One such way an idealist distinguishes from a real and hallucination experience is through the fact that it is not just the immediate experience but also past experiences which identify ‘real’ and ‘hallucination’ experiences. This means that often in a hallucination experience you will not be able to link events with any other things that have taken place in your life meaning that it can’t be a real experience. Another method in which idealists use to differentiate between the two experiences is through the knowledge that real experiences are predictable as we tend to know what is going to happen next or have experienced similar things, whereas a hallucination can be wild and unpredictable especially without having any past experiences to relate it back to.
Idealists also like to use the idea that when you are in a normal experience and state your sense data will be perfectly normal, however when you are in a hallucination experience your sense data becomes unpredictable and irregular. An example of this can be related to the words ‘my guitar’ as the words are a convenient way of referring to a repeated pattern of sensory experiences. Despite this fact, the argument can be seen as flawed as if you were in an hallucination it would be hard to know whether your sensory data is irregular.
In conclusion idealists distinguish between real and hallucination experiences in a variety of ways, the key reason was, by showing us how a real experience is connected to a past experience meaning we can’t be hallucinating.
Access the view that only minds and ideas exist
To access the view that only minds and ideas exist, we must look at what the Idealists believe in relation to this. In this essay I hope to sum up the general ideas that only minds and ideas exist.
Idealists have the viewpoint that all experience we gain are of mental representations of the real thing. This means that nothing that we see is actually real, but simply something that is manipulated by our minds to tell us it is a certain object. Idealists also believe that there is no external world as everything is unknowable; from this we can learn that idealists tend to doubt everything.
Another view shared by idealists is the idea that only minds and ideas exist, this means that the outside world doesn’t exist, as only our minds tell us what is around us. It also relates to the idea that we could just be floating minds in a jar, controlled by an evil scientist who triggers our emotions to tell us what to think and feel. It is also believed that we can not have sensory experience unless we have actually experienced that certain thing. This means that we can not believe things that we are told by people unless we ourselves have seen or sensed it, and example of this would be that stars are extremely large, as we ourselves do not know as we have not seen them up close, this means that an idealist would not truly believe that they are large.
In regards to perception idealists have the view that all we can perceive by sense data is ideas, as if we perceive physical objects then those physical objects must be made up entirely of ideas. This means that all our prior knowledge which we have gained through our sense data is simply made up of ideas without exception.
Berkeley who was a main idealist, pointed towards God with his ideas, he also has the view that it is god, not physical objects in which causes our sense experience. And that God has ordered our sense experience to react in a certain way and to certain things that happen to you. He goes on to tell us that God perceives every object all of the time so the world continues to exist when it is unperceived by humans, this links in with his idea that to be is to exist.
In conclusion idealists focus on the idea that only minds and ideas exist by telling us physical things are nothing but representations of things. However there are criticisms of the Idealists views, for example in relation to Berkeleys God theory it is far more acceptable to believe in things that we can physically see and touch rather than hypothesis as an explanation of the cause of our experience
