Thank you for explaining western philosophy in a way that I can understand! This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Carl Sagan, “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
@@Sensory0verlord You are reminding me of being a kid listening to Carl Sagen. Anyone reading this and not knowing who Carl Sagen is, please Google him. Your compliments are generous and appreciated. 🌟
our interpretations differ (full disclosure: I'm a hardcore Platonist). good presentation though ... and I'm very glad to have stumbled across another autistic philosophy enthusiast.
@bryanjurish5433 It's great to have another philosophic mind here. Welcome. Please let me know how our interpretations differ. I assume it must have something to do with the Platonic Forms...?
@@AuditingWithAutism I guess it does, yes ... in a convoluted sort of way. I *do* think your presentation of the 4 causes was clear & accessible & all around good -- you nailed it (pun intended). Without wanting to go into too much detail (which ... well ... let's just say that hasn't gone well for me in the past), my take is: the 1st cause (material) is kind of "sloppy thinking": a useful shortcut for humans to think about things like tables & chairs &c ("medium-sized dry goods") , but not really a "proper" cause (= "reason why"). I'm a big fan of cause #2 ("formal"), for presumably obvious reasons. Cause #3 ("efficient"/"moving") is pretty much the only thing empiricists & contemporary society accept as a "cause" in the usual sense ... which is fair enough for linguistic drift ... I can accept it, but it's slippery to define, and I don't think anyone has come up with a better explanation than Aristotle in 2 millennia (and it hurts to admit that -- not at all an Aristotle fan). I really really really want cause #4 ... but I can't let myself do that (for historical, personal, and epistemological reasons), except by Kant-style contortions (3rd critique, "eyes are for seeing" etc.) where the only possible justification is "I can't help but think that X is for Y". That means I've got to try every other (explanatory) option first ... that's a lot of options. A consequence of that is that as much as I love Carl Sagan, I can't sign up to the "sentient universe" hypothesis ... however much I would like to ... even if I entertain the notion (a la Pascal), I think that a sentient universe is better served by my skepticism. Also ... sorry ... personal history incoming ... when it comes to "God", I can get on board with Spinoza or Quine ("God" = set of all true propositions ... which most folks think is pretty flaky/mystical of me to believe actually exists as a thing-in-the-world), but intentionality/design is very clearly absent from that. Call me a deist. Your mileage may vary, and that's OK with me. TL;DR: □∃x.x=∅ ... everything else is subjective ;-)
@bryanjurish5433 Wow! An excellent report! I thank you very much for it. I can see that we are thinking somewhat similarly. My thoughts in return are: Yes, and ironically, the Material Cause and the Final Cause are really the "Why" questions for both the hammer AND the human, here. For example, the ultimate reason why materials exist for the Material Cause and the ultimate reason why they are used for the Final Cause, are a mystery for humanity AND the hammer, because we don't know for certain how the materials came into existence, nor do we know why they did. It appears that both the Material Cause and the Final Cause of anything leads to the "God" question. (E.g., the Final Cause for the hammer leads to the meaning of life, eventually: "Why does the person want a table? To eat. Why does the person want to eat? To live. Why does the person want to live?" And now we are back to the Final Cause of humanity itself.) Ironic but logical. This appears to be the case for all three transcendentals of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. This means that even art (the Beautiful), one could say, is used for the Final Cause of humanity. How? Because it is as necessary as the Good of food for life (using the hammer idea again), and for the Truth of existence itself. The Beautiful draws humanity toward it, by default, which in turn leads us to the Good and the True. And to be sure, there is nothing Beautiful which does not contain within it both the Good and the True. When a person makes a hammer and selects a Material, they make a choice. This decision for selection is the human "why" of the Material Cause for that hammer. Same for the Formal Cause and the Efficient Cause: the person has selected a choice for the form and the reason for that form, namely carpentry. Carpentry participates in the perpetuation of humanity, and is therefore participating in the ultimate Final Cause of humanity itself. So, to sum up, the Law of Nature, with all its materials, are origin unknown (even if our math and physics can explain its emergent properties) and the Law of the Universe (or some would say God) is the necessary framework for all these materials to exist in, leaving only the Law of Man left to use and interpret these other two laws. Sure, I make a hammer for building a table, but really, the table is used to sustain life itself. (Just like the Universe?) [The eternal forms of Plato are a curiosity for me, and I would love to hear your thoughts about them] Cheers!🌟
@@AuditingWithAutism thanks for the reply. re: Platonic Forms ... I'm pretty sure it's not how exactly Plato intended it (but I suspect it's fairly close in spirit), but I understand them as anything with a (necessary) "formal" (= logical/mathematical) definition. My favorite example is the empty set (∅). I was once asked "does the empty set exist?", and was faintly surprised at how little I had to think about it before answering (-> of course it does ... hence the modal-logic quip "□∃x.x=∅" (= "necessarily there exists an object x such that x is identical with the empty set" - "the empty set necessarily exists"). If you've got the empty set, then you've got numbers & (most) maths. Also (since I see guitars in your background) you've got notes (frequencies), intervals (frequency ratios), chords (sets of ratios) ... with time, you also get rhythms & melodies (of course, how we experience those -- including their beauty or ugliness -- is a lot more complicated than just their formal properties). Basically, I think a (pseudo-Platonic) formal cause is negative entropy (a la Shannon) ... a.k.a. information ... or, as Plato might have said, an "ordering principle".
Thank you for explaining western philosophy in a way that I can understand! This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Carl Sagan, “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”
@@Sensory0verlord You are reminding me of being a kid listening to Carl Sagen. Anyone reading this and not knowing who Carl Sagen is, please Google him. Your compliments are generous and appreciated. 🌟
our interpretations differ (full disclosure: I'm a hardcore Platonist). good presentation though ... and I'm very glad to have stumbled across another autistic philosophy enthusiast.
@bryanjurish5433 It's great to have another philosophic mind here. Welcome. Please let me know how our interpretations differ. I assume it must have something to do with the Platonic Forms...?
@@AuditingWithAutism I guess it does, yes ... in a convoluted sort of way. I *do* think your presentation of the 4 causes was clear & accessible & all around good -- you nailed it (pun intended). Without wanting to go into too much detail (which ... well ... let's just say that hasn't gone well for me in the past), my take is: the 1st cause (material) is kind of "sloppy thinking": a useful shortcut for humans to think about things like tables & chairs &c ("medium-sized dry goods") , but not really a "proper" cause (= "reason why"). I'm a big fan of cause #2 ("formal"), for presumably obvious reasons. Cause #3 ("efficient"/"moving") is pretty much the only thing empiricists & contemporary society accept as a "cause" in the usual sense ... which is fair enough for linguistic drift ... I can accept it, but it's slippery to define, and I don't think anyone has come up with a better explanation than Aristotle in 2 millennia (and it hurts to admit that -- not at all an Aristotle fan). I really really really want cause #4 ... but I can't let myself do that (for historical, personal, and epistemological reasons), except by Kant-style contortions (3rd critique, "eyes are for seeing" etc.) where the only possible justification is "I can't help but think that X is for Y". That means I've got to try every other (explanatory) option first ... that's a lot of options. A consequence of that is that as much as I love Carl Sagan, I can't sign up to the "sentient universe" hypothesis ... however much I would like to ... even if I entertain the notion (a la Pascal), I think that a sentient universe is better served by my skepticism. Also ... sorry ... personal history incoming ... when it comes to "God", I can get on board with Spinoza or Quine ("God" = set of all true propositions ... which most folks think is pretty flaky/mystical of me to believe actually exists as a thing-in-the-world), but intentionality/design is very clearly absent from that. Call me a deist. Your mileage may vary, and that's OK with me. TL;DR: □∃x.x=∅ ... everything else is subjective ;-)
@bryanjurish5433 Wow! An excellent report! I thank you very much for it. I can see that we are thinking somewhat similarly. My thoughts in return are: Yes, and ironically, the Material Cause and the Final Cause are really the "Why" questions for both the hammer AND the human, here. For example, the ultimate reason why materials exist for the Material Cause and the ultimate reason why they are used for the Final Cause, are a mystery for humanity AND the hammer, because we don't know for certain how the materials came into existence, nor do we know why they did. It appears that both the Material Cause and the Final Cause of anything leads to the "God" question. (E.g., the Final Cause for the hammer leads to the meaning of life, eventually: "Why does the person want a table? To eat. Why does the person want to eat? To live. Why does the person want to live?" And now we are back to the Final Cause of humanity itself.) Ironic but logical. This appears to be the case for all three transcendentals of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. This means that even art (the Beautiful), one could say, is used for the Final Cause of humanity. How? Because it is as necessary as the Good of food for life (using the hammer idea again), and for the Truth of existence itself. The Beautiful draws humanity toward it, by default, which in turn leads us to the Good and the True. And to be sure, there is nothing Beautiful which does not contain within it both the Good and the True. When a person makes a hammer and selects a Material, they make a choice. This decision for selection is the human "why" of the Material Cause for that hammer. Same for the Formal Cause and the Efficient Cause: the person has selected a choice for the form and the reason for that form, namely carpentry. Carpentry participates in the perpetuation of humanity, and is therefore participating in the ultimate Final Cause of humanity itself. So, to sum up, the Law of Nature, with all its materials, are origin unknown (even if our math and physics can explain its emergent properties) and the Law of the Universe (or some would say God) is the necessary framework for all these materials to exist in, leaving only the Law of Man left to use and interpret these other two laws. Sure, I make a hammer for building a table, but really, the table is used to sustain life itself. (Just like the Universe?) [The eternal forms of Plato are a curiosity for me, and I would love to hear your thoughts about them] Cheers!🌟
@@AuditingWithAutism thanks for the reply. re: Platonic Forms ... I'm pretty sure it's not how exactly Plato intended it (but I suspect it's fairly close in spirit), but I understand them as anything with a (necessary) "formal" (= logical/mathematical) definition. My favorite example is the empty set (∅). I was once asked "does the empty set exist?", and was faintly surprised at how little I had to think about it before answering (-> of course it does ... hence the modal-logic quip "□∃x.x=∅" (= "necessarily there exists an object x such that x is identical with the empty set" - "the empty set necessarily exists"). If you've got the empty set, then you've got numbers & (most) maths. Also (since I see guitars in your background) you've got notes (frequencies), intervals (frequency ratios), chords (sets of ratios) ... with time, you also get rhythms & melodies (of course, how we experience those -- including their beauty or ugliness -- is a lot more complicated than just their formal properties). Basically, I think a (pseudo-Platonic) formal cause is negative entropy (a la Shannon) ... a.k.a. information ... or, as Plato might have said, an "ordering principle".