Dominus Paradoxum

Of course, this he by no means proves, and this hidden assumption is the the lynch-pin of his whole argument. And anyway, I do not accept his premises. It does not follow from the fact that something is unimaginable that it is therefore impossible. We cannot imagine a non-euclidean space, or an object of more than three dimensions, but this is only because we have had no such experience, and that our brains only evolved to deal with three spatial dimensions. I may be a rationalist, but I am not one to put a human's capacity to imagine things as a standard for what is and is not possible in reality. For example, it is impossible to imagine that space comes to an end. If we try, we find that we always imagine some space beyond it (this is a Kantian argument). But this proves nothing. Your visual field does not stretch outwards in all directions to infinity. If you hold your index finger about an inch outward from your face, and move it straightly to the right, after a few feet you'll find that you can't see it any more. Perceptual space does indeed come to an end, quite irrespectively of the fact that we can't imagine that it does. The reason we can't "see" the borders of our visual field is that our peripheral vision slowly gets worse and worse and finally fades to nothing. Indeed, if philosophers were more attentive to the periphery of their vision, I they would find the very notion of "sense data" presented to an all-seeing "mind's eye" destroyed. Try this experiment: Get an open book, and hold it about five inches in front of your face. Close your left eye, and focus your right one on the left page of the book. Now while keeping your eye fixed on that page, try and fix your attention on the page opposite it. Now, if you're anything like me, I think you'll find that you can "see that" the text is there, without being able to discriminate any determinate shape of the characters which make it up. The image, to me, seems radically indeterminate. I think this alone if sufficent to obliterate the notion of sense data, and it also proves Berkeley wrong, for we can't imagine the text looking indeterminate like this, but we nevertheless do experience it.