You can't have an empirical science that is skeptical of concrete experience, because all empirical science depends upon verification that is given by observation (seeing blips on a screen, radiographic images, sonic data, etc...) . What is problematic, is that this skepticism potentially leads to a "science" that is no longer empirical, by passing the concrete experience entirely, by basing "science" on AI validation, working solely with computational abstraction. We need to emphasize the collaboration of science and experience to avoid this nightmare.
I think is a very under-appreciated and well-articulated point. Very nicely put. The role of experience in virtually all meaningful domains can be hard to under emphasize.
I strongly disagree. The insistence that something like "concrete" experience is happening "out there," is simply impossible. The neuroscience of sensory organs proves this, as does the entire field of anesthetic medicine. The fact that experience is body-bound is the beginning of a scientific exploration where the material and the ideal blend together in interesting and important ways. It is the beginning of a monism in which experience and reaction are housed in the same brain. Even one's experiences of non-living things like rocks or water occurs through the living medium of one's brain. That this interplay might be deemed a "nightmare" is a sign of one's attachment to a flawed model. It is a political stance that favors an overly simplistic dualism rather than a scientific stance that attempts to reasonably understand a complex monism.
I want to live in a world where our cosmology is synonymous with our molecular biology... Didn't Wal Thornhill say something like that? Good chat. Love the approach of trying to problem solve/brainstorm. What I would add, is that the mechanical actions of development may often be artifact of energetic actions. Bio physicist Mae-Wan Ho and Wal Thornhill both spoke about action at a distance, quantum coherence, in which "everything knows everything about everything all the time", and communication is instant in resonant systems. Cheers
One thing to think about in talking about "mechanism" is the difference between a geared mechanism, and a clutch (friction plate). The universe does make gears but more often something more a kin to a clutch, where there is a slippage, an error, a difference in how the energy or energy is transferred.
An awesome beginning. Brendan, you know I think highly of your questioning mind and care for the subject matter and the people you are engaged with. I can see you came in with an understanding of some profound differences and it supercharged the conversation. As you probably know I am aligned with Matt on those core phenomena within the epistemic process. I loved every minute of this conversation. I am grateful for you both. I propose bringing Zak Stein in to represent the Cosmo Erotic Humanism pov and do the conversation as a threesome ala the recent conversation between Daniel Schmactenberger, Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke.
A gem of a conversation! I enjoyed the sense of fluid layering in the back and forth. Perhaps an acknowledgement and awareness of the impact of framing as a necessity for measuring within scientific paradigms would serve as an aid to the problem of reductionism. Before reading the comments, I couldn't help but wonder "what would Bonitta Roy say? :)
What is great conversation, thank you guys! I would have loved to dive deeper with you - there are formats I know which go up to 3 hours. I think certain topics and discussions deserve to be lengthened out. (And who can follow you for an hour and a half straight, can also follow you longer - especially with breaks). Thank you.
I very much enjoyed this conversation. I have profound admiration for anyone who challenges their world view's assumptions and the conclusions they give rise too, especially when its done in the spirit of friendship. I suspect humans will be hashing this one out for centuries to come. Along the way, I hope that our love of wisdom and truth will humble us in the presence of our profound ignorance - and that in the face of this deep mystery we find our shared experience in its exquisite beauty.
This is lovely, as it makes clear that scientific theories are not just ways of seeing but ways of actively arranging and comporting ourselves toward the world so that it looks the way our models expect it to. Science thus reveals new perspectives on things only by concealing others, and when we forget what is concealed and how it became so we become blind to our own actions and technological enframings. It is this sort of self-forgetful human-centrism/-morphism that I'd think we'd want to avoid... so on that front I am with Brendan. But rather than pretend we could excise the influence of the knower on the known, I'd say we must do our humanizing of the cosmos and our cosmologizing of the human as consciously as possible.
Yes, thanks. And of course it is recusively enacted with the world, love the phrase "comport ourselves toward the world" and as such arrives at some predictability with(in) that same world. The set of actions required may be huge - a la Latour's ANT - (think Large Haldron Collider) or, as you say in your talk here, the protocols for what anomolies are discarded .... @@Footnotes2Plato
That's a helpful framing. But does it capture all of "science"? Crucially, complexity science shows some things cannot, by nature, be predicted. How do we integrate those sorts of insights, if not as science?
Yes, it brings into question whether "complexity science" is a science ... and it evokes the warning that complexity evades what we normally think of as "science." However, the definition still holds, since in complexity science you can still have protocols for action that lead to outcomes "predicted by the theory" when the theory actually predicts that you will only get fuzzy probabilities, strange attractors, metastable patterns etc... @@BrendanGrahamDempsey
@@BrendanGrahamDempsey Just as we’d expect a theory of vagueness to precisely describe vagueness, we’d want a theory of complexity to predictably describe complexity, even if that prediction involves acknowledging inherent uncertainties. Maybe it’s the word “outcomes” that’s creating tension here, as it suggests a level of certainty that complexity science often cannot provide, where the focus should also-or instead-be on understanding the nuances and emergent behaviors of the system.
The Greek philosophers viewed knowledge as the only virtue and self-knowledge as the greatest good! Self-knowledge is the only way to bring religion and science together.
I look forward to reading the papers as this aligns with some of my thinking. We have words that we use that were coined when we thought they only would be a human characteristic such as consciousness, or are using a term like Mind, that in the east denotes something far more expansive. The point about the difference between theory, model, and fact, or consensus is very important. Consensus is very dangerous. Also they ad hoc nature of the Big Bang and Cosmology needs to be stressed. There are over 20 points that the Big Bang people point to and say there look, proved it - all ad hoc fixes; where as others can point to 20 plus points where it fails. Some of the most important being the flatness of the universe, the homogeneity, the negentropy, the axis of evil. But also new work that points to NASA observations of the Sun which show that stars, or at least our sun, is made of condensed matter not a gas, which immediately falsifies Black Holes, current stellar evolution, and the CMB which is based on black body spectrum which a gas like the early universe can not produce. That said, I ask how does Big Bang fit logically in its metaphysics? What is outside, what was before, what caused it, Entropy heat death, multiverse, etc. there are many things that are just logically problematic, and or point to creationism and other problems.
I have nothing against a geocentric model per se. I was just saying that the sky would look the same regardless if the geocentric model were true or the newer spinning model were true. This is to say the classical universe looks & acts the same even though quantum physics is fundamental. We just don't yet know how to interpret quantum physics to know how it becomes the universe of classical physics Btw, the geocentric model is inferior because the math is much harder & the toolset derived from the new model is much more useful.
@@alykathryn You don't think I've spent plenty of time looking at the sky during the day and at night. Please don't be arrogant, prejudiced, and condescending!
@donaldrobertson1808 fair, youtube comments are such an inconclusive formate for healthy indepth conversations. My apologies. I half wanted to send you a 10 page paper I wrote on the topic... but I decided it was too much work and that I would rather shoot some pithy little arrows your way instead. No hard feelings intended
46:18 mention of Terrence Deacon. I wonder how much of Deacon's critique of Whitehead is in the background here for Matt. 49:23 invoking feeling here brings to mind Whitehead's panpsychism, Deacon's target
This is like watching jordan peterson aggressively interviewing someone who is apparently beyond his depth by continually asserting out of context presumptions through suggestions of common sense. The content of the visitor is ignored in pursuit of some egoistic narrative.
@@jared4034 Though I am aligned with Matt I can't agree with your assessment of Brenden. Having talked with him I can tell you he is deeply considerate of others perspectives and in fact could not have had this conversation at this level with Matt if he hadn't deeply considered Matt's pov. Brenden recognizes where the core ontological and epistemological differences are and he explored those doggedly. He has intense commitments to his narrative and how it is grounded. There is nothing wrong with such conviction and it helped to bear much fruit in this dialogue. He is genuinely vexed at how such brilliant minds could be seemingly ontologically ungrounded and produce what they produce in the world like a whole system of education that is still ahead of every child development model out there in its nuance and complexity. I am sure Brendan is open to questions like does quantum physics in some way point as to how potentization in biodynamic preps and homeopathics might work along with the subjective intentions brought attentionally to bear? His commitments may not allow for that equation to seem true but such a paradigm shift is not impossible for him to make. He is open to the answers. I know because he is damn good at finding the questions. And there are answers that have to be discovered and it is dialogues like these that will move us beyond the dualism that lies even if unintentionally, in our Cartesian culture - a bifurcation that is one of the defining features of a self (in all senses of the word) destructive modernism. Brendan sorry to talk about you as if you weren't in the room!
@@jeffbarney3584 later i thought about this discussion with Matt in the context of Brendan's interaction with layman pascal and i thought maybe this was a stage to promote challenging ideologies through some sort of devil's advocate approach, but the way that Brendan approaches the subject with his tone doesn't convince me that he has the best intentions in mind. I haven't read Brendan's most recent work, but if he is opposed to the Cartesian model i don't detect it here. I can understand the difficulty of what modern (or post-modern) thinkers are attempting to challenging us with, but to blow it off as impractical especially in this space seems like a grasp for popularity.
To return to my point, not to ignore the virtues of Brendan because i respect him as a progressive thinker, but at certain points in the conversation where he grasps for or refers to concepts that he isn't as intimately engaged with as Matt who is a specialist it's apparent the approach. I think that what makes me react is the defensiveness that brendon displays in reaction to subject matter that he isn't intimately familiar with. I understand his concern with the picture at large in view of the transitions required to establish proper relations with subjects for a sustainable future
The first speaker is living in a delusional universe. Science hasn't overturned a mechanistic view of the universe. There are plenty of flaky speculative hypotheses but they haven't overturned the mechanistic view
@@donaldrobertson1808 I can only assume this is a definitional dispute. I guess I don’t think quantum, chaos, and complexity theories, etc., are flaky speculative hypotheses.
@@Footnotes2Plato complexity theories support a mechanistic view of the universe rather than debunking it We lack a good enough intuitive understanding of what quantum mechanics is actually revealing to us to use it to form a new metaphysics. Doing so is tantamount to informing ourselves with a modern day astrology
@@donaldrobertson1808I agree a lot with this actually. We can't let science get away with so many things. The methods of science are fundamentally premised on life-hostile assumptions. We can't hope to interpret results from that afterwards into a pantheistic (or whatever you want to call it) picture. The cosmology of astrophysics is deeply nihilistic and hostile to life. And highly speculative with crazy extrapolations and tons of fictions and assumptions. We as philosophers have to stand strong against that. What about epistemology?
Great conversation guys, thanks!
You can't have an empirical science that is skeptical of concrete experience, because all empirical science depends upon verification that is given by observation (seeing blips on a screen, radiographic images, sonic data, etc...) . What is problematic, is that this skepticism potentially leads to a "science" that is no longer empirical, by passing the concrete experience entirely, by basing "science" on AI validation, working solely with computational abstraction. We need to emphasize the collaboration of science and experience to avoid this nightmare.
Yes! Microbiology hangs in the balance here.
I think is a very under-appreciated and well-articulated point. Very nicely put. The role of experience in virtually all meaningful domains can be hard to under emphasize.
I strongly disagree. The insistence that something like "concrete" experience is happening "out there," is simply impossible. The neuroscience of sensory organs proves this, as does the entire field of anesthetic medicine. The fact that experience is body-bound is the beginning of a scientific exploration where the material and the ideal blend together in interesting and important ways. It is the beginning of a monism in which experience and reaction are housed in the same brain. Even one's experiences of non-living things like rocks or water occurs through the living medium of one's brain. That this interplay might be deemed a "nightmare" is a sign of one's attachment to a flawed model. It is a political stance that favors an overly simplistic dualism rather than a scientific stance that attempts to reasonably understand a complex monism.
I want to live in a world where our cosmology is synonymous with our molecular biology... Didn't Wal Thornhill say something like that?
Good chat. Love the approach of trying to problem solve/brainstorm. What I would add, is that the mechanical actions of development may often be artifact of energetic actions. Bio physicist Mae-Wan Ho and Wal Thornhill both spoke about action at a distance, quantum coherence, in which "everything knows everything about everything all the time", and communication is instant in resonant systems. Cheers
One thing to think about in talking about "mechanism" is the difference between a geared mechanism, and a clutch (friction plate). The universe does make gears but more often something more a kin to a clutch, where there is a slippage, an error, a difference in how the energy or energy is transferred.
An awesome beginning. Brendan, you know I think highly of your questioning mind and care for the subject matter and the people you are engaged with. I can see you came in with an understanding of some profound differences and it supercharged the conversation. As you probably know I am aligned with Matt on those core phenomena within the epistemic process. I loved every minute of this conversation. I am grateful for you both. I propose bringing Zak Stein in to represent the Cosmo Erotic Humanism pov and do the conversation as a threesome ala the recent conversation between Daniel Schmactenberger, Iain McGilchrist and John Vervaeke.
A gem of a conversation! I enjoyed the sense of fluid layering in the back and forth.
Perhaps an acknowledgement and awareness of the impact of framing as a necessity for measuring within scientific paradigms would serve as an aid to the problem of reductionism.
Before reading the comments, I couldn't help but wonder "what would Bonitta Roy say? :)
What is great conversation, thank you guys! I would have loved to dive deeper with you - there are formats I know which go up to 3 hours. I think certain topics and discussions deserve to be lengthened out. (And who can follow you for an hour and a half straight, can also follow you longer - especially with breaks).
Thank you.
I very much enjoyed this conversation. I have profound admiration for anyone who challenges their world view's assumptions and the conclusions they give rise too, especially when its done in the spirit of friendship. I suspect humans will be hashing this one out for centuries to come. Along the way, I hope that our love of wisdom and truth will humble us in the presence of our profound ignorance - and that in the face of this deep mystery we find our shared experience in its exquisite beauty.
It might be helpful to use my definition of science: "The set of protocols for actions that lead to outcomes predicted by theory."
This is lovely, as it makes clear that scientific theories are not just ways of seeing but ways of actively arranging and comporting ourselves toward the world so that it looks the way our models expect it to. Science thus reveals new perspectives on things only by concealing others, and when we forget what is concealed and how it became so we become blind to our own actions and technological enframings. It is this sort of self-forgetful human-centrism/-morphism that I'd think we'd want to avoid... so on that front I am with Brendan. But rather than pretend we could excise the influence of the knower on the known, I'd say we must do our humanizing of the cosmos and our cosmologizing of the human as consciously as possible.
Yes, thanks. And of course it is recusively enacted with the world, love the phrase "comport ourselves toward the world" and as such arrives at some predictability with(in) that same world. The set of actions required may be huge - a la Latour's ANT - (think Large Haldron Collider) or, as you say in your talk here, the protocols for what anomolies are discarded ....
@@Footnotes2Plato
That's a helpful framing. But does it capture all of "science"? Crucially, complexity science shows some things cannot, by nature, be predicted. How do we integrate those sorts of insights, if not as science?
Yes, it brings into question whether "complexity science" is a science ... and it evokes the warning that complexity evades what we normally think of as "science." However, the definition still holds, since in complexity science you can still have protocols for action that lead to outcomes "predicted by the theory" when the theory actually predicts that you will only get fuzzy probabilities, strange attractors, metastable patterns etc... @@BrendanGrahamDempsey
@@BrendanGrahamDempsey Just as we’d expect a theory of vagueness to precisely describe vagueness, we’d want a theory of complexity to predictably describe complexity, even if that prediction involves acknowledging inherent uncertainties.
Maybe it’s the word “outcomes” that’s creating tension here, as it suggests a level of certainty that complexity science often cannot provide, where the focus should also-or instead-be on understanding the nuances and emergent behaviors of the system.
The Greek philosophers viewed knowledge as the only virtue and self-knowledge as the greatest good! Self-knowledge is the only way to bring religion and science together.
we're 10 minutes in and I'm waiting to hear a premiss or assertion.... oh.. i think it's coming...
I look forward to reading the papers as this aligns with some of my thinking. We have words that we use that were coined when we thought they only would be a human characteristic such as consciousness, or are using a term like Mind, that in the east denotes something far more expansive. The point about the difference between theory, model, and fact, or consensus is very important. Consensus is very dangerous. Also they ad hoc nature of the Big Bang and Cosmology needs to be stressed. There are over 20 points that the Big Bang people point to and say there look, proved it - all ad hoc fixes; where as others can point to 20 plus points where it fails. Some of the most important being the flatness of the universe, the homogeneity, the negentropy, the axis of evil. But also new work that points to NASA observations of the Sun which show that stars, or at least our sun, is made of condensed matter not a gas, which immediately falsifies Black Holes, current stellar evolution, and the CMB which is based on black body spectrum which a gas like the early universe can not produce. That said, I ask how does Big Bang fit logically in its metaphysics? What is outside, what was before, what caused it, Entropy heat death, multiverse, etc. there are many things that are just logically problematic, and or point to creationism and other problems.
What do you have against the geocentric model 😊
What would it look like to us if the Earth actually sat still at the center of the universe with the Sun, planets, & stars circling the earth daily?
Relativisticly speaking, we do. And if you want to know what it the sky looks like then go outside and watch the stars. 10/10 worth it
I have nothing against a geocentric model per se. I was just saying that the sky would look the same regardless if the geocentric model were true or the newer spinning model were true. This is to say the classical universe looks & acts the same even though quantum physics is fundamental. We just don't yet know how to interpret quantum physics to know how it becomes the universe of classical physics
Btw, the geocentric model is inferior because the math is much harder & the toolset derived from the new model is much more useful.
@@alykathryn You don't think I've spent plenty of time looking at the sky during the day and at night. Please don't be arrogant, prejudiced, and condescending!
@donaldrobertson1808 fair, youtube comments are such an inconclusive formate for healthy indepth conversations. My apologies. I half wanted to send you a 10 page paper I wrote on the topic... but I decided it was too much work and that I would rather shoot some pithy little arrows your way instead. No hard feelings intended
Folder of time
20:16 Schelling's flip: what must nature be like...
26:55 disappointment also applies to questioning traditional authority
38:39 Context Changes Everything: How Constraints Create Coherence
Book by Alicia Juarrero
43:17 the work of Robert Rosen
46:18 mention of Terrence Deacon. I wonder how much of Deacon's critique of Whitehead is in the background here for Matt. 49:23 invoking feeling here brings to mind Whitehead's panpsychism, Deacon's target
This is like watching jordan peterson aggressively interviewing someone who is apparently beyond his depth by continually asserting out of context presumptions through suggestions of common sense. The content of the visitor is ignored in pursuit of some egoistic narrative.
I admire Matt's patience.
@@jared4034 Though I am aligned with Matt I can't agree with your assessment of Brenden. Having talked with him I can tell you he is deeply considerate of others perspectives and in fact could not have had this conversation at this level with Matt if he hadn't deeply considered Matt's pov. Brenden recognizes where the core ontological and epistemological differences are and he explored those doggedly. He has intense commitments to his narrative and how it is grounded. There is nothing wrong with such conviction and it helped to bear much fruit in this dialogue. He is genuinely vexed at how such brilliant minds could be seemingly ontologically ungrounded and produce what they produce in the world like a whole system of education that is still ahead of every child development model out there in its nuance and complexity. I am sure Brendan is open to questions like does quantum physics in some way point as to how potentization in biodynamic preps and homeopathics might work along with the subjective intentions brought attentionally to bear? His commitments may not allow for that equation to seem true but such a paradigm shift is not impossible for him to make. He is open to the answers. I know because he is damn good at finding the questions. And there are answers that have to be discovered and it is dialogues like these that will move us beyond the dualism that lies even if unintentionally, in our Cartesian culture - a bifurcation that is one of the defining features of a self (in all senses of the word) destructive modernism. Brendan sorry to talk about you as if you weren't in the room!
@@jeffbarney3584 later i thought about this discussion with Matt in the context of Brendan's interaction with layman pascal and i thought maybe this was a stage to promote challenging ideologies through some sort of devil's advocate approach, but the way that Brendan approaches the subject with his tone doesn't convince me that he has the best intentions in mind.
I haven't read Brendan's most recent work, but if he is opposed to the Cartesian model i don't detect it here.
I can understand the difficulty of what modern (or post-modern) thinkers are attempting to challenging us with, but to blow it off as impractical especially in this space seems like a grasp for popularity.
To return to my point, not to ignore the virtues of Brendan because i respect him as a progressive thinker, but at certain points in the conversation where he grasps for or refers to concepts that he isn't as intimately engaged with as Matt who is a specialist it's apparent the approach.
I think that what makes me react is the defensiveness that brendon displays in reaction to subject matter that he isn't intimately familiar with. I understand his concern with the picture at large in view of the transitions required to establish proper relations with subjects for a sustainable future
To serve tend to God creation, maintenance and expansion.
This Nan goes on waaaay too much n he's not clear...
Shame on anyone who gives a time of day to people who believe that there is mysticism behind the real world.
The first speaker is living in a delusional universe. Science hasn't overturned a mechanistic view of the universe. There are plenty of flaky speculative hypotheses but they haven't overturned the mechanistic view
🤔
@@Footnotes2Plato Can't let you get away pushing such a mistruth on the public without calling you out
@@donaldrobertson1808 I can only assume this is a definitional dispute. I guess I don’t think quantum, chaos, and complexity theories, etc., are flaky speculative hypotheses.
@@Footnotes2Plato complexity theories support a mechanistic view of the universe rather than debunking it
We lack a good enough intuitive understanding of what quantum mechanics is actually revealing to us to use it to form a new metaphysics. Doing so is tantamount to informing ourselves with a modern day astrology
@@donaldrobertson1808I agree a lot with this actually. We can't let science get away with so many things. The methods of science are fundamentally premised on life-hostile assumptions. We can't hope to interpret results from that afterwards into a pantheistic (or whatever you want to call it) picture. The cosmology of astrophysics is deeply nihilistic and hostile to life. And highly speculative with crazy extrapolations and tons of fictions and assumptions. We as philosophers have to stand strong against that. What about epistemology?