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Noam Chomsky on Consciousness, Reality, Mind Body Connection, and Mathematical Realism
April 12, 2022
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The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how they impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science they analyze.
Culture, they analyze finance, economics, business, international affairs across every region. I'm particularly liking their new insider feature. It was just launched this month. It gives you, it gives me, a front row access to The Economist's internal editorial debates.
Where senior editors argue through the news with world leaders and policy makers in twice weekly long format shows. Basically an extremely high quality podcast. Whether it's scientific innovation or shifting global politics, The Economist provides comprehensive coverage beyond headlines. As a toe listener, you get a special discount. Head over to economist.com slash TOE to subscribe. That's economist.com slash TOE for your discount.
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Noam Chomsky is known as the father of modern linguistics, and the field of analytical philosophy and cognitive science are replete with references to the work of Chomsky. In my opinion, this is Chomsky at his pinnacle, stellar and the most philosophically pointed I've seen Chomsky, the most insightful I've seen him, and that's saying plenty, given the substantial amount of podcasts he's been on. This is the seventh time that I've been blessed enough to speak with Professor Chomsky, and given the vein of this channel, the Toe Channel, we stick with
philosophy, consciousness, and meaning, rather than, say, politics. There's a playlist with each of Chomsky's theories of everything appearances catalogued below.
Click on the timestamp in the description if you'd like to skip this intro. My name is Kurt Jaimungal. I'm a Torontonian filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics dedicated to the explication of the variegated terrain of theories of everything from a theoretical physics perspective, but as well as analyzing consciousness and seeing its potential connection to fundamental reality, whatever that is. Essentially, this channel is dedicated
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So number one, Putnam in 1979 argued that the indispensability of mathematics to empirical science gives us a good reason to believe in the existence of mathematical entities. According to this line of argumentation, reference to or quantification over mathematical entities such as sets, numbers, functions,
and such is indispensable to our best scientific theories, and so we ought to be committed to the existence of these mathematical entities. To do so would otherwise be called intellectual dishonesty, at least in Putnam's mind in 1979.
Well, in the first place, I think it's a bit unfair to accuse
Quine, Goodman, others of intellectual dishonesty, because they worked on what they called constructive nominalism, which was an effort to reconstruct our knowledge and understanding with denial of the existence of sets. I don't think that was intellectually dishonest.
I think it was quite a reasonable effort on the part of Quine and Goodman. Quine abandoned it later. Goodman came to it. Secondly, there's considerable difference between numbers, sets, and let's say atoms or chairs. I think I'm sure Putnam would agree.
As he knows better than I do, there's no clear notion of set. There's a reasonably clear notion of number putting aside non-standard theories, so we can assume number to be understood. Set is a famous statement by the mathematician, Kroniker, that God gave us the natural numbers
And everything else is a human creation. Of course, he didn't mean it literally. Natural numbers are just somehow there. We can try to understand them, but they have their properties and so on. Sets are concepts that we develop. First of all, there isn't any such thing as a set, just a set of something. Then if we talk about what's the right form of set theory,
There are different approaches. So you can have an axiomatic set theory like Zermelo-Frankel. You can have constructivist set theories which just develop as people's intuition develops. There are different forms of set theory. Then quite beyond that, take the difference between numbers and
what is postulated in scientific theories like atoms or at one time in history phlogiston or caloric. They're different. I mean, when say a star can go out of existence, three can't go out of existence.
If the universe, as scientists now believe, the consensus belief, if this universe is going to end in the darkness, end of time, everything disappears. Numbers aren't going to disappear. They were there before atoms appeared. They were there before stars appeared.
They're in some different category. So even if we accept the argument, which is reasonable, that if they're indispensable for scientific theories, we have no good reason to deny their existence. Their existence is of a very different kind.
And this kind of discussion, I think, just misses that distinction, which of course is what has bothered people. What kind of exists elsewhere? Putnam regularly, correctly points out that we use the word there exists in many different ways. And I think that's a positive here. We talk about the existence of numbers, the existence of stars,
We're talking about very different things. Does that mean that numbers are somehow more real than the universe? Or do we use the word real in different ways as well? To say that something is real is just to say that it is. Real is an honorific term. So when I say something is really true,
It's no different than saying it's true, other than I emphasize it. You should believe it. It's important. It's really true. If I say numbers are real, somehow means can't dispense with them. They play a role in our thinking that's gone. We have every reason to suppose that there's
Okay, we'll move on to question two, which says, what's the relationship between content and meaning?
It seems like taking the same text and tweaking how one delivers it, maybe the meaning, the intonation changes the meaning. So for example, you can act out Shakespeare and you could read it silently in your head or you can read it aloud and that's different than it being in a movie or being in a comic book. They seem to have different meanings despite the text being the same. So what's the relationship between the text and the meaning or the content and the meaning? Perhaps I shouldn't use the word content synonymously with text.
Well, the simple relation between content and meaning is we have no clear notion of either of them. This is reminiscent of Alan Turing's statement in his famous 1950 article, which founded the field of artificial intelligence. The article was Can Machines Think? And what he said is,
The question, can machines think is too meaningless to deserve discussion? Yes, we don't know what we mean by think, except very loosely. So what's the point of what we can do is if we can try to pose a specific question and see if we can answer that question. The specific question was his imitation game, so-called Turing test. Well, take the relation in content and meaning.
Meaning is a term of the English language. It's a very complex term. It's very hard to translate even into very similar languages. There's no closely corresponding term in even languages like French and German, let alone more remote ones. Content, of course, is also an English word, but it's a term of philosophical discourse.
Philosophers have invented a term which they pronounce content and use it in some technical sense, depending on whose unit. If it's Jerry Fodor, it means this. If it's Michael Domet, it means that. So you can't ask about the relationship between the technical term that someone invents and uses in a particular way and a term of the language meaning.
As for the rest of the comment, it's quite correct. The way we speak, when we're thinking to ourselves, when we're acting on a stage, when I'm talking to you, all these different ways give a different mode of understanding of what I'm saying. In loose, informal English, we say it gives it a different meaning.
even though the literal meaning is the same. So that's true. And nothing very much to say about it except describing it. There's no theory of it. We can describe it in various ways. Someone with more literary talent than I have could give a better description. But
Number four. So are all words contrast words, which is just a word that I'm giving it, which means to understand the concept of dog, one needs to know what is not a dog. Some people say this, but I imagine they're not linguists. They're just imprecisely saying this.
So if this is the case, then to me, then the word everything slash the universe would have to imply that one has a conception of what's not included in everything. But then you get some paradox there, because if you have an understanding of what's not included in the word everything, you can include that in the word everything. So is that true that to understand a word, we do so by understanding what that word means in contrast to what it's not?
Well, if there is nothing that is not a dog, then we don't understand the word dog. The word dog and every substantive word, if we understand it at all, we understand that some things don't fall under that concept. Actually, what a dog is is not a trivial matter. If you look into it, the meaning of the word dog is quite intricate.
It's not a matter of just picking out an object in the world independent of our mind. That doesn't work. But the microphone in front of me is not a dog. At least that much is clear. With regard to the word the universe, well, we do have a concept of things that are not in it, like unicorns, for example. They're not in the universe.
Lots of things that we think about are not in the universe. Things we once thought were in the universe, we now think are not in the universe. Phlogiston, for example. There were once good theories, serious scientific theories, which developed properties of Phlogiston. We now have different theories which don't postulate it. So then
We took it to be in the universe, now we take it out of the universe. Words like all and everything are in a different category, they're not substantive words, so we understand them just by their logical properties, not with regard to things they exclude.
I noticed that you skipped one. Was that on purpose or? Yeah, only because I had a question about when Turing said meaninglessness, that if he was to say so-and-so is meaningless, then to me, one has to understand meaninglessness in terms of meaning. And if we're saying, well, it's meaningless because we don't have a great concept of meaning, then to me that would imply we don't have a great concept of meaninglessness.
Well, what Turing was saying, we don't have a clear concept of thinking. And since we don't have a clear concept of meaning, there's no point in trying to ask questions like, can machines think? Machine, remember, means program. Program's a theory. So he's asking basically, can we have a theory of thinking? Well, not unless we know what we're talking about. So in that sense, it's meaningless.
There's no significance to what we're saying. He's using the word meaningless in the ordinary informal sense, where some things just have no significance, like asking how many legs does a unicorn have. It's not a factual question.
We can raise the question, if we're talking about mythology, then we can say four legs. But the question, how many does it really have? Not a question.
I understand. Okay, so we can get to question three, which we skipped, which is what's the difference between reference and referent? We spoke about this before and you mentioned one was mental and the other one was not mental or one was subjective and the other was objective. I wanted you to re-explain that if you don't mind. Well, we can start with the relation of reference. It's a technical notion, philosophers, logicians used in a certain way.
If you take a look at the tradition of logical philosophy from, has earlier origins, of course, but in the modern period, Perse, Frege, Tarski, Carnat, Coyne, is a definite concept, concepts captured in the title of books like Coyne's Word and Object. The idea is there's a relation
between a sign in person's sense, maybe a word in a language specific case, and some extra mental entity. So relation between the word river in, to take the earliest example that was studied carefully in classical Greece,
a river and something out there, which is extramental. That's the relation of reference. In the sciences, it's a goal of the sciences to construct systems which actually have a relation of reference. So it's a norm of the sciences. If you're working in chemistry, say,
to develop concept, ideas, signs in person, sense, say, concepts, words, which actually pick out things in the instrumental world. So you want, if you have the concept quark, you are postulating that out there somewhere outside of my mind, there are quarks, same with stars, same with atoms, same with caloric.
Logistic. That's the norm of the sciences. But language and human life are not formal science. So it's an empirical question whether human languages have a relation of reference. The term referent is derivative from this. It's the thing referred to. So if we have coins, word and object, the
Word is the sign, the referent is the object. You know, quark is the word and the thing we assume is out there is the referent. But does natural language have that property? Well, the classical tradition argued that it didn't. I think they were right. So if you go back to say Aristotle,
is he gave as an example the word house said what's a house and his metaphysics house is a combination of matter and form the matter of the house is bricks timbers so on things a physicist could find looking at a house the form of the house
is basically a mental construction. It's the design, what the architect have in mind, the intended use and so on. Something could look like a house exactly, but be something totally different. It could be a library, could be a stable, could be an artistic object that you put on your shelf, could be all kinds of things, and look exactly like a house.
In fact, and if you look further at the notion house, it's much more complex. So our concept of house has a designated exterior. It's an exterior. So if I paint the house brown, I'm painting the outside. Suppose it's a one-room schoolhouse. If I paint the schoolhouse brown, it's on the outside.
If I paint the room brown, it's on the inside. That's our way of conceiving the object. The object is the same, and it gets much more complex than that. I shouldn't qualify here. Aristotle was talking metaphysics. What is a house? But if you look at his theory of signs, his semantic theory, he held on interpretation that we have
internal signs, which are universal. All people have them, abstract words, and the word is just as the properties of the thing referred to. So we can carry it over and say, for the word as well, it has the properties of form and meaning and goes way beyond if you look more closely. In the
17th century, there was a major cognitive revolution, and these ideas were reinterpreted in cognitive terms. And I think those are the terms in which we can look at them. But the conclusion is that house is not a sign that refers to anything. There's no entity in the mind external world that a physicist could look at and say this is a house. Same is true of
The first example that was used before Aristotle, pre-Socratic Heraclitus, who asked a pretty deep question, how can you cross the same river twice? He could have added, how can it be you both times? Since you've changed, he didn't say that, and the river changed. So how is it the same river or the same person?
As soon as you start looking into that, it turns out to be quite non-trivial. What we regard as the same river, the same person, are very intricate notions. I won't run through it here. There's literature about it. Just to illustrate, I live in Arizona now. On my way to work, I cross the Rolito River. I've never seen any water in it. Longer-term residents tell me that
During the monsoon, water flows through it. But it's the Roledo River, even though it has no water, because of a mental construction. If the town were to paint a line in the middle, smooth it over, use it for commuting, it would be a highway. But the object wouldn't have changed in any more than trivial way. On the other hand, you could make massive changes in the object.
It would still be the Aledo River. It could change the course, for example. When water flows in, it could go in the opposite direction. It could split it into tributaries. So the story is that what we understand to be a river is something with complex conceptual mental properties. It can undergo radical changes and be the same river
can undergo tiny changes and not be a river at all. You look at every word in the vocabulary, even the simplest ones, that's the way it is. So I think the conclusion is natural language just doesn't have a reference relation. That wouldn't have bothered Frege, Tarski, Carnap, because they didn't think there was any point in looking at natural language anyway.
Let's just look at formal systems which don't have the problems of natural language, so no bother to them. Coyne is a little more ambiguous. If you look at his book Word and Object, the first half of it is pretty much about natural language and psychology. The second half is about what he calls regimented language. That means pretty much what Tarski and Carnap had in mind.
for things we construct to be better behaved for our purposes than natural language. So that's a split. But as just as a matter of empirical fact, I think languages do not have this structure, the Persian structure of sign, referent, interpretation. So technically speaking,
Natural language doesn't have semantics. Semantics, technically, is the study of reference, the relation of untruth, which depends on reference. But that just doesn't seem to be a property of natural language. With TD Early Pay, you get your paycheck up to two business days early, which means you can go to tonight's game on a whim. Check out a pop-up art show.
It's not a property of all of natural language or most of natural language. Well, it's part of here. We have a decision to make.
Do we include scientific discourse within natural language? I mean, there's the kind of language that children acquire without instruction very rapidly. So by two or three years old, children have already acquired all these concepts. They don't have any instruction, very little experience, but it's part of our natural design. We're designed to have these concepts.
Then there are other concepts like, say, quark or atom. Those are taught. And if you want to call them part of language, OK, but it's just a question without significance. It's a question of terminology. Hear that sound?
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If not, we can move on. Well, I read it years ago and maybe I'm not doing justice to it. But the way I understood it, you can check and see if this is accurate, is as an argument saying that the notion of qualia plays no clear and constructive role in our account of the world, including our experience, so we can dispense with it.
Because there's no theory of qualia, basically. Actually, as far as I recall, in check and see, he didn't discuss the one careful systematic theory that uses qualia, namely, Nelson Goodman's major work, Structure of Appearance, which was an attempt to redo what Carnap had done earlier in his
Kornap had tried to construct a logical construction of the world based on objects and Goodman redid it, not talking about the world but just about appearance, on the basis of qualia. And that's a systematic theory that uses the notion qualia with a lot of interesting results.
So within, I don't know what Dennett would say about this. I don't think he discussed it. And it's the one case that I know of of a serious theoretical construction based on quality and has, I think, quite interesting results. But it's the structure of appearance, remember. Actually, I knew Goodman pretty well. I was a student of his. He had in mind a second volume, which would be the structure of the world.
Never got to that. It was very hard to even get to the structure of appearance. Have you read Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained book? And if so, do you feel like it was explained? Consciousness has been explained? It has a lot of clever observations. It's interesting to read. I think it leaves consciousness where it was. In fact, the question of explaining consciousness
It's a very curious one. I mean, it's a modern concern till pretty recently. Consciousness was not a major issue in philosophy. When it entered at first during the great early modern period, the notion consciousness was used for self-consciousness, awareness of one's own mind. The modern problem was called
David Chalmers, The Hard Problem. That's basically the last century. As far as I can see, the best approach to it, to the so-called problem, was actually given by Bertrand Russell a century ago. I pointed out, I think correctly, that what we are most confident about is our own experience.
The rest of our intellectual efforts are attempts to make some sense of it. Science, for example, is an effort to see if you can make some sense of consciousness, conscious experience. And he pointed out as well that we would like to explain consciousness in material terms. But the problem is we have no idea what material is. For example, we don't know whether
All matter has consciousness. Arthur Eddington, his friend and colleague scientist, pointed out that we don't know that atoms don't have consciousness. We don't have a clear enough understanding of the basis of it. So as in recent work, Galen Strawson, fine young philosophers, picked this up and pointed out, I think, correctly, that it's not consciousness that has to be explained.
that we understand very well. We can describe it in extensive detail.
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We don't understand this matter. So when you talk about explaining consciousness, trying to account for it in material terms, the roadblock is we don't know what material terms are. In fact, that's true. You can pick up
Journal of Quantum Mechanics, recent journal, somebody just sent me one, which is symposium of leading quantum physicists trying to figure out what a particle is. They don't know. We know we have to postulate particles, but we don't know what they are. Matter is a very... I mean, there was a concept of matter in the
early modern scientific revolution, so called mechanical philosophy, but that was shattered by Newton, and though he didn't believe it, and regarded it as absurd, but science has since accepted it. And that leaves us without a clear notion of what matter is. Consciousness, we understand as much as you can understand anything.
Okay, since we're on this track, can we go on to question number 22, which is a question from Davey who says, to Professor Chomsky, the mind-body problem. How can Chomsky make the transposition from Newton's demolishment of the notion of physical in the natural sciences to the rejection of the concept of body in the mind-body problem? Does this dismissal mean that Professor Chomsky believes there is no material world and only the mental aspects?
Well, we're talking about the 17th century, and the 17th century body just meant some part of the physical world. There was a narrower sense of body in which it means my shoulder, my arms, and so on, but they weren't talking about that. Actually, Descartes was in his Traité de l'homme, the last volume of his Le Monde, which was never published.
out of concern for the church. But there he does talk about, you know, the structure of the body, you know, in the narrow sense of body, you know, your ribs, your digestive system, and so on, your thinking, how they're related. It's where he brings up the pineal gland as the point in which they're connected.
So there he's using a narrower sense of body. But the discussion about body is just discussion about matter. So it's not my distinction. It's just right. You have no notion of matter. You have no notion of body. This stuff here is all made of matter. And if I don't understand what matter is, I'm going to have some understanding what this is. But that's consciousness, the things we all understand. But when you ask
What's it constituted of? Well, some kind of whatever the world is constituted of. But since Newton, we have no real concept of that physical material body. That's just whatever we think the world is constituted of. I'm in physicist John Wheeler at the Institute for Advanced Study. Once advanced,
theory that's called it from bit uh says the only thing that exists in the universe is bits of information answers to questions that we pose bits everything else the it part is just our constructions from that i don't know if it's a good theory or not i'm not that competent a physicist but suppose it is okay that's matter it's
If it's something else, okay. Right now, physicists are in a strange situation where they can't find, I think it's 95% of what they have to assume the world is constituted of. Dark matter, dark energy. Can't find it. It's got to be there.
The predictions don't come out. The theory doesn't work, so it's got to be there, but you can't find it. Whatever it is, that's matter. All of this on the last part of the question, I've always been persuaded by what's called in the history of philosophy, Locke's suggestion, referring to John Locke's immediate reaction
to Newton's Principia, which he knew at once. Locke, well, he put it within his theological framework. We can restate it without the theological framework, but putting it in his terms, just as God provided matter with properties that we cannot comprehend, as Mr. Newton has shown,
So God might have super added to matter the property of thought, meaning certain organized parts of whatever the world consists of, maybe something in our brain produces thought, just as general matter has properties like attraction and repulsion. I can't understand it, but that's the way God made things.
Well, that's Locke's suggestion. It led to a century of careful inquiry into how organized matter, whatever matter is, can produce thought. David Hume, Joseph Priestley, Lemaitre, many others, finds its way to Darwin's notebooks, just as
The liver produces bile, why can't the brain produce thoughts? That was the idea through the 19th century, then 18th century, then pretty much forgotten. Interestingly, it was revived in the last decade of the 20th century, regarded as a radical new idea in the history of philosophy.
thinking is just the property of organized matter, astonishing hypothesis and so on, the new idea in modern biology, repeating almost verbatim the writings of the 18th century. I've written about this, so it was rediscovered and if there's an alternative, I don't know what it is. Thinking, what's mental, is just
some kind of property of certain types of organized matter. Notice this leaves open what matter is, whatever it turns out to be, whatever the world is constituted of. But certain organizations of it do have the property of thought. And we can now say a fair amount about that. We know that it's above the neck, not below the neck. So you can cut off my arm. I still think the same way.
decapitate me, I don't think the same way. And when you look inside the head, it's not in the nose, it's in the brain. You can find particular parts of the brain which implicated in one or another kind of thought. So you can now carry out the 17th century insights lock in more specific directions. So as to whether
There's no material world, only the mental aspects. There's a material world by definition, the material world we define as whatever there is. So there's something, not nothing. So therefore there's a material world, whatever it is. We don't know what it is. We don't know what its properties are. We know some of its properties, like some of its properties are attraction and repulsion. Other of its properties are thinking.
many other properties. Mental aspects of the world are just part of the material world. I don't see any point in distinguishing them. There are chemical aspects to the world, there are mental aspects to the world. Of course they're different, we can study them and so on, but I don't see... There is a kind of methodological dualism which holds that we have to study
the mind differently from other parts of the world. Quine was an example of this. His approach to mental aspects of the world in word and object was radically unscientific in my view. I've written about this, didn't just treat it dogmatically. Language is a complex of dispositions to verbal behavior acquired by conditioning.
It's an edict. It's not a scientific proposal, and it collapses instantly on examination. But it didn't matter because we keep to methodological dualism. We don't use the methods of science when we study the mind. Of course, Quine would deny that and did deny it. But if you look at it, I think that's the right conclusion. And you can say the same thing about all of behaviourism.
Behaviourism, I think, was a radical departure from the sciences. I mean, the sciences, typical comment about the sciences, which I think is fair enough, is Jean-Pierre Baptiste's physicist Nobel Prize lecture when he won the physics prize. He said, the goal of science is to
discover the simple invisibles that lie behind the complex visibles. Behavioral science is saying, let's just look at the complex visibles. We're not allowed to look at the hidden invisibles. In other words, we're not allowed to do science. Can't think of a more radical departure from science.
And for the 20th century, it's been considered scientific. I think that's a serious departure from science, which swept the intellectual world. So maybe you don't want to label yourself, but would you call yourself an idealist? Sorry? Would you consider yourself to be an idealist or no? No, I would accept normal science. I think we should accept normal science. We
try to discover what constitutes the world and how its various aspects work. So its chemical aspects, its metal aspects, its other aspects of the world. Try to find out what they are and see if physicists will be able to discover what constitutes the world. But going back to Russell, I think he was right to say that it's not
Consciousness that needs explaining. It's matter that needs explaining. Consciousness we know all about, more than we know about anything else. Matter we have problems with. Am I to understand that as saying it's not consciousness we need to explain, but unconsciousness? Or are you making a distinction between matter and unconsciousness? Unconsciousness too, but also matter. It's what is, if you want to
What's called reducing consciousness to the material world? Can't do that until you know what the material world is. You can describe consciousness in extensive detail. As I say, the best descriptions are in literature, where consciousness is what it's about. What does my protagonist think and feel? Extensive detail. And we can do it for ourselves.
You ask a question, what constitutes this thing? We don't know. That's where the problems arise. When I'm thinking about this question of, well, what is a cup? And let's forget about it that it's natural language. Let's just imagine we're talking, what is an atom? What is an atom? And then we say, well, we don't know exactly what an atom is. And then I wonder, well, what explanation could one possibly give
that would satisfy someone so that they wouldn't say, well, we don't know what that is. So let's say we explain the atoms in terms of something else, then we can say that again and again. Is there something at the bottom that we can say, okay, now we understand it, now we know what that is? Well, we've known since the 17th century that there isn't going to be any answer to that question that we can accept with certainty.
empirical questions. We can try to find the best theories, the best explanatory theories, but we can never be certain that they're true. That's been understood since the 17th century, since the collapse of the mechanical philosophy. So we just have to live with that. We live in a world in which we can seek best explanations, but that's it.
Now, maybe it's possible to go further. Maybe Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason can carry us further. Leibniz argued the familiar phrase is, we live in the best of all possible worlds. But there's a much deeper theory behind it saying that nature necessarily constructs the best possible world. Nothing else is possible.
If you hang a string of beads, they're going to go in a perfect form. They're not going to go in a square, because nature always necessarily seeks the simplest solution. And then there's a background for that in the principle of sufficient reason and so on. Well, if that's correct, and it's been an amazingly productive idea,
In fact, Galileo had said something similar, but more loosely. He said, the world is, nature is simple and our task is to prove it. Leibniz had a much deeper theory and a mathematical theory. And some of the great mathematicians worked on this to try to show that it's got to be true. And if you look at the results of the sciences, anywhere you understand something, it's true.
Many great scientists have commented on this, said the mysterious thing is not that there are laws, but they're always simple laws. And if they're not simple laws, we find they're wrong. Well, Leibniz had a general argument to that effect. And if you can, sometimes it's called the magical property of science. Always, if you get anything like the right answer, it's always the simplest answer. As I say, Leibniz had
arguments for that and the great mathematicians of the 17th century worked on it to try to prove it. Descartes, others. If that's true, then there's something that we should be certain about. Whatever is simplest is going to be true. But that leaves a lot of questions open.
like our understanding of simplicity, plus the impact of the law of sufficient reason. So we're in difficult territory. But the simplest point to say is we just can't be confident about our empirical conclusions. Actually, that goes back a little bit to the first question you asked. We can't assume that because something is needed,
Number 11. Here's something I've been wondering. When someone's trying to articulate their feelings, one often searches for the right word or right set of words to express an intuition which isn't precisely formed. So it's imprecise, let's say at the gut level, at an intuitive level.
Sometimes we express different words aloud and we're trying to get to it. We do this often in therapy or when we're talking with a friend to try to get to the root of the issue. We say, no, that's not it. That's not why I'm upset with Jim, for example. And then maybe the friend says, are you upset because two years ago he snubbed you at the party? Then you say, okay, that's it. Yes, that's it.
So this obviously isn't just limited to that. It could also be sometimes when we're scrolling around on TV, we feel like I'm in the mood for some show, but I don't know what show it is. And then you find the show, you said, yes, I'm in the mood for that exact show. So what is happening here? It seems like we have something that's imprecise.
That raises very interesting questions. I think what it leads to is that most of our mental life is unconscious and inaccessible to consciousness.
This is opposed to various dogmas that are held in the philosophical literature. So John Searle, for example, has argued that a necessary property of the mental is that you can bring it to consciousness. Well, unfortunately, our mental life is beyond the level of consciousness, just as we can't become conscious of the
You know something about your digestive system when you have a stomach ache, but if you want to study how it works, and it is a major nervous system, kind of like the nervous system up here, you have to study it, as philosophers put it, from a third person point of view, from the outside. And the same is true of our mental life. We can only study it from the outside. We can't introspect into it.
You can show this pretty clearly in the study of language. When you look closely at the nature of language, maybe the only area where we can study this clearly, maybe geometry, shapes and so on, but to a much richer extent in language. When we look into it, we find that the best theories of language, hence the ones we tentatively accept on
Putnam and Quine's grounds, though they didn't go to this conclusion, they rejected it. But if we accept their arguments, as I think we should, then we should tentatively accept the best explanatory theories of language. And those theories, contrary to their conclusions, tell us that there's a system of computation going on in the mind which is producing internal thoughts
which then we struggle to articulate, but they're there inside. And the kinds of examples that are discussed here show it. We all see this all the time. When you're writing, for example, you write a sentence, you look at it and you say, no, that's not what I mean. Try something else, you know, maybe that's a lot closer. There's what we call inner speech.
It's not inner speech, it's outer speech. What we call inner speech is externalized language, not what's going on inside. So you can think two sentences and you can ask, do they rhyme, for example? There's nothing in the internal system that has anything to do with that. So in fact, if you introspect, what comes to consciousness are fragments, bits and pieces of fragments.
And amazingly, they come instantaneously in very complicated ways. So take any, you walk into a room, you see a friend of yours sitting at the table, working on his computer, you remember, oh, I wanted to tell him something. But then you notice that there's another guy sitting there who would be offended if you said this, so you better
say something else when you come over to them, then you go over and maybe you say something. All of this happens in an instantaneously huge amount of thinking going on. We're not conscious of it. You get little bits and fragments here and there, but it's all going on in everything we do. In the study of language, you can actually pinpoint it. I don't have time to do it here, but you can pinpoint
things that are in the internal language which don't get expressed but must be in the internal language as we see from the way it works generally, other consequences, best theory explanations again. So if we could overcome the methodological dualism that Quine was immersed in, and I'm afraid Putnam too very often, and accept their conclusions
Look at the best theories that we have. If you can improve them, fine. Look at the best theories we have, accept their assumptions tentatively. When we do, we conclude, I think, what I just described. A lot of mental computation going on, bits and pieces of it reaching awareness, fragments usually, but so interpenetrated with what's conscious that you just can't study them separately.
Study of consciousness is never going to get anywhere unless it integrates itself with a much richer study where we understand much more of the unconscious, inaccessible mental processes that are underway. They interpenetrate so closely you can't separate one from another. So I don't think consciousness studies are going to get very far unless they begin to integrate them
into the rich, complex, mental processes that are inaccessible to consciousness, in my opinion. There are two problems with consciousness studies. One is the one I mentioned before, Russell's problem. The problem is matter, not consciousness. The second is this one. What's conscious can't be sensibly disentangled from what's unconscious and inaccessible.
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When I was speaking to Professor Michael Levin, I was asking him about consciousness studies and he said there is no consciousness studies because consciousness to study it is a first person activity. However, what you're outlining sounds like we need more third person. If you want to study it, it's going to be third person. We study things from the outside. Russell, I think, was right. Our conscious experience is what we are most
confident about. When we study our conscious experience, we discover that it's not given, it's the result of many other things, and it's often mistaken about other things. But that's our further scientific intellectual inquiry into the nature of what we are immediately aware of. So the fact that it's first person, I don't
Think it has much to do with anything. Yes, of course it's first person. And the rest of our inquiries are third person efforts to find out what it is and how it relates to the rest of the world.
The last question, what happens is we have squabbles, we quibble over definitions. People do this and scholars do this. For example, what's the definition of life? Infamously, there are 12 to 20 to 30 different definitions. Same with computation, same with what does it mean to be a woman, though that maybe is on the more political end, but it's the same idea. What are we quibbling over?
It reminds me of what we just talked about, whereas we have an intuitive notion of what the word life means. And then we have an ostensive definition where we point to different objects or what we point to different entities and we say this for sure satisfies the definition of life. These ones, perhaps maybe these ones not so much. So then let's capture it. Firstly, is my account of how we generate a definition correct? And is fighting over these definitions of a waste of time? Why or why not?
Well, let's take one of the examples he gave, computation. That is an old idea, computing things. But there was, in the mid-20th century, an answer to the question, what is computation, which is an absolute answer, to quote Kurt Gödel, namely Turing's definition.
Gertl concluded, I think plausibly, that this answers the question precisely, what is computation? It's absolute, doesn't depend on your point of view or anything else. Now, of course, it's not the intuitive notion, but it's a technical notion which captures what's essential to the intuitive notion and gives us a precise mathematical concept which then has been developed.
very rich and complicated ways into theory of computation, recursive function theory, very rich part of mathematics leads right into the empirical sciences. It was the crucial step for linguistics that allowed it to make the move from vague studies of production to precise studies of generation. That's modern linguistics based on
Turing, posts, girdles, development of a precise notion of computation. And that's, I think, what we should be aiming for in these other cases, like take life. We have an intuitive concept, like you're alive, but this cup is not alive. So we have a starting point. Our virus is alive. Well, not so clear. What we need is better
explanatory theories of the way the world works. And to the extent we construct these theories, we'll have answers not to the question of what is life, but to a coherent, clear concept of how the world works, which captures fundamental properties of what we're struggling about when we talk about life. So the quibbles aren't
useless unless they just collapse into discussions of terminology. But if there are ways of exploring the different aspects of the world to try to find what are the real qualities of the world, and here I'm descending to the metaphysical realism that Hillary spent most of his work trying to oppose, then we're doing something useful.
Is there a name for it? Because I'm extremely interested in studying how is it we come up with definitions and how is it when we know that what we've articulated matches our intuition. Is there a name for that? Science. I mean, is there a name, like it's a subfield of linguistics, like semiotics or some field, like is there a name for it? Semiotics is just the general theory of science.
Actually, I once listened to a lecture, happened to be in Paris by a leading figure in semiotics, it was to a general scientific seminar. He started by saying that semiotics has two branches. One is language, the other is traffic signals. We can say something about those two topics. He was joking, of course, but
The point is you can have a general field. Let's talk about signs and wave your hands and so on. But you can try to carve out some parts of it where you can develop serious explanatory theories that give you insight and understanding into how some parts of the world work. Well, is it the original quest? Not quite. The original quest was much broader and looser.
Okay, thank you, Professor. I know that you have to get going. I appreciate this. And hopefully next time, if there's a next time, we could get to some of the other questions as well. Hope so. Thank you, sir. Sorry, I have to leave.
okay and if anyone who's watching this knows of the field or subfield of linguistics if it's even within linguistics of the study of definitions that is how we come up with the explicit definitions for an implicit for an imprecise intuition as well as how we articulate and then know that we've matched what we have articulated as well as what i'm extremely interested in is how is it that we come up with a definition for example life when it was contingent on certain examples like let's say we consider
ourselves to be alive, frogs to be alive, the sun to be alive, and the grass to be alive, and perhaps even snowy mountains to be alive. We then extract a definition of life, which then contradicts the data points we used to come up with the pattern that produced that definition of life. So we no longer consider fire or the sun or mountains to be alive. So I'm extremely interested in that the whole field, if it's even a field of articulating definitions,
If anyone here happens to be within the field of linguistics and knows any papers or research that I should do to learn more about the subject, then please do let me know. Thank you so much for watching. Usually when I produce a podcast, I tend to rewatch it maybe at most once, whereas this one I think I'm going to rewatch a couple times. I found it to be the best one that has been done on this channel with Noam Chomsky and that's saying plenty because there may be six others, so there's seven in total. The playlist for those will be in the description.
The podcast is now finished. If you'd like to support conversations like this, then do consider going to patreon.com slash C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L. That is Kurt Jaimungal. It's support from the patrons and from the sponsors that allow me to do this full time. Every dollar helps tremendously. Thank you.
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"text": " Noam Chomsky is known as the father of modern linguistics, and the field of analytical philosophy and cognitive science are replete with references to the work of Chomsky. In my opinion, this is Chomsky at his pinnacle, stellar and the most philosophically pointed I've seen Chomsky, the most insightful I've seen him, and that's saying plenty, given the substantial amount of podcasts he's been on. This is the seventh time that I've been blessed enough to speak with Professor Chomsky, and given the vein of this channel, the Toe Channel, we stick with"
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"text": " Click on the timestamp in the description if you'd like to skip this intro. My name is Kurt Jaimungal. I'm a Torontonian filmmaker with a background in mathematical physics dedicated to the explication of the variegated terrain of theories of everything from a theoretical physics perspective, but as well as analyzing consciousness and seeing its potential connection to fundamental reality, whatever that is. Essentially, this channel is dedicated"
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"text": " There's also a link to the Patreon, that is Patreon.com slash Kurt Jaimungal, if you'd like to support this podcast, as the patrons and the sponsors are the only reasons that I'm able to have podcasts of this quality and this depth, given that I can do this now full-time, thanks to both the patrons and the sponsors' support. Speaking of sponsors, there are two. The first sponsor is Brilliant. During the winter break, I decided to brush up on some of the fundamentals of physics, particularly with regard to information theory,"
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"text": " So number one, Putnam in 1979 argued that the indispensability of mathematics to empirical science gives us a good reason to believe in the existence of mathematical entities. According to this line of argumentation, reference to or quantification over mathematical entities such as sets, numbers, functions,"
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"text": " Well, in the first place, I think it's a bit unfair to accuse"
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"text": " Quine, Goodman, others of intellectual dishonesty, because they worked on what they called constructive nominalism, which was an effort to reconstruct our knowledge and understanding with denial of the existence of sets. I don't think that was intellectually dishonest."
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"text": " I think it was quite a reasonable effort on the part of Quine and Goodman. Quine abandoned it later. Goodman came to it. Secondly, there's considerable difference between numbers, sets, and let's say atoms or chairs. I think I'm sure Putnam would agree."
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"text": " As he knows better than I do, there's no clear notion of set. There's a reasonably clear notion of number putting aside non-standard theories, so we can assume number to be understood. Set is a famous statement by the mathematician, Kroniker, that God gave us the natural numbers"
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"text": " There are different approaches. So you can have an axiomatic set theory like Zermelo-Frankel. You can have constructivist set theories which just develop as people's intuition develops. There are different forms of set theory. Then quite beyond that, take the difference between numbers and"
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"text": " what is postulated in scientific theories like atoms or at one time in history phlogiston or caloric. They're different. I mean, when say a star can go out of existence, three can't go out of existence."
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"text": " They're in some different category. So even if we accept the argument, which is reasonable, that if they're indispensable for scientific theories, we have no good reason to deny their existence. Their existence is of a very different kind."
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"text": " And this kind of discussion, I think, just misses that distinction, which of course is what has bothered people. What kind of exists elsewhere? Putnam regularly, correctly points out that we use the word there exists in many different ways. And I think that's a positive here. We talk about the existence of numbers, the existence of stars,"
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"text": " We're talking about very different things. Does that mean that numbers are somehow more real than the universe? Or do we use the word real in different ways as well? To say that something is real is just to say that it is. Real is an honorific term. So when I say something is really true,"
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"text": " It's no different than saying it's true, other than I emphasize it. You should believe it. It's important. It's really true. If I say numbers are real, somehow means can't dispense with them. They play a role in our thinking that's gone. We have every reason to suppose that there's"
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"text": " Okay, we'll move on to question two, which says, what's the relationship between content and meaning?"
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"text": " It seems like taking the same text and tweaking how one delivers it, maybe the meaning, the intonation changes the meaning. So for example, you can act out Shakespeare and you could read it silently in your head or you can read it aloud and that's different than it being in a movie or being in a comic book. They seem to have different meanings despite the text being the same. So what's the relationship between the text and the meaning or the content and the meaning? Perhaps I shouldn't use the word content synonymously with text."
},
{
"end_time": 759.787,
"index": 30,
"start_time": 730.725,
"text": " Well, the simple relation between content and meaning is we have no clear notion of either of them. This is reminiscent of Alan Turing's statement in his famous 1950 article, which founded the field of artificial intelligence. The article was Can Machines Think? And what he said is,"
},
{
"end_time": 789.65,
"index": 31,
"start_time": 760.179,
"text": " The question, can machines think is too meaningless to deserve discussion? Yes, we don't know what we mean by think, except very loosely. So what's the point of what we can do is if we can try to pose a specific question and see if we can answer that question. The specific question was his imitation game, so-called Turing test. Well, take the relation in content and meaning."
},
{
"end_time": 819.07,
"index": 32,
"start_time": 790.469,
"text": " Meaning is a term of the English language. It's a very complex term. It's very hard to translate even into very similar languages. There's no closely corresponding term in even languages like French and German, let alone more remote ones. Content, of course, is also an English word, but it's a term of philosophical discourse."
},
{
"end_time": 849.889,
"index": 33,
"start_time": 819.889,
"text": " Philosophers have invented a term which they pronounce content and use it in some technical sense, depending on whose unit. If it's Jerry Fodor, it means this. If it's Michael Domet, it means that. So you can't ask about the relationship between the technical term that someone invents and uses in a particular way and a term of the language meaning."
},
{
"end_time": 879.787,
"index": 34,
"start_time": 850.469,
"text": " As for the rest of the comment, it's quite correct. The way we speak, when we're thinking to ourselves, when we're acting on a stage, when I'm talking to you, all these different ways give a different mode of understanding of what I'm saying. In loose, informal English, we say it gives it a different meaning."
},
{
"end_time": 906.442,
"index": 35,
"start_time": 880.776,
"text": " even though the literal meaning is the same. So that's true. And nothing very much to say about it except describing it. There's no theory of it. We can describe it in various ways. Someone with more literary talent than I have could give a better description. But"
},
{
"end_time": 922.875,
"index": 36,
"start_time": 907.039,
"text": " Number four. So are all words contrast words, which is just a word that I'm giving it, which means to understand the concept of dog, one needs to know what is not a dog. Some people say this, but I imagine they're not linguists. They're just imprecisely saying this."
},
{
"end_time": 945.555,
"index": 37,
"start_time": 922.875,
"text": " So if this is the case, then to me, then the word everything slash the universe would have to imply that one has a conception of what's not included in everything. But then you get some paradox there, because if you have an understanding of what's not included in the word everything, you can include that in the word everything. So is that true that to understand a word, we do so by understanding what that word means in contrast to what it's not?"
},
{
"end_time": 975.623,
"index": 38,
"start_time": 947.466,
"text": " Well, if there is nothing that is not a dog, then we don't understand the word dog. The word dog and every substantive word, if we understand it at all, we understand that some things don't fall under that concept. Actually, what a dog is is not a trivial matter. If you look into it, the meaning of the word dog is quite intricate."
},
{
"end_time": 1004.548,
"index": 39,
"start_time": 976.323,
"text": " It's not a matter of just picking out an object in the world independent of our mind. That doesn't work. But the microphone in front of me is not a dog. At least that much is clear. With regard to the word the universe, well, we do have a concept of things that are not in it, like unicorns, for example. They're not in the universe."
},
{
"end_time": 1036.305,
"index": 40,
"start_time": 1007.244,
"text": " Lots of things that we think about are not in the universe. Things we once thought were in the universe, we now think are not in the universe. Phlogiston, for example. There were once good theories, serious scientific theories, which developed properties of Phlogiston. We now have different theories which don't postulate it. So then"
},
{
"end_time": 1055.623,
"index": 41,
"start_time": 1036.715,
"text": " We took it to be in the universe, now we take it out of the universe. Words like all and everything are in a different category, they're not substantive words, so we understand them just by their logical properties, not with regard to things they exclude."
},
{
"end_time": 1083.626,
"index": 42,
"start_time": 1056.561,
"text": " I noticed that you skipped one. Was that on purpose or? Yeah, only because I had a question about when Turing said meaninglessness, that if he was to say so-and-so is meaningless, then to me, one has to understand meaninglessness in terms of meaning. And if we're saying, well, it's meaningless because we don't have a great concept of meaning, then to me that would imply we don't have a great concept of meaninglessness."
},
{
"end_time": 1114.326,
"index": 43,
"start_time": 1084.906,
"text": " Well, what Turing was saying, we don't have a clear concept of thinking. And since we don't have a clear concept of meaning, there's no point in trying to ask questions like, can machines think? Machine, remember, means program. Program's a theory. So he's asking basically, can we have a theory of thinking? Well, not unless we know what we're talking about. So in that sense, it's meaningless."
},
{
"end_time": 1141.476,
"index": 44,
"start_time": 1114.65,
"text": " There's no significance to what we're saying. He's using the word meaningless in the ordinary informal sense, where some things just have no significance, like asking how many legs does a unicorn have. It's not a factual question."
},
{
"end_time": 1154.582,
"index": 45,
"start_time": 1142.278,
"text": " We can raise the question, if we're talking about mythology, then we can say four legs. But the question, how many does it really have? Not a question."
},
{
"end_time": 1184.48,
"index": 46,
"start_time": 1156.032,
"text": " I understand. Okay, so we can get to question three, which we skipped, which is what's the difference between reference and referent? We spoke about this before and you mentioned one was mental and the other one was not mental or one was subjective and the other was objective. I wanted you to re-explain that if you don't mind. Well, we can start with the relation of reference. It's a technical notion, philosophers, logicians used in a certain way."
},
{
"end_time": 1215.247,
"index": 47,
"start_time": 1185.247,
"text": " If you take a look at the tradition of logical philosophy from, has earlier origins, of course, but in the modern period, Perse, Frege, Tarski, Carnat, Coyne, is a definite concept, concepts captured in the title of books like Coyne's Word and Object. The idea is there's a relation"
},
{
"end_time": 1238.558,
"index": 48,
"start_time": 1215.811,
"text": " between a sign in person's sense, maybe a word in a language specific case, and some extra mental entity. So relation between the word river in, to take the earliest example that was studied carefully in classical Greece,"
},
{
"end_time": 1268.166,
"index": 49,
"start_time": 1239.241,
"text": " a river and something out there, which is extramental. That's the relation of reference. In the sciences, it's a goal of the sciences to construct systems which actually have a relation of reference. So it's a norm of the sciences. If you're working in chemistry, say,"
},
{
"end_time": 1298.797,
"index": 50,
"start_time": 1268.882,
"text": " to develop concept, ideas, signs in person, sense, say, concepts, words, which actually pick out things in the instrumental world. So you want, if you have the concept quark, you are postulating that out there somewhere outside of my mind, there are quarks, same with stars, same with atoms, same with caloric."
},
{
"end_time": 1329.275,
"index": 51,
"start_time": 1299.394,
"text": " Logistic. That's the norm of the sciences. But language and human life are not formal science. So it's an empirical question whether human languages have a relation of reference. The term referent is derivative from this. It's the thing referred to. So if we have coins, word and object, the"
},
{
"end_time": 1359.701,
"index": 52,
"start_time": 1330.009,
"text": " Word is the sign, the referent is the object. You know, quark is the word and the thing we assume is out there is the referent. But does natural language have that property? Well, the classical tradition argued that it didn't. I think they were right. So if you go back to say Aristotle,"
},
{
"end_time": 1390.299,
"index": 53,
"start_time": 1360.555,
"text": " is he gave as an example the word house said what's a house and his metaphysics house is a combination of matter and form the matter of the house is bricks timbers so on things a physicist could find looking at a house the form of the house"
},
{
"end_time": 1418.729,
"index": 54,
"start_time": 1390.828,
"text": " is basically a mental construction. It's the design, what the architect have in mind, the intended use and so on. Something could look like a house exactly, but be something totally different. It could be a library, could be a stable, could be an artistic object that you put on your shelf, could be all kinds of things, and look exactly like a house."
},
{
"end_time": 1446.954,
"index": 55,
"start_time": 1419.701,
"text": " In fact, and if you look further at the notion house, it's much more complex. So our concept of house has a designated exterior. It's an exterior. So if I paint the house brown, I'm painting the outside. Suppose it's a one-room schoolhouse. If I paint the schoolhouse brown, it's on the outside."
},
{
"end_time": 1475.52,
"index": 56,
"start_time": 1447.722,
"text": " If I paint the room brown, it's on the inside. That's our way of conceiving the object. The object is the same, and it gets much more complex than that. I shouldn't qualify here. Aristotle was talking metaphysics. What is a house? But if you look at his theory of signs, his semantic theory, he held on interpretation that we have"
},
{
"end_time": 1502.637,
"index": 57,
"start_time": 1476.783,
"text": " internal signs, which are universal. All people have them, abstract words, and the word is just as the properties of the thing referred to. So we can carry it over and say, for the word as well, it has the properties of form and meaning and goes way beyond if you look more closely. In the"
},
{
"end_time": 1532.602,
"index": 58,
"start_time": 1503.319,
"text": " 17th century, there was a major cognitive revolution, and these ideas were reinterpreted in cognitive terms. And I think those are the terms in which we can look at them. But the conclusion is that house is not a sign that refers to anything. There's no entity in the mind external world that a physicist could look at and say this is a house. Same is true of"
},
{
"end_time": 1559.275,
"index": 59,
"start_time": 1533.114,
"text": " The first example that was used before Aristotle, pre-Socratic Heraclitus, who asked a pretty deep question, how can you cross the same river twice? He could have added, how can it be you both times? Since you've changed, he didn't say that, and the river changed. So how is it the same river or the same person?"
},
{
"end_time": 1589.497,
"index": 60,
"start_time": 1559.889,
"text": " As soon as you start looking into that, it turns out to be quite non-trivial. What we regard as the same river, the same person, are very intricate notions. I won't run through it here. There's literature about it. Just to illustrate, I live in Arizona now. On my way to work, I cross the Rolito River. I've never seen any water in it. Longer-term residents tell me that"
},
{
"end_time": 1618.695,
"index": 61,
"start_time": 1589.94,
"text": " During the monsoon, water flows through it. But it's the Roledo River, even though it has no water, because of a mental construction. If the town were to paint a line in the middle, smooth it over, use it for commuting, it would be a highway. But the object wouldn't have changed in any more than trivial way. On the other hand, you could make massive changes in the object."
},
{
"end_time": 1646.732,
"index": 62,
"start_time": 1619.019,
"text": " It would still be the Aledo River. It could change the course, for example. When water flows in, it could go in the opposite direction. It could split it into tributaries. So the story is that what we understand to be a river is something with complex conceptual mental properties. It can undergo radical changes and be the same river"
},
{
"end_time": 1673.985,
"index": 63,
"start_time": 1647.21,
"text": " can undergo tiny changes and not be a river at all. You look at every word in the vocabulary, even the simplest ones, that's the way it is. So I think the conclusion is natural language just doesn't have a reference relation. That wouldn't have bothered Frege, Tarski, Carnap, because they didn't think there was any point in looking at natural language anyway."
},
{
"end_time": 1703.097,
"index": 64,
"start_time": 1674.599,
"text": " Let's just look at formal systems which don't have the problems of natural language, so no bother to them. Coyne is a little more ambiguous. If you look at his book Word and Object, the first half of it is pretty much about natural language and psychology. The second half is about what he calls regimented language. That means pretty much what Tarski and Carnap had in mind."
},
{
"end_time": 1732.466,
"index": 65,
"start_time": 1703.882,
"text": " for things we construct to be better behaved for our purposes than natural language. So that's a split. But as just as a matter of empirical fact, I think languages do not have this structure, the Persian structure of sign, referent, interpretation. So technically speaking,"
},
{
"end_time": 1759.36,
"index": 66,
"start_time": 1732.91,
"text": " Natural language doesn't have semantics. Semantics, technically, is the study of reference, the relation of untruth, which depends on reference. But that just doesn't seem to be a property of natural language. With TD Early Pay, you get your paycheck up to two business days early, which means you can go to tonight's game on a whim. Check out a pop-up art show."
},
{
"end_time": 1789.65,
"index": 67,
"start_time": 1761.015,
"text": " It's not a property of all of natural language or most of natural language. Well, it's part of here. We have a decision to make."
},
{
"end_time": 1819.07,
"index": 68,
"start_time": 1790.282,
"text": " Do we include scientific discourse within natural language? I mean, there's the kind of language that children acquire without instruction very rapidly. So by two or three years old, children have already acquired all these concepts. They don't have any instruction, very little experience, but it's part of our natural design. We're designed to have these concepts."
},
{
"end_time": 1840.435,
"index": 69,
"start_time": 1819.65,
"text": " Then there are other concepts like, say, quark or atom. Those are taught. And if you want to call them part of language, OK, but it's just a question without significance. It's a question of terminology. Hear that sound?"
},
{
"end_time": 1867.5,
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"start_time": 1841.425,
"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 1887.381,
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"start_time": 1867.5,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level."
},
{
"end_time": 1916.971,
"index": 72,
"start_time": 1887.381,
"text": " Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothy's, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 1927.261,
"index": 73,
"start_time": 1916.971,
"text": " Go to shopify.com slash theories now to grow your business no matter what stage you're in shopify.com slash theories."
},
{
"end_time": 1948.268,
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"start_time": 1930.486,
"text": " Razor blades are like diving boards. The longer the board, the more the wobble, the more the wobble, the more nicks, cuts, scrapes. A bad shave isn't a blade problem, it's an extension problem. Henson is a family-owned aerospace parts manufacturer that's made parts for the International Space Station and the Mars Rover."
},
{
"end_time": 1970.213,
"index": 75,
"start_time": 1948.268,
"text": " Now they're bringing that precision engineering to your shaving experience. By using aerospace-grade CNC machines, Henson makes razors that extend less than the thickness of a human hair. The razor also has built-in channels that evacuates hair and cream, which make clogging virtually impossible. Henson Shaving wants to produce the best razors, not the best razor business,"
},
{
"end_time": 1990.094,
"index": 76,
"start_time": 1970.213,
"text": " So that means no plastics, no subscriptions, no proprietary blades and no planned obsolescence. It's also extremely affordable. The Henson razor works with the standard dual edge blades that give you that old school shave with the benefits of this new school tech. It's time to say no to subscriptions and yes to a razor that'll last you a lifetime."
},
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"text": " Visit hensonshaving.com slash everything. If you use that code, you'll get two years worth of blades for free. Just make sure to add them to the cart. Plus 100 free blades when you head to H E N S O N S H A V I N G dot com slash everything and use the code everything. I see. OK, so question number five. Have you heard of Daniel Dennett's quining qualia argument?"
},
{
"end_time": 2049.889,
"index": 78,
"start_time": 2019.957,
"text": " If not, we can move on. Well, I read it years ago and maybe I'm not doing justice to it. But the way I understood it, you can check and see if this is accurate, is as an argument saying that the notion of qualia plays no clear and constructive role in our account of the world, including our experience, so we can dispense with it."
},
{
"end_time": 2079.667,
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"start_time": 2050.674,
"text": " Because there's no theory of qualia, basically. Actually, as far as I recall, in check and see, he didn't discuss the one careful systematic theory that uses qualia, namely, Nelson Goodman's major work, Structure of Appearance, which was an attempt to redo what Carnap had done earlier in his"
},
{
"end_time": 2110.179,
"index": 80,
"start_time": 2080.316,
"text": " Kornap had tried to construct a logical construction of the world based on objects and Goodman redid it, not talking about the world but just about appearance, on the basis of qualia. And that's a systematic theory that uses the notion qualia with a lot of interesting results."
},
{
"end_time": 2139.462,
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"start_time": 2110.572,
"text": " So within, I don't know what Dennett would say about this. I don't think he discussed it. And it's the one case that I know of of a serious theoretical construction based on quality and has, I think, quite interesting results. But it's the structure of appearance, remember. Actually, I knew Goodman pretty well. I was a student of his. He had in mind a second volume, which would be the structure of the world."
},
{
"end_time": 2169.036,
"index": 82,
"start_time": 2140.623,
"text": " Never got to that. It was very hard to even get to the structure of appearance. Have you read Daniel Dennett's Consciousness Explained book? And if so, do you feel like it was explained? Consciousness has been explained? It has a lot of clever observations. It's interesting to read. I think it leaves consciousness where it was. In fact, the question of explaining consciousness"
},
{
"end_time": 2197.346,
"index": 83,
"start_time": 2169.667,
"text": " It's a very curious one. I mean, it's a modern concern till pretty recently. Consciousness was not a major issue in philosophy. When it entered at first during the great early modern period, the notion consciousness was used for self-consciousness, awareness of one's own mind. The modern problem was called"
},
{
"end_time": 2226.51,
"index": 84,
"start_time": 2197.773,
"text": " David Chalmers, The Hard Problem. That's basically the last century. As far as I can see, the best approach to it, to the so-called problem, was actually given by Bertrand Russell a century ago. I pointed out, I think correctly, that what we are most confident about is our own experience."
},
{
"end_time": 2257.09,
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"start_time": 2227.927,
"text": " The rest of our intellectual efforts are attempts to make some sense of it. Science, for example, is an effort to see if you can make some sense of consciousness, conscious experience. And he pointed out as well that we would like to explain consciousness in material terms. But the problem is we have no idea what material is. For example, we don't know whether"
},
{
"end_time": 2286.271,
"index": 86,
"start_time": 2257.654,
"text": " All matter has consciousness. Arthur Eddington, his friend and colleague scientist, pointed out that we don't know that atoms don't have consciousness. We don't have a clear enough understanding of the basis of it. So as in recent work, Galen Strawson, fine young philosophers, picked this up and pointed out, I think, correctly, that it's not consciousness that has to be explained."
},
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"end_time": 2295.094,
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"text": " that we understand very well. We can describe it in extensive detail."
},
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"text": " That's the sweet sound of success with Shopify. Shopify is the all-encompassing commerce platform that's with you from the first flicker of an idea to the moment you realize you're running a global enterprise. Whether it's handcrafted jewelry or high-tech gadgets, Shopify supports you at every point of sale, both online and in person. They streamline the process with the internet's best converting checkout, making it 36% more effective than other leading platforms."
},
{
"end_time": 2348.268,
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"start_time": 2322.159,
"text": " There's also something called Shopify Magic, your AI-powered assistant that's like an all-star team member working tirelessly behind the scenes. What I find fascinating about Shopify is how it scales with your ambition. No matter how big you want to grow, Shopify gives you everything you need to take control and take your business to the next level. Join the ranks of businesses in 175 countries that have made Shopify the backbone."
},
{
"end_time": 2371.647,
"index": 90,
"start_time": 2348.268,
"text": " of their commerce. Shopify, by the way, powers 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, including huge names like Allbirds, Rothies, and Brooklynin. If you ever need help, their award-winning support is like having a mentor that's just a click away. Now, are you ready to start your own success story? Sign up for a $1 per month trial period at Shopify.com"
},
{
"end_time": 2401.186,
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"text": " We don't understand this matter. So when you talk about explaining consciousness, trying to account for it in material terms, the roadblock is we don't know what material terms are. In fact, that's true. You can pick up"
},
{
"end_time": 2431.459,
"index": 92,
"start_time": 2402.159,
"text": " Journal of Quantum Mechanics, recent journal, somebody just sent me one, which is symposium of leading quantum physicists trying to figure out what a particle is. They don't know. We know we have to postulate particles, but we don't know what they are. Matter is a very... I mean, there was a concept of matter in the"
},
{
"end_time": 2458.148,
"index": 93,
"start_time": 2432.09,
"text": " early modern scientific revolution, so called mechanical philosophy, but that was shattered by Newton, and though he didn't believe it, and regarded it as absurd, but science has since accepted it. And that leaves us without a clear notion of what matter is. Consciousness, we understand as much as you can understand anything."
},
{
"end_time": 2489.411,
"index": 94,
"start_time": 2460.52,
"text": " Okay, since we're on this track, can we go on to question number 22, which is a question from Davey who says, to Professor Chomsky, the mind-body problem. How can Chomsky make the transposition from Newton's demolishment of the notion of physical in the natural sciences to the rejection of the concept of body in the mind-body problem? Does this dismissal mean that Professor Chomsky believes there is no material world and only the mental aspects?"
},
{
"end_time": 2520.247,
"index": 95,
"start_time": 2490.486,
"text": " Well, we're talking about the 17th century, and the 17th century body just meant some part of the physical world. There was a narrower sense of body in which it means my shoulder, my arms, and so on, but they weren't talking about that. Actually, Descartes was in his Traité de l'homme, the last volume of his Le Monde, which was never published."
},
{
"end_time": 2544.821,
"index": 96,
"start_time": 2520.828,
"text": " out of concern for the church. But there he does talk about, you know, the structure of the body, you know, in the narrow sense of body, you know, your ribs, your digestive system, and so on, your thinking, how they're related. It's where he brings up the pineal gland as the point in which they're connected."
},
{
"end_time": 2574.189,
"index": 97,
"start_time": 2545.265,
"text": " So there he's using a narrower sense of body. But the discussion about body is just discussion about matter. So it's not my distinction. It's just right. You have no notion of matter. You have no notion of body. This stuff here is all made of matter. And if I don't understand what matter is, I'm going to have some understanding what this is. But that's consciousness, the things we all understand. But when you ask"
},
{
"end_time": 2601.903,
"index": 98,
"start_time": 2574.65,
"text": " What's it constituted of? Well, some kind of whatever the world is constituted of. But since Newton, we have no real concept of that physical material body. That's just whatever we think the world is constituted of. I'm in physicist John Wheeler at the Institute for Advanced Study. Once advanced,"
},
{
"end_time": 2631.049,
"index": 99,
"start_time": 2602.517,
"text": " theory that's called it from bit uh says the only thing that exists in the universe is bits of information answers to questions that we pose bits everything else the it part is just our constructions from that i don't know if it's a good theory or not i'm not that competent a physicist but suppose it is okay that's matter it's"
},
{
"end_time": 2657.824,
"index": 100,
"start_time": 2632.005,
"text": " If it's something else, okay. Right now, physicists are in a strange situation where they can't find, I think it's 95% of what they have to assume the world is constituted of. Dark matter, dark energy. Can't find it. It's got to be there."
},
{
"end_time": 2686.544,
"index": 101,
"start_time": 2658.114,
"text": " The predictions don't come out. The theory doesn't work, so it's got to be there, but you can't find it. Whatever it is, that's matter. All of this on the last part of the question, I've always been persuaded by what's called in the history of philosophy, Locke's suggestion, referring to John Locke's immediate reaction"
},
{
"end_time": 2716.22,
"index": 102,
"start_time": 2687.108,
"text": " to Newton's Principia, which he knew at once. Locke, well, he put it within his theological framework. We can restate it without the theological framework, but putting it in his terms, just as God provided matter with properties that we cannot comprehend, as Mr. Newton has shown,"
},
{
"end_time": 2744.275,
"index": 103,
"start_time": 2716.578,
"text": " So God might have super added to matter the property of thought, meaning certain organized parts of whatever the world consists of, maybe something in our brain produces thought, just as general matter has properties like attraction and repulsion. I can't understand it, but that's the way God made things."
},
{
"end_time": 2774.343,
"index": 104,
"start_time": 2744.735,
"text": " Well, that's Locke's suggestion. It led to a century of careful inquiry into how organized matter, whatever matter is, can produce thought. David Hume, Joseph Priestley, Lemaitre, many others, finds its way to Darwin's notebooks, just as"
},
{
"end_time": 2804.189,
"index": 105,
"start_time": 2774.838,
"text": " The liver produces bile, why can't the brain produce thoughts? That was the idea through the 19th century, then 18th century, then pretty much forgotten. Interestingly, it was revived in the last decade of the 20th century, regarded as a radical new idea in the history of philosophy."
},
{
"end_time": 2832.722,
"index": 106,
"start_time": 2804.531,
"text": " thinking is just the property of organized matter, astonishing hypothesis and so on, the new idea in modern biology, repeating almost verbatim the writings of the 18th century. I've written about this, so it was rediscovered and if there's an alternative, I don't know what it is. Thinking, what's mental, is just"
},
{
"end_time": 2860.367,
"index": 107,
"start_time": 2833.558,
"text": " some kind of property of certain types of organized matter. Notice this leaves open what matter is, whatever it turns out to be, whatever the world is constituted of. But certain organizations of it do have the property of thought. And we can now say a fair amount about that. We know that it's above the neck, not below the neck. So you can cut off my arm. I still think the same way."
},
{
"end_time": 2888.302,
"index": 108,
"start_time": 2860.998,
"text": " decapitate me, I don't think the same way. And when you look inside the head, it's not in the nose, it's in the brain. You can find particular parts of the brain which implicated in one or another kind of thought. So you can now carry out the 17th century insights lock in more specific directions. So as to whether"
},
{
"end_time": 2918.012,
"index": 109,
"start_time": 2889.087,
"text": " There's no material world, only the mental aspects. There's a material world by definition, the material world we define as whatever there is. So there's something, not nothing. So therefore there's a material world, whatever it is. We don't know what it is. We don't know what its properties are. We know some of its properties, like some of its properties are attraction and repulsion. Other of its properties are thinking."
},
{
"end_time": 2945.009,
"index": 110,
"start_time": 2918.575,
"text": " many other properties. Mental aspects of the world are just part of the material world. I don't see any point in distinguishing them. There are chemical aspects to the world, there are mental aspects to the world. Of course they're different, we can study them and so on, but I don't see... There is a kind of methodological dualism which holds that we have to study"
},
{
"end_time": 2975.077,
"index": 111,
"start_time": 2945.367,
"text": " the mind differently from other parts of the world. Quine was an example of this. His approach to mental aspects of the world in word and object was radically unscientific in my view. I've written about this, didn't just treat it dogmatically. Language is a complex of dispositions to verbal behavior acquired by conditioning."
},
{
"end_time": 3003.507,
"index": 112,
"start_time": 2976.101,
"text": " It's an edict. It's not a scientific proposal, and it collapses instantly on examination. But it didn't matter because we keep to methodological dualism. We don't use the methods of science when we study the mind. Of course, Quine would deny that and did deny it. But if you look at it, I think that's the right conclusion. And you can say the same thing about all of behaviourism."
},
{
"end_time": 3031.135,
"index": 113,
"start_time": 3004.275,
"text": " Behaviourism, I think, was a radical departure from the sciences. I mean, the sciences, typical comment about the sciences, which I think is fair enough, is Jean-Pierre Baptiste's physicist Nobel Prize lecture when he won the physics prize. He said, the goal of science is to"
},
{
"end_time": 3053.507,
"index": 114,
"start_time": 3031.391,
"text": " discover the simple invisibles that lie behind the complex visibles. Behavioral science is saying, let's just look at the complex visibles. We're not allowed to look at the hidden invisibles. In other words, we're not allowed to do science. Can't think of a more radical departure from science."
},
{
"end_time": 3083.097,
"index": 115,
"start_time": 3053.592,
"text": " And for the 20th century, it's been considered scientific. I think that's a serious departure from science, which swept the intellectual world. So maybe you don't want to label yourself, but would you call yourself an idealist? Sorry? Would you consider yourself to be an idealist or no? No, I would accept normal science. I think we should accept normal science. We"
},
{
"end_time": 3112.654,
"index": 116,
"start_time": 3083.626,
"text": " try to discover what constitutes the world and how its various aspects work. So its chemical aspects, its metal aspects, its other aspects of the world. Try to find out what they are and see if physicists will be able to discover what constitutes the world. But going back to Russell, I think he was right to say that it's not"
},
{
"end_time": 3141.903,
"index": 117,
"start_time": 3113.097,
"text": " Consciousness that needs explaining. It's matter that needs explaining. Consciousness we know all about, more than we know about anything else. Matter we have problems with. Am I to understand that as saying it's not consciousness we need to explain, but unconsciousness? Or are you making a distinction between matter and unconsciousness? Unconsciousness too, but also matter. It's what is, if you want to"
},
{
"end_time": 3172.688,
"index": 118,
"start_time": 3142.705,
"text": " What's called reducing consciousness to the material world? Can't do that until you know what the material world is. You can describe consciousness in extensive detail. As I say, the best descriptions are in literature, where consciousness is what it's about. What does my protagonist think and feel? Extensive detail. And we can do it for ourselves."
},
{
"end_time": 3199.616,
"index": 119,
"start_time": 3173.217,
"text": " You ask a question, what constitutes this thing? We don't know. That's where the problems arise. When I'm thinking about this question of, well, what is a cup? And let's forget about it that it's natural language. Let's just imagine we're talking, what is an atom? What is an atom? And then we say, well, we don't know exactly what an atom is. And then I wonder, well, what explanation could one possibly give"
},
{
"end_time": 3228.439,
"index": 120,
"start_time": 3200.009,
"text": " that would satisfy someone so that they wouldn't say, well, we don't know what that is. So let's say we explain the atoms in terms of something else, then we can say that again and again. Is there something at the bottom that we can say, okay, now we understand it, now we know what that is? Well, we've known since the 17th century that there isn't going to be any answer to that question that we can accept with certainty."
},
{
"end_time": 3258.814,
"index": 121,
"start_time": 3229.155,
"text": " empirical questions. We can try to find the best theories, the best explanatory theories, but we can never be certain that they're true. That's been understood since the 17th century, since the collapse of the mechanical philosophy. So we just have to live with that. We live in a world in which we can seek best explanations, but that's it."
},
{
"end_time": 3289.019,
"index": 122,
"start_time": 3259.172,
"text": " Now, maybe it's possible to go further. Maybe Leibniz's principle of sufficient reason can carry us further. Leibniz argued the familiar phrase is, we live in the best of all possible worlds. But there's a much deeper theory behind it saying that nature necessarily constructs the best possible world. Nothing else is possible."
},
{
"end_time": 3316.323,
"index": 123,
"start_time": 3289.787,
"text": " If you hang a string of beads, they're going to go in a perfect form. They're not going to go in a square, because nature always necessarily seeks the simplest solution. And then there's a background for that in the principle of sufficient reason and so on. Well, if that's correct, and it's been an amazingly productive idea,"
},
{
"end_time": 3347.244,
"index": 124,
"start_time": 3317.278,
"text": " In fact, Galileo had said something similar, but more loosely. He said, the world is, nature is simple and our task is to prove it. Leibniz had a much deeper theory and a mathematical theory. And some of the great mathematicians worked on this to try to show that it's got to be true. And if you look at the results of the sciences, anywhere you understand something, it's true."
},
{
"end_time": 3377.79,
"index": 125,
"start_time": 3347.892,
"text": " Many great scientists have commented on this, said the mysterious thing is not that there are laws, but they're always simple laws. And if they're not simple laws, we find they're wrong. Well, Leibniz had a general argument to that effect. And if you can, sometimes it's called the magical property of science. Always, if you get anything like the right answer, it's always the simplest answer. As I say, Leibniz had"
},
{
"end_time": 3406.305,
"index": 126,
"start_time": 3378.763,
"text": " arguments for that and the great mathematicians of the 17th century worked on it to try to prove it. Descartes, others. If that's true, then there's something that we should be certain about. Whatever is simplest is going to be true. But that leaves a lot of questions open."
},
{
"end_time": 3436.63,
"index": 127,
"start_time": 3406.766,
"text": " like our understanding of simplicity, plus the impact of the law of sufficient reason. So we're in difficult territory. But the simplest point to say is we just can't be confident about our empirical conclusions. Actually, that goes back a little bit to the first question you asked. We can't assume that because something is needed,"
},
{
"end_time": 3461.732,
"index": 128,
"start_time": 3437.09,
"text": " Number 11. Here's something I've been wondering. When someone's trying to articulate their feelings, one often searches for the right word or right set of words to express an intuition which isn't precisely formed. So it's imprecise, let's say at the gut level, at an intuitive level."
},
{
"end_time": 3483.558,
"index": 129,
"start_time": 3462.346,
"text": " Sometimes we express different words aloud and we're trying to get to it. We do this often in therapy or when we're talking with a friend to try to get to the root of the issue. We say, no, that's not it. That's not why I'm upset with Jim, for example. And then maybe the friend says, are you upset because two years ago he snubbed you at the party? Then you say, okay, that's it. Yes, that's it."
},
{
"end_time": 3502.756,
"index": 130,
"start_time": 3483.848,
"text": " So this obviously isn't just limited to that. It could also be sometimes when we're scrolling around on TV, we feel like I'm in the mood for some show, but I don't know what show it is. And then you find the show, you said, yes, I'm in the mood for that exact show. So what is happening here? It seems like we have something that's imprecise."
},
{
"end_time": 3532.619,
"index": 131,
"start_time": 3503.422,
"text": " That raises very interesting questions. I think what it leads to is that most of our mental life is unconscious and inaccessible to consciousness."
},
{
"end_time": 3560.828,
"index": 132,
"start_time": 3533.37,
"text": " This is opposed to various dogmas that are held in the philosophical literature. So John Searle, for example, has argued that a necessary property of the mental is that you can bring it to consciousness. Well, unfortunately, our mental life is beyond the level of consciousness, just as we can't become conscious of the"
},
{
"end_time": 3592.176,
"index": 133,
"start_time": 3562.261,
"text": " You know something about your digestive system when you have a stomach ache, but if you want to study how it works, and it is a major nervous system, kind of like the nervous system up here, you have to study it, as philosophers put it, from a third person point of view, from the outside. And the same is true of our mental life. We can only study it from the outside. We can't introspect into it."
},
{
"end_time": 3621.476,
"index": 134,
"start_time": 3592.961,
"text": " You can show this pretty clearly in the study of language. When you look closely at the nature of language, maybe the only area where we can study this clearly, maybe geometry, shapes and so on, but to a much richer extent in language. When we look into it, we find that the best theories of language, hence the ones we tentatively accept on"
},
{
"end_time": 3650.981,
"index": 135,
"start_time": 3622.142,
"text": " Putnam and Quine's grounds, though they didn't go to this conclusion, they rejected it. But if we accept their arguments, as I think we should, then we should tentatively accept the best explanatory theories of language. And those theories, contrary to their conclusions, tell us that there's a system of computation going on in the mind which is producing internal thoughts"
},
{
"end_time": 3678.08,
"index": 136,
"start_time": 3651.903,
"text": " which then we struggle to articulate, but they're there inside. And the kinds of examples that are discussed here show it. We all see this all the time. When you're writing, for example, you write a sentence, you look at it and you say, no, that's not what I mean. Try something else, you know, maybe that's a lot closer. There's what we call inner speech."
},
{
"end_time": 3707.073,
"index": 137,
"start_time": 3678.473,
"text": " It's not inner speech, it's outer speech. What we call inner speech is externalized language, not what's going on inside. So you can think two sentences and you can ask, do they rhyme, for example? There's nothing in the internal system that has anything to do with that. So in fact, if you introspect, what comes to consciousness are fragments, bits and pieces of fragments."
},
{
"end_time": 3735.691,
"index": 138,
"start_time": 3707.79,
"text": " And amazingly, they come instantaneously in very complicated ways. So take any, you walk into a room, you see a friend of yours sitting at the table, working on his computer, you remember, oh, I wanted to tell him something. But then you notice that there's another guy sitting there who would be offended if you said this, so you better"
},
{
"end_time": 3763.166,
"index": 139,
"start_time": 3736.664,
"text": " say something else when you come over to them, then you go over and maybe you say something. All of this happens in an instantaneously huge amount of thinking going on. We're not conscious of it. You get little bits and fragments here and there, but it's all going on in everything we do. In the study of language, you can actually pinpoint it. I don't have time to do it here, but you can pinpoint"
},
{
"end_time": 3793.251,
"index": 140,
"start_time": 3763.558,
"text": " things that are in the internal language which don't get expressed but must be in the internal language as we see from the way it works generally, other consequences, best theory explanations again. So if we could overcome the methodological dualism that Quine was immersed in, and I'm afraid Putnam too very often, and accept their conclusions"
},
{
"end_time": 3821.715,
"index": 141,
"start_time": 3793.643,
"text": " Look at the best theories that we have. If you can improve them, fine. Look at the best theories we have, accept their assumptions tentatively. When we do, we conclude, I think, what I just described. A lot of mental computation going on, bits and pieces of it reaching awareness, fragments usually, but so interpenetrated with what's conscious that you just can't study them separately."
},
{
"end_time": 3852.039,
"index": 142,
"start_time": 3822.517,
"text": " Study of consciousness is never going to get anywhere unless it integrates itself with a much richer study where we understand much more of the unconscious, inaccessible mental processes that are underway. They interpenetrate so closely you can't separate one from another. So I don't think consciousness studies are going to get very far unless they begin to integrate them"
},
{
"end_time": 3882.022,
"index": 143,
"start_time": 3852.466,
"text": " into the rich, complex, mental processes that are inaccessible to consciousness, in my opinion. There are two problems with consciousness studies. One is the one I mentioned before, Russell's problem. The problem is matter, not consciousness. The second is this one. What's conscious can't be sensibly disentangled from what's unconscious and inaccessible."
},
{
"end_time": 3902.09,
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"start_time": 3882.619,
"text": " This is Marshawn beast mode Lynch. Prize pick is making sports season even more fun on prize picks whether"
},
{
"end_time": 3924.701,
"index": 145,
"start_time": 3902.466,
"text": " football fan, a basketball fan, it always feels good to be ranked. Right now, new users get $50 instantly in lineups when you play your first $5. The app is simple to use. Pick two or more players. Pick more or less on their stat projections. Anything from touchdowns to threes and if you're right, you can win big. Mix and match players from"
},
{
"end_time": 3934.548,
"index": 146,
"start_time": 3924.701,
"text": " any sport on PrizePix, America's number one daily fantasy sports app. PrizePix is available in 40 plus states including California, Texas,"
},
{
"end_time": 3956.152,
"index": 147,
"start_time": 3934.804,
"text": " Florida and Georgia. Most importantly, all the transactions on the app are fast, safe and secure. Download the PricePix app today and use code Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. That's code Spotify to get $50 in lineups after you play your first $5 lineup. PricePix. It's good to be right. Must be present in certain states. Visit PricePix.com for restrictions and details."
},
{
"end_time": 3986.834,
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"text": " When I was speaking to Professor Michael Levin, I was asking him about consciousness studies and he said there is no consciousness studies because consciousness to study it is a first person activity. However, what you're outlining sounds like we need more third person. If you want to study it, it's going to be third person. We study things from the outside. Russell, I think, was right. Our conscious experience is what we are most"
},
{
"end_time": 4015.623,
"index": 149,
"start_time": 3987.022,
"text": " confident about. When we study our conscious experience, we discover that it's not given, it's the result of many other things, and it's often mistaken about other things. But that's our further scientific intellectual inquiry into the nature of what we are immediately aware of. So the fact that it's first person, I don't"
},
{
"end_time": 4027.449,
"index": 150,
"start_time": 4015.896,
"text": " Think it has much to do with anything. Yes, of course it's first person. And the rest of our inquiries are third person efforts to find out what it is and how it relates to the rest of the world."
},
{
"end_time": 4050.964,
"index": 151,
"start_time": 4028.712,
"text": " The last question, what happens is we have squabbles, we quibble over definitions. People do this and scholars do this. For example, what's the definition of life? Infamously, there are 12 to 20 to 30 different definitions. Same with computation, same with what does it mean to be a woman, though that maybe is on the more political end, but it's the same idea. What are we quibbling over?"
},
{
"end_time": 4079.701,
"index": 152,
"start_time": 4050.964,
"text": " It reminds me of what we just talked about, whereas we have an intuitive notion of what the word life means. And then we have an ostensive definition where we point to different objects or what we point to different entities and we say this for sure satisfies the definition of life. These ones, perhaps maybe these ones not so much. So then let's capture it. Firstly, is my account of how we generate a definition correct? And is fighting over these definitions of a waste of time? Why or why not?"
},
{
"end_time": 4107.398,
"index": 153,
"start_time": 4080.845,
"text": " Well, let's take one of the examples he gave, computation. That is an old idea, computing things. But there was, in the mid-20th century, an answer to the question, what is computation, which is an absolute answer, to quote Kurt Gödel, namely Turing's definition."
},
{
"end_time": 4136.971,
"index": 154,
"start_time": 4107.756,
"text": " Gertl concluded, I think plausibly, that this answers the question precisely, what is computation? It's absolute, doesn't depend on your point of view or anything else. Now, of course, it's not the intuitive notion, but it's a technical notion which captures what's essential to the intuitive notion and gives us a precise mathematical concept which then has been developed."
},
{
"end_time": 4165.606,
"index": 155,
"start_time": 4137.5,
"text": " very rich and complicated ways into theory of computation, recursive function theory, very rich part of mathematics leads right into the empirical sciences. It was the crucial step for linguistics that allowed it to make the move from vague studies of production to precise studies of generation. That's modern linguistics based on"
},
{
"end_time": 4194.838,
"index": 156,
"start_time": 4166.715,
"text": " Turing, posts, girdles, development of a precise notion of computation. And that's, I think, what we should be aiming for in these other cases, like take life. We have an intuitive concept, like you're alive, but this cup is not alive. So we have a starting point. Our virus is alive. Well, not so clear. What we need is better"
},
{
"end_time": 4224.514,
"index": 157,
"start_time": 4195.538,
"text": " explanatory theories of the way the world works. And to the extent we construct these theories, we'll have answers not to the question of what is life, but to a coherent, clear concept of how the world works, which captures fundamental properties of what we're struggling about when we talk about life. So the quibbles aren't"
},
{
"end_time": 4253.592,
"index": 158,
"start_time": 4225.06,
"text": " useless unless they just collapse into discussions of terminology. But if there are ways of exploring the different aspects of the world to try to find what are the real qualities of the world, and here I'm descending to the metaphysical realism that Hillary spent most of his work trying to oppose, then we're doing something useful."
},
{
"end_time": 4282.637,
"index": 159,
"start_time": 4254.633,
"text": " Is there a name for it? Because I'm extremely interested in studying how is it we come up with definitions and how is it when we know that what we've articulated matches our intuition. Is there a name for that? Science. I mean, is there a name, like it's a subfield of linguistics, like semiotics or some field, like is there a name for it? Semiotics is just the general theory of science."
},
{
"end_time": 4312.995,
"index": 160,
"start_time": 4283.916,
"text": " Actually, I once listened to a lecture, happened to be in Paris by a leading figure in semiotics, it was to a general scientific seminar. He started by saying that semiotics has two branches. One is language, the other is traffic signals. We can say something about those two topics. He was joking, of course, but"
},
{
"end_time": 4341.971,
"index": 161,
"start_time": 4313.439,
"text": " The point is you can have a general field. Let's talk about signs and wave your hands and so on. But you can try to carve out some parts of it where you can develop serious explanatory theories that give you insight and understanding into how some parts of the world work. Well, is it the original quest? Not quite. The original quest was much broader and looser."
},
{
"end_time": 4366.971,
"index": 162,
"start_time": 4342.585,
"text": " Okay, thank you, Professor. I know that you have to get going. I appreciate this. And hopefully next time, if there's a next time, we could get to some of the other questions as well. Hope so. Thank you, sir. Sorry, I have to leave."
},
{
"end_time": 4396.049,
"index": 163,
"start_time": 4367.312,
"text": " okay and if anyone who's watching this knows of the field or subfield of linguistics if it's even within linguistics of the study of definitions that is how we come up with the explicit definitions for an implicit for an imprecise intuition as well as how we articulate and then know that we've matched what we have articulated as well as what i'm extremely interested in is how is it that we come up with a definition for example life when it was contingent on certain examples like let's say we consider"
},
{
"end_time": 4425.879,
"index": 164,
"start_time": 4396.527,
"text": " ourselves to be alive, frogs to be alive, the sun to be alive, and the grass to be alive, and perhaps even snowy mountains to be alive. We then extract a definition of life, which then contradicts the data points we used to come up with the pattern that produced that definition of life. So we no longer consider fire or the sun or mountains to be alive. So I'm extremely interested in that the whole field, if it's even a field of articulating definitions,"
},
{
"end_time": 4451.561,
"index": 165,
"start_time": 4425.879,
"text": " If anyone here happens to be within the field of linguistics and knows any papers or research that I should do to learn more about the subject, then please do let me know. Thank you so much for watching. Usually when I produce a podcast, I tend to rewatch it maybe at most once, whereas this one I think I'm going to rewatch a couple times. I found it to be the best one that has been done on this channel with Noam Chomsky and that's saying plenty because there may be six others, so there's seven in total. The playlist for those will be in the description."
},
{
"end_time": 4473.268,
"index": 166,
"start_time": 4454.07,
"text": " The podcast is now finished. If you'd like to support conversations like this, then do consider going to patreon.com slash C-U-R-T-J-A-I-M-U-N-G-A-L. That is Kurt Jaimungal. It's support from the patrons and from the sponsors that allow me to do this full time. Every dollar helps tremendously. Thank you."
}
]
}No transcript available.