Reading through Wednesday’s You Get Mail post, it struck me that Coburn's position was closer to Subjective Idealism, rather than Solipsism as a couple of people had suggested. Although Subjective Idealism and Solipsism share at least one weakness.
Subjective Idealism, popularized by Bishop Berkeley, is the philosophical view that there is no such thing as physical matter. Only the mind or spirit, and not physical matter, constitutes reality. From PhiloSophos.com:
Idealism, in terms of metaphysics, is the philosophical view that the mind or spirit constitutes the fundamental reality. It has taken several distinct but related forms. Among them are Objective and Subjective idealism. Objective idealism accepts common sense Realism (the view that material objects exist) but rejects Naturalism (according to which the mind and spiritual values have emerged from material things), whereas subjective idealism denies that material objects exist independently of human perception and thus stands opposed to both realism and naturalism.
You might recognize some of Coburn's arguments there (although mercifully not his verbosity or pomposity). OK, but why would we care? Well, it provides cover for a whole host of woo beliefs, for starters. For example, it’s perfect for believers in The Secret. If everything really is just the mind, then it’s a small step to believe that really really wanting something badly enough can actually make it happen.
So could it be true? Could it be that everything that we think of as physical, is actually just thought? Well, Samuel Johnson famously refuted Berkeley by kicking a rock and stating "I refute it thus." His point being that his toe hurt, so it must be real. (Or maybe the rock didn’t move because it was too big – take your pick.) Jimmy Blue has his own refutation: "Find a busy road, step in front of a speeding bus. If you live, tell us how 'real' it felt."
The thing is, strictly speaking, those arguments don’t refute Idealism. Your toe hurts when you kick the rock, but that could be because your mind imagines your non-material toe hurting. What these arguments do show is that there really is no difference between the Subjective Idealistic and the Materialistic worlds: your toe hurts (or you are killed when you jump in front of that bus), regardless. Or to put it another way, Subjective Idealism is unfalsifiable - if it were false, there is no test we could perform that it would fail. So the argument is essentially a waste of time.
Here’s another example that shows why it makes no difference. The Secret proponents such as Joe Vitale like to say that the law of attraction (LOA) is a law just like gravity. OK, let’s think about that. NASA uses the law of gravitation and Newton’s equations to calculate velocity and trajectories to get its rockets to go where it wants them to go. Let’s say they want to send a probe to Mars, to send back pictures of the Mars surface and other scientific data. Perhaps they’ll get the calculations correct. Or perhaps they’ll get them wrong (for example by confusing imperial with metric units). Of course, getting the calculations right or wrong means different results:
- If they get the calculations correct, then the probe will land safely and they’ll get back the nice pictures and other scientific data they want. And that’s true whether there really is a physical planet Mars all those millions of miles away, or whether Mars is really just a product of our minds. We either get actual pictures of an actual physical planet, or we get what our minds construct as physical pictures of a physical planet. To us, there appears no difference. Either way we learn the same things about the planet Mars.
- If they get the calculations wrong then the spacecraft will crash on the planet’s surface (or miss it altogether), and they’ll get nothing back. And that is true whether there really is a physical planet Mars all those millions of miles away, or whether Mars is really just a product of our minds. Either our physical selves don’t get the pictures of the physical Mars and so we learn nothing, or our non-physical minds don’t get back any images of what looks like a planet. Either way we learn nothing.
So with real scientific laws, like gravity, it makes no difference whether what we see is real matter or whether it is all a product of a minds. The results are the same and repeatable both ways. Likewise with non laws, like The Secret's LOA, it makes no difference either. Wishing for that bike won’t make it magically appear. And that is true whether it is a real physical bike or a construct of our minds that we just think is a physical bike. We won’t be getting the experience of riding that bike either way.