously, takes himself to be defending common-sense. And if you’re going to argue that a philosopher’s self-understanding is fundamentally flawed, it’s going to take a bit more than just kicking a stone. I have trouble believing that Johnson didn’t understand that.
After I pointed this out, my friend just said, “someone should write a paper on this!” And when someone says to you, “someone should write a paper on this!”, what they mean is, “you should write a paper on this!” So I quickly excused myself from the conversation.
As far as I can see — which isn’t far — this argument is a bit like Last Thursdayism.
How can you test whether it’s written by Shakespeare or someone else having the same name? How can you tell whether the stone is real or whether kicking it is an illusion? What test could you make?
If you can’t see entailments, what difference does it make?
petrushka,
If there are no entailments, then there is no practical difference. However, being a curious sort (in both senses of the word), I’m hoping there is an overlooked entailment that will somehow allow us to settle the question in the future. I’m rooting for realism.
If there is no such entailment, then we’ll just have to accept that the question can’t be resolved.
ETA: Discovering a hitherto unknown inconsistency in either idealism or realism could also resolve it. Interesting question: What would it mean if we discovered inconsistencies in both?
petrushka,
Arguing that there are producers and consumers of perceptions and representations within the brain is not the same as making the homunculus error.
Homunculi are a problem because they are just as complex as what they are supposed to be explaining, leading to an infinite explanatory regress. That doesn’t happen when you view parts of the brain as being involved in perception and other parts as operating on those perceptions.
This is one of those time when I think it is okay to haul out the dictum: nothing makes sense except in the light of evolution.
Gregory take note. Raging evolutionist sighting.
I think there are features of brains that came along for the ride, so to speak, that were not explicitly selected. Music and art being prime examples.
Going way out on a limb, I will contrast individual perception of reality with what I will call a socially informed perception of reality. Consider Newton’s published works with his private musings. We are social creatures, and without feedback, we wander off the rails.
Is this in reply to what you quoted from me or something else I wrote (or someone else wrote)?
I agree with your points in general, but I am not sure how they apply to things I have written.
I would say that that there is a self1 who (that?) is a collection of neural networks and that perceive1 is the interaction of that collection of neural networks with the networks involved in processing photons received by the retina.
And there is a self2 who is a human being/social animal who is perceiving2 a green chair to sit on.
Connecting self1 and self2, if that is possible, is part of the discussion as I understand it.
Those two posts are going to take me some timeto work through. Thanks (meant seriously).
In the mean time, on the off chance that you have not seen it already, you may want to be aware of this warning before leaving your namesake’s books where children might see them.
Kant’s Critique
BruceS,
I don’t see a problem. The sentence “photons make it possible for me to see” seems coherent to me, even if I take ‘me’ in its most prosaic, everyday, personal (vs. “subpersonal”) sense.
ETA: I’m a reductionist, but it also seems perfectly coherent for a nonreductionist to utter that sentence.
KN,
Why is the word “directly” needed here?
Since our topic is direct vs. indirect perception, it seems important to clarify the difference. That’s why I wrote this:
The wording I used in my reply to Petrushka might help explain what I was trying to say. It’s the possible double meaning of the terms “self” (or “you”) and “perceive” that might be a problem.
The reductionist stuff is mean to refer to those who are believe terms or better types of human mentality cannot be reduced to types about brain events. I’m not sure I’m in the camp myself, but I understand many philosophers are, KN among them I believe.
There’s another possibility — what philosophers call a “transcendental argument.” Generically put, a transcendental argument goes like this: F is a pervasive feature of human experience. But unless G were necessarily the case, F would not even be possible. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe that G.
There’s a transcendental argument for realism. If there’s interest I’ll post it later on. Some folks don’t find it terribly convincing, but I think it’s correct.
BruceS,
I get all that, but I still don’t see an incoherence in a sentence like “without photons, I can’t see.” It seems as coherent as saying “without light, I can’t see.” The “I” in both cases is the everyday “I”.
Descending from “light” to “photons” doesn’t obligate me to descend from “I” to “the collection of atoms commonly known as ‘keiths'”.
Am I being taken as a reductionist or anti-reductionist here?
I think of myself as anti-reductionist, but I think there are at least two different kind of irreducibility: there’s the irreducibility of the vocabulary of agency, which is inherently normative or prescriptive, and then there’s the vocabulary of empirical explanation — and there there’s the irreducibility of one kind of empirical explanation to another (e.g. the irreducibility of biology to physics).
So I don’t think we can eliminate the vocabulary of agency — the personal-level, the level of culturally-mediated self-understanding — it’s just that I don’t think it should be treated as hermetically sealed off from the causal explanations of sub-personal and supra-personal mechanisms. (And there are lots of philosophers who think it should be — Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and other people working in phenomenology.)
I’m still trying to figure out what Berkeley thought he was onto.
If it has anything to do with thoughts and ideas about things being placed there by a deity; to what end? Given the history of bloody sectarian warfare – something Berkeley would very likely have known – what would a deity gain by that procedure, given that human minds are so screwed up and fallible? Why not hit them in the face with reality? Apparently Berkeley is still under the influence of Aquinas when it comes to “trustable” sources of knowledge.
What would be the program of thinking under idealism as compared with realism? Under a program of idealism, do we seek to understand a deity and thereby look inside? How do we validate such thoughts – again, recognizing explicitly bloody sectarian history?
And how does such a program of thinking under idealism compare with the programs of thinking about, say, mathematics. Mathematics certainly has roots in the measurements of things around us, but in this case, how does idealism compare with thinking about things like the Continuum Hypothesis? Back in Berkeley’s time, issues of differentiation and integration– e.g., adding up “infinite amounts of nothing to produce something” – were testing the limits of conceptual understanding. Where would such ideas come from if they don’t exist in a real world?
Also, somewhere along the line of philosophical discourse, the notions of “Idealism” and Realism” switched places. Plato attributed realism to those pure forms of geometry that we think about when we reason about the properties of those forms.
So what was Berkeley thinking about in his promotion of idealism? I suspect Johnson was just as puzzled.
I’m planning to do something along those lines on my own blog, over the next few days. Then I’ll mention it here (or perhaps start a new thread).
Well, that’s open to question. Being good at story telling – making music, poetry, singing – might make you attractive to the opposite sex and thus you get runaway sexual selection. Homo erectus may have had language ability, Homo neanderthalensis certainly did. Interesting PDF here
He was a Bishop. So it is not implausible that there is some special pleading there.
The idea, as I understand it, was based on the view that we receive inputs from the world and use those to determine what the world is like. So Berkeley was arguing that the “of the world” part plays no role. All you need is the inputs, and those might just as well come directly from God.
Berkeley is also known for his opposition to the idea of abstract objects.