Noam Chomsky – “The machine, the ghost, and the limits of understanding”
Youtube video: http://youtu.be/D5in5EdjhD0
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We are extremely happy to have Professor Noam Chomsky with us
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let me just say that he’s the most quoted
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writer in academia alive. no
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no comparison at all than anybody else and
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I think it’s fair to say he is number one public intellectual in the world
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so please, Professor Chomsky.
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I’ll talk some about Isaac Newton and his
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contributions to the study of mind,
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He’s not known for that but I think a case can be made that
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he did make substantial, indirect but nevertheless
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substantial contributions. I’d like to explain why. There is a
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familiar view that the early Scientific Revolution,
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beginning, through the 17th century,
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provided humans with limitless
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explanatory power, and that that conclusion is established more firmly by
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Darwin’s discoveries, theory of
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Evolution. I have in mind specifically a
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recent publication, exposition, of this view by
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two distinguished physicist
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philosophers, David Albert, and David Deutsch.
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But it’s commonly held with many
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variants. There’s a corollary. The corollary is
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ridicule of what’s called by many philosophers mysterianism,
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that’s the absurd notion that there are mysteries of nature
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that human intelligence will never be able to
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grasp. It’s of some interest
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to notice that this belief is
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radically different from the conclusions of the great figures who actually
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carried out the
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early Scientific Revolution. Also
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interesting to notice how inconsistent it is
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with what the theory of evolution implies and
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has always been understood to imply since its origins.
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And I’d like to say a few words about those two topics in turn
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I’ll start with David Hume’s
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History of England. There is of course a chapter on the
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Scientific Revolution, and in particular on the crucial role of
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Isaac Newton, who he describes as the
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“greatest and rarest genius that ever arose for the ornament and instruction of the
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Species.”
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And Hume concluded that Newton’s greatest achievement was that
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“while he seemed to draw the veil
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from some of the mysteries of nature, he showed
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at the same time the imperfections of
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the mechanical philosophy and thereby
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restored nature’s ultimate secrets to that obscurity
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in which they ever did and ever will remain.”
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The mechanical philosophy of course was
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the guiding doctrine of the Scientific Revolution, it
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held that the world is a machine, a grander version
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the kind of automata that stimulated the imagination of
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thinkers of the time, much in the way that
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programmed computers do today.
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They were thinking of the remarkable clocks, the
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artefacts constructed by skilled artisans,
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most famous was Jacques de Vaucanson,
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devices that
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imitated digestion, animal behavior,
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or the machines that you could find in the
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royal gardens as you walk through, they pronounced words
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when they were triggered, and many other such devices.
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The mechanical philosophy wanted to dispense with
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occult motions, neo-scholastic notions
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of forms flitting through the air, or sympathies and antipathies,
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and other such occult ideas, and it wanted to be
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hard-headed to keep to what’s grounded in
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commonsense understanding. And it in fact provided the criterion for
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intelligibility from Galileo
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through Newton and indeed well beyond.
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Well its well known also that Descartes claimed
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to have explained the phenomena of
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the material world in such mechanical terms,
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while also demonstrating that they’re not all-encompassing,
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don’t reach into the domain of mind
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(his view). He therefore postulated a new principle to account for what was beyond
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the reach of the mechanical philosophy.
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And while this too is sometimes ridiculed it’s in fact fully in accord with
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normal scientific method.
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He was working within the framework of substance
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Philosophy, so the new principal was a second substance,
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his res cogitans, And then there’s a scientific problem that
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he and others faced: determining
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It’s character, and determining how it
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interacts with a mechanical world… that’s
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the mind-body problem, cast within the
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Scientific Revolution, and it’s a scientific problem.
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Well, it was for a time. The mechanical philosophy
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was shattered by Newton, as Hume observed,
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and with it went the notion of
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understanding of the world that the scientific revolution
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sought to attain. And the mind-body problem
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also disappeared, and, I don’t believe has been resurrected,
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lthough there’s still a lot of talk about it.
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Those conclusions actually were pretty well understood
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in the centuries that followed. They’ve often been forgotten today.
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John Locke had already reached conclusions rather
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similar to Hume’s. He was exploring
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the nature of our ideas and he recognized, I’ll
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quote him, “that body as far as we can conceive
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is able only to strike and affect body and motion,
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according to the utmost reach of our ideas,
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is able to produce nothing but motion.”
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These are the basic tenets of course of the mechanical philosophy
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They yield the conclusion that there can be
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no interaction without contact,
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which is our common sense intuition.
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And modern research and cognitive science has
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given pretty solid grounds for Locke’s
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reflections on the nature of our ideas.
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It’s revealed that our
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commonsense understanding
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of the nature of bodies and their interactions, as
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nowadays we would say in large part genetically determined,
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it’s a lot, it’s very much as Locke described.
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Very young infants can
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recognize a principle of causality through contact,
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not any other way. If they recognize
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Causality, they seek a hidden contact somewhere.
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And
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those in fact appear to be the limits of our ideas,
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Of our common sense, The
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occult ideas of the scholastics,
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or of Newton (Newtonian attraction), goes
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beyond our understanding, and is unintelligible,
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at least by the criteria of the Scientific Revolution.
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Very much like Hume, Locke concluded therefore that “we remain
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in incurable ignorance of what we desire to know about
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matter and its effects. No science of bodies is within our reach.”
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and he went on to say “we can only appeal to the
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arbitrary determination of that all-wise agent
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who has made them to be and to operate as they do
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in a manner wholly above our weak understanding to conceive.”
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Actually Galileo had reached much the same conclusions
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at the end of his life. He was frustrated by the failure
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of the mechanical philosophy, his ideal,
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its failure to account for cohesion,
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and attraction, other phenomena, and he was forced to
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reject, quoting him, “the vein presumption of
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understanding everything, or to conclude, even
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worse, that there is not a single effect in nature
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such that the most ingenious theorist can arrive at complete
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understanding of it.” Actually Descartes,
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though more optimistic, had also
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recognized the limits of our cognitive reach, occasionally;
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he’s not entirely consistent about this, but
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rule 8 of the Regulae reads:
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“if the series of subjects to be examined…
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if in the series of subjects to be examined, we come to a subject of which our
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intellect cannot gain a good enough intuition,
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we must stop there and we must not examine the other matters that follow
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but must refrain from futile
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toil.” Specifically, Descartes speculated that the workings of
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res cogitans, the second substance,
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may be beyond human understanding. So he thought,
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quoting him again, “we may not have intelligence enough
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to understand the workings of mind.” In particular
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the normal use of language, one of his main
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concepts, he recognized that
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the normal use of language has what has come to be called a creative aspect.
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“Every human being
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but no beast / machine
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has this capacity to use language in ways
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that are appropriate to situations but not caused by them.
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(it’s a crucial difference) and to formulate and express
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thoughts that may be entirely new
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and to do so without bound,
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maybe incited or inclined to speak in certain ways,
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by internal and external circumstances, but not compelled to do so.”
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Which is the way his followers put the matter, which was a mystery to Descartes, and remains a mystery to us,
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though it quite clearly is a fact.
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Well Descartes nevertheless continued,
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that “even if the explanation of normal use of language
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and other forms of free and coherent choice of action,
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even if that lies beyond our cognitive grasp, as it apparently does,
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That’s no reason, he said, to question the authenticity of our experience.
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Quite generally he said free will, which is at the core of this,
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“is the noblest thing we have and there is nothing we
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comprehend more evidently and more perfectly,
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so it would therefore be absurd to doubt something that we
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comprehend intimately and experience within ourselves.”
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namely that the free actions of men are
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undetermined. “merely because it conflicts with
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something else which we know must be
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by its nature incomprehensible to us.”
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Much like Locke he had in mind divine pre-ordination.
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One of the leading Galileo scholars, Peter
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Machamar observes that by adopting the mechanical philosophy
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and thus initiating the modern scientific revolution,
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Galileo had forged a new model of intelligibility for human understanding,
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with new criteria for coherent explanation of natural phenomena.
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So for Galileo, real understanding requires a mechanical model,
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that is, a device that an artisan could
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construct, at least in principle, hence intelligible to
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us. So Galileo rejected
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traditional theories of tides, because
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he said, “we cannot duplicate them by means of appropriate artificial devices.”
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And his great successors adhered to these high standards of
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intelligibility and explanation.
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So it’s therefore quite understandable why
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Newton’s discoveries were so stridently resisted by the
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greatest scientists of the day. Christian
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Huygens described Newton’s concept of attraction as an absurdity.
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Leibnitz charged that he was reintroducing
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occult ideas, similar to the sympathies and antipathies
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of the much-ridiculed scholastic science.
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And he was offering no physical explanation
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for phenomena of the material world. And it’s important notice that Newton agreed
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Very largely agreed. He wrote that “the notion
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action at a distance is inconceivable;
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It’s so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in
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philosophical matters, a competent faculty of
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thinking can ever fall into it.”
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(philosophical means what we call scientific)
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By invoking that principle he said “we concede
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that we
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we do not understand the phenomena of the material world.”
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So, and Newton scholarship recognizes that,
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I B Cohen for example, or Duchsterhaus, pick someone else,
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points out that by the word “understand”
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Newton still meant what his critics meant:
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understand in mechanical terms, of
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contact-action.
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Newton did have a famous phrase which you all know,
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the phrase, “I frame no hypotheses.” And it’s in this context that it appears.
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He had been unable to discover the physical
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cause of gravity, so he left the question open.
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He said, “to us it is enough that gravity does really exist,
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and act according to the laws which we have explained,
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and abundantly serves to account for all the
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motions of the celestial bodies, and of our sea,
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the tides.” But while agreeing,
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as he did, that his proposals were so absurd that
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no serious scientist could take them seriously,
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he defended himself from the charge that he was reverting to the mysticism
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of the Aristotelians. What he argued was that his principles were not occult;
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only their causes were occult. So in his words “to
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derive general principles inductively from phenomena,
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and afterwards to tell us how the properties of
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actions of all corporeal things follow from these manifest principles,
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would be a very great step in philosophy (in science), though
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the causes of the principles were not yet discovered.
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And by the phrase, “not yet discovered” Newton,
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the word “yet” is crucial, Newton was expressing his hope
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that the causes would someday be discovered, in physical terms,
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meaning, mechanical terms. That was a hope that lasted right through the
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nineteenth century. It was finally dashed by
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twentieth century science, so that hope is gone.
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The model of intelligibility that
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reigned from Galileo through Newton, and indeed well beyond,
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has a corollary: when mechanism fails,
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understanding fails. So Newton’s absurdities
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Were, finally, over time, just
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incorporated into common sense
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natural science. You study them in school today.
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But that’s quite different from commonsense understanding.
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So to put it differently, one long-term consequence
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of the Newtonian revolution was to lower the standards of intelligibility for
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natural science.
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There’s the hope to understand the world, which did
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animate the modern scientific revolution. That was finally abandoned.
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It was replaced by a very different and far less
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demanding goal namely, to develop intelligible theories of the world.
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So as, such further absurdities as
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say, curved space-time, or quantum indeterminacy were absorbed into the
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natural sciences,
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the very idea of an intelligible, uh,
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of intelligibility, is dismissed as itself absurd.
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For example by Bertrand Russell who knew the sciences very well.
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By the late 1920s, he repeatedly
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places the word “intelligible” in quotes
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to highlight the absurdity of the quest.
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And he dismisses the qualms of the founders, the great founders of the
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Scientific Revolution,
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Newton, others, dismisses them as,
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their qualms about action at a distance, he
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dismisses these as little more than a prejudice. Although a more
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sympathetic, and I think accurate description would be,
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that they simply had higher standards of intelligibility.
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And if you look at the work of leading physicists, they
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more or less say the same thing, so a couple years after Russell wrote,
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Paul Dirac wrote a well-known introduction to quantum mechanics
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in which says that “physical science no longer seeks to provide pictures of
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how the world works, that is, a model
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functioning on essentially classical lines,
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but only seeks to provide a way of looking at the fundamental laws
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which makes their self-consistency obvious.”
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(So we want to understand the theories; we’ve given up trying to understand the world).
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He was referring of course to the inconceivable
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conclusions of quantum physics, but,
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if modern thinkers hadn’t forgotten the past he could just as well
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have been referring to
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the classical Newtonian models and,
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which were undermined by Newton
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undermining the hope of rendering natural phenomena intelligible.
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That was the primary goal, the animating spirit of
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the early Scientific Revolution.
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There’s a classic 19th century
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history of materialism by Friedrich Lange,
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translated into English with an introduction by Russell.
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Lange observes that “we have so accustomed ourselves
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to the abstract notion of forces, or rather to a notion
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hovering in a mystic obscurity between abstraction and concrete comprehension
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that we no longer find any difficulty in making one particle of matter
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act upon another without immediate contact,
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through void space, without a material link.
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From such ideas, the great mathematicians and physicists of the
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seventeenth century were far removed.
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They were genuine materialists. They
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insisted that contact, immediate contact, is a condition of
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Influence. “This transition”,
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he says, “was one of the most important turning points in the whole history of
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materialism,”
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(it) deprived the notion of much significance, if any at all,
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And with materialism goes the notion of physical, of
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body, other counterparts,
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They have no longer any significance, and,
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he adds that “what Newton held to be such a great absurdity
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that no philosophic thinker could light upon it,
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is prized by posterity as Newton’s great discovery of
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the harmony of the universe.” Those conclusions are quite commonplace in the
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history of science. So fifty years ago Alexander
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Koyre, another great historian of science, and scientist,
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observed that “despite his unwillingness to accept the conclusion,
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Newton had demonstrated that a purely materialistic pattern of nature
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is utterly impossible, and a purely materialistic or
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mechanistic physics as well, his
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mathematical physics, required the admission
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into the body science of incomprehensible
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and inexplicable facts imposed on us by
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empiricism, that is by what we conclude from observations.”
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Despite this recognition, the debates did not end,
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So about a century ago, Boltzmann’s
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molecular theory of gases, or
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Chegulet’s structural chemistry, in fact even
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Bohr’s atom, ones you all learn in school, these were only given an instrumental
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interpretation
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… Modern History of Chemistry, standard history, points out that
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they were regarded as calculating devices, but with no physical reality,
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And Newton’s belief that the causes of his principles were not
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yet discovered, implying that they would be,
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was echoed
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by, for example, by Bertrand Russell
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in 1927. He wrote that
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“chemical laws cannot at present
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be reduced to physical laws.” Much like Newton,
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be hoped it would happen, and he expected that it would.
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But that expectation also proved to be vain, as
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vain as Newton’s. Shortly after Russell
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wrote this, it was shown that chemical laws will never be reduced
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to physical laws, because the conception of physical laws was erroneous.
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…uh, finally done in Linus Pauling’s
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quantum theoretic account of the chemical bond.
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And very much as in Newton’s day,
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the perceived explanatory gap, as it’s now called
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by philosophers, was never filled.
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Today interestingly, just a few years ago,
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we read of the thesis of the new biology,
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that “things mental, indeed minds, are emergent properties of brains,
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though these emergences are produced by principles
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that we do not yet understand.” That’s
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neuroscientist Vernon Mountcastle. He’s
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formulating the guiding theme of a collection of essays
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reviewing the results of what was called The Decade of The Brain,
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last decade of the twentieth century. His phrase,
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“we do not yet understand” might very will suffer the same fate as
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Russell’s similar comment about chemistry, seventy
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years earlier, or for that matter, Newton’s much earlier one.
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In fact, in many ways, today’s theory of mind,
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i think, is re capitulating errors
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that were exposed in the nineteen thirties
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with regard to chemistry, and
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centuries before that with regard to core physics,
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though in that case leaving us with a mystery, maybe a permanent one for
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Humans,
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as Hume speculated, actually asserted.
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Throughout all this, and today as well,
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we can optimistically look forward to
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unification of some kind, but not necessarily reduction,
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which is something quite different. Talk about reductionism is highly misleading.
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It’s been abandoned over and over again in the history of science.
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Seeking unification (is a) much weaker goal.
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Sometimes, as in the classic case of Newton
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and what he left “veiled in mystery”, that
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may involve significant lowering of expectations and standards.
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Well let me go back to the beginning, the exuberant thesis that the
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early Scientific Revolution provided humans with
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limitless explanatory power. When we look over the history, I think a
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quite different conclusion is
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in order. The founders of the Scientific Revolution were compelled by their
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discoveries
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to recognize that human explanatory power
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is not only not limitless, but does not
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even reach to the most elementary phenomenon of the natural world.
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That’s masked by lowering the criteria of
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Intelligibility, of understanding. Well
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according, if we accept that much, as I think we should, a
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less ambitious question arises, the goals of
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science having been lowered to finding intelligible theories,
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can we sensibly maintain,
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(we can ask this), can we sensibly maintain
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that humanly accessible theories
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are limitless in their explanatory scope (it’s a much
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weaker goal), and furthermore, does the theory of evolution
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establish the limitless reach of human cognitive
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powers in this narrower more limited sense?
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Actually, if you think about it, the opposite conclusion seems much more reasonable.
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The theory of evolution of course places humans firmly within the natural
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world.
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It regards humans as biological organisms,
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very much like others, and for every such organism,
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it’s capacities have scope and limits.
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The two go together. That includes the cognitive domain.
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So rats for example can’t solve,
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say, a prime number maze. That’s because they lack the appropriate
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concepts.
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It’s not lack of memory or anything like that; they
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just don’t have the concepts, so for rats
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we can make a useful distinction between
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problems and mysteries.
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Problems are tasks that lie within their cognitive
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reach in principle. Mysteries are ones that don’t.
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(mysteries for rats; they may not be mysteries for us).
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If humans are not Angels, if we’re part of the organic world,
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than human cognitive capacity is also gonna have scope and limits.
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So accordingly the distinction between problems and mysteries,
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holds for humans, and it’s a task for science to delimit it.
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Maybe we can, maybe we can’t; but at least it’s a formulable task,
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and not inconsistent., It’s not inconsistent to think that we might be able to discover
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the
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limits of our cognitive capacities. Therefore, those who accept modern biology,
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should all be mysterians, instead of ridiculing it,
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because mysterianism follows directly from
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the theory of evolution, and everything we scientifically believe about humans.
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So the common ridicule of this concept,
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right through philosophy of mind, what it amounts to is the claim that
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somehow humans are Angels, exempt from
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biological constraints. And in fact far from
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bewailing the existence of mysteries for humans,
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we should be extremely grateful for it, because if there are no limits
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to what we might call, say, the science-forming capacity,
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it would also have no scope, just as if the
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genetic endowment imposed no constraints on
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growth, it would mean that
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we could be at most some shapeless amoeboid
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creature reflecting accidents of an unanalyzed environment.
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The conditions that prevent a human embryo from
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becoming, say an insect, or a chicken, those very same conditions,
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play a critical role in determining that the embryo can become a human.
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(you can’t have one without the other), and the same holds in the cognitive domain.
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Actually classical aesthetic theory recognized that
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there’s a relation between scope and limits.
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Without any rules, there can be no genuine
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creative activity, and that’s even the case
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when creative work challenges and revises
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prevailing rules. So far from establishing the limitless scope of human
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cognitive capacities,
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modern evolutionary theory, and in fact all of standard science,
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undermines that hope. Now that was actually appreciated
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right away when the power of the theory of evolution
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came to be recognized. One
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enlightening case is Charles Sanders Peirce,
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his inquiry into what he called abduction,
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which is rather different from the way the term is used today.
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Peirce was struck particularly by a
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striking fact that in the history of science
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major discoveries are often made
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independently and almost simultaneously
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which suggests that some principal is
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directing inquiring minds
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towards that goal, under the existing
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circumstances of understanding.
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And something similar is true for early childhood learning.
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So if you put aside the
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pathology or extreme deprivation, children are
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essentially uniform in this capacity and
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they uniformly make quite astounding discoveries
31:19
about the world, going well beyond what
31:22
any kind of data analysis could yield.
31:26
In the case of language, it’s now known that that
31:30
starts even before birth. So a child is born with
31:34
some conception of what counts as a language
31:37
and can even recognize its mother’s language as
31:41
distinct from another language, both spoken by a
31:45
bilingual woman who it’s never heard before,
31:48
(there are some interesting distinctions determining how it works but,
31:52
it can be done at birth), and in fact even the first step of
31:57
language acquisition, which is generally sort of just taken for granted,
32:01
is quite a remarkable achievement. An infant has to
32:05
select from the environment, from
32:08
what William James called “the looming buzzing
32:11
Confusion”, the infant has to somehow select the data
32:16
that are language-related. That’s a task that’s a total mystery for any other organism,
32:22
They have absolutely no way doing it. But it’s a reflexively solved problem
32:26
for human infants, and so the story continues,
32:30
all the way to the outer reaches of scientific discovery.
32:33
)Well it may not be continuous, I’m not suggesting that. There’s probably
32:38
different capacities involved.) Rather like
32:41
Hume, Peirce concluded that humans must
32:45
have what he called an abductive instinct which provides
32:49
a limit on admissible hypotheses,
32:52
so that only certain explanatory schemes can be entertained,
32:56
but not infinitely many others, all compatible with available data.
33:02
Peirce argued that this instinct develops through
33:06
natural selection, that is, the variants that yield
33:10
truths about the world provide a selectional advantage, and are
33:14
retained through descent with modification,
33:17
(Darwin’s notions), while others fall away.
33:20
That belief is completely unsustainable.
33:24
It takes only a moment to show that that can’t be true,
33:27
And if you drop it, as we must, we’re left with a serious,
33:31
challenging, scientific problem, namely: determine the
33:36
innate components or our cognitive nature,
33:39
those that are employed in reflexive identification of
33:43
language-relevant data, or in another cognitive domains.
33:48
Take one famous case, the capacity of humans which is
33:53
quite remarkable, to, if presented with a
33:58
sequence of tachistoscopic presentations, just
34:01
dots on a screen, three dots on a screen,
34:04
presented with a sequence of these, what you perceive is a rigid object in motion.
34:11
Some of the cognitive principles are known, but not the neural basis for it.
34:16
Or, for example, discovering and comprehending Newton’s Laws,
34:20
or developing string theory, or solving problems of
34:24
quantum entanglement, or as complex as you like.
34:28
And there is a further task, that’s to determine the scope and limits of human
34:32
understanding.
34:34
Incidentally, some differently structured organism, some
34:37
Martian say, might regard human mysteries,
34:41
as simple problems, and might wonder that
34:45
we can’t find the answers, or even ask the right questions,
34:49
just as we wonder about the
34:52
inability of rats to run prime number mazes.
34:56
It’s not because of limits of memory, or other superficial
35:00
constraints, but because of the very design of our
35:03
cognitive nature, and their cognitive nature.
35:07
So actually of you think it through I think it’s quite clear that
35:10
Newton’s remarkable achievements led to a significant
35:14
lowering of the expectations of science, a severe restriction on the role of
35:19
intelligibility.
35:21
They furthermore demonstrated that it’s an error to
35:25
ridicule what’s called the ghost in the machine
35:29
(that’s what I and others were taught, at
35:32
your age, in the best graduate schools, Harvard in my case,
35:36
but that’s just a mistake.) Newton did not exorcise the ghost;
35:41
Rather, he exorcised the machine; he left the ghost completely
35:45
Intact, and by so doing he
35:49
inadvertently set the study of mind on quite a new course, in fact
35:53
made it possible to integrate it into the sciences.
35:57
And Newton may very well have realized this.
36:00
Throughout his life he struggled, later life, struggled,
36:04
vainly of course, with the paradoxes and
36:08
conundrums that followed from his theory, and he speculated
36:13
that what he called “spirit”, which he couldn’t identify,
36:17
but whatever it is, “might be the cause
36:20
of all movement in nature, including the power of
36:24
moving our body by our thoughts, and the same
36:28
power within other living creatures,
36:32
though how this is done, and by what laws,
36:35
we do not know. We cannot say,” he concluded, “that
36:39
all nature is not alive.”
36:42
Going a step beyond Newton, Locke suggested, Locke added,
36:47
that “we cannot say that matter does not think.”
36:51
It’s a speculation that’s called “The Locke Suggestion” in the history of philosophy.
36:56
So as Locke put it, “Just as God had added
37:01
to motion inconceivable effects,
37:04
it is not much more remote from our comprehension
37:08
to conceive that God can, if he pleases,
37:11
super-ad to matter, the faculty of thinking.”
37:15
Locke found this view repugnant to the
37:18
idea of senseless matter, but he said that “we cannot reject it
37:23
because of our incurable ignorance and the limits of our ideas”,
37:28
that is, our cognitive capacities. Having
37:31
no intelligible concept of matter
37:34
or body or physical, as we still don’t incidentally,
37:38
but having no such concept,
37:41
he said “we cannot dismiss the possibility of living
37:46
or thinking matter”, particularly
37:49
after Newton had undermined,
37:52
totally undermined, commonsense understanding, permanently.
37:57
Locke’s suggestion was understood, and it was taken up
38:01
right through the 18th century. Hume, for example, concluded that
38:06
“motion may be, and actually is, the cause of our thought and perception.
38:12
Others argued that since thought which is produced in the brain
38:16
cannot exist if this organ is wanting,
38:20
and since there’s no reason any longer to question the
38:24
existence is thinking matter, it’s necessary to conclude
38:29
that the brain is a special organ designed
38:32
to produce thought, much as the stomach and the intestines are designed to
38:38
operate the digestion, the liver to filter bile,
38:42
and so on through the bodily organs. So just as foods
38:45
enter the stomach, and leave it with new qualities,
38:50
so impressions arrive at the brain through the nerves,
38:54
isolated and without any coherence,
39:00
but the organ, the brain, enters into action;
39:03
it acts on them; it sends them
39:06
back changed into ideas, which
39:10
the language of physiognomy
39:13
and gesture, the signs a speech and writing,
39:16
manifest outwardly” I’m still quoting, “we conclude then
39:21
with the same certainty that the brain digests, as it were,
39:24
the impressions, that is,
39:28
organically it makes the secretion of thought, just as
39:31
the liver secretes bile.” Darwin put the matter,
39:35
agreed with this, put the matter succinctly. He asked,
39:39
rhetorically, “why is thought, being a secretion of the brain,
39:44
more wonderful than gravity, a property of matter?”
39:47
a property that we don’t understand, but we just came to accept.
39:52
Its therefore rather odd to read today what I
39:56
quoted before, the leading thesis of the decade of the brain, that
40:00
ended the last century, namely that “things mental,
40:04
indeed minds, are emergent properties of brains.”
40:08
Mountcastle’s summary. Strange to read that,
40:12
because it was commonplace in the eighteenth century, so is not clear why
40:15
It’s
40:15
an emerging thesis, and many other
40:19
prominent scientists and philosophers have
40:22
presented essentially the same thesis as…
40:25
I quote some contemporary examples, “an astonishing
40:28
hypothesis of the new biology,” “a radical new idea in the philosophy of
40:33
mind”, “the bold assertion that mental phenomena are
40:37
entirely natural and caused by the neurophysiological activities of the
40:41
brain
40:42
opening the door to novel
40:46
promising inquiries”, “a rejection of
40:49
Cartesian mind-body dualism” and so on.
40:53
All of these reiterate,
40:56
in virtually the same words, formulations of
40:59
centuries ago. The traditional
41:03
mind-body problem, having become unformulable,
41:07
with the disappearance of the only coherent
41:10
notion of body, again physical, material, and so on.
41:15
So for example, Joseph Priestley’s conclusion,
41:19
eighteenth century, that “properties termed mental
41:23
reduce somehow to the organical structure of the brain.”
41:26
An idea incidentally which he developed in quite interesting ways,
41:30
an idea which was stated in different words,
41:33
less detailed, by Hume, Darwin, many others,
41:37
and almost inescapable it would seem, after the collapse of the mechanical
41:41
philosophy.
41:43
Well with the belated revival of ideas that were reasonably well understood
41:48
centuries ago,
41:50
and are direct conclusions of Newton’s discoveries,
41:54
we’re left with scientific problems about the theory of mind,
42:00
They can be pursued in many ways like other questions
42:03
of science, maybe with an eye to eventual unification, whatever form it may take,
42:09
if any. That enterprise renews a task that
42:13
Hume understood quite well. He called it the investigation of
42:18
the science of human nature, the search for “the secret
42:22
springs and principles by which the human mind is
42:26
actuated in its operations, including those parts of our knowledge that are
42:31
derived from the original hand of
42:33
nature.” so what we would call, genetic endowment,
42:37
Hume of course is the arch empiricist,
42:41
but also a dedicated nativist
42:44
(It’s supposed to be the opposite of empiricism)
42:48
and had to be because he was reasonable.
42:51
This inquiry, which
42:55
Hume compared in principle to Newton’s, had
42:58
in fact been undertaken in quite sophisticated ways by
43:02
English neo-Platonists, in work that
43:05
directly influenced Kant.
43:09
There’s a contemporary, in contemporary literature there are other names for
43:13
this; it’s sometimes called
43:14
naturalization of philosophy, or epistemology
43:18
naturalized, or sometimes just cognitive science.
43:21
But in fact it’s the direct
43:25
consequence of Newton’s demolition of
43:29
the idea of grasping the nature the world,
43:33
and inescapable. So let me just summarize
43:37
briefly. I think it’s fair to conclude that the hopes
43:40
and expectations of the early Scientific Revolution
43:44
were dashed by Newton’s discoveries, which
43:47
leaves us with several conclusions. One
43:50
conclusion, actually reinforced by Darwin,
43:53
is that while our cognitive capacities may be vast in scope,
43:58
they are nonetheless intrinsically limited.
44:02
Some questions that we might like to
44:05
explore may well lie beyond our cognitive
44:09
reach; we may not even be able to
44:13
formulate the right questions. The standards of success
44:17
may have to be lowered once again, as has happened before,
44:21
very dramatically with the collapse of the mechanical philosophy.
44:26
And another conclusion is that the mind-body problem
44:29
can safely be put to rest, since there is no
44:34
coherent alternative to Locke’s suggestion.
44:38
And if we adopt Locke’s suggestion, that opens the way to the
44:42
study of mind as a branch of biology, much like the
44:46
study of the rest of the body (the body
44:50
below the neck, putting it metaphorically).
44:53
A great deal has been learned in the past half century of
44:57
revival of traditional concerns of the early Scientific Revolution and
45:02
the Enlightenment but many of the
45:06
early leading questions have not been answered,
45:09
and may never be. Thanks.
45:33
thank you very much
45:34
We’re going to open for questions and
45:37
commence right away.
OPEN VCS, a lens for looking at models 