@fluoxy L. Are you speaking out of experience? Marty is too unapologetic in his use of philosophical jargon, which is why Destiny has to keep asking the same question over and over. He sometimes gives examples and thought experiments that sometimes help, but even then he ends up using even more sophisticated jargon. This is essentially what a teacher is for: being able to gauge the level of understanding of the students and work accordingly.
Offered a few answers to the concerns people brought up! Might make a video for clarification on other things! Thanks for the interest in philosophy guys! :D
The Philosphy Chat Interesting conversation. I think you could avoid the infinite regress by just getting to a point where your explanation is "good enough", so there doesn't have to be an infinite regress, but it also doesn't mean we can perceive that the other mind."
@@JeremyTaylor The argument isn't whether there is a "good interpretation" or "slightly worse interpretation". It's whether the content of someone's utterance is semantically indeterminate. The point is, there is no basis of establishing the semantical meaning of someone's utterances through interpretation alone. Let's say I do use an interpretation A to get at why David meant. What's the basis for acknowledging the internal meaning of A to begin with? The interpretation of B? But what's the basis for that? C, ad-infinitium. None of these are "better" or "worse", they just don't resolve the question at all because ulimately there is no basis for the interpretation if all we're using is our own inward meaning. There is a radical contingency between the meaning of someone's utterances if they are idiolectic and our own. The thinking is confused. We don't make up meanings from the inside, and then compare them to outside. Eventually, we have to say meaning isn't a species of interpretation at all (sometimes). It's something directly perceivable.
His whole language argument seems super shaky. Language seems like a reflection of and built upon our thought processes, so it seems like the sense of self might arise before or without the need of language.
Your sense of self can only arise if other "selves" have been made known to you. There is simply no other way. And the way to achieve that is through advanced communication : language.
Hey, Bit of a misunderstanding, I think. All I admitted is that there is a form of subjectivity such as ourselves that requires a language. Languages requires multiple people (as in why would we communicate without someone to communicate to?) And therefore, to some extent the subject is constituted by languages. Now, it might be said that a basic awareness doesn't require a language, but what I'm arguing is that self-consciousness requires a language and that's distinct from awareness. Because in order to talk about *that* type of subjectivity, it require that we can reflect using propositional attitudes such as "having a belief that I have a belief." Otherwise it's consciousness, not self-consciousness (knowing-that-i know about my consciousness).
The Philosophy Chat I guess where I’m stuck is at “a form of subjectivity such as ourselves that requires a language,” particularly in reference to when you say “languages require multiple people.” A language to me seems like a reflection of the ways a human brain process information. I don’t see how one can think without that thought being in some form of a language, even if it’s one only that individual can understand. So it seems to me that we can think to ourselves in some form of language, and thus we do not require others to form language. So if we can form language on our own, can’t we be self conscious without the need of others? I might be getting caught up on terms here, I’m not very experienced in philosophy.
The Philosophy Chat I think you’re argument is begging the question. You say that there is a type of subjectivity that requires language and therefore the subjective experience is composed of language. It follows logically of course but I for one see no reason to believe that being aware of “your own” awareness requires language. As you say “in order to talk about it requires language,” but the experience itself doesn’t in my view. language is just a way of expressing the things we already experience. To give you an example “I” “know” that “I” am having thoughts, but that knowledge isn’t by definition propositional I just am able to express that knowledge in a propositional way.
Its about using your mind's ability to store information temporarily effectively as fuck, and when you do it as fast as he does constantly it becomes easy for him. You have a certain amount of memory that you don't need to pay attention for, like when you hear a tune you can repeat it immediately after even though you might have been concentrating on something else. Or the way you learn lyrics without ever trying to learn them. Its pretty cool.
I think the problem is that Destiny looks at mind as a "thing" not a "process". If you use legs, the things, you get running, the process. If you break a leg, you can distort or eliminate that process. If you "use" brain, you get mind, thinking, which is a process. If you damage the brain, you can change, distort, eliminate the process.
The philosophical problem enters when we do the analysis of those situations you described. We can analyze legs and understand exactly how they generate the "running" process, but all our attempts at analyzing the brain at best get us only correlates with the mind (process of conscious experience). Even logically we don't understand how to possibly bridge the gap from correlations to explanations. You can show why muscles expanding and contracting in the right motions will cause the legs to propel themselves forward, but you can't show why appropriate brain wave patterns would result in conscious experience. How could you, even in principle? That's known as the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
57:42 The response here would be that reasons are causes too. We don't control which reasons strike us as persuasive or correct. They may not be 'reducible' to the beliefs that precipitated them, but they don't need to be. What matters is that we can't really control how persuasive a reason is to us, nor can we control which reasons will occur to us.
Hey, You don't need to control your beliefs. I believe in doxastic involuntarism. Meaning I believe that we do not have direct control over our beliefs or desires. The point isn't that we will what we want to will (that would mean we can desire before we desire!), but rather we pursue things for the sake of good reasons instead of mere causal dispositional explanations (or expressions of some causal state). There's a distinction that's important because it makes our intentional actions unique, and subject to their own laws. The reason why it's not regulated to the latter is because doing things for the sake of reasons is an irreducible property - one that cannot be determined by mere causal dispositions. Why? One of the reasons might be the case is that when we act upon reasons, we're also asking for justification. We're endorsing the actions we find reasonable. They have a normative dimension (one we ought to be in accordance with.) However, causes don't have a normative dimension. One might say that causes don't occur because they ought to have, but because there was a mechanical explanation. Justifications aren't such a species of things. Of course one might be tempted to create an identity thesis, but then they'd have to explain normativity away.
@@ThePhilosophyChat Thanks for the response. I'm curious how your theory addresses Hume's idea that "reasons are slave to passions". That is, reasons are useful in establishing the best way to go about achieving goals or solving problems, but the choosing of the goals are essentially the result of our base urges, emotions and intuitions. Like you gave the example of smoking, but the dangers of smoking striking someone as a good reason to quit would be contingent upon a desire to live as long as possible, and a willingness to sacrifice other goals (pleasure) in the service of that goal. Would you consider that a problem for your position? I agree with you that reasons have a normative dimension, but I think what that proves is that they are a unique type of cause, not that they cannot be causes. When you say "causes have no normative dimension", that premise assumes your conclusion. It seems more reasonable to say that "other causes have no normative dimension". It is metaphysically possible for a subgroup of a category to have unique properties and still remain a part of that category. At least that is me tentatively prodding at your position, I may be misinterpreting it.
11:20 Earlier, the guest said we can tell peoples mind-states by observing their external attributes. Can we be sure, by observing cock roaches that they dont have states of mind? Maybe we just lack the language then to perceive them?
I also think Destiny's issue here is he's ascribing metaphysical properties to the mind, so of course he can't expect a "mind" to be something physical. The problem is, the notion of a mind is so ill-defined and vague that it's not useful, and we think this way because our perception of ourselves and our qualia is so important that we resist saying they're simply the result of a computation from our complex brains given our sensory input and any pre-existing structures that give us instinctual behaviour or thinking. So of course if we believe in the existence of this vague, ill-defined object, that would require faith or some dualism-like belief. Unless you reject the notion that our brain is just a complex computer entirely, the "mind" goes away at that point. So asking "is a mind here?" would be simply asking "does this object have sufficient computational ability and 'sensory' input to produce what we would call a mind?" and your dualism is gone at that point. Maybe someone could counter this by saying "well we don't have a machine that can read conscious experience from a brain so you're wrong", but how many times has humanity thought "we don't know this therefore it's supernatural" and how many times has that ended up being the correct way of thinking? Maybe it's a fallacy, but until someone demonstrates to me a mind that is completely unaffected by the physical world, I'm going to keep on believing that the mind is physical and therefore, in principle, measurable. Edit: Also, I think it's a minority opinion in neuroscience that quantum mechanical properties have any effect on the mind given the size of neurons and the brain itself, so these deferrals to QM and interpretations are pretty much nothing more than pseudoscience or speculation, if I'm being charitable. QM is weird, but not "justifies anything you want to believe" weird.
Okay but I can sense my qualia. It's so immanent it makes more sense to doubt the external world, math and even logic, then it does qualia. People who dont't see this are either dishonest, or p-zombies in my view.
@@TheLumberjack1987 But why should that help us survive? There's no need for something to feel like something. Our world could work the same exact way if everybody was a robot that's following inputs.
In my view our minds are like you say a result of a computation from our complex brains, but when you imply that we don't require faith or some dualism-like belief I kinda disagree because it seems that faith is something that is "programmed" in our computer like mind. These two concepts are not mutual exclusive. Human being seem to always tend to search for some spiritual or divine way of thinking. We only disregard religion when science started proving that religous beliefs were obsulete, when logic became incompatible with those religious beliefs. And after all this we still try to find things that create a state of mind close to extreme religious experinces like meditation, hallucinogenics etc. All this things create some type of metaphysical experience and a lot of them make people imagine some type of being, like so many people who cosume hallucinogenics say to have expirienced a presence of a being.
This was very very incorrect. Chemical bonds aren't emergent in the way he is saying. They are ultimately just interatomic forces on a larger scale. Evn what we think of as an atom isn't this specific proper thing but just a mish-mash of different probabilities. We really don't know how stuff works really there's no final physical 'thing'. There's only forces and wave functions and their interactions. We could predict the result of forming chemical bonds if we understood enough about the atoms themselves. Marty's science is stuck in the 1800's. Now that doesn't invalidate the emergent property argument in itself, but the fact is that we just don't know enough quantum mechanics to make those claims for certain. QM is to physics sort of what minds are to biology. We just don't know enough to make claims like these.
"QM is to physics sort of what minds are to biology". Do you realize you just invalidated your whole useless wall of text ? Do you understand what this whole conversation was about ?
@@sovietsandvich8443 Seems about right. If you already accept the idea of spiritual substances, then I'm not exactly sure how one is managing to escape from the existence of a necessary being.
@@sovietsandvich8443 I just don't find the ontological difference between God and Nature to be tenable. (That is, dualists positions don't make sense to me. And I don't see many of the notable theists argue against panentheism these days).
Seems like Destiny's issue is with the "hard problem of consciousness" which I'm sure he has talked about years ago, but now he's phrasing it in this different way which confuses his guest.
Speaking as someone with a philosophy degree, anyone can engage with philosophy. No philosopher worth their salt is going to try and use credentials or appeals to authority to shut down criticism.
The part about communication is wrong. Or at least there is another option. The guy made the claim that if you assume there isn't some sort of inherent understanding or way to figure out what's in other peoples mind you will fall into an infinite regression, so there has to be some. That's not true, understanding language is based on concepts we associate with words. For the dog example you have a concept of what a dog is from experience. You saw a dog, you heard a dog etc. Then you associate that concept with the word "dog" by seeing other people associate it with what seems like your concept of a dog. The flow is like this: Someone says a word > that word is associated with a concept in your mind > the concept comes from personal experience Of course it can be a lot more complicated, there could be a lot more steps in there, but it ends in personal experience, its not an infinite regression and it doesn't mean the association you make is magically the same association that the other person makes when he thinks of that word. They tend to be similar (we assume), ofc, because we all experience the same reality(we assume), just from different points of view. That's the assumption you have to make imo, not that the world gives you some information on other people's minds. So the way you associate the word "dog" with your concept of a dog is by seeing, for instance your mom point at a dog and say "dog". You don't know what's going on in her mind, you have no direct information on that, what you know is that they associated the word "dog" with YOUR concept of what a dog is. Also on how it's not possible to have a private language, that depends on how you define language. If you define it as a means of communication between multiple people then yeah, it's true by definition. If you don't assume that it has to be between multiple people then you can absolutely have private language. Make up some signs and define a meaning for them. Write them on a piece of paper and then read them after a while, there you go, you made your own language.
Hello, As I have said earlier: It's whether the content of someone's utterance is semantically indeterminate. The point is, there is no basis of establishing the semantical meaning of someone's utterances through interpretation alone. Let's say I do use an interpretation A to get at why David meant. What's the basis for acknowledging the internal meaning of A to begin with? The interpretation of B? But what's the basis for that? C, ad-infinitium. None of these are "better" or "worse", they just don't resolve the question at all because ulimately there is no basis for the interpretation if all we're using is our own inward meaning. There is a radical contingency between the meaning of someone's utterances if they are idiolectic and our own. The thinking is confused. We don't make up meanings from the inside, and then compare them to outside. Eventually, we have to say meaning isn't a species of interpretation at all (sometimes). It's something directly perceivable. To further this point. Even if we associate a concept with a word, there is no basis to determine whether someone else associated any concept with that word. Since there can be an infinite amount of words with a series of different concepts. You can say we just agree upon something. But how do we know we came to an agreement is the very question being asked. It's not possible to create a private language. You can make up words once you have acquired a language, and say "shoe" for each time you think the concept "horse", but you are already working with an established set of norms. Norms cannot be made individually since norms presuppose error. And if you are creating all the words yourself, then there should be no basis for error. Error presupposes other individuals keeping you in check with yourself.
@@ThePhilosophyChat "The point is, there is no basis of establishing the semantical meaning of someone's utterances through interpretation alone." But I never said it's interpretation alone, I said it always boils down to experience. What I was trying to say was that you interpret 'A' not through 'B' etc but through what you see, hear, smell, taste or feel. I guess my point would boil down to experience being the base for understanding anything, including what's in people's minds. Of course we can have no guarantees that we understand exactly what other people are communicating, but that's the case with all our knowledge. "there is no basis to determine whether someone else associated any concept with that word" The basis is common experience. (We assume that) the experiences people have come from a common reality (if you see a tree it's because there's a tree there and other people can see it too). Which means that the information we extract from experience would be very similar. And "But how do we know we came to an agreement is the very question being asked." I mean, c'mon to put it bluntly if everyone says "dog" when they see a dog and you also see a dog and hear them say "dog" when you see them looking at it, it's pretty safe to assume that they associated that concept with the word. It's not exactly an agreement, it's just you learning to use a word when you want to describe a thing because you've seen people use that word when they were interacting or observing that thing in some way. I'm not sure I really understand what your position is. Do you think we somehow extract information directly from other peoples minds without being aware of it? Or that we have some sort of way of communicating that we're not aware of? Common consciousness? Or is it a similar position to what I'm describing, just more refined and I'm not getting it? Or something completely different?
@@kappa6544 (1) I don't know what about the senses informs you of what the meaning of the content is, unless you're saying we "see"/precieve meaning. Which is what I'm arguing for. (2) I agree that there is a similar experience that is the basis for (some) our concepts [though I'm not sure if of course all of language functions like this, obviously], but then we are not forming an arbitrary internal meaning for something. There is content (out there) that rationally constraints the meaning of our concepts. That is, it informs us. But that just means, that the conceptual content is directly perceivable, and used for the basis of our agreement. However, I am not sure if that's what you have in mind. You seem to think that we have non-conceptual content outside, that we make intelligible. And presumably we make it intelligible through forms of inferentialism. But, as I said, that doesn't work. (3) I don't see what saying, "It's obvious" amounts to. Say, I use the word "fin". How do we know if the person is meaning it in french for "Finish" or is saying it in English for the fin we see on a fish. We need somehow to disambiguate it. Pointing can only get us to far, as we can be pointing to several things, and it's indeterminate which ostensive gesture is being get at. We can use context-relative language, but then how do we discover which context is being used in the first place? Interpretation? But then we get an infinite regress. (4) Yes, I think that intentions and meaning are directly perceivable to some extent. That is, there are some forms of propositional content that is given to use without the use of inferences. In the same sense that color, or extension is directly perceivable. There is some sort of immediacy to other people's intent, or the meaning of utterances. This certainly isn't always the case, or for the majority of the time, but in some rare cases.
29:50 ive not got this either - that chemical bond thing... H2 plus O chemically bonded to FORM water sure changes the nature and properties of things that are pre-existing. It might be more interesting to ask "Where" the energy went to that enabled this bond to occur rather than focus on the water. I get what Destiny is saying, we can measure water. It has properties - if we were to measure "mind" what metrics could we use to say if more - or less - mind was present? Is "ANY" mind present at all? When the talk first started and Destiny mentioned that things are things we can measure, feel, sense and touch, i thought about spandrels. (For example, the "Arch" formed under the bricks that are laid at a slight angle to each other over a door way to support the weight above. From "where" does that arch come from?)
Listening to peeps with an Anglophone phil background talk about broad theoretical topics is always such a trip. Like, if it's on a shared subject, it's like a little language barrier, which is easy to overcome. But these sorts of videos... It's like watching an Eisenstein flick, or a contemporary Chinese film. It's a prolonged dive into a different culture.
But imo his initial premise that a solitary person can't distinguish itself from the nature around it doesn't pass the sniff test. A lone person still would understand without language that it does not function the way a tree or puddle does. Language is socially constructed to communicate these subjective experiences but the experiences exist without effective communication
Long post but there’s a lot of evidence in modern psychology that suggests that language is the corner stone of what makes humans a higher animal. The theory I’m most familiar with claims that without language you would literally lack the ability to construct what the idea of something independent to the physical thing itself - which would make you as cognitively aware as a monkey. And this isn’t an innate cognitive ability either, the brains of children who are deprived of language as babies are underdeveloped in areas where we think these processes must come from. The isolated man in your hypothetical, following this model likely would not be able to distinguish between himself and a tree because whilst he can experience and react to the tree he lacks the ability to even have an understanding of what a ‘tree’ is because there would be no feedback to the grunts he might make when he sees the tree. A dog called ‘Andy’ can respond to its name but because they don’t have language they can never ever cognitively experience being ‘Andy’. Simply having memory and the ability to react to stimuli is not enough to ‘understand’ much of anything - unless we want to make the argument that a video game is conscious since games have both of those things.
@@wisenatorez2269 I'm familiar with that concept in psychology however there are also critiques. Such as the idea that whether language is formalized there are still innate distinctions made. In essence some aspects of pre language. Furthermore there's evidence to suggest that even in isolation verbalized distinctions would be made by anyone not deaf because of the interaction with other creatures. His argument that it essentially requires a collective to ascend to higher order thinking and self awareness doesn't hold. It's not exactly a settled idea in any discipline
sybil sanity sybil sanity Of course. It’s called relational frame THEORY for a reason. The causes of behaviour are ultimately cognitively impenetrable. So yeah I don’t really think the dude in the video had any ground to stand on - I was just bringing up that there’s an argument that can be made for language being more influential than memory/reactivity visa vis conscious experience.
@@wisenatorez2269 yeah I'm totally on board to give credit to language for having a greater influence than it is often afforded. Just Not full credit or that it necessarily supercedes other aspects like this guy was pushing
i dont see why there cant be an infinite regress in interpretation like marty assumes. can he, or anyone, even conceive of an interpretation that i can't ask "why?" to? i don't mean a correct interpretation either, i mean any, no matter how ridiculous. what could you tell me that i couldn't break down further?
@@Mightyzep you're conflating math/logic, which has axioms, with the physical world. it would make more sense to appeal to science, but there are no scientific axioms. and you can ask "why?" with math, until you get to the axioms. however, if an axiom had a "why?" it would no longer be an axiom, by definition. what then are the axioms of reality?
Heya, If there was an infinite interpretation of a word/sentence a person could mean, it would mean that the semantic content is semantically indeterminate - any meaning we assume is just as good as any other guess; no conclusion could be given. We need some way in order to know what a person means without the infinite regress. And we do seem to be communicating to some extent. That is, we do understand what people mean/the normativity of their language. To summarize the problem using McDowell/Thornton: "1. If possession of a concept were correctly conceived as the grasp of a ratification-independent pattern, then there would be no knowing for sure how someone else understand an expression. The minor premise would be: 2. It is not the case that there is no knowing for sure how someone else understands an expression. Or: 1. If possession of a concept were correctly conceived as the grasp of a ratification-independent pattern, then that understanding would have to be idiolectic i.e. a matter of individual understanding). 2. Idiolectic meaning is an illusion. " You can find more information about this in Tim Thorton's book "John McDowell."
If you ask what a dog is, and do the why game long enough, the final answer youll get is just an actual dog. You cant ask any more questions about that, a dog is a dog. The final answer is just dog = dog.
It could just be that we aren't technologically advanced yet. During the industrial revolution, philosophers liked to compare steam engines with the mind (e.g. emotions such as sexual stress could be accumulated and released towards war efforts for soldiers). Today we like to compare our brains with computers which better represents how we calculate and induce emotions through releases of chemicals triggered by signals, like how computers execute functions. I don't see why we wouldn't be able to point at a characteristic in the brain responsible for consciousness in the future as technology and brain knowledge advance as it has in the recent past. (also why I think nonphysical influence is unlikely, maybe its fourth dimension fuckery that we just cant perceive yet, who knows?)
the issue is the intractability between our sense perception systems and our first person qualitative experiences. so we can explain eg that our sensory processing systems are what allow us to have these experiences, but it cant explain why my experience of red is red and not something else, and it cant explain intentional states (i am thinking *about* something right now, but how can eg neurons be about anything?) read jerry fodor. he was one of the big people behind developing our current computational theories of how the mind work. he was convinced this approach would solve these issues, but became disillusioned when he saw what he considered to be NO progress made on certain fundamental questions pertaining to the mind. to paraphrase him, "if you want to study emotions, read Henry James" (= read poetry, because cognitive science has very little to actually say about the topic)
There's two big problems here though: (1) What is the basis of making the comparison between our minds and computers in the first place? You will have to provide an explanation for why they are identical or of the same type of function. It is not enough to make analogies between hardware/software. Otherwise, all we are doing is anthropomorphizing computers, and giving them human-like capacities arbitrarily. (2) If we want to say that "eventually" we will find a complete explanation, then this isn't an argument as much as we are hold out on faith. It's a "science-of-the-gaps" argument that presupposes that the mind MUST be like a computer, and that science MUST fill in all known gaps. Which has no basis.
@@ThePhilosophyChat The relevance of the comparison is that they both operate with signals making patterns which are the closest thing other than the brain we know of, and i say it feels like we will find better answers in the not so far future, like we did from the industrial revolution and now for all sorts of things. It may be true there's currently an un-observable force at work and science won't be able to figure it out forever, but that's unprecedented hence unlikely.
@@painzkiller2452 Hello! Well, everything functions with patterns/and signals. Things like electric circuits, calculators, etc. However, I doubt anyone is going to say that calculators or electrical circuits have minds like ours.
@@ThePhilosophyChat Yo is this you? Heres the thing, brains CODE for consciousness, calculators dont. It's not just information, its information and systems assembled in a way that codes for a virtual space, an inner world. It's more like a video game, less like a calculator. Also why dont philosophers give more credence to neuroscientists?
So if I have a car without wheels and I add wheels the drivablility power that the car attains would be radical kind emergence because it is emergent but it is not spacial and it is not mass... But we can pretty easilly identify that the emergent property of drivability of the car is reducible to it's macro parts at the very least which tells me that radical kind emergence is not sufficent to prove that something is not reducable. (I am pretty agnostic to reductionism as a whole)
a mind emerges from the brain in the same way that software emerges from hardware, or literature from paper/ink. You cant crack it open and find it physically, because it does not exist as a separate physical entity. It is something that we read into the physical elements
@@paulgotik Careful, I feel like this simplifies it way too much. Theres complex interactions between brain regions that code for models, virtual spaces that give the impression of immaterialness. Electrochemical processes are not what consciousness is any more than a video game is just a bunch of transistors. Theres whole levels of higher emergent properties that are in between them.
destiny->13:09-"I feel like something exists that I fully believe in that I cannot percieve in any physical way whatsoever" Isn't this the same feeling that religious people have? It's the same way of thinking.
The thing about salt is that it doesn't have any new type of property that sodium an chlorine didn't already had. Sure it is not inflammable anymore but it goes through a chemical reaction in the presence of fire, just not the same, whereas conciousness seems to be a different type of property that anything physical has, not just a different way of expressing a shared property
@fluoxy L. are eyes working, as is the case for many animals on the planet, us engaging the properties of consciousness? Edit for clarification: I dont mean that the properties of conciousness cannot be measured to reflect a conscious state. We can see that a brain does things, that a body does things, but also that certain pieces don't aggregate into something that consciousness can be describes as coming from.
Great discussion! However there seems to be some kind of cancerous error that's taking up the bottom left of your recording... hopefully that is fixed in later uploads.
Can't we say a mind exists by it's argrigated parts in a certain state. So neurons with charges firing through them? What its consciously experiencing probably has a relationship with that too, giving us some measurement or perception of someone's consciousness (brain scans showing parts of the brain functioning). This should also give us some insight into conscious subjectivity somehow I assume.
Is there chemistry or are there chemical reactions that can't be explained by physics alone? In the same way that cultural phenomena can't be explained by physics alone, I mean.
@@romanski5811 Well, I would argue that if we had a perfect computer with infinite computing power, then we could explain cultural phenomena by calculating neuron signals and so on. But I don't think we will ever achieve the creation of such a computer. Chemistry is similar. In Theory it should be completely explainable by formulas and calculations from Physics alone. However, the computing power necessary to calculate all the energy equations would be astronomical. That is where the Science of Chemistry steps in. Chemists creates Theories and Hypotheses that ease the burden of calculation by simplifying the equations or by finding correlations so significant that one can bypass the calculations altogether. So basically everythings is Chemistry ergo everything is Physics ergo everything is Maths but we will probably never achieve the computing power necessary to be able to calculate the phenomena we want to be able to explain.
For those of you who are interested in emergence of consciousness rigorously argued, you should read Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. The book is absolutely massive, because his philosophy has that many prerequisites and he goes explain all of them. The book is a work of art and should not be considered a mere philosophy tome, but also a literary piece and a mathematical text. I honestly hope Destiny would read it too, because it is a such a beautiful book and also because Hofstadter examplifies the behavious he is explaining also in music among other things. The books is called Godel, Escher, Bach, because it was Godel who used self reference to prove his incompleteness theorem, Escher because his drawings illustrated a lot of weird phenomenon Hofstadter is talking about like recursion, again self reference, etc. Finally Bqch stands for no other than Johan Sebastian Bach, who composed incredibly complex fuges, which Hofstadter analyses to see how his ideas apply to music. He explains the fundementals of logic and mathematics to delve into the philosophy of so called strange loops, which are these phenomena that look like they influence themselves or that they come back to where they started, but in fact that is an emergent illusion. This is not just some hogwash psuedo philosophy, this is a real text that people study in grad schools and he argues his assertions and points very very rigorously in comparison to basically any other philosopher tackling consciousness like this guy talking to Destiny who can't argue any of his assertions whatsoever without resorting to illdefinitions of the natural language that allow ambiguities he can use. This book is absolutely gigantic so if you just want to get a glimpse of an idea of what his philosophy might look like, watch the video You Are A Strange Loop by Will Schroder. The video gives an intuitive idea of how this might look like, but please understand that it would be impossible to argue the points in such a short video where Hofstadter himself needed a 800 page tome to cover the prerequisites a layman would definitely be missing. Though he did go on MANY tangents, because the book is not JUST philosophy text, like I said. So please resort to GEB if you are serious about this. There are also MIT lectures on GEB here on UA-cam, and are pretty okay, but again, they gloss over A LOT, so the book is again your best bet, but the lectures might be a good way to get the general idea.
@@ThePhilosophyChat mind criticising it? After extensive search for serious philosophical criticism myself, I couldnt find anything other than some armchair philosophers/people writing a sentence or two on how it isn't "real" philosophy and how its intent is more artisitic and mathematical. But they never go into any real detail. If you actually know of a serious essay or work criticising Hofstadter in detail, please do show. It might not be a concise rigorous essay, but lets be honest, the author goes deep into the details ajd arguments in his philosophy. Much more than many classic and well regarded philosophers I might add. The Kalam cosmological argument is a linguistic wprd play for example where Craig fails to construct or reasonably define any entity or object he is working with. Just an example that came to mind.
@@ThePhilosophyChat anyways, im sure valid criticism exists and all, but Hofstadter's ideas are not to be dismissed and trown away just like that. The only issue is that the philosophy has a high barrier of mathematical prerequisite to properly understand, hence why it is not as well known as other ideas.
@@berserker8884 I couldn't give a criticism because it's been years since I have read it. I am just saying this isn't literature people really consider when they make judgements in the philosophy of mind. You're free to tell me what arguments are there related to the philosophy of mind that hinge on anything relevant, though.
@@ThePhilosophyChat I admit I don't have the time to write it myself, but the video essay You Are A Strange Loop on UA-cam is a good start that intuitively summarizes it all. Hofstadter goes into detail and tries to establish an isomorphism between the mind and mathematics when it comes to self reference. He argues that consciousness is nothing more than what he calls a strange loop, i.e. a certain kind of emergent property. Loop as in that it is self referential and strange as one "loops" around it, an illusion emerges of rising in the level of abstraction, but in fact no such thing is happening. We think in terms of "I did this", but Hofstadter argues that this is an illusion. If I'm not mistaken, he is also a cognitive scientist and there is some shocking research on the neuroscience of "free will", which definitely supports this. If you know some serious mathematics, you might be able to think of this idea in terms of covering spaces, just and idea I'm having as I'm writing this, probably a bad one, but might be worth looking into some day. But that was probably even beyond scope of Hofstadter himself, because only pure math students and mathematicians seriously study algebraic topology. Anyhow, I haven't seen a philosophical theory of consciousness as fundamental as what Hofstadter is presenting us with here. GEB is his magnum opus that is by no means just a philosophy text and I would say it should never be seen as just that, but is a beautiful piece of literature presenting serious mathematics in an artistic way to discuss serious philosophy, again in a heavily artistic way. I admit I, as a math student, am pretty biased towards his line of thinking, because I have seen many times how things can emerge in mathematics in physics as beautiful consequences of more fundamental ideas. Noether's theorem is one of the most beautiful examples of this, where the least action principle together with symmetries of certain quantities give rise to general physical conservation laws. This seems to be on of the most successful lines of thinking when it comes to abstraction of ideas in mathematics and philosophy. Furthermore, I found myself often having an issue with morality, ontology and epistemology theories where many terms and concepts are poorly defined, which is very much the case when it comes to the fundamental "structure" of consciousness. Also, it is easy to say "consciousness is just bunch of molecules being in a super complex relationship", but it is hard to go into details with this. Here again mathematics comes to aid and one of the more interesting ideas is to use homology theory from algebraic topology to study the topological structure of a brain to find out where the complexity lies. But none of these hard science ideas do any kind of serious philosophy of consciousness, hence why I don't consider them here. They analyze complexity, they train AI models, etc, but they don't talk what consciousness really *IS*. It took mathematicians thousands of years to develop the modern system we have today, which is even now constantly evolving and being criticized left and right in the community. *Amateur* philosophers would learn quite a bit from the history of mathematics, logic and linguistics, specifically about definitions and epistemology. And this is why I don't really consider any theory of consciousness to be any "better" than what Hofstadter has presented and he should be respected just as any other philosopher who had big ideas. Finally, I don't think Hofstadter's idea is perfect or infallible. I specifically looked for any serious criticism or essay on the topic, but all I could find for the most part was people either totally misunderstanding the whole text(e.g. there is a serious looking essay on Research Gate I think and upon reading it I came across a sentence where they think that consistency means that "the formal systems can show all its truths"(paraphrase). I immediately closed the article.), or math enthusiasts who don't care for the philosophy, but just enjoy the beauty of his explanations and explorations. Oh and there were also some rare few who love the book mainly for its artistic literary value as well. P.S. I think that his book I Am a Strange Loop is a better focused "philosophy text", but I think it lacks in mathematics, which is why I don't recommend it, but it might be worth checking out.
Heya! I think it's straight-forward. I think the chemical bond offers a form of "radical-kind emergentism" that I defined. I defined radical kind according to the philosopher Van Gulick. It’s a form of emergentistism that is: 1. Different in kind from those had by its parts, and 2. Of a kind whose nature and existence is not necessitated by the features of its parts, their mode of combination and the law-like regularities governing the features of its parts. So, I think this is exemplified in the chemical bond, and also in mind-like emergentism.
Is it not common to consider the mind to be a verb rather than a noun? To me, a mind is just "the capacity for personality". Can one see "running"? I mean the verb "running" itself, not the person who is running. I think minds work like that: you can easily see the thing with the mind but you can never see the mind any more than any other verb.
this is about definition - mind is very abstract thing, it is a word only, mind probably consists of multiple things, all of witch should be perceptible.
I feel like Destiny falls into the trap that so many people have over history that "we have no idea how to understand this thing, therefore it's non-physical". I don't know why it's a stretch to believe that consciousness is IN PRINCIPLE measurable, we just don't have the technology to yet. And he's falling into the trap where there's this made-up dichotomy between "real" consciousness that humans experience and "fake" consciousness that a highly complex robot would experience. If a robot has sufficient complexity to show all the "consciousness" traits that we find in people, who's to say that's not consciousness too? Why do I have to believe that philosophical zombies do not equal a conscious being? I don't know why so many people think "difficult to do in practice" means "impossible".
The "we just haven't gotten there yet"-argument is like saying we can easily colonize mars, we just need a big enough ladder. It ignores a lot of nuances and harbors hidden assumptions.
The problem is that we don't know yet. There could be a way to detect consciousness, but until that day, we don't really know. It's kinda like the god of the gaps argument. There could be one, but there is barely any evidence for one and it appears we can't detect him/her/it right now, not say that there being a god is 100% not possible.
Does anyone have a reference to what Marty (The Philosophy Chat) is talking about regarding languages? Intuitively, I want to reject this premise completely and I wasn't convinced from this discussion; however, there's probably more to it, since I trust he's put a lot of thought and effort into it.
I like Tom Jump's options for conscious choice. He posits that choices are either random with no reason, or determined by reasons. For him some third option is undefined, and no advocate of dualism, or idealism can answer what the third option is. So dualism, or idealism are basically useless because those have no explanation for freewill. Without freewill what's the purpose of dualism, or idealism? The answer is nothing.
wow you couldnt be more misinformed on idealism. For one, idealism doesn't necessarily posit free will. Second, the purpose of idealism is to give a metaphysical account of reality. It's not useless and in fact stops us from trying to solve insoluble problems like the hard problem of consciousness, which will indefinitely persist under physicalism.
@@zak2659An account is the same as saying explanation, and without evidence an account is equivalent to a guess. As far as consciousness goes I think solving it may be trivial, or it may be truly hard. We just don't know. It's like everything else that was an unsolved problem.
@@spacedoohicky There is as much if not more evidence for idealism than physicalism. For one, we know mental states exist without a doubt. Positing a second metaphysical substance such as the "physical" is therefore a leap of faith and increases the complexity of your metaphysical account unnecessarily. There is zero evidence for the physical apart from referring to your own EXPERIENCE (mental stuff) of it. As for the hard problem of consciousness, its not like every other problem solved/unsolved. This problem presents an epistemic gap. It is an in principle problem that means it is impossible to deduce consciousness from physical parameters alone.
I think what Destiny is trying to express here is the 'hard problem of consciousness.' How can you really know what another sentient being is experiencing? How can you describe color to someone who has been blind their whole life? If the hard problem was easy to explain then it wouldn't be called the 'hard' problem.
2 questions: 1) if the idea of radical emergency that marty brought up is just properties emerging from previous properties that just isnt reducible, then what would be the difference between what he is saying vs materialism? 2)when marty said that the privately built principles that came from the person instead of antecedent causations, and isnt reductive to those causations, why isnt it? destiny never pushes this and he never gives an answer to why these principles cant be reduced down to previous experiences in the persons environment
Hello! (1) I think the term materialism is just vacuous and undefinable. (2) There's a distinction that's important because it makes our intentional actions unique, and subject to their own laws. The reason why it's not regulated to the latter is because doing things for the sake of reasons is an irreducible property - one that cannot be determined by mere causal dispositions. Why? One of the reasons might be the case is that when we act upon reasons, we're also asking for justification. We're endorsing the actions we find reasonable. They have a normative dimension (one we ought to be in accordance with.) However, causes don't have a normative dimension. One might say that causes don't occur because they ought to have, but because there was a mechanical explanation. Justifications aren't such a species of things. Of course one might be tempted to create an identity thesis, but then they'd have to explain normativity away.
When it comes to free will I'm pretty much very deterministic... There's all the more common arguments, but also the brain's activity literally involves a bunch of science such as physics that are completely out of your control and things like the big bang led to that brain being wherever it is at a given time and existing there along with all the chemicals and synapses and so forth... No matter how much you might think you're doing something of your own free will, it doesn't really change the fact that all the activity tied to biology, chemistry and physics going on there and elsewhere was the result of previous biology, chemistry and physics going on there and elsewhere and those were likewise not impacted by your supposed free will... Anything you do with your brain/thoughts to try and prove your free will is the result of your brain being there, however it exists, in order to do it and how your brain exists is kinda what is deciding what your brain is doing and by extension what you are doing by trying to prove free will with your brain/thoughts... And looking at the principle of alternate possibilities, there's no alternate possibilities when your talking about things like physics, chemistry and biology because these things are rather predictable so long as you know enough about them... A common baseball in Earth's atmosphere is predictably going to fall every time if Earth's gravity is the only force ever acting upon it because that's just the only possibility with what is known about how physics work... Kinda would be the same with the brain as long as you understood well enough the physics of all the synapses going off as well as the chemistry of all the chemicals... It's just a lot more going on to calculate and it's not as easy to calculate, but it should be possible to calculate... Anyway, main point is that your reflecting on your thoughts/decisions/possible decisions is also basically predetermined by the physics/chemistry/biology... Essentially there's this problem with agent causation which Crash Course on UA-cam brings up: What causes it? If it's not caused then is it just random? What causes an agent to make one decision over another? If it's random then that's kinda saying that humans are unpredictable even to themselves which seems strange since we can kind of think about something before we do it and predict that we will do the thing we are thinking about... But it's not random and there's something that can cause an agent to make one supposedly free choice over another supposedly free choice then you've supported the deterministic conclusion that it's caused by something that happened before it, since that thing that keeps human choices from being totally random is the thing that determined what inevitably was the choice you ultimately went with... Aside from that they mention that mental states are directly tied to brain states which are biological states which are physical states which are deterministic which goes back to the previous paragraph...
Obviously perceiving the meaning of language is a guessing game. Language is a construct, and its impossible for any given person to turn their particular feelings into precise words.
Yes, go ask a physicist what they think the implications of quantum mechanics are on consciousness. (Hint: Results are similar to asking a pilot about the implications of air traffic control on Mercury being in retrograde).
@@1999_reborn if there are metaphysical things that can't be percieved in the physical world, then why would we rule out the possibility that a god also exists in a metaphysical way?
I definitely *AM* guessing when I'm communicating. How do you ever presume to know exactly what someone means? In a world where lying is possible, we can't know that.
If the mind perceives something you can use quantum physics to measure if something has been observed. So that machine is possible. If the mind isn't perceptive. If that mind is a closed circuit from the rest of the universe then yeah you can't measure that.
This whole thing reeks of declarations going uncontested to make an argument that only works because you dont have to validate anything prior. There might be something worth considering in this, but I cant take someone seriously when they talk for half an hour and yet seem to miss the point of the conversation topic entirely the whole time.
45:00 if you explained to someone what a dog was using the bounds of their knowledge (say you said it was a domesticated wolf), and they asked someone else if they had a domesticated wolf, they would immediately understand that explanation. Surely this immediately disproves the idea that communicating ideas involves infinite regression. In the real world if there isn't a shared knowledge people can still communicate using approximations and those approximations can be error-corrected by the person interpreting.
It could just be that the mind is working use quantum mechanics and the current way we use tools to observe the mind is not at a quantum level. There for we are not able to perceive the mind because we are not using the right tools. Much like before we first seen the atom, we could not perceive the atom because the tool to perceive it was not being used.
Some forms of communication are moreorless reflexive (e.g. "OW") so it's possible for an individual person to come up with utterances and maybe even phrases that express something that hasn't become part of proper language, yet... I think... I'm having a hard time following his argument. He seems to think mute people don't have souls.
And his language example doesn't factor different languages. Because language can be taught and learned is because of the experience of individuals. For example languages that have words not included in your languages. Very simply like the group that has over a dozen words for snow not seen in mist cultures that don't have as much snow
I can't tell if Destiny is serious, or if this is some long con when he seems to honestly suggest that you can't conceive of a mind but, can conceive of a photon hitting an atom where we could perceive it... Marty's example of saltiness explains it fairly perfectly, and easily.
Marty seems to have far more knowledge than he does imagination and as a philosophy buff I find it really aggravating. He always seems to hold the most surface level interpretations of the concepts he discusses.
I understood approximately 20% of what they were saying in this debate.
@fluoxy L. "just get a degree lol"
It was a joke, I understand more than 20% but the main thing is that I'm not a native english speaker so sometimes it gets a bit hard to follow.
@@Cymricus thank you he didn't finish a single damn point!
@fluoxy L. Are you speaking out of experience? Marty is too unapologetic in his use of philosophical jargon, which is why Destiny has to keep asking the same question over and over. He sometimes gives examples and thought experiments that sometimes help, but even then he ends up using even more sophisticated jargon. This is essentially what a teacher is for: being able to gauge the level of understanding of the students and work accordingly.
Offered a few answers to the concerns people brought up! Might make a video for clarification on other things!
Thanks for the interest in philosophy guys! :D
Finally a youtube channel! Gib content, nub!
The Philosphy Chat Interesting conversation. I think you could avoid the infinite regress by just getting to a point where your explanation is "good enough", so there doesn't have to be an infinite regress, but it also doesn't mean we can perceive that the other mind."
@@JeremyTaylor The argument isn't whether there is a "good interpretation" or "slightly worse interpretation". It's whether the content of someone's utterance is semantically indeterminate. The point is, there is no basis of establishing the semantical meaning of someone's utterances through interpretation alone. Let's say I do use an interpretation A to get at why David meant. What's the basis for acknowledging the internal meaning of A to begin with? The interpretation of B? But what's the basis for that? C, ad-infinitium. None of these are "better" or "worse", they just don't resolve the question at all because ulimately there is no basis for the interpretation if all we're using is our own inward meaning. There is a radical contingency between the meaning of someone's utterances if they are idiolectic and our own. The thinking is confused. We don't make up meanings from the inside, and then compare them to outside. Eventually, we have to say meaning isn't a species of interpretation at all (sometimes). It's something directly perceivable.
@@ThePhilosophyChat thanks for clarifying! I thought I understood this to some extent, but I guess I don't really grasp it.
Destiny discovered the value of saltiness in this debate.
His whole language argument seems super shaky. Language seems like a reflection of and built upon our thought processes, so it seems like the sense of self might arise before or without the need of language.
it's pure bullshit.
Your sense of self can only arise if other "selves" have been made known to you. There is simply no other way. And the way to achieve that is through advanced communication : language.
Hey,
Bit of a misunderstanding, I think.
All I admitted is that there is a form of subjectivity such as ourselves that requires a language. Languages requires multiple people (as in why would we communicate without someone to communicate to?) And therefore, to some extent the subject is constituted by languages. Now, it might be said that a basic awareness doesn't require a language, but what I'm arguing is that self-consciousness requires a language and that's distinct from awareness. Because in order to talk about *that* type of subjectivity, it require that we can reflect using propositional attitudes such as "having a belief that I have a belief." Otherwise it's consciousness, not self-consciousness (knowing-that-i know about my consciousness).
The Philosophy Chat I guess where I’m stuck is at “a form of subjectivity such as ourselves that requires a language,” particularly in reference to when you say “languages require multiple people.”
A language to me seems like a reflection of the ways a human brain process information. I don’t see how one can think without that thought being in some form of a language, even if it’s one only that individual can understand.
So it seems to me that we can think to ourselves in some form of language, and thus we do not require others to form language. So if we can form language on our own, can’t we be self conscious without the need of others?
I might be getting caught up on terms here, I’m not very experienced in philosophy.
The Philosophy Chat I think you’re argument is begging the question. You say that there is a type of subjectivity that requires language and therefore the subjective experience is composed of language. It follows logically of course but I for one see no reason to believe that being aware of “your own” awareness requires language. As you say “in order to talk about it requires language,” but the experience itself doesn’t in my view. language is just a way of expressing the things we already experience. To give you an example “I” “know” that “I” am having thoughts, but that knowledge isn’t by definition propositional I just am able to express that knowledge in a propositional way.
How does he simultaneously play the game and listen to this guy talk?!
He can also talk or listen to people while reading which blows my mind as well
He was a pro Starcraft player he can take in and perceive a lot of information at a time
Its about using your mind's ability to store information temporarily effectively as fuck, and when you do it as fast as he does constantly it becomes easy for him. You have a certain amount of memory that you don't need to pay attention for, like when you hear a tune you can repeat it immediately after even though you might have been concentrating on something else. Or the way you learn lyrics without ever trying to learn them. Its pretty cool.
Yeah I've always wondered this about Destiny. It blows my mind
I think the problem is that Destiny looks at mind as a "thing" not a "process". If you use legs, the things, you get running, the process. If you break a leg, you can distort or eliminate that process. If you "use" brain, you get mind, thinking, which is a process. If you damage the brain, you can change, distort, eliminate the process.
I agree
The philosophical problem enters when we do the analysis of those situations you described. We can analyze legs and understand exactly how they generate the "running" process, but all our attempts at analyzing the brain at best get us only correlates with the mind (process of conscious experience). Even logically we don't understand how to possibly bridge the gap from correlations to explanations.
You can show why muscles expanding and contracting in the right motions will cause the legs to propel themselves forward, but you can't show why appropriate brain wave patterns would result in conscious experience. How could you, even in principle? That's known as the Hard Problem of Consciousness.
@Madger Bole
@@SCRAAAWWW You are precisely correct
@@SCRAAAWWW Exactly.
57:42 The response here would be that reasons are causes too. We don't control which reasons strike us as persuasive or correct. They may not be 'reducible' to the beliefs that precipitated them, but they don't need to be. What matters is that we can't really control how persuasive a reason is to us, nor can we control which reasons will occur to us.
Exactly.
Hey,
You don't need to control your beliefs. I believe in doxastic involuntarism. Meaning I believe that we do not have direct control over our beliefs or desires. The point isn't that we will what we want to will (that would mean we can desire before we desire!), but rather we pursue things for the sake of good reasons instead of mere causal dispositional explanations (or expressions of some causal state).
There's a distinction that's important because it makes our intentional actions unique, and subject to their own laws. The reason why it's not regulated to the latter is because doing things for the sake of reasons is an irreducible property - one that cannot be determined by mere causal dispositions. Why? One of the reasons might be the case is that when we act upon reasons, we're also asking for justification. We're endorsing the actions we find reasonable. They have a normative dimension (one we ought to be in accordance with.) However, causes don't have a normative dimension. One might say that causes don't occur because they ought to have, but because there was a mechanical explanation. Justifications aren't such a species of things. Of course one might be tempted to create an identity thesis, but then they'd have to explain normativity away.
@@ThePhilosophyChat thanks for the succint response
@@ThePhilosophyChat Thanks for the response. I'm curious how your theory addresses Hume's idea that "reasons are slave to passions". That is, reasons are useful in establishing the best way to go about achieving goals or solving problems, but the choosing of the goals are essentially the result of our base urges, emotions and intuitions. Like you gave the example of smoking, but the dangers of smoking striking someone as a good reason to quit would be contingent upon a desire to live as long as possible, and a willingness to sacrifice other goals (pleasure) in the service of that goal. Would you consider that a problem for your position?
I agree with you that reasons have a normative dimension, but I think what that proves is that they are a unique type of cause, not that they cannot be causes. When you say "causes have no normative dimension", that premise assumes your conclusion. It seems more reasonable to say that "other causes have no normative dimension". It is metaphysically possible for a subgroup of a category to have unique properties and still remain a part of that category. At least that is me tentatively prodding at your position, I may be misinterpreting it.
11:20 Earlier, the guest said we can tell peoples mind-states by observing their external attributes. Can we be sure, by observing cock roaches that they dont have states of mind? Maybe we just lack the language then to perceive them?
I also think Destiny's issue here is he's ascribing metaphysical properties to the mind, so of course he can't expect a "mind" to be something physical. The problem is, the notion of a mind is so ill-defined and vague that it's not useful, and we think this way because our perception of ourselves and our qualia is so important that we resist saying they're simply the result of a computation from our complex brains given our sensory input and any pre-existing structures that give us instinctual behaviour or thinking. So of course if we believe in the existence of this vague, ill-defined object, that would require faith or some dualism-like belief. Unless you reject the notion that our brain is just a complex computer entirely, the "mind" goes away at that point. So asking "is a mind here?" would be simply asking "does this object have sufficient computational ability and 'sensory' input to produce what we would call a mind?" and your dualism is gone at that point.
Maybe someone could counter this by saying "well we don't have a machine that can read conscious experience from a brain so you're wrong", but how many times has humanity thought "we don't know this therefore it's supernatural" and how many times has that ended up being the correct way of thinking? Maybe it's a fallacy, but until someone demonstrates to me a mind that is completely unaffected by the physical world, I'm going to keep on believing that the mind is physical and therefore, in principle, measurable.
Edit: Also, I think it's a minority opinion in neuroscience that quantum mechanical properties have any effect on the mind given the size of neurons and the brain itself, so these deferrals to QM and interpretations are pretty much nothing more than pseudoscience or speculation, if I'm being charitable. QM is weird, but not "justifies anything you want to believe" weird.
Okay but I can sense my qualia. It's so immanent it makes more sense to doubt the external world, math and even logic, then it does qualia. People who dont't see this are either dishonest, or p-zombies in my view.
@@TheLumberjack1987 But why should that help us survive? There's no need for something to feel like something. Our world could work the same exact way if everybody was a robot that's following inputs.
In my view our minds are like you say a result of a computation from our complex brains, but when you imply that we don't require faith or some dualism-like belief I kinda disagree because it seems that faith is something that is "programmed" in our computer like mind. These two concepts are not mutual exclusive. Human being seem to always tend to search for some spiritual or divine way of thinking. We only
disregard religion when science started proving that religous beliefs were obsulete, when logic became
incompatible with those religious beliefs. And after all this we still try to find things that create a state of mind close to extreme religious experinces like meditation, hallucinogenics etc. All this things create some type of metaphysical experience and a lot of them make people imagine some type of being, like so many people who cosume hallucinogenics say to have expirienced a presence of a being.
This was very very incorrect.
Chemical bonds aren't emergent in the way he is saying. They are ultimately just interatomic forces on a larger scale. Evn what we think of as an atom isn't this specific proper thing but just a mish-mash of different probabilities. We really don't know how stuff works really there's no final physical 'thing'. There's only forces and wave functions and their interactions. We could predict the result of forming chemical bonds if we understood enough about the atoms themselves.
Marty's science is stuck in the 1800's.
Now that doesn't invalidate the emergent property argument in itself, but the fact is that we just don't know enough quantum mechanics to make those claims for certain. QM is to physics sort of what minds are to biology. We just don't know enough to make claims like these.
Also this isn't like some out there stuff
Hardly high school or first year uni level QM
What do you mean by "not emergent in the way he is saying". What do you think he means by emergent?
Marty or whatever his name is, is a bullshitter...the language subjectivity thing is another thing he just blurted out.
"QM is to physics sort of what minds are to biology".
Do you realize you just invalidated your whole useless wall of text ? Do you understand what this whole conversation was about ?
@@lilywalatahersweet21 lol
Is it just me or does Marty seem like a undercover religious apologist.
Haha, no. I'm not religious. Maybe at best a panentheist.
@@ThePhilosophyChat We could smell the rat.
@@sovietsandvich8443 Seems about right. If you already accept the idea of spiritual substances, then I'm not exactly sure how one is managing to escape from the existence of a necessary being.
@@sovietsandvich8443 I just don't find the ontological difference between God and Nature to be tenable. (That is, dualists positions don't make sense to me. And I don't see many of the notable theists argue against panentheism these days).
@@sovietsandvich8443 Abstract objects by definition don't exist.
This guy talks like he's writing an essay; which is awesome. I'm just too dumb to follow along. lmao
Seems like Destiny's issue is with the "hard problem of consciousness" which I'm sure he has talked about years ago, but now he's phrasing it in this different way which confuses his guest.
I love how everyone in the comments is suddenly a philosopher and obviously knows better than him.
Speaking as someone with a philosophy degree, anyone can engage with philosophy. No philosopher worth their salt is going to try and use credentials or appeals to authority to shut down criticism.
Destiny's consciousness emerged in this debate
The part about communication is wrong. Or at least there is another option. The guy made the claim that if you assume there isn't some sort of inherent understanding or way to figure out what's in other peoples mind you will fall into an infinite regression, so there has to be some. That's not true, understanding language is based on concepts we associate with words. For the dog example you have a concept of what a dog is from experience. You saw a dog, you heard a dog etc. Then you associate that concept with the word "dog" by seeing other people associate it with what seems like your concept of a dog.
The flow is like this:
Someone says a word > that word is associated with a concept in your mind > the concept comes from personal experience
Of course it can be a lot more complicated, there could be a lot more steps in there, but it ends in personal experience, its not an infinite regression and it doesn't mean the association you make is magically the same association that the other person makes when he thinks of that word. They tend to be similar (we assume), ofc, because we all experience the same reality(we assume), just from different points of view. That's the assumption you have to make imo, not that the world gives you some information on other people's minds. So the way you associate the word "dog" with your concept of a dog is by seeing, for instance your mom point at a dog and say "dog". You don't know what's going on in her mind, you have no direct information on that, what you know is that they associated the word "dog" with YOUR concept of what a dog is.
Also on how it's not possible to have a private language, that depends on how you define language. If you define it as a means of communication between multiple people then yeah, it's true by definition. If you don't assume that it has to be between multiple people then you can absolutely have private language. Make up some signs and define a meaning for them. Write them on a piece of paper and then read them after a while, there you go, you made your own language.
Hello,
As I have said earlier: It's whether the content of someone's utterance is semantically indeterminate. The point is, there is no basis of establishing the semantical meaning of someone's utterances through interpretation alone. Let's say I do use an interpretation A to get at why David meant. What's the basis for acknowledging the internal meaning of A to begin with? The interpretation of B? But what's the basis for that? C, ad-infinitium. None of these are "better" or "worse", they just don't resolve the question at all because ulimately there is no basis for the interpretation if all we're using is our own inward meaning. There is a radical contingency between the meaning of someone's utterances if they are idiolectic and our own. The thinking is confused. We don't make up meanings from the inside, and then compare them to outside. Eventually, we have to say meaning isn't a species of interpretation at all (sometimes). It's something directly perceivable.
To further this point. Even if we associate a concept with a word, there is no basis to determine whether someone else associated any concept with that word. Since there can be an infinite amount of words with a series of different concepts. You can say we just agree upon something. But how do we know we came to an agreement is the very question being asked.
It's not possible to create a private language. You can make up words once you have acquired a language, and say "shoe" for each time you think the concept "horse", but you are already working with an established set of norms. Norms cannot be made individually since norms presuppose error. And if you are creating all the words yourself, then there should be no basis for error. Error presupposes other individuals keeping you in check with yourself.
@@ThePhilosophyChat
"The point is, there is no basis of establishing the semantical meaning of someone's utterances through interpretation alone."
But I never said it's interpretation alone, I said it always boils down to experience. What I was trying to say was that you interpret 'A' not through 'B' etc but through what you see, hear, smell, taste or feel. I guess my point would boil down to experience being the base for understanding anything, including what's in people's minds. Of course we can have no guarantees that we understand exactly what other people are communicating, but that's the case with all our knowledge.
"there is no basis to determine whether someone else associated any concept with that word"
The basis is common experience. (We assume that) the experiences people have come from a common reality (if you see a tree it's because there's a tree there and other people can see it too). Which means that the information we extract from experience would be very similar. And
"But how do we know we came to an agreement is the very question being asked."
I mean, c'mon to put it bluntly if everyone says "dog" when they see a dog and you also see a dog and hear them say "dog" when you see them looking at it, it's pretty safe to assume that they associated that concept with the word. It's not exactly an agreement, it's just you learning to use a word when you want to describe a thing because you've seen people use that word when they were interacting or observing that thing in some way.
I'm not sure I really understand what your position is. Do you think we somehow extract information directly from other peoples minds without being aware of it? Or that we have some sort of way of communicating that we're not aware of? Common consciousness? Or is it a similar position to what I'm describing, just more refined and I'm not getting it? Or something completely different?
@@kappa6544 (1) I don't know what about the senses informs you of what the meaning of the content is, unless you're saying we "see"/precieve meaning. Which is what I'm arguing for.
(2) I agree that there is a similar experience that is the basis for (some) our concepts [though I'm not sure if of course all of language functions like this, obviously], but then we are not forming an arbitrary internal meaning for something. There is content (out there) that rationally constraints the meaning of our concepts. That is, it informs us. But that just means, that the conceptual content is directly perceivable, and used for the basis of our agreement. However, I am not sure if that's what you have in mind. You seem to think that we have non-conceptual content outside, that we make intelligible. And presumably we make it intelligible through forms of inferentialism. But, as I said, that doesn't work.
(3) I don't see what saying, "It's obvious" amounts to. Say, I use the word "fin". How do we know if the person is meaning it in french for "Finish" or is saying it in English for the fin we see on a fish. We need somehow to disambiguate it. Pointing can only get us to far, as we can be pointing to several things, and it's indeterminate which ostensive gesture is being get at. We can use context-relative language, but then how do we discover which context is being used in the first place? Interpretation? But then we get an infinite regress.
(4) Yes, I think that intentions and meaning are directly perceivable to some extent. That is, there are some forms of propositional content that is given to use without the use of inferences. In the same sense that color, or extension is directly perceivable. There is some sort of immediacy to other people's intent, or the meaning of utterances. This certainly isn't always the case, or for the majority of the time, but in some rare cases.
29:50 ive not got this either - that chemical bond thing... H2 plus O chemically bonded to FORM water sure changes the nature and properties of things that are pre-existing. It might be more interesting to ask "Where" the energy went to that enabled this bond to occur rather than focus on the water. I get what Destiny is saying, we can measure water. It has properties - if we were to measure "mind" what metrics could we use to say if more - or less - mind was present? Is "ANY" mind present at all? When the talk first started and Destiny mentioned that things are things we can measure, feel, sense and touch, i thought about spandrels. (For example, the "Arch" formed under the bricks that are laid at a slight angle to each other over a door way to support the weight above. From "where" does that arch come from?)
Haven't watched the video yet, but thank fucking god he's doing more stuff with Marty, easily the best content he does.
Listening to peeps with an Anglophone phil background talk about broad theoretical topics is always such a trip. Like, if it's on a shared subject, it's like a little language barrier, which is easy to overcome. But these sorts of videos... It's like watching an Eisenstein flick, or a contemporary Chinese film. It's a prolonged dive into a different culture.
Reading a youtube comment with no known background on any topic at all is such a trip.
Didn't help getting asked how to resolve the problem of other minds! :P
Philosophy 101.
Quantum physics is whatever you want it to be.
fluoxy L. I think machines can collapse wave functions.
ua-cam.com/video/Ebycar22Y0E/v-deo.html
Rem is Pepe, while Marty is Yee. Yee neva lose
imagine thinking rem is anything other than yee lol cope harder.
Pepe always wins
I've never seen a more TRUE comment.
Typical Yee shitter. Latching onto something external because of your lack of identity.
LOOK AT THE LIKES BOYS NEVA EVA LOSE
Always gets the pseudo-scientific vibes from these discussions about deep philosophy and speculations about the human mind.
Same
before the first formation of any compound there is no concept of that compound that can be deduced from examination of the original partickes/values.
i wish i could leave every social interaction like Marty did IN THIS DEBATE
But imo his initial premise that a solitary person can't distinguish itself from the nature around it doesn't pass the sniff test. A lone person still would understand without language that it does not function the way a tree or puddle does. Language is socially constructed to communicate these subjective experiences but the experiences exist without effective communication
Long post but there’s a lot of evidence in modern psychology that suggests that language is the corner stone of what makes humans a higher animal.
The theory I’m most familiar with claims that without language you would literally lack the ability to construct what the idea of something independent to the physical thing itself - which would make you as cognitively aware as a monkey. And this isn’t an innate cognitive ability either, the brains of children who are deprived of language as babies are underdeveloped in areas where we think these processes must come from.
The isolated man in your hypothetical, following this model likely would not be able to distinguish between himself and a tree because whilst he can experience and react to the tree he lacks the ability to even have an understanding of what a ‘tree’ is because there would be no feedback to the grunts he might make when he sees the tree. A dog called ‘Andy’ can respond to its name but because they don’t have language they can never ever cognitively experience being ‘Andy’. Simply having memory and the ability to react to stimuli is not enough to ‘understand’ much of anything - unless we want to make the argument that a video game is conscious since games have both of those things.
@@wisenatorez2269 I'm familiar with that concept in psychology however there are also critiques. Such as the idea that whether language is formalized there are still innate distinctions made. In essence some aspects of pre language. Furthermore there's evidence to suggest that even in isolation verbalized distinctions would be made by anyone not deaf because of the interaction with other creatures. His argument that it essentially requires a collective to ascend to higher order thinking and self awareness doesn't hold. It's not exactly a settled idea in any discipline
sybil sanity sybil sanity Of course. It’s called relational frame THEORY for a reason. The causes of behaviour are ultimately cognitively impenetrable. So yeah I don’t really think the dude in the video had any ground to stand on - I was just bringing up that there’s an argument that can be made for language being more influential than memory/reactivity visa vis conscious experience.
@@wisenatorez2269 yeah I'm totally on board to give credit to language for having a greater influence than it is often afforded. Just Not full credit or that it necessarily supercedes other aspects like this guy was pushing
i dont see why there cant be an infinite regress in interpretation like marty assumes. can he, or anyone, even conceive of an interpretation that i can't ask "why?" to? i don't mean a correct interpretation either, i mean any, no matter how ridiculous. what could you tell me that i couldn't break down further?
You can’t ask why with math, it just is.
@@Mightyzep you're conflating math/logic, which has axioms, with the physical world. it would make more sense to appeal to science, but there are no scientific axioms. and you can ask "why?" with math, until you get to the axioms. however, if an axiom had a "why?" it would no longer be an axiom, by definition. what then are the axioms of reality?
@@itstoogooditswaytoogood3211 science also use axioms so ...
Heya,
If there was an infinite interpretation of a word/sentence a person could mean, it would mean that the semantic content is semantically indeterminate - any meaning we assume is just as good as any other guess; no conclusion could be given. We need some way in order to know what a person means without the infinite regress. And we do seem to be communicating to some extent. That is, we do understand what people mean/the normativity of their language. To summarize the problem using McDowell/Thornton:
"1. If possession of a concept were correctly conceived as the grasp of a ratification-independent pattern, then there would be no knowing for sure how someone else understand an expression.
The minor premise would be:
2. It is not the case that there is no knowing for sure how someone else understands an expression.
Or:
1. If possession of a concept were correctly conceived as the grasp of a ratification-independent pattern, then that understanding would have to be idiolectic i.e. a matter of individual understanding).
2. Idiolectic meaning is an illusion. "
You can find more information about this in Tim Thorton's book "John McDowell."
If you ask what a dog is, and do the why game long enough, the final answer youll get is just an actual dog. You cant ask any more questions about that, a dog is a dog. The final answer is just dog = dog.
Destiny and Marty did not understand each other in this debate.
stop using this meme
It could just be that we aren't technologically advanced yet. During the industrial revolution, philosophers liked to compare steam engines with the mind (e.g. emotions such as sexual stress could be accumulated and released towards war efforts for soldiers). Today we like to compare our brains with computers which better represents how we calculate and induce emotions through releases of chemicals triggered by signals, like how computers execute functions. I don't see why we wouldn't be able to point at a characteristic in the brain responsible for consciousness in the future as technology and brain knowledge advance as it has in the recent past. (also why I think nonphysical influence is unlikely, maybe its fourth dimension fuckery that we just cant perceive yet, who knows?)
the issue is the intractability between our sense perception systems and our first person qualitative experiences. so we can explain eg that our sensory processing systems are what allow us to have these experiences, but it cant explain why my experience of red is red and not something else, and it cant explain intentional states (i am thinking *about* something right now, but how can eg neurons be about anything?)
read jerry fodor. he was one of the big people behind developing our current computational theories of how the mind work. he was convinced this approach would solve these issues, but became disillusioned when he saw what he considered to be NO progress made on certain fundamental questions pertaining to the mind.
to paraphrase him, "if you want to study emotions, read Henry James" (= read poetry, because cognitive science has very little to actually say about the topic)
There's two big problems here though: (1) What is the basis of making the comparison between our minds and computers in the first place? You will have to provide an explanation for why they are identical or of the same type of function. It is not enough to make analogies between hardware/software. Otherwise, all we are doing is anthropomorphizing computers, and giving them human-like capacities arbitrarily. (2) If we want to say that "eventually" we will find a complete explanation, then this isn't an argument as much as we are hold out on faith. It's a "science-of-the-gaps" argument that presupposes that the mind MUST be like a computer, and that science MUST fill in all known gaps. Which has no basis.
@@ThePhilosophyChat The relevance of the comparison is that they both operate with signals making patterns which are the closest thing other than the brain we know of, and i say it feels like we will find better answers in the not so far future, like we did from the industrial revolution and now for all sorts of things. It may be true there's currently an un-observable force at work and science won't be able to figure it out forever, but that's unprecedented hence unlikely.
@@painzkiller2452
Hello!
Well, everything functions with patterns/and signals. Things like electric circuits, calculators, etc. However, I doubt anyone is going to say that calculators or electrical circuits have minds like ours.
@@ThePhilosophyChat
Yo is this you?
Heres the thing, brains CODE for consciousness, calculators dont. It's not just information, its information and systems assembled in a way that codes for a virtual space, an inner world. It's more like a video game, less like a calculator.
Also why dont philosophers give more credence to neuroscientists?
Did you know salt has a taste.
Wtf did that have to do with the original language/mind argument 🙄dude was being deliberately vague.
So if I have a car without wheels and I add wheels the drivablility power that the car attains would be radical kind emergence because it is emergent but it is not spacial and it is not mass... But we can pretty easilly identify that the emergent property of drivability of the car is reducible to it's macro parts at the very least which tells me that radical kind emergence is not sufficent to prove that something is not reducable. (I am pretty agnostic to reductionism as a whole)
a mind emerges from the brain in the same way that software emerges from hardware, or literature from paper/ink. You cant crack it open and find it physically, because it does not exist as a separate physical entity. It is something that we read into the physical elements
yep, mind it's just a product of chemical interactions, like software is a product of the way that the hardware works.
@@paulgotik
Careful, I feel like this simplifies it way too much. Theres complex interactions between brain regions that code for models, virtual spaces that give the impression of immaterialness. Electrochemical processes are not what consciousness is any more than a video game is just a bunch of transistors. Theres whole levels of higher emergent properties that are in between them.
Instead of going higher why not go lower to prove dualism? what if the simulation was complete
destiny->13:09-"I feel like something exists that I fully believe in that I cannot percieve in any physical way whatsoever" Isn't this the same feeling that religious people have? It's the same way of thinking.
The thing about salt is that it doesn't have any new type of property that sodium an chlorine didn't already had. Sure it is not inflammable anymore but it goes through a chemical reaction in the presence of fire, just not the same, whereas conciousness seems to be a different type of property that anything physical has, not just a different way of expressing a shared property
Omg this idealistic shit is cringe Destiny, pls just get jhc back on so we may be blessed to hear the lords word again...
game he is playing?
Rimworld
Yee neva eva lose
TRUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUE
Ah yes just when my sleeping pattern was getting outta whack Marty comes along and knocks me the fuck out ResidentSleeper
You can engage the properties of a h2o, it seems that you cannot engage with the properties of consciousness.
@fluoxy L. are eyes working, as is the case for many animals on the planet, us engaging the properties of consciousness?
Edit for clarification: I dont mean that the properties of conciousness cannot be measured to reflect a conscious state. We can see that a brain does things, that a body does things, but also that certain pieces don't aggregate into something that consciousness can be describes as coming from.
@fluoxy L. Well, I see that this is not going to be productive. Thank you for your time.
Great discussion! However there seems to be some kind of cancerous error that's taking up the bottom left of your recording... hopefully that is fixed in later uploads.
Can't we say a mind exists by it's argrigated parts in a certain state. So neurons with charges firing through them? What its consciously experiencing probably has a relationship with that too, giving us some measurement or perception of someone's consciousness (brain scans showing parts of the brain functioning). This should also give us some insight into conscious subjectivity somehow I assume.
As a chemist I cringe everytime this dude talks about salts.
I don't think he even knows anything about orbitals or ions.
Is there chemistry or are there chemical reactions that can't be explained by physics alone? In the same way that cultural phenomena can't be explained by physics alone, I mean.
@@romanski5811 Well, I would argue that if we had a perfect computer with infinite computing power, then we could explain cultural phenomena by calculating neuron signals and so on. But I don't think we will ever achieve the creation of such a computer.
Chemistry is similar. In Theory it should
be completely explainable by formulas and calculations from Physics alone. However, the computing power necessary to calculate all the energy equations would be astronomical. That is where the Science of Chemistry steps in. Chemists creates Theories and Hypotheses that ease the burden of calculation by simplifying the equations or by finding correlations so significant that one can bypass the calculations altogether.
So basically everythings is Chemistry ergo everything is Physics ergo everything is Maths but we will probably never achieve the computing power necessary to be able to calculate the phenomena we want to be able to explain.
Same here, chembro.
For those of you who are interested in emergence of consciousness rigorously argued, you should read Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. The book is absolutely massive, because his philosophy has that many prerequisites and he goes explain all of them. The book is a work of art and should not be considered a mere philosophy tome, but also a literary piece and a mathematical text. I honestly hope Destiny would read it too, because it is a such a beautiful book and also because Hofstadter examplifies the behavious he is explaining also in music among other things. The books is called Godel, Escher, Bach, because it was Godel who used self reference to prove his incompleteness theorem, Escher because his drawings illustrated a lot of weird phenomenon Hofstadter is talking about like recursion, again self reference, etc. Finally Bqch stands for no other than Johan Sebastian Bach, who composed incredibly complex fuges, which Hofstadter analyses to see how his ideas apply to music.
He explains the fundementals of logic and mathematics to delve into the philosophy of so called strange loops, which are these phenomena that look like they influence themselves or that they come back to where they started, but in fact that is an emergent illusion.
This is not just some hogwash psuedo philosophy, this is a real text that people study in grad schools and he argues his assertions and points very very rigorously in comparison to basically any other philosopher tackling consciousness like this guy talking to Destiny who can't argue any of his assertions whatsoever without resorting to illdefinitions of the natural language that allow ambiguities he can use.
This book is absolutely gigantic so if you just want to get a glimpse of an idea of what his philosophy might look like, watch the video You Are A Strange Loop by Will Schroder. The video gives an intuitive idea of how this might look like, but please understand that it would be impossible to argue the points in such a short video where Hofstadter himself needed a 800 page tome to cover the prerequisites a layman would definitely be missing. Though he did go on MANY tangents, because the book is not JUST philosophy text, like I said. So please resort to GEB if you are serious about this. There are also MIT lectures on GEB here on UA-cam, and are pretty okay, but again, they gloss over A LOT, so the book is again your best bet, but the lectures might be a good way to get the general idea.
Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter is not really prime literature in philosophy of mind.
@@ThePhilosophyChat mind criticising it? After extensive search for serious philosophical criticism myself, I couldnt find anything other than some armchair philosophers/people writing a sentence or two on how it isn't "real" philosophy and how its intent is more artisitic and mathematical. But they never go into any real detail. If you actually know of a serious essay or work criticising Hofstadter in detail, please do show.
It might not be a concise rigorous essay, but lets be honest, the author goes deep into the details ajd arguments in his philosophy. Much more than many classic and well regarded philosophers I might add. The Kalam cosmological argument is a linguistic wprd play for example where Craig fails to construct or reasonably define any entity or object he is working with. Just an example that came to mind.
@@ThePhilosophyChat anyways, im sure valid criticism exists and all, but Hofstadter's ideas are not to be dismissed and trown away just like that. The only issue is that the philosophy has a high barrier of mathematical prerequisite to properly understand, hence why it is not as well known as other ideas.
@@berserker8884 I couldn't give a criticism because it's been years since I have read it. I am just saying this isn't literature people really consider when they make judgements in the philosophy of mind.
You're free to tell me what arguments are there related to the philosophy of mind that hinge on anything relevant, though.
@@ThePhilosophyChat I admit I don't have the time to write it myself, but the video essay You Are A Strange Loop on UA-cam is a good start that intuitively summarizes it all. Hofstadter goes into detail and tries to establish an isomorphism between the mind and mathematics when it comes to self reference. He argues that consciousness is nothing more than what he calls a strange loop, i.e. a certain kind of emergent property. Loop as in that it is self referential and strange as one "loops" around it, an illusion emerges of rising in the level of abstraction, but in fact no such thing is happening. We think in terms of "I did this", but Hofstadter argues that this is an illusion. If I'm not mistaken, he is also a cognitive scientist and there is some shocking research on the neuroscience of "free will", which definitely supports this. If you know some serious mathematics, you might be able to think of this idea in terms of covering spaces, just and idea I'm having as I'm writing this, probably a bad one, but might be worth looking into some day. But that was probably even beyond scope of Hofstadter himself, because only pure math students and mathematicians seriously study algebraic topology.
Anyhow, I haven't seen a philosophical theory of consciousness as fundamental as what Hofstadter is presenting us with here. GEB is his magnum opus that is by no means just a philosophy text and I would say it should never be seen as just that, but is a beautiful piece of literature presenting serious mathematics in an artistic way to discuss serious philosophy, again in a heavily artistic way.
I admit I, as a math student, am pretty biased towards his line of thinking, because I have seen many times how things can emerge in mathematics in physics as beautiful consequences of more fundamental ideas. Noether's theorem is one of the most beautiful examples of this, where the least action principle together with symmetries of certain quantities give rise to general physical conservation laws.
This seems to be on of the most successful lines of thinking when it comes to abstraction of ideas in mathematics and philosophy. Furthermore, I found myself often having an issue with morality, ontology and epistemology theories where many terms and concepts are poorly defined, which is very much the case when it comes to the fundamental "structure" of consciousness.
Also, it is easy to say "consciousness is just bunch of molecules being in a super complex relationship", but it is hard to go into details with this. Here again mathematics comes to aid and one of the more interesting ideas is to use homology theory from algebraic topology to study the topological structure of a brain to find out where the complexity lies. But none of these hard science ideas do any kind of serious philosophy of consciousness, hence why I don't consider them here. They analyze complexity, they train AI models, etc, but they don't talk what consciousness really *IS*.
It took mathematicians thousands of years to develop the modern system we have today, which is even now constantly evolving and being criticized left and right in the community. *Amateur* philosophers would learn quite a bit from the history of mathematics, logic and linguistics, specifically about definitions and epistemology. And this is why I don't really consider any theory of consciousness to be any "better" than what Hofstadter has presented and he should be respected just as any other philosopher who had big ideas.
Finally, I don't think Hofstadter's idea is perfect or infallible. I specifically looked for any serious criticism or essay on the topic, but all I could find for the most part was people either totally misunderstanding the whole text(e.g. there is a serious looking essay on Research Gate I think and upon reading it I came across a sentence where they think that consistency means that "the formal systems can show all its truths"(paraphrase). I immediately closed the article.), or math enthusiasts who don't care for the philosophy, but just enjoy the beauty of his explanations and explorations. Oh and there were also some rare few who love the book mainly for its artistic literary value as well.
P.S. I think that his book I Am a Strange Loop is a better focused "philosophy text", but I think it lacks in mathematics, which is why I don't recommend it, but it might be worth checking out.
this guy needs a new analogy, the chemistry thing is kinda weak
I think it's really good. Do you think it's weak because he used it several times?
Heya!
I think it's straight-forward. I think the chemical bond offers a form of "radical-kind emergentism" that I defined. I defined radical kind according to the philosopher Van Gulick. It’s a form of emergentistism that is:
1. Different in kind from those had by its parts, and
2. Of a kind whose nature and existence is not necessitated by the features of its parts, their mode of combination and the law-like regularities governing the features of its parts.
So, I think this is exemplified in the chemical bond, and also in mind-like emergentism.
Watch the film " The Miracle Worker" and all your questions about "self" and language will pivot. Great talk, no bullshit, thanks.
Twitch chat!?!?
Lovely chat
Is it not common to consider the mind to be a verb rather than a noun? To me, a mind is just "the capacity for personality". Can one see "running"? I mean the verb "running" itself, not the person who is running. I think minds work like that: you can easily see the thing with the mind but you can never see the mind any more than any other verb.
Destiny developed the power of saltiness in this debate.
stop using this meme
@@zmedn no
this is about definition - mind is very abstract thing, it is a word only, mind probably consists of multiple things, all of witch should be perceptible.
I feel like Destiny falls into the trap that so many people have over history that "we have no idea how to understand this thing, therefore it's non-physical". I don't know why it's a stretch to believe that consciousness is IN PRINCIPLE measurable, we just don't have the technology to yet.
And he's falling into the trap where there's this made-up dichotomy between "real" consciousness that humans experience and "fake" consciousness that a highly complex robot would experience. If a robot has sufficient complexity to show all the "consciousness" traits that we find in people, who's to say that's not consciousness too? Why do I have to believe that philosophical zombies do not equal a conscious being?
I don't know why so many people think "difficult to do in practice" means "impossible".
The "we just haven't gotten there yet"-argument is like saying we can easily colonize mars, we just need a big enough ladder. It ignores a lot of nuances and harbors hidden assumptions.
The problem is that we don't know yet. There could be a way to detect consciousness, but until that day, we don't really know. It's kinda like the god of the gaps argument. There could be one, but there is barely any evidence for one and it appears we can't detect him/her/it right now, not say that there being a god is 100% not possible.
@fluoxy L. That was such a good response
Does anyone have a reference to what Marty (The Philosophy Chat) is talking about regarding languages?
Intuitively, I want to reject this premise completely and I wasn't convinced from this discussion; however, there's probably more to it, since I trust he's put a lot of thought and effort into it.
I like Tom Jump's options for conscious choice. He posits that choices are either random with no reason, or determined by reasons. For him some third option is undefined, and no advocate of dualism, or idealism can answer what the third option is. So dualism, or idealism are basically useless because those have no explanation for freewill. Without freewill what's the purpose of dualism, or idealism? The answer is nothing.
wow you couldnt be more misinformed on idealism. For one, idealism doesn't necessarily posit free will. Second, the purpose of idealism is to give a metaphysical account of reality. It's not useless and in fact stops us from trying to solve insoluble problems like the hard problem of consciousness, which will indefinitely persist under physicalism.
@@zak2659An account is the same as saying explanation, and without evidence an account is equivalent to a guess. As far as consciousness goes I think solving it may be trivial, or it may be truly hard. We just don't know. It's like everything else that was an unsolved problem.
@@spacedoohicky There is as much if not more evidence for idealism than physicalism. For one, we know mental states exist without a doubt. Positing a second metaphysical substance such as the "physical" is therefore a leap of faith and increases the complexity of your metaphysical account unnecessarily. There is zero evidence for the physical apart from referring to your own EXPERIENCE (mental stuff) of it.
As for the hard problem of consciousness, its not like every other problem solved/unsolved. This problem presents an epistemic gap. It is an in principle problem that means it is impossible to deduce consciousness from physical parameters alone.
Ill never understand how something thinks they could have done otherwise between any choice they make in life.
I think what Destiny is trying to express here is the 'hard problem of consciousness.' How can you really know what another sentient being is experiencing? How can you describe color to someone who has been blind their whole life? If the hard problem was easy to explain then it wouldn't be called the 'hard' problem.
2 questions:
1) if the idea of radical emergency that marty brought up is just properties emerging from previous properties that just isnt reducible, then what would be the difference between what he is saying vs materialism?
2)when marty said that the privately built principles that came from the person instead of antecedent causations, and isnt reductive to those causations, why isnt it? destiny never pushes this and he never gives an answer to why these principles cant be reduced down to previous experiences in the persons environment
Hello!
(1) I think the term materialism is just vacuous and undefinable.
(2) There's a distinction that's important because it makes our intentional actions unique, and subject to their own laws. The reason why it's not regulated to the latter is because doing things for the sake of reasons is an irreducible property - one that cannot be determined by mere causal dispositions. Why? One of the reasons might be the case is that when we act upon reasons, we're also asking for justification. We're endorsing the actions we find reasonable. They have a normative dimension (one we ought to be in accordance with.) However, causes don't have a normative dimension. One might say that causes don't occur because they ought to have, but because there was a mechanical explanation. Justifications aren't such a species of things. Of course one might be tempted to create an identity thesis, but then they'd have to explain normativity away.
When it comes to free will I'm pretty much very deterministic... There's all the more common arguments, but also the brain's activity literally involves a bunch of science such as physics that are completely out of your control and things like the big bang led to that brain being wherever it is at a given time and existing there along with all the chemicals and synapses and so forth... No matter how much you might think you're doing something of your own free will, it doesn't really change the fact that all the activity tied to biology, chemistry and physics going on there and elsewhere was the result of previous biology, chemistry and physics going on there and elsewhere and those were likewise not impacted by your supposed free will... Anything you do with your brain/thoughts to try and prove your free will is the result of your brain being there, however it exists, in order to do it and how your brain exists is kinda what is deciding what your brain is doing and by extension what you are doing by trying to prove free will with your brain/thoughts... And looking at the principle of alternate possibilities, there's no alternate possibilities when your talking about things like physics, chemistry and biology because these things are rather predictable so long as you know enough about them... A common baseball in Earth's atmosphere is predictably going to fall every time if Earth's gravity is the only force ever acting upon it because that's just the only possibility with what is known about how physics work... Kinda would be the same with the brain as long as you understood well enough the physics of all the synapses going off as well as the chemistry of all the chemicals... It's just a lot more going on to calculate and it's not as easy to calculate, but it should be possible to calculate... Anyway, main point is that your reflecting on your thoughts/decisions/possible decisions is also basically predetermined by the physics/chemistry/biology...
Essentially there's this problem with agent causation which Crash Course on UA-cam brings up: What causes it? If it's not caused then is it just random? What causes an agent to make one decision over another? If it's random then that's kinda saying that humans are unpredictable even to themselves which seems strange since we can kind of think about something before we do it and predict that we will do the thing we are thinking about... But it's not random and there's something that can cause an agent to make one supposedly free choice over another supposedly free choice then you've supported the deterministic conclusion that it's caused by something that happened before it, since that thing that keeps human choices from being totally random is the thing that determined what inevitably was the choice you ultimately went with... Aside from that they mention that mental states are directly tied to brain states which are biological states which are physical states which are deterministic which goes back to the previous paragraph...
I got confused in this debate.
As a philosophy student I am very careful not to pickup language that will make other people not get what I'm talking about.
Obviously perceiving the meaning of language is a guessing game. Language is a construct, and its impossible for any given person to turn their particular feelings into precise words.
Okay... Did you watch the video beyond 2-3 minutes ? What you said does not contradict in any way what was said.
@@Tomy762 nope
Congratulations! You've heard of Wittgenstien.
Destiny thought about thinking about stuff in this debate
stop using this meme
Yes, go ask a physicist what they think the implications of quantum mechanics are on consciousness. (Hint: Results are similar to asking a pilot about the implications of air traffic control on Mercury being in retrograde).
So if you believe in dualism do you believe in stuff like god or magic too?
How does that follow at all?
@@1999_reborn if there are metaphysical things that can't be percieved in the physical world, then why would we rule out the possibility that a god also exists in a metaphysical way?
@Lunar Orbit no it's just a question. I think he even said that he could be religious in a couple of months when he first said he was a duelist
@@1999_reborn usually people who believe in dualism tend to be sort of spiritual/religious
Destiny put me to sleep in this debate.
Damn dude Marty has some pretty dumb arguments
can i borrow 10 or 20 IQ points from someone so i can fully follow this conversation?
Here you go.
Not a single mention of the hard problem of consciousness? Damn.
Reddit buzzword
@@zyto7904 Lool, ok sure mate.
I definitely *AM* guessing when I'm communicating. How do you ever presume to know exactly what someone means? In a world where lying is possible, we can't know that.
i didnt get anything in this debate
stop using this meme
I’m black
If the mind perceives something you can use quantum physics to measure if something has been observed. So that machine is possible. If the mind isn't perceptive. If that mind is a closed circuit from the rest of the universe then yeah you can't measure that.
What’s Marty’s personality Type he sounds very extroverted
This whole thing reeks of declarations going uncontested to make an argument that only works because you dont have to validate anything prior. There might be something worth considering in this, but I cant take someone seriously when they talk for half an hour and yet seem to miss the point of the conversation topic entirely the whole time.
Introdutions
i want to like this guy but i just don't
dude should definitely invest into new mic
In this debate
45:00 if you explained to someone what a dog was using the bounds of their knowledge (say you said it was a domesticated wolf), and they asked someone else if they had a domesticated wolf, they would immediately understand that explanation. Surely this immediately disproves the idea that communicating ideas involves infinite regression. In the real world if there isn't a shared knowledge people can still communicate using approximations and those approximations can be error-corrected by the person interpreting.
This guy seems very circular in his logic. Now I'll shut up lol
It could just be that the mind is working use quantum mechanics and the current way we use tools to observe the mind is not at a quantum level. There for we are not able to perceive the mind because we are not using the right tools. Much like before we first seen the atom, we could not perceive the atom because the tool to perceive it was not being used.
Twitch chat is overrepresented, they shouldn't have such a large portion of the screen
Some forms of communication are moreorless reflexive (e.g. "OW") so it's possible for an individual person to come up with utterances and maybe even phrases that express something that hasn't become part of proper language, yet... I think... I'm having a hard time following his argument. He seems to think mute people don't have souls.
Mr. Mouton
This guy is unlistenable
And his language example doesn't factor different languages. Because language can be taught and learned is because of the experience of individuals. For example languages that have words not included in your languages. Very simply like the group that has over a dozen words for snow not seen in mist cultures that don't have as much snow
Chomsky's main career was Linguistics. He proved the in- built nature and structure of language with books and papers that still define the work.
And his admission that you can't fully know that you've explained something fully is exactly the point of the issue
I can't tell if Destiny is serious, or if this is some long con when he seems to honestly suggest that you can't conceive of a mind but, can conceive of a photon hitting an atom where we could perceive it... Marty's example of saltiness explains it fairly perfectly, and easily.
Yee wins
288th new pb
This man is loud af in this debate
stop using this meme
It makes sense untill you word it right - he's saying , "You think , therefore I am" in its tight form this sentence presupposes so much
Marty seems to have far more knowledge than he does imagination and as a philosophy buff I find it really aggravating. He always seems to hold the most surface level interpretations of the concepts he discusses.
dualism WeirdChamp
I feel like this guy only has a degree because philosophy doesn't have wrong answers
@Lunar Orbit ah
This guy is why I don't like philosophy