Hope somebody finds it helpful or useful.
1.
Welcome, everyone. I’m OlavGjelsvik, I’m director
of [Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature], and we’re extremelyhappy to
haveProfessorNoamChomsky with us. Let me just say that he is themostquoted
writer in academia alive. No comparison at all with anybody else, and I think
it’s fair to say he’s numberone public intellectual in the world. So please,
ProfessorChomsky.
2.
Okay. Sound of applaud. Omitted.
3.
I’ll talk some aboutIsaacNewton, and his
contribution to the studyofmind. He’s not known for that, but I think a case
could be made that he did make a substantial, indirect, nevertheless
substantial contribution, and I’d like to explain why. There’s
a familiar view that theearlyScientificRevolution in theearlyseventeenthcentury
provided humans with limitlessexplanatorypower, and that conclusion is
establishedmorefirmly byDarwin’sdiscoveries, TheoryOfEvolution. I have
in mind specifically recent publiction, exposition of this view by two
distinguished physicsts and philosophers, DavidAlbert and DavidDeutsch, but it’s commonlyheld with many
variants. There’s a corollary. The corollary is ridiculed, what’s called by
many philosophers asMysterianism, that’s an absurd notion that there are
mysteries ofNature that humanintelligence will never be able to grasp. It’s of
some interest to notice that this belief is radicallydifferent from the
conclusions of the great figures who actuallycarried out
theearlyScientificRevolution. Alsointeresting to notice
how inconsistent it is what theTheoryOfEvolution implies and has always been understood
to imply since its origin, and I’d like to say those twotopics in turn. Start
withDavidHume’sHistoryOfEngland. Of course,
there’s a chapter on theScientificRevolution and, in
particular, the crucial role of[]Newton, who[m] he’s described as “the-greatest
and rarest genius that ever arose for the ornament and instruction of the
species.” And Hume concluded that Newton’sgreatestachievement was that,
“while he seemed to draw the veil from some of the mysteries ofNature, he
showed, at the same time, the imperfections of the mechanicalPhilo and thereby restored
the Nature’s ultimate secrets to that obscurity in which they ever did and ever
will remain.” MechanicalPhilo is of course the guidingdoctrine of theScientificRevolution.
It held that the world is a machine. The grander version of the
kind of autonomy of what stimulated the imagination of the thinkers of the
time. Much in the way programcomputers do today, they were thinking of
remarkable clocks, the artifacts constructed by skilled artisants.
Themostfamous was JacquesVaucanson, devices that imitated
digestion, animalbehaviour or the machines you can find inRoyalGarden as you
walk through that pronounced words as they were triggered, and many other such
devices. The mechanicalPhilo wanted to dispense with occult notions, neoecclasticnotions
of forms fleeting through the air, sympathies and antipathies, other such
occult ideas, and they wanted to be hardheaded and keep
to what’s grounded in commonsense and understanding. And in fact, it
provided a criterion for intelligibility fromGalilei throughNewton and deep
well beyond. It’s wellknown also that Descartes claimed to have explained the
phenomena of the material world in such mechanical terms, while alsodemonstrating
that they are not-allencompassing. Don’t reach into the domain of mind, his
view. He, therefore, postulated a new principle to account for what was beyond
the reach of mechanicalPhilo. Although this, too, is sometimesridiculed, it’s
in full accord with normal nonscientificmethod. He was working within the
framework of substancePhilo. So the new principle was second substance,
res-cogitans. And there was a scientificproblem that he and others faced [in]
determining its character and determining how it interacts with the mechanical
world, that’s mindbodyproblem cast within theScientificRevolution, and it’s a
scientificproblem. Well, it was for a time. MechanicalPhilo was shattered
byNewton, as Hume observed, and with it, went the notion of understanding of
the world that theScientificRevolution sought to attain, and the
mindbodyproblem alsodisappeared. And I don’t believe it has been resurrected
although there’s still a lot of talk about it. Those conclusions were actually prettywellunderstood
in the centuries that follow though they’ve often been forgotten today. []Locke had alreadyreached a conlcusion rather similar
toHume’s. He was exploring the nature of our ideas, and he recognised, I’ll
quote him, that, “body as far as we can conceive is
able only to strike and affect body and motion according to the utmost reach of
our ideas is able to produce nothing but motion.” These are the basic
tenets, of course, of mechanicalPhilo that yield to the conclusion that there
can be no interaction without contact, which is our commonsense and intuition. And
modern research inCognitiveScience has given a lot of prettysold grounds
forLocke’sreflection on the nature of our ideas. It’s revealed that our
commonsense and understanding (of the nature of bodies and their interactions),
as nowadays we would say, in large part geneticallydetermined, it’s verymuch as
what Locke described. Veryyoung infants can recognise a principle of causality
through contact. Not in another way. If they recognise causality, they seek a
hidden context somewhere. Those, in fact, appear to be the limits of our ideas or
our commonsense. The occultideas ofScholastics or ofNewton,
NewtonianAttraction, it goes beyond our understanding, and it’s unintelligble at
least by the criteria of theScientificRevoluvtion. Verymuch likeHume, Locke
concluded therefore that, “We remain an incurable
ignorance of what we desire to know about (matter and its effects). NoScience
of bodies is within our reach,” and he went to say we can only appeal to the “arbitrary
determination of all that lies agent, who made them to be and operate as they
do, in a manner whollyabove our weak understanding to conceive.” Actually,
Galilei had reached much thesameconclusion at
his life. He was frustrated by the failure of the mechanicalPhilo as ideal,
its failure to account for cohesion, attraction, other phonemona. [Research
required.] And he was forced to reject, I’m quoting him, “Vain presumption of understanding everything, or to
conclude, even worse, that there’s not a single effect inNature such that themostingenious
theorist can arrive at complete understanding of it.” Actually, Descartes, though moreoptimistic, had alsorecognised
the limits of our cognitivereach. Occasionally, he’s notentirelyconsistent about
this. RuleEight ofRegulae reads, “If in a series of subjects
to be examined, we come to a subject of which our intellect cannot gain good
enough intuition, we must stop there, and we must not examine the other matter
that follow, but must refrain from futile toil.” Specifically, Descartes
speculated that the workings of res-cognitans, secondsubstance, may be beyond humanunderstanding,
so he thought, quoting him again, “We may not have
intelligence enough to understand the workings of mind, in particular normal
use ofLang”, one of his main concepts. He recognised that the normal use
ofLang has what has come to be called a creative aspect. It’s every humanbeing,
but no beast or machine, has this capacity to useLang in ways that are appropriate
to situation, but notcaused by them, it’s a crucial difference, and to
formulate and express thoughts that may be entirely new, and to do so without
bound, may be incited or inclined to speak in certain ways by internal and external
circumstances, but notcompelled to do so. It’s the way his followers put the
matter, which was a mystery toDescartes and remains a mystery to us, though
quiteclearly it’s a fact. Descartes nevertheless continued. “Even if the explanations of normal use of explanation ofLang
and other forms of free and coherent choice of action,” even if that lies
beyond our cognitivegrasp as it apparently does, “that’s no reason,” he said, “to
question the authenticity of our experiene. Quite generally, he said, “Freewil,”
which is at the core of this, “is thenoblest thing we have, and there’s nothing
more we comprehend-moreevidently and -moreperfectly, therefore it would be absurd
to doubt something that we comprehendintimiately and experience within
ourselves.” Namely freeactions of men are undetermined, “merelybecause it
conflicts with something else, which we know must be, by its nature,
incomprehensible to us.” Much likeLocke, he had in mind,
divinepreordination. One of the leadingGalileischolar, PeterMachamer observes that, “by adopting
mechanicalPhilo,” and thus initiating the modernScientificRevolution, “Galilei
had forged a new model of humanintelligibility for humanunderstanding with new
criteria for coherent explanation for natural phenomena.” So forGalilei, real
understanding requires mechanical model, that is, the device artisant can
construct, at least in principle, hence intelligible to us. So Galilei rejected
traditional theories of tides, because as he said, “We cannot duplicate them by
means of artifical devices,” and his great successors adhered to this
high standards of intelligibility and explanation. So therefore, it is quiteunderstanble
why Newton’sdiscoveries were so stridently resisted by the greatest scientists
of the day. []Huygens describedNewton’sconceptofattraction
as an absurdity. Leibniz charged he was
reintroducing occultideas similar to the sympathies and antipathies of much ridiculedScholasticScience,
and he was offering no physical explanation for the phenomena of the material
of the world. It’s important to notice that Newton
agreed, verylargelyagreed. He wrote that the notion of actionat-a-distant is
inconceivable, “It’s so great an absurdity that I believe no man in his
philosophical matters and competent faculty of thinking can ever fall into it.” Philsophilcal
means what we call scientific. By invoking that principle, he said we can
see that, we do not understand the phenomena of the material world, and Newtonscholarship
recognises that. IBCohen, [?]House, pick someone else, points out that, by the word
understand, Newton stillmeant what his critics meant, understand in
mechanicalterms, contactaction. Newton did have a famous phrase, which you all
know, [HypothesesNonFing-o], it is this context that it
appears. He had been unable to discover the physical cause of gravity,
so he left the question open. [I have not as yet been
able to discover the reason for these properties of gravity from phenomena, and
I do not feign hypotheses. For whatever is not deduced from the phenomena must
be called a hypothesis; and hypotheses, whether metaphysical or physical, or
based on occult qualities, or mechanical, have no place in
experimentalPhilosophy. In this Philosophy particular propositions are inferred
from the phenomena, and afterwards rendered general by induction. Translator,
IBCohen and AnneWhitman] He said, “To us, it is enough that gravity does reallyexist,
and act according to theLaws which we explained and abundantly serves to
account for all the motions of celestialbodies,”
seas and tides. Though while agreeing, as he did, his proposals were so
absurd that no serious scientist can take [consider] them seriously, he
defended himself from the charge he was reverting to theMysticism
ofAristotelians. What he argued was, His principles
were not occult, only their causes were occult. In his words, “to derive general principles inductively from phenomena, and
afterwards to tell us how the properties of actions of all corporeal things
follow from these manifest principle would be a great step inPhilo,” That
meansScience. “though the causes of the principles are not yet discovered.”
And by the phrase, not yet discovered, Newton, the word yet is crucial, Newton
was expressing his hope that the causes would someday be discovered in
physicalterms, meaning mechanicalterms. That was the hope that lasted right through
thenineteenthcentury. It was finallydashed by thetwentiethcentury
inScience, so that hope is gone. The model of intelligibility that
reigned fromGalilei throughNewton and deep well beyond has a corollary. When
Mechanism fails, understanding fails. So Newton’sabsurdities were finally over
time incorporated into commonsense naturalScience, but that’s quite different
from commonsense and understanding. So to put it differently, one longterm
consequence ofNewtonianrevolution was to lower the standards of intelligibility
forNaturalScience, that is, to hope to understand the world, which did animate the
modernScientificRevolution. That was finallyabandonded. It was replaced by
verydifferent and farlessdemanding goal, namely to develop intelligible theories
of the world. So as such further absurdities, say CurvedSpaceTime or QuantumIndeterminancy,
were absorbed into theNaturalScience, thevery idea of intelligibility is
dismissed as itself as absurd. So for example, by[]Russell,
who knew theSciences verywell, By the late nineteentwenties, he repeatedly
places the word intelligible in quotes to highlight the absurdity of the quest,
and he dismisses the qualms of the great founder ofScientificRevolution, Newton
and others, dismisses them, their qualms about action-at-a-distance, he
dismisses these as [“nothing more than vulgar
prejudice,”]. Although moresympathetic and accurate description would
be, I think, they had higher standards of intelligibility. And if you look at
the work of leading physicsts, they more or less say thesamething. So, a couple
of years after Russell wrote [this], []Dirac wrote
a wellknown introduction to quantumMechanics, in which he says that, “PhysicalScience no longer seeks to provide pictures of how
the world works, that is, a model functioning in essentiallyclassical line, but only seeks to
provide a way of looking at fundmentalLaws which make its selfconsistency
obvious.” So we understand the theories, we’ve given up trying to
understand the world. He was referring, of
course, to inconceivableconclusions-of-quantumPhysics, but if modernthinkers
hadn’t forgotten the past, he could just as well have been referring toNewtonianmodels,
which were undermined byNewton, undermining the hope of rendering natural
phenomena intelligible. That was the[most]primary goal, earlyScientificRevolution.
There’s a classic nineteenthcenturyHistory ofMaterialism by[]Friedrich[Albert]Lange, translted in
english with an introduction byRussell, Lange observes, “We have so accusomted
ourselve to the abstract notion of forces, or rather to a notion hovering in mystic
obscurity between abstraction and concrete comprehension that we no longer find
any difficulty in making oneparticle of matter act upon another without an
immediate contact through void space.” without a material link. From such
ideas, the great mathematicians and physicists of the seventeenthcentury were
far removed. They were genuine materialists. They insisted that contact,
immediatecontact is the condition of influence. “This transition,” he says, “was
one of themostimportant turning point in the wholeHistory ofMaterialism,”
deprived the notion of any significance, if any all. And withMaterialism goes
the notion of physical of body, other counterparts, they have no longer any
significance. He adds that, “What Newton held to be such
a great absurdity that no philosophical thinker could light upon it is prized
by posterity as Newton’sgreatdiscovery of the harmony of the universe.” Those
conclusions were quite commonplace inHistoryOfScience. So fiftyyearsago, AlexandreKoyré, and other great historians ofScience and scientists
observed that, “Despite his unwilligness to accept his
conclusion, Newton had demonstrated that a purelymaterialistic pattern ofNature
is utterlyimpossible, and purely-materialistic- or -mechanical-Physics as well.
His mathPhysics required the admission into the body ofScience, an
incomprehensible and inexplicable facts imposed on us byEmpiricism,”
that is, by what we conclude from observations. Despite this recognition,
debates did not end. So about onecenturyago, Boltzman’smoleculartheoryofgases
or Kukule’sstructuralChemistry, and in fact, even the words atom, the ones you all
learn in school, these are only given an instrumental interpretation. ModenHistory ofChem, standardHistory points out they were regarded
as calculating devices, but with no physicalReality. And Newton’sbelief
that causes of his principles were not yet discovered, implying that they would
be, it was echoed by, for example by[]Russell in1927, he
wrote that, “ChemicalLaws cannot at present be reduced
to physicalLaws.” Much likeNewton, he hoped that it would happen, and
expected it would, but that expectation alsoproved to be in vain, as vain
asNewton’s. Shortlyafter
Russell wrote this, it was shown that chemicalLaws will never be reduced to
physicalLaws, because the conceptions of physicalLaws were erroneous. Finallydone in[]Pauling’s quantumtheoretical account of chemicalbond.
Verymuch as inNewton’sday, perceived explanatory gap, as it’s now called
by philosophers, were neverfilled. Today interestingly, just a few years ago,
we read of the the thesis of the newBiology that “things mental, indeed minds, are
emergent properties of brains, though these emergents are produced by
principles that we do not yet understand.” That’s a neuroscientist, VernonMountcastle.
He’s formulating the guiding theme of a collection of essays, reviewing the results
of what was called the decade of the brain, thelastdecade of
thetwentiethcentury. His phrase, “we do not yet understand,” might verywell
suffer thesamefate as Russell’s simlilar comment aboutChem seventyyearsearlier,
or for that matter, Newton’s muchearlier one. In fact in many ways,
today’sTheoryOfMind, I think is recapitulating errors that were exposed in1930s
with regard toChem, and centuries before that with regard to core ofPhysics. Though
in that case, leaving us with a mystery, maybe a permanent one for humans, as
Hume specualted, acutally asserted. Throughout all
this, today as well, we can optimisticallylook forward to unification of some
kind, but not necessarily to reduction, which is something different. Talk
aboutReductionism is highlymisleading, it’s been abandoned over and over again
in theHistory ofScience. Seeking unification, muchweaker goal. Sometimes
in the case, classic case ofNewton and what he left veiled in mystery that may
involve significant lowering of expectations and standards. Well, let me go
back to the beginning, the exuberant thesis that earlyScientificRevolution
provided humans with limitlessexplanatorypower. If you look over theHistory,
quite different conclusion is in order. The founders of theScientificRevolution
were compelled by their discoveries to recognise that humanexplanatorypower is
not only notlimitless, but does not even reach to themostelementary phemonema
of the natural world. That’s masked by lowering the criteria of intelligibility
of understanding. If you accept that much, as I think we should, less ambitious
question arises, goals ofScience having been lowered to finding intelligible
theories, can we sensiblymaintain that humanlyaccesible theories are limitless
in their explanatory scope. It’s a muchweaker goal. And furthermore, does theTheoryOfEvolution
establish the limitless reach of humancognitivepowers in this narrower,
morelimitless sense. Actually if you think about it, the opposite conclusion seems
muchmorereasonable. TheTheoryOfEvolution, of course,
placesfirmly humans in the natural world. It regards humans as
biologicalorganisms, verymuchlike others. And for every such organism, its
capacities have scope and limits, the two go together, that includes the cognitivedomain.
So rats, for example, can’t solve, say a
primenumbermaze. It’s because they lack appropriate concepts. It’s not lackofmemory
or anything like that. They just don’t have the concepts. For rats, we can make
an useful distinction between problems and mysteries. Problems are tasks that
lie within their cognitivereach and principle. Mysteries are ones that don’t for
rats, they may not be mysteries for us. Human are notangels if we are part of the
organic world, and humancapacity also is going to have scope and limits. So
accordingly, a distinction between problems and mysteries holds for humans, and
it’s task ofScience to delimit it. Maybe we can, maybe we can’t, but at
least, it’s a formulable task. And not in consistence. Not inconsistent to
think that we might be able to discover the limits of our cognitivecapacities. Therefore
those who accept modernBiology should all be
mysterians, instead of ridiculing it, because Mysterianism follows directlyfrom
theTheoryOfEvolution, everything we believescientifically about human.
So the common ridicule of this concept right throughPhilosophyOfMind, what it
amounts to is the claim that somehow humans are angles exempt from biological
constraints. In fact, far from bewailing the existence of mysteries for humans,
we should be extremelygrateful for it, because if there are no limits to what
we might call Scienceforming capacity, it would also have no scope, just as if
the geneticendowments impose no constraints on growth, we would mean that we
can be at most some shapeless ameobacreature refleting accidents to nonanalysed
environment. Conditions that prevent humanembryo from becoming insects or
chicken, those same conditions play a critical role in determining that the
embryo can become a human. Can’t have one without the other. And thesame holds in
the cognitivedomain. Actually, classicalAesthetictheory
recognises that there’s a relation between scope and limits. Without any rules,
there can’t be no genuine creative activity. And that’s even the case when
creative work challenges, improvises prevailing rules. So far from
establishing the limitless scope of humancognitivecapacities, modern
evolutionary theory, and in fact the whole standardScience, undermines that
hope. Now that was appreciated right away when the power of
theTheoryOfEvolution came to be recognised. One enlightening case is CharlesSandersPeirce. His inquiry into what he called
abduction, which is ratherdifferent from the way the term is used today. Peirse was struck particularly by a striking fact that, in
theHistory ofScience, major discoveries are oftenmade-independently and -almostsimultaneously,
which suggests that some principle is directing inquiring minds towards that goal
under existing circumstances of understanding. Something
similar is true for earlychildhoodlearning. So if you put aside the Pathology or
extreme deprivation, children are essentiallyuniform in this capacity.
And they uniformlymake quite an astounding discoveries about the world, going
well beyond what any kind of dataanalysis could yield. In
the case ofLang, it’s now known it starts even before birth. So the child is born
with some conception of what counts asLang, can even recognise its mother’sLang
is distinct from another Lang, spoken by bilingual woman who[m] he’s neverheard
before. There’s some interesting distinctions determining how it works,
but can be done at birth. In fact, even thefirststep inLanguageacquisition,
which is generallytaken for granted, is quite a remarkable achievement. An infant has to select from the environment, what
WilliamJames called “blooming, buzzing confusion,” the infant somehow has to
select the data that are Langrelated. That’s a task [which is] a total mystery for
any other oganisms, they have no way of doing it, but it’s reflexivelysolved
for humaninfants. So the story continues, all the way to the outer reach
of scientificdiscovery. It may not be continuous, I’m not suggesting that.
There are probably different capacities involved. Rather likeHume, Peirce
concluded that humans must have what he called an abductive instinct, which
provides a limit on admissible hypotheses. So only certain explanatory schemes
can be entertained, but notinfinitely many others, all compatible with available
data. Purse argued that this instinct develops throughNaturalSelection, that
is, the variants that yield truths about the world provide us selection of
advantage, and retain through, descent-with-modifications, Darwin’snotions,
while others fall away. That belief is completelyunsustainable. It takes only a
moment to show that that can’t be true. And if you drop it, as we must, we’re
left with a serious and challenging scientificproblem, namely, determine the
innate component of our cognitivenature, those that are employed,
reflexive identification of Langugagerelevant data and other cognitivedomains.
Take one famous case. The capacity of humans, which is quite remarkable, if you
present it with a sequence of tachistoscopic presentation, just dots on the
screen, threedots on a screen, what you perceive is rigid object in motion.
Some of the cognitiveprinciples are known, but not the neural basis for it. Or
for example, discovering and comprehending Newton’sLaws or developingStringTheory
or solving problems ofQuantumEntanglement, or as complex as you like. And there’s
a further task that’s to determine in scope and limits of humanunderstanding. Incidentally, some differentlystructured organism, some martian,
say, might regard humanmysteries as simpleproblems, and might wonder that we
can’t find the answers or even ask the right questions. Just as we wonder about
the inability of rats to run primenumbermazes. It’s notbecause of
limitsofmemory or other superficial constraints, but because of the verydesign
of our cognitivenature, or their cognitivenature. So if you think it through, I
think it’s quite clear that Newton’sremarkableachivements led to a significant
lowering of the expectations ofScience, severe restriction on the role of
intelligibility. They furthermore demonstrated that it’s an error to ridicule
what’s called theGhostAndTheMachine, that’s what I and others were taught at
your age at bestgraduateschools, Harvard in my case, but that’s just a mistake.
Newton did not exorcise the ghost, rather he exorcised
the machine. He left the ghost completelyintact. And by so doing, he
inadvertentlyset the study of mind on quite a new course. In fact, made it
possible to integrate it intoSciences. And Newton may verywell have realised
this. Throughout his life, he struggled, later life struggled, vainly of course, with
the paradoxes and conundrums that followed from his theory, and he speculated what he called
spirit, which he couldn’t identify, but whatever it is, might be “the cause of
all movement inNature, including the power of moving our bodies by our thoughts
and thesamepower within other living creature, though how it is done, or by
whatLaws, we do not know. We cannot
say that,” he concluded “that all-Nature is notalive.” Going step beyondNewton,
Locke suggested, Locke added, “We cannot say that matter does not think.” It’s a
speculation calledLockesuggestion inHistory ofPhilo. So as Locke put it, “Just
as god had added to motion inconceivable effects, it is notmuchmore remote from
our comprehension to conceive that god can, if he pleases, superadd to matter,
the faculty of thinking.” Locke found this view “repugnant to the idea of
senseless matter,” but he said, “we cannot reject it, because our incurable
ignorance and the limits of our ideas,” that is our cognitivecapacities. Having
no intelligible concept of matter or body or physical, as we stilldon’t
incidentally, but having no such concept, he said, “we cannot dismiss the
possibility of living thinking matter,” particularlyafter Newton undermined
commonsense and understanding permanently. Lockesuggestion was understood, and
was taken up right through the eightteenthcentury. Hume,
for example, concluded that, “motion may be, and actually is, the cause of our
thought and perception. Others argue that since thought, which is produced in
the brain, cannot exist if this organism is wanting, and since there’s no
reason any longer to question the existence of thinking matter, it’s necessary
to conclude that the brain is a special organ designed to produce thoughts,
much as stomach and intestines are designed to operate digestion, liver to
filter bile, and so on through the bodilyorgans. Just as foods enter the
stomach and leave it with new qualities, so impressions arrive at the brain through
the nerves, [] they arrive isolated without any coherence, but the organ, the
brain, enters into action, it acts on them, it sends them back, changed into
ideas, which theLanguage of physiognomy and gestures, theScience of
speechandwriting manifest outwardly.” I’m stillquoting. “We conclude then with thesamecertainty
that the brain digests that, as it were, impressions, that is, organically
mixed the secretion of thought,” Just as the liver secrets bile. Darwin agreed with this, put the matter succintly. He
askedrhetorically, “Why is thought being the secretion
of the brain, morewonderful than gravity, the property of matter,” a
property that we don’t understand, but we just came to accept. It’s therefore ratherodd
to read today what I quoted before, leading thesis of the decade of the brain
at the end of thelastcentury, namely that, “things mental, indeed minds, are the
emergent property of the brains,” Mountcastle’ssummary. Strange to read that, because it was commonplace in eighteenthcentury,
so
it’s notclear why it’s an emerging thesis. And many other prominent
scientists or philosophers have presented essentially thesamethesis, I’ll quote
some contemporary examples, “an astonishing hypothesis of the newBiology,” “radical
new idea in thePhilosophyOfMind,” “the bold assertion that mental phenomena are
entirelynatural, and are caused by the neurophysiological activity of the
brain, opening the door to novel promising inquiries rejection
ofCartesianmindbodydualism,” and so on. All of these virtuallyreiterate having
become unformulable with the disappearance the physical, the material, and so
on. []Priestly concluded in “Properties term
mental organical structure of the brain the idea which stated lessdetailed
byHume, Darwin, and many others after the collapse of the mechanicalPhilo. Belated
revival of ideas, which we reasonably understood centuries ago direct
conclusions ofNewton’sdiscoveries, we’re left with the scientificproblem of
maybe with an eye to if any. That enterprise renews the task that Hume
understood quite well, he called it “the investigation of humannature, the
search for secret springs and principles by which the humanmind is actuated in
its operations including the parts of our Knowledge that are derived from the
original hand ofNature,” so we would call geneticendowment. Hume was, of course,
an archempiricist, but also a dedicated nativist, supposed to the opposite ofEmpiricism.
And he had to be, because he was reasonable. This inquiry, which Hume compared
in principle toNewton’s, had in fact been undertaken in quite an interesting
ways by english neoPlatonists inEngland [whose] works
directlyinfluencedKant. In contemporary literature, there are names for
this. They’re sometimescalled naturalisation ofPhilo or Epistomology
naturalised or sometimes just CognitiveScience. But in fact, it’s direct
consequence ofNewton’sdemolition of the idea of grasping the nature of the
world and inescapable. Let me just summarisebriefly. I think it’s fair to
conclude that the hopes and expectations of theearlyScientificRevolution were
dashed byNewton’sdiscoveries, which leaves us with a few conclusions. Oneconclusion
reinforced byDarwin is that, while our cognitivecapacities may be vast in
scope, they are nonetheless intrinsicallylimited. Some questions we might like
to explore may lie beyond our cognitivereach. We may not even be able to
formulate the right questions. The standards of success may have to be lowered
once again as happened before, verydramatically with the collapse of
mechanicalPhilo. And another conclusion is the mindbodyproblem can safely be
put to rest, since there is no coherent alternative toLockesuggestion. And if
we adopt theLockesuggestion, that opens the way to the study the mind, as the branch
ofBiology, much like the study of the rest of the body, the body below
the neck, putting it metaphorically. Great deal has been learned in the past
halfcentury of revival of traditional concerns of theearlyScientificRevolution
and theEnlightenment, but many of the early leading questions have not been
answered, and may never be. Thanks. Sound of applaud.
4.
Thank you very much. We’re going to open for
questions and comments right away. Omitted.
5.
I have a question about mindbody. You just
ended here, maybe we should just forget that dilemma. And my question to you
is, If you have a thought about, instead of.
6.
About?
7.
Instead of just forget it and put it in the
bracket, then we can just add another factor, mindbodyandthesenses, and see
what happens. My question to you is, Have you anything to say about that
combination?
8.
Mindbodyandthesenses? Mindbody is
meaningless. If there is no body, there’s no mindbodyproblem. There’s hasn’t
been any concept of body sinceNewton. I mean, Newton stillthought there was
one, but as he put it, We haven’t yet discovered it, meaning, accounted for in
the mechanical terms. But that’s been given up certainly by
thetwentiethcenturies. So there is no concept of physical. The term, physical,
is kind of like an honorific word. Kind of like the word Real when we say
realtruth. It doesn’t add anything. It just says serious truth. So to say
something physical today just means, You’ve got to take it seriously. There’s
no further concept of physical or material or body, so there can’t be a
mindbodyproblem. It’s unformulable. There’s a lot of work on mindbodyproblem.
9.
Yeah, I follow that. I follow that well.
That’s what I don’t understand.
10.
What about the senses? Well, senses are part
of the body.
11.
If you. Okay. Thank you. Sound of laughter.
12.
We all agree. There’s some way in which externalworld
hinges on the organism, and the way that happens is what we call senses, and we
have differences from other organisms. You know, there are other organisms
muchsmarter than us, they can see ultravioletlight, hear things we can’t hear,
and so on. We all have our scope and limits in senses, too.
13.
You said that there’s kind of reduction of
expectation of what the explanation could be when it was no more mechanical and
not necessarily understandable. And I wonder the relation between mechanical
and material, and also I’ve just been to the conference onGregoryBateson, and he’s veryinto
this idea of information being difference, makes a difference. He says that difference
is intrisicallynonmaterial, so cybernetic causalities, they are nonmaterial but
mechanical. And I wonder what relations in mechanical and material. Could that
be some of the problem?
14.
There can’t be any relation, because there’s no
such thing as material. That’s like saying, What’s the relation between
information and ectoplasm? You can’t ask that question until you tell us what ectoplasm
is. And nobody can tell us what material is. Actually when you look at
modernPhysics, you have some prettyinteresting proposal. There’s a book, I
don’t pretend to understand it, but published by theAmericanPhysicsSociety, so
I guess it’s taken [considered]seriously, but verywellknownphysicsts, I
think he diedrecently. InstituteOfAdvancedStudy, JohnWheeler,
who argues that theonlything that exists in the world is bits of information,
namely answers to question we pose to theNature. That’s all there is. Everything
else is some kind of construct from those. From that point of view, all there
is is information. It’s apparently notridiculed by physicsts, so I’m
notable to ridicule. Laughter ofChomsky. I understand what he means. He’s
talking within theframeworkofquantumtheories, which says that what’s there is our
observations and questions we pose toNature and answers it gives back to us, and
those are bits of information. Everything else is constructed from that. It’s a
little bit like-Addington and -Russel, earlytwentieth, saying that all it
exists is meterreadings, and everything else is our construction from
meterreadings. So if physicists had thesameillusions as psychologists and
sociologists and others, they might callPhysics meterreadingScience. The way
modern study of society and action, it’s sometimescalled behaviouralScience, that’s confusing the topic with data
for it, some of the data.
15.
You were talking about the limits of
understanding a little bit. I was watching a clip onYouTube, I believe it was
1971, and you were debating with the frenchphilosopher, Foucault, I believe, I
don’t remember. And you were debating about, his arguments were moresocial
limits that we impose [on] ourselves, something that needs to be taught and
needs to be reinforced, while you were trying to say it’s something inherent to
humanmind to have kindness and intelligence in order to be social. My question
is, Why do you think our limits are to be able to go in peace like in a social
context and start struggling. I believe in evolution, so I think it’s
evolutionthing, but I think you philosophers are trying veryveryhard to develop
or to understand in order to be moresocial and peaceful creatures.
16.
Not just philosophers, all of us are in our
ordinary lives, raising children, whatever it may be. The debate was notabout the
importance of social factors, although of course, they exist. The debate was about what is taken to be contentious, but
shouldn’t be, the existence of innate factors. That’s verycommonlydenied. And Foucault
was, in fact, denying it, but it’s just incoherent to deny it. If you deny it,
then our cognitive and social behaviour would be like some imagined organism,
if you can imagine one, that doesn’t have any geneticprogram that determines what
kind of organism it will be. Nothing that determines that it will be an insect
or mouse or human or whatever, and therefore we’ll be nothing. It will be some
amoebastyle reflexion of the data. A lot of scientist have argue that,
philosophers, too. Quine, for example, famously, I
would say infamously, argued that Lang, but it would hold for all behaviour, in
fact all theories, is just the result of, it’s a kind of accidental collection of
behaviours constructed, developed through conditioning. That’s essentially like
saying, We’re all amoebas. Not even amoebas, because amoebas has internal
structure. It doesn’t make any sense. You can’t have any structure in
organism unless there’s some form of predetermination. That form of
predetermination will provide scope, it will alsoimpose limits, there’s just no
way out of that. That’s just practicallyLogic. But yes, try to become morehumane creatures, it’s just
not the philosopher’squests, but it should be a quest for all of us.
17.
What are the determination and what are the
historical or scientific factors determining the scope of our understanding,
and can we assume that this scope of our understanding have progressed since,
say, the ancient times?
18.
As far as we know,
humancognitivecapacities have notchanged for at least fiftythousandyears when some
small group of huntergatherers leftAfrica, spread all over the world, we’re all
their descendants. Maybe a little morecomplex than that, but not a lot more. Now we know that prettywell. It’s not that anyone
understands the biological nature of it, but there’s verystrong evidence. So
for example, if you take some tribe inPapuaNewGuinea that hasn’t had other
humancontact for fortythousandsyears, and that’s a possibility, you take that
infant and you bring it toOslo and raise it from infancy inOslo, it will be
indistinguishable from the people studyingPhysics inOsloUniversity. It has
thesamecognitivecapacity, and conversely. You take an infant from here, put it
in that tribe inPapuaNewGuinea, it will be able to do all the complex cognitivetasks
they can’t solve, but that you and I couldn’t possiblysolve. We couldn’t
survive there for oneweek. From evidence like that, which is maybenotconclusive,
but certainlypowerful. It seems that cognitivecapacities just haven’t changed.
In fact, humans are geneticallyverymuchalike as compared with any other
species. And it’s notsurprising, because there’s apparently
a common origin not verylong ago. Fiftythousandsyears is nothing in
evolutionary time. It’s an eyeblink. So the chances are whatever the cognitivecapacities
were fiftythousandyears ago, they still are. Of course, they have be brought
out, like other innate capacities, they have to be illicited by experiences,
but they’re there. And I think that’s, Hume wasn’t thinking about evolution, of
course, but when he talked about the common faculties that are given by the original
hand ofNature, I think that must be what he meant. I mean, these were real
problems in the seventeenthandeighteenthcenturies. Remember that at the time of
theearlyScientificRevolution, that was also the time of the first real
exploration, and explorers were finding
all sorts of creatures that didn’t look like europeans. Like negros and
oranguatans, and so on. And they weren’t sure how to distinguish them. So which
ones, some of them are human or not? If you’re a Cartesianrationalist, there’s
a sharp distinction between human and nonhuman. CartesianRationalism is
incompatible withRacism. It’s a point that a historian ofPhilo, Harry[M]Bracken,
discussed it at length. You can’t be a rationalist and
a racist. Either (you have a mind) or (you don’t have a mind). Sound of
laughter. And if you have a mind, it’s thesame, there’s onlyone, sothat’s it.
Empericist, on the other hand, could be racist, because you have different
properties. These were hotlydebated issues in the seventeenthandeighteenthcentury.
They couldn’t figure out what those other creatures were. Were they humans or
weren’t they? If they were humans, did they have rights? If so, what rights?
and so on, but of course, that’s long past. Now, it appears that humans are
essentially all alike. There could be a study of what our common cognitivecapacities
are, and in fact, it’s studied quite a lot. So when you study [when] infants
determine continuity of objects on the basis of veryscarce data, they’re essentiallyasking
the kinds of questions Descartes asked. Unfortunately,
philosophers these days tend only to read[MéditationMétaphysique], but that’s
notDescartes. In fact, that was kind of propaganda. He even pointed that out in
a famous letter he wrote to his friend, Mersenne where he said that the point of[MéditationMétaphysique] is
to try to convince jesuits to take [consider] hisPhysics
seriously. That’s what he reallycared about. When he wrote[PrincipiaPhilosophiae],
which means PrinciplesOfScience, that’s the real stuff. In that work
and in the[Optica] and other things, he posed veryinteresting questions. He
didn’t carry out experiments, but he carried out thoughtexperiment, verymuch
the way Galilei did. If you carried it out, it would probablycome out his way. One
was to ask a question, he said, Imagine an infant who has no experience with geometrical
figures, okay, which in fact is everyinfant, because geometrical figures don’t
exist inNature. It’s just some other things. So take an infant with no
experience with geometrical figures, present that infant with a triangle drawn
on paper. He said, What the infant will perceive is distorted triangle, not the
perfect instance of whatever crazy figure it is with the twolines not quite coming
together, one of them somewhat curved, and so on. He regarded it as paradoxical,
why should that be true? And if you are a thoroughgoing empricist, you
shouldn’t permit that conclusion. Since the conclusion is almostcertainlycorrect,
it’s an easy refutation of standardEmpiricism. And his conclusion,
Descarte’sconclusion was, While we must have some innate system of he would
assume EuclieanGeometry, which we impose on data to yield our understanding, in
fact, our perception. And there’s quite a lot of work on the speculation
through the seventeenthandeighteenthcenturies on how this could be, and basic
ideas are probablycorrect. There’s now a lot of experimentwork with infants and
comparative work, and investigating it. And that is at the beginnings of work
trying to find out what our cognitivecapacities are. There’s also work on
something like rudimentaryScience for me. How the children develop a concept of
the world in some rational fashion. A lot of this was developed out ofPiaget’swork
even though it doesn’t stand up as he presented it, that kind of work has been
pursued. And that is, I think, the study of what you’re asking. How far it can
go? It can go up to what kind of scientifictheory we can understand. That’s far
off.
19.
If we no longer considerMaterialism as relevant,
but we move on to dualPhilo, there should be a point. And what should be the endeavour
ofPhilo be then, if pure consciousness? Is that what we are exploring? And if
so how do we go about exploring, and if so, how do we go about exploring those limits
ofKnowledge, and how do you practicallydo that, because many people propose,
for instance, they can use psychedelic substances, and so are there some taboos
that are stopping us from making that research that would be leavingMaterialism
behind and moving on forward considering different aspects of our experience or
whatever, I’m not sure.
20.
I don’t think we can leaveMaterialism behind
until somebody tells us what Materialism is. That’s kind of elementary. There
was a concept ofMaterialism right through theearlyScientificRevolution, right
throughNewton. Newton stillaccepted it. In fact, the great scientists in
thenextcentury accepted it. Lagrange and others kept trying to develop
mechanicalconceptoftheuniverse, went right through thenineteenthcentury,
ethertheory and so on. It was finallygiven up in the twentiethcentury. Finallyrecognised
we’re never going to get it, and totallynew ways of looking at things were
developed, which have no relation to traditionalMaterialism. Friedrich[Albert]Lange is
correct. And nobody’s suggested another notion. Materialism is like anything we
more or less understand. It includes thinking, it includes reasoning, and so on
and so forth. Lockesuggestion. So we can’t leave it behind unless someone tells
us what it is, but there’s no reason why we can’t study it. I mean, we can
study what the humancapacity of understanding is. In fact, we know some things
about it. We know some negative things. For example, we can’t understand how
the world works, because our concept of understanding is toolimited to
incorporate what Newton described as an absurdity. People like-Newton and
-Hume and -Locke were not idiots. You have to take [consider] them seriously.
They regarded it as absurdity for verygood reasons. And modernCognitiveScience,
which somehow tries to recapitulate some of this, find prettymuch that. As I mentioned, infant presented with presentations which
indicate that there’s some kind of causality, like you know, roll runs this
way, light turns red or something, they will invent mechanicalcause, and they
don’t care if it’s notvisible, because infants understand most of what goes on
is invisible, but there’s got to be some mechanicalcause, because otherwise
there’s no way to influence them. So that does seem to be our minds
work. And that tells us something about the limits of our understanding, and in
fact, classical crucial case. And it could go on to other cases. And we can
study it directly. In principle, we can study it directly. It’s notsimple. I
mean, It’s noteasy to understand why a rat can’t deal
with the primenumbermaze. Even that’s hard. We have good evidence it’s true, but
why it’s true is unclear. Nothing known about the brains of rats that
explains why they can’t do that. In fact, we can’t
explain why thetiniestorganism that’s seriouslystudied, [Caenorhabditis
elegans]. Eighthundredscells,
threehundredsneurons, the entire wiringdiagram known. There’s been years of studies
trying to explain why this thing, it goes left instead of right, let’s say.
It’s just we don’t know how to explain that. There’s an answer, but these
are hard scientificquestions. When you talk about how humanintelligence work, it’s
incomparablymoredifficult. So you can ask the questions, you can cut away at
them, but we shouldn’t exaggerate. It’s kind of striking that, going back to what philosophers ought to do, philosophers oftenappear
to tend to want to get answers about humans that we can’t get about insects,
and that’s toomuch, you know. Sciences work at the edge of understanding,
and faces hard question all the way. So we can sort of talk about it, but if
you want to seriouslywork on it, you have to take a look at what is understood
and see if you can formulate a question could be investigated and tell us more
about what’s understood. There's an interesting work going on on this, having
to do with things like humanMoralinstinct. The past twentythirtyyears, that’s become
an experimental subject with interesting experimental work on probablyuniversalMoralprinciples.
Veryimportant book just came out a couple of weeks ago byJohnMikhail. He’s a
philosopher, now teachesLaw atGeorgetownUniversity, who’s veryacute. He more or
less initiated this modern study, he didn’t publish much, but other people
drawn from his work, combination of reanalysis of traditionalMoralPhilo, mainly
Rawls and his
antecedents, and analysis of a lot of critique ofRawls, and went on to develop experimental
program to investigate some of these questions. And it’s feasible. Maybe we can
get some insight of innatehumanMoralconcepts that are crosscultural, like you
can find them in every culture and you can find them young children free of any
serious cultural impact. Those are the things that can be studied, and there’s
beginnings of studies.
21.
I was wondering what you think about the prospects
of geneticengineering, and how that might perhaps expand our cognitiveabilities,
thereby maybe alsoexpanding the scope of what we are able to understand.
22.
Well, in order to
carry out geneticengineering, you have to understand something about theGenetics of the traits that
you’re trying to deal with. So, if Monsanto[Company] wants to geneticallyengineer, say rice that will be
immune to some kind of disease, they have to understand something about what in
theGenetics of rice [which] yields, you know, [to] susceptibilities of disease.
When we talk about humanunderstanding, we
haven’t a clue what theGenetics are, so you can’t even being to ask the
question. I mean, that raises anEthicalquestion,
Should we even try if we did know? But that Ethicalquestion is prettyfaroff in the distance,
because theGenetics of it aren’t understood. I mean, my own professional
work is mostly onLang. But even in the case ofLang, which is a small part of
our cognitivecapacity, kind of a central part, but small part, nobody has any
idea, verylittle idea what theGenetics are. It’s obviously there, you can see
its consequences, but to try to find it is veryhard. And as I said, questions
like that are noteasy to answer about insects or tinyworms.
23.
Would you say that the search for these socalled
particlescarriers of influence like[Peter]HiggsBoson in the photon, is that a search for a path
back to contactaction, and therefore mechanicalPhilo?
24.
I’m sorry. I didn’t understand.
25.
OlavGjelsvik: Search for the photon. Contact.
Photon.
26.
Search for the[Peter]HiggsBoson.
27.
Oh, hexposon. Sound of laughter. There’s a slight
problem inPhysics. They can’t find ninetypercent of what the universe is made
up of. Doesn’t means an end toPhysics. You
just look harder. And what they’re searching for
is [Peter]HiggsBoson, which is supposed to be there, and if it is there, it can
account for what particles are masked, hence energy. Otherwise, just can’t
account for it. I mean, it’s just assumed that either it’s there or it’s just different
from standardmodels, but until it’s found, you can’t say whether it exists or whether
the standardmodel [which] presupposes it is wrong. It’s a verylive
question. They’re spending billionsUSD
trying to answer it inSwitzerland. TheUnitedStates, incidentally, has given up
on that question. Congress won’t fund it. Laughter ofChomsky.
28.
Hi, my name is TimothyChan. I’m postdoc here.
ProfessorChomsky, you mentioned that your thought as a scientificproject to
investigate where limits of humanunderstanding lies, whether the question is
beyond our ability to answer. I just wanted to answer. I just wonder what kind
of effort is required to [Unclear] So for example inPhilo, ColinMcGinn would
hold that the nature of consciousness humanbeings are just therefore be able to
answer. And I guess some affinity between his position and what you say. But an
objection to him that I’m sympathetic to is that how do you know that if we
cannot know. How do you know that humanbeings tenthousandyears, suppose we
haven’t gone extinct by then, how do you know that, in tenthousandyears, people
aren’t going to come up with new concepts that they don’t now have? So how do
you know that they’re not going to be able to, so I just wonder, you think
there is a scientificevidence, if so what kind of evidence would that be?
29.
First of all, we’re talking about empirical
questions. And in the case of empirical questions, you neverknow with certainty,
that’s what makes them empirical questions. Otherwise, it would be a question
of-Logic or maybe -Arithmetic. Even there you can ask questions. If it’s
empirical, we’re nevergoing to know with certainty, that’s for sure, that’s
true by definition. So the question really is, What evidence do we have and How
good is the evidence. Well, in some cases, the evidence is prettygood. Like take
the classical case of what Newton regarded as an absurdity, and again, I
think you have to take [consider] people likeNewton seriously, and Hume, and
Huygens and the rest of them. What they regarded it as an absurdity is that
there could be influence without contact. While we don’t know with certainty
that’s the limits of humanintelligence, there’s prettygood evidence[s]. First
of all, we just have our own intuitions, and from, you know, History of
centuries of efforts by the leading scientists to try to do something to
overcome it, finallyending in failure and abandoning the quest. And we alsoknow
it, we’re beginning to understand it just from experimental studies of infants,
the kind that I mentioned. They reflexivelyseek some kind of contact in order
to account for correlations, then makes sense otherwise. Physicists have
finallygiven that up. They said, Look, we’re never going to find it. It doesn’t
exist. How
strong is that evidence? Well, you decide how strong it is. Looks
prettycompelling to me. And if it really is the
limits of our intelligibility, nothing’s going to change in tenthousandyears,
just as it didn’t change in lastfiftythousand[years]. What about things
beyond that? Well you know, it’s not an easy question to ask even about other
creatures, like rats, but you can investigate it. Are you ever going to get
certainty? No, you’ll neverhave certainty, because it’s an empirical investigation.
So that, you don’t bother looking for. As far as consciousness is concerned,
it’s a veryhot topic these days. In fact, inPhilo, it’s called the hard problem.
Everything else is an easy problem somehow. Sound of laughter. But this is the
hard problem. If you go back to the seventeenthandeighteenthcentury, they alsohad
something called the hard problem, namely, how is
motion possible? That was the hard problem. Newton wrestled with it,
finallysaid, It’s impossible. We just have to accept it even though we can’t
find what he called physical cause. That was called the hard rock inPhilo. Voltaire, a dedicatedNewtonian, said that the fact that
humans can cause motion by thought, like I can think-(I want my hand to go over
here) and something will move, he said that’s so inexplicable that it’s got to
be divineintervention. He was, of course, prettydedicated atheist by the
standards of the time. But it looks as if we’re stuck with it, and there
seem to be, if you look further, there seem to be many other things. Take say
Lang, which is an easier study. I mean, there are impossibleLang. You can
construct things that look, simple sequences, which are given interpretations,
and so on, but which have a structure that humans cannot learn. They may deal with
it as a puzzle of some kind, but they can’t deal with it as a linguistic task.
By now, prettygood experimental data on that. That’s the kind of thing you
expect to find when you deal with any organism, including our other
cognitivecapacities. As far as consciousness is concerned, I’m not so convinced
that it’s the hard problem. First of all, you have to formulate it coherently, What’s
the problem? I’ve quotedFrancisCrick, I didn’t
mention him saying, He has an astonishing hypothesis that consciousness comes
from activity of the brain. That’s Locke, Hume. Yes, they took that for granted.
So that’s the astonishing hypothesis. Then you can go and proceed, as he and
other have done, to ask, What’s going on in the brain when people are conscients?
That’s serious work. Suppose you get all those questions answered, does that
tell you what consciousness is? No, it leaves open the questions of consciousness.
In fact, we might ultimately be reduced to something like what []Russell wrote.
Read his AnalysisOfMatter, for example, which
unfortunately isn’t read much, but it’s important, I think. In1928 or
so, he says that, Look, theonlything we have any confidence in is our
immediateconsciousness. We may be wrong about it, [Accurate.] but at least, we
have some degree of confidence in it. Everything else is intellectualconstruction,
[Accurate.] including our conception of objects, the theory of the world, and
so on. So that’s, if you want, the hard rock not too hard, because it
could be wrong. That’s all we have to start with. And the best you can do is.
30.
Okay, your politicalideas have, they have a
foundation onEthics, yeah? Ethics [and] Morality. Then I want to ask you how is
Morality compatible with limited mind, determined human, as you put it, if I
understood you well, because in a limited mind and determined human, I don’t
see a place for theFreeWill, which is the base ofMorality in the humanworld. So
what you think about it?
31.
About FreeWill?
32.
And Morality, which is, of course the base for-Politics
and -(social ideas).
33.
HumanMoralprinciple, we can study, like the kind
of work I mentioned, JohnMikhail
and others are carrying out the beginnings of experimental work, which sheds
light and may ultimatelyshed a lot of light on what are innateMoralprinciples
are, what Hume was looking for, for example. AdamSmith and others. That could
shed some light on it. It’s not going to tell you much about
theFreedomOfTheWill. FreedomOfTheWill, I think we’re
prettymuch stuck where Descartes was. We just can’t abandon believing it, it’s our
most immediate phenomogicallyobvious impression, but we can’t explain it. And
as he said, it’s something we know to be true and we don’t have any explanation
for it, well, toobad for our explanatory possibilities. Sound of laughter. But I
don’t see any way getting around that. There’s a lot of arguments that we don’t
haveFreedomOfTheWill. There’s a ton of literature on that, and literature is
kind of interesting. Actually for reasons that
WilliamJames discussed. He said, If you don’t believe that there’s noFreedomOfTheWill,
why bother presenting an argument? Sound of laughter. You’re just forced to do
it, the preson you’re talking to can’t be convinced. Sound of laughter. Because
there’s no such thing as reasons. So why not watch a baseballgame? That
wasn’t his example. Anybody who denies
theFreedomOfTheWill actuallybelieves that it’s there, otherwise they wouldn’t
bother presenting reasons. I mean, unless they say, Look, I’m just forced to present
[it], I can’t do anything else. Sound of laughter. And it’s veryodd
discussions, many of them. Actually, you may have seen some experimental work,
which caused the big flurry a couple of years ago. Some neurophysiologists discovered
that if a person is going to carry an act of willed action, say you know, pick
this up say. You can find activity in the motorcenters of the brain before there’s
a decision to pick it up, okay? And that was held to show, Okay, we undermined
theFreedomOfTheWill. It doesn’t say anything. All that says is what we ought to
know anyway, decisions are mostlymade unconscious. By the time it reaches
consciousness, the decision is already probably been made, but that doesn’t
tell us anything about how the decisions are made.
34.
But you didn’t answer me. At least, I didn’t []perceive
that I got an answer. Is it compatible, your [] about determined,
geneticallydetermined humans and Ethics, politicalEthics, Morality, FreeWill,
that is what I asked? It’s compatible?
35.
It’s compatible?
36.
You say it’s unexplainable.
37.
I don’t understand why belief
inEthicalprinciple should be inconsistent with the belief that we have the
ability to make choices. They seem totallyconsistent. Maybe it’s all wrong, but
it’s consistent.
38.
If somebody’s determined, they cannot make a
choice. That is the, that’s the base of.
39.
I don’t understand what the alleged
inconsistency is. It’s more like what I thought you said before, commitment
toMoralprinciples basicallypresupposes theFreedomOfTheWill, but I don’t see any
inconsistency.
40.
Some believe in geneticDeterminism to you.
41.
There’s geneticDeterminism, of course. That’s
why you and I are humans and not insects, because that’s our geneticendowment. That’s
geneticDeterminism. Just what follows from it, we have to look and see. We
don’t know.
42.
My question relates to the previous question actually,
FreeWill. As a philosopher, I’d like to. You as a philosopher, I’d like to ask
you this question. You know, studies have shown
that decisions made in the brain actuallyappear some moments before an
individual. [] How can you then say that there’s such a thing asFreeWill? I
mean, WireDeterminism proves that FreedomOfTheWill doesn’t exist.
43.
Those are the experiments I was just referring
to. There are some experiments which show that, in a willed action, simple motoraction,
you know, picking something up, there is activity in the relevant parts in the
motorcortex before the decision to pick it up is conscious, okay? That tells us
absolutelynothing aboutFreedomOfTheWill except that the choices are probably unconscious.
I think we know that without experiments. What? Complicated? Sound of
laughter. Oh yeah, anything in this area is complicated. When we understand
nothing, everything’s complicated, it’s another truism.
44.
You do seem to imply that theories of-Physics
and -Chem are in some way constructs in our imagination, and I wouldn’t want
much to [] to that, but you alsosseem to imply that they can be deconstructed in
some way intoBiology, constructed into neuroBiology of our brains. But what
gives you confidence that our scientificmethod of our scientificmethod?
45.
Our Sciences what?
46.
Our Scientificmethod.
47.
Scientificmethod.
48.
What give you enoughconfidence in the
scientificmethod to believe that evidence that Biology gives us? There seems to
be some innateSkepticism in that system of thought. I will end up believing in
nothing at all, not even that we do not believe in anything than actually
believing in our own limitations. So if we are so fundamentallylimited as we
claim we are, how can we have any confidence providing the fact that we are
limited?
49.
Pure skeptic, you
can give no answers to, which means they’re notasking sensible questions.
We’re onlyinterested in sensible questions, the kind to
which you can even imagine an answer, maybe a wrong answer. But you
can’t even imagine an answer, it may have a form of a question, but it’s not a
question. Like for example, if you were to ask, Why
do things happen? Okay, that happens to have a structure of
interrogativesentence, but it has no answers, no even imaginable answers,
therefore it’s not a question. Just has the structure of interrogative. Pure
skeptic, if one can be imagined, is posing things that look like question, but
aren’t really. As to how you can have confidence, first of all, you neverhave
complete confidence if it’s an empirical issue. In fact, even Arithmetic, you
can’t have complete confidence, it’s known that you can have nonstandard models
ofArithmetic which satisfy axioms but are different, and so on. But in empirical questions, you develop confidence from
experience, intuition, experiment and so on. What’s called the scientificmethod,
but that’s a funny term, because there’s nothing like scientificmethods. When
you takePsychologycourse, you do take a course inMethodology. When you
studyPhysics, you don’t take a course inMethodology. Method is being reasonable, you know? Learning from what has
been done and see if you can carry it forward, and so on. In fact, the courses inMethodology you take, say,
inPsychology or Sociology are mostly courses on-Statistics and –(techniques you
can use). But scientificmethod is just whatever way we have of the way we deal
with the world rationally, reasonably. Can we have confidence in it? No, maybe
it’s misleading us, just as rats are consistenly being misled about mazes.
Sound of laughter. We can understand it for them, but if that’s true, all we
can do is to try to see if we can use thesame rational approaches to see what
our limits of our intellectualcapacities are, and we have some examples, in
which I think we can have fair confidence. Like collapse of intuitivelyobvious
fact that interaction requires contact.
50.
I don’t know much aboutPhysics, so I’m going to
ask this simple, simply. Maybe you alreadyanswered this. Do you reject the
possibility of nonphysicalReality interacting with physicalReality? And do you,
like, acknowledge it, the possibility of it the effects it might have with
physicalReality? I’m thinking of like the study of thesmallest entities, like atom,
and, yeah, and also just power of attraction. What is it?
51.
Two of us share something. I don’t know much
aboutPhysics, either. Sound of laughter. So we’re in thesame. In fact, I don’t
think physicsts understand it, they’re prettyopen about it. Sound of laughter. See,
you can’t
ask the question about interaction between physical and nonphysical until you
tell us what physical means, okay? At least, you’ve got to be able to tell us
what physical means in order for the question to be answered. [One of themostimportant
questions in this unverse.] But there hasn’t
been any concept of physical for hundredsofyears. I mean, there was one in theearlyScientificRevolution, veryintuitive
concept of the physical, that’s what inspired-Galilei, -Descartes, -Liebniz,
-Newton, -Lagrange, many others all throughout the modernHistory ofScience. But
it was alreadyrecognised, afterNewton, that it’s gone. Locke recognised it,
Hume recognised it. ForHume, it’s not only gone, it’s a total mystery beyond our
intellectualcapacities. That we can speculate about, but it’s certainlygone,
and no one has proposed anything else. Physical these days are things
that Newton would have regarded it as total absurdities. LikeCurvedSpaceTime,
how can that be physical? QuantumEntaglement, I mean, Einstein regarded as
absurdity, because it’s so absurd, but now scientists justaccept it. Physical is just anything we more or less understand, and if
that’s theonlynotion of physical we have, there can’t be interaction between physical
and nonphysical. Nonphysical is just all the things we don’t understand.
If we ever get to understand them, it’ll be physical.
