Berkeley and the Mind of God

I tackle a troubling question of interpretation: Does Berkeley\u27s God feel pain? Berkeley\u27s anti-skepticism seems to bar him from saying that God does not feel pain, for this would mean there is something to reality \u27beyond\u27 the perceptible. Yet Berkeley\u27s concerns for common sense and orthodoxy bar him from saying that God does have an idea of pain. For Berkeley to have an idea of pain just is to suffer it, and an immutable God cannot suffer. Thus solving the pain problem requires answers to further questions: What are God\u27s perceptions, for Berkeley? What are God\u27s acts of will? How are the two related and how is God\u27s mind related to humans\u27 as a result? I argue that Berkeley\u27s God does not feel pain by way of answering these questions. I also argue that saying so leaves Berkeley saddled with neither skepticism nor heterodoxy. Berkeley is able to preserve God\u27s immutability, God\u27s personality, and reality\u27s not lying across some \u27veil of perception.\u27 Berkeley can dissolve the pain problem since God does not perceive passively as we do. What it means to say God \u27perceives\u27 is just that God\u27s acts of will are intentional. Yet neither God nor reality is thereby placed across some skeptical chasm. God\u27s acts of will contain their content in virtue of and are of necessity made manifest in each human being\u27s perceptions. The \u27real world\u27 is our world: the contents of God\u27s mind are simply made plain to human beings by way of their experience of the laws of nature. God does not occupy the same perspective with respect to God\u27s own mind, however: God is a being purely active. By way of understanding the laws of nature as a language, Berkeley renders God more personal than other conceptions we might call to mind. Thus Berkeley\u27s God is not a blind \u27force of nature,\u27 despite God\u27s not feeling pain. God is rather a personal mind which continuously communicates with humans by way of symbols, namely human perceptions. Insofar as human beings are passive, this is the way with which we must be communicated. The cost to my interpretation is that Berkeley cannot literally vindicate the utterances of the vulgar : talk of God\u27s feeling pain, delighting in righteousness or grieving over wickedness is at best metaphorical and at worst misleading. Strictly speaking the only contents of God\u27s mind are God\u27s perceptions and God\u27s acts of will, and neither class of contents contains such feelings

Book Reviews

Music in Shakespearean Tragedy (F. W. Sternfeld) (Reviewed by John P. Cutts, Wayne State University)Picasso\u27s Guernica: The Genesis of a Painting (Rudolf Arnheim) (Reviewed by Victor H. Miesel, The University of Michigan)Sir Constantine Huygens and Britain: 1596-1687: A Pattern of Cultural Exchange (A. G. H. Bachrach) (Reviewed by S. A. Golden, Wayne State University)James Gibbons Huneker: Critic of the Seven Arts (Arnold T. Schwab) (Reviewed by David W. Beams, Columbia College, Columbia University)Borodin (Serge Dianin (tr. Robert Lord)) (Reviewed by L. E. Cuyler, The University of Michigan)A First-Draft Version of Finnegans Wake, \u27 (David Hayman) (Reviewed by Fred H. Higginson, Kansas State University)A Second Census of Finnegans Wake : An Index of the Characters and Their Roles\u27 (Adaline Glasheen) (Reviewed by Fred H. Higginson, Kansas State University

Knothole March 4, 1992 Vol 44 No 20

The mission of The Knothole publication is to provide its readers with writings that are both stimulating and contemporary; to inform its students of clubs, events, and off-campus happenings; to challenge a world driven by progress to uncover the truth about current environmental policies and innovations; and to express such ideas, ingeniously and collectively.https://digitalcommons.esf.edu/knothole/1554/thumbnail.jp

Mechanistic Solidarity and the Diminution of Conscience

One of the main modes of other-directedness that has only been indirectly linked with anomie and that is the technique and technology of the modern machine both as a metaphor for mechanism in semi-conscious working states of affairs the public life of our large and general social role as one of the others and one of the mass producer and consumer but also the machine as a physical enabler a force in the material world wherein it alleviates suffering with a view to assuaging anomie The machine houses and promotes a new set of norms It is never normless although often mindless It cannot suffer itself It does not feel the wind chill and though it breaks down it does not die It represents in its obliviousness to sorrow and to ennui an ideal form for modern humanity We would be as it is Functional able to work and nothing else turned on and off in an instan

Prospectus, December 5, 1979

MAC EXCITES CU; Canteen tries deli; Disposable lighters are like dynamite; Bad weather procedures; MTD raises prices; Across the globe; In the nation; Around the state; Letters to the editor: Response to Scott, Article clarified, Iran: no blackmail; Campus Question: Will MTD increase affect you; Ski Club celebrates; Promotion committee hopes to rejuvenate downtown Urbana; Tooth Buzz; \u27A Christmas Carol\u27 off key; Reviews: \u27Mac\u27 outclassed itself; Classifieds; Faculty Focus: Sex at high noon; Comebacks become cardiac Cobras trademark; Orange Fever catching CU; Women hit highs and lowshttps://spark.parkland.edu/prospectus_1979/1001/thumbnail.jp

StreamBed: capacity planning for stream processing

StreamBed is a capacity planning system for stream processing. It predicts, ahead of any production deployment, the resources that a query will require to process an incoming data rate sustainably, and the appropriate configuration of these resources. StreamBed builds a capacity planning model by piloting a series of runs of the target query in a small-scale, controlled testbed. We implement StreamBed for the popular Flink DSP engine. Our evaluation with large-scale queries of the Nexmark benchmark demonstrates that StreamBed can effectively and accurately predict capacity requirements for jobs spanning more than 1,000 cores using a testbed of only 48 cores.Comment: 14 pages, 11 figures. This project has been funded by the Walloon region (Belgium) through the Win2Wal project GEPICIA

Imagination, Thought Experiments, and Personal Identity

Should we descry the nature of the self from thought experiments? Shaun Nichols says ‘maybe,’ but only if we use thought experiments that do not recruit the indexical “I” (non-I-recruiting). His reason is that the psychology of “I” perforce mandates that imagination responds to thought experiments that recruit it (I-recruiting) peculiarly. Here, I consider whether he is correct about non-I-recruiting personal identity thought experiments. I argue positively using the same framework, i.e., considering the underlying psychology