Rebecca Goldstein on the Meaning of Matter, Philosophy, and Consciousness | Closer To Truth Chats
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 21 ก.ย. 2020
- Rebecca Goldstein discusses the meanings of "matter", philosophy in science, the hard problem of consciousness, and her decades of experience as a fiction and non-fiction writer.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein's Website: www.rebeccagoldstein.com/
Follow Rebecca Goldstein on Twitter @platobooktour
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is a novelist and Professor of Philosophy. She has written ten books, a number of short stories and essays, and biographical studies of mathematician Kurt Gödel and philosopher Baruch Spinoza.
Watch more Closer To Truth interviews with Rebecca Goldstein: bit.ly/2ZQvjmH
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Closer to Truth presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.
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I think I like this raw, underproduced style just as much as the full production. It's always been the quality of the conversations that matters.
Thank you for posting all of these fascinating conversations.
We're about as unique as every other species. Except perhaps in our narcissism, which may well be unique. But, bombardier beetles poop acid. That's pretty impressive. Some ants can follow scent paths with maybe a few molecules per unit of distance (I forget exactly). That's pretty impressive. That we've been eating our way through the entire planet, destroying as much as we can, hurtling toward destruction while asking, "What's it all about? Can I find meaning?"
Absolute rambles pal.
@@emmashalliker6862 Just on the off chance you're not a troll or bot, rambling, like, how?
Thank you for this series and all the great content you have been sharing
Glad you enjoy it!
Consciousness seems to feed on its desire to seek knowledge and meaning in existence. A never ending journey of seeking for answers. Many settle for a limited dogmatic belief and stifle any additional desire to seek. Once you believe you possess truth you stop thinking and have no desire for contrary information that disputes what you choose to believe. This leads to conflicts in life expressed in politics and religion.
This wonderful discussion brings to mind recent experiments which show that using quantum mechanics to observers can have equally valid points View. That seems like a topic that would be perfect for your series. Thanks so much!👍🏻
To matter, or say to belong and to be recognized ... when did that become a new idea? Or is was there something new "under the sun" here that I missed?
Thanks for the information of global warming matter, first human suffering human being problem,past destination in universe, all projects questions to problem making solution
A deep longing to matter is universal to individual consciousness. Probably accounts for all the varieties of political and religious dogmas and doctrines that affect us all. Primacy of ego?
I enjoyed the interview..Rebecca seems to be a humble person whose intellectual honesty shows in her reluctance to make unsupported assertions..As a scientific materialist, I DO take umbrage with any argument that suggests an equivalence in uncertainty between physics and other philosophical constructs that explain reality..An understanding of QM was first necessary before the electronic age could emerge.. Much MORE than a useful "Methodology" for beneficially manipulating our environment, physics and the scientific worldview is revealing HOW the universe works..Thats an assertion to be sure, BUT there is evidence and support to back it up..One mans opinion, Peace....
Ontology and mechanics are two very different things. To compare physics with philosophy (I’ll assume you’re alluding to various -isms incompatible with materialism ie dualisms, idealisms etc.) is also a category mistake.
@aidanhall6679 A well stated position friend, but I would suggest, however, that physical reality is ALL about materialism or very literally NOTHING at all.. Philosophy (in modern times) is essentially about nothing more than the proper framing of pertinent questions and definitions.. As you implied in your worthy comment.. Peace..
@aidanhall6679 Ps..If I remember my philosophy 101 class many decades ago, category errors and such do have relevance, so don't get me wrong. STILL, it is my opinion that such considerations are detached from any future or even potential understanding of the universe we inhabit..That is solely the purview of science..
@@Bill..N I agree with you, physical reality is indeed about materialism, but I fail to see how that statement is insightful, it’s rather tautological in fact. Mental reality is all about idealism etc.
that is certainly philosophy but it is a philosophy, but I don’t think we can define philosophy at all, it would be like trying to justify reason, nor do I think we should adhere to any one conception of philosophy any more than another.
Ontology is relevant, it is merely detached from our ability to make predictions about reality’s behaviour, just as science is detached from our understanding of being. But, they do inform one another, it’s just not asymmetrical; ontological considerations play an important, or in some cases decisive role in the moulding and shaping of our theoretical intuitions in model building and the dynamics of physical systems inform our ontological interpretation thereof. Of course it’s not all cut and dried, and I agree with you that physics is solely responsible for our conception of nature’s patterns and regularities, but science is mute on the question of consciousness, and I think we ought to try to explain that before we presuppose our ideological prejudices by sweeping it under the analytical rug and call it philosophy or ignore qualia altogether and call it science.
@aidanhall6679 Well said as I would expect given your last comment.. It is OK to disagree as well.. Here is my rebuttal.. It is very easy to argue that our " being" AND ALL mental states, which obviously would include awareness of the environment and the SO-CALLED sense of qualia, are ALL physical events and nothing more.. Again, I can argue that nothing exists that isn't physical.. Not dreams, not imagination, not ANY feeling that we are capable of.. I would be willing to explore that position if you like..
We have no choice but to matter since this chance of life we had no say about being born in a world that life is born to what year we fall into. To be young is the start and being old is the end of life knowing the time frame you lived in and feeling good about the fact that you did the best job of being human. Everything is energy across the whole cosmos this is a fact jack.
To anyone disliking these videos, I'm just curious as to why you felt the need to dislike the video. What about this and others like this don't work for you?
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@@philippemartin6081 I have no idea what you're saying. I'm referring to people who put a "thumbs down" on the video.
@@johncormier You do know what he's saying.
Kudos -- 444 Gematria -- 🗽
I feel Only things that exist are conscious agents and some concepts of conscious agents. Mathematics, numbers are concepts. Even matter, space, time are concepts. This approach even if it is correct will not be of much use if we want to create new technology. Dumb matter paradigm is more helpful and this way of thinking has helped humanity in achieving great things like science and technology. Even if we believe in dumb matter paradigm we end up with spacetime and some dancing fields in space time. These fields appear more like mathematical objects. They are not some concrete objects.
Mathematics is NOT an object, it is a series of explicative concept that can be applied to objects. It is the map not the terrain.
When scientists does not have enough evidences to be able to proof some phenomenon, then good, philosophy, of course will proof that subjects.
What matters is our ability to create music & entrain to Flow with The One! Groovism is the belief system we've all been endowed with!! www.groovism.org is our non-profit's web site. Currently with clips of our daily streamed Grooves. Soon to Be 24/7, streaming from around the planet!!
She defies my stereotype of a "philosopher". Very easy to listen to. Very clear.
On the issue of "matter" and "consciousness", I suspect the notion of "matter" is still too basic. She does mention "mathematics", which is a step towards the metaphysical direction. But "mathematics", if these means expressing everything in terms of equations, may still be too simple. (I assume she means it in a broader sense.) The tendency nowadays is to express everything in terms of ""computation" (e.g. Wolfram, Joscha Bach).
Maybe one tangible approach to exploring the interface between matter and "consciousness" is in abiogenesis. Biological life, is a form of "consciousness". (Definition of terms?) The first cells is a "proto" version of it. It has a very specific structure, cell wall, separating "self" from "environment". Associated with this is a set of processes, energetics, defying entropy. There is a noticeable difference between animate and inanimate objects.
(I heard we recently discovered a potential bio-signature in Venus's atomosphere. If this turns out to be true, that there is life, it adds to the broader picture, of how widespread life can be.)
👍👍
I am in a Logic Twilight Zone!!!
Meaning is a philosophical term, but flow of natural forces is not, energy will balance out regardless if anybody understand why or how it will happen. This would imply that flow of energy does have a meaning, since process is physical necessity. In mater of fact, physical phenomena are conditions for psychological meaning. Than we should distinguish between serious expectations and illusions, even when there's no physical possibility for something to continue towards desired ending, people can still find process meaningful. This principle is useful for technologies, we understand nature will stop some apparatus from working when stored potentials will run out, but we can plug in devices into external sources of energy and physical process will continue.
Does this mean we can enforce our will over nature? If yes, than meaning of nature must be very weak principle, easy superseded with technological means. But if this is true, than meaning is vital for advance of human species, we must make one ourselves or nature will not allow us to cross physical barriers.
Question is, what happens once energy potentials get exhausted, what does it mean to extend very purpose why nature exist? Problem is, it's not clear how far can we go, there must be some limit before material nature will resist to our endeavors and make us stop. It's like, this universe is designed for physical mechanics, it exist because physical laws are so fine tuned. This natural stability prevent catastrophes like all things happening at once or impossibility of traveling back in time, but this doesn't prevent same physics inside our head to imagine whatever we want. And i find this fact very weird, sooner or latter magic will escape biological confinement and change entire unverse.
If there are different levels then it's possible to exert will over nature, but this is confined to one's own level. This could also explain what happens when energy potential is exhausted on this level it continues on others, and this level is replenished by the other levels. I think the levels could be non mass particles/no fields, then the physical universe, both perhaps still present, along with maybe a level of patterns. Awareness is engagement with the environment, is a fundamental. Intelligence is cleverness and awareness. Consciousness is intelligence and awareness.
So the magic is around us waiting to be perceived, to be engaged with. In the engagement, a field is created in which oscillations can occur and the result moves "up" a level. That result is usually unaware of the level that produced it, but humans are in a sweet spot that perceives other levels, they have mobile concentrated awareness/consciousness. This is different than herd, pack or flock creatures that have externalized awareness as in sound or scent fields.
To describe meaning I have to see sense data as being digitized as it enter the body, then reassembled by the brain calculations. To go a bit deeper, see the periodic and aperiodic patterns formed in this process...is it stable or does it quickly fall to chaos? The more stable, the more meaning. Repetition can be very comforting or very claustrophobic. When it becomes claustrophobic, some aperiodic patterns are needed in the mix.
The perception of this comes from an assigned identity which has it's origin as oscillations in fields producing a result, the result in this case is the identity or person, arising from the field in the body/brain.
Skeptical agnosticm
She looks like MOMO! 6:00
lmao
Pinker is bad at cogsci/psych/linguistics and Goldstein is bad at philosophy. Perfect match.
Yes it is programme but I beleive Humains have the nessesary to be able to created or own "univers" and to contrôle it with a thermal boundray and way more colapsing hydrogène atom into are build univers will give us are own black Hole. This is posive Wright. sincères salutations philippe Martin
👍, good to see you take a break from theologians.
Vy
I think the answer to the hard problem lies outside the universe. I think reality is some kind of computer game and the computer code is like an infinite sea, and the universe is like a holographic bubble within it. Consciousness is probably a property of the code outside the universe?.
If you're talking about the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences study, than it doesn't say what you're claiming it says.
_"Our study shows that decisions are unconsciously prepared much longer ahead than previously thought. But we do not know yet where the final decision is made. We need to investigate whether a decision prepared by these brain areas can still be reversed."_
@@acetate909 Perhaps it's like acrobat rolling over thin air, his brains are prepared to land him on his feet, but potentials can change very fast and brain must leave some space for tolerance and tweaking or acrobat would land on his head instead.
Sure man! Can I have the next puff?
To him whose ego leads him to believe that energy begins and ends in him, instead of knowing that the vast energy of the universe is his to use when he knows his universality, that is his stumbling block - his brake to success set against himself.
Egotistical man, proud of his few insignificant discoveries, which at best have but lifted us to where we are as apt to use them for mutual destruction as for mutual blessing, continually boasts of our gradual “conquest of Nature.” Nothing could be more absurd. Man is not conquering Nature, he is but conquering ignorance by becoming aware of Nature, a little fraction of it at a time.
One should develop a belief in oneself which reaches to the skies, but that belief should be free of the taint of personal ego.
Where then is the universal energy? It is not in motion at all but in the stillness from which motion springs, and that stillness is in the magnetic Light of universal Consciousness.
There is no material universe. Matter and motion do not exist. They appear to exist, but that appearance of existence is the great cosmic illusion. Even the senses which tell us that matter exists do not exist, for they are motion, and motion is merely the electric record of thought imaginings.
All bodies in all the universe are but waves of motion which in themselves are only seeming. There is no such thing as motion or substance. There is but illusion which we sense as motion and substance.
Sunshine in Nature would be a calamity without shadow - and an artist’s picture would be purposeless and valueless without both sunshine and shadow in their balanced relations.
No matter how great your knowledge of the unreality of death may be, - no matter how strongly you may live in the spiritual world - you must not forget that you have a physical body which manifests spiritual idea - and that you live in both the divided and the undivided universe of CAUSE and EFFECT
To have so much knowledge of the undivided universe that it leaves you cold to the emotion of the divided universe is to hold yourself aloof from the Play, and render you purposeless.
If you fully comprehend what I have just told you, you will fully comprehend the relation of the divided universe of motion which forever repeats its sequences of motion to create illusion, to the undivided universe of stillness from which those sequences of motion are projected.
In other words you will be intellectually able to be constantly aware of the two worlds in which you live - the undivided and the divided - instead of just the one divided world of the senses which has dominated man’s actions for ages.
The supremacy of man is dependent upon the measure of his ability to live knowingly in the undivided Mind universe. The master makes use of the divided universe of sensed matter as he wills - or dismisses it from his Consciousness when he wills. Until you become master of matter it will master you. The greatest aim of your life should be freedom from matter and to be its master.
That is why I am stressing the mechanics of the divided universe of sensed matter which has made man its slave for ages, in order that knowing man can transcend matter and become its master instead of its slave. For this reason you must know the mechanics of it until it is automatic in you. The small effort of study you give to knowing this principle in your heart is more than priceless to you.
That is exactly what I mean by the transformation which will lift the more spiritually advanced of the human race out the ages of material man into the age of Cosmic Man. And that also is the reason why you should know the invisible universe of God’s still Light even more abundantly than you can sense the two lights of opposed pressures which constitute the sensed electric universe of divided motion.
The Soul is the fulcrum from which the polarized lever of motion extends to manifest a polarized body. All bodies are electric, therefore all bodies are polarized.
A polarized body means a body which is divided into two seemingly separate parts because of two opposite conditions which cause that seeming separateness.
The whole universal body is polarized. It is divided into compressed light waves of matter which you can see, and into expanded ones which you cannot see.
There has been much controversy in science as to the nature of light. For a long time light has been presumed to be corpuscular, which means that it is composed of particles of matter. In recent years light has been said to be made up of waves. Both are right All motion in the universe is wave motion. Matter is a corpuscular record of the electric potential at any one point in any wave. Particles of matter form wherever desire of Mind to express form takes place - and that is everywhere.
There is no point in the universe which is not continually extending and retracting in inward-outward explosions to multiply the black light of space into the white light of incandescent matter and to divide the white light to return it to the zero from which it came. Every particle of matter is a wave and every wave is completely filled with particles of matter which measure the electric potential at every point in every wave-field.
The entirety of this convincing universe of seeming reality is motion, controlled by INTELLIGENCE and powered by DESIRE. The realities of love, truth, balance, idea, inspiration, religion, invention, beauty, the arts, romance, courage, character, ethics, loyalty and all of the ennobling or debasing attributes of man’s world are not in matter or motion at all. Give thought to this all who think of their bodies as themselves.
Matter consists of countless little and big whirlpools of two-way motion. One of these two directions winds up its two intertwining electric opposites into an incandescent fury of explosive resistance which become the suns of stellar, solar and atomic systems.
That winding up of motion is what polarization is. That fury of resistance to the winding up process is what compression is. That also is what gravitation is. And all of it is but one piston stroke of the electric heartbeat of the universe of matter.
That polarizing piston stroke which generates the hot light of suns electrically records God’s concentrative thinking in the forms of Creation which simulate God’s knowing. That polarizing piston stroke vitalizes bodies and makes them “live” and grow toward strength. That polarized light of suns repolarises other bodies while the dark of space depolarises them. But God’s concentrative thinking is sequentially repeated in reverse. The intensity of generated resistance to such compression must relax. The wound up whirlpools of motion which simulated one half of life must unwind into the cold dark of space to simulate the other half. Everything which appears must disappear.
That opposite, relaxing piston stroke of God’s decentrative thinking depolarises, degenerates and devitalises bodies and makes them seem to “die” and decay. It gives bodies back to the source of their borrowing. It RADIATES that which has been GENERATED.
In motion alone is the answer to all of the mysteries of matter. With one stroke of the piston we “live” - with the other we “die.” With the next stroke of it we are reborn to again die. And so it is that the cosmic cinema goes on forever. Bodies appear, disappear and reappear as a continuity forever and forever, but they never die, for they manifest eternal life, and LIFE CANNOT DIE.
(Source: Extracts from The Home Study Course by Walter Russell)
They matter to describe matter. I find that not very illuminating.
Nah, no need for crazy lady talk right now