I'm here from a tweet you wrote on the tendency for academics to become silo'ed and narrow in their reading and became an instant fan. Now as I scroll through your Yt content I'm happy to see this is all up my alley. A rare W for the internet today.
Thanks for sharing this. I love the part where he quotes from Pinker's book: "I can account for everything but: consciousness the self free will meaning knowledge and morality."
Considering the fact that computers are modeled on, not even human minds but on a few things that human minds do, to use them as a model for the minds they are modeled on strikes me as one of the most profoundly foolish ideas in all of modernistic thought.
I like Prof. Taylor - and watching him slap Pinker, Dennett and Dawkings is even better! (to be honest, I don't know who Dennett is ... but for some reason I believe he deserves it).
Dennett is wrong headed in my view in his overall approach, but he was a formidable thinker. Pinker and Dawkins are pretty unoriginal from what I can tell.
Around 3:58: "...what couldn't be explained is the "perception of real, intrinsic meaning",..so claims Taylor. Au contraire...we can indeed "materialistically" (setting aside what matter is for now) explain the "perception" but cannot explain/prove whether anything we perceive to have such meaning "actually" does have it (objectively-outside of our minds). Meaning cannot be proven to be anything other than subjective, and so, a biological machine can perfectly well be "programmed" by its genes' "hardwiring" and their interactions/experiences to assign meaning to things and events-situations-conditions, and will do so according to its primary drives as a life form, and there will also be feedback loops (evolutionary) that can lead to hardwiring, genetic changes-give us our uniqueness as a person or as a species. All of Taylor's supposed refutations can also be refuted...He fails to disprove the basic thesis of "materialism". Yes, and even "consciousness" can have a materialistic explanation, whatever consciousness may be...first we'd have to agree on that. It may be that Pinker, Dennett, and Dawkins haven't done such a good job with their explaining-describing, and I'd recommend reading-listening to Sapolsky for a great critique of "free will", but this does not mean they stand refuted. Ultimately, a philosopher like Taylor is trying to please a desire (implanted, programmed into him by nature + nurture, no "free will" involved) to prove the existence of some non-materialistic-other-worldly-god-concept's realm, and yet such a realm remains unprovable-undisprovable by its definition as being beyond this world, therefore not capable-amenable of being detected-measured (the scientific method) and therefore the only one we can know as the biological machines we are in this world. He's just making arguments to confirm a bias, as all of us do, and so the question we might be able to answer is whence came his bias that he shares with the audience to whom he's lecturing. Psychology (a product of nature + nurture) precedes philosophy.
@@brunischling9680 Good point! Agreed and ditto for "spiritualism" or whatever we might call "non-materialism". Any argument must begin with some agreement as to definitions.
Two responses: look at Michael Levvin's research which shows materialism does not explain what genes and living systems do, nor how they do it. 2. Dennet, et al forget that, when they think, their verbal dominant hemispheres are actively dumbing down reality into categories and concepts, and making things, all "concrete" and therefore logical. The reality is this: the elephant in the ballroom is no longer in the ballroom when it has been carved up into bite-sized pieces, served and digested by the hundreds of materialists present. I am curious if Dennet and Dawkins and Pinker (oh my!) would find any relevance in the Tao te Ching, or simply dismiss it as more religious drivel which has no bearing on anything scientific. That book captures the essence I do not hear any materialists acknowledge: nothing exists in isolation. Reality is made up of messy "becomings" and beings are changing form and structure every attosecond. Material things "aren't." And immaterial "things," like experience, information, physical and mathematical "laws" aren't either. We dismiss the supernatural as having no scientific validity. Tell that to a woman who absolutely knows, to the minute, what time her husband or child died, even half-way around the globe.
@@glenliesegang233 A lot to unpack there. Sorry, but I'm just going to be as brief as possible: Agreed that "material things aren't"...all that exists is centers of force (Nietzsche). One might even say that's a spiritual universe. The "supernatural" can be totally imaginary or it can be quite real. One might even say all things that exist are supernatural since we can't explain how anything came to exist...We live in a mystery, lao Tze made that clear in his Chapter One...I love Lao Tze too. The universe is a whole greater than the sum of its parts. In matters of understanding (describing/codifying "laws") how things work, including the human mind, I will stick with LaPlace when Napoleon asked him why God did not appear in his writings on celestial mechanics: "Sire, I have no need for that hypothesis." Is that "materialistic" or just keeping things limited to what we can know via our senses and instruments, the stuff of which science is built...observations and experiments.
I was surprised to hear Taylor talk like that. He is usually quite articulate in his familiar grounds, i.e. the sociology of faith and secularism. Here, he can't even finish a sentence he started. Out of the world salad, the only thing that comes out, is his proposal that the mystery of consciousness invalidates the results of science. Not even as amusing as that whole naive idea of Reasonable Accommodation of a few years back.
He doesn't understand who and what he's attempting to critique well enough to even venture a valid criticism. And apparently neither do you, given that you're posting this. The God of the gaps isn't going away anytime soon, but this is nothing more than that in yet another guise. Thomas Nagel fell prey to the same woo-making, even more embarrassingly.
Aristotle was a naturalist and well before the "God of the gaps". So the defense of teleology can receive both immanent and transcendent (religious) defenses. A note for philosophers!
@@jasonwblakely A naturalist who confidently asserted that women have fewer teeth than men--proving that he could be as bad as induction as he was at deduction. Aristotelian scholasticism has been surpassed for a reason: it's bunk, as is teleology and theology. But you're a Catholic, so you're bound to it. Maybe you'll get past it, maybe you won't. Shrug.
@@nnix true but i'm a convert. and so you have the order there wrong. i partly abandoned atheism because i couldn't see anyone capable of getting rid of teleology in the human sciences. so i am religious because of teleology, not the other way round... Godspeed!
No way 😳 You're telling me that after reflecting you didn't select the good ol' brute contingency? The expanding singularity of mass behind all phenomenon?? @jasonwblakely
@@jasonwblakely Aristoltle also considered a deity to be natural. The Prime Mover argument, which is at its most basic primise, a god of the gaps argument. But because at the time and limited knowledge of reality's ontology, this was the only comprehensive induction one could make. Knowing what we know now, historically and from hard sciences, God isn't needed to make naturalism work coherrently. But what is confusing is how your response with Aristotle has anything to do with what @nnix laid out about Taylors ramblings. You saying you've converted because you've found biblical teleology convencing is also puzzling. Given that evolution is a fact about organic life coming about, Intellegent design aka Creationism and irreducible complexity is just false. Unless you're going to argue that a deity started everything. But then you'd be left with nothing defending either an incompetent deity or a deity who doesn't care about us because we'd still be the product of evolution/chance and not a product of his design. Fine tuning is actually an argument for naturalism/materialism and not a universe creating agent. I'm struggling to see anything left that could have convinced you. I also agree with @nnix. Taylor is as bad as Peterson. Where Peterson struggles to speak without word salad, Taylor seems to suffer from not verbally finishing a thought.
Taylor's critique is materialistic theories may wish to wed themselves with christian based western culture, (after the Christ has been abstracted of course) but its logical arc of evolution is towards some variant of marxism...... In relation to Dawkin's recent 'cultural christian' remarks.....'>.....
@@lzzrdgrrl7379 I understand your position and for sure Prof. Taylor is a very good philosopher. I have most of his books, including his excellent Hegel book. Philosophical attempts using Christianity as a foundational base fails every time.
@@johnmaisonneuve9057 Not even challenging whether such an attempt is possible, but noting that the implications of such a failure isn't much appreciated from the secular and scientific angle....'>...
@@IncornsyucopiaI find them very convincing - what did Taylor offer instead? Taylor believes in evolution but when Dawkins writes a book trying to figure out the unit of selection that natural selection works on, Taylor doesn’t like it. Does he have a better idea? Dennett presents a theory about how apparent intelligence arises out of unintelligent parts. Taylor doesn’t like it. Does he have a better idea? As for Pinker’s list - perhaps items on the list simply aren’t what we thought they were. That’s the implication of the list.
@@anthonyzav3769 Well, that would be pretty convenient for Pinker if it were true, which of course he has no way of demonstrating. As for the gene as the unit of selection... Read James Shapiro, read Philip Ball. Huge swathes of biology have moved on from Dawkins (or just ignored him) in the past 50 years, including his old teacher Denis Noble. Taylor observes that Dennett has an idea that doesn't hold logical water (he's hardly the only one to notice that emergentism is pretty logically flimsy.) I don't think that obliges Taylor to come up with an alternative.
Professor Charles Taylor, I could listen to all day.
Thank you.😊
I'm here from a tweet you wrote on the tendency for academics to become silo'ed and narrow in their reading and became an instant fan. Now as I scroll through your Yt content I'm happy to see this is all up my alley.
A rare W for the internet today.
Thanks for sharing this. I love the part where he quotes from Pinker's book:
"I can account for everything but:
consciousness
the self
free will
meaning
knowledge
and morality."
Hilarious--I remember reading that part in Pinkers How the Mind Works but somehow in Charles's retelling becomes appropriately absurdist
Can you quote me the passage where that appears in HTMW?
@@rishabhprasad5417 No, I can't. Taylor is quoting from it in the video. He said it's at the end of the book.
@@KingoftheJuice18 How the Mind Works, 1997, pp. 558-9
@@KL0098 Thanks.
What a wonderful, refreshing talk! Cheered me up! Wished Charles Taylor commented on Harari.
Considering the fact that computers are modeled on, not even human minds but on a few things that human minds do, to use them as a model for the minds they are modeled on strikes me as one of the most profoundly foolish ideas in all of modernistic thought.
A materialistic view of Life is the best explanation so far. All others are just Circular Reasoning.
says the man without a mind
His laughter at the end of that clip lol
Have you ever looked at Alasdair MacIntire After Virtue or John Milbank Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason.
This man is more trusty that's for sure
No slouch is Mr.T, a gentleman philosopher and nobody’s fool.
I like Prof. Taylor - and watching him slap Pinker, Dennett and Dawkings is even better! (to be honest, I don't know who Dennett is ... but for some reason I believe he deserves it).
Dennett is wrong headed in my view in his overall approach, but he was a formidable thinker. Pinker and Dawkins are pretty unoriginal from what I can tell.
Around 3:58: "...what couldn't be explained is the "perception of real, intrinsic meaning",..so claims Taylor. Au contraire...we can indeed "materialistically" (setting aside what matter is for now) explain the "perception" but cannot explain/prove whether anything we perceive to have such meaning "actually" does have it (objectively-outside of our minds). Meaning cannot be proven to be anything other than subjective, and so, a biological machine can perfectly well be "programmed" by its genes' "hardwiring" and their interactions/experiences to assign meaning to things and events-situations-conditions, and will do so according to its primary drives as a life form, and there will also be feedback loops (evolutionary) that can lead to hardwiring, genetic changes-give us our uniqueness as a person or as a species.
All of Taylor's supposed refutations can also be refuted...He fails to disprove the basic thesis of "materialism". Yes, and even "consciousness" can have a materialistic explanation, whatever consciousness may be...first we'd have to agree on that. It may be that Pinker, Dennett, and Dawkins haven't done such a good job with their explaining-describing, and I'd recommend reading-listening to Sapolsky for a great critique of "free will", but this does not mean they stand refuted. Ultimately, a philosopher like Taylor is trying to please a desire (implanted, programmed into him by nature + nurture, no "free will" involved) to prove the existence of some non-materialistic-other-worldly-god-concept's realm, and yet such a realm remains unprovable-undisprovable by its definition as being beyond this world, therefore not capable-amenable of being detected-measured (the scientific method) and therefore the only one we can know as the biological machines we are in this world. He's just making arguments to confirm a bias, as all of us do, and so the question we might be able to answer is whence came his bias that he shares with the audience to whom he's lecturing. Psychology (a product of nature + nurture) precedes philosophy.
If you bypass a definition of matter
, you bypass also any valid argument for materialsm
@@brunischling9680 Good point! Agreed and ditto for "spiritualism" or whatever we might call "non-materialism". Any argument must begin with some agreement as to definitions.
Two responses: look at Michael Levvin's research which shows materialism does not explain what genes and living systems do, nor how they do it.
2. Dennet, et al forget that, when they think, their verbal dominant hemispheres are actively dumbing down reality into categories and concepts, and making things, all "concrete" and therefore logical.
The reality is this: the elephant in the ballroom is no longer in the ballroom when it has been carved up into bite-sized pieces, served and digested by the hundreds of materialists present.
I am curious if Dennet and Dawkins and Pinker (oh my!) would find any relevance in the Tao te Ching, or simply dismiss it as more religious drivel which has no bearing on anything scientific.
That book captures the essence I do not hear any materialists acknowledge: nothing exists in isolation. Reality is made up of messy "becomings" and beings are changing form and structure every attosecond.
Material things "aren't." And immaterial "things," like experience, information, physical and mathematical "laws" aren't either.
We dismiss the supernatural as having no scientific validity. Tell that to a woman who absolutely knows, to the minute, what time her husband or child died, even half-way around the globe.
@@glenliesegang233 A lot to unpack there. Sorry, but I'm just going to be as brief as possible: Agreed that "material things aren't"...all that exists is centers of force (Nietzsche). One might even say that's a spiritual universe. The "supernatural" can be totally imaginary or it can be quite real. One might even say all things that exist are supernatural since we can't explain how anything came to exist...We live in a mystery, lao Tze made that clear in his Chapter One...I love Lao Tze too.
The universe is a whole greater than the sum of its parts. In matters of understanding (describing/codifying "laws") how things work, including the human mind, I will stick with LaPlace when Napoleon asked him why God did not appear in his writings on celestial mechanics: "Sire, I have no need for that hypothesis." Is that "materialistic" or just keeping things limited to what we can know via our senses and instruments, the stuff of which science is built...observations and experiments.
i'm of one mind with you on this, Avianthro, and your responses here just bring things back to clarity rather than to any personal project
I was surprised to hear Taylor talk like that. He is usually quite articulate in his familiar grounds, i.e. the sociology of faith and secularism. Here, he can't even finish a sentence he started. Out of the world salad, the only thing that comes out, is his proposal that the mystery of consciousness invalidates the results of science. Not even as amusing as that whole naive idea of Reasonable Accommodation of a few years back.
Intrinsic value then is the "good." That's what the materialist can't explain.
Pinker has good hair.
Best line: Brrhhhhuh!
Well of course the answer to the question is "God did it" !
Our brains crave certainty. “God did it” provides that certainty.
@@devos3212 people feel certain about many many false things right?
@@tgrogan6049are u trying to prove or disprove empiricism 😂
@@Ryan-so4xl Are your reading these words? Our senses are reasonably reliable right?
It’s funny how evolutionary theory is breaking down now. The math doesn’t work.
We don't know how this Universe came about, but we do know we're Animals that live and die, like all the other animals.
Ramblings of an embittered, clueless philosopher.
That's enough about you; what about Taylor's argument?
Mostly drivel.
WASP
He doesn't understand who and what he's attempting to critique well enough to even venture a valid criticism. And apparently neither do you, given that you're posting this. The God of the gaps isn't going away anytime soon, but this is nothing more than that in yet another guise. Thomas Nagel fell prey to the same woo-making, even more embarrassingly.
Aristotle was a naturalist and well before the "God of the gaps". So the defense of teleology can receive both immanent and transcendent (religious) defenses. A note for philosophers!
@@jasonwblakely A naturalist who confidently asserted that women have fewer teeth than men--proving that he could be as bad as induction as he was at deduction.
Aristotelian scholasticism has been surpassed for a reason: it's bunk, as is teleology and theology. But you're a Catholic, so you're bound to it. Maybe you'll get past it, maybe you won't. Shrug.
@@nnix true but i'm a convert. and so you have the order there wrong. i partly abandoned atheism because i couldn't see anyone capable of getting rid of teleology in the human sciences. so i am religious because of teleology, not the other way round... Godspeed!
No way 😳
You're telling me that after reflecting you didn't select the good ol' brute contingency? The expanding singularity of mass behind all phenomenon??
@jasonwblakely
@@jasonwblakely Aristoltle also considered a deity to be natural. The Prime Mover argument, which is at its most basic primise, a god of the gaps argument. But because at the time and limited knowledge of reality's ontology, this was the only comprehensive induction one could make. Knowing what we know now, historically and from hard sciences, God isn't needed to make naturalism work coherrently. But what is confusing is how your response with Aristotle has anything to do with what @nnix laid out about Taylors ramblings.
You saying you've converted because you've found biblical teleology convencing is also puzzling. Given that evolution is a fact about organic life coming about, Intellegent design aka Creationism and irreducible complexity is just false. Unless you're going to argue that a deity started everything. But then you'd be left with nothing defending either an incompetent deity or a deity who doesn't care about us because we'd still be the product of evolution/chance and not a product of his design. Fine tuning is actually an argument for naturalism/materialism and not a universe creating agent. I'm struggling to see anything left that could have convinced you.
I also agree with @nnix. Taylor is as bad as Peterson. Where Peterson struggles to speak without word salad, Taylor seems to suffer from not verbally finishing a thought.
eh?
Not convincing. When wedded to a religious point of view, just repetitive blab blab is offered. Very disappointing.
Taylor's critique is materialistic theories may wish to wed themselves with christian based western culture, (after the Christ has been abstracted of course) but its logical arc of evolution is towards some variant of marxism......
In relation to Dawkin's recent 'cultural christian' remarks.....'>.....
@@lzzrdgrrl7379 I understand your position and for sure Prof. Taylor is a very good philosopher. I have most of his books, including his excellent Hegel book. Philosophical attempts using Christianity as a foundational base fails every time.
@@johnmaisonneuve9057 Not even challenging whether such an attempt is possible, but noting that the implications of such a failure isn't much appreciated from the secular and scientific angle....'>...
You’re babbling
Trivial critique to a trivial worldview meh!
zip it man! tired of hearing such bullshit explanations
bla bla bla... but unconvincing...
How so?
Yes, Dennett, Dawkins and Pinker are very unconvincing, as Taylor so clearly shows.
@@IncornsyucopiaI find them very convincing - what did Taylor offer instead? Taylor believes in evolution but when Dawkins writes a book trying to figure out the unit of selection that natural selection works on, Taylor doesn’t like it. Does he have a better idea? Dennett presents a theory about how apparent intelligence arises out of unintelligent parts. Taylor doesn’t like it. Does he have a better idea? As for Pinker’s list - perhaps items on the list simply aren’t what we thought they were. That’s the implication of the list.
@@anthonyzav3769 Well, that would be pretty convenient for Pinker if it were true, which of course he has no way of demonstrating. As for the gene as the unit of selection... Read James Shapiro, read Philip Ball. Huge swathes of biology have moved on from Dawkins (or just ignored him) in the past 50 years, including his old teacher Denis Noble. Taylor observes that Dennett has an idea that doesn't hold logical water (he's hardly the only one to notice that emergentism is pretty logically flimsy.) I don't think that obliges Taylor to come up with an alternative.