Overall I believe Berkeley’s idealistic metaphysical beliefs are, at face value anyway, threatened by contemporary findings in natural science. Berkeley’s foundational principle is that: “The objects of human knowledge…are…ideas.”
Natural science has had much to say about the brain in the recent past. What it has to show us is that mental perception is a very real and integral part of each individual’s reality. What one person perceives may not be the same as what another perceives, thus their ideas may be entirely different based on the same empirical stimuli. This is in keeping with the idealist opinion that ideas are reality in and of themselves. To that extent, natural science lends idealism credence. In the same breath, however, these very findings undermine the basic idealist tenet that matter is a by-product of the mind. To the contrary, natural science points to the fact that our thoughts can at least be seen and charted in the physical world (via EKG, etc.) and at most that our thoughts and ideas stem from physical causality.
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