On John Cage's 4'33": kzread.info/dash/bejne/g4ai2q2OZ9PUhbQ.html

@Bibibosh

Жыл бұрын

I really enjoyed this topic of conversation . Its the core of philopshy and the meaning of life!

@SerifSansSerif

Жыл бұрын

I only found you recently but If you've read my comments I left, you'll see that what you are describing here is kind of been the philosophical train of thought that has plagued me for a while. 1. This "Hard Problem" can be simplified to the problem of science, which is that science is a purely mechanical field dealing not with "why" questions but "how" questions. In this I mean that science can never ascribe intent or motive and it has no imaginative comparison. It's simply a framework for building axioms based on observational data throughout generations. (As far as we can assume generations, a past and future consistent with the present, etc ). It's a bit of linguistic trickery by which we say "why" and accept a "how" answer. It's also why, as a former student of philosophy I am abhorrent of scientists trying to attempt cosmology (they haven't the tools to declare the imaginary states as facts, although they constantly try). They're essentially running around with hammers and assuming everything else is a nail. 2. The problem of consciousness is even more pernicious. Turing probably never set about to do philosophy with his thoughts experiments, but nevertheless he did . When it comes to brain science, we treat the brain as a purely physical entity, and the states of the mind as causing consciousness (should it exist, which I believe it does, but nevertheless...). We also hold, scientifically that this is what it is and no non-physical entity causes consciousness and intelligence. Within the field of computing and AI, we are pushing to create a thing of wildly different material components to behave similarly and produce the same results as consciousness. If the state of consciousness is inherent to the material that it is constructed of (brain jelly vs. silicon chips), then this should be impossible. Even if we were to argue that they are in fact different although indistinguishable, you end up with a problem of having water, and having a not-water indistinguishable from water, which is still called water and has all the same properties of water and trying to explain why water isn't the same as the non-water water. Even more to the point you have consciousness as an emergent property, which also starts to work a wedge into the issue of hard physicalism and reductionism (both of which are bedfellows with science, at least in that science must assume them in order to science as stated above). This isn't even beginning to get into Nagle's points about what it's like to be a bat, and how difficult it would be to imagine the experiences of another species might be, even one that's different enough yet not radically different as the flying mammalian bat, which has various ways of interpretation and consequences, none of which help make for the case of a purely physical mind. 3. Symbols are interesting. They're physical representations of non-physical abstract thoughts and ideas. A dog is a dog until it's Hackiko and then it's a symbol of unwavering loyalty and devotion. Similarly, words on a page are just marks, but they have meaning when those marks form letters and those letters in turn form words and then those words are read and form images and those images invoke feelings and thoughts. That's gotta be like 7 layers of symbols no different from how the phone I type this on is constructed of materials constructed of atoms constructed of more rudimentary particles constructed of quarks. I don't want to dismiss science or the physical in its entirety, but it doesn't do enough to explain much of anything. I can only say that the physical is only one step or layer within reality. I also believe that the way symbols operate and what they inherently are might help understand the world, meaning that they are the most natural way we bridge the physical (and pointedly the most physical) with the (most abstract) non-physical ideas. They also make a great thing to point to when trying g to explain why pure physicalism just inherently fails.

@johnmanno2052

Жыл бұрын

One of my favorite pieces of music, which I found out about way, way back in the 70s when I was in my teens. I performed an entire program of Cage's music when I was in music school. Love John Cage. Thank you for talking about him. And you're still my favorite philosopher ever. And I've known other ones

@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself

Жыл бұрын

My favorite song!

@Doctor.T.46

Жыл бұрын

Can I recommend that you read Dan Dennett or the Churchlands on the subject of consciousness. Better still, dig out some neurophysiology books. I put faith in the scientific trajectory. Clearly Kane you knowledge, as you admit, is limited. That's a shame because the answer to the perceived 'hard problem' lies in scientific study. You are putting forward a classic argument from ignorance.... I don't know the answer,,so there mustn't be an answer.

That's interesting. I feel like learning math actually does feel similar to thinking about the hard problem of consciousness in a way. It's always really difficult to know what actually constitutes "understanding" in math since you can know "how" do certain things without feeling a sense of deeper comprehension. I'm not sure it's even just about brute facts. I think part of it is that there legitimately is no "truth" at that level of explanation. I liked the idea of understanding being an instance of computational reduction, and with that perspective, there could be many possible explanations that reduce a system to a simpler set of objects and actions, but retains the behavior we deem important.

Is it weird that I send your videos to my therapist? Haha I do so because I've encountered similar questions to yours during therapy time, for more than 10 years. They help me to better explain myself. Thanks for your hard work! Your videos keep me sane. Merry Christmas 🎅

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

Not weird, I'm happy whenever folks watch my videos, whatever the reason! Merry Christmas!

Ideas like these are why I found science class so difficult in High School. Obviously, I didn’t (and probably still don’t) have the ability to think through and articulate these ideas with much sophistication, but I just found the explanations I was given so unsatisfying. I’m the kind of person who finds it difficult to understand something until I have some idea of how or why it is the case, but with this kind of hard problem, that just blocks my understanding.

Hey Kane 🙌🏼 thanks for the upload and for carrying me through my undergraduate degree. Have a good Christmas!🎄

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

Merry Christmas! Great to hear that my videos have been helpful!

I find myself incredibly sympathetic to this line of argument. The older I get, the more time I've had to answer questions and every time I do I find a plethora of new questions growing to attention. It's questions all the way down! As I've fallen down this Chasm of Utter Ignorance I've also discovered that 'everyone is wrong about everything all of the time'. Whatever justifications a person has for believing or holding to be true a certain fact or assertion, there is an end to their ability to explain it. At a certain point, everyone, on every topic, just kinda goes "Well, that's just the way it is" and hand-wavingly (if they have them!) goes on with the rest of their life. Thanks for sharing. I found it both worthwhile and enjoyable time well spent.

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

That's, glad to hear you enjoyed the video!

@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself

Жыл бұрын

It is, after all, all deterministic particles interacting with each other. I.e. shit happens and then we tell a story about it.

@CognitiveOffense

Жыл бұрын

@@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself Yeah, maybe! ... but what are particles? By what rules are they determined? What governs their dynamics? How do theoretical stories interact with collapsing observers? Are you sure? Are you always sure at every moment? Can you explain it to me? Will your explanations make sense to a multitude of conceivably sapient beings that might have brains or vats or both? And what do undead-cats-in-a-box have to do anything at all?

@namidawhamida5958

9 ай бұрын

@@CognitiveOffenseI’ll be back to let you know when I have the answers

@tgenov

5 ай бұрын

And that's why religion is a wonderful hack to rescue one's mind from the time-wasting, undecidable hellhole of philosophy. Plug the infinite regress of human ignorance with an ideal omniscient/omnipotent/omnipresent being. Bolt on "faith" and move on about life trusting that it will (mostly) work out OK. And for most part - it does.

I was talking about this with friends recently, and you put out a video about it! Interesting synchronicity. Great video.

Howard Robinson makes exactly this point in his lecture “Why There Is No Such Thing As Naturalism”

Applying the same treatment of the hard problem of consciousness to the rest of reality is a clever thing to think to do. I feel like the Buddhist concept of Shunyata / Emptiness is applicable to this topic-- It posits that all things are devoid of any underlying concrete essence, and there are descriptions of it which delve into the same aspects of things that the hard problem does and that you are thinking out loud about here. we can label, measure, and study the interactions of things at any level to any detail yet still be faced with the same inherent mystery of their existence and the way they manifest to us. I think it is endlessly fascinating to consider the intersection of the content from neurology, psychology, philosophy, and eastern spiritual teachings. I feel like the big leaps in progress we might make regarding this topic will probably be made by some combination of empirical conclusions about scientific tests with personal experiential insights such as those acquired from meditation and introspection.

The difference, I think, between Hume’s cause effect disconnect issue and the hard problem of consciousness is that hume’s is overcome if we presume laws of physics but for conscious states, those laws are going to be several orders of magnitude harder to derive for methodological reasons.

@PhilSophia-ox7ep

4 күн бұрын

Hume's problem is in no way solved by assuming the laws of physics. Hume's problem points out precisely that it is assumed. It's the problem of induction. You can't escape it.

Huge fan of your videos ^^ thank you so much for your amazing insights and knowledge. You scratch my brain in just the right way ☺️

I think you're mixing two different questions here. One is, "why does the universe obey the rules it does?" and "Given the rules the universe obeys, how can we explain one macroscopic phenomenon given the microscopic properties?" The Hard Problem of consciousness addresses the latter kind of question, and posits that we may not be able to do this using scientific method. Your "why does H2O have these liquid properties" boils down to the former kind of question. The reason is because we _can_ explain why H2O has liquid properties given the rules of our world. We can simulate H2O molecules satisfying Schrodinger's equation and exhibiting, on the large scale, the viscous properties it has. And even if we couldn't do that in practice, we would know how to go about that in principle. We don't even know how to approach this, in principle, with neurons in the brain exhibiting consciousness. To your point that you can imagine a world in which H2O molecules _don't_ exhibit liquid properties, I would say that, sure that world is conceivable, but it does not follow the same rules (e.g. Schrodinger's equation) as this one. In general, as long as any scientific model can explain any phenomenon, then the "why" questions terminate at the axioms of that particular model. That doesn't mean its axioms are really the bottom level ground truth of the world, it's just the lowest level we have found thus far. A future physics model might derive those axioms as results, but it might have more _basic_ axioms, which has been done many times. (For example, Maxwell's equations, which are the axioms of classical electrodynamics, can be derived using quantum electrodynamics.) But when it comes to consciousness, there's no model we have (yet) that can explain it from lower level axioms at all. Because it's clearly a macroscopic phenomenon, it's probably not good enough to say that it's _fundamental_ and stop at that point (though panpsychists seem to think that's satisfactory).

Great video!! I still feel the frustration from when my childhood “why” questions would be answered in any of the three ways you described and I’m still trying to make peace with the fact that there really is no satisfying answer when you go deep enough into pretty much anything. Personally I’ve always found the “brute fact” answer most frustrating, especially when I really feel like it must go deeper than that. What about you, do you have a similar reaction to any of those three possible responses?

@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself

Жыл бұрын

Try changing your question from why? to how? You'll find more satisfaction.

Quick sketch: when people or animals walk past each other in the hallway, how do they choose which way to go? Dominant handedness could be traced back to chemical chirality, and if the people or animals feel safer going one way, as I think studies show or would show, as caused by hand dominance, then emotions can be causally traced to a surprising degree in this hallway encounter

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

I'm not sure what that has to do with the video but thanks for the comment.

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

Dude you know, when animals walk past each other in hallways.

@HENRYIII003

Жыл бұрын

@@KaneB i should have made the jump to a painting of people meeting in the hallway and then I could explain a feeling of melancholy when looking at a painting, which I think was an example you gave. I'm always trying to imagine new physical explanations of sensation or emotion so I tried relating my hallway idea to your painting analogy. More generally, to be honest, I've been thinking about context in comment sections but idk what to say about that. Anyway, I love your content.

@marcomoreno6748

Жыл бұрын

Why do I smell that zaza

Awesome video, I share the same intuition! It seems to me a matter of modality..physically, we can trace down every phenomenon to a bunch of brute facts..metaphysically, possibilities are completely open!

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

Yeah, perhaps this is motivated by my antirealism about modality. I would prefer not to say that metaphysically, possibilities are completely -- rather, I would say that metaphysically, there just are no modal properties: no possibility, no necessity.

@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself

Жыл бұрын

In other words, metaphysics = that which isn't real, so isn't worth discussing.

I think that with regard to your discussion assumes that it all explanations must involve necessary truths when I would accept an explanation involving contingent truths. Eventually in an infinite tower of why questions, you need to check at every stage whether the 'why' question is still well-formed and meaningful. At the point where it becomes ill formed, you have to refine the question if you really want an answer.

The model of h20 includes forces. Forces determine the behavior. Liquidity is just that behavior. It’s logically impossible for it to behave that way and not be liquid. It’s like saying that people are dancing, drinking, and having fun together, but that doesn’t entail it’s a party. Of course it does! That’s just what we mean by party!

1. So you want an explanation of why a painting invokes (causes) melancholy without using a (causal) mechanical model? Maybe I am misunderstanding you but this sounds to me a little bit as if you ask to explain the properties of an atom without using an atomic model. Other explanations are of curse valid but maybe redundant. 2. It could be that the micro structure is in contradiction with the water not being liquid. Maybe this contradiction can be proven mathematically. But of curse, why should reality even obey the law of noncontradiction in the first place? 3. There are four kinds of explanation. A brute fact explanation, a circular explanation, a infinite chain of explanations and trivialism. Of curse the right answer is trivialism obviously. You can literally explain everything with anything else without boundaries. Why does an apple fall if I am throwing him? It is simply because snow is white and because my dog ate the yellow snow.

I think of "why" as an endlessly descending ladder... The more "why" questions you answer, the deeper down you go! If you get stuck on one, then that's a reason to explore further!

@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself

Жыл бұрын

Switch from why? to how? for better results.

Banger

I like this video and the infinite regress of why maybe does present a fair hard problem of everything. On the liquid nature of water specifically, I think that something that might be missed with regard to this specific example is temperature as a phenomena. In the Physicalist/Materialist framework, temperature is the movement of atoms and depending on how much the h2o molecules are moving water does exist in solid liquid and gaseous states throughout the universe. Assuming that you have accepted the assumptions of Physicalism and Atomic theory (both ideas that present their own issues,) the idea that liquid water is the way that it is because the h2o molecules are in motion and bounce off of each other rather than staying in line as they would in a colder environment, it’s an idea that I think does jive or scratch the itch at least with regards to this specific example. I don’t want to be accused of missing the point though, because I get that you could still ask “why does water turn liquid at this temperature threshold?” or “why do atoms move at all?” But if you take on the assumptions of physicalism then you can get physicalist answers to these questions that build a model that usually satisfies. I suppose likewise if you were to take on the assumptions of a religion you could also get religious answers that work off the model of the universe as constructed by the religion, “because that was how god intended it,” and to the theist that might satisfy. I still see this “problem of everything” especially with regards to the art examples, though I wonder if this may only be a problem for philosophers, and perhaps also for people looking to change someone else’s mind. Love your videos btw, great food for thought.

'Whereof one cannot speak thereof one must be silent'

Good video mate, you are in the heart of the matter here

I would be extremely interested to hear what you have to say about Quentin Meillassoux’s Humean argument in “After Contingency” for the reality of what he terms “hyperchaos”-the necessity of contingency. It attempts to pronounce precisely this “hard problem of everything” in a very interesting way, with wild implications.

Here's my attempt at restating what you're saying: There are an infinite number of things (broadly defined), and relationships between those things. And theory can only cover a finite range of those relationships. So any explanation is potentially unsatisfying, because it's limited, and there is an infinite number of things and relationships that it doesn't cover. Moreover, when explaining thing X in terms of Y, there are an effectively infinite number of things, and relationships between those things, in the gap between X and Y, so the explanation will leave an effectively infinite number of those things and relationships out. So an explanation could be useful by narrowly defining H2O and wetness, and choosing the right subset of things between the two, but it still leaves an unlimited amount of stuff out.

As Kane suggests, in the academic/scientific world all metaphysical problems are hard and consciousness is one of many. The hard problem of consciousness is the difficulty pig-headed researchers have in abandoning the unnecessary assumptions that cause it in the first place. Thus it is actually a quite easy problem. As Kane says, the same problem arises for consciousness, mind and matter. Oddly, no hard problems arise for the non-dual doctrine of the Perennial philosophy, but of course scientists and philosophers of mind usually know it is false. Not sure how they know this, but they think they do. So they meet hard problems all over the place. Crazy. It's a genuine academic scandal.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but in exploring these "hard questions" as on the question of consciousness, it would seem to me quite natural to pose such questions in the context of evolutionary biology of living organisms which have a metabolism and reproductive system and needed to be able to survive and adapt to different circumstances and developed sense organs and the means to organize those sense perceptions into usefull feeedback signals to respond to those signals, etc. because that is the only context in which consciousness makes sense. Of course, as developed living organsisms which inherit the features of all our ancestors, consciousness did not come about in its current state but in a less developed state, perhaps only as a few brain cells that could distinguish light from dark and send a feedback signal to muscles or other organs on which direction to go to, etc. Consciousness is not some abstract function of the brain with which we are able to ponder the questions of life, the universe and everything, but in most of the history of consciouss animals and for the most part still serves a different purpose. And the brain not only functions to equip us with conscious experience, but also to keep us alive and send and receive signals to and from different body parts by which we keep functioning even when we are unconsciouss aka in a sleep state. Certain chemical substances can directly interact with our state of consciousness and even bring us in a state of unconsciousness (anesthesia) which gives plenty of ground for assuming that the physical state of our living body influences our state of mind.

Did you considered posting the audio of your videos on Spotify ? I know that in my case there are a lot of times where I would like to listen to your channel but it would be more convenient in an audio track.

Hey Kane, great stuff. I'm largely in agreement with this and also your "Philosophy Without Justification" video. I'd like to hear your thoughts on an issue that arises in my mind in thinking about both videos. If, as you suggest in PWJ, that reasons are answers to why questions about why you hold such-and-such beliefs, then what's implied by the (seeming) suggestion here that there are no answers to why questions? Isn't the account of reasons thereby undercut? Aren't you left with the view, then, that there aren't any reasons after all? I don't intend this as a gotcha or a takedown, just wondering what you think of this "no justifications, and no reasons either" view. Cheers!

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

I wouldn't be too troubled about committing to the view that there are no justifications and no reasons either, but that's not how I see my current view for a couple of reasons (hah!): First, when I say that reasons are answers to "why?" questions, there are no constraints on what those answers must be. In response to any "why?" question, anything might be given as an answer. Whatever you give as an answer to a "why?" question is one of your reasons. So suppose I ask, "why is water liquid at room temperature?" and Verity responds by citing the underlying physical facts about H2O molecules. I may not find that satisfying; it may not fully scratch the explanatory itch for me. But presumably it does for Verity. Second, what I'm inclined to say is that science does provide explanations of plenty of things; it just doesn't provide a "complete" explanation of anything. I put "complete" in square quotes because I'm not sure what it means to talk of "complete" explanations, but the idea is that there will always be explanatory gaps analogous to the purported gap that blocks complete physicalist explanation of consciousness. As far as I understand, even most people who think that there is an explanatory gap here would grant that we can give some types of explanations of consciousness. For instance, I take it there's nothing in principle problematic about deductive-nomological explanations of phenomenal states; if that's the kind of explanation we're after, then it's enough to state lawlike correlations between lower-level physical states and higher-level phenomenal states, and the question of why those lower-level states instantiate phenomenal properties just doesn't matter. Perhaps what I'm getting at is that scientific explanations will leave things unexplained: so you can get an answer to a "why?" question, but then there will be a bunch of other related "why?" questions that are unaddressed. "Why do these lower-level states manifest as this higher-level property?" seems to me to be a question that is often unaddressed.

@PeteMandik

Жыл бұрын

Thanks, Kane. That’s very helpful. I especially appreciate the complete/incomplete distinction. I thought maybe you had a far more radical view. And perhaps I got that impression from your remark in PWJ where you say “totally arbitrary.” But anyway, I think we’re very much in the same page. (Also, do check out some Mark Wilson if you haven’t done so already for excellent examples of explanatory gaps in the material sciences.)

They do because the hydrogen bonds between water molecules are loose and distributed enough to let them slide past each other, but strong enough to keep them from flying apart. Within a relatively narrow range of temperatures and pressures, at least.

This is why I had to drop physics and philosophy and look for a different way to approach the deeper questions. It was a so refreshing to find these problems cease to be an issue when studying systems such as Zen Buddhism. However, this approach is not an answer for everyone. To use this approach in it necessary to throw away eveyrthing that may have been held as axiomatic for years - and most people can't do that!

When it comes to water, I understand that it is only for illustration, yet I belive sharing what is the explanation of this phenomena is still relevant as people suspect something similar must be the case for conciousness, though less understood. (Disclaimer: I’m a mathematicion, not a physichist nor a neuro scientist.) So, as you deacribed just deacribing the individual watermolecule is not enough, and there is a were easy example when you have a situtaion where they don’t behave like liquid: you decrease the temperature intil it becomses a solid, something qualitatively different. What is missing from the picture is the interaction between the molecules, how they relate to each other, in this case via a force. This discreption is still not that terribly complicated as you only have to consider how two pairs interact with each other, and the rest is indeed just the “sum” of these interactions. (Some other phenomena include higher order interactions like what happens when three particles are colliding but 3 is still much smaller than 10^24 to give a sense of scale.) And the neet part is that after knowing the constituents and how they relate to each other you can actually describe the macrosopical properties like what state of matter is it in, what is the critical temperature above which it is a liquid and below it is a solid. All of these are emergent properties of the molecules and their telation to each other. On technical step is that we can describe things in the limit where there are infinitely many molecules. But this becomes a good approximation when you have a large enough system, but one can sort of see failing small systems made of 10 molecules and so on. This idea works more generally. Personally I use these macroscopical emergent properties for epidemiological models. There molecules are people and the interaction between two people are such that an infected person can propagate the illnes to a susceptible person if they are physicslly connected (say they meet with each other). Then the “states of mater” would be weather the disease would die out quickly or does it spred out to couse a global epidemic. The themperature would be the rate of infection. Understanding how the “critical temperature” depends on the social network of interacting people is something that people are interested in this field. It has practical utility too as changing said network might be able to crate a phase transition where the diseas dies out by itself with possibly small social cost compared to the cost of the pandemic itself.

I don't think we can say the "hard problem of consciousness" is hard, until we actually understand the brain. People thought genetics and chemistry would be hard to understand, until we saw the structure of DNA and the atom and the answers became simple. It might be that, when we actually know what is going on in the brain, the reason why consciousness is as it is will spring forth. Given philosophy's history of saying things are "beyond science" (academics really said chemistry and genetics were beyond science and the structure of atoms and the genetic material wouldn't help us with that) it seeks sketchy to say consciousness is beyond science when we haven't got a scientific understanding of it yet. I suspect this applies to the physical examples you provide too; we don't know the laws of physics completely, if we did, we might have a solid answer.

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

What exactly does it mean for "the reason why P is the way it is" to spring forth? I think that what's happening here is that sometimes, explanations *feel* intellectually satisfying. When you get that feeling of satisfaction, you are happy for the explanation to come to an end. Whether or not a person experiences this intellectual tingle is a matter of their psychological idiosyncrasies. It wouldn't surprise me if descriptions of brain states could prompt that intellectual tingle with respect to consciousness, just as descriptions of H2O molecules prompt that intellectual tingle with respect to the liquidity of water. But I also suspect that in both cases, we can make the tingle stop... Well, I think that's true for me personally at least. I think in both cases there is plenty that is left unexplained, including the question of why the underlying physical states produce the manifest property that we are trying to explain.

@JadeVanadiumResearch

Жыл бұрын

​@@KaneB what I'm getting from what Ketone is saying is, unless we have a particular reason to think that the "why" questions are endless, it might be the case that the chain of "why" is merely extremely long, but finite. Unless we have clear evidence that a question is unanswerable in principle, it might be too hasty to assume it is. I think the case of liquidity is like this: I suspect it's possible to produce a mathematical description of the molecular model of fluids, and then *prove* that liquidity (by whatever appropriate definition) necessarily follows as a *logical* consequence. I would be surprised if this hasn't already been done at some point, possibly thousands of times, but no doubt these proofs and their supporting mathematical machinery are extremely complex. If this is the case though, it seems like this "hard problem of liquidity", where we ask why some micro-scale phenomenon must lead to a particular macroscopic phenomenon, reduces entirely to pure mathematical logic. Perhaps the real problem of liquidity is sociological: such mathematical proofs are not widely understood and available. As an example I am more familiar with, you might be interested in the Jordan Curve theorem. The theorem asserts that if we have a loop on a flat surface, and this loop doesn't cross over itself, then the loop necessarily partitions the surface into a region "interior" to the loop, and a region "exterior" to the loop, and there's no way to go from one point to the other without crossing the loop. The theorem is notorious precisely for the fact that it is intuitively obvious, and yet very few people have taken the time to understand its extremely complicated proofs. This is similar to the case of liquidity, where it seems like there's no logical way to connect the local phenomenon to the global phenomenon, and yet *it is* possible with pure logic alone. Necessarily, a valid mathematical proof is reducible entirely to first principles, leaving only definitions and essential logical axioms like modus ponens. In any case, if these hard problems can be reduced to "why does logic work", I would say this qualifies as an extremely good explanation, and "the hard problem of everything" is just "the hard problem of logic". I'm sure other hard problems remain, but synthetic arguments seem to be pretty safe so long as they are perfectly formal.

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

“Safe as long as they are perfectly formal” LOL - Both Modus Ponens and Modus Tollens have been successful challenged with many counter examples, Graham Priest, non-classical logicians and logical nihilists have been making a mockery of classical logic for quite some time now. The responses to their challenges are really embarrassing too. I know Kane doesn’t share your faith in logic, so obviously this reduction to logic isn’t going to be compelling to him.

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

@@JadeVanadiumResearch As Unknown Knowns suggests, I'm a antirealist about logic; I don't think there is any fact of the matter whether a given proposition follows as a logical consequence from any other set of propositions. But putting that aside, I'm happy to grant that, in principle, there might be some way of overcoming the "hard problem of liquidity"; indeed, maybe we've already done it. It's hard for me to see how we could overcome it, because in general I don't see any conceptual connection of metaphysical constitution -- it seems to me that lower-level states could manifest as almost any imaginable higher-level phenomenon. But this could just be a failure of my imagination. The same point, however, can be made for the hard problem of consciousness. We could say (plenty of folks do say) that the hard problem is only apparent; once we have a full enough description of the physical states, we will see how they must instantiate consciousness. I can't see any way of ruling out that epistemic possibility. (But then, I'm a fallibilist. I don't rule out any epistemic possibility. Haha.) What I can say is that very, very few people actually possess a complete description of the underlying physical states of water, and then a chain of inferences showing how to logical derive the manifest properties. Most people when they think of the underlying physical states of water probably don't have a model that is any more sophisticated than what I said in this video: they'll think of a bunch of H2O molecules jostling around like balls in a bag. Yet that's enough to "scratch the explanatory itch."

@niart4600

Жыл бұрын

@@KaneB I don't think we should focus on how much an explanation "scratches the explanatory itch", but rather how useful it is to us. Our solution as to why liquids behave the way they do has solved the "hard problem of liquidity" not because it satisfies our curiosity, but because it can be applied with utility. We will solve the problem of consciousness when we can recreate consciousness in a lab, when it becomes a predictable, definable, understandable process that is useful to us in practical application. I do understand the issue of knowledge, that we can always ask why to an infinite degree, but it doesn't particularly concern me that our knowledge will never be complete, because that only means we have infinite room to technologically develop.

Right on Kane! There’s always an explanatory gap and the skeptic always wins….sometimes….maybe?🤔😉🧐🤪

I think the hard problem of consciousness is "what do we mean by the word?" and we could probably solve the problem scientifically if we could find a precise definition but (this may be like defining how many grains of sand make a pile - inherently nonsensical). I think this ill-definition of the underlying questions is a common issue in many hard problems.

@Kane B Thanks for sharing your new take on the hard problem of consciousness and maybe everything. I believe your view is quite interesting as a remark about the limit of knowledge. Albeit, I am not sure that it holds as an objection to the hard problem of consciousness, as I believe you intended it to be. Let me rehearse your argument here in my own words, before addressing it and preparing myself for a reply. Your critique is twofold. On one side, you are trying to build an argument with the force of a reductio ad absurdum but I don't see such a force. You say: ok, if you have a hard problem of consciousness then you have a hard problem of everything. A possible reply to this part is: so, be it. Human knowledge and understanding could be plausibly taken to be limited, in principle. One can argue for this from animal analogies. Take the following example by Chomsky: mice can improve their maze-solving skills by responding to specific training that "teaches" them the right way to take. There are mazes whose solution can be coded in simple operations, like turning right in even number of past crossings, and this can be readily "taught" to mice. However, in setups where the maze solution is encoded in harder formula, for instance, turning right in prime numbers of past crossings, any attempt of training the mice fails. The concept of a prime number seems to be as close as it gets to a limit of mice understanding. Now, add the premise that we are alike mice in a host of other mental respects, and that our difference in intelligence is a matter of degree and nothing else. Then, one can argue that there are limits also to our knowledge and understanding, even though we don't necessarily know which are they. So, I don't see where the statement that knowledge is limited gain the force of the reductio you seem to think it has. Pehaps your reductio is supposed to be not in the fact that there are limits but in the putative fact that limits are everywhere...? But I don't see why. If we accept the example of maze-solving mice we may not only extrapolate by analogy, from mice to human beings, but we can also extrapolate across varieties of experiences and fields of knowledge. Why we should supposed that prime numbers are so special in mice? Why not to think that in principle there could be another high-level geometrical notion beyond their reach? If it is not in the fact that there are limits to knowledge nor in the the possibility that those limits could be widespread, where is it that you locate the reductio's pun of your argument? Up to this point, I can only say you are building a companion in guilt argument, but I don't see the guilty statement anywhere. The other side of your argument is more pragmatic. You say: there are many whys beyond the grasp of science, but we are perfectly fine with that; science is not interested in explaining everything and there is always a place where explanation is settled despite possible further whys. I concur. However, notice that the reason for each science to settle at some level of explanation are often arbitrary, and accidental (perhaps, due to cultural or historical facts, or even to personal dispositions of researchers). There is no necessary level at which Science with capital S should settle; or if you will, there is no principled way of finding the level at which knowledge on a certain field starts to be dispensable. The fact that we stop at a certain why question is a contingent fact. Moreover, such a limit level of explanation is only a dynamical boundary that evolves with scientific and philosophical progress. So, if you are trying to put the guilt of the companion in guilt argument here, I don't believe it is the right place. I mean, if you are trying to say: 1) if there is a hard problem of consciousness, there should be a hard problem of anything, and then 2) but there cannot be a hard problem of anything because science don't ever face such a limit, then you lost me at your second proposition. Now, let us keep your pragmatic tone. If what you want to say is "who cares about the hard problem; certainly not science" then I can appeal to the arbitrary and accidental desiderata the community of neuroscience and cognitive sciences is starting to fix as a the new level of explanation required within the field. Maybe the same sort of knowledge limit is reached when one defines objects, for instance. But no one in any community is that much interested in the hard problem of objects as they are in the hard problem of consciousness. The problem I see on this part of your argument is like the one appearing in militant atheists when facing the question of the lack of evidence both for God's existence as for God's inexistence. They often say: ok, we lack evidence also for the inexistence of smurfs, and still we don't believe in them. The problem of the existence/inexistence of God is obviously placed in a different status because its importance to us. Similarly, we should treat differentially the quest for a solution to the hard problem of consciousness, even though there may be a plethora of hard problems that will remained unsolved, without challenging our current understanding of the world.

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

You've misinterpreted my intent in this video. I wasn't trying to object to the hard problem of consciousness or construct a reductio against it. I was simply stating the views that I am actually inclined to hold. That is, I'm inclined to think that there is a hard problem of consciousness, but that additionally, there is also a hard problem of everything else. As I see it, the hard problem of everything isn't an absurdity to be avoided; it is that stance that I am inclined to actually take. With that said, I agree with much of what you've said there, particularly about the arbitrariness of stopping points of explanation.

You can find an argument very similar to what you're making in Peter Winch's "The Idea of a Social Science," a very nice book. If you haven't read it I would strongly recommend.

Read Bernardo Kastrup and Arnold Zuboff.

At some point, we must reach a set of propositions for which all members are universally applicable (and hence self-applicable also). Some proposition that allows explicability must exist.

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

What point? And how do you know it’s going to or must be reached?

@stalemateib3600

Жыл бұрын

@@unknownknownsphilosophy7888 well, I suppose we could choose to ignore the pursuit of such propositions, but in that case, we would be, in my viewpoint, ignoring the solution to the problem on the philosophical level.

I like this perspective. Hard problems are just explanatory gaps, situations where inquiry ceases to provide reasons.

@girlmoment669

8 ай бұрын

what do you mean by "just explanatory gaps"

@maxmax9050

8 ай бұрын

@@girlmoment669 An explanatory gap being a lack of an explanation, a ground, a 'why', intelligibility, or of being able to see the connection between two things such that they become completely understandable, that they can be explicated in commensurate terms. So, a hard problem is just any place in inquiry where we become unable to see or confused about the "why," where there doesn't seem to be any obvious conceptual framework or linkages through which we could completely and totally understand something in its entirety.

The physical state of matter is way out there. The nature of experience is the most immediate thing there is. Patterns in qualia are literally how we know anything at all. It's reasonable to ask how, or if, the sensations arise from the patterns, or vice versa.

'Why is r painting melancholic?' This can definitely be answered by science, partly. Psychology, Sociology and Biology - its appropriate branches that can answer the question - is capable of answering this question. Why do humans find this piece of art melancholic, how does it relate to societal themes if any, what is the psychological impact of colors, sound etc. in humans etc. Also, we can view it like so: P1. Philosophy can answer r question. P2. Science can be viewed as philosophy. P3. Science is philosophy. C. Science can answer r question.

The questions reminds me of Wittgenstein's therapeutic philosophy. I know in one of your videos, you said he's an overrated philosopher :)

Chomsky has given a couple of lectures on the "limits of understanding" you may find interesting.

Cool video! To me, the takeaway from this is that the hard problem of consciousness is really like the loose thread that unravels the entire physicalist paradigm. Science doesn't tell us what the universe *is*, it merely describes what the universe *does*. Thinking we can bridge between the being and the doing of reality through the empirical lens of science is completely misguided from the start, and the hard problem of consciousness just reveals that. This points to a need to reevaluate the metaphysics that has underpinned the (post)modernist worldview. I can't help but think idealism/nondual/consciousness-as-fundamental theory is the only way forward.

I believe there is a fundamental difference between consciousness and everything. The idea of the hard problem of consciousness is that *IF* you had complete understanding of its material correlate, you could still ask _how_ that feels the way it does. An analogue argument with water should begin with something like, if you had a theory of everything, but such a theory would allow to explain _how_ water behaves like a liquid in given conditions. You can make a similar chain of _hows_ but in this hypothetical case you would have an answer to all of them, at least as long as the answer could influence anything you could measure. Now even if this seemed unlikely for water, in the case of consciousness, if you assume that it arises from the connections between neurons then it doesn't seem as far fetched. Note that the HPOC only exists because _you_ know what having such consciousness _feels_ _like,_ the big IF in the beginning says you could explain any other individual's observed behavior. So there is no second half of the argument for water, unless you imagined it was _somehow_ conscious!

Hmm, I’m not sure I follow the argument that water’s liquidity poses a hard problem. There is a direct and intuitive explanation: Water molecules at room temperature have weak bonds that allow them to move around each other like grains of sand. This property of being able to flow *just is* what we call “liquidity”. But we cannot do the same with consciousness. I cannot make a reductive explanation of processes in the body’s nervous system which *just is* some conscious phenomenon. (Or alternatively, if I can, perhaps through some more advanced emergent theories, then consciousness loses its hard status and neither consciousness nor anything else is a hard problem).

Aldous Huxley took mescaline and wrote a book about it, and in it he talked a bit about brute facts. On his trip, he worshipped the brute facts as divine. Calling it divine is basically just one of the 3 answers to the "why" questions: the "i don't know" answer. "It's above our human comprehension."

the new look suits you very well

One way I make sense of your point suggests the explanation of anything would only be complete if it also explained consciousness, so our relation to and history with the original explanandum, and I expect everything else too. Are you going this way?

As an engineer I see the problem as no different than showing an average person a cell phone or even an old radio and asking them how it works.

@NoActuallyGo-KCUF-Yourself

Жыл бұрын

Hmm, almost as if it is better that we all work together to figure things out rather than rely on a single human mind to make decisions for everyone.

to me the "hard problem of constitution" just sounds like emergence. things like water have properties that are a direct consequence of the properties of its components. It's like asking why the structures in (for example)Conway's game of life behave the way they do. There is no mysterious reason-defying problem of constitution in Conway's game of life. The glider in the game "moves" because the cells are arranged in a way that creates a structure similar to it which is slightly displaced whenever you apply the rules of the game. A simpler example might be that 2 + 2 = 4 because of the value of two and the behavior of addition. Water is similar. Water behaves the way it does because of the properties of its constituent parts lend themselves to the behavior of water when those parts interact with one another. The parts of water derive their properties in turn from their constituent parts, and so on until we find the base properties of the universe itself. Where the properties of the universe come from we are unlikely to ever find out unless maybe it turns out to be a mathematical necessity or something like that. The reason an explanation of a painting's meaning/experience by use of a model of the brain would not be satisfying is because it was not the model you wanted, because either it wasn't useful to you, or you just want to hear a model in which the meaning/experience of paintings is explained differently. providing an explanation of the dissolution of salt through a model of human reaction is not useful because the dissolution of salt is not a human experience, salt experiences the dissolution. And so using a model of the brain to explain aesthetics might be useful because perception of aesthetics happens to sentient creatures. Your hard problem of everything is more like the hard problem of meaning/experience, which to us(humans) is closely related to everything, and maybe also a hard problem of convincingness

1:20 I don't think all of the processes in one person's head can make up a "complete unit of consciousness". I haven't studied enough Carl Jung (and the rest of psychology in general), but shared consciousness is clearly a thing. Individuals are trained by other people on how to recognize the world around said individuals. I ought to clearly state that recognizing the world, and separating ourselves from it, and separating things apart from one another are all parts of consciousness. Not only is their an individual consciousness happening, but there is an interplay of the individual and the shared consciousness. This topic is really beyond my current capabilities. I'm trying though. Also, I don't mean to cut you off early. I'll try to listen without commenting. This comment works mote like my personal notes than a genuine, solid opinion on any topics. Around 5:05 you are starting to remind me of something that has bothered me for a long time. "Even if everything can be explained, described, modeled, or otherwise theorized in a systemic and mechanistic manner by science, should everything be Scienced?" I really don't know the answer to this question. It has been a desire of mine for a long time to Science everything; however, Sciencing everything leads to funny, absurd situations like describing art in an inhumane manner. I really don't know the answer to this question. It's almost dehumanizing to Science everything. Maybe that's where we humans are headed though?

Functionalism gets me more than most things on the daily for years

Fire

2:41 yes just as Kant said: "Ding an sich" is unknowable

Edit: turns out I was completely wrong about the videos position. Joshua Bach's explanations are better than yours is this area. You experience things for the same reason characters in stories experience things. Because it's written into the story, but in this case the story is generated by your brain. You can question the why the law's of physics are the way they are. But that's completely shifting the question away from your lack of understanding in this area.

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

Nuh-uh my big brother says that his explanation is better than both Jonas and Kane’s

@rickybloss8537

Жыл бұрын

@@unknownknownsphilosophy7888 Cool what is his theory?

@rickybloss8537

Жыл бұрын

@@unknownknownsphilosophy7888Tho I doubt your brother is working at Intel as a cognitive scientist.

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

@@rickybloss8537 LOL, least impressive credentials of all time

@rickybloss8537

Жыл бұрын

@@KaneB Says the KZreadr. I mean he also taught at Harvard. Though his credentials are besides the point. His theory is more explanatory.

Seems like your point could be summed up as saying that the question of why certain physical states give rise to conscious states is similar to the question of why are fundamental physical laws what they are. Also on the aesthetics bit, it seemed like you just accept mind independent aesthetic realism?

I find it interesting that some matter has consciousness and other matter does not appear to have consciousness. Is the brain not atoms? Does consciousness reside in the brain? If the purely scientific model of mechanical cause and effect type of reality is correct, then we don't even have free will, right? It would only appear that I do in my perception. If so, who is it that is perceiving? Who is it that I am referring to when I say, "I"? If you haven't already, you should find books of Ramana Maharishi and similar teachers. Rupert Spira has great youtube videos on these types of questions and I think he is in the UK.

Enjoyed the video. I don't like your response very much though. Consciousness not being explainable through science would be like art not being explainable through aesthetics. The intuition gap is that we would expect it to be explainable through science as it (seems) to be the kind of thing that would be.

About the explanations chain: "Brute fact" isn't really anything since what does it even mean? If it's an "it is how it is because of it" explanation then it's a self-explanatory explanation. If it's "there is no next explanation at all" we can just go meta and ask the question "why is that the case that provided explanation is enough for the explained phenomena to be?" If it's "I don't know an explanation to that" then we can start to deal with hypotheticals or go to the higher level of abstraction. The brute fact is a declaration of inability to explain, and inability to explain is what is philosophy trying to overcome, no? And there are other cases of explanation chaines that at first glance look like a solve of the whole problem: - The chain goes forever, there is an explanation to each explanation: in that case, you go meta and ask "why is that the case that such chain of explanations allows for the explained phenomena to be?" It's kinda like if there is a person floating, and you ask how are they floating and they say they are just holding onto that other person that is also floating, so you ask that other person the same and they say that they are holding onto the other person.... and the chain seems infinite so you can just skip asking them individually and ask them all how the whole group is floating (that's what I mean by "going meta", it's just looking at the bigger picture) - The chain has a self-explanatory link, or the chain loops on itself, or the original explanation is self-explanatory: in that case, you go meta and ask "why is that the case that this looping system of explanation allows for the explained phenomena to be?" It's kinda like if there is a person floating, and you ask how are they floating and they say they are just holding onto the person, that is holding onto another person that is holding onto itself. It doesn't really work. Or they say that they are just holding onto the other person and you ask the other person and they say they're holding onto a third person and you ask the third person and they say they're holding onto the person that you asked first, and you ask the person that you asked first and they say they're holding onto the other person... so on. Doesn't really work too - We can't comprehend explanations after a certain amount of links: in that case, you go meta and ask "why is that the case that this explanation system allows for the explained phenomena to be?" Kinda complicated but it's like seeing if there is a person floating, and you ask how are they floating and they say they are just holding onto a ghost that floats because of the ghost stuff that you wouldn't understand. If they aren't lying you can still ask for an explanation on how tf ghosts even exist and why they're holding onto one and what's going on. - There is an end to a chain, the last link. Probably what is meant by the "brute fact": in that case you go meta and stuff, same question, I'm sure you can figure It's kinda like if there is a person floating, and you ask how are they floating and they say they are just holding onto that other person that is also floating, so you ask that other person the same and they say that they are levitating and you like "why tho" and they're like "you wanted to know why that first person was floating and you have your answer, get lost." If you're satisfied with that, why wouldn't you be satisfied with just observing the first person floating without asking why? - Let's say we go meta and the explanation is self-explanatory so you go meta again and it's self-explanatory again and you go meta nad it's... and so on: you need to go like meta-meta. It's kinda like if there is a person floating, and you ask how are they floating and they say that god wanted them to. So you ask god why it wanted that random person to float and they say that person wanted to float so god granted that. You see how the explanation isn't relly working and you go meta and ask me why I made that whole hypothetical situation up the way I did and i say that I needed an example of self-looping explanation so I created that hypothetical with a floating person. And you ask why the floating person tho, why it's not cards that support each other, and why I needed an analogy in the first place and I start explaining how it's just a circumstance that gravity is a good analogy for a need of explanation. And you see that it's pointless to ask me so you go to the god of this world and ask why was it the case that that first person was floating and the god says "it is what it is" and you aren't satisfied so you go even more meta and it's me again because the previous me was just a character-avatar and now you're on an actual reality lvl and you actually managed to get out of my youtube comment and ask real me. And I'm still saying the same stuff and it's useless, and you go to the god again, same stuff. And it turns out you're still in a KZread comment so you get out this time for real-real... So yes, I'm just constantly generating those meta-levels because in reality "you" is just a character so for me to speak to that character I need to insert my meta-reality in the story and that makes that meta-reality a part of fiction. And that explanation covers infinite nested meta-levels, that why I call it meta-meta There are some more I think but that's the ones that i remember. Also, if you just ask what can even hypothetically even be on the end of the chain - it's a question of "Why there is anything at all", or rother some even cleaner version like "how all" or "how whatever".

@robheusd

Жыл бұрын

"Brute facts" is there in fact to stop such an infinity chain. It is not per se an explenation, merely a provisional answer, sometimes to indicate where one's limit of understanding is reached, or one's patience in explaining it in more detail or more fundamentally. Or it can be posed in the form of tautoligcal truths, like existence exists, and non-exisence does not.

Not to be obnoxious, but any form of water that is to be found on Venus (if it at all contains water) is quite sure not in liquid form but gaseous, and on Mars in the form of ice. The state of water, as science correctly explains, depends on temperature and pressure. And water molecules don't have the property of liquidity, that's just nonsense. The property of liquidity or solidity manifests itself only for a large collection of those molecules. For an individual molecule one can only measure it's kinetic energy.

I think a lot rests on an explanation of consciousness that does not rest on other phenomena being explained. Including things, like solipsism, skepticism, idealism and the nature of human beings. In comparison the more we understood about biology the better able we have been to treat diseases. Knowing more about consciousness in this we could be enlightening. On the other hand not knowing exactly how water works may not impact us in a great way.

Actually the matter of Bulk Properties isn't quite so much a brute fact, at least not directly. Statistical Mechanics will explain these by taking a simplified model of the microscopic system, and seeing what happens when it's extended in size by many orders of magnitude. The goal is to go from a model with many different internal variables, to a much smaller set of variables. The fact this happens at all is rather startling, but it is this tendency for the variables to get 'washed away' that gives rise to bulk properties. Why do several of the variables get washed away? Well, I hope, as a universal skeptic, you can appreciate the answer: they don't. It's just that the microscopic model should tend to, most of the time, behave like the macroscopic model with those variables removed. This is not a matter of evidence or measuring: statistics very definitely says that the two models will diverge very slowly at macroscopic length-scales, and the error can be calculated mathematically. Now, why should the microscopic model resemble the microscopic reality? Again, you might appreciate, it doesn't. But many of the properties which can be measured of the real and modelled system will be within quantifiable error. This, of course, is where we place our brute fact. That an arbitrary model should be within a 'reasonable error' of 'reality' is not logically justifiable. But it's also not causal. The model was made to look like the reality in this and that manner, but that 'there must exist a model which the reality resembles' is a very peculiar assertion. You could argue that for every property of a system, either it's the sort of thing that can be predicted (or had statistics made about it), or it isn't that sort of thing; and then anything that can be predicted will fit into some model. But now you've asserted that there are such things as properties (not to mention assuming that things exist), and that most stuff doesn't/wouldn't fall into a sort of intermediate category of properties that isn't cleanly predictable or not. Though I suppose it could just be that all properties are unpredictable. Though, I would guess that most scientists would almost insist that most properties already are in that intermediate category, and we're just that good at modelling, except that also our models are always limited and imperfect even for the stuff they're supposed to predict. I don't know, I've never been convinced that uncertainty defeats existence. Maybe it's the nature of things that existing entails uncertainty. Why can't we have both? Justification is such a contrivance. I have a theory: The function of epistemological justification is to excuse doubt from a position of understanding that doubt, and the purpose of justification is to denote that rectifying the original doubt would result in a new, less desirable doubt. (Here, rectifying might mean something like rejecting the hypothesis or belief that led to the doubt.) From that theory, it's obvious that you can't justify things if all doubts are equal, or that no doubts are ever undesirable. On the face of it I sympathize with the position that all doubts are equal and not undesirable. It feels scientific, intellectual. And the rejection of such a position feels wrong: that there may be situations or ideas that you just would not want to doubt? But, such is the way things are in real life, in my experience. You could of course take the "position" that interacting in the real world is philosophically a farce, and it entails no such matters as belief or justification or existence or cause. Not asserting in such a way that it's not how you really are in the world, but that the proper terms for the "things" which you "do" and "think" are not the ones found in philosophy. I comprehend this stance and I believe that a functional approach to defining these terms would, if comprehensive and successful, quash much of this stance. All you would perhaps be left with then is that there are no words at all of meaning, which would _seem_ nigh untenable in conversation or debate. Of course, I don't have a functional definition for all or many philosophical terms, but such definitions might be like that of my theory of justification.

The liquidity of H2O is a necessary emergent property of its electrochemical structure. The electronegativity of oxygen is 3.5, and the electronegativity of hydrogen is 2.1. Electronegativity is the strength of attraction an atomic nucleus has for electrons. Since oxygen has a higher strength then hydrogen, electrons have a bias to orbit the oxygen atom for a longer duration than they orbit the hydrogen atom. This results in the oxygen atom having a bias for having extra negative charge floating around, where as the hydrogens have a bias for being barren of negativity, resulting in a mere positive charge. This causes H2O to be bipolar, negative on one side, positive on another side. This bipolar nature of H2O causes it to be attracted to itself, where all of the oxygens will search out the barren hydrogens. By being attracted to itself, it creates the phenomenon of liquidity.

@jeremyp3310

Жыл бұрын

That's observation not explanation isn't it?

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

@@jeremyp3310 I'm happy to say that it's a kind of explanation, but I question whether it's a complete explanation. I feel like I'm still left with the puzzle: okay, but why do these physical states manifest as liquidity? It seems like there could in principle be these physical states, but then these manifest as the "higher-level" phenomenon of metal or fire or whatever. Like sure, we can investigate water, break it down and figure out what is underlying properties are. But this doesn't in itself give us any insight into the collection between the lower-level and higher-level properties.

@jonstewart464

Жыл бұрын

@@KaneB "Why do these physical states manifest as liquidity?". I find the explanation of liquidity perfectly satisfying, not leaving me with any puzzle about how the micro level entails the emergent phenomenon. I can imagine the H2O molecules visually with their internal structure and forces between them as buzzy energy-ball-blob type things that pull towards each other a bit and won't overlap each other, under the downward pull of gravity, bouncing about. When I zoom out in my mind's eye I can see exactly how this results in liquidity. It's a great example of the perfect reductionist, physical explanation because it's so clear how the lower and higher level properties relate, easily grasped at this visual/intuitive level. Describing observable emergent phenomena in terms of their micro structure is bread-and-butter science; but describing phenomena that only exist from the first person perspective of a subject is a different kettle of fish. I'm not saying it can't be done, it just hasn't been yet.

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

@@jonstewart464 All I can say is that when I zoom out, I feel like I can zoom out to anything at all. I can tell the story any way I want. But yeah, if you find that you can only zoom out to liquidity, then I guess it makes sense that you would find the scientific explanation fully satisfying. If it's outright inconceivable that these lower-level states could manifest as anything other than liquidity, then you have an account of why those states manifest as liquidity.

@jonstewart464

Жыл бұрын

@@KaneB Yes, I think it's inconceivable that anything other than liquidity results. It might help that I've had to actually do the statistical mechanics years ago when I studied physics? Or that I'm just not very imaginative...but the explanation accounts for all the emergent properties such as surface tension, evaporation, behaviour in zero gravity, anything you can throw at it. I like David Deutsch on what makes a good explanation (hard to vary), and I think that the molecular explanation of liquidity meets his criteria perfectly. On the other hand, "explanations" of consciousness, e.g. Dennett, functionalism, attention schema theory, panpsychism, the lot, are a bag o'shite in this view. Reduction just isn't the same task when the emergent phenomenon only exists from a first person perspective.

Um, I got your point but like our physical theories explain why water is a liquid when it is. You'll have to ask a few more why's before getting to a brute fact if the matter.

Perhaps identification solves some hard problems. Suppose X correlates with Y. We can satisfyingly explain explain this correlation by equating X with Y. For example, being made of H20 correlates with being clear, odorless, tasteless, etc. We can satisfyingly explain this correlation by equating the two properties. Perhaps we need to explain why X = Y. I interpret such an identity claim as stating that "X" and "Y" co-refer. This co-reference is explained by elaborating how "X" and "Y" came to refer to the same thing. Of course, if this strategy works for the hard problem of consciousness, then some token- or type-identity theory is correct. And such a consequence is controversial. But identification seems to solve at least some hard problems, even if not all. What do you think?

@Calhoun90

Жыл бұрын

@queerdo Good question! I forgot to clarify how the explanation is supposedly satisfying. Suppose X correlates with Y. A hard question is why X correlates with Y. Well, if X = Y, then the correlation exists simply because everything correlates with itself. Indeed, it's impossible for anything to not co-occur with itself. (Maybe this impossibility itself needs explanation? I'm unsure.) So, by equating X with Y, we simply explain the correlation. Perhaps, though, this explanation isn't satisfying until we also explain how such different terms (i.e. "X" and "Y") came to refer to the same thing. It presumably isn't (totally) accidental that such different terms co-refer.

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

How are we equating X with Y though? Are we just doing that by stipulation? So we investigate water, and find that it's composed of H2O. Then we say that water just is H2O; that is, "water" and "H2O" co-refer. I can get on board with this (for the sake of argument at least). But how does this give me any insight into why the properties of H2O manifest as e.g. liquidity? It seems like on your view, all we're saying is that they do manifest that way. But we already knew that!

@Calhoun90

Жыл бұрын

@@KaneB Thanks for taking the time out to reply! And I appreciate your question. In my opinion, there's a subtle distinction between: (1) H20 = water; and (2) being made of H20 molecules = being clear, odorless, tasteless, etc. (1) equates a scientific stuff (i.e. H20) with a sensible stuff (i.e. water). (By "scientific stuff", I mean stuff that we denote with scientific terms. By "sensible stuff", I mean stuff that we denote with sensible terms.) In other words, according to (1), "H20" and "water" refer to the same stuff. But (1) fails to equate the scientific property of _being made of H20 molecules_ with the sensible property of _being clear, odorless, tasteless, etc._ (1) thus leaves open whether both these properties are identical, and so leaves open why both these properties correlate. (2) does equate _being made of H20 molecules_ with _being clear, odorless, tasteless, etc._ (2) thus explains why water's micro-structure manifests as clearness, etc. In particular, water's micro-structure manifests as clearness, etc. because: (a) water's micro-structure is identical to clearness, etc.; and (b) all else equal, X manifests as X. Of course, (2) may be false. But, if (2) is true, then the hard problem is arguably solved. I'm not beholden to this argument. I'm not even a physicalist about the mind! But it always seemed to me that the physicalist could plausibly say something like the preceding.

Consciousness is different, though, and the way the Hard Problem is often stated masks that difference. My conscious states are experienced by me from the inside, from a first-person perspective. The liquidity of water is experienced from an outside, third-person point of view, just like physical structures are. There might be a problem, and it may be hard, but it's not *as* hard.

@girlmoment669

8 ай бұрын

This was also my initial reaction but upon second thought, it not rly correct. Yes, consciousness is qualitatively different bc it's what we get to experience, immanent. But *explaining* both consciousness and things outside of consciousness falls on the *same* explanatory wall> Even if the experience with consciousness is direct, when we're trying to explain-model something, we're doing it cognitively, it's symbolic abstraction, externalized in all cases, so despite it being different, the hardness remains the same in respect to explanatory power

@whycantiremainanonymous8091

8 ай бұрын

@@girlmoment669 However, on the explanatory plane, my consciousness simply doesn't exist. It's not a phenomenon in somebody else's purview. Nobody else can observe my consciousness. There's nothing there to explain.

@girlmoment669

8 ай бұрын

​@@whycantiremainanonymous8091 that's what you don't get, matter/energy as things that exist also suffer from the same issue, it *doesn't* matter that you can perceive, *EVEN* if the experience is uniquely subjective

@whycantiremainanonymous8091

8 ай бұрын

@@girlmoment669 We have a standardised procedure for providing explanations for material phenomena. People find it persuasive enough in most cases. Maybe not rightly so, but they do. Consciousness can't be covered by this procedure, however.

@girlmoment669

8 ай бұрын

@@whycantiremainanonymous8091 ik and I agree with you, but that's just not what Im claiming here

What about axiology and axiological explanations?

@theautodidacticlayman

Жыл бұрын

11:45 There would be an explanation for why the ball moved or explodes or spins or shrinks and disappears, though, right? That would be traceable to the properties of the billiard balls, or what billiard balls just _are._ 🤔

@theautodidacticlayman

Жыл бұрын

15:30 ☝🏻

It seems like the problem you're grappling with is the "limitation" of proof between epistemes. A proof or demonstrated proposition established within, say, a post-positivistic epistemological paradigm cannot be comprehended without the axioms and supplementary explanatory framework of its originating episteme. Which is why the question of art - a question that can theoretically originate from an occult, critical, feminist, or [fill in your episteme here] epistemology - becomes an opportunity for comedy when it involves cognitive modeling - proof requiring another paradigm. But conversely, the question of art OF a particular paradigm sometimes requires another altogether different paradigm to be realized. This was, and I may be mistaken, one of several key implications drawn from Gödel's incompleteness theorems. It's very possible that humanity will understand the emergent property of consciousness in greater detail. But the context of that understanding may only be realized through what Kuhn describes as a "paradigm shift" - one that will exceed the present Popperian paradigm (edit: that our era of) science is conducted in.

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

I love how you instantly beg the question with the phrase “The emergent property consciousness” LOL

@marcoacuna1953

Жыл бұрын

Could you dumb this down for me

@zasterheffor

Жыл бұрын

@@unknownknownsphilosophy7888 How, exactly.

@zasterheffor

Жыл бұрын

​@@marcoacuna1953 Sure. The ruleset, or "explanatory framework," of a certain domain of human knowledge, particularly science, has grown increasingly sophisticated and rigorous over time. Due to this increased sophistication, science developed a revelatory function in relation to other domains, say art, history, or even politics; some insights into art, history, and so on, inaccessible to their own explanatory framework, are only realizable through the use of an altogether separate field, such as science. At some point in the future, another domain of knowledge with a different ruleset may have a revelatory function in relation to what we, in this era, describe as science. This future, hypothetical, domain and ruleset may reveal insights about a) natural phenomena, b) other domains, including c) 21st cent. science, in greater detailing than our 21st. cent. science is capable of. Kuhn labeled these ruleset transitions in domains, and even between domains as "paradigm shifts." The domain and ruleset that bridge the apparent explanatory gap between 1) neuronal activity or electrical signaling and 2) consciousness might be post-human or transhumanist in origin, even. ["Science" has already undergone constant de-territorialization and de-anthropomorphization since the Enlightenment (18th. cent.) and as such is in constant contention with the physical limitations of the human brain: perception, intrinsic biases, memory, etc.]

@marcoacuna1953

Жыл бұрын

@@zasterheffor Is that sort of what the ctmu is trying to be?

Are you still offering philosophy tutoring?

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

Yes

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

Yes, mine is better.

Why does this particular collection of my fingers and my palm gives rise to the manifest property of "hand-ness"? Is it logically possible to have all the fingers and the palm in those exact places, but no hand there?

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

I’ve never seen “hand-ness” anywhere, you must have pretty special eyes. You mean to say why is your perception so theory laden and habituated that you can’t help but see hands when you look at certain colored light. But that collection of light doesn’t need to be seen as a hand, the boundaries can be drawn infinitely many ways. So arranging the light in any pattern and picking it out as a hand or whatever else is highly arbitrary, meaning the analogy fails since this colored light doesn’t need to be picked out as a hand, similarly why should this it be that this collection of micro items must manifest as water as opposed to wood. Why couldn’t the same collection not have been wood instead?

@user-qm4ev6jb7d

Жыл бұрын

@@unknownknownsphilosophy7888 You've got things backwards: "hand-ness" is a _pretheoretic_ notion that we get from perception. Afterwards, the theoretic understanding of how our perception works allows us to figure out that it's just the brain automatically drawing boundaries. Similarly, we have a pretheoretic notion of "liquidity", and then we can theoretically understand that it's just our brain automatically drawing an arbitrary boundary around some interactions of molecules.

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

What’s the evidence it’s pretheoretic? And what evidentiary standard and criteria are you using? And what theory of truth? And why that evidentiary standard and not some other and why that theory of truth and not some other? And also what is your theory of what knowledge is? Your notion of what is pretheoretic is post-theoretic meaning you have a theory about what things count as pretheoretic but why believe in this theory?

@user-qm4ev6jb7d

Жыл бұрын

@@unknownknownsphilosophy7888 If you're looking for evidence, I guess you can look up experiments wherein babies can recognize hands and faces long before they learn language. As for a definition of theoretic and pretheoretic, I think at least one necessary pre-requisite of calling something a "theory" is for it to be put into _words._ And what does my theory of truth have to do with this? That's about as relevant as asking me what interpretation of quantum mechanics I'm using. Or my stance on the problem of the criterion.

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

I love how you say “if you are looking for evidence here are some experiments” this assumes a certain standard and criteria of what counts as evidence and assumes that I share it with you. This is why I asked the question about your standards of evidence, instead of answering it you just say “experiments” and proceed to assume that is valid evidence, but this means I only have an incredibly vague notion of what your evidentiary standard is and you are assuming I also assume the same things you do about what counts as good evidence. Your evidentiary standard will of course be wrapped up and intertwined with theories of truth, knowledge, justification and the problem of the criterion. The problem of the criterion is particularly relevant to the question of what counts as pretheoretic and what doesn’t. As for the baby example: So you have a metaphysical assumption or theory that “this colored light is a baby” and you assume that’s true. And then you assume “this colored light is a hand” and “this colored light is a face” and after those assumptions about what those are you project those abilities onto the assumed to be correct boundaries called “a baby” and that it can detect such and such before it can speak, the issue is this is circular and begs the question. If we don’t assume those boundaries of the baby are as you think they are or that the boundaries of hands or faces are where you think they are then those experiments will fail. The success of the experiments presupposes the conclusion of ahead of time. It uses the babies facial reactions to assume that a baby can recognize faces, but this presupposes that human and facial boundaries are already epistemically secure to begin with and that the innate security of that in adults can then be grafted on to babies. But once again the location of the baby and hands and faces was assumed prior to the experiments. If I say how do you know these assumptions were correct and you answer “babies have it prior to theories” and then I ask you how do you know where the boundaries of a baby or faces are to begin with? And you reply it was built into me as a baby you’ve just gone in a circle without realizing it. Even if you are correct (I don’t agree) but even if you were correct then it’s just a naturalistic fallacy. Even if it was built it in by nature that doesn’t necessitate its accuracy any more than the survival advantage of deer having false positive skittishness implies that there actually was something in the bushes. So either way the example of hands in your initial comment doesn’t work.

'H2O molecules' do not necessarily manifest themselves as liquid. It can be solid (ice) or gas (steam). I don't even have to 'imagine' this, I can experience it. However, if you are not asking the 'molecules' (chemistry) but rather why does 'water' manifest itself as liquid? then this is a different question and it's about language, not chemistry.

Hey Kane, it seems to me as though you're skipping over an important difference between the liquidity and consciousness/qualia examples. It's something like the difference between strong and weak emergence - both macro phenomena are surprising but one (the liquidity case) seems as though it can at least in principle be explained in physical terms.

@jonb.4710

3 күн бұрын

Your causation example was a better one but again, even if the effect is not logically necessary it at least seems as though in principle we could discover why it is naturally necessary/explain why it behaves the way it does in physical terms (because after all, we are just talking about behaviour and external properties rather than experience and internal properties).

Interesting. So then this becomes a hard problem of semantics, how do things mean something. That of course is something the brain does very well, associates one pattern with another. Neurons firing in one pattern causes other neurons to fire in a different patten. I think you're on to something here

I think that you should study physics to gain a better understanding of things such as fluid dynamics and causality. In my interpretation of reality, the billiard ball could never do anything but do what we have observed. It could never shrink or explode without something causing it to do so. The property of liquidity is not solely found within the structure of water, but also mixed with the bigger picture of the laws of physics constantly at play. For instance, water doesn’t act as a liquid if there isn’t much energy imbued into it, liquidity is not inherent to h2o molecules. The way that space is fluid incentivizes water molecules to also become fluid. I also believe that nothing evades scientific explanation, and if it seems to, then I think it’s more likely that the thing unexplained is an illusion. Such as science being unable to explain if we are in a simulation, or if god is real, or idealism, etc. I think that liquidity is easily explained by science, and that you just personally don’t understand it. The reason we know the billiard ball will roll after getting hit is the same reason that we know Jesus wasn’t born to a virgin and didn’t come back to life. The ‘anything is possible’ mentality is a poisonous one akin to being religious. While it is logically consistent and cannot be falsified, I can guarantee you that the future will go on as the laws of physics dictate them. If I told you exactly how the future would unfold for the entirety of your lifetime would you say that I knew it was going to happen that way, or would you claim that it was a coincidence or lucky guess? If I tell you that 2 hours past noon it will be 2pm and then that happens, was that a gamble on good odds or did I know for a fact that the event would occur? Causality is proven by science. Einstein is the human with the best concept of reality to have existed thus far (at least on a mathematical level and in my opinion). He cemented the idea of causality into physics, and even our best and most refined theories to date are forced to incorporate causality. It is evidently and axiomatically a truth on the workings of our experienced universe. That’s the thing about theistic arguments such as idealism or simulation theory. They advocate for physicalism, but say that for unknown and unseen reasons with little to no evidence, there is or might be some underlying truth to reality. Let’s imagine that idealism or simulation theory is real. What practical application does that knowledge have? We can only interact with what appears to be the physical. While your philosophy may dictate that anything is possible, you still only observe a very small amount of outcomes. I believe on a grand scale, that causality could not be inherent to reality, such as other universes could lack it and still exist. But causality is fundamental for any conscious experience to take place. Things could be happening such as time spontaneously reversing or going in other directions, but our awareness only increases or updates as time goes forward aka things move in a causal fashion. So as far as any conscious observer cares, causality must remain in tact. And so far, there is no interaction that moves forward in time that cannot be explained by causality. And there likely never will be. And don’t get me wrong, I love psychedelics, I spend a lot of time ‘outside of’ the physical. I hold on to those hopes of existence beyond the physical, but sadly I cannot believe in those ideas whilst maintaining intellectual integrity. I think that perhaps you find free will to be axiomatic, and therefore you must rationalize causality away to maintain a logically consistent worldview. I suppose that the inverse scenario is what I do, but I feel pretty vindicated by the fact that my thoughts are based on scientific evidence. The same thing that is the basis for all of our collective knowledge on the workings of the universe. If I’m wrong about things I would love to be enlightened. Like I said, I would love to be proven wrong, I would love for the things in my imagination to exist. If you have insight that could change how I view the world then please let me know. Maybe I misunderstand concepts like idealism, and that is the cause for my cynicism for it. If you saw a tortoise shell in the desert, would you think that there was any other explanation for it other than that it came from a tortoise? And if so, how is that explanation any different from saying that god put it there?

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

Right so what are responses to the skepticism surrounding causality and the refutations of causality specifically? Hume’s debunking of it, Russel’s debunking of it and beyond. Just repeating how great science is doesn’t defeat these arguments because there are many causal skeptics who are not religious and make a living as working scientists so causal realism isn’t a requirement for being a scientist, skepticism about causality doesn’t make one religious or disable one from doing science, in fact the secular causal skeptic believes less then you do. You are in a sense more religious than they a secular causal skeptic is because you believe in some magic thing called causality when the responses to the skeptical arguments are horrible. So perhaps you have a good response to casual skepticism and anti-realism that has never been heard before or perhaps you should get in a time machine and focus your efforts on being a top Pokémon card player.

@liamcarter7597

Жыл бұрын

@@unknownknownsphilosophy7888 Perhaps you missed when I said this, and maybe I didn’t articulate myself well. Causality may not be an inherent function of the universe. For all we know, the universe could be infinite in size and would infinitely display every possible arrangement of quarks and leptons so that every possible event is happening simultaneously with or without cause. Only the parts that coincidentally happen to maintain a causal narrative and entropy seems to go forward through time could emerge with conscious properties. Causality could be an illusion based on the structure of the region of space we happen to inhabit. But there’s no pragmatism in believing that we are coincidentally existing as some simulation. It is very practical to believe in physicalism and causality. We use it to make predictions very accurately and such. The point is that causality is necessary for a conscious experience, even if it isn’t a fundamental property of the universe. Any conscious being will find themselves in a space where causality is maintained and in a space that is habitable, etc. Our environment is not made for us, but we are made for our environment. While anything, in theory, is possible; we will only experience a very limited array of things. I think that Russel explains causality well. He calls it trivial, I call it pragmatic. We will never find ourselves in a situation that cannot be explained by the previous, even if causality is not inherent to reality. Similarly to how we can only consciously experience time going forward, even if it were to be oscillating in direction in reality.

@pandawandas

Жыл бұрын

@@liamcarter7597Why is constant conjunction less practical than causality? It seems more practical considering that physics is heading towards a non-temporal understanding of reality.

@liamcarter7597

Жыл бұрын

@@pandawandas causality and non-temporal interpretations go hand in hand if you ask me. If you were to interpret the universe in a non-temporal way, that is to say that you interpret the time dimension as spatial, causality is maintained because rather than movement through time, there would actually be one static structure. The causal relationship between one moment in time and the next moment in time would be highlighted by the geometry of the objects in 4 dimensions. For example if you focused on life on earth in this view, we would see one structure that accounted for every living organism from abiogenesis up to the extinction of life. It would all be one structure that smoothly transitions and branches out to show every aspect of all evolutionary life on earth. While all of the branches would exist simultaneously in this view, there would still be separation between fish and monkeys, you would have to travel from the fish branch back down to before fish and monkeys deviated and travel back up the monkey branch. This is causality. Constant conjunction doesn’t seem non-practical necessarily, but it seems to exist to serve the purpose of acknowledging that some events are causal and some are coincidental, but wants to group these events under one term. The problem is that an event such as roosters crowing and then the sun rising not being causal is misleading. From one reference frame the crowing of the roosters and the rising of the sun would be completely unconnected, not occurring in constant conjunction. Whereas causal events maintain local causality no matter their reference frame. Such as there is no reference frame where humans existed before the hominids they came from. We know that this happens because of the constant speed of light for all observers. If information could go faster than light, then causality could be broken, and you could view some event as happening before what we would consider it’s cause. The convenient LAW of physics that no information can travel faster than the speed of light maintains local causality ALWAYS. We do not yet have a theory to suture relativity (gravity) and quantum mechanics, but we already figured out that causality is integral to and maintained in quantum mechanics.

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

​@@liamcarter7597 Do you know what ceteris paribus conditions are and are you familiar with Paul Teller and Nancy Cartwright's work? If not you better slow your roll with that physical law stuff.

Seems to me one cannot explain something that hasn’t been described adequately Qualia are like that

Egg. Egg. Room Noise. Egg. Apricot. Dynamite. Egg. Lizard tail. Swim. Swim. Chinese. Push it. Push it out. Sweet Sweet Baby Kane. Jet Fuel. Low. Lady. Low Lady. Bright. Bright. Bright. Bright. Bright.

@phillbill5678

Жыл бұрын

the voices

@ShamusMac

Жыл бұрын

Even seemingly simple claims, like the apple is red, or the sun will rise tomorrow, turn out to be highly relative, subjective perspectives, given a single fingernail scrape of a thought.

@Opposite271

Жыл бұрын

@@ShamusMac Another scrape will reveal that a universal objective perspective and a relative subjective perspective are identical by virtue of the fact that humans are infallible. Since every proposition is true they can not fail to get to the truth according to any arbitrary theory of truth.

Liquids aren't hard; solids are hard... Jokes aside though, I suspect liquidity is satisfactorily explainable. Liquidity macroscopically manifests because the atoms are loosely bound; solidity because the atoms are rigidly bound. (Ex: Imagine walking through a crowd of people, passing through like a liquid; now imagine the same crowd but in which everyone is holding hands, behaving like a solid.) When I try to imagine a liquid with rigid atomic bonds or a solid with loose atomic bonds I find it pretty inconceivable. In other words, we have a pretty tight material science explanation of the emergence of liquidity and solidity from atomic structure. To me this seems disanalogous to consciousness for which we have no such comparable structural explanation.

There are people who give talks about this in what has come to be called the "spiritual/non-dual community". Mostly, the non-dual people are Ramana Maharshi acolytes, so it's metaphysics. (It's the stuff that does my head in with its ridiculousness. Yes, Sam Harris is a spiritual seeker in this vein.) But Tony Parsons, Jim Newman, Kenneth Madden, and Andreas Müller sit in this odd epistemological space of radical skepticism. It's Hume, basically. There's a terrific little series of animations that explain the non-dual scene at Non Duality Fun. And of course there's Blood Meridian. It's unusual to live with this skepticism, but it can be done. I've been living it for 5 years. No one understands me and I have no idea what's happening, but somehow it's the most incredible life ever. Also, it's the most ordinary life ever. So yeah....

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

Kane knows about non-duality and has had the direct experiences. He gets it. He just doesn’t make it public. He’s been working with me doing self inquiry meditations for this whole past year and really loves them. Which is a big change considering when I met him he said he thought meditation wasn’t interesting at all. It turned out he thought meditation was just sitting with eyes closed. When I introduced him to the inquiry stuff that all changed. Kane knows. Don’t feel alone. Kane understands you and I understand you.

@RaraAvis42

Жыл бұрын

@@unknownknownsphilosophy7888 Are you his guru?

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

I’m his close friend. But I’ve meditated 20 thousand plus hours and he got interested so I taught him a wide range of self inquiry techniques from a bunch of traditions.

@RaraAvis42

Жыл бұрын

@@unknownknownsphilosophy7888 I do see how a meditation practice of calming the mind can be a great comfort. Sounds like the two of you are on quite the adventure!! I love your gamer stats. I'm nearly 53 years old and it feels like I spent all those hours unwittingly practicing how to speedrun the spirituality game. Which I did after it hit me like a freight train. I've experienced stuff I will never understand. This broke all the rules. It's chaos and unconditional freedom all the way down. I do love me my Hume, though. It was he who came to me when I was going through the crazy awakening shit that every spiritual seeker desperately wants before they realize how ridiculous it all is. His thoughts (which of course felt like my thoughts) were the glitch I found to jump through the game crazy fast. And now I'm apparently here... and not at the same time... My best wishes to you both. There is literally *no possible way* to screw anything up, so you need absolutely no well-wishing beyond it just being a conventional way to say good-bye. (oh, and thanks for all the fish) ✌

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

@@RaraAvis42 I agree about the absolute freedom and no rules part, all of it actually. I had an experience where I looked at a stack of oranges in a grocery store and "I" just disappeared, forever, haven't been back since. The meditation might have had nothing to do with it, those meditation stats are just to comfort those who don't know what you know, just like the title "doctor" puts some people at ease and lets them trust your helping them. But it's wonderful to hear what you wrote.

Something is liquid if it conforms to the shape of its container but retains a constant volume independent of pressure. You can pour water into a cup to see this happen. This has nothing to do with it's structure. It has to do with it's temperature. Gold can be liquid. Hydrogen can be liquid. Goya's dog is a dark, monochromatic painting with a small subject low in the painting, slightly off center. It is not meant to be a vibrant, happy piece with lots of movement

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

Someone is fat when they eat too much food.

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

I figured it would go without saying that my comments about "H2O molecules" should be understood as "H2O molecules at such-and-such temperature, pressure, etc..." but apparently not. Obviously, I'm significantly simplifying the physical details, because getting into that would double the length of the video and it isn't necessary for the broader point.

@InventiveHarvest

Жыл бұрын

@@KaneB the point is that we can indeed go down into details - knowledge is possible.

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

@@InventiveHarvest I'm not denying that we can "go down into details". On the contrary, I'm taking it for granted that we *can* do that. You can't even set up the hard problem of consciousness (or the hard problem of any other phenomenon P) unless you can state the details of the physical states correlated with consciousness (or correlated with P).

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

Ok dude, if you got the solution to Agrippa’s trilemma then spit it out, stop eating the solution and spit it out.

While there are questions that can not be answered by science, and there are logics that answer questions that are not scientific, the fact is, that science answers those questions that, through inquiry and the recording of the data in the observation of the inquiry, for that expectation based on what is known to be expected... if there is a difference between this expectation and what has happened scientifically, this is a discovery of new knowledge. Thus, your "hard problem of everything" does not appear well defined. Neither does your understanding of the hard problem of consciousness.

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

This appears to in no way address what Kane even said. Why does the arrangement of the micro in this necessarily manifest as water and not wood? This also didn’t address what was said about art. Also not seeing how the hard problem formulation was bad, philosophy of mind is my area so it’s striking you found it so bad. What was so bad about it?

@jmarkinman

Жыл бұрын

​@@unknownknownsphilosophy7888 because I stopped watching after 3 minutes since the foundations were off.

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

What did I get wrong about the hard problem of consciousness?

@jmarkinman

Жыл бұрын

@@KaneB It's not specifically "wrong" it's just slightly weaker than the hardest formulation of the hard problem of consciousness. "Why" particular physical attributes lead to a certain consciousness is weaker than the question of the difference of qualia between different consciousnesses. I took more of an issue with the notion of the "hard problem of everything".

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

@@jmarkinman I'm aware that there are different ways of framing the hard problem of consciousness. I went with the one that seemed the simplest to communicate. After all, this video wasn't really about the hard problem of consciousness specifically. Anyway, I don't think I misunderstand the problem or said anything misleading about it.

Consciousness, at least the sort of consciousness you seem to be discussing is inherently subjective, but more than this it also lacks definition. We do not even know whether we are talking about the same thing. Objective consciousness is anything but a hard problem, it is simply an ability to report awareness of the environment in a way that coheres with objective standards. It is easily tested: if you have had a blow to the head it may be assessed by answers to simple questions (Where are you? What day is it? What can you see in my hand? etc.), but I do not think this is the kind of consciousness that you invoke here. I think you are trying to discuss something that is indefinable and personal to you, and moreover includes what it is like to be you. Of course you are right, there is a hard problem in everything, because at a fundamental level subjectivity is inescapable. Fortunately maintaining the fiction that we can adopt an objective perspective has been enormously successful in our understanding of the world and its history. Although there is some value to our understanding in acknowledging that we cannot escape subjectivity, it is limited, because the alternative is to be pointless and lost in a solipsistic void.

1 is 1 A is A Blue is Blue. Barring language barriers.

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

Dude you got it wrong. 1 is 0, A is 0, Blue is 0, no matter what language.

If water manifested it self in a different way then the current way we wouldn't exist.

@jeremyp3310

Жыл бұрын

That's an observation not an explanation. The whole point of the video I think.

@rickybloss8537

Жыл бұрын

@@jeremyp3310 The problem is there is no explanation that will satisfy the position of the video. Because you can always just respond to the explanation as well why does it work that way. It's equivalent to that child which asks "why?" Over and over.

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

So basically your answer to the continued “why” questions is to have low standards and not answer them. This is the same thing religious people do when you ask them why questions enough times. You take it that you are special though and when you retreat to brute facts it’s cool when you do it because you have the magic set of brute facts and the other person’s brute facts are merely them avoiding deep truths by remaining religious. I think that’s exactly what you are doing, it’s exactly the same, you’re just a religious person who doesn’t know you’re a religious person, you give up and settle cause you have low standards. And then you call this settling “rationality” LOL

@rickybloss8537

Жыл бұрын

@@unknownknownsphilosophy7888 according to Josha Bach, consciousness is a story the brain tells itself about a person. Whenever we feel something we feel it for the same reason a character in a story says they feel something. It's because it's written in to the story. I have evidence from neuroscience, physics, and machine learning. What about this answer is religious.

@rickybloss8537

Жыл бұрын

@@unknownknownsphilosophy7888 It's not religious to say there are a finite number of answers. No infinities exist. And no your brute facts will point to the same conclusion. So long as their facts. Or I will be proven wrong by a better theory.

I strongly disagree with you on this one Kane. In the case of artistic properties I think it's completly legitimate to simply give a causal explanation of why we have such and such emotional reactions. I don't think there's anything else to explain here. There's no artistic property beyond relational properties reducible to how humans react when they physically interact with artworks. The same could be said of moral properties, for example. But that's not the case with conciousness. There's these distinct subjective properties and we all know it they are there. It's not amenable to eliminativism. I also disagree with the liquidity thing. Of course the microphysical structure of water conceptually entails it's liquidity. You just need to think about what "liquidity" means. It means things like being able to flow, or being able to go through a sieve, and so on. Liquidity is conceptually equivalent with properties about movement, that can be fully explained if we explain how the constituent molecules move.

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

I also think it's completely legitimate to do that. But for me what this amounts to is a decision not to engage in artistic interpretation. In the same way, we can decide not to care about, say, subjectivity and first-personhood. There's nothing wrong or irrational or whatever about either of these decisions. But for those who do not make such decisions, it seems that "scientific" models will leave an explanatory gap, in the sense that there will be features of interest left unexplained by the models. I'm not confused about the meaning of "liquidity". What I'm claiming is that the microphysical structure could manifest as pretty much any macro property. There could be the same microphysical structure, but this manifests as a macro substance that does not flow, that does not go through a sieve, etc. That seems easily conceivable to me. (This is not to say that conceivability entails possibility. But given that I'm inclined to antirealism about modal properties, I'm not sure what to appeal to other than conceivability when assessing these sorts of claims.)

So are you an infinitist now?

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

No. My view on justification is that there is no justification. See my previous video: kzread.info/dash/bejne/mpOJ2NVtibHZYdI.html

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

It isn’t justified. And? You act like what Kane should be doing is to pretend like he has justification when he doesn’t think there is any. Why would he pretend to have any justification even for claims about justification?

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

@Boulanger No. There is no justification so a fortiori there is no justification for the view that there is no justification.

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

@Boulanger None of that stuff bothers me

@liber-primus

Жыл бұрын

Owned ^

you might know this, but this should be very relevant: Richard Feynman is asked about magnets: kzread.info/dash/bejne/g2Wgro-hiLKYZ7Q.html

Wow, such a brilliant insight, my 5 year old niece made the same point just this morning. Maybe I should shoot you her email so you can pick her brain for more video ideas

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

I’d love to know what you take good philosophy to be. Name some examples of what you take the “good stuff” to be.

@RefinedQualia

Жыл бұрын

@@unknownknownsphilosophy7888 Why should I do that? So you can ask "Why?" to every response I give you, like my 5 year old niece? Why waste the time when we already know the answer? Why? Why? Why?

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

Thanks, glad to hear you enjoyed the video. It's also cool that you talk about these topics with your niece.

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

No, so the other commenters can see what great taste you have and how the philosophers you like are much better and smarter than Kane is since you are also supposedly better and smarter given the guy makes the arguments that 5 year olds make according to you. So let everyone see how refined your philosophical palette is. Since you’re a very respected and cherished thinker in our society other people might wanna know. Even if Kane and I are hopelessly confused.

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

Damn. Kane and I need you back on the discord you were great, cool music. Get back on there. Heumer hahahahaha ok that pretty much explains everything, thanks!

I don't agree with the hard problem of consciousness. I think if you knew all the mental states of the mind and how they interact, then the magic of consciousness would disappear.

im confused by your examples. It seems like if you knew everything there was to know about the past, the position of every molecule, every possible pattern that they form at any given moment (like every grouping of them) and all the psychophysical laws (assuming there are such things) and all mathematical features of the universe (shapes, geometric patterns, number patterns, etc.) , you would be able to know everything there was to know about art cuz you would know exactly how artists engage with art down to scientific level. You can describe form and brightness and contrast in terms of color patterns caused by patterns of certain molecules. The water example is even more confusing. Once you know all the chemical and physical laws, you would be able to logically deduce how and why those molecules behave like water. It would actually be impossible to imagine H2O not behaving like water in our universe (with all its laws held constant). You can do it now only because your representation of H2O in your mind isnt perfectly capturing all the properties of H2O. Its like if somebody were to imagine the Eifel tower not knowing how big it was and thinking it was bigger than the empire state building.

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

Ok so Laplace’s demon knows everything and then has a new artist thought about the aesthetic quality of the totality of all this knowledge and this totality has its own aesthetically unique qualities which unfortunately for the laplacian demon must instantly be subsumed and reintegrated into his total knowledge before he ever thinks it rendering new artistic musings about this totality impossible without being able to step outside the knowledge of everything (and in stepping outside it delegitimizing it since now one is outside of everything which one is obligated to remain apart of and within) but in order to aesthetically appreciate or even to have knowledge of the sum total one has to step back to view it as their knowledge or as their object of aesthetic appreciation but this stepping back process can’t happen without violating one’s knowledge of everything since one must step back from everything but yet be included in it at the same time. So basically whatever the totality is make sure to not have any totally new aesthetic thoughts about that totality that must then instantly get recursively subsumed by your knowledge of it into the whole which creates a paradox. And if you’re Laplace’s demon which you’d have to be for this example you might want to avoid thinking about yourself and analyzing your own Laplacian mind because it’s going to wind up with contradictions that will have to be arbitrarily suppressed to preserve the totally phony edifice of classical logic that’s required for this phony thought experiment to play out. So Laplace’s demon is going to need to be unconscious to play it safe. But of course to have the storage space to preserve all the detail and knowledge of every aspect of reality it’s to going require a storage medium the same size of reality itself. And since it’s unconscious we could just have a block universe copy which would be nothing more than this universe as it already is right now while somehow not having it outside of everything while somehow staying inside of everything even though as a copy of everything it’d really just be an expansion of everything and thus need to be an infinitely regressing copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. And what would be the point of this? Well absolutely nothing.

How to film yourself to look like a Taliban hostage :

As usual, semantics gets confused for logic.

Aren’t you a skeptic ?

You're almost there Kane. Take the Heidegger pill. Ontology is poetical.

There is no sharp distinction between what counts as a macro vs micro structure. I think it is logically incoherent to suppose that something could behave exactly like water at the micro level but not at the macro. You're just denying the law of identity if you do that. As you zoom out from the micro level structure every added layer of complexity is identical to the collection of micro structures it is made up of.

@unknownknownsphilosophy7888

Жыл бұрын

We already know that things behave vastly different than water at the micro level. You think electrons behave like water does at the macro level? So in terms of behavior they vastly differ. There are context where the law of identity is denied and it seems the problem of the many and Hume’s bundle theory and eastern philosophy can also show that the notion fundamental identity is totally misguided.

@juliohernandez3509

Жыл бұрын

@@unknownknownsphilosophy7888 I accept that electrons don't behave like water at the micro level. What's your point? My claim is that a collection of electrons, protons and neutrons behaving like water at the micro level would also behave like water at the macro level since they are both identical. The macro vs micro level are just two different ways of describing the very same thing. I understand that you are a super duper skeptic that is perfectly willing to doubt the law of identity and I have no problem with that. The only claim I was making was that Kane was wrong when he said that there is nothing incoherent about something behaving like water at the micro level but not at the macro level. I think there is something incoherent about that because it denies the law of identity. I don't see how the problem of the many has anything to with my comment. The question of which water molecules belong to a drop of water as opposed to being right next to the drop of water but not part of it is irrelevant. As long as an identity is stipulated between a certain group of molecules and a certain drop of water then the collective micro activity of those molecules should be no different than the macro activity.

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

I agree that there is no sharp distinction between micro and macro properties, but I don't think anything I say depends on there being a sharp distinction there. Why should I accept that identity claim? It seems to me that those things are not identical. Of course, that's only how things seem to me; I could be wrong about this.

@juliohernandez3509

Жыл бұрын

@@KaneB I think that a composite object is by definition identical to the objects it is made up of. This isn't a brute fact. Unless you think the law of identity is a brute fact. If that's the case then the way the composite object behaves is identical to how the collection of objects it is made of behaves. The only way to deny this is to reject the stipulated identity or to invoke strong emergence. I am fine with these two possibilities. But it is still incorrect to say that a macro structure might behave differently from the collection of it's micro structures. If it is behaving differently then the identity between the macro and micro is false or there are Strong emergent laws.

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

@@juliohernandez3509 I'm granting that water is in fact composed of H2O. Then I'm asking why it is that the states of H2O manifest as liquidity. What I'm suggesting is that there could be the same states of H2O without liquidity, that these underlying physical states could manifest as some other property. To say that there is no problem because water is identical to H2O seems question-begging in this context, no? Compare the hard problem of consciousness. Grant that conscious minds are in fact realised by physical brains. But now why is it that those brain states manifest as consciousness? It seems that there could be those same brain states without consciousness. Now there may be problems with this line of reasoning; obviously there are plenty of objections to the idea that there is really any problem here. But just to insist that there isn't a problem because consciousness is identical to brain states would be question-begging.

Isnt there a hard problem of nothing?

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

I think so, yes. Good luck coming up with a scientific model that provides a full explanation of e.g. why there is nothing rather than something. (I'm being serious; I think that the proposition "there is nothing at all" is a legitimate and interesting way of making reality. So I might be interested in explaining why there is nothing. I doubt science will be particularly helpful here.)

@thedddh

Жыл бұрын

@@KaneB You should. Seems like the scieneces (physics) shy away from the question about nothing, they rather talk about something, wich is understandable. But i do like the metaphysical question of what was before the big bang, has there always been a infite something, or where there always a infite nothing, how could there always be something, or how could something emerge out of nothing.

What would a satisfactory answer to the hard problem of consciousness look like? What is even being asked? It's not just a hard question to answer, it's one that's impossible to answer, because those who ask the question reject all possible answers. It's a nonsensical question with no answer. Language allows us to ask nonsensical questions that disguise themselves as something deep. Trying to answer it is a waste of time and effort. Instead, find a way to ask the question such that it makes sense.

@lilemont9302

2 ай бұрын

It wouldn't be a hard problem if the appropriate form was clear. What is the reason to think the question doesn't make sense? Also, pardon my humility, but I have a feeling that we are not even close to proposing all possible answers.

The thing with physicalism is it tries as hard as it can to fit a square peg in a round hole and can never get the desired result. But we have a the round peg of panpsychism that says experience is ever present in the physical world. In all honesty this is just simpler than neurons firing and magically somehow the color white metaphysically just pops into existence. Also consciousness is not the same as physical cause and effect because we filter cause and effect through consciousness.

@user-qm4ev6jb7d

Жыл бұрын

Hey, I can play this game too! People are constantly failing to fit this concept of "qualia" into the hole of empirical reality, resulting is different complicated theories of qualia, inconsistent with each other and sometimes with themselves. Isn't it time to abandon these pointless attempts and accept the OBVIOUS conclusion that qualia don't exist? Besides, eliminativism is already pretty well developed by people like Dennett - and it's so effective at cleaning out the garbage concepts that cause all the problems!

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

I'm sympathetic to panpsychism but I'm not convinced it solves the hard problem. It seems like any panpsychist explanation will leave us with a question such as: Why is it the case that particular lower-level phenomenal states manifest as a given higher-level consciousness? I can tell a story of a creature that is composed of identical underlying phenomenal states to me, but that has no higher-level experience. This isn't obviously incoherent. Of course, if we make consciousness fundamental, then there's no hard problem of consciousness in itself, but there's still a hard problem of higher-level experience.

@johnfowler3125

Жыл бұрын

@@user-qm4ev6jb7d Lol. Sure dude.

@johnfowler3125

Жыл бұрын

@@KaneB There would be no “why” panpsychism is true beyond the reasoning we give to any other physical law. It’s mostly to improve the paradigm we already have that doesn’t include language that encompasses all phenomena we currently know of.

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

@@johnfowler3125 I'm not sure I follow. The question isn't "why is panpsychism true?" I'm granting that panpsychism is true, and then asking why particular lower-level states, which have phenomenal properties as the panpsychist says, constitute a higher-level consciousness.

this is just waffle.

@KaneB

Жыл бұрын

I like waffles