I buy into Hilary's argument (for the most part) that getting at the truth/reality is unattainable and may not even make sense. But I think there are things we can do to reduce our level of ignorance. Triangulating different perspectives and types of data and reasoning and looking for consistency will allow us to eliminate some things from our picture. As well as interrogating the world, we can interrogate the observer (i.e. understand how the human mind works) to better understand the limitations/distortions of our own perception.
When I was young, I thought all this would be poindexter thought or over thinking. I am of average intelligence. I admire those that did create or developed these ideas. I’m nearly 60 now and have accepted, we will not see true reality. I never knew of the double slit experiment until I was 50ish. I don’t tecall even hearing of it in school. I think I never heard anything of quantum during my 79-83 high school years. Life is more crazy on so many levels. Gods, turtles or math all the way done! 🤓🙈
No. “Out there” is an illusion, an artifact of a very limited part of reality: the mind. Out and in are one thing/think and to attempt to understand it (grasp it) is as futile as the idea that the mind is infinite. A binary organism (pain/pleasure, on/off) might evolve to what today we call gods, but even then will only be a part of reality, constrained to its limitations. Only reality can perceive itself (if perception is real). We are not reality. We are just a part of it. And I’m the dumbest dot in it. 😅 I would retitle the lecture: The mind/thought after reality.
Reality is a word that comes from the surface and describes only the surface. In depth, like in vacuum, there is another reality that must be very different indeed.
On the whole I think everything Lawson told is agreeable, save for one thing. Reality isn't theological; rather, the notion that reality must be observable or coherent to us is theological. Sort of along the track of Buddhist philosophy, reality is what he initially describes it. Some "suchness", which is inherently indescribable because to describe something isn't the same as the thing itself. The idea of reality isn't itself reality. No knowledge or thought or language or mathematics can do anything more than give an account. You can't produce reality. The Buddhists ultimately enter into anti-realism, then even anti-idealism, both for all sorts of reasons. I do agree, however, that our self acknowledged futile attempt to hold reality is utile. It's useful to try to grasp at that which is inherently ungraspable. Even if our account is indirect (perception and conception), or seemingly at times incoherent (the account of quantum physics for instance, and seemingly paradoxical/impossible things), it is nonetheless useful to us. It works rather well. We don't have to give up on the concept of reality, but being too bound to it, trying to capture it, often leads nowhere at all.
Saying "reality is an illusion" is not the same as saying "our perception of reality is an illusion". It seems like nonsense to say the former, when you mean the latter.
Ref Anil Seth's ideas - I wonder if the phenomenon of blind-sight could give us some additional access to external reality by bypassing the construction imposed by our consciousness?
I imagine 'Blind Sight' is about creating a mental image without the assistance of vision. If thats the case, then no. Consciousness is thought, and thinking is consciousness, and all it can create is 'our reality', which can be improved upon and deepened, but can never be absolute, or total reality.
My researches into numina gave me a stunning insight yesterday morning , I to am a numinous being! Still working on this but joyfully . The joy was surprising and also healing. The equation is thus , joy is resonant with an unarticulated undifferentiated truth , at least contingently. I have been aquainted betimes with revelation and this seems congruent with some life changeing experiences.
Thank you Hilary, this is most impressive and something to lift our spirits! Let us not give up the tools of the enlightment, but only the thought that we are uncovering reality. We owe our knowledge, our language, our science to a reality that we will never uncover. I believe that all these patterns we call "knowledge", "language", "laws of nature" can exist because there is an underlying fixed reality that exists independently of our observations. Otherwise, how could we explain that we see the same patterns when looking at distant galaxies (e.g. spectrum of hydrogen) as we see looking at objects on Earth? "Reality" may be a theological notion, but some universal underlying mechanism must be at play to produce such a consistent illusion.
Let me quote Timothy Williamson, as my own objection is not very different from his: "Lawson wants logic without truth. In rejecting truth, he takes himself to be relying on logically valid arguments. But the standard account of logical validity is in terms of truth: for an argument to be logically valid is for the truth of its premises to require the truth of its conclusion (exactly what ‘requires’ means here can be spelt out in different ways, which we needn’t go into). Without truth, there is no logical validity in the standard sense. Of course, Lawson might try to understand logical validity in truth-independent terms. Others have attempted to do so, though with little success. Lawson seems not to recognize that his project of keeping logic while dumping truth faces this massive challenge-like keeping the molecules while dumping the atoms they are made of. Similar problems arise for Lawson’s assumption that after he has dumped truth he can still have ‘learning’ and ‘rigorous rational and empirical principles’. Rigour gets its significance from an attempt to exclude various kinds of error. But, for Lawson, there are no errors. For error involves falsity, and for Lawson there is no falsity, since there is no truth. By his post-realism, we cannot learn from our errors, because we never make any. If only!"
Just reading the chapter on Art and the avoidance of Closure. Excellent! This talk synthesized perfectly what I have been reading for the last few days. The theory of Closure aligns so well with my experience. Thank you so much!. Ps I mailed you a letter yesterday.
The only real noumena, what we are most acquainted with, is consciousness-whatvwe undoubtedly are and can't be anything else. The phenomenal is everything else that we perceive, the world as it appears to us. That is the real mystery. Idealism is a parsimonious metaphysics that reinforces the apparent monism of perception. Everything appears in our field of awareness. It is all happening in the medium of mind. To suppose thatvthere is a world 'out there' independent of mind, is an abstraction for which we have zilch evidence other than the phenomenal surface that betrays illusions. Kant got it inversely wrong when he said we don't perceive the noumenal world directly and that our perception is phenomenal. The noumenal is the undeniable reality of consciousness and the phenomenal is this illusory reality that we perceive.
The closest we can get to a sensation of reality is that we are hungry, and we ingest something into our body from outside of it, to alleviate that hunger. Dogs divide up the world into what can be eaten and what can't. It's at its root, the same. And we seek to stay alive as long as we can. Is that real? It feels so. Our culture is based on that. The closure that a unitary god provided was that of a) eternal life and b) judgement, and punishment of the wicked. Scientific inquiry makes no claims of that sort, and probably never will, but that is what humanity actually wants. If one has an active, perhaps even overheated mind like mr. Lawson, one has within one's reach the promise of a life well spent, come what may. But the rest of us are by in large consumed with with our fears, passions, conceits, and we bind our minds in those shackles voluntarily. Religion is making a big comeback everywhere you look.
I disagree. If these brains are yet another , part of this physical structure , then who are we ? where are we ? . I thought we are these brains. I still beleive that we are brains. I control these hands and the one's that we can't control, well its atoms are currently arranged differently.
Understanding and knowledge informs reality, absolute knowledge describes absolute reality. We will only improve and deepen our 'personal realities' as we assess and include elements of the 'collective reality' of human kind. We will never know everything, so we will never know 'true reality', but our curiosity will always drive us to know more.
ok, let's say we have a fundamentally random universe when loking at quantum mechanics, how should we get any new answers about the universe? Couldn't something like this be the end of science/philosophie? I think this universe is finite, since for example 1+2+3+4+5...=-1/12 which is wrong so infinity kind of doesn't work here I guess
My experience walking in the woods plus my sense of smell can identify the reality of a skunk at least 99% of the time. That's good enough for me. Whatever he is flailing at seems more like senility than the firmness of reality.
Are hammers real. If you disagrees I would challenge you to hold your hand still on a table top while I bash it with the non-existing hammer. I think even Lawson would agree that our brain's perception of a hammer is realistic enough for most people to avoid the challenge.
Well, no. The world _isn’t_ ‘out there’. Our brains imagine it… And then use incoming sensory data to update the model. The world isn’t ‘out there’, it’s in our heads!
But the outside world has to exist separate to our inner experience in some way, or does it? But then how is ithe outside world seemingly consistent between different humans’ experiences? Do other humans’ experiences even exist? For all I know the future and the past may not even exist. Only the present moment as experienced from my perspective is surely real. But what is the fundamental self that experiences or observes our inner experience? The soul, the consciousness, the observer. It’s one of the biggest mysteries of the universe, but it was taboo to talk about in a scientific context for most of the 20th century. Modern scientists are finally asking questions about it again, and it seems that the observer must be something extra physical or, according to Roger Penrose, at least non-computable.
Dogs have 40 times more olfactory neurons or they have a much better intuitive sense of our intuitive immediate world. Nature may have limited our immediate intuitive sense but given us tools to build our intuition with other bits of data.
When it comes down to it, reality seems to be math after all. That's the only thing not changing between perspectives. Then again maybe math is just the most accurate language we discovered facilitating the description of reality in a sense.
Irrational belief whether true or not, reality or not, has been a motivating force. Humans need to be motivated to achieve anything. If we stop lying to ourselves, will we still achieve? AI doesn't need truth to achieve, until it evolves to need it's own self-delusion and it invents it's own concept of truth. There is no truth. There is only observation and response.
Mr Philosopher, switch your focus to study human senses physical range, some physics, and maybe you will see that we have abandoned God due to propaganda not reality. For me God is a whole reality, this within and outside our sensors range and understanding.
About 200 years ago most people saw the world like you, even the intelletual class. But that ship has sailed unfortunately, and there is no restoring the past. History is filled with attempts at restoration, they all inevitably fail
I agree. As much as the lemmings use "Galileo And The Church" to support the false science over religion. Truth is organized science would not exist without organized religion first.
@@isaac1572 point me to some. as far as I know, deeper scientists are digging, more doubts they have into present concepts. many talk about 'God' or god-like force again. thing is science makes hidden leaps of faith, (like one with primordial soup) and nobody really cares
No we replaced it with a belief in scientists and science. It’s still a belief system. We don’t know anything for sure, and even many scientific “facts” are shown to be false later
It’s the STRENGTH of science that it doesn’t claim absolute truth like region does. It doesn’t claim to be “reality”. It claims to be our best predictive theory about reality, and it acknowledges that it is almost certainly wrong to some extent, and that we need to constantly work to improve it.
Do you think we would ever reach what's "out there"? Or is the idea of reality dead? Let us know below!
I bought Hilary''s book "Closure" some time ago. I must say I find his arguments quite persuasive - a real challenge to realism.
I buy into Hilary's argument (for the most part) that getting at the truth/reality is unattainable and may not even make sense. But I think there are things we can do to reduce our level of ignorance. Triangulating different perspectives and types of data and reasoning and looking for consistency will allow us to eliminate some things from our picture. As well as interrogating the world, we can interrogate the observer (i.e. understand how the human mind works) to better understand the limitations/distortions of our own perception.
no not really
When I was young, I thought all this would be poindexter thought or over thinking. I am of average intelligence. I admire those that did create or developed these ideas. I’m nearly 60 now and have accepted, we will not see true reality. I never knew of the double slit experiment until I was 50ish. I don’t tecall even hearing of it in school. I think I never heard anything of quantum during my 79-83 high school years. Life is more crazy on so many levels. Gods, turtles or math all the way done! 🤓🙈
No. “Out there” is an illusion, an artifact of a very limited part of reality: the mind. Out and in are one thing/think and to attempt to understand it (grasp it) is as futile as the idea that the mind is infinite.
A binary organism (pain/pleasure, on/off) might evolve to what today we call gods, but even then will only be a part of reality, constrained to its limitations. Only reality can perceive itself (if perception is real). We are not reality. We are just a part of it.
And I’m the dumbest dot in it. 😅
I would retitle the lecture: The mind/thought after reality.
Reality is a word that comes from the surface and describes only the surface. In depth, like in vacuum, there is another reality that must be very different indeed.
On the whole I think everything Lawson told is agreeable, save for one thing. Reality isn't theological; rather, the notion that reality must be observable or coherent to us is theological. Sort of along the track of Buddhist philosophy, reality is what he initially describes it. Some "suchness", which is inherently indescribable because to describe something isn't the same as the thing itself. The idea of reality isn't itself reality. No knowledge or thought or language or mathematics can do anything more than give an account. You can't produce reality.
The Buddhists ultimately enter into anti-realism, then even anti-idealism, both for all sorts of reasons. I do agree, however, that our self acknowledged futile attempt to hold reality is utile. It's useful to try to grasp at that which is inherently ungraspable. Even if our account is indirect (perception and conception), or seemingly at times incoherent (the account of quantum physics for instance, and seemingly paradoxical/impossible things), it is nonetheless useful to us. It works rather well. We don't have to give up on the concept of reality, but being too bound to it, trying to capture it, often leads nowhere at all.
Saying "reality is an illusion" is not the same as saying "our perception of reality is an illusion". It seems like nonsense to say the former, when you mean the latter.
Ref Anil Seth's ideas - I wonder if the phenomenon of blind-sight could give us some additional access to external reality by bypassing the construction imposed by our consciousness?
still trying to get at that elusive "real" reality eh? It's a waste of time
I imagine 'Blind Sight' is about creating a mental image without the assistance of vision. If thats the case, then no. Consciousness is thought, and thinking is consciousness, and all it can create is 'our reality', which can be improved upon and deepened, but can never be absolute, or total reality.
I’m with you, I’m interested to learn more about the experience of blind sight. Seems like there could be another piece to the puzzle in there.
My researches into numina gave me a stunning insight yesterday morning , I to am a numinous being! Still working on this but joyfully . The joy was surprising and also healing. The equation is thus , joy is resonant with an unarticulated undifferentiated truth , at least contingently.
I have been aquainted betimes with revelation and this seems congruent with some life changeing experiences.
The essence of reality and our perception of it is categorically incomparable.
Thank you Hilary, this is most impressive and something to lift our spirits! Let us not give up the tools of the enlightment, but only the thought that we are uncovering reality. We owe our knowledge, our language, our science to a reality that we will never uncover.
I believe that all these patterns we call "knowledge", "language", "laws of nature" can exist because there is an underlying fixed reality that exists independently of our observations. Otherwise, how could we explain that we see the same patterns when looking at distant galaxies (e.g. spectrum of hydrogen) as we see looking at objects on Earth?
"Reality" may be a theological notion, but some universal underlying mechanism must be at play to produce such a consistent illusion.
Let me quote Timothy Williamson, as my own objection is not very different from his:
"Lawson wants logic without truth. In rejecting truth, he takes himself to be relying on logically valid arguments. But the standard account of logical validity is in terms of truth: for an argument to be logically valid is for the truth of its premises to require the truth of its conclusion (exactly what ‘requires’ means here can be spelt out in different ways, which we needn’t go into). Without truth, there is no logical validity in the standard sense. Of course, Lawson might try to understand logical validity in truth-independent terms. Others have attempted to do so, though with little success. Lawson seems not to recognize that his project of keeping logic while dumping truth faces this massive challenge-like keeping the molecules while dumping the atoms they are made of.
Similar problems arise for Lawson’s assumption that after he has dumped truth he can still have ‘learning’ and ‘rigorous rational and empirical principles’. Rigour gets its significance from an attempt to exclude various kinds of error. But, for Lawson, there are no errors. For error involves falsity, and for Lawson there is no falsity, since there is no truth. By his post-realism, we cannot learn from our errors, because we never make any. If only!"
if we don't have knowledge, how do we know that we don't have knowledge (or any of the other truth claims he makes)?
Just reading the chapter on Art and the avoidance of Closure. Excellent! This talk synthesized perfectly what I have been reading for the last few days. The theory of Closure aligns so well with my experience. Thank you so much!. Ps I mailed you a letter yesterday.
The only real noumena, what we are most acquainted with, is consciousness-whatvwe undoubtedly are and can't be anything else. The phenomenal is everything else that we perceive, the world as it appears to us. That is the real mystery.
Idealism is a parsimonious metaphysics that reinforces the apparent monism of perception. Everything appears in our field of awareness. It is all happening in the medium of mind. To suppose thatvthere is a world 'out there' independent of mind, is an abstraction for which we have zilch evidence other than the phenomenal surface that betrays illusions.
Kant got it inversely wrong when he said we don't perceive the noumenal world directly and that our perception is phenomenal. The noumenal is the undeniable reality of consciousness and the phenomenal is this illusory reality that we perceive.
The closest we can get to a sensation of reality is that we are hungry, and we ingest something into our body from outside of it, to alleviate that hunger. Dogs divide up the world into what can be eaten and what can't. It's at its root, the same. And we seek to stay alive as long as we can. Is that real? It feels so. Our culture is based on that. The closure that a unitary god provided was that of a) eternal life and b) judgement, and punishment of the wicked. Scientific inquiry makes no claims of that sort, and probably never will, but that is what humanity actually wants. If one has an active, perhaps even overheated mind like mr. Lawson, one has within one's reach the promise of a life well spent, come what may. But the rest of us are by in large consumed with with our fears, passions, conceits, and we bind our minds in those shackles voluntarily. Religion is making a big comeback everywhere you look.
I was like... "Why is the dude from Breaking Bad trying to do philosophy and/or metaphysics?"
Too many ads
Adblock is your friend
Interesting talk but that is definitely not how neurons work.
I observed and shared with anyone interested all of these insights decades ago. Why am i not a professional philosopher?
I disagree. If these brains are yet another , part of this physical structure , then who are we ? where are we ? . I thought we are these brains. I still beleive that we are brains. I control these hands and the one's that we can't control, well its atoms are currently arranged differently.
Understanding and knowledge informs reality, absolute knowledge describes absolute reality.
We will only improve and deepen our 'personal realities' as we assess and include elements of the 'collective reality' of human kind.
We will never know everything, so we will never know 'true reality', but our curiosity will always drive us to know more.
ok, let's say we have a fundamentally random universe when loking at quantum mechanics, how should we get any new answers about the universe? Couldn't something like this be the end of science/philosophie? I think this universe is finite, since for example 1+2+3+4+5...=-1/12 which is wrong so infinity kind of doesn't work here I guess
My experience walking in the woods plus my sense of smell can identify the reality of a skunk at least 99% of the time. That's good enough for me. Whatever he is flailing at seems more like senility than the firmness of reality.
How did YOU even end up, viewing this talk?
Authoritarian Constitutional Republic
Love it.🎇
There is no Standford university.
Excellent!
(Being(and time))
i love it.....great talk.
Are hammers real. If you disagrees I would challenge you to hold your hand still on a table top while I bash it with the non-existing hammer. I think even Lawson would agree that our brain's perception of a hammer is realistic enough for most people to avoid the challenge.
Believe that
After seeing s number of highly educated people talking about reality i am beginning to think all of this is just a scam
Well, no. The world _isn’t_ ‘out there’. Our brains imagine it… And then use incoming sensory
data to update the model. The world isn’t ‘out there’, it’s in our heads!
But where is our head? Is it also just contained in itself? And has it created itself out of nothing?
But the outside world has to exist separate to our inner experience in some way, or does it?
But then how is ithe outside world seemingly consistent between different humans’ experiences?
Do other humans’ experiences even exist?
For all I know the future and the past may not even exist. Only the present moment as experienced from my perspective is surely real.
But what is the fundamental self that experiences or observes our inner experience?
The soul, the consciousness, the observer. It’s one of the biggest mysteries of the universe, but it was taboo to talk about in a scientific context for most of the 20th century. Modern scientists are finally asking questions about it again, and it seems that the observer must be something extra physical or, according to Roger Penrose, at least non-computable.
Sorry for rambling. But consciousness really is a mystery worthy of scientific inquiry. Look up the hard problem of consciousness
No new information.
Dogs have 40 times more olfactory neurons or they have a much better intuitive sense of our intuitive immediate world. Nature may have limited our immediate intuitive sense but given us tools to build our intuition with other bits of data.
Agreed, dogs can't smell dark matter or curves in spacetime. But our observations and models can indirectly detect their presence.
Ha Ha, i wonder what dogs make of it all.
@@xtrofilm They have dogmas
My dog has got more than 40 sniffing neurons than me thats for sure reality.
Why is reality a "theological" notion?
Reality exists, but for humans it will always be tainted by our interpretation (thoughts), and limited by the scope of our senses
When it comes down to it, reality seems to be math after all. That's the only thing not changing between perspectives.
Then again maybe math is just the most accurate language we discovered facilitating the description of reality in a sense.
‘Math’ is better described as Algebracadabra - When you realise that there is only one thing in existence..
spaceandmotion
wave structure of matter
Irrational belief whether true or not, reality or not, has been a motivating force. Humans need to be motivated to achieve anything. If we stop lying to ourselves, will we still achieve? AI doesn't need truth to achieve, until it evolves to need it's own self-delusion and it invents it's own concept of truth.
There is no truth. There is only observation and response.
Mr Philosopher, switch your focus to study human senses physical range, some physics, and maybe you will see that we have abandoned God due to propaganda not reality. For me God is a whole reality, this within and outside our sensors range and understanding.
You are welcome to include God in 'your reality'.
However, it is better to include concepts that have some supporting evidence into your reality.
About 200 years ago most people saw the world like you, even the intelletual class. But that ship has sailed unfortunately, and there is no restoring the past. History is filled with attempts at restoration, they all inevitably fail
I agree. As much as the lemmings use "Galileo And The Church" to support the false science over religion. Truth is organized science would not exist without organized religion first.
@@isaac1572 point me to some. as far as I know, deeper scientists are digging, more doubts they have into present concepts. many talk about 'God' or god-like force again. thing is science makes hidden leaps of faith, (like one with primordial soup) and nobody really cares
@@marcodallolio9746 True words, comrade!
His proposal isn’t real.
The God you think in mind is dead
This guy is everything that's wrong with the culture lol
Seems irrefutable.
"what we replaced god with is... reality" Hahaha so true, sad that so many people still choose religion over REALITY in 2023
No we replaced it with a belief in scientists and science. It’s still a belief system. We don’t know anything for sure, and even many scientific “facts” are shown to be false later
It’s the STRENGTH of science that it doesn’t claim absolute truth like region does. It doesn’t claim to be “reality”. It claims to be our best predictive theory about reality, and it acknowledges that it is almost certainly wrong to some extent, and that we need to constantly work to improve it.
Science doesn’t claim “this is the truth and that’s it”. That would be the antithesis of science.
@@spaceowl5957 ew, stop comparing religion to science, ew ew ew