Reality is the tapestry of perception

Reality is the tapestry of perception

Dr. Helen Yetter-Chappell

The materialist worldview robs reality of its colour, temperature, smell, leaving us with a picture that is radically at odds with our common sense understanding of the world. Helen Yetter-Chappell proposes an alternative: reality is made of experiences, woven together into an experiential tapestry that persists even when we aren’t looking. This essay is the latest instalment of our series ‘The Return of Idealism,’ in partnership with the Institute of Art and Ideas (IAI). It was first published by the IAI on 20 May 2024.

God is traditionally taken to be an omni-benevolent, omnipotent, omniscient agent. But none of these features are essential for God’s role in sustaining your chocolate cake. God could harbor occasional wicked thoughts or be unable to perform miracles and still sustain your chocolate cake. And God needn’t have beliefs (and hence knowledge) to sustain the cake. What is essential—at least on the view embodied by the limerick—is simply God’s sensory experiences: The experiences of brownness, chocolatiness, sweetness, and sponginess, as well as the structural relations between these experiences. I proposed peeling away the inessential attributes for a more minimal non-theistic form of idealism.

God’s mind is like a “black box” to us. For the traditional theistic idealist, a huge amount of work is concealed from us inside of this black box. Non-theistic idealism invites us to peek inside the black box and uncover the mysteries of how it all fits together.

I suggest that reality is a sort of “experiential tapestry” woven out of experiential threads. The central work is to explain (i) what makes up the threads, (ii) how the threads are structured or “woven” into a world, and (iii) how we relate to the experiential tapestry… and, finally, (iv) to show that we don’t need to abandon our scientific worldview to do so.

The word 'tapestry' caught my attention. I think I've come across it either in NDE or other spiritual experiences, where each of our human lives is a thread making up a tapestry (in the context of multiple past lives for example).

Perhaps tapestry it is the metaphor du jour.

What Does God Add to an Idealist World?

Helen Yetter-Chappell

There has been increasing interest among contemporary philosophers in nontheistic forms of ontological idealism, in contrast to the canonical theistic idealism of Berkeley. Given the ontological role that God plays in Berkeley’s metaphysics, it’s natural to think that questions of the value-impact of God will be greater in an idealistic context. Thus, it seems fruitful to ask: What does God add to (or detract from) an idealist world? This paper assesses the benefits and costs that come from moving to an idealism which is not (essentially) theistic. I explicate various dimensions along which theistic and nontheistic idealisms differ. Most of these metaphysical differences are surprisingly value-neutral. The one respect in which God’s (in)existence makes a distinctive value-impact within an idealistic context is in the intelligibility of reality. This is a variant of what Lougheed (2020) calls the Complete Understanding Argument. But the argument takes on a new significance within the idealistic context. Here, the inability to fully comprehend God doesn’t merely pose a challenge for understanding the God-part of reality, or the occasions on which God interferes with the naturalistic causal order. It presents a challenge to understanding the very nature of reality, itself. Finally, I consider what sort of value difference this is, distinguishing between two sorts of value that God’s existence might confer: value for a world (including its inhabitants) and value for a theory.

Nontheistic Idealism

On the “always experiencing” reading, what’s essential to God’s role in sustaining the world is not his beliefs, desires, intentions, or goodness, but simply his continual experiencing of it. Suppose we do away with everything that’s inessential for playing this world constituting/sustaining role. We’re left with the greenness of the tree, the shape, the smell of pine, the roughness of the bark, the prickliness of the needles, and so on. But reality is not a disjoint set of colors, shapes, and textures. And God, in sustaining reality, does not have a set of disjoint, disconnected experiences. Stripping away the features of God that are not essential for his world sustaining role, we are left with a phenomenal unity in which all the experiences of reality are fused into a single, coherent whole. On the resulting view, physical reality is a vast, impersonal phenomenal unity:

a unity of consciousness, weaving together sensory experiences6of colors, shapes, sounds, smells, sizes, etc. into the trees, chairs, black holes, and central nervous systems that fill the world around us. (Yetter-Chappell 2018, 68)

Just as God doesn’t merely experience the world from my perspective, or from all human perspectives, but from all perspectives, so too this vast phenomenal unity will include all possible veridical perspectives. We might describe this as a kind of God-minus: Berkeley’s God, minus everything save his world-constituting experiences. Alternatively, we could think of this phenomenal unity as a kind of tapestry, in which the phenomenal threads of reality are woven together into the structure of reality.