Wait... Somebody who... Knows... What they're talking about? Is that what this is? I never thought we'd see the day again. I'm so fkn happy to hear something intelligent for a change.
@@matthias1948 To be fair, you're overqualified to be on his streams. Also thank you; as a part time philosophy junkie the arguments you presented were particularly interesting, and your smooth Nordic voice helped to calm this platonist's boiling frustrations at Destiny lol.
@@ZenobiaofPalmyra Haha, thanks. However I truly sincerely believe that good Philosophy has to have the ability to be made intuitive for non-philosophers. So, I don't think I am 'overqualified' at all.
@Alexandre Ventura If Christ was never raised from the dad by God. That, or if an atheist argument like the problem of evil or divine hiddenness or some sort of argument from incoherence succeeds.
@@akhiem6 That is completely made up. I don't know of any scholar, no matter how fringe, that believes that it was the son of Jesus that appeared 3 days later. For one, no source, Biblical or otherwise, made reference to Jesus having a son. This is important because scriptures and extra-biblical Christian documents take the people who knew Jesus to be highly important. The apostles and James the brother of Jesus are important for this very reason. The idea that the very son of Jesus would not make an appearance in any documents is preposterous, especially if he was still living after the crucifixion. Second of all, why would any of the apostles mistake the son of Jesus for Jesus? They would obviously look different and an encounter with his son would definitely not convince anybody that he rose from the dead. Yet, the apostles dedicated their lives to that message, going through constant persecution and never giving in. And we're supposed to believe that an encounter with his son led to these beliefs? Look, there are a lot of contested facts about the Bible. No sane person contests that the apostles truly believed that Jesus rose from the dead, because they dedicated their life to teaching just that and received no material gain in doing so. The only question is why they believed it, and an encounter with his son simply does not explain that. "The tomb was empty, because Jesus' corpse was disposed of not put in a...cave?" That depends. What happens to a dead body after crucifixion can vary depending on the circumstances and there is good reason to think Jesus received an honorable burial. Regardless, I don't think the empty tomb is actually necessary to make a case for the resurrection. It's only really important for Biblical inerrancy. "Paul's, I believe, betrayal was staged to garner more praise." What betrayal are you talking about? What did Paul say to ever garner him praise? He admitted to murdering Christians prior to conversion and to being the least of the apostles. He spent a huge chunk of his time in prison, during which he sent heartfelt letters of encouragement to his Christian brothers and sisters to stay strong. I get the feeling that you haven't actually read any of Paul's letters. I suggest you go do that because your version of Paul simply doesn't line up with reality.
Super fun conversation. Some back and forth. Some "well if I say that's true, then I have to accept your argument" from both parties. Some laughter at the logical puzzles. Really fun break from yelling at slobbering troglodytes.
@@fastandbulbous9697 Oh, huh. That's a bit weird. Well, now that I am imagining it I guess it's not that weird (ignoring the fact that its a cartoon pony). Actually, I'm kind of interested in the anatomy of this picture. I can't imagine her front legs are long enough to reach back there. Also, she has hooves, so I can't really imagine how that would work either (unless she is using some sort of toy). You know what, if you still have the link, please reply with that. This is just for research purposes. I've never really been into clop so I don't know how this shit works.
What the hell, I'm a first-year philosophy student and will write an exam partially on this topic this Friday. Good thing I didn't study too much, Destiny might save me now.
@@justinlacek1481 Too late. But they supposedly are easier at my uni than at others, or at least that's what I've been told. Seems fine right now, but we're doing really basic stuff.
@@ler6118 Ahah. Man, we had like 1 mandatory symbolic logic class all the majors had to do, which was fine, but there was an optional level 2 symbolic logic class and I took it; I'm not over-exaggerating when I say it was the single most difficult class I've ever taken in my entire life. It was on Godel's completeness/incompleteness theorems
35:16 destiny is misunderstanding intentionally at this point. The question is how can purely physical substance be 'about' anything at all, not merely whether or not purely physical substance can be said to possess the property of truth or falsity.
Imo intentionality is extremely hard to explain to people without a background in philosophy. I tried my best, but it was very hard to organize my thoughts and make it intuitive.
@@skepticmoderate5790 How is it that a chunk of matter in your brain, e.g. a set of neurons, represents or pictures another chunk of matter in the universe. It seems like we can never coherently talk about that representation purely in the language of physical interactions, without of course denying the mental or qualitative aspects of experience. Think of the math example. 2+2=4 is a tautology and we can 'reduce' 4 to 2+2. We cant, in the same way, reduce qualitative mental content (e.g. I'm hungry) to talk of neurons without losing the qualitative experience itself. We can say that this particular arrangement of neurons is usually followed with subsistence behaviors but we literally cant speak of the qualitative feeling of being hungry in purely physical language. It seems absurd to deny that feeling and that is the problem.
@Estryus Flemming You keep using words like experience, feel, etc., which presuppose mental content, however you do not have physical evidence of such processes. You have evidence that neurons of a particular arrangement are firing in a particular order, but unless you infer mental content (based off the fact you yourself experience mental content for example) you either have to deny it exists or give it some sort of distinct ontological status, as dualists and others do.
@@matthias1948 for this, you could say "the axioms required to prove 1+1 = 2 is created by people so we already know the what the axioms are. This means we dont need to figure out (research) what the axioms are" or something like that.
Kant called mathematical truths "synthetic apriori." Even a complicated calculus problem can be solved independent of empirical observation so it fits in the same category as something simple as 1+1=2. Another example he used of this type of truth would be a statement like "bachelors are unmarried" because the truth of this statement can be verified without needing to know or have met a bachelor.
MATH ALWAYS NEEDS PROOFS. theres an equation that makes a pattern up to 10^47 digit integers before it breaks. Many others that break after less, proofs are CRUCIAL to our understanding of modern advanced mathmatics, not a math major but still, my 2c
Yes, certainly! However they don't need empirical research, that was what i was trying to say. Couldn't find the right words though. Whenever I say research I mean empirical investigations going on.
@TheEsotericZebra I was arguing against the so-called logical materialism(lm). The argument is roughly as follows: lm claims that MentalState=PhysicalState. For example they would claim: the believe that Angela Merkel is chancellor of Germany = Some Neurons in certain locations. However identity function as such that it is necessary. For example 2+2 is necessarily, that means in all possible worlds, the same as 4. It being necessary further means that we would need no empirical research to find out more about it. We wouldn't need to go into the world testing and looking what 2+2 is for example. We would simply need to find out the meaning of "2" and of "+". And this finding out is purely conceptual, linguistically about the meaning of those terms "2" and "+". So it seems weird that we do those things in neuroscience, if identity truly obtains. Have I answered your question lol? the point about "corresponding to reality" was more a matter later on when talking about intentionality.
@@matthias1948 Wait is your claim that concepts are not mental states that we can materially find in the mental state? Was not the claim of materialism that concepts are just connections and limitations. Mathematical concepts are just extremely limited. For example we know why a bird is an animal but a rock is not. We have made arbitrary rules that connect concepts and do not connect others. The more limiting the rules the more sprecise we get (maths). It does not matter if the rules can be tested by material means. The rules have always been arbitrary anyway. And no 2 + 2 is not equal to 4 in all world. Any mathematician can make a vectorspace where 2 + 2 = 5. The same rules do not apply on all vectorspaces. For example GPS coordinates the rules how you so addition and substraction is diffetent than in normal vectorspace. Only if your initial assumptions are the same then 2 + 2 = 4 always.
@@matthias1948 "the belief that Angela Merkel is chancellor of Germany = Some Neurons in certain locations" No, it's not a direct translation, the neurons are just set up in a pattern such that when they are processed by that specific brain they produce the thought that "Angela Merkel is chancellor of Germany". You can have the same in mathematics where F is your function. You can break it down into its specific components (F(x) = 2x) to find the properties of that function, just as you would be able to find and break down a brain into its components with enough information. "F(2) = 4" doesn't mean anything on its own, but when you break it down into "2(2) = 4" it does. Same goes for your thought equation. "F(Neurons in certain locations) = the belief that Angela Merkel is chancellor of Germany" doesn't mean anything on its own, but that doesn't mean you couldn't break it down into a logical equation with enough information about the properties of "F".
@@firesong7825 That would be called Functionalism which we didn't get to argue on. It's probably the most common form of Physicalism today. We argued about the logical materialism which disregarded the syntactic functions of neurons.
When I was studying Philosophy in college, the hardest topics (for me) were Mind, Language and most certainly Logic. Honorable mention for phenomenology
At 51:40 : you can resolve the discrepancy by saying there are apparently, but not actually, infinite mental states _because_ there are finite physical states. At some point the mental state would get "too big".
If I go out jogging, my body is performing an action. It's in the state of jogging. We talk about a "jog" being a thing, but it's not really. There is no "jog" object we can point to in the physical universe, outside of a colloquial allusion to a period of time in which I was jogging. The same way, when my brain is thinking, it's performing an action. It's in the state of thinking. We talk about "thoughts" being a thing, but they're not. There is no "thought" object we can point to in my physical brain, outside of a colloquial allusion to a period of time in which I am thinking. Saying my "thoughts" exist on some realm or plane outside of my physical brain is like saying my "jog" can't be explained by the locomotion of my body. At least, that's how absurd these arguments always sound to me. I know this guy said he was not arguing for anything supernatural, but he doesn't say what he *is* arguing for. Destiny tried to address this issue a couple times, asking what are these irreducible "mental states," how we can find them or know about them, what is their nature, etc., and he couldn't answer. That's the problem. You can't say "Thoughts are not of this world, they come from World X," when we have no idea if there is a World X, no reason to think World X is real, and no way to find out. We have ONE universe, this one right here, and zero knowledge of any other one. It is begging the question, the same way a religious person says we get morality from God before ever demonstrating that there is a God. The brain is incredibly complex, and we don't understand 100% exactly how all of it works, but we sure as shit know it's a physical organ in the human body. On the philosophical level of "Do we know thinking is what the brain does," we've got that shit on lockdown. The brain, in this sense, is nothing special. It's not magical. It does what it does, just like a heart pumps blood.
Some thoughts about equations: I think the left side of the equation (2+2 = 4) tells you a lot more than the right side of that equation. On the right side you have one number. On the left side you arrive at how that number is constructed, what it entails, how those things, that form the number, correspond with each other. It's like putting on X_ray glasses. Even though an equation is identical in nature, it allows for two very different ways to look at the same thing (obviously). So I'd say there is a difference in the perspective, whether we talk about "2+2" or "4".
@@dr.leroychew1724 I'm to dumb to know if this comment of yours validated or falsified my statement, so this comment here might be a case of "si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses".
If I’m not mistaken some of the confusion regarding the identity property comes from the fact that in math 2+2 is not identical to 4. They are equal, but not identical. 2+0 is identical to 2. The +0 is redundant, but neurological research required to understand the connection between a mindstate and a neurostate is not redundant, it’s requisite. Could be wrong though, haven’t done that sort of math in a while
If i write sentence "All ravens are white", the sentence itself will be "true", because it exists in the physical world as ink on a paper, but the context of the sentence will be "false", because it goes against what exists in the physical world. The same with thoughts. If I have thought "All ravens are white", the thought itself will be "true", because it exists in the physical world as neurons in my brain, but the context of the sentence will be "false", because it goes against what exists in the physical world. I just can't see why is it so hard to understand?
I agree with that one dude I don't think you are human(or alive human) if you cant experience things. In the same way that if you loose all your memories you are not the same person because you will have different experience. So if you don't experience anything its the same as being dead.
i'm having a problem with the more physical than mental states because it gets infinity wrong. 2 x Infinity is still infinity and infinity ^ 2 is also equal to infinity. So while there are Printout ^ 2 states (believing or not believing the printout) it's both the same amount if we extrapolate this to infinity.
In your case, you are swaping signs around, not changing the a priori structure of arithmetic. I refer you to approximately page 360 of Russell and Whiteheads Principia Mathematica. The proof is often useful.
@53:26 Buffer overflow. No way that anyone can remember that A told B, B after told R, rB told R, and Rb heard Br talk to rB, and told S, etc. while the Jester came up with the idea, pretending to be the pope.
For the first part about "identity containing no information" I don't think I agree, depending on the formulation. For example if we say each natural number is identical to its prime factorisation. To say that knowing a number's prime factorisation is the same as knowing the number essentially makes certain kinds of public key cryptography automatically insecure. In theoretical computer science we can understand hard "tautologies" (I think he technically means "logical validities" but this is semantics which isn't even consistently defined in the literature) using the frameworks in complexity theory (e.g. polynomial time, exponential time) while this also rests on assumptions, it seems "wiser" than assuming that logical validities aren't informative at all. Indeed the subset of logical validities known as "tautologies" are actually CoNP-complete so those are only "easy" in a complexity-theory sense if P=NP.
I said a lot of times, that "no new information would be gained" this was the view very successfully (and convincingly imo) pushed by the early and probably also late Wittgenstein for example. However I maybe should've maybe stated that "no new empirical information could be gained" instead to make it easier? You are totally correct, I didn't for the sake of clarity distinguish between logical truths and tautologies which is technically speaking simply wrong. You can have systems in which you show logical truths without showing tautologies for example in works of Carnap (?) iirc. However in the semantics of possible worlds usually we would say that both tautologies and logical truths would both be true in all possible worlds, which was the context of mixing things up, no?
@@matthias1948 I suppose I could agree with it being called free of new "empirical information" (as long as what is empirical information is suitably defined). I pointed it out- not only because I dedicate my life to "non-empirical" information so i prefer for it not to be ignored, but also because things like public key cryptography or one way functions are counterintuitive and regularly challenge the assumptions of my CS students on mathematics. I enjoyed your discussion BTW, I'm very glad and surprised you brought up stuff I actually know something about on the stream. I'm not a philosopher by expertise though so I can't say how Wittgenstein feels prime factorisation though.
@@dr.leroychew1724 Thanks! If you are interested about the earlier Wittgenstein and his idea about sense, senseless and nonsense: plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#SensNons Roughly put the idea is that logical propositions like tautologies and contradictions do no represent anything being the case, so they lack sense.
There is only a possible infinite amount of mental states *if* there are not physical constraints on those mental states. One can imagine a process by which we can invent an infinite amount of mental states, but you would need an infinite amount of brains to actualize those mental states. This does not invalidate physicalism. As Destiny said, at some point your brain could not hold all of that information and you would have to start writing it down. Then at some point you will run out of paper (or bits or whatever physical media you store information on). The amount of possible mental states is constrained by the number of possible ways to rearrange all of the physical states of the universe.
Kareem LeBaker thanks for the recommendation. Just listened to the sample and I’m going to start it after I finish the war god series. It sounds dope af.
I don't know what you're talking about. This debate about race realism and the Jewish question seemed really clear to me. Destiny kept going off topic though
you'd think that someone who's doing a master would have had some teaching on how to pronounce certain generic things in English. I'm pretty sure that most (higher) educated germans learn a good amount of English.
@@ShakyKiller well some of us newa lose our sweet sweet GERMANIC aksents. ;) Plus it might depend on how international your school and later your university is. Some people just do not get to practice enough with native speakers.
I've worked in customer service and gotten pretty good at understanding accents but even I'm having difficulty following on a complex subject such as this...
Is it possible to 'believe' of an infinite number of mental states? - I think belief is a physical state. If you think about anxiety - anxiety could be a form of disbelief perhaps. So when you are in a state of anxiety then maybe you are perhaps able to experience all mental states possible but not have a belief in any particular mental state itself? - if I was to present this in an idealistic way... Wouldn't this then be a catch-22?
I don't think the analytic/synthetic distinction is so compelling. We are supposed to acknowledge that statements of the form "Bachelors are unmarried" are tautological in the sense that one need only know the definitions of the words in order to know whether they are true; whereas we can know the definitions of the words in the statement "Angela Merkel is the chancellor of Germany" without knowing whether the statement is true. Is this really so justifiable? It seems to me that propositions as such have zero meaning without some empirical content in their definitions--but then the distinction between analytic and synthetic knowedlge comes entirely from what kind of empirical knowledge you smuggle into the "definition". Suppose I am not a native speaker of the language, and I am from a (hypothetical) culture that has no tradition of marriage. However, I know the definition that "A bachelor is an unwed man." I know that a wedding is a ceremony that romantic partners hold to elevate their relationship to some special status. I have even attended many weddings (in this language I do not speak, because of friends), so I know much about the conventions and appearances of weddings. What I do not realize is that a wedding entails the same thing as "marriage", which I understand as a lifelong partnership between two people who live together and have some legal status. It *appears* I know how to use the word wedding and I know many associated empirical facts about weddings; it appears I know how to use the word marriage, and I know many associated empirical facts about marriage; and I know that a Bachelor is an unwed man (by definition stipulated to me by a native speaker). But I don't know that a Bachelor is an unmarried an. By empirical experience, I could acquire the knowledge that a bachelor is an unmarried man, because marriage is entailed by weddings. So, one must claim that I simply don't know the definitions of these words. One must likewise assert that I can know the definition of "Angela Merkel" without the empirical fact that she is the chancellor of Germany. But why should this be so? Is it because I can identify her in photographs? Because I know her voice? Because I have heard someone describe her in certain terms? Because I have heard her name spoken? Certainly our imaginary friend in the previous example could recognize weddings and married couples in many practical situations. But still he didn't know the "definition"!
Is this basically an 'Existence' vs 'Probability' argument? (which I think relates to the concept of a Boltzmann Brain - which probabilistically is more likely to exist in an ideal universe than it actually appears to be able to exist in our actual universe [if I remember this correctly])... and so proves god exists? - should we then define what we mean by 'god' rather than trying to disprove god's existence?... plus this would require an indepth understanding of language.
Computation, Automata, and Formal Language Theory by Hopcroft and Ullman goes over the mathematics of this kind of stuff (classification and counting of abstract formal languages). I was taught this in a graduate computer science/math course.
Couldn't this conversation be dumbed down to whether or not existence is random? (If you knew everything thing that has happened in the past, you could predict the future) nothing is random, everything that happens, happens for a reason ...
The german guy says that no new knowledge is gained when saying 2+2=4 because it is necessarily true in all worlds and that that distinguishes it from when we would find out an identity of a mental state and a physical state of the brain where there IS knowledge gained. But 2+2=4 in only true if you have gained the knowledge of what those symbols mean the same way you have to gain knowledge about what a mental state means. When I say 'Zwei plus zwei ist gleich vier' this sentence is true in all worlds but not everybody who reads this sentence would know that it mean the same as the english sentence 'two plus two equals four'. He might counter that there might be a world where mental states are not the same as brain states, making it not true out of necessity but the same would be true for 2+2=4 where those symbol might have a different meaning.
Saying statements are true and false could be allowed (without anything "nonphysical") by saying these are just another configuration of rocks. They aren't true or false in any other sense.
You cant talk about slipperiness at the level of quarks and electrons. Slipperiness is a property that can be possessed by things at a certain level of description. Individual quarks aren't slippery. Quarks arranged in the form of a banana peel on the ground for example can possess the property of slipperiness. Likewise, conciousness, thoughts, beliefs, desires, etc. can't be spoken of coherently purely at the level of neuronal firings. They emerge as a property of neurons under particular arrangements.
These things (slipperiness, beliefs, desire ect) can't be spoken of coherently on those terms because of human limitations of memory and attention span. For a human with a computer like memory I could describe a 4000x4000 pxl black and white picture by one by one giving out a random pixel with its coordinates and whether its black or white and when I got to the end he would know what the picture was but of course this wouldn't work with a normal human. Therefore this isn't an argument against whether these things can be reduced to these very small parts rather it's just about what amount of reduction is suitable for human communication in the current situation.
@@skullcrusher6 aren't you still admitting that in the case of slipperiness, the sum of quarks and electrons is more than that of its parts? Even if it could observe every partical individually, wouldn't the realization of slipperiness occur as a product of the organization, and to talk about it independently of that organization on some level to miss the point? Like both those levels of description are true. You just cant have the higher without the lower, but there's something at the higher level we can make sense of that we wont find without looking at that organization as a totality. I dont know if this works lol this is my attempt.
Slipperiness is, of course, an emergent property. But you can, at least in theory, talk about it at the level of a single quark in terms of it's electromagnetic (and possibly other) properties. It is dependent on their organization, but the organization is the 'summing' part. So, I don't see how the property of a banana peel is becoming more than the sum of properties of the constituent particles. Rather, it is exactly equal to the sum. To think of emergence as the whole being more than the sum of the parts seems unphysical. In the case of mental states, however, it is unclear how they can be completely reduced to the level of neurons (or something more fundamental).
Also, his inability to accept hard determinism caused him some problems. He believes in free-will, even if he says he doesn't, and therefore he's already allowed spiritualism/religion into his framework.
17 minutes in, the guy mentions the need for mental states as an irreducible property, which sounds a bit like what Chalmers says? I agree with the german guy on this, but will have to hear the rest of his argument. I really like the idea of panpsychism.
I am a dumbo, but it seems hard to say that ideas are actually material. It seems like you cannot really assert , for example , that the concept of good PHYSICALLY exists.
Yeah but are all products of the mind inherently physical , such as ideas ? And if ideas can be false in a way that physical things cannot ( something is either physically there or it isn't ) then are they really only physical per say ?
You can't measure a smell, a taste, a sight, a sound. You can only measure the brain states that occur while they happen. Thus you cannot measure mind, thus it's not physical. You can only measure the brain. If you think they're the same thing, you must understand that trying to measure pain by how loud people scream isn't accurate for exactly the same reason. Pain is an experience, and you cannot access it physically. You can't run away from the experience of pain, you can't lock it away in the closet, you can't send it through a particle accelerator; it's not physical.
Wait, he totally changed the conversation from "real mindsets real people could have" to "mindsets we can theoretically concieve of". Isn't HE kind of presupposing his thing there? I would say that the set of real mindsets a real person can have is finite, and can be reduced to the physical properties of the neurons in your brain. Which generally, in our experience, seems to be true - At some point, things become too long or too complex to hold them in a single "thought". Even if I granted you an infinite amount of time to say "I think that you think that I think that you think...", I'd argue that eventually, because your brain is finite, you will have completed so many iterations that the number gets too big for your brain to hold, so you'd basically fall into a repeated loop of brain states at that point, even though the sentence itself would become infinitely long. Essentially, to cover all my bases, I would put it into three/four arguments: 1. The subset of all theoretically concievable mindsets which only contains those that are actually possible in a real human brain is finite and in 1:1 correspondence to a finite* set of physical states of the neurons in your brain. 2. The thought process you use to create an algorithm to theoretically concieve of thoughts that are infinite is a part of that set of physically achievable mental states. (Just like we can write Euler's Constant as a summation with only a couple of symbols) 3. The thoughts the algorithm would produce eventually become impossible for a real human mind to hold, keeping the set of physically possible mental states finite. (Just like we can't actually write down Euler's Constant on any "piece of paper" that could exist in the world) (4. Any mindset that is not within the set of actually phyiscally possible mindsets can strictly be one of two things: Either you can only arrive at it through some phyiscally conceivable algorithm, or it is impossible to even concieve of it) Of course all of this is sort-of only obtainable by declaring it axiomatically, but I also think you can somewhat justify it inductively with observations we can make about thoughts and human brains in the real world. *Also, another problem could be that we don't know 100% if our universe does or doesn't have the theoretical ability to hold infinite information. There are things like planck length/time/energy, but quantum superpositions challenge that. Maybe there are infinitely many possible physical neuron arrangements. But I don't think this argument is even really necessary.
Yes, if you assume materialism to be true as you do in 1, materialism will be true. However, we want to find out whether it is true and it seems deeply weird that there seem to be a possible (not actual) amount of infinite mental states and only a finite possible amount of neural states. Logically, at no point we would have reason stop the iterative process. There are physical limitations, sure. However physical limitations are not in the realm of logics and possibility but simple actual limitations. Here an analogy: We cannot write down an infinite amount of numbers, but infinity does still "exist".
@@matthias1948 Well, infinity exists as a concept, because we invented it, can think about it (sort of), and because it is useful sometimes. But does infinity... actually... exist? For example, correspond to anything in the real world? I don't know. In math, the only reason infinity exists is because we've declared it axiomatically. Well, maybe the universe has infinite space, I suppose? Idk. I personally don't think the human mind's ability to confuse itself, i.e. think of and about things that don't correspond to something in the real world, disproves materialism. And, do we even really? We think of properties that are paradoxical, but because they are, we never are really able to grasp a concept like infinity completely. I would even go as far as to say I'm not sure logic is "real". The human mind has observed things in our universe and made the concept of "causality", which _seems_ to universally apply, so we're _pretty sure_ the laws of logic always hold true. Kind of "We have to assume logic applies to the real world to be able to do anything, and it seems to be working out so far, let's really hope nothing comes along and messes this up for us.", and so far nothing really has shaken our understanding of causality and logic. I guess the only thing I would grant you is that maybe there is a use in giving "concepts that don't apply to anything in the real world" a new name, even though I 100% believe the act of thinking about them is all reducable to neuron states (Like I said, the human mind's ability to confuse itself is highly explainable through science) and nothing that isn't reducable actually happens in the real world. To summarize, I feel like your argument at this point is "Because we can think of something that doesn't exist, means that not everything is material" and I don't really agree with that. Even if those thoughts are useful concepts, they are all kind of "silly" (which is okay! I appreciate how silly humans are, that's a good thing, and it helps sometimes. Embracing completely silly thoughts is probably what granted us the world domination that we currently have in the animal kingdom) PS: I find it kind of weird to use math for all of this, btw, because math is a bunch of made-up shit. It's really great made-up shit, but unlike science, it isn't concerned with reality at all. It just happens to be useful in science and every day observation sometimes.
@@newsoupvialt "Because we can think of something that doesn't exist, means that not everything is material". Kind of? However it's not simply that it doesn't exist but that we NEED the operator of possibility in actual science and possibility as such would result in problems for materialist views. You are right math is kind of silly, however it works as an accurate description of reality and is really useful. I mean gambling makes loads of money with it and they NEED the concept of possibility and infinity haha
@@matthias1948 I understand, and I kind of agree, but I wouldn't say something being able to be thought of and be useful in application means it exists. It exists as an idea in somebody's mind, but it does not at all exist in the same way that a rock on the ground does. And any idea about something that doesn't exist still exists as a result of somebody's material thought process, of course. We can create fantastical worlds in our minds but they will never exist. I thought what we mean by "existing" is that it's something that interacts with reality in some way. "Infinity" will never interact with reality - A human being thinking about the impossible concept of infinity, applying it to something in the real world in a useful way, is what interacts with reality. What is actually going on is that a bunch of neurons are firing in a way that makes the human act in a certain way that has certain effects. The human can think about something non-material as hard as they want, and it never actually starts interacting with the real world, it's always them who does and the universe doesn't care about all the fantastical things they came up with to get there. And this definition of "existing" by interacting with the real world is not me presupposing materialism, right? Because something spiritual, like God, would interact with the real world via miracles and creating the world to begin with etc... Zodiac signs affect the probability of real-world outcomes, etc. Some could claim a God actually exists that never interacts with our universe or only with a planet so far away that we will actually 100% guaranteed never see it or feel any effects on it, but I would consider that a paradoxical statement anyway. If something happens that has no bearing on the real world and the people within it, I would consider that thing to not exist, because the word "exists", like everything in science, presupposes a human perspective, and what's useful for us to talk about. Just covering my bases here, I don't know if you'd even disagree with this. Of course, my materialism only goes so far as to say "everything that has any effect on us is material", I can't 100% guarantee that there isn't something like a seperate spiritual plane that we never have a chance of interacting with. I can totally see that we need a different term or framework to analyze things like inifinity through than very basic materialsm (Kind of like we talk about a "chair" to refer to a structure of atoms and it doesn't really make sense to talk about the properties of those atoms individually, it makes more sense to identify the abstract properties of a chair, like being able to sit on it etc), but I still don't really agree that they are outside of it (Just like at the end of the day, any real chair still is "just a collection of atoms"). Anything that happens in the real world is reducable to material stuff. And honestly, I think it's kind of arrogant for humans to say "This material world makes my brain, and all of my thoughts are just neuron states, but because I can think of a theoretical thing that is not material, that means I have ascended and disproved materialism", or less selfishly, "I need to prove the existence of non-material concepts like infinity to justify using them to make positive change in the real world". I don't think you do, we can say they don't truly exist one bit, but they are useful to deal with things that do exist.
I doubt consciousness is something can happen by accident just because you have a lot of interacting parts. Most of the cognition happening in the human brain isn't conscious, for example.
Be careful with the reproducibility of emergence - saying it cannot be reduced implies a heck lot of things (thing i wouldn't agree on) Destiny firing back there was very good and show nice intuitive understanding of implications of statements :D A small suggestion from a fellow philosopher, could we stop seeing consciousness as a binary? the debate on mushrooms zombies and AI becomes a lot more logical if we assume a scale - better even multidimensional scale, no not just more or less conscious but "different conscious - as there are different types qualities properties and effects of consciousness, we can have one and not another, there factors are then "dimensions" on a scale, therefore everything is conscious, just sometimes close to 0 never actual 0 :) it is therefore very feasible other "things" reach a level similar or higher then humans in consciousness. This also solves the "cut off criticism" if consciousness is binary and separated it must have evolved, therefore it must have appeared out of nowhere in its entirety which is illogical :) hope i made sense :D and one more, about the infinity paradox. A possible different answer to saying its limited (as that is illogical): A possible mental state is created by a physical state creating it, unless the physical state exists the mental state doesnt either, its a conclusion of the physical system that creates it not an entity that exists by itself. This does kinda limit the amount of mental states theoretically, assuming the physical system is contained, but even about that we arent sure, its very possible that the physical system is infinite (hello time), if it is limited then what "surrounds" it? as long as we can not reasonably answer these questions there is little sense in debating whether there is more mental states then physical one - we dont know the exact connection between mental and physical states nor do we know the extent of either of the dimensions.
1 plus 1 equals 2, if i create a microwave, every component that is internal for that machine to be a microwave will remain as is for it to be a microwave, if i make a car to drive, it will remain as is to be a car that drives based on its components, however, every human being has the same components, from atoms, to protein chains, to dna, to cells, to organs, to the body as a whole, yet, we are all so different, a robot that is designed to do a task will do that task, if human beings are basically robots in a material or deterministic world, then we wouldn't be different at all, because we would all be determined the exact same way despite origin of birth or culture of anything, a microwave in Canada will be a microwave in china, and america, or Paris it doesnt matter. Human beings interpret things differently, and are influenced and can change or make progress, a microwave or television or car will never decide or express desire to be something more than what it is, i highly doubt the amount of neurons or whatever makes up the brain would make us this different so drastically all alone, especially when our building blocks are very much the same.
Fuck me, this was some real shit. I mean it could be seen as all bs, but at least this dude had some knowledge. I was blown away at the level that Destiny was able to keep up. His physical brain must be exerting some serious tired neurons from all the dumb cunts he has had on the channel, it's nice to see him have to wake up in a debate for once:P. TBh I don't get how having more of one thing makes that thing more correct. In theory, you can combine 100 physical things in 10,000 different ways or wtv and create more from less. Why could multiple neurons not do the same to create more ideas then there are neurons to express them?
A German Philosopher on materialism. Name a more iconic duo.
Blumpkins and the relationship I have with my dad
@@goodbeans F
Friedrich der große and Jean-Jacques Rousseau smokinn phAt bLünt$, mein kameradier
German philosophers and idealism
Wait... Somebody who... Knows... What they're talking about? Is that what this is? I never thought we'd see the day again. I'm so fkn happy to hear something intelligent for a change.
That's very nice of you to say, thanks.
@@matthias1948 To be fair, you're overqualified to be on his streams. Also thank you; as a part time philosophy junkie the arguments you presented were particularly interesting, and your smooth Nordic voice helped to calm this platonist's boiling frustrations at Destiny lol.
@@ZenobiaofPalmyra Haha, thanks. However I truly sincerely believe that good Philosophy has to have the ability to be made intuitive for non-philosophers. So, I don't think I am 'overqualified' at all.
Yes finally someone who is as smart and big brained as you are
@@matthias1948 Well, I meant in contrast to the average 'centrist liberal' that calls in. :P
The christian god falsified destiny in this debate.
SIR I'M STILL WAITING FOR A DEFEATER FOR THE CHRISTIAN GOD
Ryan Davis legend has it that he is STILL waiting...
Uncle So lame and overdone
@Alexandre Ventura
If Christ was never raised from the dad by God. That, or if an atheist argument like the problem of evil or divine hiddenness or some sort of argument from incoherence succeeds.
@@akhiem6
That is completely made up. I don't know of any scholar, no matter how fringe, that believes that it was the son of Jesus that appeared 3 days later. For one, no source, Biblical or otherwise, made reference to Jesus having a son. This is important because scriptures and extra-biblical Christian documents take the people who knew Jesus to be highly important. The apostles and James the brother of Jesus are important for this very reason. The idea that the very son of Jesus would not make an appearance in any documents is preposterous, especially if he was still living after the crucifixion.
Second of all, why would any of the apostles mistake the son of Jesus for Jesus? They would obviously look different and an encounter with his son would definitely not convince anybody that he rose from the dead. Yet, the apostles dedicated their lives to that message, going through constant persecution and never giving in. And we're supposed to believe that an encounter with his son led to these beliefs?
Look, there are a lot of contested facts about the Bible. No sane person contests that the apostles truly believed that Jesus rose from the dead, because they dedicated their life to teaching just that and received no material gain in doing so. The only question is why they believed it, and an encounter with his son simply does not explain that.
"The tomb was empty, because Jesus' corpse was disposed of not put in a...cave?"
That depends. What happens to a dead body after crucifixion can vary depending on the circumstances and there is good reason to think Jesus received an honorable burial. Regardless, I don't think the empty tomb is actually necessary to make a case for the resurrection. It's only really important for Biblical inerrancy.
"Paul's, I believe, betrayal was staged to garner more praise."
What betrayal are you talking about? What did Paul say to ever garner him praise? He admitted to murdering Christians prior to conversion and to being the least of the apostles. He spent a huge chunk of his time in prison, during which he sent heartfelt letters of encouragement to his Christian brothers and sisters to stay strong. I get the feeling that you haven't actually read any of Paul's letters. I suggest you go do that because your version of Paul simply doesn't line up with reality.
*German accent intensifies*
ups there goes Poland
Germans always sound like homosexuals. It's funny.
The accent couldn't be more German
Super fun conversation. Some back and forth. Some "well if I say that's true, then I have to accept your argument" from both parties. Some laughter at the logical puzzles. Really fun break from yelling at slobbering troglodytes.
Don't let this video distract you from the fact that they didn't play Sweet Victory
Hahahaha cool normie content friend
@@JUNO-69
Thanks, you can save it, it's all yours!
Nice pfp.
Is this about the superbowl or something? I'm sorry but I'm not from the US
@@fastandbulbous9697 Oh, huh. That's a bit weird.
Well, now that I am imagining it I guess it's not that weird (ignoring the fact that its a cartoon pony).
Actually, I'm kind of interested in the anatomy of this picture. I can't imagine her front legs are long enough to reach back there. Also, she has hooves, so I can't really imagine how that would work either (unless she is using some sort of toy).
You know what, if you still have the link, please reply with that. This is just for research purposes. I've never really been into clop so I don't know how this shit works.
Some hardcore galaxy brain discussion in this, good one here Destiny.
This is how you get eyes on the inside. Fear the old blood.
Anthony Ha lawrence has Homer Simpson brain XD
What the hell, I'm a first-year philosophy student and will write an exam partially on this topic this Friday.
Good thing I didn't study too much, Destiny might save me now.
Dodge the logic courses at all costs. You'll thank me later
@@justinlacek1481 Too late. But they supposedly are easier at my uni than at others, or at least that's what I've been told. Seems fine right now, but we're doing really basic stuff.
@@ler6118 Ahah. Man, we had like 1 mandatory symbolic logic class all the majors had to do, which was fine, but there was an optional level 2 symbolic logic class and I took it; I'm not over-exaggerating when I say it was the single most difficult class I've ever taken in my entire life. It was on Godel's completeness/incompleteness theorems
I’m lost, see you guys in the next video.
35:16 destiny is misunderstanding intentionally at this point. The question is how can purely physical substance be 'about' anything at all, not merely whether or not purely physical substance can be said to possess the property of truth or falsity.
Imo intentionality is extremely hard to explain to people without a background in philosophy. I tried my best, but it was very hard to organize my thoughts and make it intuitive.
Because the material phenomenon of our brains says it is. Why is this such a mystery?
@@skepticmoderate5790 How is it that a chunk of matter in your brain, e.g. a set of neurons, represents or pictures another chunk of matter in the universe. It seems like we can never coherently talk about that representation purely in the language of physical interactions, without of course denying the mental or qualitative aspects of experience. Think of the math example. 2+2=4 is a tautology and we can 'reduce' 4 to 2+2. We cant, in the same way, reduce qualitative mental content (e.g. I'm hungry) to talk of neurons without losing the qualitative experience itself. We can say that this particular arrangement of neurons is usually followed with subsistence behaviors but we literally cant speak of the qualitative feeling of being hungry in purely physical language. It seems absurd to deny that feeling and that is the problem.
@@Dirtgut Why can't we just say that the feeling emerges from underlying physical interactions?
@Estryus Flemming You keep using words like experience, feel, etc., which presuppose mental content, however you do not have physical evidence of such processes. You have evidence that neurons of a particular arrangement are firing in a particular order, but unless you infer mental content (based off the fact you yourself experience mental content for example) you either have to deny it exists or give it some sort of distinct ontological status, as dualists and others do.
I love how everytime Destiny talks about philosophy with someone it's always someone from germany.
I love these philosophy videos destiny! Please make more!!
Plz have discussions like these more often!
Three arrow burner account no doubt.
I LOVE HOW LONG & DENSE THESE VIDEOS ARE!!! IT JUST FEELS SOOOOOO GOOD TO LISTEN TO LONG-FORM MEDIA... AAAAAAHH!
I think there is a math proof for 1+1 and I'm pretty sure its 200 pages long
It's a proof, sure. However no empirical research would be necessary, which was my point. Couldn't state it clear enough for some reason lol
Matze _ Are you the person in the video?
@@matthias1948 for this, you could say "the axioms required to prove 1+1 = 2 is created by people so we already know the what the axioms are. This means we dont need to figure out (research) what the axioms are" or something like that.
@@asdfgh6210 This kind of "finding out" is however not something empirical we are doing. It's purely conceptual which neuroscience is not.
Kant called mathematical truths "synthetic apriori." Even a complicated calculus problem can be solved independent of empirical observation so it fits in the same category as something simple as 1+1=2.
Another example he used of this type of truth would be a statement like "bachelors are unmarried" because the truth of this statement can be verified without needing to know or have met a bachelor.
Destiny please learn some mathematical logic, I believe it will help you organize your high level constructions more concisely.
MATH ALWAYS NEEDS PROOFS.
theres an equation that makes a pattern up to 10^47 digit integers before it breaks. Many others that break after less, proofs are CRUCIAL to our understanding of modern advanced mathmatics, not a math major but still, my 2c
Yes, certainly! However they don't need empirical research, that was what i was trying to say. Couldn't find the right words though. Whenever I say research I mean empirical investigations going on.
@TheEsotericZebra I was arguing against the so-called logical materialism(lm). The argument is roughly as follows: lm claims that MentalState=PhysicalState. For example they would claim: the believe that Angela Merkel is chancellor of Germany = Some Neurons in certain locations.
However identity function as such that it is necessary. For example 2+2 is necessarily, that means in all possible worlds, the same as 4. It being necessary further means that we would need no empirical research to find out more about it. We wouldn't need to go into the world testing and looking what 2+2 is for example. We would simply need to find out the meaning of "2" and of "+". And this finding out is purely conceptual, linguistically about the meaning of those terms "2" and "+".
So it seems weird that we do those things in neuroscience, if identity truly obtains.
Have I answered your question lol? the point about "corresponding to reality" was more a matter later on when talking about intentionality.
@@matthias1948 Wait is your claim that concepts are not mental states that we can materially find in the mental state?
Was not the claim of materialism that concepts are just connections and limitations. Mathematical concepts are just extremely limited. For example we know why a bird is an animal but a rock is not. We have made arbitrary rules that connect concepts and do not connect others. The more limiting the rules the more sprecise we get (maths). It does not matter if the rules can be tested by material means. The rules have always been arbitrary anyway.
And no 2 + 2 is not equal to 4 in all world. Any mathematician can make a vectorspace where 2 + 2 = 5. The same rules do not apply on all vectorspaces. For example GPS coordinates the rules how you so addition and substraction is diffetent than in normal vectorspace. Only if your initial assumptions are the same then 2 + 2 = 4 always.
@@matthias1948 "the belief that Angela Merkel is chancellor of Germany = Some Neurons in certain locations"
No, it's not a direct translation, the neurons are just set up in a pattern such that when they are processed by that specific brain they produce the thought that "Angela Merkel is chancellor of Germany".
You can have the same in mathematics where F is your function. You can break it down into its specific components (F(x) = 2x) to find the properties of that function, just as you would be able to find and break down a brain into its components with enough information.
"F(2) = 4" doesn't mean anything on its own, but when you break it down into "2(2) = 4" it does.
Same goes for your thought equation.
"F(Neurons in certain locations) = the belief that Angela Merkel is chancellor of Germany" doesn't mean anything on its own, but that doesn't mean you couldn't break it down into a logical equation with enough information about the properties of "F".
@@firesong7825 That would be called Functionalism which we didn't get to argue on. It's probably the most common form of Physicalism today. We argued about the logical materialism which disregarded the syntactic functions of neurons.
Desting got big brained in this discussion.
i tried but i just couldn't follow this im too small brain
So happy you had this guy on.
When I was studying Philosophy in college, the hardest topics (for me) were Mind, Language and most certainly Logic. Honorable mention for phenomenology
Covered a ton of topics I've been thinking about lately and wondering about Destiny's perspective on. I love when the deep philosophers come on.
"We can have infinite mental states" based on being a philosophy student
At 51:40 : you can resolve the discrepancy by saying there are apparently, but not actually, infinite mental states _because_ there are finite physical states.
At some point the mental state would get "too big".
If I go out jogging, my body is performing an action. It's in the state of jogging. We talk about a "jog" being a thing, but it's not really. There is no "jog" object we can point to in the physical universe, outside of a colloquial allusion to a period of time in which I was jogging.
The same way, when my brain is thinking, it's performing an action. It's in the state of thinking. We talk about "thoughts" being a thing, but they're not. There is no "thought" object we can point to in my physical brain, outside of a colloquial allusion to a period of time in which I am thinking.
Saying my "thoughts" exist on some realm or plane outside of my physical brain is like saying my "jog" can't be explained by the locomotion of my body. At least, that's how absurd these arguments always sound to me. I know this guy said he was not arguing for anything supernatural, but he doesn't say what he *is* arguing for. Destiny tried to address this issue a couple times, asking what are these irreducible "mental states," how we can find them or know about them, what is their nature, etc., and he couldn't answer. That's the problem. You can't say "Thoughts are not of this world, they come from World X," when we have no idea if there is a World X, no reason to think World X is real, and no way to find out. We have ONE universe, this one right here, and zero knowledge of any other one. It is begging the question, the same way a religious person says we get morality from God before ever demonstrating that there is a God.
The brain is incredibly complex, and we don't understand 100% exactly how all of it works, but we sure as shit know it's a physical organ in the human body. On the philosophical level of "Do we know thinking is what the brain does," we've got that shit on lockdown. The brain, in this sense, is nothing special. It's not magical. It does what it does, just like a heart pumps blood.
Ah man finally an interesting discussion, love these though they're somewhat rare!
Does anyone have a link to what he’s talking about at 19:20
de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libet-Experiment
Looked like you were going Super Saiyan Blue in the thumbnail...
Why couldn't there be infinite possible physical states?
I got lost when they started discussing a rock’s existence
Some thoughts about equations:
I think the left side of the equation (2+2 = 4) tells you a lot more than the right side of that equation. On the right side you have one number. On the left side you arrive at how that number is constructed, what it entails, how those things, that form the number, correspond with each other. It's like putting on X_ray glasses. Even though an equation is identical in nature, it allows for two very different ways to look at the same thing (obviously). So I'd say there is a difference in the perspective, whether we talk about "2+2" or "4".
knowing that p \times q =n actually can tell you cryptography breaking information if p and q are prime (which can be efficiently tested )
@@dr.leroychew1724 I'm to dumb to know if this comment of yours validated or falsified my statement, so this comment here might be a case of "si tacuisses, philosophus mansisses".
If I’m not mistaken some of the confusion regarding the identity property comes from the fact that in math 2+2 is not identical to 4. They are equal, but not identical. 2+0 is identical to 2. The +0 is redundant, but neurological research required to understand the connection between a mindstate and a neurostate is not redundant, it’s requisite. Could be wrong though, haven’t done that sort of math in a while
If i write sentence "All ravens are white", the sentence itself will be "true", because it exists in the physical world as ink on a paper, but the context of the sentence will be "false", because it goes against what exists in the physical world.
The same with thoughts. If I have thought "All ravens are white", the thought itself will be "true", because it exists in the physical world as neurons in my brain, but the context of the sentence will be "false", because it goes against what exists in the physical world.
I just can't see why is it so hard to understand?
Man whoever does the thumbnails for these videos is amazing
A mental state is the same as a transistor that is on or off. Its just a property that a physical things have.
I agree with that one dude I don't think you are human(or alive human) if you cant experience things. In the same way that if you loose all your memories you are not the same person because you will have different experience. So if you don't experience anything its the same as being dead.
Care to hop on Discord my dude =) ?
Ah, the hard problem of conscioussness once again. If the planet wasn't burning, this would be what I devoted my life to.
Keep it up Matze_.
i'm having a problem with the more physical than mental states because it gets infinity wrong. 2 x Infinity is still infinity and infinity ^ 2 is also equal to infinity. So while there are Printout ^ 2 states (believing or not believing the printout) it's both the same amount if we extrapolate this to infinity.
^2 infinity is bigger than infinity. This was proven by Cantor.
Destiny got roped by lifecoach in this debate.
unknown entinty why is this profile pic meme still a thing?
can someone explain why people keep saying in any possible world 2+2=4 i can create a game world where this is generally not true...
In your case, you are swaping signs around, not changing the a priori structure of arithmetic. I refer you to approximately page 360 of Russell and Whiteheads Principia Mathematica. The proof is often useful.
@53:26 Buffer overflow. No way that anyone can remember that A told B, B after told R, rB told R, and Rb heard Br talk to rB, and told S, etc. while the Jester came up with the idea, pretending to be the pope.
I didn't wanna bang my head against a wall even once! what channel am I on
For the first part about "identity containing no information" I don't think I agree, depending on the formulation. For example if we say each natural number is identical to its prime factorisation. To say that knowing a number's prime factorisation is the same as knowing the number essentially makes certain kinds of public key cryptography automatically insecure. In theoretical computer science we can understand hard "tautologies" (I think he technically means "logical validities" but this is semantics which isn't even consistently defined in the literature) using the frameworks in complexity theory (e.g. polynomial time, exponential time) while this also rests on assumptions, it seems "wiser" than assuming that logical validities aren't informative at all. Indeed the subset of logical validities known as "tautologies" are actually CoNP-complete so those are only "easy" in a complexity-theory sense if P=NP.
I said a lot of times, that "no new information would be gained" this was the view very successfully (and convincingly imo) pushed by the early and probably also late Wittgenstein for example. However I maybe should've maybe stated that "no new empirical information could be gained" instead to make it easier? You are totally correct, I didn't for the sake of clarity distinguish between logical truths and tautologies which is technically speaking simply wrong. You can have systems in which you show logical truths without showing tautologies for example in works of Carnap (?) iirc. However in the semantics of possible worlds usually we would say that both tautologies and logical truths would both be true in all possible worlds, which was the context of mixing things up, no?
@@matthias1948 I suppose I could agree with it being called free of new "empirical information" (as long as what is empirical information is suitably defined). I pointed it out- not only because I dedicate my life to "non-empirical" information so i prefer for it not to be ignored, but also because things like public key cryptography or one way functions are counterintuitive and regularly challenge the assumptions of my CS students on mathematics.
I enjoyed your discussion BTW, I'm very glad and surprised you brought up stuff I actually know something about on the stream. I'm not a philosopher by expertise though so I can't say how Wittgenstein feels prime factorisation though.
@@dr.leroychew1724 Thanks!
If you are interested about the earlier Wittgenstein and his idea about sense, senseless and nonsense: plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#SensNons
Roughly put the idea is that logical propositions like tautologies and contradictions do no represent anything being the case, so they lack sense.
Materialism so advanced it's indistinguishable from idealism.
wat
A bit too much reverb?
There is only a possible infinite amount of mental states *if* there are not physical constraints on those mental states. One can imagine a process by which we can invent an infinite amount of mental states, but you would need an infinite amount of brains to actualize those mental states. This does not invalidate physicalism. As Destiny said, at some point your brain could not hold all of that information and you would have to start writing it down. Then at some point you will run out of paper (or bits or whatever physical media you store information on). The amount of possible mental states is constrained by the number of possible ways to rearrange all of the physical states of the universe.
Destiny became turing incomplete in this debate
Hahaha yes, the German accent enhances this convo! Very enjoyable. Great job guys.
BLINDSIGHT - Peter Watts - READ IT!!!
Kareem LeBaker thanks for the recommendation. Just listened to the sample and I’m going to start it after I finish the war god series. It sounds dope af.
Ideas can exist outside of their physical truth so it is kinda hard to reduce everything to just material right?
insane conversation. would love to pick your brain on a couple of topics that i think i can argue on.
Damn that hardcore German accent is really hard to understand.
I don't know what you're talking about. This debate about race realism and the Jewish question seemed really clear to me. Destiny kept going off topic though
I'm german and it causes me pain.
It sounded like a very stereotypical german->english accent and i love it
you'd think that someone who's doing a master would have had some teaching on how to pronounce certain generic things in English. I'm pretty sure that most (higher) educated germans learn a good amount of English.
@@ShakyKiller well some of us newa lose our sweet sweet GERMANIC aksents. ;) Plus it might depend on how international your school and later your university is. Some people just do not get to practice enough with native speakers.
This video is very high level and hard to follow but I love it.
I've worked in customer service and gotten pretty good at understanding accents but even I'm having difficulty following on a complex subject such as this...
22:29 Well, you lost me there, buddy.
Is it possible to 'believe' of an infinite number of mental states? - I think belief is a physical state. If you think about anxiety - anxiety could be a form of disbelief perhaps. So when you are in a state of anxiety then maybe you are perhaps able to experience all mental states possible but not have a belief in any particular mental state itself? - if I was to present this in an idealistic way... Wouldn't this then be a catch-22?
Destiny got rocked in this debate
"I think therefor you are" - Hegel probably
Hah! The OPPOSITE is true, I claim *sniff*
@@broquestwarsneeder7617 Ahh yes I forgot Slavoj Zizek's "You think therefor I am."
I don't think the analytic/synthetic distinction is so compelling.
We are supposed to acknowledge that statements of the form "Bachelors are unmarried" are tautological in the sense that one need only know the definitions of the words in order to know whether they are true; whereas we can know the definitions of the words in the statement "Angela Merkel is the chancellor of Germany" without knowing whether the statement is true.
Is this really so justifiable? It seems to me that propositions as such have zero meaning without some empirical content in their definitions--but then the distinction between
analytic and synthetic knowedlge comes entirely from what kind of empirical knowledge you smuggle into the "definition".
Suppose I am not a native speaker of the language, and I am from a (hypothetical) culture that has no tradition of marriage. However, I know the definition that "A bachelor is an unwed man." I know that a wedding is a ceremony that romantic partners hold to elevate their relationship to some special status. I have even attended many weddings (in this language I do not speak, because of friends), so I know much about the conventions and appearances of weddings. What I do not realize is that a wedding entails the same thing as "marriage", which I understand as a lifelong partnership between two people who live together and have some legal status. It *appears* I know how to use the word wedding and I know many associated empirical facts about weddings; it appears I know how to use the word marriage, and I know many associated empirical facts about marriage; and I know that a Bachelor is an unwed man (by definition stipulated to me by a native speaker). But I don't know that a Bachelor is an unmarried an. By empirical experience, I could acquire the knowledge that a bachelor is an unmarried man, because marriage is entailed by weddings. So, one must claim that I simply don't know the definitions of these words.
One must likewise assert that I can know the definition of "Angela Merkel" without the empirical fact that she is the chancellor of Germany. But why should this be so? Is it because I can identify her in photographs? Because I know her voice? Because I have heard someone describe her in certain terms? Because I have heard her name spoken? Certainly our imaginary friend in the previous example could recognize weddings and married couples in many practical situations. But still he didn't know the "definition"!
I like this type of debate. It seems like in this environment ideals really get challenged
Is this basically an 'Existence' vs 'Probability' argument? (which I think relates to the concept of a Boltzmann Brain - which probabilistically is more likely to exist in an ideal universe than it actually appears to be able to exist in our actual universe [if I remember this correctly])... and so proves god exists? - should we then define what we mean by 'god' rather than trying to disprove god's existence?... plus this would require an indepth understanding of language.
Das ist Amowzing!
Computation, Automata, and Formal Language Theory by Hopcroft and Ullman goes over the mathematics of this kind of stuff (classification and counting of abstract formal languages). I was taught this in a graduate computer science/math course.
Destiny was a whatever I can't do this in this debate....
Couldn't this conversation be dumbed down to whether or not existence is random? (If you knew everything thing that has happened in the past, you could predict the future) nothing is random, everything that happens, happens for a reason ...
The german guy says that no new knowledge is gained when saying 2+2=4 because it is necessarily true in all worlds and that that distinguishes it from when we would find out an identity of a mental state and a physical state of the brain where there IS knowledge gained. But 2+2=4 in only true if you have gained the knowledge of what those symbols mean the same way you have to gain knowledge about what a mental state means. When I say 'Zwei plus zwei ist gleich vier' this sentence is true in all worlds but not everybody who reads this sentence would know that it mean the same as the english sentence 'two plus two equals four'.
He might counter that there might be a world where mental states are not the same as brain states, making it not true out of necessity but the same would be true for 2+2=4 where those symbol might have a different meaning.
He was just using it as an example of a tautological statement, which he then followed up with a better example.
Destiny didn't bring forth the strongest argument in this discussion
This was nice.
Saying statements are true and false could be allowed (without anything "nonphysical") by saying these are just another configuration of rocks. They aren't true or false in any other sense.
You cant talk about slipperiness at the level of quarks and electrons. Slipperiness is a property that can be possessed by things at a certain level of description. Individual quarks aren't slippery. Quarks arranged in the form of a banana peel on the ground for example can possess the property of slipperiness. Likewise, conciousness, thoughts, beliefs, desires, etc. can't be spoken of coherently purely at the level of neuronal firings. They emerge as a property of neurons under particular arrangements.
These things (slipperiness, beliefs, desire ect) can't be spoken of coherently on those terms because of human limitations of memory and attention span.
For a human with a computer like memory I could describe a 4000x4000 pxl black and white picture by one by one giving out a random pixel with its coordinates and whether its black or white and when I got to the end he would know what the picture was but of course this wouldn't work with a normal human.
Therefore this isn't an argument against whether these things can be reduced to these very small parts rather it's just about what amount of reduction is suitable for human communication in the current situation.
@@skullcrusher6 aren't you still admitting that in the case of slipperiness, the sum of quarks and electrons is more than that of its parts? Even if it could observe every partical individually, wouldn't the realization of slipperiness occur as a product of the organization, and to talk about it independently of that organization on some level to miss the point? Like both those levels of description are true. You just cant have the higher without the lower, but there's something at the higher level we can make sense of that we wont find without looking at that organization as a totality. I dont know if this works lol this is my attempt.
Slipperiness is, of course, an emergent property. But you can, at least in theory, talk about it at the level of a single quark in terms of it's electromagnetic (and possibly other) properties. It is dependent on their organization, but the organization is the 'summing' part. So, I don't see how the property of a banana peel is becoming more than the sum of properties of the constituent particles. Rather, it is exactly equal to the sum. To think of emergence as the whole being more than the sum of the parts seems unphysical. In the case of mental states, however, it is unclear how they can be completely reduced to the level of neurons (or something more fundamental).
I enjoyed this.
Destiny failed the second he allowed the guy to introduce the concept of "infinity" which is a non-physical/spiritual concept.
Also, his inability to accept hard determinism caused him some problems. He believes in free-will, even if he says he doesn't, and therefore he's already allowed spiritualism/religion into his framework.
No you
An amusing notion, but might I counter-propose...
No, YOU?
Maybe my friend maybe
haHAA
17 minutes in, the guy mentions the need for mental states as an irreducible property, which sounds a bit like what Chalmers says? I agree with the german guy on this, but will have to hear the rest of his argument.
I really like the idea of panpsychism.
I wonder if Destiny's stance on "the mental states of others" was impacted by his shroom journey.
I also believe Destiny's hardcore anti-religion stance (which has a bit of an emotional basis) pushes him to be hardcore physicalist.
I wish Destiny would have brought up music, or the arts in general to contrast the guest’s position on moral realism.
Destiny got Mind’ed in this debate
Hello good sirs, do you have a moment to hear the word of the great philosopher Henri Bergson?
I am a dumbo, but it seems hard to say that ideas are actually material. It seems like you cannot really assert , for example , that the concept of good PHYSICALLY exists.
nice, finally a reasonable philosopher :X
@Just_J hey, not ducking you for real. im traveling so meme length responses is about as good as i can do atm.
Casting my vote before it start
Mind is physical
Dat iz corwekt
@1999 In what way is it wierd?
Yeah but are all products of the mind inherently physical , such as ideas ? And if ideas can be false in a way that physical things cannot ( something is either physically there or it isn't ) then are they really only physical per say ?
Qualia my dude
You can't measure a smell, a taste, a sight, a sound. You can only measure the brain states that occur while they happen. Thus you cannot measure mind, thus it's not physical. You can only measure the brain. If you think they're the same thing, you must understand that trying to measure pain by how loud people scream isn't accurate for exactly the same reason. Pain is an experience, and you cannot access it physically. You can't run away from the experience of pain, you can't lock it away in the closet, you can't send it through a particle accelerator; it's not physical.
Wait, he totally changed the conversation from "real mindsets real people could have" to "mindsets we can theoretically concieve of". Isn't HE kind of presupposing his thing there?
I would say that the set of real mindsets a real person can have is finite, and can be reduced to the physical properties of the neurons in your brain.
Which generally, in our experience, seems to be true - At some point, things become too long or too complex to hold them in a single "thought". Even if I granted you an infinite amount of time to say "I think that you think that I think that you think...", I'd argue that eventually, because your brain is finite, you will have completed so many iterations that the number gets too big for your brain to hold, so you'd basically fall into a repeated loop of brain states at that point, even though the sentence itself would become infinitely long.
Essentially, to cover all my bases, I would put it into three/four arguments:
1. The subset of all theoretically concievable mindsets which only contains those that are actually possible in a real human brain is finite and in 1:1 correspondence to a finite* set of physical states of the neurons in your brain.
2. The thought process you use to create an algorithm to theoretically concieve of thoughts that are infinite is a part of that set of physically achievable mental states. (Just like we can write Euler's Constant as a summation with only a couple of symbols)
3. The thoughts the algorithm would produce eventually become impossible for a real human mind to hold, keeping the set of physically possible mental states finite. (Just like we can't actually write down Euler's Constant on any "piece of paper" that could exist in the world)
(4. Any mindset that is not within the set of actually phyiscally possible mindsets can strictly be one of two things: Either you can only arrive at it through some phyiscally conceivable algorithm, or it is impossible to even concieve of it)
Of course all of this is sort-of only obtainable by declaring it axiomatically, but I also think you can somewhat justify it inductively with observations we can make about thoughts and human brains in the real world.
*Also, another problem could be that we don't know 100% if our universe does or doesn't have the theoretical ability to hold infinite information. There are things like planck length/time/energy, but quantum superpositions challenge that. Maybe there are infinitely many possible physical neuron arrangements. But I don't think this argument is even really necessary.
Yes, if you assume materialism to be true as you do in 1, materialism will be true. However, we want to find out whether it is true and it seems deeply weird that there seem to be a possible (not actual) amount of infinite mental states and only a finite possible amount of neural states. Logically, at no point we would have reason stop the iterative process. There are physical limitations, sure. However physical limitations are not in the realm of logics and possibility but simple actual limitations. Here an analogy: We cannot write down an infinite amount of numbers, but infinity does still "exist".
@@matthias1948 Well, infinity exists as a concept, because we invented it, can think about it (sort of), and because it is useful sometimes.
But does infinity... actually... exist? For example, correspond to anything in the real world? I don't know. In math, the only reason infinity exists is because we've declared it axiomatically. Well, maybe the universe has infinite space, I suppose? Idk.
I personally don't think the human mind's ability to confuse itself, i.e. think of and about things that don't correspond to something in the real world, disproves materialism. And, do we even really? We think of properties that are paradoxical, but because they are, we never are really able to grasp a concept like infinity completely.
I would even go as far as to say I'm not sure logic is "real". The human mind has observed things in our universe and made the concept of "causality", which _seems_ to universally apply, so we're _pretty sure_ the laws of logic always hold true. Kind of "We have to assume logic applies to the real world to be able to do anything, and it seems to be working out so far, let's really hope nothing comes along and messes this up for us.", and so far nothing really has shaken our understanding of causality and logic.
I guess the only thing I would grant you is that maybe there is a use in giving "concepts that don't apply to anything in the real world" a new name, even though I 100% believe the act of thinking about them is all reducable to neuron states (Like I said, the human mind's ability to confuse itself is highly explainable through science) and nothing that isn't reducable actually happens in the real world.
To summarize, I feel like your argument at this point is "Because we can think of something that doesn't exist, means that not everything is material" and I don't really agree with that. Even if those thoughts are useful concepts, they are all kind of "silly" (which is okay! I appreciate how silly humans are, that's a good thing, and it helps sometimes. Embracing completely silly thoughts is probably what granted us the world domination that we currently have in the animal kingdom)
PS: I find it kind of weird to use math for all of this, btw, because math is a bunch of made-up shit. It's really great made-up shit, but unlike science, it isn't concerned with reality at all. It just happens to be useful in science and every day observation sometimes.
@@newsoupvialt "Because we can think of something that doesn't exist, means that not everything is material". Kind of? However it's not simply that it doesn't exist but that we NEED the operator of possibility in actual science and possibility as such would result in problems for materialist views. You are right math is kind of silly, however it works as an accurate description of reality and is really useful. I mean gambling makes loads of money with it and they NEED the concept of possibility and infinity haha
@@matthias1948 I understand, and I kind of agree, but I wouldn't say something being able to be thought of and be useful in application means it exists. It exists as an idea in somebody's mind, but it does not at all exist in the same way that a rock on the ground does. And any idea about something that doesn't exist still exists as a result of somebody's material thought process, of course. We can create fantastical worlds in our minds but they will never exist.
I thought what we mean by "existing" is that it's something that interacts with reality in some way. "Infinity" will never interact with reality - A human being thinking about the impossible concept of infinity, applying it to something in the real world in a useful way, is what interacts with reality. What is actually going on is that a bunch of neurons are firing in a way that makes the human act in a certain way that has certain effects. The human can think about something non-material as hard as they want, and it never actually starts interacting with the real world, it's always them who does and the universe doesn't care about all the fantastical things they came up with to get there.
And this definition of "existing" by interacting with the real world is not me presupposing materialism, right? Because something spiritual, like God, would interact with the real world via miracles and creating the world to begin with etc... Zodiac signs affect the probability of real-world outcomes, etc.
Some could claim a God actually exists that never interacts with our universe or only with a planet so far away that we will actually 100% guaranteed never see it or feel any effects on it, but I would consider that a paradoxical statement anyway. If something happens that has no bearing on the real world and the people within it, I would consider that thing to not exist, because the word "exists", like everything in science, presupposes a human perspective, and what's useful for us to talk about. Just covering my bases here, I don't know if you'd even disagree with this.
Of course, my materialism only goes so far as to say "everything that has any effect on us is material", I can't 100% guarantee that there isn't something like a seperate spiritual plane that we never have a chance of interacting with.
I can totally see that we need a different term or framework to analyze things like inifinity through than very basic materialsm (Kind of like we talk about a "chair" to refer to a structure of atoms and it doesn't really make sense to talk about the properties of those atoms individually, it makes more sense to identify the abstract properties of a chair, like being able to sit on it etc), but I still don't really agree that they are outside of it (Just like at the end of the day, any real chair still is "just a collection of atoms"). Anything that happens in the real world is reducable to material stuff. And honestly, I think it's kind of arrogant for humans to say "This material world makes my brain, and all of my thoughts are just neuron states, but because I can think of a theoretical thing that is not material, that means I have ascended and disproved materialism", or less selfishly, "I need to prove the existence of non-material concepts like infinity to justify using them to make positive change in the real world". I don't think you do, we can say they don't truly exist one bit, but they are useful to deal with things that do exist.
we have evidence that 2 and 2 make 4. we don't just assume it's true.
Cookies and cookies are not the same as the other one
Listening to other german people who embrace the ZEE is really weird to me
Love the content :)
As a german its really painful to listen to a german accent...
yEs YESSSS MOAR FUCKING PHILOSOHY; DSTINY, MORE FUCKING pHiloSOPHISTICALITIES IN THIS DEBATE
Can you imagine a two-dimensional universe?
Would anyone say the Internet itself is conscious?
I doubt consciousness is something can happen by accident just because you have a lot of interacting parts. Most of the cognition happening in the human brain isn't conscious, for example.
Angela Merkel got chancellored in this debate.
:/
Maybe next video buddy, it'll be okay
Oh gno
Be careful with the reproducibility of emergence - saying it cannot be reduced implies a heck lot of things (thing i wouldn't agree on) Destiny firing back there was very good and show nice intuitive understanding of implications of statements :D
A small suggestion from a fellow philosopher, could we stop seeing consciousness as a binary? the debate on mushrooms zombies and AI becomes a lot more logical if we assume a scale - better even multidimensional scale, no not just more or less conscious but "different conscious - as there are different types qualities properties and effects of consciousness, we can have one and not another, there factors are then "dimensions" on a scale, therefore everything is conscious, just sometimes close to 0 never actual 0 :) it is therefore very feasible other "things" reach a level similar or higher then humans in consciousness.
This also solves the "cut off criticism" if consciousness is binary and separated it must have evolved, therefore it must have appeared out of nowhere in its entirety which is illogical :)
hope i made sense :D
and one more, about the infinity paradox.
A possible different answer to saying its limited (as that is illogical):
A possible mental state is created by a physical state creating it, unless the physical state exists the mental state doesnt either, its a conclusion of the physical system that creates it not an entity that exists by itself. This does kinda limit the amount of mental states theoretically, assuming the physical system is contained, but even about that we arent sure, its very possible that the physical system is infinite (hello time), if it is limited then what "surrounds" it? as long as we can not reasonably answer these questions there is little sense in debating whether there is more mental states then physical one - we dont know the exact connection between mental and physical states nor do we know the extent of either of the dimensions.
You make my day 😌
I bet this guy has a German accent even when speaking German! Wowzers
HOMEOSTASIS
Destiny got...
1 plus 1 equals 2, if i create a microwave, every component that is internal for that machine to be a microwave will remain as is for it to be a microwave, if i make a car to drive, it will remain as is to be a car that drives based on its components, however, every human being has the same components, from atoms, to protein chains, to dna, to cells, to organs, to the body as a whole, yet, we are all so different, a robot that is designed to do a task will do that task, if human beings are basically robots in a material or deterministic world, then we wouldn't be different at all, because we would all be determined the exact same way despite origin of birth or culture of anything, a microwave in Canada will be a microwave in china, and america, or Paris it doesnt matter. Human beings interpret things differently, and are influenced and can change or make progress, a microwave or television or car will never decide or express desire to be something more than what it is, i highly doubt the amount of neurons or whatever makes up the brain would make us this different so drastically all alone, especially when our building blocks are very much the same.
46:30
Fuck me, this was some real shit. I mean it could be seen as all bs, but at least this dude had some knowledge. I was blown away at the level that Destiny was able to keep up. His physical brain must be exerting some serious tired neurons from all the dumb cunts he has had on the channel, it's nice to see him have to wake up in a debate for once:P. TBh I don't get how having more of one thing makes that thing more correct. In theory, you can combine 100 physical things in 10,000 different ways or wtv and create more from less. Why could multiple neurons not do the same to create more ideas then there are neurons to express them?
Don't get stuck debating semantics