AMA responses

[@thefluffychild4619]

Meet you are straight up one of the most informative and smartest people in the philosophy sphere keep it up I'm a big fan

[@KaneB]

Thanks!

[@dream1430]

How do you know he’s actually smart, or even a person, he could be a 5 iq goblin with a maxed charisma stat

[@ThePowerofTower]

Your comments on employment are the most relatable things I've heard in a while! I recently moved looking for better work, but lost one of the papers I need, and this is a mood

[@justus4684]

This might be an unconventional opinion, but you are very attractive

[@KaneB]

This is obviously true.

[@justus4684]

@@KaneB 😂

[@confrontingcapital5080]

@@KaneB stance independently true, even

[@Gregoryzaniz]

@@confrontingcapital5080 hi mouthy

[@justus4684]

@@JustADudeGamer 😂🤣

[@blankname5177]

Thank you good sir!! Appreciate the time you put in to make the time stamp.

[@braden_m]

I don’t know if you respond to comments on older videos but I very much love you Kane. Thank you for inadvertently taking part in our parasocial relationship - it’s wonderful ❤️

[@KaneB]

I appreciate it! Great to hear you like the videos!

[@broganoxford7549]

Great video! I love your channel. I appreciate your dedication to philosophical banter. Talking for 5 hours straight is no easy task.

[@DrexisEbon]

3:15:00 Yeah, you can't know anything is absolutely true, you can merely give good reason to believe something is likely to be absolutely true. It's a big question to try to answer in an AMA.

[@Bubba17644]

Thanks for responding to my questions! I find your view about "art" as an excuse term pretty interesting. Also, the term "seriousness" isn't my invention or anything; Overgaard et al. use it in their intro to metaphilosophy when discussing philosophical virtues (I forget the exact chapter, but it's in the context of comparing Socrates with the sophists). And yeah, when you talked about the constructivist way of understanding gender, that was more or less what I had in mind (and also semantic externalism) when asking about your views on FPA of gender identification.

[@justus4684]

8:25 Come on 😢 You scared me

[@Wherrimy]

Funniest shit I've seen in a couple hours

[@braden_m]

I was driving, just got onto the highway, and nearly fucking died cuz Kane never does that shit and I didn’t have the screen to give me the context clues necessary to understand what was going on lol

[@hahahalol-hf1gb]

thanks. I've been reading stuff about autopoiesis and perspectivism in living things as a way to generate a kind of normativity/teleology. maybe it doesn't work out the macro-level, like you could say cutting your arm off isn't "bad" per se in some moral way. but, at a cellular or metabolic level, it seems like there are things that your body tries to do, and there are helpful and harmful things that can happen to it, independent from what we think about it. maybe that's just a way of talking about it, but I'm not sure, there's something weird about it.

[@Donagni]

1:50:34 I think it's a bit ironic that you say that the pragmatist view that truth is what works is "just wrong" and that it "isn't a useful way of thinking about truth." If its unusefulness is evidence of its falsity, then doesn't that imply that truth does in fact have something to do with usefulness and workability?

[@KaneB]

I probably just didn't express myself very well there. But it's possible to hold both that truth has something to do with usefulness, and that pragmatist definitions of truth fail. If we suppose that any view which defends a theory of truth by appealing to the utility of that theory is a pragmatist view, then we could just argue that (a) specific pragmatist proposals fail and (b) various views which would standardly be classed as non-pragmatist are actually pragmatist per this definition. Or something like that.

[@Sazi_de_Afrikan]

Good thing that's not what pragmatists other than James or Rorty believe

[@KaneB]

@@Sazi_de_Afrikan Yeah, I do mention in the video that I've been told by plenty of people that my objection to pragmatism really only applies to a few pragmatists. In which case, maybe I just am a pragmatist. I tend to take a pragmatist line on a lot of topics, and the only major problem I have pragmatism is the collapse or obscuring of the success/truth distinction -- so if most pragmatists don't do that, then pragmatism is fine with me.

[@Sazi_de_Afrikan]

@@KaneB Pragmatists (John Capps' article on the SEP and his papers a common sense pragmatist theory of truth), try to explicate what truth "means". We could place that in the realm of "epistemic" and "semantic" theories of truth. Put another way, pragmatists are trying to "operationalize" or put to work the more classical notion of correspondence. In fact, the main debate between Russell and Dewey (which pushed Russell to write on Truth in the 40s) was about what is meant "on the ground" when conditions for the utterance of truth is present. I guess we could say that pragmatists want to combine epistemic criteria with the semantic criteria while defanging the maw of more metaphysical theses.

[@Donagni]

@@KaneB My comment was fairly glib and partially in jest. To give it a more serious go, I think that the pragmatists are pretty clever about truth in ways that often go unnoticed. If someone argues that their views fail, they'll usually argue that it fails to account for some phenomena or plausible intuition. But the pragmatist can always simply reply that that is itself a matter of workability. If we can "prove" that truth isn't just about workability, then that proof will be a demonstration that the pragmatist definition of truth doesn't work! This might smack of circularity, but the pragmatist reply would be that certain (but not all) circularities work. The comment below suggests that other pragmatists don't have this view of truth as what works, but there are arguments to be made that in reality the other pragmatists are simply more clear. James was pretty sloppy with his language and just didn't give pragmatism (even his own version of it) a good representation. In any case I think it's a pretty nuanced issue that usually doesn't get its proper due. The pragmatist theory of truth is pretty stubborn to criticism in light of the fact that showing that their theory "fails" or "doesn't work" can never actually disprove their theory.

[@DrexisEbon]

I'd be interested in seeing you do a video attempting to prove that the liars paradox "this sentence is false" may be a linguistic paradox, but it not an example of an actual paradoxical being existing within reality as a thought is not the physical entity that it mentally models beyond the synaptic form which is not paradoxical in any functional way.

[@jmike2039]

Ahhhhh ghosts 😆

[@dominiks5068]

you talking about your non-existent dating life is one of the funniest parts of this channel lol

[@jiposbernoullic.6887]

Where do you get your questions for AMAs?

[@KaneB]

I make a video asking people to leave questions in the comments. I do an AMA three times per year.

[@prenuptials5925]

in response to your question to me, yes it was a troll question 😂 i thought it'd keep the tradition alive of asking the one-box vs two-box question

[@KaneB]

Cool! My bold conjecture that two-boxers are just fucking me now has a confirmed novel prediction!

[@adamkarlovsky6015]

Re: suicide, have you considered coherent extrapolated volition? and what about having multiple goals and values that conflict with each other, why privilege ceasing to exist over others?

[@armanrasouli2779]

I appreciate it so much🙏🏼❤️

[@HumaneHancock]

Regarding my thought experiment with the pig and the mild headache: Just because in the hypothetical scenario, nobody finds out about what you do, that doesn’t mean that in reality you can’t honestly answer the question with what you would do. It might have been interesting to hear how you think people finding out would influence your decision. Anyway, I think you’re wrong that in order to engage with the hypothetical properly, you can’t tell us the answer. I guess you have other reasons for dodging the question. Thanks for the video anyway, I enjoyed many of your responses to other questions and I really like your channel.

[@KaneB]

I was making a joke. Why did I choose to make a joke? Because (a) I've had questions related to this tons of times, *including from you*, and (b) I know, based on questions you have asked me in the past, that you're perfectly well aware of my view on the moral status of animals. For anybody seeing this comment who isn't aware, I explain my views in this video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/r37Qo2iGbbx_m9k -- the TL;DW is that I take animals to have no moral status. So in all the hypothetical scenarios of the kind described by Humane Hancock, I would, obviously, press the button that imposes pain on the animal... unless the consequence for the human is minor enough that I might feel mischievous pleasure from pressing that instead. Since I'm somewhat tickled by the idea of somebody getting a random, mild 20 headache, I might press that button. Moreover, you might notice that despite starting with a joke, I do actually say all of this in this video as well! (See 2:42:40)

[@HumaneHancock]

@@KaneB Ah okay, sorry I didn’t realise you were joking. Thanks for the response!

[@norabelrose198]

8:24 jesus fucking christ kane

[@truthseeker2275]

Instead of thinking of morality as a 'platonic' type object that cannot 'exist' rather think of it as a process that produces outcomes, in that way a process can exist without a corresponding object...if everything is energy do any objects really exist? or do we just mislabel processes as objects.

[@avaevathornton9851]

Absolute mad lad!

[@davidzuilhof2272]

Thanks for answering my questions!!! Questions for next AMA (unless you wanne become more active in the discord or respond in comments or just do an interview for your channel): Q0.0: how do you respond to the frictionless spinning in the void counterargument by Sellars(or by McDowell sry im bad with names) against coherentism? Seems like it would apply as well to your merging of voluntarist epistemology and coherentism position. Q0.1: Volunarist epistemology seems like a very bad conceptual analysis of how we use 'rational believe', why don't you see this as a big enough problem? Q0.2: Is volunarist epistemology compatible with scepticism? With which forms of scepticism would it be compatible and with which ones not? Q0.3: do I understand you correctly if I say that you just don't believe in justification as some kind of anti-luck maker of true beliefs? Because luck is something you find acceptable in rational belief? Q0.4: You mention that it's rational to believe things because you are contrarian, but don't we mean by rational to maximise true beliefs/minimise false ones? Doesn't that "goal" of epistemology go against volunarist epistemology? → is it rational to be a contemporary flat-earth theorist if you do it to be contrarian? ~sry of reminding you of the thing I will not mention again, to prevent further reminding ~ Q1.0: What is the difference between observables and unobservables? Isn't that a pretty vague line? How does the scientific anti-realist deal with this? Q2.0: Bas van Fraassen is a Christian, you like much of his work, have you considered what he has said on Christianity seriously as well? Q2.1: Bas van Fraassen thinks questions of philosophy of mind have to deal with Godel's incompleteness theorem, because it's me who is asking about me, aka there is some kind of self-reference which causes problems in naive set theory or something like that, anyway, what do you think of applying Godel's incompleteness theorem to philosophy in general and do you think it's useful in philosophy of mind in the way Van Fraassen talks about it? Q3.0: The meaning verification principle or whatever its actual name is, is about applying the logical positivist definition of meaningfulness (only meaningful if it can be verified or is analytical) . If you apply it to itself then it tells you that it's meaningless, this can be done with some philosophical positions (Bacon's inductive method applied to how he comes about his inductive method is another example) , do you think these types of arguments work or is there something wrong with them? How does this relate to Godel's incompleteness theorem (is this type of self-reference also discussed in Godel's incompleteness theorem?) Q4.0: In response to your comments on sensitivity, I wanted to ask you what you think about a contextualist sensitivity condition? Or maybe alternatively a ‘mean sensitivity condition’, where we add 1 if you still believe it even though it is false in that possible world and add 0 if you don’t believe it anymore and then divide through all the amount of possible worlds you evaluated and then that number tells you how sensitive your belief is, you could say that the number and types or worlds needed is contextually determined or you could say it has to be infinite kinda depends on the type of philosopher you wanne be I guess, anyway, would any of those type of new sensitivity conditions answer your objections? Q4.1: What do you think about virtue epistemology? Does it answer the Gettier problem? Q4.2: Is there a fact of the matter about a specified counterfactual? Like the counterfactual in which one electron is in a slightly different position in your body or whatever? Q5.0: In Buddhism as a philosophical tradition (Theravāda Buddhism, Mahāyāna Buddhism, Zen Buddhism, etc (not the religion Buddhism)) a central concept is conventional truth (in contrast with ultimate truth), we conventionally have a self, but ultimately we don’t, is this analogous to your constructivist views on the self? (I would link a wiki article on the two truths doctrine, but scared of getting deleted) Q5.1: What do you think of the 3rd noble truth? You seem to accept that life is unsatisfactoriness/suffering (1) and that the cause of this suffering is desire (2) in your response in the Q and A, so what about the 3th: if one stops desiring/wanting things to be different than they currently are, one stops being in this constant state of unsatisfactoriness/suffering/Dukkha? Q5.2: I don’t understand your explanation of there not being thoughts and emotions in the same way as there isn’t a self. Why are mental impressions constructed by us? What does it mean to be constructivist about inner mental states? Q6.0: What is belief? Do you like Hume's analysis of beliefs in the treatise? Q7.0: Is there a distinction between literature and philosophy(having Satre and Camus in mind)? If so, what is it? What about theology and philosophy(having philosophy of religion in mind)? What about science and philosophy (experimental philosophy in mind) ?

[@TheLonelyPanther]

Great 👍

[@posthuman3411]

Thank you very much!

[@arkamukhoty1491]

Thank you for the answer!

[@aniketsharma5870]

Thank you, sir. Your response is valuable.

[@jacklessa9729]

When you believe suffering is not bad(a believe), is harder to look to other people suffering and care(emotion) , feel sad about it and wanting to help them(a Desire) . When you believe suffering is bad, is easier (but not always motivational) to care, feel sad about and wanting to help them. A believe cause a feeling, the feeling cause the desire, the desire cause the action. But all begins with the believe that suffering is bad and we have reasons to evoid it.

[@braden_m]

I mean maybe. Causal relationships are always dubious though, and it could always be the opposite (which is what I suspect), or something else entirely. And also this assumes the choice of belief, which is also rather dubious. But you could be right, I just don’t think it’s obvious

[@jacklessa9729]

@@braden_m yes, actually I think the opposite is true. When people feel sad about others sadness they have motivation to help. When they don't, they have less or no motivation to help. Believe the suffering is bad is a reason to be sad about others suffering, but is not the only one. Maybe you sad about others suffering not only because is bad, but because you love this person, or because is a hard worker, or a unlucky person... I don't think is obvious, I just thinking how could a believe create motivation

[@braden_m]

@@jacklessa9729 yeah I might’ve misunderstood idk. Thanks for trying to help clear it up for me!

[@antennastoheaven]

5 HOURS, WOW

[@WalRUs1216]

I'm surprised about your taste in music. I thought you would be a radiohead fan :P

[@KaneB]

Not really. I like them well enough, but they've never been among my favourites.

[@DeadEndFrog]

You have to have a phd. in Peterson to be able to criticize him, but he doesn't have to have a phd. in any of the fields he talks about :^)

[@svenluebke]

Have you just deleted my comment? If yes: why though - was it simply too long?

[@KaneB]

I didn't delete it. KZbin regularly removes comments automatically, for reasons that are often mysterious to me. If your comment contained a link, that might be why. But it can be anything really. Sometimes my own comments on my channel get removed.

[@svenluebke]

@@KaneB @Kane B okay then that's good to hear :D yeah makes sense. I was not adding a link and was very polite, but it was very long. Can i write you an email? It's about the question regarding reductionism and constructivism.

[@KaneB]

@@svenluebke sure

[@suddenuprising]

it sounds like you're doing continental philosophy when you talk about how your life is bad.

[@braden_m]

It sounds like you’re doing analytical philosophy when you use language

[@suddenuprising]

@@braden_m is philosophical pessimism more closely associated with continental philosophy or analytical philosophy?

[@braden_m]

@@suddenuprising is badness more closely associated with continental philosophy or analytical philosophy? (Read: I was joking. Also the divide seems largely artificial, especially now)

[@suddenuprising]

@@braden_m My bad, I do have a habit of taking things too seriously.

[@braden_m]

@@suddenuprising no it’s okay. I actually feel bad because the first one was really snarky and kind of mean. Like it was a joke, but a joke made to sort of point out that maybe your reasoning could work the other way, in a sort of reductio ig. But even though such a thing isn’t bad in itself, I did it kind of mean spiritedly and then was all like “it was just a joke.” Which it was. But that wasn’t all it was. So sorry for being a snarky asshole is what I’m trying to say

[@reuelmcintosh1589]

let the people pay you for your philosophical services Kane.

[@ferdia748]

are you growing the neckbeard back

[@shm1472]

I don't know why I can't send comments to your videos. I sent a question but it wasn't sent. (Edit: It seems this one is being sent successfully. So I will ask some question here.) Q: You are a scientific anti-realist, so you shouldn't believe in the arguments in your video "Evolutionary Debunking Arguments". After all, you don't believe the Evolution Theory to be actually true. Am I right? If not, how is your scientific anti-realism different to the scientific realism? Am I mistaken about the meaning of "scientific anti-realism"?

[@KaneB]

First, I'd prefer not to put it in quite those terms -- that evolutionary theory is not true. Yes, I'm an antirealist, but I do take it that our best science delivers correct descriptions of entities and processes in the observable world. In many cases, we can literally observe evolution. I outline what an instrumentalist take on evolutionary theory looks like in this video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/qnfCfWuvjpKYoa8 The TL;DW on this is that in my view, antirealism is compatible with taking specific selective models of biological populations to provide true descriptions of the development of those populations. Indeed, it's hard to see how any plausible antirealism could avoid this, unless we're just going for universal skepticism. Also, with respect to evolutionary debunking arguments, it can sometimes be enough, in order to undermine justification for belief, to provide plausible alternative scenarios for how the belief arose. Consider the example I gave at the beginning of the video about the ethnographer inventing stories about the tribe. Well, if you come to believe that this is what took place, it looks like the justification for your beliefs about the tribe has been undermined. But similarly, if you come to suspend judgment about whether the ethnographer visited the tribe or just invented the stories, it looks like this undermines justification as well.

[@shm1472]

@@KaneB Thanks for the response. Kyle Stanford (as an instrumentalist) explicitly states that we don't have to believe 'humans and spiders have a common ancestor', since the postulate (the common ancestor) is too far back in time for us to observe it directly. I don't endorse his position, but I was curious to know your position on the issue, since you both identify as instrumentalists (or anti-realists) (It seems that your versions of anti-realism are substantially different).

[@Eta_Carinae__]

Lmao rip. Thanks for the answers!

[@TheNaturalLawInstitute]

KANEB: RE: Moral Realism. QUESTION. What if any fault is there is this reasoning: PROPOSITION: (a) There are no conditions under which we cannot explain human choices as rational given knowledge, in time. (b) likewise, there are no conditions under which we cannot determine choices would be irrational. (c) We can determine whether a choice between individuals is irrational if it violates the tests of productive, exhaustively informed, warrantied, voluntary destruction, harm, consumption, or transfer, of demonstrated interests, free of imposition of costs upon the demonstrated interests of others by externality. (d) Human groups evolved different group evolutionary strategies given geography, resources, means of production, competitors, demographics, and initial institution (state, religion, law), (e) This group strategy seeks to maintain reciprocity within the limits of proportionality given those group evolutionary and institutional constraints. (f) as such there are no conditions under which we cannot determine immorality. (g) anything that we cannot determine qualifies as immoral, is either immoral or moral. Morality is explicable. Morality consists of Reciprocity within the limits of proportionality. The conditions of reciprocity within the limits of proportionality vary given group differences in evolutionary strategy. We can find no extant or past conditions where this claim is false. THEREFORE morality is objective.

[@KaneB]

Some initial reactions: I don't understand claims (a) and (b); I think claim (c) involves a conception of rationality that I would reject; I don't know how claim (f) follows from anything that comes before.

[@TheNaturalLawInstitute]

Then clarifying (c) would explain (a) and (b), and why (f) follows. If you would tolerate a video chat at your discretion it'd be interesting to hear your objections. Though if I recall you don't engage in discourse often? -cheers

[@KaneB]

@@TheNaturalLawInstitute I'm a bit busy at the moment but if you want to set something up send me an email (in channel description)

[@pedroparamo4938]

Bro, just trim hair a little bit and you are good to go on dates.

[@KaneB]

Tried that already. It's bullshit.

[@pedroparamo4938]

@@KaneBWell, I did not say it's a sufficient condition, but it's a necessary one.

[@KaneB]

@@pedroparamo4938 You actually did say it was sufficient. Anyway, every piece of dating advice I've ever received has been total bullshit. My current view is that with respect to dating, nobody knows what the fuck they're talking about. And I'm not interested in advice from people who don't know what they're talking about.

[@pedroparamo4938]

@@KaneB Okay, best wishes. Did not mean to lecture or frustrate you in any way. p.s. You are right, I did say it was sufficient, my bad.

[@KaneB]

@@pedroparamo4938 No problem; I might have come across as more testy in that previous reply than I intended. Sorry about that!

[@NickTSMINW]

BORING

[@KaneB]

haters gonna hate ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[@NickTSMINW]

@@KaneB But, if we suppose that, as a reporter, you can't affect the outcome or make interventions, then you could use the experience to better understand your current ethics (and even become more resolute in them).

[@KaneB]

@@NickTSMINW I don't think that subjecting myself to miserable experiences is an effective means of achieving that, and even if it were, the benefits wouldn't be worth the cost.

[@braden_m]

Honestly this is my favorite type of video I don’t understand you

[@NickTSMINW]

@@braden_m Was talking about the answer to my question