There are no possible worlds: th-cam.com/video/oR9ybYl9KpE/w-d-xo.html There are no modal properties: th-cam.com/video/F-eSa9KROgo/w-d-xo.html Ordinary objects: th-cam.com/video/07PZ1a-gZxw/w-d-xo.html
found out this channel a few days ago, i've been binge watching your videos:) you have a very calming voice and a lot of interesting things to say. i would be interested in a video about your favourite books recommendations if you would ever wanted to do. have a nice day!!
I wouldn't offer these as recommendations, since I can't say whether they would be of interest to others. My favourite books are: Hume's "Treatise" "Against Method" -- Paul Feyerabend "Ways of Worldmaking" -- Nelson Goodman "In Contradiction" -- Graham Priest "The Unique and Its Property" -- Max Stirner "The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" -- Stephen Jay Gould "The Empirical Stance" -- Bas van Fraassen
Making a definition is arbitrary or at least pragmatic. But, whether an object fits into that category is factual. There are various boundaries we can set to define "deer" but once we've done that, the animal fits or it doesn't.
I agree, but another thing I want to point out is that material composition( i.e. varying states of aggregate matter) is perceived as spatially/temporally distinct properties but without a conscious agent( another colelction of particles, like a human) there would be no fndamental difference between the constituents of a deer and surrounding matter. Categorization is merely a heuristic, a metric of variance that we use to seperate qualitative properties from one another. Defining a "world" is problematic however, as saying that it exists in an abstract sense still doesn't explain anything that relates to the existence of materiality( unless a world is conceived of a matrix of probability that acts on matter).
@@jackkrell4238 so about the world... Categorization is a heuristic, but some heuristics work better than others. We create the abstract of the world and then can observe that reality conforms to the category. It kind of has to conform in this case because there are some tautological properties to a category of "everything that is"
Yes, this is the appropriate response to the last argument. I like this channel, but arguments like this and those from Peter Unger are weak. Just because terms like heap or know are vague doesn't mean there isn't any hay or that I don't know anything. Similarly, just because world is vague doesn't mean "I and all my surroundings" don't exist - using David Lewis's definition of worlds. The first two cases seemed stronger, but he rightly pointed out their flaws.
Yet another conundrum created by assuming that "identity" is a concept that has logical consistency. As a biologist, I'll one-up your deer example. Not only the concept of "species" has pitfalls, but also the concept of "individual". How would you count a two-headed deer? A pregnant deer? If you go deeper and find about mycology (the study of fungi) you'll see that asking "how many individuals do you have in your population?" can be an entirely pointless question.
Identity is logical consistency. Denying it means anything goes. One can debatable use identity and go a step further with ideas from the likes of Williamson interpreting axioms (such as ∀x∃y□(y=x)) to say everything is necessarily something.
@@nocturnaltransmissions9748 It is merely an axiom we like to use a lot. The fact that it leads to so many contradictions points towards it not having logical consistency by itself. Whether or not we can conceptualise logic without that concept is irrelevant. Or maybe logical consistency can't exist. There's plenty of other options.
@@ekki1993 Does it lead to contradictions in logic or just conceptually in philosophical arguments? I frankly wouldn't worry too much about the latter.
@@nocturnaltransmissions9748 Then why care if some concept has logical consistency in the first place? My point is that the philosophical framework is inherently flawed so the circlejerk of western philosophers trying to define "fundamentals" are making a fool's errand by building on top of inconsistent assumptions like "an individual is a single entity" or "there is a fundamental form of [human word]".
Defining the world as "the totality of everything" reminds me of Russell's paradox: "The comprehensive class we are considering, which is to embrace everything, must embrace itself as one of its members. In other words, if there is such a thing as “everything,” then, “everything” is something, and is a member of the class “everything.” But normally a class is not a member of itself. Mankind, for example, is not a man. Form now the assemblage of all classes which are not members of themselves. This is a class: is it a member of itself or not? If it is, it is one of those classes that are not members of themselves, i.e., it is not a member of itself. If it is not, it is not one of those classes that are not members of themselves, i.e. it is a member of itself. Thus of the two hypotheses - that it is, and that it is not, a member of itself - each implies its contradictory. This is a contradiction. (1919, 136)
Russells paradox is a specific consequence of how Frege defines classes, namely that classes are the extension of some property. This has it's origins in Cantor etc. On this view the set of all possible sets is clearly contradictory because it's the extension of the property of extension. It's like asking what is the length of length itself. Defining the world as the totality of all existing objects is not contradictory in this way.
What do you think about the Nietzschean thesis is that all knowledge is metaphorical, meaning all science, philosophy and psychoanalysis are literature, the only true science? And since by using metaphor to supposedly interpret the world we invent it, making Nietzsche a Feuerbachian. The Ubermensch is the return of the author.
Brilliant video and argument. I think that your usage of mereology is fantastic and probably one of the main reasons why I have been a functional Pyrrhonist for so many years. Anyway, I will offer my solution. I will solve ALL mereological dilemmas in 10 words or less, as follows: "The Discrete Set {T, F} and the Continuous Open Interval (0, 1) are Equivalent ... in the same sense that Inertial Frames are said to be Equivalent'. This basic assumption solves every philosophical problem, and a ton of physics problems ... I also have some math which derives from this and it's pretty crazy stuff. Equivalence ...in the sense of Relativity ...resolves all of those nasty mereological issues. Peace -
3:03 A possible reproach to this comes down to semantics. The notions in physics presuppose a certain symbolic ground level to become meaningful, saying that there are no chairs because you learned that everything is made of little particles, goes against the semantic meaning of the chair in its inception, which de facto includes all the level of abstraction below it, whichever they might end up being.
What about a kind of Daoist interpretation of "actual worlds", e.g. the belief that there is some sort of reality but we definitionally can't capture it in theory? I'm not sure this view is particularly useful or informative since you can't say anything about the "actual world" that you believe in, but it seems to get around the issues with assuming theory should converge to a "fixed" reality. To state the position I'm thinking of in other words, it seems like the "fixed reality" view is assuming two things - the development of theory is governed by something external to it, and this thing that governs it will produce converging theories. What if you just get rid of the second assumption?
I'm no expert on Daoism, but I doubt we could treat the dao as a world in any normal sense, and surely not in anything close to the sense that analytic metaphysics means. At the very least, the actual world is supposed to be all that exists. But as I understand it, "existence" cannot be predicated of the dao - and not just because of a commitment to the standard philosophical view that existence is not a predicate! Rather, the dao is non-being, or perhaps it is what brings about both non-being and being, both non-existence and existence. With that said, I'm sympathetic to your suggestion that we can deny that there is a fixed reality which explains convergence of theories. Once we jettison that assumption, though, what becomes of the claim that there is something external to our theories? I would say that there are many external things. Which of these is the actual world though? I see no reason to suppose that any of these things play the role demanded by metaphysical theorising, though we might call some of them "worlds". There is the world of science, the world of art, real worlds and dream worlds, the whole world and my world. There are brave new worlds and first world problems. Across all the corners of the world, people wonder whether there is a next world after this one. I often find myself lost to the world. But who can blame me? All the world's a stage and sometimes the play is out of this world. There is a world a difference between these worlds and the philosopher's Actual World.
Why is there such a focus on “things” in such metaphysical theorizing, as opposed to perhaps a dynamic view of reality of being as becoming? Is this predeliction perhaps rooted in our own anthropocentric limitations in physical perception and consciousness?
Sorry to go a bit off-topic, but I really like how morality serves to ground this whole discussion. Whatever one's conception of an "actual world" - whether it's "merely such-and-such" or "ultimately thus-and-so", at _some_ point we're going to be faced with a choice to either (for example) help an old lady across the street, or not help her. Whether you think she's "ultimately" just a collection of particles, or "merely" a confluence of energies, etc., at the end of the day, the question becomes: will you pause the ontological project for a moment and assist her, or will you not? As long as you _do_ help her, then I'm okay with your philosophy. But if you _don't,_ then we've got problems, cuz that old lady is my mom. Cheers!
4:30 "what is that"? According to mereological nihilism, I would think that the "world" is the collection of all fundamental particles, at least when it comes to the material world.
I like to think about the “objects” and “categories” in the world as 100% context dependent like you. They are basically linguistic constructions. Am I a human? Or am I the process of a human aging? Or am I an actor within a socio-political system? Or am I a complex aggregation of metabolic reactions? Kind of all and none of the above. I believe in a concrete, material world. But maybe that’s just a useful fiction that I am programmed to believe so I die more slowly lol,
Hello Kane, would you happen to have sources for any readings/papers that inspired the ideas in this video? Or would you happen to have further readings arguing against an actual world? (My apologies if you mention in the video, I am just now returning to comment after a long while and can't recall the details)
in particular, I am curious as to whether anyone has anything to say about the non-existence of the actual world in terms of modal logic, i.e. that all which exists are possible worlds
Hypothetically, there could be no things and yet still be a world, in the sense of "There is 'stuff' and an abstract totality thereof." I'm not sure how we can deny that the totality of "whatever this is" exists, unless the dispute is whether that totality is a "real thing." Which perhaps it isn't, but at that point it seems like nitpicking, since we already think of "reality" as a collection of "everything."
4:37 I think we could translate "world" to "world-arrangement" which sounds better (since is just one) and just means something like "maximal arrangement" in a Wittigstenian like definition of world.
Clearly, the idea that "the World is the sum of all objects" is obvious and non-problematic enough for colloquial purposes. But our problems start when we try to distinguish between an "Actual" World and "Some Other Kind" of World. As per usual, such distinctions just confuse us, which is why we are better off not making them. We know how to talk about how our experiences motivate us to come to particular conclusions, but we don't know how to talk about the relationship between our experiences and "the World." And yet, we are none the worse for that. Ontology isn't something we will "figure out." It is something we will realize is better left ignored. See pragmatism.
It seems to me that you attack the concept of "world" more than that of an "actual" world, specially in the first part of the video (this goes in line with critiques of the metaphysical concept of world as the totality of entities, or everything that is the case). In the second part you seem to attack the notion of an independent external world, but i'm not sure that capture the meaning of "actual world" as related to "possible worlds". It would be interesting to see if you have a take in the notion of actuality itself.
i think this is pretty academic, but to some extent it's got some practical significance too. i think a lot of the talk people make about things like "society" and "politics" are based on nothing but their imaginations
So, I wonder how much work we could get out of the mind-dependent versus mind-independent distinction. I'm also thinking of distinctions in relations, namely that between real relations versus relations of reason (also sometimes called relations of logic or virtual relations). One other feature of knowledge that can help to explain concepts is the notion of interest, i.e., we can explain the "number of deer in the forest", speaking of this putative fact as a claim about the world, as being the result of human interests to know a particular thing about that world: how many deer occupy a particular space loosely designated by its forest-ness (and our reasons for establishing that boundary condition could be highly varied). My intuition goes something like this. There is always a dependence of facticity on the relation the knower has to the state of affairs that is known. A fact about the number of deer in a forest a priori respects the categories available to the inquirer, which itself always respects the interests of that knower. There is some story to tell about why humans, for example, have an interest in forests and an interest in deer, and we can derive the integrated interest any human has in knowing the number of deer in a forest from those stories. The question is whether such facts in any way carve up a state of affairs called a world. For me, if I have you right, this is not so much about the problem of imprecision or determinacy, but rather whether or not there is a mind-independent possibility for construing knowledge. As you point out, getting out of that question looks like we appeal, at least implicitly, to an objective kind of knower (this someone knows if we don't). Maybe I want to say that we can designate the actual world as whatever could be the subject of interest, of any kind, by anything with interests. Presumably, even if we are quite wrong in how we have formed our category "deer", there is something we are referring to that could be viewed any number of ways by any number of kinds of perceivers. I'm imagining an alien race who long ago became fused with a technology that sees everything atomically. And perhaps the field of awareness of this alien race is not as narrow as ours. But all of the particles that make up what interests us, insofar as it seems to us like a forest with deer in it, would still represent a pattern of associations of particles that the alien race may or may not have reason to be interested in. It would depend upon the nature of the alien. I think we could begin to try to understand what the nature is of the overlap between these interests. Whatever the total is of objects or events that an intelligent being could have an interest in constitutes the actual world. Now, this is going to get us a distinctly Kantian gap that perhaps we can close or not. Either way, the thing-in-itself looks ubquitous, insofar as it is the universal subject of interest. Maybe that seems fuzzy. I don't think it is as fuzzy as it strikes prima facie. Imagine a being that exists on the scale of what we think are galaxies. Its world would consist of something like galactic objects. Nevertheless, those objects would somehwere include whatever was the subject of interest to humans who perceive some segment of it as deer and forests. The definition of interest necessary to exclude fictional objects would simply stipulate that the right sort of interest is in things to which we relate really (as opposed to logically). For any interest-bearer X, in order that a perceiver P has interest in X, X must seem to exist causally independently of P's mind. That is, P knowing something about X does not constitute X. So, interest here cannot be a constitutive relation in which X is dependent upon P because the relevant "modal interest" arises just when X does not seem to P to be constitutively dependent upon P. The actual world consists of whatever is possibly the subject of interest of this kind. Or, I'm stupid.
I am not sure I understood the final conclusion, so I’ll have to think about it. But this seems very similar to when mathematicians in set theory just make it an axiom that you can’t have a set that is the set of all sets, because if you do you would run into all sorts of trouble down the line.
Just a, hot take that, popped into my mind right after hearing your yourself initial thesis. This is a, thought I've entertained since i first heard about modal, properties and possible worlds. Modal properties apply only to a to a system that is nomologically coherent with the terms that are used to describe it. If we use modal opperators such as there is and there exists, these operators create their own "theoretical operational space" so to say, in which they hold ( yes, I realize this makes me an anti-platonist about mathematics) That is to say, modal properties and logical operators can apply to possible words in their full capacity, sensu stricte, as the possible world resulting from this logical statement is FULLY defined by it But our world could only be described, not fully defined by a modal formulations. Why? Well, the first argument that comes to mind is this - no statement of modal logic can actually describe the entirety of the actual world as possible world with the additional predicate of existence ( Kantian here, existence is not a predicate) Second argument that I pulled out of my ass - no account or argument formulated by a being that is incapable of direct, absolute, and total knowing and perception can be said to accurately represent reality ( and that assumes that the utterer of the statement would not modify the reality they exist in by making such an utterance, which also seems to be difficult to believe) Well all that sounds like im not understanding the term " possible world" because i don't think that " the totality of the world could be possibly extant if modal assertion x was true" is a definition of this term Afaik a possiboe world is a possible "state of affairs" not a possible "entire world in which such a state of affairs holds". Am i right on that last one?. Still, i feel like my conclusion would be " a possible world is a theoretical construct that is fully defined, created, and operational only within modal arguments, therefore whatever world we occupy must not fit the definition of" a possible world"
it's not possible to have a being that can fully represent reality because that leads to nothingness. Everything is nothing, because something is defined in relation to something else and so if you were to bear witness to everything at one, you would not actually witness anything in particular as there would be no borders around wit which carve it out as being a particular 'thing'.
@@johnsmith-pm1qethat's precisely so. In that case trying to encompass everything (e. G. The world) in a logical preposition would be trying to encompass nothing of distinguishable sense
If I got the point right: there are a few ways of talking about the world; what constitutes it but we can't know which is the ideal perfect way of talking about it? If we can't find the ideal way and all ways share the same weight then we can't talk about the world with certainty. Thus there is no world or possible world. I would naturally question the statement that we don't know or can't the ideal way to talk about the world or what constitutes a forest or stars for example. But this doubt weakens when one sees that for any definition there are some criteria: boom!: criterion problem.
I’ll give it a go, what’s the worst that could happen? The only reason to assume a world in the first place is to frame interactions between invariances, not invariances themselves. A cup is a cup because of its shape, not because of its relevance to my needs. A random rock with a divot will still incidentally cup things, regardless of agency. It seems fair on it’s face to say the question is reducible to “is actuality real?” It seems like yes
I don't know whether you have addressed "Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized" by Ladyman, Ross and Spurrett, which gives a naturalistic argument for onticstructural realism. This asserts the opposite of mereological nihilism that there are no objects, simple or otherwise there are at base only relationships, and everything we call and object or material thing is fundamentally composed of those relationships. Edit I see you have in your video on structural realism.
12:15 I don’t see a problem with defining the actual world as the set of all things? I don’t see how you would exclude concrete objects by using that definition. There’s a bag of rice in my cupboard. I can think of each grain of rice as a whole object, not part of any other object. I can pick up a grain and say, “yup, that’s one whole grain of rice.” But there’s nothing out of the ordinary in referring to the bag of rice itself, as a set of all grains contained within the bag. The bag is a set, but it’s not a “mere abstraction” that excludes the concrete objects that compose it. In the same way, it seems perfectly sensible to me to think of the actual world as the set of all things. Maybe this set isn’t An Object in the metaphysical sense unless you’re a mereological universalist, but does it need to be? Even the mereological nihilist refers to sets of particles arranged chairwise, and there doesn’t seem to be anything objectionable about speaking of sets in that context. Why would speaking about the actual world as a set be different? I’m not super well informed about the various arguments around mereology, but that’s just my immediate takeaway.
Actually, you don't. By "you" I mean my general viewers: lots of people ask me for videos like this, where it's just me expressing some ideas. The slides are more for the introductory lectures.
All points well-taken, but what really is the problem with a purely formal designation of: "'The world' is a label that we attach, for our linguistic convenience, to everything that exists, regardless of how one chooses to conceptualise 'things' and 'existence'"? Yes, much stronger claims have been made about what a world is (with very different meanings attached to the term "world" in the process), but you can spend your time more effectively arguing against such claims directly, instead of focusing on the term "world" itself.
There are lots of uses of the word "world" that are perfectly fine, sure. I'm not going to object to a stipulative definition. You could tell me that "God" is the label for all that there is and I'd say very well: I believe in God. The danger is when we illicitly shift from stipulation to substantive metaphysical theorising, and I think that this is particularly tricky with "world" because it can seem so trivial. Re the metaphysics, notice that per your use of "world", there could not be other possible worlds, since if they existed they would simply be part of the world so a fortiori not other worlds. >> but you can spend your time more effectively arguing against such claims directly I thought that's what I was doing. I did try to make it clear from the start that I was talking about the actual world as postulated by some metaphysicians.
In which case, it's not the *ordinary* cup. Or to put this another way: we don't ordinarily think of a cup as being part of a larger object cup+table. That's a counterintuitive consequence of mereological universalism.
That's cool for you, but for the mereological nihilist there isn't really any such thing as "the sum of all particle arrangements." That phrase would also need to be reinterpreted. What the nihilist can do is refer to "all particles" or "every particle" or whatever. What kind of arrangement is that?
@KaneB How can this be though? A mereological nihilist says for example that there is no chair but particles arranged chair-wise. She can name all the arrangements of particles that exist: then she adds them and puts them in a set and calls it the particle arrangement of the world. Is this different than mereological nihilism?
@@ZoiusGM "the particle arrangement of the world" -- what does "the world" refer to there? The most that the nihilist can say is that there are all the particles, or every particle, or whatever. There is no particular arrangement that would count as being arranged worldwise; this just amounts to referring to all the particles, whatever their arrangement happens to be.
The term ‘world’ from a syntactic form seems to be semantically weak in a noun phrase construction but strong or robust as a adjectival construction as in ‘world politics, denotes a state of affairs akin to infinite states as in my imagined community which is incorrigible as theory of mind that I have about another. So a possible world is semantically weak but through the rigour of philosophy takes a robust form though as argued is suspect to being meaningless like the classical set of all sets. A ‘world actual’ is less meaningful than ‘actual world’ but ‘political world’ is more meaningful than ‘actual world’ but less robust than ‘world politics’ because‘world politics’ denotes content of mind whereas ‘political world’ is semantically identical to the actual world which is vague.
Mereological Nihilism might not allign with the standard few of objects but that does not conlude that there is no actual world. The terms we use to classify are arbitrary but there are still actual things that are beint classified. The actual world then does not consist of the sum of all objects but of that sum of all atoms or what ever makes up those. Im not sure if I got your point about the metaphysics of parts but I don't think abtraction and technically different language matters here. Your cup and your table are still actual existing things. If the table was the only thing in existance we would say thats it's the actual world. If it was the table and the cup, those to together aka the sum of them would constitute the actual world. This ad infinitum and we're back where we started. Thus saying "the sum of everything that exists" is not an abstract thought, as every single concrete cup and table are still part of the equation. Even if your point about the sum of all things being to abstracts hold it doesnt matter on a smaller scale. You dont interact with the sum of all things but with objects in your room. From a single POV thats their actual world. Things exist and language wont change that. The third argument seems to be about truth (from a human pov) rather than an actual world. Predictions are not part of the actual world but predictions of how it will behave. Of course human methods are flawed (I think if one was to make an predictions with the help of the theory of everything, it would always be true) and so they can turn out wrong. How WE define deer also doesnt matter, as this is another philosophy of language problem. Of course our definition might and most likely will be flawed but we still CAN define what a deer is. And counting with that definition in mind we will still acurattely describe one part of reality - one part of the actual world. This description might not be true but it is real.
I don't see any easy way out of this for the nihilist. On their view, there isn't really a sum of all things, or a totality of all things - at least, the sum/totality is not an entity, not an object, not a thing. So it would still be true to say, "there is no such thing as the actual world." Strictly speaking, the nihilist would have to take talk of "the sum of all atoms" as a façon de parler: in fact, there are just the atoms and nothing else, though we can introduce linguistic devices for referring to more than one atom at once, including a device for referring to them all. I don't deny that my cup and table exist. As I said at the beginning, this is not an argument for radical skepticism. I deny that they are part of the actual world, where this is the sort of entity postulated by metaphysicians as in standard interpretations of possible worlds semantics. >> Predictions are not part of the actual world The actual world is supposed to be a kind of totality of all that there is, so given that we actually do make predictions, I would have thought that these would be denizens of the actual world. But perhaps this disagreement over what "the actual world" supposedly contains (even once we agree on what statements are true) only illustrates how slippery that concept is. To clarify the third argument, what I'm addressing there is the idea that the actual world is the thing to which our theories answer, the thing of which they may provide true or false descriptions. I claim that there is no unique entity that plays this role. Given a particular classification scheme, there may be a correct answer to a question such as, "what is the rate of deer population growth in this forest?" This answer depends on our having drawn various boundaries, and then we take an idealised version of this perspective where we have complete information relevant to it. But there are many ways of drawing boundaries, none of them right or wrong. There is not one ideal perspective, there are many. So I suppose I could just as well have argued, not that there is no actual world, but that there are many actual worlds. Though given that the actual world is supposed to be a totality, it seems reasonable to say that if there are many worlds, then there are none.
There is a good reason to say that the world exists, namely, that we want to talk about it. We want to say that its entropy is (almost) always increasing, that it is ~13 billion years old, that it will exist forever, etc.
I don't deny the existence of the universe, or to the various related postulates of cosmological theories. Speaking more colloquially, we can use "world" to refer to the universe or the cosmos. I deny that any of these are the metaphysician's actual world.
@@philbelanger2 I don't see why believing that there is a universe would commit you to these sorts of principles of mereology. There may not be any mereological sum of all things but we can still talk about the properties of the universe. Anyway, consider how Wikipedia defines "universe": >> The universe is all of space and time and their contents, including planets, stars, galaxies, and all other forms of matter and energy. This seems reasonable as a first stab at defining "universe". Of course, this isn't quite right. The multiverse would include spatiotemporal things beyond the universe, in which case the universe would not be all of space and time. But that aside, the universe is understood as a kind of totality of space and time. In which case, the universe may not contain many of the things that there are, such as numbers and values under some interpretations of those. Presumably, numbers would still be part of the actual world on these views. So there are issues with taking "universe" and "world" to be equivalent. The more important point is this. There's nothing wrong with a stipulative definition. We can stipulate that "world" refers to the universe (or that "world" refers to the Earth, or that "world" refers to a particular way of thinking…), in which case there is no objection to the claim that there is a world (or even many worlds). But you're not going to get any interesting metaphysical conclusions out of this. For example, if I say that there are no possible worlds of the sort postulated by standard interpretations of possible worlds semantics, it would be illegitimate to respond like so: "No, you do believe that there are possible worlds, since you believe that there is a universe, and you accept that the universe is the actual world. The actual world just is a possible world." This illicitly shifts from a stipulative definition to a substantive metaphysical theory. (Unless, of course, we are also proposing a similarly deflationary definition for "possible world".)
@@KaneB Believing that there is a universe doesn't commit you to any principles of mereology, but that doesn't mean the universe is not, in fact, the mereological sum of all objects. (In the same way that believing that there is a cup in front of you doesn't commit you to believing that it is a collection of atoms, but it might nonetheless be such a collection.) I don't understand your last point. If, for example, you and someone else agree that a world is a spatio-temporally isolated concrete entity and you then accept that the universe is one such entity, then it seems like you agree that there is a possible world. (Unless you believe that there is a world but not a possible one, which needs explaining imo.) It is just that, contrary to your interlocutor, you believe in the existence of only one. I agree that if the world is the fusion of all concrete and abstract entities then it is not identical to the universe.
@@philbelanger2 I don't accept that there is a mereological sum of all objects. On the last point: I say that there is the universe. You tell me that "actual world" is just another term for "universe". Fine, then there is the actual world. But in saying this, I am saying nothing more than that there is the universe. I'm not for this reason alone committed to any particular metaphysical theory. You can't get metaphysical conclusions from stipulating a definition. (Also, I don't accept that the universe is a "spatiotemporally isolated concrete entity".)
You remind me Wittgenstein: everything is a language game, also the book about it! The wold doesn't exist, but there are universals, species and so on...
Modality! Of course in the logic RM3 the implication is defined as ((not possible x) or y) and ((not possible (not y)) or not x) so everything you said really depends on the contrapositive. Also you look like Wolverine
Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the concept you're referring to is discrete categories/sets or (discretion). The nature and requirements of discrete categories/sets make them incongruent with reality. Discrete categories/sets are uniform in make up, follow the laws of contradiction and have boundaries that are infinitely far away from everything else. A somewhat good example is the set of even numbers, it's make up is uniform, there exists no number that is both even as well as odd and because the distance between all numbers is infinite so is the distance between the set of even numbers and everything else.
I think I would separate here the metaphysical from the semantic dimension. -It seems to me that universalist existence and nihilist existence has two different referents. But the referent of „universalist existence“ might be independent of one’s classification scheme. -Maybe universalist existence is some kind of property or substance or maybe it is it’s own thing. -I mean it seems like that independent of how I classify my sensory experience, that it doesn’t change anything about the state of affairs of my sensory experience. I think I would give a different metaphysical challenge to the existence of the world. -Let’s say everything is made up of gunk, then we have a mereological bottomless pit. -Infinite means never ending and if there where a ground then there would be a end. -So let’s say there are infinite entities. Because the way upwards is without a end there can be no such thing as a mereological top. -So if there are infinite entities then there can be no such thing as the word. Of curse if objects where made of gunk then they would be composed of infinitely many entities. Since ordinary objects do exist, one might argue that there is no such thing as gunk. But of curse, this still lets open the possibility that there are infinitely many entities, it just means that any existing entity has to have a finite number of parts. Edit: I think I should add, that the reference relation between „existence“ and existence depends on one’s classification scheme, my point is that the referent on its own might be independent of it.
About infinity, I imagine a metaphysician might respond like this: The natural numbers continue without end. Nevertheless, we can still quantify over the whole set of natural numbers. Indeed, this is what is designated by the noun phrase "the natural numbers". Similarly, suppose that there are infinite entities. Well, we can still quantify over all of them. There is *everything*, there is *all things*. This is just what we mean by "actual world". This answer does run into serious problems, such as how to deal with possibilities. We might not want to count those as part of the actual world. The point though is just that there is no obstacle in principle to taking the whole set of infinite entities.
@@KaneB It seems like that as long as my Argument against infinitely composed entities is still intact, that I would be forced to accept that there is simply no such thing as a set of all natural numbers. But anyway, I wonder if one could replace talk about possible worlds with talk about possible places.
I think youre equivocating. The ideal perspective in, say, counting deer, is not ideal in terms of classifying deer, but rather share what we mean when we say deer-a fortiori, shares the same classification as our models, upon which the idealisation is based. So the ideal perspective isnt about idealising classification, just idealising our ability to count deer. As well as this --Im not convinced that saying 'the world' is akin to the 'ideal perspective'. If I say, for example, that there are deer in the world, this is not an ideal perspective at all, but rather saying that deer simply exist. This is useful as then I can say 'there are no Gruffalo in the world'-I'm not appealing to an ideal perspective, I'm simply saying that 'Gruffalo' belongs to a domain of fictional discourse. This view is consistent with your anti-possible worlds view, but I think its silly to then say that there is no actual world (dont make me tap the misuse of words sign!!)
>> So the ideal perspective isnt about idealising classification, just idealising our ability to count deer. I'm mystified as to what it is that you disagree with. This is literally exactly my point. >> Im not convinced that saying 'the world' is akin to the 'ideal perspective'. Sure. In that part of the video, I was discussing one use of "the world", one thing we might have in mind when we say that there exists an actual world, which has at least something in common with what might be meant by "the world" in the philosopher's sense. I discussed a different approach in the first half of the video. Also, to clarify, it's not that "the world" is taken to be ideal perspective. Rather, the world is the thing to which our theories answer, the thing that we make claims about, of which we might give correct or incorrect descriptions. I think we can make sense of this by thinking in terms of idealized versions of our own perspectives, but that's not going to deliver a single ideal perspective, so it's not going to deliver a unique actual world. If all that's meant by "there are deer in the world" is that "deer exist", then obviously I don't disagree with that (at least for the purposes of this video), but then we can't infer from this that there exists some thing that is the referent of "the world". >> dont make me tap the misuse of words sign Feel free to tap away. Every time you tap that sign, I take a sip of water from my "Wittgenstein sucks" mug.
@@KaneB 1. Then this has nothing to do with mereology and there's nothing against the existence of an actual world here, as idealising our counting ability with the same constants of the meaning of deer is perfectly fine. 2. None of this entails the thesis that there is no actual world--it merely says that the world is not something that can essentially stand in a subject predicate relation-- its not an 'object' that can act as a referent. Are you saying then that the thesis 'there is no actual world' just amounts to 'the word 'world' is not used in a way that amounts to a referential relation? Those are pretty different but hey, you gotta do what gets the clicks i suppose, cant blame you. 3. grr thatd make me so mad knowing youre aware of anything wittgenstein says 😠😠
Also: "There are deer in the world" -- note that "in the world" is redundant here. You could just as well say, "there are deer." Now you might object that this doesn't distinguish a case from where I wish to assert the existence of deer, from a case where I'm merely playing along with a fiction. But adding "in the world" doesn't in itself distinguish those cases either. I could pretend to assert: "there are Gruffalo in the world"... similarly, I might speak within the fiction of Doctor Who and pretend to assert that Cybermen invaded a base in Antarctica in 1986. Context and intention are what distinguish genuine assertions from mere pretense. We can pretend to assert anything. There are deer in the world, but is there no actual world. That is, there is no thing that is referred to by "the actual world", certainly not the sort of thing counts as an instance of the world-objects postulated possible worlds theories. "... in the world" is a linguistic flourish, misleading if taken literally.
@@yyzzyysszznn >> Then this has nothing to do with mereology I'm not talking about mereology there. You're conflating two different arguments. The stuff about mereology is from about 2 minutes to 14 minutes. Then afterwards, I address a different approach which takes the world as the thing to which our theories answer. >> Those are pretty different Not really, given that I'm explicitly responding to philosophers who treat "the actual world" as object. Obviously I'm not claiming that people should stop using the phrase "the world" or even "the actual world" in particular contexts. I'm objecting to a particular kind of metaphysical theorizing. (And it's not that you can't use the word "world" referentially. It's that the specific referential use in metaphysics fails to pick out anything.)
@@KaneB "There are deer in the world, but is there no actual world. That is, there is no thing that is referred to by "the actual world"" There you go--if a word is not one with a referential relationship to a referent, then it doesn't exist. Genius or clickbait, you choose! If I say 'there are deer in the world', im saying 'there are deer', sure. If I say 'there is a Gruffalo', you might say 'no, for he is only fiction'-so what do I respond? 'Sure, there is no actual Gruffalo, but a fictional character exists'. Whats the 'actual' doing here?
Could the mereological nihilist claim instead that "There is no world, but there is the totality of particles" as opposed to "there is no world, but there are particles arranged world-wise."? Perhaps "world" does not refer to a specific arrangement like other physical words like "chairs" do.
For the mereological nihilist, strictly speaking there is no such thing as "the totality of particles". On their view that's not a thing, not an object. At best, there would be an abstract set of all particles, or something like that.
While on the other hand, Ladyman and Ross in "Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized" suggest that there are no objects at the most basic level. There are only relationships, and all supposed "things" , including the simplest objects, are composed of relationships. Edit: as you already mentioned in your "Structural Realism 8" video...
By the way, Kane how old are you. Because you've looked 20 for the past 10 years. I'm starting to develop a JTB that there is such a possible world Wx such that Wx is an actually existing world and it such that a vampire by the name or Kane B. exists in it. 😂
I'm 32. Possibly a vampire. I'm nocturnal, I have sharp teeth, I drink the blood of virgins, and I'm not keen on garlic. (One of those things might not be true.)
Just a reflection of what you said on the part/whole problem. To say there must becan object of which all other objects are a part is akin to stating that a atom can make inferences about the human being it makes up based on its epistemic horizon. In other words, the world can't also be an object because it would have to be an object which includes all relations of objects and subjects. it would have to include the preposition " a collection of all objects and their relation is an object called the world" in its essence. Kinda makes me think of Freges Law V
Are you doing anything more than arguing that meaning inherently contains some aspects of indeterminacy? I think the implication of this is to claim that any concept of the (or an) actual world has some indeterminate aspects. I do not see how this translates to 'there is no actual world' though.
What I'm trying to do is deny the existence of a thing proposed by some metaphysicians. Where this becomes a bit tricky is that this thing can seem trivial. Surely there must be an actual world - the world is all that is the case, so if I grant that there is anything at all, then I grant that there is a world! Of course, there is a colloquial use of the term "world" where this kind of statement is acceptable. But this is not the actual world of metaphysicians. I'm making two points. First, when metaphysicians talk about the actual world, they are often smuggling in a controversial metaphysical theory or an alternative use of language. Second, there are good reasons to deny the existence of the thing to which they intend to refer. This second point only works if we fix on a specific meaning of the term "world", but this is the case for any philosophical argument. Before giving an argument against the existence of God, an atheist will need to specify exactly what is meant by "God". I don't think my arguments here rest on any claim of meaning indeterminacy. It wouldn't be a problem to me if they did though, because I endorse indeterminacy of meaning.
Nominalism is either the view that there are no abstract objects, or the view that there are no universals. The actual world is not always thought of as either an abstract object or a universal. Sometimes it is presented as a kind of concrete object, the greatest concrete object. Or it is the sum of everything that there is, both concrete and abstract. Taking it this way, perhaps it is an abstract object. In any case, we can deny the existence of the actual world without denying the existence of all abstract objects. Just as I said at the beginning that there are trees and fields, but these are not part of the actual world, so we might say that there are numbers and sets, but these also are not part of the actual world.
you seems doing a relatively decent job in dissecting philosophy as it is. Makes you different than other philosophy youtubers who are full of agendas. please please please keep it that way. Philosophy is already so bullshit and useless nowadays. Nothing enlightening.
I don't get why talking about world as totality of all existing things requires introduction of technical metaphysical language. It is perfectly understandable in context of everyday language. We don't need to pose that that totality is a set therefore it has some property. Another thing about this video that troubles me is that in the first half of it Kane discards some proposals because they can only be formulated in technical metaphysical language, yet in the second half he has to introduce technical language to discard another proposal. It feels inconsistent.
It doesn't require that. There are all sorts of uses of the term "world" that are unobjectionable. In ordinary discourse we make claims about the world, about all things, about everything, etc., and usually context makes it clear what is meant. As long as we get on board with something like a common sense view of things, many such claims will be true. But as I tried to make clear at the start of the video, I'm not talking about these ordinary uses. I'm responding specifically to the concept of the "actual world" as it appears in metaphysical theorising - in particular, with respect to standard interpretations of possible worlds semantics. (Enough people have raised this objection that I'm now thinking I probably didn't make this clear enough in there video. I'm not sure what else I should have said though.) I don't have any objection to technical languages. My objection is to the substantive claims of certain metaphysical theories. People can use whatever language they like. You can, if you like, simply stipulate that "the actual world" will be used to refer to all existing things. Then I might be willing to join you in talking about the actual world. However, no metaphysical conclusions follow from this. So it won't be legitimate to argue as follows: "See Kane, you do accept possible worlds after all. You accept that there are things. But "actual world" just refers to all of those things, and the actual world is a possible world." Indeed, it won't even be legitimate to argue like this: "See Kane, you do accept that there exists an actual world. You accept that there are things. But "actual world" just refers to all of those things." No: the fact that there are things, and that "the actual world" is used to refer to those things, does not entail that there exists an actual world. Here's an analogy. There is a wall to my left and a cup to my right. I could introduce the term "wallcup" to refer both to the wall and to the cup. As a linguistic device, there can be no objection to this in principle. But we can't infer from this alone that there exists a wallcup, that there is some entity that is composed of both the wall and the cup. Despite the best efforts of folks like Anselm, you can't establish metaphysical theories by stipulative definition.
is this an actual video ? or an illusion ?? Stop fooling yourself... whatever you are perceiving through your sense organs about the world , that is a real reality... without which your life would not be possible ... You are real, your thought and experience is real... enjoy this real world in your lifetime !
@@KaneB Neither have I, but I am aware of certain things, and one of those is the fact that German has more terminology than English, and the word "part" translates into several words and terms that singularly relate to the different meanings we use. I just wonder, if you took a few minutes to learn the German words for "Part", would that change your ideas here?
I'm only 30 seconds into the video, but I just want to say that I've ALWAYS said that the universe DOES NOT EXIST. I'm not trying to be weird (although I have no resistance to being weird). It's just that saying that "The universe exists" is a friggin ABUSE OF LANGUAGE. This is what I mean: "X exists" has ALWAYS meant "X is a part of the universe and interacts with other things within the universe". What else could it mean? The universe OBVIOUSLY doesn't qualify as an existing thing then!!!
Can't the universe be part of itself? It's not a proper part of itself, but presumably ordinary language doesn't make the part/proper part distinction. And if we take "interaction" in the broadest sense to mean that X interacts with Y just in case X has some relation to Y, well the universe presumably has the relation of identity to itself. So the universe interacts with itself. Hence the universe exists. Isn't metaphysics great lol
This is a typical example of useless philosophical circle jerking. The world - as the word is used in both philosophy and fiction and ordinary speech - is that which imparts relation between particles or metaphysical concepts or whatever else you're talking about. The only way for there to be no world is to stop engaging with it, which is definitely an option to consider in certain circumstances.
(1) Uselessness is good. (2) As I explicitly stated at the beginning of the video, I'm not addressing the various ordinary uses of the term "world". I'm addressing the actual world as a postulate of certain metaphysical theories, as in standard interpretations of possible worlds semantics.
@@404errorpagenotfound.6 I'm not trolling. I'm genuinely an anti-pragmatist with respect to philosophy. I've defended this in a few places, most notably this video: th-cam.com/video/RqYbY1p4ORU/w-d-xo.html
There are no possible worlds: th-cam.com/video/oR9ybYl9KpE/w-d-xo.html
There are no modal properties: th-cam.com/video/F-eSa9KROgo/w-d-xo.html
Ordinary objects: th-cam.com/video/07PZ1a-gZxw/w-d-xo.html
Do you have a source for the picture in the thumbnail? I like it a lot, but I can't find the original.
@@epsteindidntkillhimself69 It's from the artwork "Quails and Full Moon" by Tsukioka Kōgyo.
Kane B, destroyer of worlds >:3
Philosophers will see titles like this and just go "hell yeah"
certain philosophers*
Babe, wake up. Kane Baker dropped a new video
My exact reaction.
"New, hot anti-realism video just dropped!"
There is no babe. But anti realism has nothing to do with that
@@Jorge-vo9iiI'm his babe. So there is.
Wake up neo…
…the [Kane]trix has you
I don't know why. But it feels like you are the very few people who are into philosophy but not wasting people's time on word salad and jargon.
Literally the only good philosophy youtuber
@@ahmedal-hijazi3618second to Norm MacDonald
So no Joe Schmidt?
are there any other simular youtubers?
Absolutely no one:
Kane B: Hello youChube😭💀
If there is no actual world, does that I mean I don't have to pay off my credit card debt?
Yeah why not? Give it a shot dawg, let us know how it works out. YOLO
What credit card? There are no credit cards.
You have no "debt" - just quantities arranged _debt-wise._ ✅️
found out this channel a few days ago, i've been binge watching your videos:) you have a very calming voice and a lot of interesting things to say. i would be interested in a video about your favourite books recommendations if you would ever wanted to do. have a nice day!!
I wouldn't offer these as recommendations, since I can't say whether they would be of interest to others. My favourite books are:
Hume's "Treatise"
"Against Method" -- Paul Feyerabend
"Ways of Worldmaking" -- Nelson Goodman
"In Contradiction" -- Graham Priest
"The Unique and Its Property" -- Max Stirner
"The Structure of Evolutionary Theory" -- Stephen Jay Gould
"The Empirical Stance" -- Bas van Fraassen
Well, that's a relief
Kane is looking sharp as hell damn
Making a definition is arbitrary or at least pragmatic. But, whether an object fits into that category is factual. There are various boundaries we can set to define "deer" but once we've done that, the animal fits or it doesn't.
I agree, but another thing I want to point out is that material composition( i.e. varying states of aggregate matter) is perceived as spatially/temporally distinct properties but without a conscious agent( another colelction of particles, like a human) there would be no fndamental difference between the constituents of a deer and surrounding matter. Categorization is merely a heuristic, a metric of variance that we use to seperate qualitative properties from one another.
Defining a "world" is problematic however, as saying that it exists in an abstract sense still doesn't explain anything that relates to the existence of materiality( unless a world is conceived of a matrix of probability that acts on matter).
@@jackkrell4238 so about the world...
Categorization is a heuristic, but some heuristics work better than others. We create the abstract of the world and then can observe that reality conforms to the category. It kind of has to conform in this case because there are some tautological properties to a category of "everything that is"
Yes, this is the appropriate response to the last argument. I like this channel, but arguments like this and those from Peter Unger are weak. Just because terms like heap or know are vague doesn't mean there isn't any hay or that I don't know anything. Similarly, just because world is vague doesn't mean "I and all my surroundings" don't exist - using David Lewis's definition of worlds. The first two cases seemed stronger, but he rightly pointed out their flaws.
Yet another conundrum created by assuming that "identity" is a concept that has logical consistency.
As a biologist, I'll one-up your deer example. Not only the concept of "species" has pitfalls, but also the concept of "individual". How would you count a two-headed deer? A pregnant deer? If you go deeper and find about mycology (the study of fungi) you'll see that asking "how many individuals do you have in your population?" can be an entirely pointless question.
I'll use this as an opportunity to direct people to my videos on biological individuality: th-cam.com/video/8pZ2cZdUA3o/w-d-xo.html
Identity is logical consistency. Denying it means anything goes. One can debatable use identity and go a step further with ideas from the likes of Williamson interpreting axioms (such as ∀x∃y□(y=x)) to say everything is necessarily something.
@@nocturnaltransmissions9748 It is merely an axiom we like to use a lot. The fact that it leads to so many contradictions points towards it not having logical consistency by itself. Whether or not we can conceptualise logic without that concept is irrelevant. Or maybe logical consistency can't exist. There's plenty of other options.
@@ekki1993 Does it lead to contradictions in logic or just conceptually in philosophical arguments? I frankly wouldn't worry too much about the latter.
@@nocturnaltransmissions9748 Then why care if some concept has logical consistency in the first place? My point is that the philosophical framework is inherently flawed so the circlejerk of western philosophers trying to define "fundamentals" are making a fool's errand by building on top of inconsistent assumptions like "an individual is a single entity" or "there is a fundamental form of [human word]".
Defining the world as "the totality of everything" reminds me of Russell's paradox:
"The comprehensive class we are considering, which is to embrace everything, must embrace itself as one of its members. In other words, if there is such a thing as “everything,” then, “everything” is something, and is a member of the class “everything.” But normally a class is not a member of itself. Mankind, for example, is not a man. Form now the assemblage of all classes which are not members of themselves. This is a class: is it a member of itself or not? If it is, it is one of those classes that are not members of themselves, i.e., it is not a member of itself. If it is not, it is not one of those classes that are not members of themselves, i.e. it is a member of itself. Thus of the two hypotheses - that it is, and that it is not, a member of itself - each implies its contradictory. This is a contradiction. (1919, 136)
Russells paradox is a specific consequence of how Frege defines classes, namely that classes are the extension of some property. This has it's origins in Cantor etc. On this view the set of all possible sets is clearly contradictory because it's the extension of the property of extension. It's like asking what is the length of length itself.
Defining the world as the totality of all existing objects is not contradictory in this way.
What do you think about the Nietzschean thesis is that all knowledge is metaphorical, meaning all science, philosophy and psychoanalysis are literature, the only true science? And since by using metaphor to supposedly interpret the world we invent it, making Nietzsche a Feuerbachian. The Ubermensch is the return of the author.
Brilliant video and argument. I think that your usage of mereology is fantastic and probably one of the main reasons why I have been a functional Pyrrhonist for so many years. Anyway, I will offer my solution. I will solve ALL mereological dilemmas in 10 words or less, as follows: "The Discrete Set {T, F} and the Continuous Open Interval (0, 1) are Equivalent ... in the same sense that Inertial Frames are said to be Equivalent'. This basic assumption solves every philosophical problem, and a ton of physics problems ... I also have some math which derives from this and it's pretty crazy stuff. Equivalence ...in the sense of Relativity ...resolves all of those nasty mereological issues. Peace -
I concur totally with this! (Not that I understand it at all - I just like concurring.) Cheers.
3:03 A possible reproach to this comes down to semantics. The notions in physics presuppose a certain symbolic ground level to become meaningful, saying that there are no chairs because you learned that everything is made of little particles, goes against the semantic meaning of the chair in its inception, which de facto includes all the level of abstraction below it, whichever they might end up being.
I like that train of thought.
What about a kind of Daoist interpretation of "actual worlds", e.g. the belief that there is some sort of reality but we definitionally can't capture it in theory? I'm not sure this view is particularly useful or informative since you can't say anything about the "actual world" that you believe in, but it seems to get around the issues with assuming theory should converge to a "fixed" reality. To state the position I'm thinking of in other words, it seems like the "fixed reality" view is assuming two things - the development of theory is governed by something external to it, and this thing that governs it will produce converging theories. What if you just get rid of the second assumption?
I'm no expert on Daoism, but I doubt we could treat the dao as a world in any normal sense, and surely not in anything close to the sense that analytic metaphysics means. At the very least, the actual world is supposed to be all that exists. But as I understand it, "existence" cannot be predicated of the dao - and not just because of a commitment to the standard philosophical view that existence is not a predicate! Rather, the dao is non-being, or perhaps it is what brings about both non-being and being, both non-existence and existence.
With that said, I'm sympathetic to your suggestion that we can deny that there is a fixed reality which explains convergence of theories. Once we jettison that assumption, though, what becomes of the claim that there is something external to our theories? I would say that there are many external things. Which of these is the actual world though? I see no reason to suppose that any of these things play the role demanded by metaphysical theorising, though we might call some of them "worlds". There is the world of science, the world of art, real worlds and dream worlds, the whole world and my world. There are brave new worlds and first world problems. Across all the corners of the world, people wonder whether there is a next world after this one. I often find myself lost to the world. But who can blame me? All the world's a stage and sometimes the play is out of this world. There is a world a difference between these worlds and the philosopher's Actual World.
Why is there such a focus on “things” in such metaphysical theorizing, as opposed to perhaps a dynamic view of reality of being as becoming? Is this predeliction perhaps rooted in our own anthropocentric limitations in physical perception and consciousness?
Bro I love these videos they are just straight Ws
Sorry to go a bit off-topic, but I really like how morality serves to ground this whole discussion. Whatever one's conception of an "actual world" - whether it's "merely such-and-such" or "ultimately thus-and-so", at _some_ point we're going to be faced with a choice to either (for example) help an old lady across the street, or not help her. Whether you think she's "ultimately" just a collection of particles, or "merely" a confluence of energies, etc., at the end of the day, the question becomes: will you pause the ontological project for a moment and assist her, or will you not? As long as you _do_ help her, then I'm okay with your philosophy. But if you _don't,_ then we've got problems, cuz that old lady is my mom. Cheers!
Next video by Kane:
*Why You Don't Really Exist, and Have Never Existed*
Already done! th-cam.com/video/wKwVxI9F_Ig/w-d-xo.html
@@KaneBlove this, thanks!
Next video: There is nothing please (but unironically)
I managed to dispose of all possible worlds and the actual world in under an hour. I suppose it shouldn't take too long to eliminate everything else.
@@KaneB 🔥🔥🔥
4:30 "what is that"? According to mereological nihilism, I would think that the "world" is the collection of all fundamental particles, at least when it comes to the material world.
I like to think about the “objects” and “categories” in the world as 100% context dependent like you. They are basically linguistic constructions.
Am I a human? Or am I the process of a human aging? Or am I an actor within a socio-political system? Or am I a complex aggregation of metabolic reactions? Kind of all and none of the above.
I believe in a concrete, material world. But maybe that’s just a useful fiction that I am programmed to believe so I die more slowly lol,
Hello Kane, would you happen to have sources for any readings/papers that inspired the ideas in this video? Or would you happen to have further readings arguing against an actual world? (My apologies if you mention in the video, I am just now returning to comment after a long while and can't recall the details)
in particular, I am curious as to whether anyone has anything to say about the non-existence of the actual world in terms of modal logic, i.e. that all which exists are possible worlds
Is there any thing?
No, Of course
Hypothetically, there could be no things and yet still be a world, in the sense of "There is 'stuff' and an abstract totality thereof." I'm not sure how we can deny that the totality of "whatever this is" exists, unless the dispute is whether that totality is a "real thing." Which perhaps it isn't, but at that point it seems like nitpicking, since we already think of "reality" as a collection of "everything."
There is only one
ZA WARUDO STOP TIME
WRYYYY
Separation is an illusion
4:37 I think we could translate "world" to "world-arrangement" which sounds better (since is just one) and just means something like "maximal arrangement" in a Wittigstenian like definition of world.
Clearly, the idea that "the World is the sum of all objects" is obvious and non-problematic enough for colloquial purposes. But our problems start when we try to distinguish between an "Actual" World and "Some Other Kind" of World. As per usual, such distinctions just confuse us, which is why we are better off not making them. We know how to talk about how our experiences motivate us to come to particular conclusions, but we don't know how to talk about the relationship between our experiences and "the World." And yet, we are none the worse for that. Ontology isn't something we will "figure out." It is something we will realize is better left ignored. See pragmatism.
😂
It seems to me that you attack the concept of "world" more than that of an "actual" world, specially in the first part of the video (this goes in line with critiques of the metaphysical concept of world as the totality of entities, or everything that is the case). In the second part you seem to attack the notion of an independent external world, but i'm not sure that capture the meaning of "actual world" as related to "possible worlds". It would be interesting to see if you have a take in the notion of actuality itself.
i think this is pretty academic, but to some extent it's got some practical significance too. i think a lot of the talk people make about things like "society" and "politics" are based on nothing but their imaginations
Thoroughly interesting, thank you
So, I wonder how much work we could get out of the mind-dependent versus mind-independent distinction. I'm also thinking of distinctions in relations, namely that between real relations versus relations of reason (also sometimes called relations of logic or virtual relations). One other feature of knowledge that can help to explain concepts is the notion of interest, i.e., we can explain the "number of deer in the forest", speaking of this putative fact as a claim about the world, as being the result of human interests to know a particular thing about that world: how many deer occupy a particular space loosely designated by its forest-ness (and our reasons for establishing that boundary condition could be highly varied).
My intuition goes something like this. There is always a dependence of facticity on the relation the knower has to the state of affairs that is known. A fact about the number of deer in a forest a priori respects the categories available to the inquirer, which itself always respects the interests of that knower. There is some story to tell about why humans, for example, have an interest in forests and an interest in deer, and we can derive the integrated interest any human has in knowing the number of deer in a forest from those stories. The question is whether such facts in any way carve up a state of affairs called a world. For me, if I have you right, this is not so much about the problem of imprecision or determinacy, but rather whether or not there is a mind-independent possibility for construing knowledge. As you point out, getting out of that question looks like we appeal, at least implicitly, to an objective kind of knower (this someone knows if we don't).
Maybe I want to say that we can designate the actual world as whatever could be the subject of interest, of any kind, by anything with interests. Presumably, even if we are quite wrong in how we have formed our category "deer", there is something we are referring to that could be viewed any number of ways by any number of kinds of perceivers. I'm imagining an alien race who long ago became fused with a technology that sees everything atomically. And perhaps the field of awareness of this alien race is not as narrow as ours. But all of the particles that make up what interests us, insofar as it seems to us like a forest with deer in it, would still represent a pattern of associations of particles that the alien race may or may not have reason to be interested in. It would depend upon the nature of the alien.
I think we could begin to try to understand what the nature is of the overlap between these interests. Whatever the total is of objects or events that an intelligent being could have an interest in constitutes the actual world. Now, this is going to get us a distinctly Kantian gap that perhaps we can close or not. Either way, the thing-in-itself looks ubquitous, insofar as it is the universal subject of interest.
Maybe that seems fuzzy. I don't think it is as fuzzy as it strikes prima facie. Imagine a being that exists on the scale of what we think are galaxies. Its world would consist of something like galactic objects. Nevertheless, those objects would somehwere include whatever was the subject of interest to humans who perceive some segment of it as deer and forests.
The definition of interest necessary to exclude fictional objects would simply stipulate that the right sort of interest is in things to which we relate really (as opposed to logically). For any interest-bearer X, in order that a perceiver P has interest in X, X must seem to exist causally independently of P's mind. That is, P knowing something about X does not constitute X. So, interest here cannot be a constitutive relation in which X is dependent upon P because the relevant "modal interest" arises just when X does not seem to P to be constitutively dependent upon P.
The actual world consists of whatever is possibly the subject of interest of this kind.
Or, I'm stupid.
I am not sure I understood the final conclusion, so I’ll have to think about it.
But this seems very similar to when mathematicians in set theory just make it an axiom that you can’t have a set that is the set of all sets, because if you do you would run into all sorts of trouble down the line.
Just a, hot take that, popped into my mind right after hearing your yourself initial thesis. This is a, thought I've entertained since i first heard about modal, properties and possible worlds.
Modal properties apply only to a to a system that is nomologically coherent with the terms that are used to describe it. If we use modal opperators such as there is and there exists, these operators create their own "theoretical operational space" so to say, in which they hold ( yes, I realize this makes me an anti-platonist about mathematics)
That is to say, modal properties and logical operators can apply to possible words in their full capacity, sensu stricte, as the possible world resulting from this logical statement is FULLY defined by it
But our world could only be described, not fully defined by a modal formulations.
Why? Well, the first argument that comes to mind is this - no statement of modal logic can actually describe the entirety of the actual world as possible world with the additional predicate of existence ( Kantian here, existence is not a predicate)
Second argument that I pulled out of my ass - no account or argument formulated by a being that is incapable of direct, absolute, and total knowing and perception can be said to accurately represent reality ( and that assumes that the utterer of the statement would not modify the reality they exist in by making such an utterance, which also seems to be difficult to believe)
Well all that sounds like im not understanding the term " possible world" because i don't think that " the totality of the world could be possibly extant if modal assertion x was true" is a definition of this term
Afaik a possiboe world is a possible "state of affairs" not a possible "entire world in which such a state of affairs holds".
Am i right on that last one?.
Still, i feel like my conclusion would be
" a possible world is a theoretical construct that is fully defined, created, and operational only within modal arguments, therefore whatever world we occupy must not fit the definition of" a possible world"
it's not possible to have a being that can fully represent reality because that leads to nothingness. Everything is nothing, because something is defined in relation to something else and so if you were to bear witness to everything at one, you would not actually witness anything in particular as there would be no borders around wit which carve it out as being a particular 'thing'.
@@johnsmith-pm1qethat's precisely so. In that case trying to encompass everything (e. G. The world) in a logical preposition would be trying to encompass nothing of distinguishable sense
If I got the point right: there are a few ways of talking about the world; what constitutes it but we can't know which is the ideal perfect way of talking about it? If we can't find the ideal way and all ways share the same weight then we can't talk about the world with certainty. Thus there is no world or possible world.
I would naturally question the statement that we don't know or can't the ideal way to talk about the world or what constitutes a forest or stars for example. But this doubt weakens when one sees that for any definition there are some criteria: boom!: criterion problem.
Here's my proof that the world exists: the world is defined as all things that exist. By tautology, all things that exist exist. So the world exists.
I’ll give it a go, what’s the worst that could happen?
The only reason to assume a world in the first place is to frame interactions between invariances, not invariances themselves. A cup is a cup because of its shape, not because of its relevance to my needs. A random rock with a divot will still incidentally cup things, regardless of agency.
It seems fair on it’s face to say the question is reducible to “is actuality real?” It seems like yes
I don't know whether you have addressed "Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized" by Ladyman, Ross and Spurrett, which gives a naturalistic argument for onticstructural realism. This asserts the opposite of mereological nihilism that there are no objects, simple or otherwise there are at base only relationships, and everything we call and object or material thing is fundamentally composed of those relationships.
Edit I see you have in your video on structural realism.
I also discuss their work in my videos on naturalized metaphysics.
@@KaneB Thanks, I don't think I have seen those yet.
Markus Gabriel influence on this one?
12:15 I don’t see a problem with defining the actual world as the set of all things? I don’t see how you would exclude concrete objects by using that definition.
There’s a bag of rice in my cupboard. I can think of each grain of rice as a whole object, not part of any other object. I can pick up a grain and say, “yup, that’s one whole grain of rice.” But there’s nothing out of the ordinary in referring to the bag of rice itself, as a set of all grains contained within the bag. The bag is a set, but it’s not a “mere abstraction” that excludes the concrete objects that compose it.
In the same way, it seems perfectly sensible to me to think of the actual world as the set of all things. Maybe this set isn’t An Object in the metaphysical sense unless you’re a mereological universalist, but does it need to be? Even the mereological nihilist refers to sets of particles arranged chairwise, and there doesn’t seem to be anything objectionable about speaking of sets in that context. Why would speaking about the actual world as a set be different?
I’m not super well informed about the various arguments around mereology, but that’s just my immediate takeaway.
You know we want slideshows homie.
Actually, you don't. By "you" I mean my general viewers: lots of people ask me for videos like this, where it's just me expressing some ideas. The slides are more for the introductory lectures.
All points well-taken, but what really is the problem with a purely formal designation of: "'The world' is a label that we attach, for our linguistic convenience, to everything that exists, regardless of how one chooses to conceptualise 'things' and 'existence'"?
Yes, much stronger claims have been made about what a world is (with very different meanings attached to the term "world" in the process), but you can spend your time more effectively arguing against such claims directly, instead of focusing on the term "world" itself.
There are lots of uses of the word "world" that are perfectly fine, sure. I'm not going to object to a stipulative definition. You could tell me that "God" is the label for all that there is and I'd say very well: I believe in God. The danger is when we illicitly shift from stipulation to substantive metaphysical theorising, and I think that this is particularly tricky with "world" because it can seem so trivial. Re the metaphysics, notice that per your use of "world", there could not be other possible worlds, since if they existed they would simply be part of the world so a fortiori not other worlds.
>> but you can spend your time more effectively arguing against such claims directly
I thought that's what I was doing. I did try to make it clear from the start that I was talking about the actual world as postulated by some metaphysicians.
12:11 Why not? The cup would be part of the sum.
In which case, it's not the *ordinary* cup. Or to put this another way: we don't ordinarily think of a cup as being part of a larger object cup+table. That's a counterintuitive consequence of mereological universalism.
Who is laughing in the background?
4:40
4:42 The particles are arranged world-wise: the sum of all particle arrangements. I don't find this notion hard to accept.
That's cool for you, but for the mereological nihilist there isn't really any such thing as "the sum of all particle arrangements." That phrase would also need to be reinterpreted. What the nihilist can do is refer to "all particles" or "every particle" or whatever. What kind of arrangement is that?
@KaneB How can this be though? A mereological nihilist says for example that there is no chair but particles arranged chair-wise. She can name all the arrangements of particles that exist: then she adds them and puts them in a set and calls it the particle arrangement of the world. Is this different than mereological nihilism?
@@ZoiusGM "the particle arrangement of the world" -- what does "the world" refer to there? The most that the nihilist can say is that there are all the particles, or every particle, or whatever. There is no particular arrangement that would count as being arranged worldwise; this just amounts to referring to all the particles, whatever their arrangement happens to be.
@@KaneBfor the nihilist nothing has meaning. This is hardly an argument. This is hardly philosophy
The term ‘world’ from a syntactic form seems to be semantically weak in a noun phrase construction but strong or robust as a adjectival construction as in ‘world politics, denotes a state of affairs akin to infinite states as in my imagined community which is incorrigible as theory of mind that I have about another. So a possible world is semantically weak but through the rigour of philosophy takes a robust form though as argued is suspect to being meaningless like the classical set of all sets. A ‘world actual’ is less meaningful than ‘actual world’ but ‘political world’ is more meaningful than ‘actual world’ but less robust than ‘world politics’ because‘world politics’ denotes content of mind whereas ‘political world’ is semantically identical to the actual world which is vague.
And you wonder why the public has no interest in philosophy.
Mereological Nihilism might not allign with the standard few of objects but that does not conlude that there is no actual world. The terms we use to classify are arbitrary but there are still actual things that are beint classified. The actual world then does not consist of the sum of all objects but of that sum of all atoms or what ever makes up those.
Im not sure if I got your point about the metaphysics of parts but I don't think abtraction and technically different language matters here. Your cup and your table are still actual existing things. If the table was the only thing in existance we would say thats it's the actual world. If it was the table and the cup, those to together aka the sum of them would constitute the actual world. This ad infinitum and we're back where we started. Thus saying "the sum of everything that exists" is not an abstract thought, as every single concrete cup and table are still part of the equation.
Even if your point about the sum of all things being to abstracts hold it doesnt matter on a smaller scale. You dont interact with the sum of all things but with objects in your room. From a single POV thats their actual world. Things exist and language wont change that.
The third argument seems to be about truth (from a human pov) rather than an actual world. Predictions are not part of the actual world but predictions of how it will behave. Of course human methods are flawed (I think if one was to make an predictions with the help of the theory of everything, it would always be true) and so they can turn out wrong.
How WE define deer also doesnt matter, as this is another philosophy of language problem. Of course our definition might and most likely will be flawed but we still CAN define what a deer is. And counting with that definition in mind we will still acurattely describe one part of reality - one part of the actual world. This description might not be true but it is real.
I don't see any easy way out of this for the nihilist. On their view, there isn't really a sum of all things, or a totality of all things - at least, the sum/totality is not an entity, not an object, not a thing. So it would still be true to say, "there is no such thing as the actual world." Strictly speaking, the nihilist would have to take talk of "the sum of all atoms" as a façon de parler: in fact, there are just the atoms and nothing else, though we can introduce linguistic devices for referring to more than one atom at once, including a device for referring to them all.
I don't deny that my cup and table exist. As I said at the beginning, this is not an argument for radical skepticism. I deny that they are part of the actual world, where this is the sort of entity postulated by metaphysicians as in standard interpretations of possible worlds semantics.
>> Predictions are not part of the actual world
The actual world is supposed to be a kind of totality of all that there is, so given that we actually do make predictions, I would have thought that these would be denizens of the actual world. But perhaps this disagreement over what "the actual world" supposedly contains (even once we agree on what statements are true) only illustrates how slippery that concept is.
To clarify the third argument, what I'm addressing there is the idea that the actual world is the thing to which our theories answer, the thing of which they may provide true or false descriptions. I claim that there is no unique entity that plays this role. Given a particular classification scheme, there may be a correct answer to a question such as, "what is the rate of deer population growth in this forest?" This answer depends on our having drawn various boundaries, and then we take an idealised version of this perspective where we have complete information relevant to it. But there are many ways of drawing boundaries, none of them right or wrong. There is not one ideal perspective, there are many. So I suppose I could just as well have argued, not that there is no actual world, but that there are many actual worlds. Though given that the actual world is supposed to be a totality, it seems reasonable to say that if there are many worlds, then there are none.
There is a good reason to say that the world exists, namely, that we want to talk about it. We want to say that its entropy is (almost) always increasing, that it is ~13 billion years old, that it will exist forever, etc.
I don't deny the existence of the universe, or to the various related postulates of cosmological theories. Speaking more colloquially, we can use "world" to refer to the universe or the cosmos. I deny that any of these are the metaphysician's actual world.
@@KaneB I thought you defined the world as the mereological sum of all objects. What is the difference between this and the universe?
@@philbelanger2 I don't see why believing that there is a universe would commit you to these sorts of principles of mereology. There may not be any mereological sum of all things but we can still talk about the properties of the universe. Anyway, consider how Wikipedia defines "universe":
>> The universe is all of space and time and their contents, including planets, stars, galaxies, and all other forms of matter and energy.
This seems reasonable as a first stab at defining "universe". Of course, this isn't quite right. The multiverse would include spatiotemporal things beyond the universe, in which case the universe would not be all of space and time. But that aside, the universe is understood as a kind of totality of space and time. In which case, the universe may not contain many of the things that there are, such as numbers and values under some interpretations of those. Presumably, numbers would still be part of the actual world on these views. So there are issues with taking "universe" and "world" to be equivalent.
The more important point is this. There's nothing wrong with a stipulative definition. We can stipulate that "world" refers to the universe (or that "world" refers to the Earth, or that "world" refers to a particular way of thinking…), in which case there is no objection to the claim that there is a world (or even many worlds). But you're not going to get any interesting metaphysical conclusions out of this. For example, if I say that there are no possible worlds of the sort postulated by standard interpretations of possible worlds semantics, it would be illegitimate to respond like so: "No, you do believe that there are possible worlds, since you believe that there is a universe, and you accept that the universe is the actual world. The actual world just is a possible world." This illicitly shifts from a stipulative definition to a substantive metaphysical theory. (Unless, of course, we are also proposing a similarly deflationary definition for "possible world".)
@@KaneB Believing that there is a universe doesn't commit you to any principles of mereology, but that doesn't mean the universe is not, in fact, the mereological sum of all objects. (In the same way that believing that there is a cup in front of you doesn't commit you to believing that it is a collection of atoms, but it might nonetheless be such a collection.)
I don't understand your last point. If, for example, you and someone else agree that a world is a spatio-temporally isolated concrete entity and you then accept that the universe is one such entity, then it seems like you agree that there is a possible world. (Unless you believe that there is a world but not a possible one, which needs explaining imo.) It is just that, contrary to your interlocutor, you believe in the existence of only one.
I agree that if the world is the fusion of all concrete and abstract entities then it is not identical to the universe.
@@philbelanger2 I don't accept that there is a mereological sum of all objects.
On the last point: I say that there is the universe. You tell me that "actual world" is just another term for "universe". Fine, then there is the actual world. But in saying this, I am saying nothing more than that there is the universe. I'm not for this reason alone committed to any particular metaphysical theory. You can't get metaphysical conclusions from stipulating a definition. (Also, I don't accept that the universe is a "spatiotemporally isolated concrete entity".)
You remind me Wittgenstein: everything is a language game, also the book about it! The wold doesn't exist, but there are universals, species and so on...
Locality vs non locality
Modality! Of course in the logic RM3 the implication is defined as ((not possible x) or y) and ((not possible (not y)) or not x) so everything you said really depends on the contrapositive. Also you look like Wolverine
The real is the virtual machining the actual
Correct me if I'm wrong but I believe the concept you're referring to is discrete categories/sets or (discretion). The nature and requirements of discrete categories/sets make them incongruent with reality. Discrete categories/sets are uniform in make up, follow the laws of contradiction and have boundaries that are infinitely far away from everything else. A somewhat good example is the set of even numbers, it's make up is uniform, there exists no number that is both even as well as odd and because the distance between all numbers is infinite so is the distance between the set of even numbers and everything else.
I think I would separate here the metaphysical from the semantic dimension.
-It seems to me that universalist existence and nihilist existence has two different referents. But the referent of „universalist existence“ might be independent of one’s classification scheme.
-Maybe universalist existence is some kind of property or substance or maybe it is it’s own thing.
-I mean it seems like that independent of how I classify my sensory experience, that it doesn’t change anything about the state of affairs of my sensory experience.
I think I would give a different metaphysical challenge to the existence of the world.
-Let’s say everything is made up of gunk, then we have a mereological bottomless pit.
-Infinite means never ending and if there where a ground then there would be a end.
-So let’s say there are infinite entities. Because the way upwards is without a end there can be no such thing as a mereological top.
-So if there are infinite entities then there can be no such thing as the word.
Of curse if objects where made of gunk then they would be composed of infinitely many entities. Since ordinary objects do exist, one might argue that there is no such thing as gunk. But of curse, this still lets open the possibility that there are infinitely many entities, it just means that any existing entity has to have a finite number of parts.
Edit: I think I should add, that the reference relation between „existence“ and existence depends on one’s classification scheme, my point is that the referent on its own might be independent of it.
About infinity, I imagine a metaphysician might respond like this: The natural numbers continue without end. Nevertheless, we can still quantify over the whole set of natural numbers. Indeed, this is what is designated by the noun phrase "the natural numbers". Similarly, suppose that there are infinite entities. Well, we can still quantify over all of them. There is *everything*, there is *all things*. This is just what we mean by "actual world".
This answer does run into serious problems, such as how to deal with possibilities. We might not want to count those as part of the actual world. The point though is just that there is no obstacle in principle to taking the whole set of infinite entities.
@@KaneB
It seems like that as long as my Argument against infinitely composed entities is still intact, that I would be forced to accept that there is simply no such thing as a set of all natural numbers.
But anyway, I wonder if one could replace talk about possible worlds with talk about possible places.
I think youre equivocating. The ideal perspective in, say, counting deer, is not ideal in terms of classifying deer, but rather share what we mean when we say deer-a fortiori, shares the same classification as our models, upon which the idealisation is based. So the ideal perspective isnt about idealising classification, just idealising our ability to count deer.
As well as this --Im not convinced that saying 'the world' is akin to the 'ideal perspective'. If I say, for example, that there are deer in the world, this is not an ideal perspective at all, but rather saying that deer simply exist. This is useful as then I can say 'there are no Gruffalo in the world'-I'm not appealing to an ideal perspective, I'm simply saying that 'Gruffalo' belongs to a domain of fictional discourse. This view is consistent with your anti-possible worlds view, but I think its silly to then say that there is no actual world (dont make me tap the misuse of words sign!!)
>> So the ideal perspective isnt about idealising classification, just idealising our ability to count deer.
I'm mystified as to what it is that you disagree with. This is literally exactly my point.
>> Im not convinced that saying 'the world' is akin to the 'ideal perspective'.
Sure. In that part of the video, I was discussing one use of "the world", one thing we might have in mind when we say that there exists an actual world, which has at least something in common with what might be meant by "the world" in the philosopher's sense. I discussed a different approach in the first half of the video. Also, to clarify, it's not that "the world" is taken to be ideal perspective. Rather, the world is the thing to which our theories answer, the thing that we make claims about, of which we might give correct or incorrect descriptions. I think we can make sense of this by thinking in terms of idealized versions of our own perspectives, but that's not going to deliver a single ideal perspective, so it's not going to deliver a unique actual world.
If all that's meant by "there are deer in the world" is that "deer exist", then obviously I don't disagree with that (at least for the purposes of this video), but then we can't infer from this that there exists some thing that is the referent of "the world".
>> dont make me tap the misuse of words sign
Feel free to tap away. Every time you tap that sign, I take a sip of water from my "Wittgenstein sucks" mug.
@@KaneB
1. Then this has nothing to do with mereology and there's nothing against the existence of an actual world here, as idealising our counting ability with the same constants of the meaning of deer is perfectly fine.
2. None of this entails the thesis that there is no actual world--it merely says that the world is not something that can essentially stand in a subject predicate relation-- its not an 'object' that can act as a referent. Are you saying then that the thesis 'there is no actual world' just amounts to 'the word 'world' is not used in a way that amounts to a referential relation? Those are pretty different but hey, you gotta do what gets the clicks i suppose, cant blame you.
3. grr thatd make me so mad knowing youre aware of anything wittgenstein says 😠😠
Also: "There are deer in the world" -- note that "in the world" is redundant here. You could just as well say, "there are deer." Now you might object that this doesn't distinguish a case from where I wish to assert the existence of deer, from a case where I'm merely playing along with a fiction. But adding "in the world" doesn't in itself distinguish those cases either. I could pretend to assert: "there are Gruffalo in the world"... similarly, I might speak within the fiction of Doctor Who and pretend to assert that Cybermen invaded a base in Antarctica in 1986. Context and intention are what distinguish genuine assertions from mere pretense. We can pretend to assert anything.
There are deer in the world, but is there no actual world. That is, there is no thing that is referred to by "the actual world", certainly not the sort of thing counts as an instance of the world-objects postulated possible worlds theories. "... in the world" is a linguistic flourish, misleading if taken literally.
@@yyzzyysszznn >> Then this has nothing to do with mereology
I'm not talking about mereology there. You're conflating two different arguments. The stuff about mereology is from about 2 minutes to 14 minutes. Then afterwards, I address a different approach which takes the world as the thing to which our theories answer.
>> Those are pretty different
Not really, given that I'm explicitly responding to philosophers who treat "the actual world" as object. Obviously I'm not claiming that people should stop using the phrase "the world" or even "the actual world" in particular contexts. I'm objecting to a particular kind of metaphysical theorizing. (And it's not that you can't use the word "world" referentially. It's that the specific referential use in metaphysics fails to pick out anything.)
@@KaneB "There are deer in the world, but is there no actual world. That is, there is no thing that is referred to by "the actual world""
There you go--if a word is not one with a referential relationship to a referent, then it doesn't exist. Genius or clickbait, you choose!
If I say 'there are deer in the world', im saying 'there are deer', sure. If I say 'there is a Gruffalo', you might say 'no, for he is only fiction'-so what do I respond? 'Sure, there is no actual Gruffalo, but a fictional character exists'. Whats the 'actual' doing here?
"There Is No Actual World" - well, if you had left the house, you would have seen it.
🤓
Could the mereological nihilist claim instead that "There is no world, but there is the totality of particles" as opposed to "there is no world, but there are particles arranged world-wise."? Perhaps "world" does not refer to a specific arrangement like other physical words like "chairs" do.
For the mereological nihilist, strictly speaking there is no such thing as "the totality of particles". On their view that's not a thing, not an object. At best, there would be an abstract set of all particles, or something like that.
While on the other hand, Ladyman and Ross in "Every Thing Must Go: Metaphysics Naturalized" suggest that there are no objects at the most basic level. There are only relationships, and all supposed "things" , including the simplest objects, are composed of relationships. Edit: as you already mentioned in your "Structural Realism 8" video...
No captions
By the way, Kane how old are you. Because you've looked 20 for the past 10 years. I'm starting to develop a JTB that there is such a possible world Wx such that Wx is an actually existing world and it such that a vampire by the name or Kane B. exists in it. 😂
I'm 32. Possibly a vampire. I'm nocturnal, I have sharp teeth, I drink the blood of virgins, and I'm not keen on garlic. (One of those things might not be true.)
Just a reflection of what you said on the part/whole problem.
To say there must becan object of which all other objects are a part is akin to stating that a atom can make inferences about the human being it makes up based on its epistemic horizon.
In other words, the world can't also be an object because it would have to be an object which includes all relations of objects and subjects. it would have to include the preposition " a collection of all objects and their relation is an object called the world" in its essence.
Kinda makes me think of Freges Law V
I need to get some simulation coffee and put on my simulation clothes or ill be late to simulation work.
Are you doing anything more than arguing that meaning inherently contains some aspects of indeterminacy? I think the implication of this is to claim that any concept of the (or an) actual world has some indeterminate aspects. I do not see how this translates to 'there is no actual world' though.
What I'm trying to do is deny the existence of a thing proposed by some metaphysicians. Where this becomes a bit tricky is that this thing can seem trivial. Surely there must be an actual world - the world is all that is the case, so if I grant that there is anything at all, then I grant that there is a world! Of course, there is a colloquial use of the term "world" where this kind of statement is acceptable. But this is not the actual world of metaphysicians.
I'm making two points. First, when metaphysicians talk about the actual world, they are often smuggling in a controversial metaphysical theory or an alternative use of language. Second, there are good reasons to deny the existence of the thing to which they intend to refer. This second point only works if we fix on a specific meaning of the term "world", but this is the case for any philosophical argument. Before giving an argument against the existence of God, an atheist will need to specify exactly what is meant by "God".
I don't think my arguments here rest on any claim of meaning indeterminacy. It wouldn't be a problem to me if they did though, because I endorse indeterminacy of meaning.
the books! 📚 💕
How is this different from nominalism?
Nominalism is either the view that there are no abstract objects, or the view that there are no universals. The actual world is not always thought of as either an abstract object or a universal. Sometimes it is presented as a kind of concrete object, the greatest concrete object. Or it is the sum of everything that there is, both concrete and abstract. Taking it this way, perhaps it is an abstract object. In any case, we can deny the existence of the actual world without denying the existence of all abstract objects. Just as I said at the beginning that there are trees and fields, but these are not part of the actual world, so we might say that there are numbers and sets, but these also are not part of the actual world.
you seems doing a relatively decent job in dissecting philosophy as it is.
Makes you different than other philosophy youtubers who are full of agendas.
please please please keep it that way. Philosophy is already so bullshit and useless nowadays. Nothing enlightening.
Thanks!
You are right
I don't get why talking about world as totality of all existing things requires introduction of technical metaphysical language. It is perfectly understandable in context of everyday language. We don't need to pose that that totality is a set therefore it has some property.
Another thing about this video that troubles me is that in the first half of it Kane discards some proposals because they can only be formulated in technical metaphysical language, yet in the second half he has to introduce technical language to discard another proposal. It feels inconsistent.
It doesn't require that. There are all sorts of uses of the term "world" that are unobjectionable. In ordinary discourse we make claims about the world, about all things, about everything, etc., and usually context makes it clear what is meant. As long as we get on board with something like a common sense view of things, many such claims will be true. But as I tried to make clear at the start of the video, I'm not talking about these ordinary uses. I'm responding specifically to the concept of the "actual world" as it appears in metaphysical theorising - in particular, with respect to standard interpretations of possible worlds semantics. (Enough people have raised this objection that I'm now thinking I probably didn't make this clear enough in there video. I'm not sure what else I should have said though.)
I don't have any objection to technical languages. My objection is to the substantive claims of certain metaphysical theories. People can use whatever language they like. You can, if you like, simply stipulate that "the actual world" will be used to refer to all existing things. Then I might be willing to join you in talking about the actual world. However, no metaphysical conclusions follow from this. So it won't be legitimate to argue as follows: "See Kane, you do accept possible worlds after all. You accept that there are things. But "actual world" just refers to all of those things, and the actual world is a possible world."
Indeed, it won't even be legitimate to argue like this: "See Kane, you do accept that there exists an actual world. You accept that there are things. But "actual world" just refers to all of those things." No: the fact that there are things, and that "the actual world" is used to refer to those things, does not entail that there exists an actual world. Here's an analogy. There is a wall to my left and a cup to my right. I could introduce the term "wallcup" to refer both to the wall and to the cup. As a linguistic device, there can be no objection to this in principle. But we can't infer from this alone that there exists a wallcup, that there is some entity that is composed of both the wall and the cup.
Despite the best efforts of folks like Anselm, you can't establish metaphysical theories by stipulative definition.
is this an actual video ? or an illusion ?? Stop fooling yourself... whatever you are perceiving through your sense organs about the world , that is a real reality... without which your life would not be possible ... You are real, your thought and experience is real... enjoy this real world in your lifetime !
Have you ever studied German?
No
@@KaneB Neither have I, but I am aware of certain things, and one of those is the fact that German has more terminology than English, and the word "part" translates into several words and terms that singularly relate to the different meanings we use.
I just wonder, if you took a few minutes to learn the German words for "Part", would that change your ideas here?
"Object zee"
Don’t let your mental ailments take over
and yet i still keep getting billed for it
Mr Worldwise
What is this solipsism?
Actually, there is.
oh come on now
...and only you exist.
I'm only 30 seconds into the video, but I just want to say that I've ALWAYS said that the universe DOES NOT EXIST.
I'm not trying to be weird (although I have no resistance to being weird). It's just that saying that "The universe exists" is a friggin ABUSE OF LANGUAGE.
This is what I mean: "X exists" has ALWAYS meant "X is a part of the universe and interacts with other things within the universe". What else could it mean?
The universe OBVIOUSLY doesn't qualify as an existing thing then!!!
Can't the universe be part of itself? It's not a proper part of itself, but presumably ordinary language doesn't make the part/proper part distinction. And if we take "interaction" in the broadest sense to mean that X interacts with Y just in case X has some relation to Y, well the universe presumably has the relation of identity to itself. So the universe interacts with itself. Hence the universe exists. Isn't metaphysics great lol
It's funny how a feverish upper respiratory infection changes one's view of the physical world.
Dude, a star is a point of light in the sky. It’s not that complicated.
This is a typical example of useless philosophical circle jerking. The world - as the word is used in both philosophy and fiction and ordinary speech - is that which imparts relation between particles or metaphysical concepts or whatever else you're talking about. The only way for there to be no world is to stop engaging with it, which is definitely an option to consider in certain circumstances.
(1) Uselessness is good.
(2) As I explicitly stated at the beginning of the video, I'm not addressing the various ordinary uses of the term "world". I'm addressing the actual world as a postulate of certain metaphysical theories, as in standard interpretations of possible worlds semantics.
blud didn't watch the video 😂
Poggers
Satchitananda for the win
Khrist B
Do philosophers, particularly modern ones, do anything of value for society?
No, and that's a good thing.
@@KaneB how is contributing nothing but f value a good thing. There are plenty of modern philosophical problems to tackle.
@@404errorpagenotfound.6 Uselessness is good. Down with practicality!
@@KaneB are you trolling in your own comments section?
@@404errorpagenotfound.6 I'm not trolling. I'm genuinely an anti-pragmatist with respect to philosophy. I've defended this in a few places, most notably this video: th-cam.com/video/RqYbY1p4ORU/w-d-xo.html
profound madness
god philosophy is cringe
Wa 0:33 0:33 0:
crying
Fake philosophy
fake moustache