Great to hear a recent Chomsky interview on philosophy and linguistics, given it's almost entirely politics for him these days

Chomsky what an intellect !

"I don't know why people are so concerned about what is consciousness, what's more interesting to me is what is inaccessible to consciousness" Forgive me, but these are the same question.

🌏Chomsky;yes (thank you ).A great man with a big heart. We need many as you 🤗

@drtevinnaidu

6 ай бұрын

💙

People who would like to know more about the issues & questions raised here might do well to check out Chomsky's book 'What Kind of Creatures Are We?' It covers similar ground to this interview, with more detail & with references to the primary & secondary sources etc. etc.

@davidleemorgan

Жыл бұрын

thank you for this reference! just bought it.

***Unfortunately I lost over an hour worth of content with Noam due to technical difficulties. We've scheduled another interview in June. If you have any questions for Noam, reply to this comment and I'll do my best to address many of them in our conversation. Thank you for watching/listening and apologies for the abrupt ending!***

@mourdebars

2 жыл бұрын

waiting, great talk

@WalterBurton

2 жыл бұрын

Oh I might have one or two. lol Not sure when I'll get to watch this, but I've bumped it up in my queue. I saw the name and skipped ahead of your last one. At any rate, I'll watch this soon, and I already have MANY questions for Mr. Enemy of the State! lmao 👍👍👍

@deansellsbooks485

2 жыл бұрын

Hello Dr Tevin Naidu! Would you kindly ask Professor Chomsky this question: in 2012 he had an interview with Peter Hallward on topics including philosophy; Peter Hallward brought up Spinoza's idea of thought. Would Professor Chomsky comment on Spinoza's philosophy of mind, and what did he mean by saying to Peter Hallward "putting aside considerations of Spinoza's subtle ideas"? Is Spinoza's work still relevant, and of any value today, and was Spinoza, then, going into the "right" direction, closer to truth per se? Thank you! I look forward to the next interview in June and I hope to hear about this concerning Spiniza. - Dean

@freeintellect

2 жыл бұрын

Please ask why he believes that so many linguists disagree with him. Why is behaviorism still very popular?

@mourdebars

2 жыл бұрын

@@freeintellect behaviorism is a pest. He said that indirectly some time ago.

Thank you for this interview, and for letting your distinguished guest speak, uninterrupted. Invaluable ❤

@drtevinnaidu

11 ай бұрын

Thank you Arman! Glad you're enjoying the content. Comments like these always make my day!😃🙏🏽🙌🏽

@armanshaghi

11 ай бұрын

:) just checked out the rest of your channel - subscribed, and will be binging it all for sure 💪 well done man

@drtevinnaidu

11 ай бұрын

Lots more to come!🙏🏽🙌🏽

15:00 The argument may not be that all matter is alive, but rather what demarcates what makes things alive first and then conscious.

Great starting question! I heard bits and pieces of his answer in other interviews but this is the first time he gave the entire story in one go afaik. Subscribed!

@drtevinnaidu

8 ай бұрын

Thank you! Hope you enjoy the rest of the content. There's a "Round 2" interview with Chomsky on the channel as well. Focuses more on Free Will.

Quite the cliff-hanger, I would have liked to have heard the entire discussion.

@drtevinnaidu

2 жыл бұрын

Chatting to Noam again soon Christopher. Hopefully you'll enjoy the next one (without any abrupt endings!)😅

@Primitarian

2 жыл бұрын

@@drtevinnaidu I would love it if you could ask him whether he has any issues with Immanuel Kant. Specifically, does his theory of generative grammar align with Kant's notion of the synthetic a priori, and if not, how not?

Not questioning the nature of consciousness is a luxury. I can see why chomsky would think there's no reason to believe that consciousness is "ethereal", however, there is also no reason to think it is not ethereal, as he himself pointed out: we don't know what it is. Experience is undeniable and ineffable, just ask anyone experiencing pain whether or not they care that their pain is correlated with chemical substances in their brain and you'll get a very heartwarming response. Why even care about logic if at the end of the day we will ignore the fact that every proposition we believe in rests upon a basic assumption we have decided not to question? Isn't that what religion is? Instead of giving evasive responses to try to keep thought as the holy grail of our existence, maybe it's time to realize that thought may not be the proper tool to investigate the nature of our experience, which is what really matters to us. Again, I repeat: not questioning the nature of consciousness is a luxury, a luxury humans do not have.

I wonder what was edited out at 2:25....

Finding this really useful as I try to work out my own position regarding materialism and alternative cinceptual frameworks. Chomsky’s brief history of the issue over the last few centuries has been illuminating and provokes some follow-up reading on my part. On Donald Hoffman: as I understand it, he’s not a physicist, he’s a cognitive psychologist. Whose work I’ve also found really stimulating. Thanks for the interviews!

@drtevinnaidu

Жыл бұрын

Thanks Bruce. Glad these interviews have been helpful🙏🏽

Thank you for this intriguing, detailed, explicit adventure into philosophy, language and consciousness studies. A joy to experience.

@drtevinnaidu

2 жыл бұрын

I'm glad you enjoyed it! Thanks so much for the kind words.

@stephenbastasch7893

2 жыл бұрын

@@drtevinnaidu You're welcome!

Excellent material, thanks so much for that. If there’s a continuing link for the end of the interview please post us! Thanks again for your work!

@drtevinnaidu

10 ай бұрын

Glad you enjoyed it Rafael! Unfortunately we could not salvage the rest of the footage. On the bright side, Noam and I had another chat ("Round 2"). If you scroll through the content you'll find our part 2 on Free Will, Moral Responsibility & the Meaning of Life. Enjoy!

How interesting that Chomsky, like so many scholars and philosophers since 1670, omitted Spinoza in this discussion. Chomsky always starts with Descartes, who Spinoza corrected in one of his great theses, but never mentions Spinoza. One reason for this is that Spinoza resolved the 'hard questions' that have plagued thinkers before and after him. Professional thinkers are obliged to come up with new answers in order to make a living. They can't admit answers have already been found that make their work unnecessary or even absurd. (Some, like Nietzsche, acknowledged Spinoza's completeness, so he moved into psychological and artistic realms to express himself, for better or worse. But he had the integrity to credit Spinoza, as did Einstein later on). I have a question for Mr. Naidu: do you intend to keep my comment visible or do you intend to shadow-block it? I've noticed that many Chomsky channels contain only positive comments about Chomsky. My own highly critical comments on other channels (far more negative than this one) never solicit challenges, which I find odd. What is your policy, Mr. Naidu? I would appreciate a reply comment by anyone reading this.

I have no idea what we can do without you, your knowledge, politeness and your absolute kindness Noam. Love you Sir

@drtevinnaidu

Жыл бұрын

Get ready for round 2 coming soon. Had an even better/longer chat with Noam (without technical issues this time!).

wow noam chomsky! thank you for making this available . What date did this take place?

@drtevinnaidu

2 жыл бұрын

My pleasure! It took place on 11 May 2022.

Is there any point number three?

Nooo! I so wanted to hear Chomsky’s response to your question about free will! Is there no way to get that video back?

@drtevinnaidu

2 жыл бұрын

Unfortunately not.😢 I tried my best! I'll ask him to address it again in our next chat. I feel guilty becauseI left that last bit in as a teaser for the next one!😆

AHA! There it is, at about 25:15. 🧐

Finally ask a question he cares about, and then cut off his answer with loud music.

@drtevinnaidu

7 ай бұрын

Read my pinned comment about the technical difficulty causing the abrupt ending... We continued the free will conversation in our second podcast together - check it out.👍🏽

How does one have a typescript of the conversation?

@drtevinnaidu

Жыл бұрын

Are the typescripts not active on your end? They seem to work on our end?

he refers to a young philosopher whose name i cannot make out. I think Strauss is the surname - regarding 20thC philosophy. Could anyone tell me the full name if you would be so kind?

@drtevinnaidu

Жыл бұрын

Galen Strawson. I'm scheduled to chat to him soon!😊🙏🏽

@greenbeans6253

Жыл бұрын

@@drtevinnaidu Sounds good. Thank you 👍

Noam surprisingly seemed to misunderstand the discussion of consciousness. He says the study of consciousness limits itself to 'consciousness' in the original sense of the word (i.e not unconcsious), and that it should focus more on the unconscious. But the term consciousness has come to be used to refer to mind on the whole, obviously including unconsciousness.

@herbalfleece8821

Жыл бұрын

And is generally taken by those studying the questions the interviewer raised as the field from which language and thought, which Noam rightly suggests deserve serious inquiry, arise.

@nblumer

Жыл бұрын

I think you misunderstand his point. We know human consciousness from it's behavioural attributes (awareness of self and world) looking at it from the outside and for that, it is useful but not vital to contrast it with what is not. (It may be more difficult to understand the consciousness of nonhuman creatures but that's another matter). However, we don't know what consciousness is grounded in because his point is that we don't know what matter is. It's a bit like the person living near an active volcano 200 years ago. That person would have known the volcano well by what it does and what it produces but not what underlies one. With our geological knowledge of what underlies the volcano (ie chemicals, tectonic drift) we now can explain it.

@herbalfleece8821

Жыл бұрын

@@nblumer To be clear I was referring to his confusion about the interest in the new study of consciousness, which he points out at 19:00. It definitely is important to study the unconscious mechanisms behind language and thought, the volcano behind the irruptions, to use your metaphor. My point was that people in this new 'consciousness' field are indeed interested in that. However Chomsky seems to assume they aren't, I think because he isn't realising that most of them don't mean 'consciousness' in the old psychological sense of 'not-unconscious'. They mean it basically as referring to the whole psyche, phenomenological (non-conscious) experience included

@tookie36

11 ай бұрын

@@herbalfleece8821 I think a lot of us westerners have a problem with defining consciousness bc even though it’s part of our personal experience we almost all misidentify it with some part of the mind. Bc we don’t have a big meditation culture here we look very shallow internally and think… “oh yea I understand the vast complexity of my internal world. No need to investigate further “

Why do you speed up the video if we can asily do it ourselves if needed. And then you cut the video short.

@drtevinnaidu

2 жыл бұрын

I do not speed up the interview content, so the video speed is unaltered..

@TipoQueTocaelPiano

2 жыл бұрын

@@drtevinnaidu OK, thanks for your reply.

Noam is correct that nobody can be a materialist anymore but he is wrong about why. What Einstein and the quantum wizards showed is that matter is just one state of physics, so the thesis of materialism is false, matter isn’t what our universe is made from. The “inconcievability” claim is kind of silly and irrelevant. He holds Newtonian physics to be inconceivable, but physicists and all the rest of us don't seem to experience this problem. I was surprised you did not challenge this claim.

@dcleve2353

11 ай бұрын

Noam did not elaborate on the "inconceivability" claim, but he left hints that lead me to suspect what he meant. Most of us, in our childhood, mostly interact with human-scale solid objects, which operate under a principle of no superposition -- only one solid can be at a location at a time. And prior to Newton, causation was assumed to be via a pushing contact by a solid. And the science of the time sought coherence, a single coherent model of everything. Newton broke that model of causation, as gravity was a pull, and operated without contact. AND any model that allows fields, brings with it superposition. Non-superposition was already broken by liquids, gases, and light, as well. So Newtonian physics, needed a new definition of causation, which we have yet to develop. AND it along with the other physics and chemistry of the era, broke the conceptual models that most of us develop in childhood of solidity. And the full integration of these ideas has never been complete, particularly with the vague definition of causation. BUT, physics today is not constrained by our psychological comfort based on our childhood! And physicists have learned to work with fields, supposition, and probabilistic and field gradient causation just fine, and they find these concepts fully conceivable. And physics, and science as a whole, lives just fine with pluralism between incompatible reference frames. The pluralism of science insures it will never be coherent. And this is conceivable. Humans can and regularly do live with cognitive dissonance. In cognitive dissonance, we conceive of BOTH contrary views, not NEITHER! Noam seems to think we humans have to only have coherent thoughts to be able to conceive of something. But we humans so not seem to be able to have coherent thoughts, and the belief we do, is a self-delusion based on not asking enough questions about our incompatible assumptions. Noam's definition of conceivability is an impossible standard. Materialism is conceivable, it is just wrong. Physicalism, the fallback that former materialists resort to, IS subject to the 'we can't define physics/substance problem. AND to the incompatibility between the open nature of a science, an the closed nature of an ontological claim (This is Hempel's Dilemma). And to the way that information and abstract objects are not matter/energy. AND -- to the problem that if physicalism were true, we should not be conscious, yet we are. This last point, is the "hard problem of consciousness" and it is perfectly clear and articulatable, contra Chomsky. The issue that I think have with Chomsky, is that he seems to be treating science as a logic analysis field, rather than an empirical field of test cases. Physicalism, Dualism, and Idealism -- all are testable. None are "outside the bounds of science". Science is not constrained to only the mechanical vision of the 1700s. Noam even admitted this, and described Descartes model as a science hypothesis! Ans held that Descartes was only refuted because Newton showed that mechanicalism with respect to matter was untrue! So -- we can build alternate models of physics, and of consciousness, and this is perfectly fine science.

@drtevinnaidu

11 ай бұрын

Love comments like these!

😬😬😬