I have a philosophy Final in an hour and this helped so much. My favourite thing about her is that she was willing to say "I don't know". The number of people unwilling to admit that they don't know something is unfortunate tbh.
I like the sound of this woman. Obviously we need to consider her writing in the context of her time (which I think is true of all writing really). I wonder if she had been a man, if her work would have been better known?
I think probably not. Although if she were a man she'd have been likely to receive formal education and her writings would have been different. Cavendish' primary drawbacks are that her style of writing is painfully difficult to read (this is completely avoidable). The impact of this can be seen even in this video, where the narrator has some misunderstandings of her thought (e.g. she doesn't think figures "communicate" any kind of knowledge at all, in the OUE she claims her "previous thoughts" had that idea and she actually disagrees with them). Her thoughts are also somewhat underdeveloped and even though she understands some of the shortcomings of her arguments she basically says "well, yeah, it doesn't really make sense, but just trust me on this one. At least my theory is simpler than the other theories, even if it doesn't necessarily make more sense". That's not a really attractive way to sell your theory. Since her ideas are more developed by people like Hume (who are anyway often read in universities and even high schools) it's only natural that Hume and Locke become the locus for delivering these ideas. As it is, Cavendish is one of a multitude of philosophers who are primarily interesting to historians of philosophy rather than actual philosophy students (although if you're one of those few people who specializes a lot in metaphysics you'll come across her sooner or later).
Another point to make is that matter can affect the mind. Brain damage can do all kinds of things to someones personality and thought processes, like make them lose inhibitions or forget what their friends names are. I find it difficult to understand how an immaterial thing could be affected so.
I don't see how brain damage 'refutes' substance dualism. Try to think of the *brain* as a *piano* and the *mind* as a *pianist*. If the piano is damaged, the pianist is restricted in his actions, and cannot play the same music as he used to.
Xavy Johnson Tomy But what is unique to the mind at that point if everything that makes up a person can be distorted or changed this way? It doesn't have memory, emotions don't come from it, and our personality has more to do with our fleshy bits than anything else. If the mind is where thought originates from, shouldn't the person afflicted be acutely aware that thoughts aren't getting through? I mean the pianist would be aware when his high C just made a clunking noise, it doesn't make sense for us to not know we thought something. You'd think that something would happen on the rational side of us to make us aware of missing input. Like if you were playing a video game and the "a" button on your controller was non-functioning, you'd realize pretty quickly that you couldn't make the character jump. The character in the game wouldn't realize they were being told to but the character isn't the one thinking, you are. Similarly, with a damaged piano the pianist would be totally aware of the problem but a lot of people with brain damage have trouble with that kind of thing. Without feedback from other people some wouldn't even know there was something wrong.
+Eon2641 If we think of thoughts as the music of the piano, then the music aka thoughts would be damaged by the damage of the piano. That's all I was trying to show with my analogy. The pianist wouldn't be able to play music with a damaged piano. Since thoughts are akin to music in the analogy, it doesn't make sense to ask about the thoughts of the pianist, since in the analogy, the thoughts is the music.
Xavy Johnson Tomy But the "mind" is the pianist, correct? Am I incorrect in my understanding that the mind is meant to be the source of thought and, in effect, the thing that makes a person who they are?
The mind is the self, an immaterial entity - a person - which uses the brain as a physical organism for thought. It was actually the Nobel prize winning neurologist Sir John Eccles compared the relationship between the soul (or the mind) and the brain to the relationship between a musician and a piano. The musician can produce music by playing on the piano; the instrument (the piano) produces the music but not on its own. It is only at the instigation of the agent - the musician - who plays the piano. Eccles said in exactly the same way the self (or the mind, or the soul) uses the brain to think. It uses it as an instrument for thinking just as a musician uses a piano as an instrument to play music. Both the piano and the pianist are closely related, but they aren't identical to each other. If, like the piano, the brain is in a severely diseased or injurious state, the mind cannot demonstrate its abilities; they of necessity remain private and unrevealed. However, for all we know, the mind still has its full range of abilities, but is hindered in its capacity to express them.
If she is underrepresented in western classes, then here in Thailand she's non-existent. Here we've got only obsolete 60s textbook selectively summarized and translated as material. And it's a major university in Bangkok, the capital...
I majored in philosophy at a global top 20 university and I think there are good reasons for omitting her from most curricula. The first reason is that her philosophical writing is extremely difficult to interpret. In the OUE, she holds a dialogue between her past and present thoughts, and because of her style of writing it's really difficult to know when to attribute a specific argument to her "latter thoughts" or her "previous thoughts". Secondly, you are probably familiar with that stereotype of philosophy where people claim philosophers to be edgy kids who smoke weed and sit in a circle and just blurt out random things about the world? While she's not quite that far gone, I think she straddles the line between actual philosophy and fanciful thought. She correctly identifies and responds to an existing idea (dualist interpretation of mind-body), but her methodology is dubious. When she lifts up some possible counter-arguments to her theory she essentially says "we are finite beings and can't understand infinite nature, so I can't actually prove that I'm right. But I think my account is more aesthetically pleasing and simpler than that of the dualists. Therefore you should adopt my ideas". This is obviously a massive flaw because it's really discouraging to read an account that just says "Well, I don't know if this makes sense, but just trust me on this". You could say practically anything if that were an acceptable argument. I think this is where her lack of formal education shines through, because historically philosophy has been very much about method. Finally, her ideas are more developed and better represented by the likes of Hume, which has delegated her to become an object of study primarily for historians of philosophy. These are fairly complex ideas, and you wouldn't be introduced to much of her reasoning in an intro to metaphysics class. The only professors I've seen include her in their curricula think there is benefit in showcasing female philosophers, and this is a primary cause for them to have students look at her texts.
Thank you for this video, I had no idea that Cavendish was such a badass anti-mainstream philosopher in a time, where philosophy was a realm of men. :) Question: Why did she believe in god? She'd already argued against dualism and since the universe is intelligent itself (following her ideas), what role did god play in her belief? God seems like a leftover in this context... Beside of that, I am really impressed by her ideas, which, in a sense, have survived until today. Even I can identify with a lot of them :)
In my class one thing we talked about was how she really didn’t want to write on religious matters as religion had become so tied in with European politics, and as she had been a political refugee in France a large portion of her life, she didn’t really want to rock the boat.
Her work was and still is one of the top three most amazing things I have ever heard or read about...and it is sad that her life came to an end too soon and with her failing her ultimate goals...not really realizing her dream. BUT she most def. left her mark on this world...this material world.
So the analogy of the billiard balls "interacting" and "passing on info which tells the other what to do" is fascinating. Firstly, because there is actually the idea of objects carrying "information" in physics, and that information being passed on. A good analogy is that when you drop an extended slinky, the bottom of the slinky remains in place until slinky has contracted. It seems the whole slinky hovers in place, even if you'd expect some movement over time. One explanation given is that the information the slinky has been dropped has to reach the bottom of the slinky before it moves. It's not a particularly convincing explanation to me, but I've yet to refute it based on any analysis. (Veritasium has a really good video series about this problem.) Secondly, this idea of information transmitting between objects and altering their spacial position is basically what Feynman diagrams represent. When two billiards come together, it is the electromagnetic interaction that causes them to bounce off each other. According to various models in Quantum Mechanics/Particle physics we can think of a virtual photon passing on this "information" like some little messenger. Of course, this interaction is the aggregate of trillions of such interactions between all the electrons on the colliding surface areas of the billiard balls, but the comparison seemed really interesting to me nonetheless.
Well, I have finally watched all of your videos. I wish my Intro to Philosophy class in college was as interesting as this channel. My Teacher's method was "read the book and discuss it amongst yourselves"
FUN FACT: Margaret Cavendish is an ancestor of William Cavendish. William was responsible for the naming of the Cavendish banana, the common bright yellow kind we all eat today. Now every time you eat a banana you have cause to think about 17th century materialism!
She also was the wife of William Cavendish, first duke of Newcastle, who, aside from being an influential figure in dressage in the 17th and 18th century, also was the patron of Hobbes, Gassendi, and Descartes :)
Question: from what you are saying of her thought, it sounds like she also presaged Claude Shannon and information theory. Is this an accurate assessment, or did something get lost in transmission (there is a philosophical pun in there)? A billiard ball, by modern thinking, DOES transfer information. The pool table can even be seen as processing information. I admit, I don't fully understand any of this.
Her theory on "billiard balls hitting each other are transferring information" sounds to me like exactly how computers work. Transistors exchange electric charges, and in the right arrangement they can create a CPU capable of processing what we would conventionally consider information.
If the Toon is your home town Olly, then I compliment you on your cultivation of the the least Geordie like accent I've ever heard. I'm from North Shields btw ;)
Thomas Nagel (Ph.D., Harvard) wrote a greak book entitled _Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False_ published on Oxford University Press in 2012. He does a pretty good job of destroying materialism. Oh and by the way Dr. Nagel is an atheist, he's not motivated by religious reasons. He's convinced by the facts that materialism is wrong. Happy reading.
+IOnceMadeLuv2APolarBear Yes I would suggest reading the book and he does present some arguments that do in fact contradict materialism. He argues for a kind of neutral monism.
She sounds like she was a very intelligent person, and was aware that although she may be wrong, if she is, it's nothing to be ashamed of, and the idea is to get ideas into the world and find out which one is correct. I respect when someone admits that they don't know and may be wrong.
I really like the fact that Olly spends more time speaking about female philosopher these days ! Gender does not matter for good philosophy, but usually, people always throw in the same good old guys : Descartes, Freud, Nietzsche... Not that those don't matter, of course. But it's pleasant to learn about lesser known authors, and especially females since they don't seem to get the credit they actually deserve !
Cavendish's view of physical objects communicating information to each other is a perfectly cromulent way to look at physical processes. Every physical process is a transfer of energy, and every transfer of energy is a signal that carries information, so you can look at the goings-on of the physical universe either as a flow of energy from one thing to another or a flow or information from one thing to another: the transmissions of signals that trigger responses from their recipients works out to the same model of the universe one way or another.
I'm so excited to learn more about her and not surprised that she's kept in the background or left out of educational systems, at least in the US. Critical thinking and questioning the norm/patriarchy aren't encouraged in here America.
I think there might be a misunderstanding of Cavendish' writing in OUE in this video. She doesn't think there is "communication" of any kind of knowledge between figures. Rather, figures can navigate the world because all animate substance has "exterior perception" and "self-knowledge". So basically, if you're looking at the micro level, a stick being lifted by a hand is "self-moving", it's not actually being lifted by the hand. The hand is just the occasion for the stick to move itself. The stick can perceive the hand's motion and, because it has self-knowledge, it knows in which direction it should move in order to be "harmonious with nature". The hand doesn't tell the stick to move anywhere. This only applies on the micro level though (what she calls "creatures of nature"). If you were to zoom out ("body of nature"), the stick looks completely inert in relation to the hand that is lifting it. When viewed from this perspective, then, the stick IS actually being moved. Cavendish thinks that both the "creatures of nature" and "body of nature" views exist at the same time without contradiction. Thus, the stick is in one sense self-moving and in another sense being moved by another body. Here is the exact quote from Cavendish with regards to communication: "[...]by the example of a horse and a man, where the man was moved and carried along by the horse, without any communication or translation of motion from the horse into the man: Also a stick, said they, carried in a man’s hand, goes along with the man, without receiving any motion from his hand." (OUE, pp.27) This is actually really important for Cavendish' account, because from the "body of nature" perspective it seems as if the stick is being moved by the hand, but the how could the hand give knowledge to the stick that it does not itself possess? And that's why she introduces perception and self-knowledge to matter.
At 2:32 it looks like you offer gravity as an example of the immaterial imposing a force on the material. This may not be the case, though, if I understand correctly. Perceiving gravity as a force is an illusion. I think what they say is that we are always "falling through the curvature of spacetime". Its counter-intuitive and difficult to understand but really fascinating. I recommend the UA-cam channel PBS Space Time. Look at the stuff they present on gravity and black holes. You'll love it. Good video, btw.
She posited very serious criticisms of idealism and good reasons for why materialism shouldn't be discounted, but until science can prove to me where consciousness is located and which mechanisms are used and until I witness something that defies the laws of the natural universe, I will remain a dualist.
On the point that she says ones mind can cause things to happen in the material world, an interesting phenomenon is the placebo effect. If your mind thinks of something ('I'm getting the right medication, thus I'll be better soon') it can cause the body to fight the illness and get better without the medication actually entering the system, which I consider very fascinating because it's medically still not really explainable.
The thought that your mind can't be in a place outside of your body reminds me of a thought about the video on time you did, and my personal views on it. I like to think of time in a theoretical physics sense (I think that is where it would lie...), one with multiverses and such. In this case, there is a universe for each set of outcomes, and you are currently in one of them. There is a universe for you to eat a pop tart for breakfast, and there is a universe for you to eat cereal. A universe for you to toast the pop tart, or eat it straight out of the package. Etc. I think that the past and future exist, and that the whole of history is one particular universe in the multiverse. However, the universe that you are in changes constantly depending on the decisions you make. In other words, the future is determined, but the future you will be in is not. Every time you make a decision, your mind goes to the universe where that decision is made, and so on with every decision. There are also universes for the decisions that you don't make. So, my mind might not be able to be in New York if my body is in Florida, but my mind can be in a different version of myself in another universe, and there are infinite other versions of myself where my mind is not. I imagine this view has plenty of problems, so feel free to explain them to me. Philosophy is awesome, but I am only just learning about it.
This is a great start to my day, thanks, Olly! I think physical damage to our brain matter can change our minds and souls. What about how we can damage our minds with things like drugs and alcohol? Physical damage and altered connections in our brains caused by taking a drug (mushrooms for instance ) can permanently change our whole perspective on the world and ourselves (Bill Hicks for example. The film 'American' talks about this). Or those cases you hear of where a person suffers a blow to the head (or something like that) and can suddenly play piano or speak another language? Seems like you pretty much have to hurt your physical brain to make this happen, though. Like how You never hear about someone eating a bowl of cereal and then suddenly is able to recite Pi to 30,000 decimals. but maybe that's because there aren't little mushrooms in Lucky Charms.
Topic recommendation: You recently discussed your path on atheism, and I was wondering if you studied any of Nietzsche's work? I ask because I enjoy reading Nietzsche and also would enjoy a video about Nietzsche from your perspective. If you are not familiar with him; he was a German existentialist who did not believe in absolute morality, and is somewhat controversial in the American academic scene. Also; Nietzsche made Dawkins look like a religious sympathizer, as opposed to a militant atheist, but I think you'd like Nietzsche more than Dawkins, maybe not; let us know?
The big problem with the idea of the soul is that it raises a large number of other questions that don't really have answers, such as: What are they made of if not matter? Where do they come from? Why do we have them? How do we know about them? And so on. Even if Descartes was the philosopher who could not doubt the existence of the immaterial mind because he was thinking, it seems (I haven't read all of his works yet) to have never occurred to him that he COULD doubt that someone else was thinking, and from the perspective of someone else, they could also doubt that he was thinking. Any study that tires to reveal what a conscious mind is won't succeed if the researcher is trying to relate what he finds to his own mind, because it is impossible to accurately analyze one's own consciousness, and the reason for that is that you are trying to view a frame of reference from the very frame of reference you are trying to view, which is sort of like trying to divide by zero.
+Ben Crispe it's not a problem that it raises more questions. also I really don't understand what you are saying about Descartes, could you explain it a little more? I'm not a philosophy student or anything like that but to my knowledge all Descartes' quote ever suggests is that fact that he himself exists in some form. "cogito ergo sum." cognitive therefore togetherness I think therefore I am. I know I am real because I can perceive the world around me, but my senses can be fooled, but if my senses ARE being fooled then there IS something to fool. somewhere at least. sorry for the pre-school way I explained that but I need to make sure we know what the other is talking about if I want to understand.
Aaron Woods What Descartes was trying to do was come up with some idea that was certain knowledge. He believed that if there was something that he could not possibly doubt, then it would be certain knowledge. He was able to doubt everything except that fact that he was thinking, because doubting is a kind of thinking. He therefore concluded that because he could doubt the existence of his body, but not his mind, that the mind and body must somehow be separate from one another. Unfortunately for Descartes, he had unknowingly tripped over something called the 'Masked Man Fallacy', which states that what you think about something isn't a property of the thing itself, so his quest for certain knowledge could not be based on what he simply could not doubt.
As a completely pedantic note, ( 5:30 ) the theory of evolution doesn't attempt to describe how life came to be, but what happens once it has arisen. Abiogenesis and panspermia attempt to describe a way life can arise from non-life substances.
+Viper magi Panspermia doesn't really do that, it just defers the question, like, ok life on earth might have originated on another planet, but how did it arise there?
+Viper magi Yes, and neither does he claim it does. He cites it as an example for how complex systems can come about from simple systems and simple actions.
+Viper magi You're right, this dude from Philosophy Tube constantly makes these basic mistakes and he studied philosophy!!, those ideas of evolution being totally tested and abiogenesis being an undeniable fact are promoted by pop culture but a studied philosopher like he is shouldn't make those mistakes.
+Viper magi He said, "complex systems can arise from matter", not "life can arise from non-life." I get what you're saying, but it sort of just comes down to semantics, and whether or not that "matter" he mentioned is alive. But what is "alive"? What is "is"? What "is"? Philosophy, yeah!
I hope my explanation actually gets noticed this time, but I mean, whatever. Specks of rationality will manifest as they will, based on determined principles. Nice to get noticed and at least debated, if not accepted.
It isn't true that immaterial objects don't have a location in space and time. It is very well possible for them to have it. For example, we know that immaterial abstract objects like the equator of the earth, the centre of mass of the solar system, Beethoven's fifth symphony etc. do have a location in space and time i.e. the equator began to exist along with the earth, and has a location on the earth and similarly for the rest. Now we may or may not believe in platonism, but we can agree that this conception is coherent. So the objection that immaterial minds cannot have a location in space and time. They can exist contingently.
I have a question : what is the "problem" with materialism ? When theists start to say things like "then we're mere matter" I really don't follow. Could you explain that ? Or anyone , I really want to know. Ps: Love your videos, keep doing them forever if possible haha (:
1:30-1:50 sounds like a non-sequitur to me. If the mind were immaterial, it couldn't have a location. How so? I don't think many people in history believed that their immaterial souls were also whizzing around on Jupiter. So surely it could in principle be possible for something immateria, but "real" (i.e. not numbers or abstract concepts) to be in a certain location. In the case of minds/souls/..., that location would presumably usually be pretty close to the body.
All science has shown is that there is a correlation between brain states and intentional states, which dualist-interactionalists expect. The mind is the self, an immaterial entity - a person - which uses the brain as a physical organism for thought. It was actually the Nobel prize winning neurologist Sir John Eccles compared the relationship between the soul (or the mind) and the brain to the relationship between a musician and a piano. The musician can produce music by playing on the piano; the instrument (the piano) produces the music but not on its own. It is only at the instigation of the agent - the musician - who plays the piano. Eccles said in exactly the same way the self (or the mind, or the soul) uses the brain to think. It uses it as an instrument for thinking just as a musician uses a piano as an instrument to play music. Both the piano and the pianist are closely related, but they aren't identical to each other. If, like the piano, the brain is in a severely diseased or injurious state, the mind cannot demonstrate its abilities; they of necessity remain private and unrevealed. However, for all we know, the mind still has its full range of abilities, but is hindered in its capacity to express them. The thoughts are the music, and the mind cannot express them with a broken brain.
From what you are saying about her, I'm suprised that she didn't apply her materialism to the concept of God/the soul. If material objects, like billard balls, pass information, could not this be part of a vast (but still material, not immaterial) mind which could be called God? It's a bit of Baruch Spinoza for that, who also existed in the same time period, or even Giordano Bruno.
You mentioned Descartes, Locke and Hobbes, but you didn't bring up Leibniz and his Monadology. Could it be that Leibniz was influenced by Margaret Cavendish? Leibniz's Monadology is a short, and somewhat easy read, I don't have it at the time of writing this comment, it is currently at my university while I am on break, but I do remember it mentioning that the Monad, the smallest piece of matter in the universe, each has its own soul. The reason we perceive matter is because these Monad are so abundant, and each one is unique, that they come together to make the physical universe. Now, Leibniz was a Monist in the fact that to him the Physical and Non-Physical both existed. It is just that they both came from the Non-Physical, what one might call God. I just started watching this channel, so I don't know how much of Leibniz you have covered, but one last thing is that, in Calculus, their is a divide between people who think who created Calculus, Leibniz or Newton. They both came up with their own Calculus near the same time, so people fight over who the originator of Calculus is.
What's your take on Gary Edwards, if you have one? Not trying to start a war, just curious as to how closely you line up with him philosophically, as I so far I get the impression you are quite a ways apart.
After that damn Anime video that I totally fell for; I had to check if this was an April fools video. I'm checking all the videos these days. That anime video was too philosophical! #anime #animus #anima
+shaun Brown I agree with you, troughout history some writers said they were christian and then say that they believe in a God that is not like the clearly defined God in the Bible.
Yeah I was listen to president Obama's oval office speech the other day and he said the God see's everyone the same no matter the religion and I'm like " I know some religions that are not going to agree"
+Josue Lopez I feel that one does not need to believe in God as defined literally in the Bible to label oneself Christian. Heck, how does one even define what is "literal" and what is not? What about language evolving and translations? Connotations? Interpretations?
RunItsTheCat I do think that a christian should try his best to follow the Bible as close as he can. The interpretation in the Bible (what should be literal and what not) it's a relatively easy thing to do basing on sintax, grammar, way of writting, there are experts on those matters but at the end there are some things that cause controversy.
According to the current standard model of subatomic particles in physics, forces are not immaterial: they are caused by bosons, which are basically subatomic particles which exert each force. And, as far as I understand, thoughts are electrical signals in the brain, so they aren't immaterial either. And, as far as I understand God isn't immaterial either, at least not in the way you seem to be defining 'immaterial'. I haven't studied theology, but I do go to church (I'm a catholic) and all over the Bible he interacts directly with the material world.
Can only imagine what kind of God she believed in, if as she claims it is a passive observer. Also this point would leave little room for an explanation of the Creationism theory. Still for the time I imagine it was a daring statement to make, doubting the interfering hand of a deity.
I assume left you Liverpool a long time ago. You don't appear to have any hint of the accent. And on a note actually related to the video: Is Cavendish basically describing Pantheism there?
Wouldn't the scientific explanation/argument for modern times in regards to material minds be that: since brains elicit minds via electrical impulses, due to reactions in synapses that release an electrical charge (i.e. a material, if we consider electrons as a particle) then thoughts are material (because they are the electrical impulse)? Therefore, minds are patterns of electrical current, which are made of matter (electrons) and thus in accordance with Margaret Cavendish's ideas. This may not work though, depending on whether thoughts are viewed as (a) the reaction that occurs when electrons interact with the brain, or (b) the electrons/electrical current that occurs between synapses and nerve cells. I'm curious about what you think; are thoughts electrons, and would electrons necessarily have to be viewed as a particle to coincide with Cavendish?
Even if it were possible that the mind was immaterial, at least in part, then how does it work exactly? What is this magical connection between the two? It brings up so many questions that cannot be answered or even speculated well. Let's consider the computer. Everything you see in a computer is as advanced, if not more advanced than the majority of our human internal mental processes: like calculations and extracting the properties of imagery and sounds or even touch. HOWEVER computers are bad at one thing... labelling trees. We haven't come up with a good way to label objects in a relevance tree of property relations. Humans are amazing at that, we can easily place objects in a heirarchical tree based on the properties we're ok at recognizing. But considering things like this, we can easily say that it's likely that the human mind can be about the same as a computer in terms of programs made by the geometry and chemical connections between neurons, which is self organizing using organics and chemical processes reinforcing certain things. I believe Margaret was WWWAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY beyond her time. There were few and still are few people who believe that model of mental existence. In the way that a computer's behaviour and it's programs can be seen, as the effects of the things the mind does, and the computer is based entirely on little 1-0 switches, it's safe to assume that the brain can do the same thing because it is feasible. Whatever the process may be and whether it truly works that way are still a mystery.
+RPGgrenade That is bad attitude towards knowledge, just because something seems difficult to answer or even to think about doens't mean that you should deny it or stop thinking about it, if all of us were like you, we would be way less advanced. So, really, stop thinking like that and better yet, start thinking. Second, you are way uninformed if you think that computers are more complex than human brains, that thing inside your head is arguably the most complex thing (along with the other human brains obviously) in the universe. That's one of the problems with abiogenesis, because order doesn't naturally come from disorder, it doesn't matter how much time passes, the DNA will never form itself from nothing, not even self replicating RNA, it is information and information will never come by accident.
Josue Lopez umm... thanks for the insults. And to me there's likely a different definition of knowledge then there is to yours. It's not that the concept is impossible that a mind can be immaterial.. just that it'd explain nothing because all definitions would wind up somewhat circular in description (at least from what I've seen.) When did I say computers were MORE complex than human brains, I said they can do certain things FAR BETTER than human brains can, and in fact took it out of my way to explain what computers are lacking when compared to human brains, which makes brains better overall for practical processing of information on a small scale. I feel that you misread my comment, honestly... And what the fuck does abiogenesis have anything to do with this? Now you're making a near creationist level of claims that have no relevance on the subject at hand. Also, you must be uninformed if you believe it impossible for DNA to form. It's not about making a giant full strand of DNA or chromosomes to form a creature. You only need self replicating molecules that do so by drawing in the molecules it's composed of. Finally, I must accuse you of being uninformed if you were unaware of the various ways artificial intelligence and neuroscience has advanced in recent years basically showing that most of the immaterial mind ideas are kind of pointless or at least going the wrong direction when it comes to learning about it. And EXTREMELY uninformed if you think that "information" somehow implies intention. There's never been a reason to assume that because information is a really difficult to pinpoint concept. And as a computer software engineer I can at least say I have a LITTLE bit of authority on the computer/information processing claims, if only a little.
RPGgrenade Insults? I was a little bit harsh, I admit it, but insults? I didn't insulted you, If you felt insulted I apologyse. Also what do you mean with definitions being circular in descriptions? No, I didn't misread your comment you said that computers are more complex than human brains, which is not true. Just because something does something better it doesn't mean is more complicated. About DNA, you are the uninformed one, the self replicating thing is RNA not DNA, but again just because it self replicates it means that it began to exist ordered just like magic. You could say that as a computer software engineer you have some kind of authority, however I must tell you that this is a philosophical questions and could be adressed by elevated physics. Now, it is not true that information can form itself, you should see this on your daily basis, have you ever seen a software that was programmed by a cat playing above the keyboard? If you see a written message on the sand of a beach would you conclude that it is there because of the way the air moved the sand? No, information does need a mind to exist, information is order which can only come from a ordered thing, a mind.
Josue Lopez Apology accepted. The comment about advancement was the part that stung a little. information doesn't need to be from a mind. What you're referring to as information is a kind of information that only exists with a purpose. Information can form all the time. I can look at a rock and gain a lot of information from it, but no intention was behind it. Humans function purely on information otherwise we wouldn't have the brains we have, but that doesn't mean the information we gather must have intention behind it. That's your presupposition because of your limited interpretations of where you've experienced information coming from. While it is true that a cat playing a keyboard (as mine has) can cause a big mess on the chat, it still hold information, said information is that something caused the event to happen where several keys were pressed and possibly for a very long time, so you can readily deduce that it was a cat. That's still information. But not the kind you're thinking of. If you read back to what I said you could see that I never stated that DNA was self replicating, only that there would be a self replicating molecule. You act as if the properties of physics and chemistry play no role in what atoms could attract to each other in this scenario, as if they don't exist until DNA or RNA does. That's not how it works... as if by magic? Try statistics and probability in a place where there's enough conditions met to produce that sort of thing over long periods of time increasing the probability by each molecule in the solution and second that passes for them to interact. These things bring the statistics up to near 90% if the conditions were ideal, in fact, by pure chance, that sort of thing could conceivably come about on several occasions. You are wrong once again, having read back at my comment about computers, thinking maybe I forgot, I in fact said "advanced", not "complex", it's typical that people confuse the two. Complexity does not imply efficiency. Advanced things are more efficient than another thing and CAN be more complex. It's not always the case. Computers ARE more efficient than human brains in many, MANY departments. I don't know what your beliefs are, but you are starting to sound like someone who may be religious or at least doubtful of general scientific consensus. Because you bring "elevated physics" into this which I can only assume means metaphysics. And you've placed no bearing on what we know about the mind from psychology, neurology, brain science in general and several plausible hypotheses floating around that have yet to be explored which are purely secular in nature, and in fact could potentially explain all of human cognition. This is a topic I've delved into extensively, and I advise you to pick and choose your words carefully when addressing anything scientific, the biggest problem being addressing something unscientific to attempt to explain something you don't understand. It doesn't actually explain anything, it's more like a putting a pin on it until we can find an actual answer. Many things that were thought to only exist in the realm of philosophies has been leaked over to science for them to dissect and speculate about regardless of what the philosophers think of it, essentially reaching for more practical, and in my opinion, believable ideas of how the mind works. It's not a subject that can just be explained with "information", which may as well be magic woo-woo if you place that as the definitive answer. Information, like energy, is something you can measure, and converts from one state to another, so it's NOT quite the kind of thing you may be imagining (if you can imagine pure information, you're not imagining pure information, just like you can't imagine pure energy). Finally, by circular definition I mean that almost EVERY single person who has attempted to explain the mind or soul or whatever to me has tried to explain it to as a thing that hold conciousness, or morality, or love or something like that. Which are all abstract subjects that are slowly, but surely being explained by the chemistry, events and interactions our brains have with the outside world to make the sensations of these things. It's circular because they're using more and more abstract concepts to explain the abstract concept and end up claiming that's why the abstract mind exists in the way they envision it. Despite the fact that they can't explain how any of the things composing it work, and interact with the physical brain in some way, essentially saying "The immaterial thing that holds conciousness, morality and love... is immaterial, holds conciousness, morality and love". And I've heard that A LOT. And I've yet to hear a good definition of the mind that didn't consist of neurological processes and events.
RPGgrenade I wrote a long response to you but somehow the page closed, I feel very frustrated now. So, I will answer later to you when I feel with the energy. bye bye
I find it a tad ironic that modern physics suggests that all mass is fundamentally composed of the, strictly speaking, immaterial (namely energy). We don't even know what energy really is.... As such, how can anyone reasonably assert that a god (of unknown essence) can't interact with matter because that deity is immaterial? To assert such, strikes me as speaking beyond what we could possibly know for the assertion is reliant on too many assumptions that are far from obvious. Any rigorous study into the question of how do we have confidence in our knowledge (epistemologically speaking) seems to justify granting it as possible that God could in fact interact with the material.
Um... Epicurus said minds and thoughts are matter and that was oooh just a little bit before Cavendish's time. Credit where credit is due? Who prefigured modern materialism and physicalism?
I think of thoughts which make up a mind more as energy than matter. But if a computer can think, as a brain can think, then isn't hydrogen and oxygen (both, naturally, gaseous in the Earths atmosphere) getting together to form liquid water not an "intelligent" arrangement? I suspect that the "intelligence" of arranged matter is "programmed" (like a computer, rather than a brain) in the available EM bonds in their molecular construction... Which, in it's self is dictated by the laws of physics and nature of gravity and mass.
She makes the mistake of assuming that "science" is a thing and not just a process of studying the world. "Science" is not just being able to come up with a purely naturalist explanation of something
This is the first video of yours that I actually agree with. Now can you take the ideas presented in this video and use it to debunk retarded crud such as "Searle's Chinese Room" and "non-representational qualia"?
The same refutation Cavendish offered against dualists i.e. that we don't know yet how the brain is the mind can be thrown back to thr materialist. We don't know how an immaterial mind can causally interact with a material body. There isn't any logical contradiction for an immaterial mind to causally interact with the material world. As you said, forces like gtavity aren't material, but they do causally interact with the material world.
+somewony Energy is just matter in a different form (i.e. matter with velocity, matter up a potential well, charged particles in motion creating electromagnetic waves, etc.) Really, any form of energy can be traced back to behavior coming from matter.
I have a philosophy Final in an hour and this helped so much. My favourite thing about her is that she was willing to say "I don't know". The number of people unwilling to admit that they don't know something is unfortunate tbh.
Zone Doll did you make it? How was it?
Hope your final turned out well
I like the sound of this woman. Obviously we need to consider her writing in the context of her time (which I think is true of all writing really). I wonder if she had been a man, if her work would have been better known?
I think probably not. Although if she were a man she'd have been likely to receive formal education and her writings would have been different.
Cavendish' primary drawbacks are that her style of writing is painfully difficult to read (this is completely avoidable). The impact of this can be seen even in this video, where the narrator has some misunderstandings of her thought (e.g. she doesn't think figures "communicate" any kind of knowledge at all, in the OUE she claims her "previous thoughts" had that idea and she actually disagrees with them).
Her thoughts are also somewhat underdeveloped and even though she understands some of the shortcomings of her arguments she basically says "well, yeah, it doesn't really make sense, but just trust me on this one. At least my theory is simpler than the other theories, even if it doesn't necessarily make more sense".
That's not a really attractive way to sell your theory. Since her ideas are more developed by people like Hume (who are anyway often read in universities and even high schools) it's only natural that Hume and Locke become the locus for delivering these ideas. As it is, Cavendish is one of a multitude of philosophers who are primarily interesting to historians of philosophy rather than actual philosophy students (although if you're one of those few people who specializes a lot in metaphysics you'll come across her sooner or later).
Another point to make is that matter can affect the mind. Brain damage can do all kinds of things to someones personality and thought processes, like make them lose inhibitions or forget what their friends names are. I find it difficult to understand how an immaterial thing could be affected so.
I don't see how brain damage 'refutes' substance dualism. Try to think of the *brain* as a *piano* and the *mind* as a *pianist*. If the piano is damaged, the pianist is restricted in his actions, and cannot play the same music as he used to.
Xavy Johnson Tomy But what is unique to the mind at that point if everything that makes up a person can be distorted or changed this way? It doesn't have memory, emotions don't come from it, and our personality has more to do with our fleshy bits than anything else.
If the mind is where thought originates from, shouldn't the person afflicted be acutely aware that thoughts aren't getting through? I mean the pianist would be aware when his high C just made a clunking noise, it doesn't make sense for us to not know we thought something. You'd think that something would happen on the rational side of us to make us aware of missing input. Like if you were playing a video game and the "a" button on your controller was non-functioning, you'd realize pretty quickly that you couldn't make the character jump. The character in the game wouldn't realize they were being told to but the character isn't the one thinking, you are. Similarly, with a damaged piano the pianist would be totally aware of the problem but a lot of people with brain damage have trouble with that kind of thing. Without feedback from other people some wouldn't even know there was something wrong.
+Eon2641 If we think of thoughts as the music of the piano, then the music aka thoughts would be damaged by the damage of the piano. That's all I was trying to show with my analogy. The pianist wouldn't be able to play music with a damaged piano. Since thoughts are akin to music in the analogy, it doesn't make sense to ask about the thoughts of the pianist, since in the analogy, the thoughts is the music.
Xavy Johnson Tomy But the "mind" is the pianist, correct? Am I incorrect in my understanding that the mind is meant to be the source of thought and, in effect, the thing that makes a person who they are?
The mind is the self, an immaterial entity - a person - which uses the brain as a physical organism for thought. It was actually the Nobel prize winning neurologist Sir John Eccles compared the relationship between the soul (or the mind) and the brain to the relationship between a musician and a piano. The musician can produce music by playing on the piano; the instrument (the piano) produces the music but not on its own. It is only at the instigation of the agent - the musician - who plays the piano. Eccles said in exactly the same way the self (or the mind, or the soul) uses the brain to think. It uses it as an instrument for thinking just as a musician uses a piano as an instrument to play music. Both the piano and the pianist are closely related, but they aren't identical to each other.
If, like the piano, the brain is in a severely diseased or injurious state, the mind cannot demonstrate its abilities; they of necessity remain private and unrevealed. However, for all we know, the mind still has its full range of abilities, but is hindered in its capacity to express them.
I love that you did this. She is never talked about and I love her thinking!!! well done 😍
"we are living in a material world and I have a material mind"
+Chris notaperson this same thing popped into my head hahaha
*and I am a material girl
If she is underrepresented in western classes, then here in Thailand she's non-existent. Here we've got only obsolete 60s textbook selectively summarized and translated as material. And it's a major university in Bangkok, the capital...
I majored in philosophy at a global top 20 university and I think there are good reasons for omitting her from most curricula.
The first reason is that her philosophical writing is extremely difficult to interpret. In the OUE, she holds a dialogue between her past and present thoughts, and because of her style of writing it's really difficult to know when to attribute a specific argument to her "latter thoughts" or her "previous thoughts".
Secondly, you are probably familiar with that stereotype of philosophy where people claim philosophers to be edgy kids who smoke weed and sit in a circle and just blurt out random things about the world? While she's not quite that far gone, I think she straddles the line between actual philosophy and fanciful thought. She correctly identifies and responds to an existing idea (dualist interpretation of mind-body), but her methodology is dubious. When she lifts up some possible counter-arguments to her theory she essentially says "we are finite beings and can't understand infinite nature, so I can't actually prove that I'm right. But I think my account is more aesthetically pleasing and simpler than that of the dualists. Therefore you should adopt my ideas".
This is obviously a massive flaw because it's really discouraging to read an account that just says "Well, I don't know if this makes sense, but just trust me on this". You could say practically anything if that were an acceptable argument. I think this is where her lack of formal education shines through, because historically philosophy has been very much about method.
Finally, her ideas are more developed and better represented by the likes of Hume, which has delegated her to become an object of study primarily for historians of philosophy. These are fairly complex ideas, and you wouldn't be introduced to much of her reasoning in an intro to metaphysics class.
The only professors I've seen include her in their curricula think there is benefit in showcasing female philosophers, and this is a primary cause for them to have students look at her texts.
Thank you for this video, I had no idea that Cavendish was such a badass anti-mainstream philosopher in a time, where philosophy was a realm of men. :)
Question: Why did she believe in god? She'd already argued against dualism and since the universe is intelligent itself (following her ideas), what role did god play in her belief? God seems like a leftover in this context...
Beside of that, I am really impressed by her ideas, which, in a sense, have survived until today. Even I can identify with a lot of them :)
In my class one thing we talked about was how she really didn’t want to write on religious matters as religion had become so tied in with European politics, and as she had been a political refugee in France a large portion of her life, she didn’t really want to rock the boat.
Lol " the universe itself is intelligent" what a crock of💩
Her work was and still is one of the top three most amazing things I have ever heard or read about...and it is sad that her life came to an end too soon and with her failing her ultimate goals...not really realizing her dream.
BUT she most def. left her mark on this world...this material world.
I've been really really into philosophy for a long time now and i'm glad to find these vids, always excited to hear new methods of thought an such.
+Kaima Moonfury Welcome to the little community!
3:31 I love when dad- I mean olly calls me very clever :)
Songs are the melodic communication of ideas, feelings, and thoughts through the medium of music(not necessarily but often).
Love the interaction at the end, keep that up for sure.
Olly, would you consider a segment on Kierkegaard? =D
the title of this video: Lets tackle the most complicated topics in human history in 10 minutes
So the analogy of the billiard balls "interacting" and "passing on info which tells the other what to do" is fascinating.
Firstly, because there is actually the idea of objects carrying "information" in physics, and that information being passed on. A good analogy is that when you drop an extended slinky, the bottom of the slinky remains in place until slinky has contracted. It seems the whole slinky hovers in place, even if you'd expect some movement over time. One explanation given is that the information the slinky has been dropped has to reach the bottom of the slinky before it moves. It's not a particularly convincing explanation to me, but I've yet to refute it based on any analysis. (Veritasium has a really good video series about this problem.)
Secondly, this idea of information transmitting between objects and altering their spacial position is basically what Feynman diagrams represent. When two billiards come together, it is the electromagnetic interaction that causes them to bounce off each other. According to various models in Quantum Mechanics/Particle physics we can think of a virtual photon passing on this "information" like some little messenger. Of course, this interaction is the aggregate of trillions of such interactions between all the electrons on the colliding surface areas of the billiard balls, but the comparison seemed really interesting to me nonetheless.
I'm from Newcastle and have a Philosophy of Mind exam this week and have managed to have never come across her, well timed video though.
+Bryn De Ivey Good luck! You don't happen to be at RGS, do you?
+Philosophy Tube No! I have a few friends who went/are still going. I went to Heaton Manor but i'm at Glasgow Uni now.
My mom’s the tetrachroma lady. I’m descended from royalty. Margaret Cavendish owned my hometown. Who am I?
Well, I have finally watched all of your videos. I wish my Intro to Philosophy class in college was as interesting as this channel. My Teacher's method was "read the book and discuss it amongst yourselves"
"only material things can have a location"
Another great argument made confusing by digitalization
The round faced era of Philosophy Tube
FUN FACT: Margaret Cavendish is an ancestor of William Cavendish. William was responsible for the naming of the Cavendish banana, the common bright yellow kind we all eat today. Now every time you eat a banana you have cause to think about 17th century materialism!
She also was the wife of William Cavendish, first duke of Newcastle, who, aside from being an influential figure in dressage in the 17th and 18th century, also was the patron of Hobbes, Gassendi, and Descartes :)
Question: from what you are saying of her thought, it sounds like she also presaged Claude Shannon and information theory. Is this an accurate assessment, or did something get lost in transmission (there is a philosophical pun in there)?
A billiard ball, by modern thinking, DOES transfer information. The pool table can even be seen as processing information. I admit, I don't fully understand any of this.
This is an excellent point that deserves more attention.
Her theory on "billiard balls hitting each other are transferring information" sounds to me like exactly how computers work. Transistors exchange electric charges, and in the right arrangement they can create a CPU capable of processing what we would conventionally consider information.
Kinda sounds like the Turing test
If the Toon is your home town Olly, then I compliment you on your cultivation of the the least Geordie like accent I've ever heard. I'm from North Shields btw ;)
Thinking. Just the act of thinking, is fucking mind blowing.
Whole mindedly agreed.
Thomas Nagel (Ph.D., Harvard) wrote a greak book entitled _Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False_ published on Oxford University Press in 2012. He does a pretty good job of destroying materialism. Oh and by the way Dr. Nagel is an atheist, he's not motivated by religious reasons. He's convinced by the facts that materialism is wrong. Happy reading.
+IOnceMadeLuv2APolarBear Yes I would suggest reading the book and he does present some arguments that do in fact contradict materialism. He argues for a kind of neutral monism.
She sounds like she was a very intelligent person, and was aware that although she may be wrong, if she is, it's nothing to be ashamed of, and the idea is to get ideas into the world and find out which one is correct. I respect when someone admits that they don't know and may be wrong.
Happy Holidays!
I really like the fact that Olly spends more time speaking about female philosopher these days ! Gender does not matter for good philosophy, but usually, people always throw in the same good old guys : Descartes, Freud, Nietzsche... Not that those don't matter, of course. But it's pleasant to learn about lesser known authors, and especially females since they don't seem to get the credit they actually deserve !
+Azher “Krimsanity” Crimson Yeah, representation on the show is really something I wanna make better.
Well I'm happy to let you know that your efforts have not gone unnoticed then :-)
Cavendish's view of physical objects communicating information to each other is a perfectly cromulent way to look at physical processes. Every physical process is a transfer of energy, and every transfer of energy is a signal that carries information, so you can look at the goings-on of the physical universe either as a flow of energy from one thing to another or a flow or information from one thing to another: the transmissions of signals that trigger responses from their recipients works out to the same model of the universe one way or another.
absolutley glorious, thank you
I'm so excited to learn more about her and not surprised that she's kept in the background or left out of educational systems, at least in the US. Critical thinking and questioning the norm/patriarchy aren't encouraged in here America.
AZULA!!!!!!! my daughter making a cameo
I think there might be a misunderstanding of Cavendish' writing in OUE in this video. She doesn't think there is "communication" of any kind of knowledge between figures. Rather, figures can navigate the world because all animate substance has "exterior perception" and "self-knowledge".
So basically, if you're looking at the micro level, a stick being lifted by a hand is "self-moving", it's not actually being lifted by the hand. The hand is just the occasion for the stick to move itself. The stick can perceive the hand's motion and, because it has self-knowledge, it knows in which direction it should move in order to be "harmonious with nature". The hand doesn't tell the stick to move anywhere.
This only applies on the micro level though (what she calls "creatures of nature"). If you were to zoom out ("body of nature"), the stick looks completely inert in relation to the hand that is lifting it. When viewed from this perspective, then, the stick IS actually being moved.
Cavendish thinks that both the "creatures of nature" and "body of nature" views exist at the same time without contradiction. Thus, the stick is in one sense self-moving and in another sense being moved by another body.
Here is the exact quote from Cavendish with regards to communication:
"[...]by the example of a horse and a man, where the man was moved and carried along by the horse, without any communication or translation of motion from the horse into the man: Also a stick, said they, carried in a man’s hand, goes along with the man, without receiving any motion from his hand." (OUE, pp.27)
This is actually really important for Cavendish' account, because from the "body of nature" perspective it seems as if the stick is being moved by the hand, but the how could the hand give knowledge to the stick that it does not itself possess? And that's why she introduces perception and self-knowledge to matter.
At 2:32 it looks like you offer gravity as an example of the immaterial imposing a force on the material. This may not be the case, though, if I understand correctly. Perceiving gravity as a force is an illusion. I think what they say is that we are always "falling through the curvature of spacetime". Its counter-intuitive and difficult to understand but really fascinating. I recommend the UA-cam channel PBS Space Time. Look at the stuff they present on gravity and black holes. You'll love it.
Good video, btw.
Margaret Cavendish... I'll try to remember that name.
That's amazing. I'd heard the name, but never the first name or what she did.
My favorite Cavendish moment is her anti-microscopy phase.
She posited very serious criticisms of idealism and good reasons for why materialism shouldn't be discounted, but until science can prove to me where consciousness is located and which mechanisms are used and until I witness something that defies the laws of the natural universe, I will remain a dualist.
On the point that she says ones mind can cause things to happen in the material world, an interesting phenomenon is the placebo effect. If your mind thinks of something ('I'm getting the right medication, thus I'll be better soon') it can cause the body to fight the illness and get better without the medication actually entering the system, which I consider very fascinating because it's medically still not really explainable.
The thought that your mind can't be in a place outside of your body reminds me of a thought about the video on time you did, and my personal views on it.
I like to think of time in a theoretical physics sense (I think that is where it would lie...), one with multiverses and such. In this case, there is a universe for each set of outcomes, and you are currently in one of them. There is a universe for you to eat a pop tart for breakfast, and there is a universe for you to eat cereal. A universe for you to toast the pop tart, or eat it straight out of the package. Etc.
I think that the past and future exist, and that the whole of history is one particular universe in the multiverse. However, the universe that you are in changes constantly depending on the decisions you make. In other words, the future is determined, but the future you will be in is not. Every time you make a decision, your mind goes to the universe where that decision is made, and so on with every decision. There are also universes for the decisions that you don't make.
So, my mind might not be able to be in New York if my body is in Florida, but my mind can be in a different version of myself in another universe, and there are infinite other versions of myself where my mind is not.
I imagine this view has plenty of problems, so feel free to explain them to me. Philosophy is awesome, but I am only just learning about it.
Really interesting video!
I love Cavendish and curse my sad excuse for an education.
This is a great start to my day, thanks, Olly! I think physical damage to our brain matter can change our minds and souls. What about how we can damage our minds with things like drugs and alcohol? Physical damage and altered connections in our brains caused by taking a drug (mushrooms for instance ) can permanently change our whole perspective on the world and ourselves (Bill Hicks for example. The film 'American' talks about this). Or those cases you hear of where a person suffers a blow to the head (or something like that) and can suddenly play piano or speak another language? Seems like you pretty much have to hurt your physical brain to make this happen, though. Like how You never hear about someone eating a bowl of cereal and then suddenly is able to recite Pi to 30,000 decimals. but maybe that's because there aren't little mushrooms in Lucky Charms.
Topic recommendation: You recently discussed your path on atheism, and I was wondering if you studied any of Nietzsche's work? I ask because I enjoy reading Nietzsche and also would enjoy a video about Nietzsche from your perspective. If you are not familiar with him; he was a German existentialist who did not believe in absolute morality, and is somewhat controversial in the American academic scene. Also; Nietzsche made Dawkins look like a religious sympathizer, as opposed to a militant atheist, but I think you'd like Nietzsche more than Dawkins, maybe not; let us know?
It seems like Cavendish's view of the world is very animistic, i really like it
sounds like an interesting girl. had never heard about her before. great video
The big problem with the idea of the soul is that it raises a large number of other questions that don't really have answers, such as: What are they made of if not matter? Where do they come from? Why do we have them? How do we know about them? And so on. Even if Descartes was the philosopher who could not doubt the existence of the immaterial mind because he was thinking, it seems (I haven't read all of his works yet) to have never occurred to him that he COULD doubt that someone else was thinking, and from the perspective of someone else, they could also doubt that he was thinking.
Any study that tires to reveal what a conscious mind is won't succeed if the researcher is trying to relate what he finds to his own mind, because it is impossible to accurately analyze one's own consciousness, and the reason for that is that you are trying to view a frame of reference from the very frame of reference you are trying to view, which is sort of like trying to divide by zero.
+Ben Crispe
it's not a problem that it raises more questions.
also I really don't understand what you are saying about Descartes, could you explain it a little more?
I'm not a philosophy student or anything like that but to my knowledge all Descartes' quote ever suggests is that fact that he himself exists in some form.
"cogito ergo sum."
cognitive therefore togetherness
I think therefore I am.
I know I am real because I can perceive the world around me,
but my senses can be fooled,
but if my senses ARE being fooled then there IS something to fool. somewhere at least.
sorry for the pre-school way I explained that but I need to make sure we know what the other is talking about if I want to understand.
Aaron Woods
What Descartes was trying to do was come up with some idea that was certain knowledge. He believed that if there was something that he could not possibly doubt, then it would be certain knowledge. He was able to doubt everything except that fact that he was thinking, because doubting is a kind of thinking. He therefore concluded that because he could doubt the existence of his body, but not his mind, that the mind and body must somehow be separate from one another.
Unfortunately for Descartes, he had unknowingly tripped over something called the 'Masked Man Fallacy', which states that what you think about something isn't a property of the thing itself, so his quest for certain knowledge could not be based on what he simply could not doubt.
yey for Newcastle!! :D
As a completely pedantic note, ( 5:30 ) the theory of evolution doesn't attempt to describe how life came to be, but what happens once it has arisen. Abiogenesis and panspermia attempt to describe a way life can arise from non-life substances.
+Viper magi Panspermia doesn't really do that, it just defers the question, like, ok life on earth might have originated on another planet, but how did it arise there?
+Viper magi Yes, and neither does he claim it does. He cites it as an example for how complex systems can come about from simple systems and simple actions.
+Viper magi You're right, this dude from Philosophy Tube constantly makes these basic mistakes and he studied philosophy!!, those ideas of evolution being totally tested and abiogenesis being an undeniable fact are promoted by pop culture but a studied philosopher like he is shouldn't make those mistakes.
He said we know how "complex systems can arrise from matter" . He didn't say "life from matter".
+Viper magi He said, "complex systems can arise from matter", not "life can arise from non-life." I get what you're saying, but it sort of just comes down to semantics, and whether or not that "matter" he mentioned is alive.
But what is "alive"?
What is "is"?
What "is"?
Philosophy, yeah!
Hey! I wanted to know if you could do an episode on some Nietzsche concepts! Thanks!
I think the immaterial is simply the "information" that material holds and abides by. Like the waves of an photon.
Jim Sterling fan spotted!
The Drüid
#ResiSterling
I hope my explanation actually gets noticed this time, but I mean, whatever. Specks of rationality will manifest as they will, based on determined principles. Nice to get noticed and at least debated, if not accepted.
It isn't true that immaterial objects don't have a location in space and time. It is very well possible for them to have it. For example, we know that immaterial abstract objects like the equator of the earth, the centre of mass of the solar system, Beethoven's fifth symphony etc. do have a location in space and time i.e. the equator began to exist along with the earth, and has a location on the earth and similarly for the rest. Now we may or may not believe in platonism, but we can agree that this conception is coherent. So the objection that immaterial minds cannot have a location in space and time. They can exist contingently.
The mind is the physiological manifestation of the central nervous system's function, neurobiologically.
good to hear you're a Geordie, have you ever been to the Lit and Phil?
I have a question : what is the "problem" with materialism ? When theists start to say things like "then we're mere matter" I really don't follow. Could you explain that ? Or anyone , I really want to know.
Ps: Love your videos, keep doing them forever if possible haha (:
1:30-1:50 sounds like a non-sequitur to me. If the mind were immaterial, it couldn't have a location. How so? I don't think many people in history believed that their immaterial souls were also whizzing around on Jupiter. So surely it could in principle be possible for something immateria, but "real" (i.e. not numbers or abstract concepts) to be in a certain location. In the case of minds/souls/..., that location would presumably usually be pretty close to the body.
All science has shown is that there is a correlation between brain states and intentional states, which dualist-interactionalists expect. The mind is the self, an immaterial entity - a person - which uses the brain as a physical organism for thought. It was actually the Nobel prize winning neurologist Sir John Eccles compared the relationship between the soul (or the mind) and the brain to the relationship between a musician and a piano. The musician can produce music by playing on the piano; the instrument (the piano) produces the music but not on its own. It is only at the instigation of the agent - the musician - who plays the piano. Eccles said in exactly the same way the self (or the mind, or the soul) uses the brain to think. It uses it as an instrument for thinking just as a musician uses a piano as an instrument to play music. Both the piano and the pianist are closely related, but they aren't identical to each other.
If, like the piano, the brain is in a severely diseased or injurious state, the mind cannot demonstrate its abilities; they of necessity remain private and unrevealed. However, for all we know, the mind still has its full range of abilities, but is hindered in its capacity to express them.
The thoughts are the music, and the mind cannot express them with a broken brain.
From what you are saying about her, I'm suprised that she didn't apply her materialism to the concept of God/the soul. If material objects, like billard balls, pass information, could not this be part of a vast (but still material, not immaterial) mind which could be called God? It's a bit of Baruch Spinoza for that, who also existed in the same time period, or even Giordano Bruno.
You mentioned Descartes, Locke and Hobbes, but you didn't bring up Leibniz and his Monadology. Could it be that Leibniz was influenced by Margaret Cavendish? Leibniz's Monadology is a short, and somewhat easy read, I don't have it at the time of writing this comment, it is currently at my university while I am on break, but I do remember it mentioning that the Monad, the smallest piece of matter in the universe, each has its own soul. The reason we perceive matter is because these Monad are so abundant, and each one is unique, that they come together to make the physical universe. Now, Leibniz was a Monist in the fact that to him the Physical and Non-Physical both existed. It is just that they both came from the Non-Physical, what one might call God. I just started watching this channel, so I don't know how much of Leibniz you have covered, but one last thing is that, in Calculus, their is a divide between people who think who created Calculus, Leibniz or Newton. They both came up with their own Calculus near the same time, so people fight over who the originator of Calculus is.
What's your take on Gary Edwards, if you have one? Not trying to start a war, just curious as to how closely you line up with him philosophically, as I so far I get the impression you are quite a ways apart.
After that damn Anime video that I totally fell for; I had to check if this was an April fools video. I'm checking all the videos these days. That anime video was too philosophical! #anime #animus #anima
It sounds like pantheism to me. I would like to get into definitional discussion about what being God means to her.
+shaun Brown I agree with you, troughout history some writers said they were christian and then say that they believe in a God that is not like the clearly defined God in the Bible.
Yeah I was listen to president Obama's oval office speech the other day and he said the God see's everyone the same no matter the religion and I'm like " I know some religions that are not going to agree"
+Josue Lopez I feel that one does not need to believe in God as defined literally in the Bible to label oneself Christian. Heck, how does one even define what is "literal" and what is not? What about language evolving and translations? Connotations? Interpretations?
RunItsTheCat
I do think that a christian should try his best to follow the Bible as close as he can. The interpretation in the Bible (what should be literal and what not) it's a relatively easy thing to do basing on sintax, grammar, way of writting, there are experts on those matters but at the end there are some things that cause controversy.
Josue Lopez True... Tbh, I think all that really matters is that we are truly trying our best.
What does it mean to know something by faith?
According to the current standard model of subatomic particles in physics, forces are not immaterial: they are caused by bosons, which are basically subatomic particles which exert each force. And, as far as I understand, thoughts are electrical signals in the brain, so they aren't immaterial either.
And, as far as I understand God isn't immaterial either, at least not in the way you seem to be defining 'immaterial'. I haven't studied theology, but I do go to church (I'm a catholic) and all over the Bible he interacts directly with the material world.
Oh, and by the way, thanks for featuring my comment. I'm happy now.
Can only imagine what kind of God she believed in, if as she claims it is a passive observer. Also this point would leave little room for an explanation of the Creationism theory. Still for the time I imagine it was a daring statement to make, doubting the interfering hand of a deity.
I assume left you Liverpool a long time ago. You don't appear to have any hint of the accent.
And on a note actually related to the video: Is Cavendish basically describing Pantheism there?
+Code: Marla I never lived in Liverpool, it was Newcastle haha. And my parents weren't Geordie so I never picked up the accent.
I meant Newcastle... I literally just watched the video but for some reason typed Liverpool... I have no idea why.
3:17 this woman just figured out entanglement in the 17th century
@olly would you rather incline towards being a philosophical materialist or an idealist/dualist?
damn based Margaret Cavendish
edit: except for being a noble, which is big fat cringe
Wouldn't the scientific explanation/argument for modern times in regards to material minds be that: since brains elicit minds via electrical impulses, due to reactions in synapses that release an electrical charge (i.e. a material, if we consider electrons as a particle) then thoughts are material (because they are the electrical impulse)? Therefore, minds are patterns of electrical current, which are made of matter (electrons) and thus in accordance with Margaret Cavendish's ideas.
This may not work though, depending on whether thoughts are viewed as (a) the reaction that occurs when electrons interact with the brain, or (b) the electrons/electrical current that occurs between synapses and nerve cells. I'm curious about what you think; are thoughts electrons, and would electrons necessarily have to be viewed as a particle to coincide with Cavendish?
Any good books on materialism please?
1:55 That's not New York, that's the New York New York casino in Las Vegas :p
+Jake Santos Yes, it was, uh, a test. Well done. You passed. Totally meant to do that.
Cavendish's idea of information seemed absurd for a while, then Quantum Physics broke down our conception of information
Was that a Matt Lees I spied?
Even if it were possible that the mind was immaterial, at least in part, then how does it work exactly? What is this magical connection between the two? It brings up so many questions that cannot be answered or even speculated well.
Let's consider the computer. Everything you see in a computer is as advanced, if not more advanced than the majority of our human internal mental processes: like calculations and extracting the properties of imagery and sounds or even touch. HOWEVER computers are bad at one thing... labelling trees. We haven't come up with a good way to label objects in a relevance tree of property relations. Humans are amazing at that, we can easily place objects in a heirarchical tree based on the properties we're ok at recognizing. But considering things like this, we can easily say that it's likely that the human mind can be about the same as a computer in terms of programs made by the geometry and chemical connections between neurons, which is self organizing using organics and chemical processes reinforcing certain things.
I believe Margaret was WWWAAAAAAAYYYYYYYY beyond her time. There were few and still are few people who believe that model of mental existence. In the way that a computer's behaviour and it's programs can be seen, as the effects of the things the mind does, and the computer is based entirely on little 1-0 switches, it's safe to assume that the brain can do the same thing because it is feasible. Whatever the process may be and whether it truly works that way are still a mystery.
+RPGgrenade That is bad attitude towards knowledge, just because something seems difficult to answer or even to think about doens't mean that you should deny it or stop thinking about it, if all of us were like you, we would be way less advanced. So, really, stop thinking like that and better yet, start thinking.
Second, you are way uninformed if you think that computers are more complex than human brains, that thing inside your head is arguably the most complex thing (along with the other human brains obviously) in the universe.
That's one of the problems with abiogenesis, because order doesn't naturally come from disorder, it doesn't matter how much time passes, the DNA will never form itself from nothing, not even self replicating RNA, it is information and information will never come by accident.
Josue Lopez umm... thanks for the insults. And to me there's likely a different definition of knowledge then there is to yours. It's not that the concept is impossible that a mind can be immaterial.. just that it'd explain nothing because all definitions would wind up somewhat circular in description (at least from what I've seen.)
When did I say computers were MORE complex than human brains, I said they can do certain things FAR BETTER than human brains can, and in fact took it out of my way to explain what computers are lacking when compared to human brains, which makes brains better overall for practical processing of information on a small scale. I feel that you misread my comment, honestly...
And what the fuck does abiogenesis have anything to do with this? Now you're making a near creationist level of claims that have no relevance on the subject at hand. Also, you must be uninformed if you believe it impossible for DNA to form. It's not about making a giant full strand of DNA or chromosomes to form a creature. You only need self replicating molecules that do so by drawing in the molecules it's composed of.
Finally, I must accuse you of being uninformed if you were unaware of the various ways artificial intelligence and neuroscience has advanced in recent years basically showing that most of the immaterial mind ideas are kind of pointless or at least going the wrong direction when it comes to learning about it. And EXTREMELY uninformed if you think that "information" somehow implies intention. There's never been a reason to assume that because information is a really difficult to pinpoint concept. And as a computer software engineer I can at least say I have a LITTLE bit of authority on the computer/information processing claims, if only a little.
RPGgrenade Insults? I was a little bit harsh, I admit it, but insults? I didn't insulted you, If you felt insulted I apologyse. Also what do you mean with definitions being circular in descriptions?
No, I didn't misread your comment you said that computers are more complex than human brains, which is not true. Just because something does something better it doesn't mean is more complicated.
About DNA, you are the uninformed one, the self replicating thing is RNA not DNA, but again just because it self replicates it means that it began to exist ordered just like magic.
You could say that as a computer software engineer you have some kind of authority, however I must tell you that this is a philosophical questions and could be adressed by elevated physics. Now, it is not true that information can form itself, you should see this on your daily basis, have you ever seen a software that was programmed by a cat playing above the keyboard? If you see a written message on the sand of a beach would you conclude that it is there because of the way the air moved the sand? No, information does need a mind to exist, information is order which can only come from a ordered thing, a mind.
Josue Lopez Apology accepted. The comment about advancement was the part that stung a little.
information doesn't need to be from a mind. What you're referring to as information is a kind of information that only exists with a purpose. Information can form all the time. I can look at a rock and gain a lot of information from it, but no intention was behind it. Humans function purely on information otherwise we wouldn't have the brains we have, but that doesn't mean the information we gather must have intention behind it. That's your presupposition because of your limited interpretations of where you've experienced information coming from.
While it is true that a cat playing a keyboard (as mine has) can cause a big mess on the chat, it still hold information, said information is that something caused the event to happen where several keys were pressed and possibly for a very long time, so you can readily deduce that it was a cat. That's still information. But not the kind you're thinking of.
If you read back to what I said you could see that I never stated that DNA was self replicating, only that there would be a self replicating molecule. You act as if the properties of physics and chemistry play no role in what atoms could attract to each other in this scenario, as if they don't exist until DNA or RNA does. That's not how it works... as if by magic? Try statistics and probability in a place where there's enough conditions met to produce that sort of thing over long periods of time increasing the probability by each molecule in the solution and second that passes for them to interact. These things bring the statistics up to near 90% if the conditions were ideal, in fact, by pure chance, that sort of thing could conceivably come about on several occasions.
You are wrong once again, having read back at my comment about computers, thinking maybe I forgot, I in fact said "advanced", not "complex", it's typical that people confuse the two. Complexity does not imply efficiency. Advanced things are more efficient than another thing and CAN be more complex. It's not always the case. Computers ARE more efficient than human brains in many, MANY departments. I don't know what your beliefs are, but you are starting to sound like someone who may be religious or at least doubtful of general scientific consensus. Because you bring "elevated physics" into this which I can only assume means metaphysics.
And you've placed no bearing on what we know about the mind from psychology, neurology, brain science in general and several plausible hypotheses floating around that have yet to be explored which are purely secular in nature, and in fact could potentially explain all of human cognition.
This is a topic I've delved into extensively, and I advise you to pick and choose your words carefully when addressing anything scientific, the biggest problem being addressing something unscientific to attempt to explain something you don't understand. It doesn't actually explain anything, it's more like a putting a pin on it until we can find an actual answer. Many things that were thought to only exist in the realm of philosophies has been leaked over to science for them to dissect and speculate about regardless of what the philosophers think of it, essentially reaching for more practical, and in my opinion, believable ideas of how the mind works. It's not a subject that can just be explained with "information", which may as well be magic woo-woo if you place that as the definitive answer. Information, like energy, is something you can measure, and converts from one state to another, so it's NOT quite the kind of thing you may be imagining (if you can imagine pure information, you're not imagining pure information, just like you can't imagine pure energy).
Finally, by circular definition I mean that almost EVERY single person who has attempted to explain the mind or soul or whatever to me has tried to explain it to as a thing that hold conciousness, or morality, or love or something like that. Which are all abstract subjects that are slowly, but surely being explained by the chemistry, events and interactions our brains have with the outside world to make the sensations of these things. It's circular because they're using more and more abstract concepts to explain the abstract concept and end up claiming that's why the abstract mind exists in the way they envision it. Despite the fact that they can't explain how any of the things composing it work, and interact with the physical brain in some way, essentially saying "The immaterial thing that holds conciousness, morality and love... is immaterial, holds conciousness, morality and love".
And I've heard that A LOT. And I've yet to hear a good definition of the mind that didn't consist of neurological processes and events.
RPGgrenade I wrote a long response to you but somehow the page closed, I feel very frustrated now. So, I will answer later to you when I feel with the energy. bye bye
I find it a tad ironic that modern physics suggests that all mass is fundamentally composed of the, strictly speaking, immaterial (namely energy). We don't even know what energy really is....
As such, how can anyone reasonably assert that a god (of unknown essence) can't interact with matter because that deity is immaterial? To assert such, strikes me as speaking beyond what we could possibly know for the assertion is reliant on too many assumptions that are far from obvious. Any rigorous study into the question of how do we have confidence in our knowledge (epistemologically speaking) seems to justify granting it as possible that God could in fact interact with the material.
Sigh... Mass is not "composed" of energy...
Sigh... Mass is not "composed" of energy...
If faith can lead one to multiple conclusions, is that a good way to come to true conclusions?
What did the first ever science fiction writer write about?
Forces are mediated by particles
And we are living in a material world
And I am a material girl!
I really think creation is just a kind of discovery
Anarcho-capitalism episode please
Um... Epicurus said minds and thoughts are matter and that was oooh just a little bit before Cavendish's time. Credit where credit is due? Who prefigured modern materialism and physicalism?
+FruitGod That's fair, that's fair.
Says New York, shows a picture of a hotel in Las Vegas
I think of thoughts which make up a mind more as energy than matter. But if a computer can think, as a brain can think, then isn't hydrogen and oxygen (both, naturally, gaseous in the Earths atmosphere) getting together to form liquid water not an "intelligent" arrangement?
I suspect that the "intelligence" of arranged matter is "programmed" (like a computer, rather than a brain) in the available EM bonds in their molecular construction... Which, in it's self is dictated by the laws of physics and nature of gravity and mass.
No way is this guy a Geordie like!
She makes the mistake of assuming that "science" is a thing and not just a process of studying the world. "Science" is not just being able to come up with a purely naturalist explanation of something
Embodied cognition tho
Oh, I thought this was going to be about Henry Cavendish, lol. My bad.
Cavendish was a rationalist right?
i woulda liked this anyway but then you used a gif of azula so i really had no choice.
This is the first video of yours that I actually agree with.
Now can you take the ideas presented in this video and use it to debunk retarded crud such as "Searle's Chinese Room" and "non-representational qualia"?
The same refutation Cavendish offered against dualists i.e. that we don't know yet how the brain is the mind can be thrown back to thr materialist. We don't know how an immaterial mind can causally interact with a material body. There isn't any logical contradiction for an immaterial mind to causally interact with the material world. As you said, forces like gtavity aren't material, but they do causally interact with the material world.
you said christopher columbus found america
TOON ARMY
Can anyone name a force that can act on matter without that force originating from matter?
+treynaylor3 Gravity comes from curvature of spacetime, which can be, but doesn't need to be, caused by matter.
+treynaylor3 The Big Bang
Edit: I noticed that you asked for a force not a event like the Big Bang, but still it's interesting
Erick Capitanio anti-matter also curves space time... badum tsss
Energy. Erick Capitanio
+somewony Energy is just matter in a different form (i.e. matter with velocity, matter up a potential well, charged particles in motion creating electromagnetic waves, etc.)
Really, any form of energy can be traced back to behavior coming from matter.
I thought this was about bananas...