Noam Chomsky - Matter and Mind

[@landonech]

This deserves vastly more views

[@bobs182]

This is the first video of Chomsky's that I didn't understand. I think Chomsky has a limited audience due to most people not being intellectually inclined.

[@pietersteenkamp5241]

@@bobs182 I think he has a limited audience because he is very intelligent and has done the leg work. The fault isn't so much with our collectively intellectual inclinations but with how little time and energy we can allocate it after meeting out basic survival commitments. Chomsky also doesn't try to be pursued as he doesn't believe that to be wise or correct.

[@pietersteenkamp5241]

@@bobs182 I must admit this really is one of the most interesting things i have seen by him and as far as i can tell i am understanding it which of course may not mean much!. I think he explained it better than i have seen others try so much for not being persuasive.

[@bobs182]

@@pietersteenkamp5241 I don't think that most people think in terms of objective truth but rather in terms of what is means to them. Most people want to prescribe the world rather than describe the world.

[@Baron-nv1ez]

It requires a lot of curiosity and intellectual pursuit to understand Noam Chomsky's material, most people don't have the inclination or patience to take the time to learn and discover the meaning behind his work.

[@tookie36]

That’s what I was sayin

[@brendawilliams8062]

Thankyou for these experiences with such a Giat

[@brendawilliams8062]

Giant

[@jaredprince4772]

That we can't not see something that is itself an illusion is true only if we do not avail ourselves of tools that help us see past the illusions. It is a fairly simple tool that we can use to see the moon at different angles above the horizon as the same relative size. It is a fairly simple cognitive tool that allows us to see the sunrise/sunset as the earth rotating on its axis. As an example, I have been in a vehicle that I either thought was moving that was not or that I thought was not moving that was moving and getting a queazy feeling. The problem was with seeing an adjacent vehicle that appeared to be moving relative to the one I was in but not seeing any stationary object as a reference. The solution is to refocus on such a stationary object. Both physical and purely cognitive tools are available to us to make more sense of the world than we can without them.

[@stevenhetzel6483]

What.

[@msimp0108]

“making more sense of the world” does not dispel the illusion, no matter how many cognitive tools you use or how many different relative views you make. In order to dispel the illusion it would be necessary to see the object in question from every point of view in space and time. If that were possible, the resulting impression would not bear any likeness to any one of the points of view individually. POV, in fact, is the source of the illusion. You are in your own point-of-view world that you are creating from whatever the actual world is.

[@jaredprince4772]

@@msimp0108 There is ample evidence that it does dispel the illusion. The fact that many can see the same table from their own perspective and still recognize that it's a table is evidence of this fact. While it's true that certain perspectives may make an object difficult to identify similarly to the identification others have made from their perspectives simply makes obvious the necessity of using the tools available for a better identification. POV is, in fact, the tool for dispelling the illusion. Social interactions help us see other points of view. Living in one's own world without social interactions facilitates the perception of illusions. The actual world...now that's another matter. We can perceive no more than a small portion of the actual world, and certainly not the world in its entirety, or even a portion of the world in its entirety. That, however, is hardly an illusion. It's merely a bad assumption that anyone might perceive a thing in its entirety.

[@jaredprince4772]

We can study many aspects of the world. I can see the problem with referring to them as physical or material aspects of the world, but we don't have to. Liquids, solids and gases are states. As such, they exhibit certain properties distinct from other states. If what we wrongly think of as physical or material are fields or waves, we can still study those fields or waves.

[@GabrielWard2001]

Does anyone know where the full lecture can be found / what it is ? It seems like it's some sort of introduction to philosophy, which would be very interesting to listen to in full, if so.

[@thejackbancroft7336]

kzbin.info/www/bejne/iWTKd5SEjtGoeLM You can sometimes find these in the description of these shorter videos

[@vishalbanshal6857]

kzbin.info/aero/PLeXn81KloPghNpYVTa7vcCI7igXSzWu3D

[@khuzaimahhaleem4994]

Yes this is a 9 part lecture series which can be found here kzbin.info/aero/PLeXn81KloPghNpYVTa7vcCI7igXSzWu3D&si=yYfDsZdK05h5YwHl

[@khuzaimahhaleem4994]

I really hope you do watch it. It's really amazing

[@francisyurisich694]

Thurgeson

[@jimacht8]

Can someone clarify what he means when he starts talking about how "bodies don't exist" and "matter doesn't exist"? Is he inducing that from to the realization that we can't trust any intuition we have about the physical world, or how all our observations and conclusions are restricted by us being organisms/minds contained in subjective physical shells so we can't actually conceptualize anything, or both? Seems like a pretty rigid point of view but I can respect it. Great talk either way

[@theblackdeath4398]

What he means by "bodies don't exist"/"matter doesn't exist" isn't literally that what we call matter/bodies don't exist, but the concepts that we assign to them don't exist. We have to remember here that the basis of physics in the Scientific Revolution was mechanical philosophy, whose core doctrine was that the world worked like a machine, i.e. all things which happens or exist are made up of things which physically contact each other. The physics derived from this belief that all things happen because of contact between "machine parts" of the world came to be known as contact mechanics. However, eventually that theory had a very rude awakening: there are things you simply could not explain with the idea of contact mechanics, such as gravity (which is why Newton's contemporaries dismissed his idea of gravity as "reintroducing occult forces"), attraction and repulsion at a distance, etc. In another talk of his, he quoted Bertrand Russell's introduction to a book by Friedrich Lange on the History of 19th Century Materialism, which explains that today we have become so accustomed to the idea of things interacting with each at a distance that we don't recognize how unintelligible that is to us anymore. Because this old idea of physicality, and thus "matter" and "bodies," was dismissed by Newton, "matter" and "bodies" no longer exist as concepts, and we humans can only now study the world in terms of aspects (the chemical aspect, the phenomenological aspect, the light aspect, etc.).

[@johndamo9421]

Philo student, he answered my emails (had similar questions) and my personal thoughts. Chomsky said there is no such thing as physical. The word physical itself is a misnomer/misunderstanding...a fundamentally bogus term. A deep indoctrination from birth and how the mind grasped onto learning. Such as the sophisticated machine you are as a homo sapien primate, your heart a pump, your brain RAM,CPU, storage drive, your skeleton a frame, your ears sensory hardware, your eyes sensory hardware etc. You are processing information from the light waves entering your eyes, sound waves entering your ears just like other machines like a router processing radio waves on the information electromagnetic spectrum. The router machine counts in binary the homo sapien machine in base 10. When you stop processing information you break down into carbon,iron, hydrogen,oxygen, etc. that is you are dead. Just as a router breaks down into the elements also. Definition to living matter being able to input information even if through impulses. Mr. Chomsky also mentioned there are hard limits to human understanding because the hardware, the brain, cannot process further just like there are hard limits to a literal CPU from processing information. TLDR; No such thing as physical. You are a sophisticated piece of machinery/technology. There are hard limits to human understanding with our current DNA. Also he labeled "interesting" the concept of living in an extremely complex coded simulation, that being the reality. It gets more complex the deep you look as with everything.

[@DirtBlockGames]

@@johndamo9421 I'm not sure I understand this. Isn't 'You are a sophisticated piece of machinery/technology' entirely compatible with you being physical? Could you explain? I'd really appreciate it

[@johndamo9421]

@@DirtBlockGames What is the definition of the word physical? Which is what you are asking. My understanding is that it ultimately comes down to just information/data objectively or relatively coded. The word physical is an erroneous/subjectively thought out word. Reality is a massive video game where mathematics is the code. Geometry being the graphics as an example. Your facial countures are a collection of defined shapes in unison. If computer science is the most logical science currently discovered and we live in a logical reality then computer science can explain reality better than any other science. What is referred to as biological life is actually a family of technological devices. Homo sapien, speaking objectively without bias even if it sounds silly, is a device when you see what is in front of your eyes. It has a motherboard which is called the "skeleton" as the foundation of the device, video cameras for lightwave processing -the "eyes" , microphones for sound wave processing -the "ears", short term memory also known as RAM, long term memory known as drive storage, and a CPU/GPU inside the entire "Brain". etc. If you see anything from a bird to a whale or a raccoon or a homo sapien you are looking at somewhat sophisticated technology from what we currently have, robots, to use a better term devices. These devices are processing massive amounts of data with software processes in the background or daemons and processes in everyday life in the foreground both combined are "consciousness". What appears physical turns out to be objectively coded information. Even one pixel unit of reality takes a considerable amount of bytes of data. I'm sure there is a mathematical formula for it. Taking a photo with your smartphone is a very fascinating thing. So TLDR the word physical is a subjective misunderstanding..there is no such thing as physical..we are objectively coded hardware processing information with relative coded software. What is information? seems like the circular-like calculation of a change somewhere in the universe.

[@foodchewer]

​@@johndamo9421 I just want to comment to say that I find your "video game" and coding metaphors really reductive and deflationary. Yes, you could say this boils down to a difference in semantics (or a difference in our "relative coded software" as you might put it), but I think this language does not do justice to the metaphysics and appearance of reality, which are truly awe-inspiring and mysterious. Why not just go with what various schools of world religions like Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, and Hinduism have suspected and written about for thousands of years, that we are phenomena arising in the divine mind sustaining reality? Why not just talk in the language of metaphysical idealism? Is it that much crazier than assuming reality as we know it is some kind of simulation?

[@ar-bitross6447]

@10:33

[@tenzinsoepa7648]

24:33

[@EuDouArteHipHopArtCulture21]

thank you

[@Cassus123456]

Most probably there is no matter - only waves

[@rasmushastbacka5884]

How do you define matter?

[@Antonio-cr2ix]

​@@rasmushastbacka5884 potential energy so waves in electromagnetic field

[@brendawilliams8062]

Most of the curios will fight a good fight and then come back to the smarter ones who have the sense

[@waterspider599]

Ooo

[@ankithooda1536]

If we fully understand nature. Iet us assume we totally understand human nature. from this assumption, deduction can be made that human nature is deterministic. It would mean we are determined to determine our nature or matter trying to find its essence. It seems like a weird loop. There are some lines in thus spake Zarathustra, where he say to a teen. Your soul wants liberation. It is not liberated yet. It still seeketh liberation. It seems it is same with matter. As they say, knowing truth is path to liberation. That's what matter is trying to do.

[@Evilanious]

I don't think this a particularly good explanation of Descartes views, nor of the history of science/natural philosophy, nor of the philosophy of mind. While Descartes' views on philosophy of mind and epistemology should not be studied in isolation of his scientific views (excepting that for didactic reasons you have to start somewhere and those are the parts that are most relevant still) the idea that the meditations is not important is just silly and Chomsky would have done well to read it better. Descartes saw its arguments as the basis of his scientific views. He says so in letters and some of his contemporaries found it a convincing introduction to the rest of his views. This is why most of the points from the meditations are repeated in the early parts of his more scientific magnum opus, the principles of philosophy. The skeptical arguments therein are not just weird epistemology on the periphery of Descartes thought, they are supposed to accustom the reader to the idea of the difference between experience and the cause of experience. This is important to Descartes because he believes firmly in what later would be called 'secondary qualities', things in experience that don't resemble their physical causes (this phrasing is quite explicit in Le Monde which Chomsky seems to favor). This is because one of the core parts of his philosophy/mechanics was the idea that colors, sounds, etc where all experiences. The physical counterparts of these experiences where uncolored particles (corpuscules) in motion. It is the disconnect between our colored, pain-feeling, hearing mind and the physical world which has none of those qualities but only extension that motivated Descartes' dualism. For that reason I also think the idea that Descartes' views are common sense is strongly misleading. Perhaps his idea of merely local causality is common sense (it is still defended by some modern physicists actually, Einsteins views are more favorable to locality than Newtons apparently) but his rather thorough defense of secondary qualities is certainly not and is certainly better credited to Descartes or Locke than to Newton which Chomsky ends up more or less implying. His claim that Newton made the machine more ghostly is even more off base. Non-locality does not at all explain secondary qualities, free will or other thorny issues in the philosophy of mind. Lastly his challenge that we can't explain what matter is, is in some trouble if you for example still believe in secondary properties and/or, which Chomsky even seems to do. Most of the rest of the world seems to be deterministic or possibly probabilistic and seems to not include by definition, those secondary properties (this might not exactly characterize matter but it does characterize the mind as suspiciously unique). That makes it strange that free will or secondary properties could even exist which is why the likes of the Churchlands might want to deny that they do. I do somewhat agree that a lot of criticisms and ridiculing of Descartes' philosophy of mind is both somewhat off base and a bit cheap and easy and at the very least woefully unoriginal. When Princess Elizabeth pointed out to Descartes that he had an interaction problem in his philosophy it was a sharp point, but when twentieth or twenty-first century philosophers try to reinvent that wheel I too roll my eyes a little.

[@Artflow1977]

Yeah you're inferring too much.

[@lilmane1070]

BOO BOO CLAP

[@dereklondon9404]

Chomsky’s great! I don’t agree with him on everything, but he is definitely one of the more subtle and listenable atheists around.

[@rasmushastbacka5884]

He is not an atheist

[@dereklondon9404]

@@rasmushastbacka5884 lol uh, last I checked he is. If you have a clip proving otherwise, I’m all ears.

[@rasmushastbacka5884]

@@dereklondon9404 When he has been asked if he is agnostic, atheist or have a faith in God, he has replied that he doesn't understand what he is supposed to believe in or not believe in.

[@dereklondon9404]

@@rasmushastbacka5884 That’s an interesting response. I wasn’t aware, thank you. His statements do seem to reflect an absence of belief in the supernatural, so he still falls under the atheist banner, although, atheism does tend to come with a bit of extra baggage he cleverly sidesteps with such an answer.

[@rasmushastbacka5884]

@@dereklondon9404 Well perhaps you could call it atheism. But atheists usually appear to understand the God claim and then say they are not convinced of the claim. Chomsky is explicit that he doesn't understand it.

[@hughesunworshipper5118]

Hey guys check out - Jesus never existed- KZbin channel be there

[@monikaherath7505]

It's a nonsequitur to say that just because the mechanical philosophy was discarded, there is no matte or notion of a physical. He goes way off. He seems to be unduly influenced by certain archaic ramblings of philosophers. An example of how an exceptionally intelligent man can have totally bizarre opinions, almost akin to religious indoctrination,

[@workingTchr]

Chomsky meanders around in a disconnected way dropping little bombs like "but that's wrong" and "nobody reads those parts of Descartes" and then without a break moves on to something else. It's almost word salad. He's not trying to explain matter and mind or anything else as much as he's trying to show that there's some important truth at work here that has eluded others. That's the only real takeaway. The talk is so scattered that we never find out what that truth is. All we know for sure is that Chomsky is onto it.

[@declinescore]

I think he trying to convey that science is searching for an answer (or answers) that continually elude it. All the while it poses theories that are ultimately meaningless (or just plain wrong) as the foundation is based on truths and assumptions that it can not change, namely that the world is made of physical material, whatever that means.

[@workingTchr]

@@declinescore Before I knew Chomsky was political, I took a philosophy of language class circa 1983 and chose, for some reason, Chomsky as my class topic. In my required presentation I was trying to be truthful but critical and the class kept cracking up. Later a friend in the class said he thought I was ridiculing Chomsky. Anyway, later I became Left and, of course, got into Chomsky. But putting everything together, I suspect that Chomsky wants to come across as the genius who is far ahead of everyone else and so he obfuscates deliberately. I agree with his politics, but I think the details of his thought is basically, "manufacturing image."

[@JrocTheReal]

@@workingTchrI think you are having a hard time adjusting to alternative viewpoints. Your explanation for disagreement is simply subjective in nature.

[@workingTchr]

​@@JrocTheReal "Adjusting to alternate viewpoints". Yes comrade. I will endeavor to try harder.

[@JrocTheReal]

@@workingTchr me as well.