It almost makes me cry how much I love and respect Chomsky. All these questions I struggle with, he so easily explains them with facts and examples. He's brought so much light to my dark world.
@@graemevp4523 Nope. He's really not. The only conspiracy I've ever heard him mention is that corporations conspire to affect government policy - a view for which he provides lots of evidence.
I don't think Chomsky really explains anything in depth here. Can you explain to me how he proves the existence of "free will" beyond the illusion of "free will"?
Chomsky always busy trying to make sense of things instead of criticizing other thinkers. That’s just another remarkable characteristic of this inspiring human being. BTW, in terms of this specific issue, Chomsky was clear (here and elsewhere): the thing is that some aspects of reality seem to be unintuitive to our senses (take the quantum world as a paradigm); it is NOT that our theories about them are unintuitive by definition, it is just that some aspects of the world may not be opened to human understanding as they would be if we were packed with other sensorial organs, different brain cells and, perhaps, different neurocomputational processes.
We are not limited by our senses(body). Thats why we have tools. As long as we can detect a phenomenon by our senses or by tools we can come to understand that phenomenon.
Chomsky doesn't criticize other thinkers? Are you nuts? The only thinkers he praises are ones who praise him (Finkelstein, for example). Chomsky is a Marxist charlatan. His beloved Anarchy will destroy the world.
@@captainbeefheart5815 Dennett doesn't even understand that "strong emergence" is a strictly empty non-concept utterly devoid of semantic content and does exactly zero explanatory work.
Dennett thinks it's impossible to pose any question with an answer that lies beyond the capacity of humans to comprehend? What an awful example of a philosopher.
Chomsky is also arrogant and condescending when it comes to his critique of physicists, for no reason. Don’t be a bild fanboy. Appreciate and admire all the good he has achieved and said, but understand the fact that even he can be an arrogant humanist and throw reason out of the window in certain topics.
@@RP-ch8yn I was just listening to a talk where he was taking about how honest of a field physics is because your lies will be so easily disproven in a manner impossible in so many other fields. Sounded like a compliment to me. Can you point me to this criticism? Is this from the sit down with Lawrence Krauss he did?
@@RP-ch8yn Huh?! Never heard him criticise Physicists in this video or elsewhere. In fact he's been accused of "physics worship" i.e. as seeing it as the paragon for all rational enquiry
@@jjdemaioI’ve been a Chomsky fan for over a decade and he seems to me to have adopted a very judgmental, ivory tower attitude towards some intellectuals/scientists. I can’t tell when he adopted that attitude (and it probably has to do with certain negative life experiences), but it shows in his opinion of Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, and Steven Pinker.
Plato, Descartes, and Chomsky address epistemology and ontology- the nature of thought and the symbol. Plato proposes that our works are thrice removed from the truth of form. Dennett is a positivist - what you see is what there is. Descartes put in motion our Western critical thinking with the example if the ball of wax. The wax appears to be a solid. The positivist would conclude that the wax must be a solid because it looks solid. Descartes applies heat to the wax causing it to become a liquid. Dennett's positivism reaches a roadblock. We are taught by Descartes to explore the nature of things. Chomsky critically examines and tests the limits of our assumed reasoning methods not unlike Plato, Descartes, St. Augustine, Dante, Marx, etc.
We don't know what questions we don't know to ask, but that doesn't mean that we couldn't ask them if we had reason to do so. The limit of human understanding about the universe is likely limited by what can be tested and not what can be conceived.
I take your point, but does the fact that we are aware of our limitations not, in a sense, make us "all-knowing" and therefore the fish analogy breaks down?
I don't get Dennett's position - natural language can be shown to be insufficient in its ability to prove all potential statements in a rich enough system (as per Godel)... so that immediately eliminates natural language (and mathematics as well). So, what is left? Intuition falls well short of satisfying what it means to "understand" something - worse, as Chomsky states, much of what we understand is abstracted out of "reality" and converted into theorems.
What Godel proved is that the perception of consistency is completeness. Since perceptions can always be had anew, no axioms or even a complete historical enumeration of events can suffice to contain the attributive quality of perception. This makes perception identical to causality, since attribution and perception are identical with respect to completeness. Perception doesn't eliminate natural language & math, but implicates the inclusion of "reflexive self processing" and "self duality" as extensions of mathematical logic required to scientifically model reality, extensions effectively identical to perception as elements implicated in primordial causality. See Chris Langan's CTMU & Introduction to Mathematical Logic for details.
@xxxYYZxxx, wow, I can't tell if that's just word salad or some seriously technical stuff, but I'm guessing very few around here would have a clue what it meant. @Roberto Toscano, I was thinking the same until I heard Dennett talk about reading libraries of books and getting some understanding of an answer. I'm not sure he's right, but this idea of having some inkling of an answer is different, I think, from the sort of thing that Godel excludes, which relies on absolute proof, truth or falsehood, of a set of propositions. In fact, this is pretty much how most of our knowledge already is - scientific knowedge is probabilistic. It would be insane to say that we don't have some understanding of gravity, for instance, but we haven't a clue about its fundamental properties, and most of what we know is predictive or mathematical/propositional models, like curved spacetime or gravity as a form of acceleration. I'd go further, the more answers we have the more questions they tend to raise. So, for me, the question the person asked doesn't have a simple answer, and it will depend greatly on how we define terms.
This short excerpt does not really capture Dennett's position which he covers in detail in his books. Dennett does not deny that there may be some things beyond human understanding but he resists jumping to the conclusion that difficult concepts like consciousness and free will are in the "too hard" basket. Chomsky suggests free will may be in the two hard basket - although he is not categorical about it. To me Chomsky's point of view hinges on his statement that he thinks it is "fruitful" to recognise that some things are beyond our limited capabilities. This seems illogical. Surely this can only lead to giving up on problems that are just hard, but not impossible - reducing the fruit of human enquiry?
Two very respectable intellectuals! I love both of these guys. Regardless of your scientific or philosophical views, you can learn a lot from both of them.
I would not be too harsh on the guy. Dennet has very often deep insights and a sharp judgement. I don't understand why insists on 2 ridiculous claims: 1) that if you can formulate the question you must be able, at least in principle, to get the answer (however at a point he admits we have limits, so I could be misinterpreting him) 2) consciousness is an illusion (how can an unconscious being have an illusion, which is a subjective experience?) For the rest, I think he's a very good philosopher.
He's arguing against Chimsky's statement that we do indeed have limits. There's no reason to think there are limits to our potential understanding. Of course there might be limits, but to assume there are is making an assumption based off no evidence.
@@ggg148g 2) is false, Dan isn't stating illusion in this way. As per Dennett, you really have subjective experiences, but they are not what you think they are. Its like magician's trick with cards, it looks like the card is teleporting but in fact, it is not. So, what happens really, for Dennett, is a bunch of underlying brain processes with no "real magic" involved.
@@sergiootero5904 Dennet denies the possibility that humans are not able to answer a question that we raised ourselves. I think that's ridicolous because I have lots of examples of questions I can raise myself but I can't possibly answer. This said, he's a great philosopher anyway.
@@mac1414 the question is not the existence of the subjective experience, no reasonable person can deny it. Dennet is a good philosopher, he knows it. The question is whether subjective experience requires a special explanation, in addition to the "easy" questions on how the brain does what it does. I dare to disagree on this with a renowned philosopher like Dennet, also because he's not able to provide, as far as I know, convincing metaphors to support the alleged vacuity of the hard problem. No magic trick would impress anybody, no successions of pixel colors on a screen could be lived as real events, if there were no conscious beings observing those things, and if their consciousness were not something special deserving a special explanation.
Saying we can't understand something is saying we know all the things we could understand . Saying we can understand something is saying we know all the things we can't understand . Saying there is possibility of knowing something is saying we know all impossible things of our understanding .
The thing is that I know what is consciences? And many others do, but the language of interpreting this idea in particular is not conveyed efficiently, and I tried a lot and finally you'll reach a point in whatever field you're in and that is, you'll find the majority of people understand speaking correctly about some kind of science but not understanding its "essence", and you can trace that by asking an enormous amount of questions until you find that ERROR, so they came up with horrible mistakes, and it is very hard to clarify that error, it's like you have a PC without the processing capability of a certain rare task, it will do all the amazing things you want and worldwide, it'll be recognized as a world-class PC, but still not understand your command of that rare task. And all of that, again assures the limits of language and the scary limits of understanding. There's a quote, I don't remember who said it but it was like : I can talk to you about my understanding of a phenomenon but I can NOT give you my understanding of it.
lmao...communication takes on all kinds of forms....Consciousness isn't some one off phenomena. It's literally what governs the universe. that's what language is about in this reality.
Saying that there must be a trajectory through "bookland" that will make you understand any given thing is similar to saying that even if you don't speak Chinese or Arabic, it must be possible to write a book in Arabic that will make you understand Chinese.
Saying that there is a trajectory through "bookland" is saying that everything is ultimately reducible to concepts that can be communicated. For your example, I imagine that Dennett would say that it is certainly possible to write a book in Arabic to help you understand Chinese because it is possible to write a book in English to help you understand Arabic.
So there might be questions that we CANNOT understand, but that we therefore do not have to bother about? Does the understanding of a question guarantee that we can answer it? (Dennett seems to presuppose that. The dog cannot understand questions about democracy, so it cannot get any answers. We can understand questions about free will and consciousness, so we can get the answers)
It weird to me to think that humans have no limits, and it's even weirder that people would argue that people don't have limits. To me the fact that people would argue against limits establishes a relationship to an empirical biological limits that we do have, limits and that there might be a biological spectrum of behavior that allows sense of self or theory of mind to be that selfish, or self centered, or hopeful, meaning self awareness and self centered-ness have emotional conflict, is a biological trait, which kinda proves what Chompsky says, people go crazy when they have to think about themselves, they lose all reason.
It seems self evident that Chomsky is correct. It also seems self evident that we have no choice but to proceed as if Dennett was correct and just hope for the best.
That pertains to psychology. Nothing wrong with that. But Chomsksy does not deal in psychology -- except to indoctrinate his followers with false ideology of Marxist anarchy, which is insane.
“… what’s beyond the limits? And we have some examples. Plausible examples, and there may be many others. And I think that’s a fertile direction to explore.” What examples beyond the limits? What’s an example of that direction to explore? How could a biology experiment be set up to even find how free will operates?
Saying we can't understand something assumes you know all the things we can understand. I disagree , it only assumes what it asserts : that we can't understand some things . It means assuming knowing all the things we can understand regarding specific topic , not all things in reality . To make example , i can say we will never bulid buildings that float in sky , it only assumes knowing that in engeneering we will never have such knowledge , it doesn't assume babies will or will not be born , nuclear war can't happen etc .But let's go for topic argument and say it is what that ment . I would put tht argument on it's head and say : it is lack of humility to say we will understand everything , because it assumes we have no lack of understanding of reality .Saying we can know something also assumes you know all the things we could understand . Saying there is possibility of knowing something also assumes we know all the things we could understand because we assume we have knowledge on all possibilities . Whatever person argues it is with same outcome : 1) saying p thus x where p is ( knowing all things we can understand ) and x( we can't understand something, we can understand something , there is possibility of understanding something) . If you want to go down that path you would have to say : we don't know something we can't understand , we don't know something we can understand and we don't know there is possibility of understanding . Anything else is the same in all 3 examples : we are saying we know all things we could understand so we say something won't happen ( because we know all the things that will) , something will happen ( because we know all the things that will and will not happen so that something happens ), something might happen ( we know that all the things that are impossibe to happen so we know something is possible )
If there are types of understanding that are impossible, shouldn't the debate at least be about defining the types of problem you can't develop an understanding of.
I think that a problem here is that they are actually making two different points, but neither is being clear as to what the difference is. Mind you, considering that they are not directly debating with each other, perhaps that is not surprising. The difference is brought out by Chomsky's example of the prime number maze being "a total mystery" to rats. It is not a mystery, in Dennett's sense, to the rat, because the rat can't even ask the question to which it can't find the answer. There might be phenomena that humans will never understand because we can't even ask the question. It is the difference between "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns". Then again, you might have "known unknowables" and "unknowable unknowables". And does the fact that we are aware of our own limitations make us, in a sense, all-knowing? Oh, my head hurts!
"And does the fact that we are aware of our own limitations make us, in a sense, all-knowing? Oh, my head hurts!" In my mind, that's the only way we'll ever create a theory of everything.
Chompsky immediately discredits himself by claiming infinite training would never help a rat complete a prime number maze. He can’t possibly prove that.
@@NickHolum Correct. For some reason Chomsky can’t accept all of human thoughts and experiences are simply the playing out of the laws of chemistry and physics. I think that his political philosophy might explain his reluctance to accept that we can’t have free will. His assertion that people who write books theorising that free will does not exist thereby disprove their own theory is wrong. Human beings are programmed by their DNA to be curious because it helps them survive in the world and the intuitive feeling of free will is no more than a feeling. It’s like the feeling of pain or fear or the sensation of colour or sound. - a construction of the human brain.
The meaning of the question "what is consciousness?" is not transparent to me - I don't clearly understand it. It seems that the disagreement hinges on what we mean by *understanding*
Dennetts first argument was just completly wrong, Chomsky used the example of rats not being able to do a prime number maze, not that rats and monkeys can't understand democracy. The rats he referred to were shown through experiment to not understand the concept of the prime number maze, Chomsky then made the deduction, like any good sceintist would, that the limits of knowledge is species oriented, and that human beings 'could possibly' have the same limits in another form.
Go back and listen to Chomsky. "...Newton demonstrated that there are no machines, nothing works by mechanical principles...And he's right..." -- Chomsky (around 6:45) Chomsky confuses two questions, limits of understanding IN GENERAL and limits of HUMAN understanding. Before this he pointed out that the early scientists held that the world was a machine, and to "understand" or "explain" any phenomenon is to reduce it to a machine. This is his working definition of understanding. What he says following this is what I quoted. That is, Newton showed (and he agrees but doesn't show how Newton showed) that world is not a machine and thus fundamentally unintelligible to us or any mind for that matter. The example of the rat is irrelevant to the question of understanding IN GENERAL. Chomsky is just rambling here if you ask me.
@@a46475 "Chomsky confuses two questions, limits of understanding IN GENERAL and limits of HUMAN understanding." what is the distinction between these two in your mind? I see no distinction.
Huh?! Dude Dennett wasn't purporting to state Chomsky's position verbatim. He was just giving a flavour of it. Dennett may never have heard Chomsky give his position with the rat example
The limits of our understanding are expanding, that is to say, what we once thought were limitations are no longer. We exist in time, so the limitations of the present define us. When we cast ourselves mentally into the future we open doors into realms that may or may not have any basis in reality, but it often seems of late that reality is expanding and catching up with our ability to imagine. Reality and imagination may be synonymous some day in the future.
That's not what the limits of our understanding is though. That's just our current understanding vs future understanding. What chomsky is saying is that it is highly likely there are things we will never truly understand. This is pretty much true when we look at things like quantum mechanics. We can observe the behaviours but as the saying goes if you say you understand quantum mechanics, you do not understand quantum mechanics. It is truly unintelligible as to why they behave that way and as such is a mystery to human understanding. We can see and predict with great accuracy but understanding is another thing entirely.
@@robertpirsig5011 Chomsky gave the example of Martians that can see a concept of something that we're incapable of seeing. What I'm saying is that humans are evolving and we won't be what we are now in a hypothetical future where we're changing radically and at a pace which is thousands of times faster than natural evolution. What we now regard as essentially human may be seen as antiquated or incompatible with the social realities of civilization centuries hence. We have no basis for assuming our limitations will remain if we can't assume that we (humanity as it exists now) will remain.
Chomsky's best argument BY FAR: without limits you can't have scope. Its funny that chomsky's point about the relation of limits and scope is just never dealt with. It's irrefutable so it just gets ignored despite the fact that Dennett loves to invoke Bertrand Russel who wrote a book literally called "Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits". Dennet is kind of dumb here. There's basically no argument given, he just calls "bizarre" the idea that we could formulate questions we couldn't answer. Well I don't think its bizarre and I've given just as much evidence. Krauss is just dumb - saying there are things we can't understand is OBVIOUSLY A MUCH, MUCH more reserved prediction than the idea that our capacity for understanding is literally unbounded (and saying there are things humans can't understand doesn't entail knowing everything they can). Dennett even throws in "now of course there could be limits" almost as if it doesn't undermine his entire premise. That's bizarre. It just goes to show that most intellectuals are no smarter than a carpenter, chef, mechanic, or sales clerk. Other than a handful of truly special intellects most intellectuals are just more pompous morons who flatter the right people (Quine in Dennett's case). What's the difference between saying chomsky is an asshole and "chomsky is a new mysterion who likes mysteries" - the first is just invective while the latter is an outright lie. But outright lies are perfectly acceptable in the academy.
REvisiting this video after a few years, I think Dennett is even more obtuse that I did before. I almost laughed out loud when he suggested a dichotomy between biology and "mysticism," as though biology is just another word for "Truth." Here's an arguent against Dennett, from Kant: If we look at something, we may judge it to be the product of deliberate manufacture to some end (a teleological judgment), or we may judge it as something that emerged from the blind forces of nature (a non teleological judgment). But if we judge it one way we are precluding ourselves from judging it the other way. So there is an antinomy of these two modes of judgment. Yet they must relate to each other through some over arching principle, otherwise they couldn't enter into the same survey of Nature. What is that overarching principle? Who knows? It may be beyond human capacity to understand, yet that does not mean we cannot infer its existence. But if we want to get at the thing itself, it's beyond us.
This is a mix of the Dunning-Kruger effect in effect... combined with Dennets limit of understanding. Actually rather funny, that he sets it up like this.
The limits of natural science, though, are defined by the limits of our understanding. Unless you're talking about non-human beings doing science, that is.
Dennett does not understand that "infinite" is different from "everything". Chomsky says that language can generate "infinite" elements, like the decimal numbers between 1 and 2 which do not include 3. So the fact that we can generate infinite thoughts has nothing to do whatsoever with the question of whether we can understand all the mysteries of nature. We generate thoughts and sentences within the limits of our human nature. I cannot understand how some people can take Dennett seriously. He seems embarrassingly stupid to me.
I still don't get why modern scientists keep trying to know everything. As Chomsky says, there has to be a limit, and that limit is science itself. If we could know everything, then how would we find life interesting? And of course in this pursuit we fail to criticize science, like he who complains of others instead of looking at himself and get better. I think we're in the adolescence of human existence, and that's why we act so recklessly.
Is there some kind of cosmic contract that humans must find life interesting? Lol… besides who says that understanding everything would be disinteresting?
I'm aware this may be a stupid question. There are many things I can choose or not choose to do e.g. kiss a girl or a man, but how many of that choice are not influenced by the culture I have internalised?
@@stevenhines5550 -- You are correct. And regarding Hinduism, our dialogue here -- you and me going back-and-forth in the comments -- is a manifestation of "The Maya," a/k/a, The World Game, The Illusion, The Magic. It's always Now. Call it "reality," or call it "the mind," it really doesn't matter. I think Alan Watts' description, "This Is It," are the English words that come closest to describing The Ultimate Reality. But maybe the Taoist "description": "That which can't be named" is more apt.
@@Unfamous_Buddha I'm just learning about it from Shunyamurti and Sarvapriyananda. I haven't read the Vedas or the Gita. My friend is encouraging me to read Yogananda's autobiography. I'm interested in your comments about maya...I think I get it but this ride is as much about understanding as it is about meditation so I'd like to learn more.
@@stevenhines5550 -- In the 60s, I read two Alan Watts' books. "This Is It," and "The Two Hands of God." The "The Two Hands of God" was about Hindu thought and how that the so-called "gods" in Hindu myth were just manifestations of our own minds (or self). "This Is It" was a collection of essays regarding cosmic consciousness via Buddhism, Taoism, Zen and Hinduism. If it wasn't for those books I don't think I would have gotten "IT."
Why does Dennett get any public exposure. His explanation of consciousness completely misses the point and he always comes off sounding arrogant and condescending. Chomsky towers above him intellectually and Dennett knows it. Arrogance and condescension is how he tries to compensate. He fails pathetically.
This pursuit of the all knowing truth is fine but no guarantee we will be better, look at all the progression we have now and we are still warring, murdering, causing huge suffering to ourselves and the planet.
I think Dennett misses the point when he says, 'humans have language', where other creatures don't. His point being - I think - that because we have language and therefore books we can gain, share, and build upon some knowledge edifice which will eventually take us to all things - an intellectual Tower of Babel. But just like we have language (human thought), rats can run mazes. They just can't run prime number mazes - and here's the key - NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU TRAIN THEM. So, just like they are biological organisms with scope and limits, so are we. We have human thought with incredible scope (as compared to the organisms we know of), but with scope comes limits - by definition. So, unless we're unique in all of nature, we too have limits. And, there are probably things we can't do no matter how many books we write or how many people tackle it.
Newton had to reluctantly give up the mechanistic doctrine because of the "action at a distance" (gravity); Einstein opposed the "spooky action at a distance" (quantum entanglement), but recent work in experimental physics shows that he was wrong (return to "occult forces"); quantum mechanics, although incomprehensible and utterly mysterious, is undoubtedly the most robust theory in the history of science; current physical theories, unlike previous ones, although more predictive, have less explanatory power, and hence, do not give us a deeper understanding of the world; the holographic principle, which states that there is an unexplained (mysterious?) relationship between the geometry of space-time (topology) and information; the cosmological constant (Λ), which is so finely tuned that it leads some physicists to abandon the Copernican principle; several physicists today claim that space-time is doomed; Gödel's incompleteness theorems, revisited by the algorithmic theory of information, have as a consequence that almost all mathematical facts escape reason (see Gödel, Chaitin, Calude); Turing's discovery that most problems are uncomputable; etc. No wonder that ignorabimus has become fashionable again. It makes us want to re-examine our usual assumptions about the comprehensibility of the world, or lack thereof, and question one of Einstein's most famous quotes: "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." Today science and mathematics have consequences which many find perplexing. Personally, what I find the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it seems incomprehensible.
We can't understand how 1) the Universe can have emerged out of Nothing or 2) how it could have always existed without beginning -- no matter how hard we try. And I'm not sure it has to do with quantity of brain power. It seems our system of logic is not of the type to cope with this problem
Dennett's logical fallacies and flaws are shocking. I remember sitting one evening with a friend, smoking a joint, and watching some roundtable discussion with Dennett, Gould, Freeman and Rupert Sheldrake, a couple others, and then a moderator. My friend is wicked smart, with an advanced degree. I'm nobody. After listening to Dennett and Gould bloviate like total assholes for 15 minutes I turned to my buddy and said "these guys are charlatans, the only one who is even talking about science is Sheldrake". Wouldn't you know, Dennett and Gould were arrogantly dismissing everything Sheldrake proposed - just exactly the way Dennett just dismissed Chomsky in this little video. Notice, crucially, Dennett makes absolutely zero reference to science, the scientific method, the philosophy of science, the history of science or anything else remotely related to science. He simply bloviates as ever. Compare to Chomsky. Chomsky STARTS his answer by referencing a simple maze experiment with rats to illustrate his point. Dennett is just posturing. He is implying he is above method; that he can simply hold forth without reference to science and call it obvious.
I've seen that roundtable. It was interesting to me that the one genius at the table (Freeman Dyson) was the quietest Yeah I've no Idea what Dennett is for. He doesn't really do straight analytic philosophy. There's very little in his work that is straight "where do we get to with these assumptions plus straight logic". It's all kind of hand wavy and suggestive and patronising analogies all the time. I had a Philosophy encyclopedia once upon a time and he was in it. It was said that he, alone among philosophers, had engaged deeply with neuroscientists, AI experts etc and was now in a position to explain consciousness. Garbage!
Godell's incompleteness theorem (the first one) states that for any expressive enough language with a countable set of names and there is a continuum of true statements and only a countable ways of proving which ones are true and which ones are false. The contrast is between two different orders of infinity. No where is the expansion of human intelligence claimed to be bounded like Dennett seems to imply.
This reminds me of the question, "Is there a god?" How can we know? To think otherwise is pure speculation. It could be used as an argument for something greater than us. God?
Can't believe he does not grasp the notion that an infitine set (like language) does not necessarely contains everething. He even tries to make fun of Chomsky while in the process making a fool of himself. :p
why vs? They are saying the same thing! in the same spectrum, just one is trying to defend against the argument that "we will never get it..." the other trying to defend against the argument that "we will know it all..." but both talking in the same spectrum
The rat example is a fundamentaly flawed argument. The knowledge of prime numbers might have taken humans centuries if not millenia to discover. Not to mention prior knowledge that leads to prime numbers(division, Base 10 number system, ten finger counting). For a rat to understand prime number mazes it must have use of prior knowledge to even have a chance at prime numbers. In short it's like judging a rats natural abilities against knowledge that took us thousands of years to understand. This is not everything he said but you can apply the same way of thinking to most of his examples. Free will debate, really!? In this age where we can see the brain making a decision before the individual is aware of it.
The idea presented (and at least provisionally rejected, to his partial credit) by Dennett @ 2:04, that certain answers can't be had for reasonable questions, presumes reality is decidedly not a logical system, and that its operations can't be verified in a straightforward manner amounting to the scientific method. If such a refutation of logic is true, then it's a self-referencing paradox for it to hold in a non-logical system. In effect it would confer a psychological "messiah" status on its believer, as what else could explain the coincidence of its truth in the absence of a logically straightforward reality. Chomsky's apparent confusion @ 5:23 over something as simple as "the interaction of objects" admits of confusion (intentional or genuine?) over the equivalence of attribution (perception) and causality, an equivalence long since proven by quantum mechanics. What is the cause of Chomsky being an expert on anything if he's correct, ie that the world is not intelligible? He can't say what it is, since "perception" is simultaneously the basis of his authority, and the cat he can't let out of the bag as the very causality he can't seem to wrap his mind around.
Let me get this straight, in a comment section of a video featuring NOAM CHOMSKY & DAN DENNETT, you're claiming that I'm a "post modernist bullshitter" (to paraphrase), and that NOAM CHOMSKY & DAN DENNETT are what, straightforward and rational? The very notion that answers to reasonable questions can't be found in principle (and not for lack of trying or primitive technology, or because the answers are on the dark side of a moon in another galaxy, etc), is a positive statement that reality is NOT a logically coordinated system, ie one whereby any and all aspects are equivalent to PERCEPTION (theory, model, observation, confirmation). The sheer stupidity promoted by such a notion is beyond words to describe, which is why any criticism of these fools seems like BS to folks who think Dennett & Chomsky are on to something. These guys are posing as scientists and preaching irrationality. Dennett seems genuinely confused and possibly harmless, but Chomsky seems genuinely clueless and hence his popularity as the premier gatekeeper for the scholarly elite and every pretentious wannabe.
Just because something can be represented with a question mark in English does not mean it is a question in the logical sense. Your statement is only true for formal and self consistent systems, but natural language is not this. If I ask "how does the world work?", this looks like a logical question, but it's actually not at all, and that becomes obvious when you ask "what is the world"?
Chomsky's part is expanded on in "The machine, the ghost, and the limits of understanding", if you want to listen to the rest. IMO, Chomsky takes the ironic stance of refuting his own position in order to demonstrate his point, although the refutation is limited. In other words, he does show that humans are limited, but our limit comes from our desire to wish that things were some other way than what we conclude they must be. The free will debate is the ultimate expression of this. It is very satisfying to hear him express the exact free will paradox I've thought about in my own head for years: everything must be random or pre-determined (or random within pre-determined limits). There's no conceivable in-between. And yet, he denies the obvious conclusion: free will cannot be what most people conceive of it. Instead, he just asserts that "nobody really believes free will is an illusion. ... there just must 'really' be an explanation out there that we just can't understand (like rats can't understand prime numbers)...(maybe)". Well, I have no problem with the "maybe" part, but that borders on inaction. There is even an obvious way to proceed, and to suggest that our inability to properly define free will as most people "feel" it should be defined just means that we are emotionally attached to some imagery, sensory or emotional experience, or otherwise incoherent concept which has no actual bearing on what "free will" really means. Thus, we are left with the functionalistic obligation to simply redefine free will in terms of social responsibility or accountability or some other such idea. And what's wrong with that? Thus, free will exists, even if everything is random within pre-determined limits. There's no contradiction if you just properly and objectively define free will. This isn't just some abstract point, either, but has real bearings on our social dynamics, which is why if I were to dialogue with Chomsky I'd try to win him over to this point. The fact that free will, for instance, can only be meaningfully grasped in terms of randomness within deterministic limits means that our social policies should be geared with this in mind. Punishment merely for the satisfaction of the wronged against the transgressor should be recognized as nothing more than hedonism, and our social mores, folkways and morals/ethics should be geared within all this in mind and in proportion to the violations committed with specific goals in mind. They should not be based on some abstract notion of "accountability of free agents" but rather on the recognition that people have free will and yet their actions are logically necessarily explicable by things out of their control. And yet, just as I said above, humans are emotional (illogical) creatures. We have an area of the brain or a function of the brain that reasons, and we have another area or function that is baseless and emotional, and causes us to obscure the obvious conclusions. And in fact, much of our pleasure and meaning in life comes from the exercise of the latter. So we don't delete our human nature; we just must find the proper synthesis of the two realms for our continued survival. So again, to recapitulate, Chomsky asserts humans may be biologically limited, like rats are regarding prime numbers, and tries to give the analogy of our understanding of free will as a possible parallel. He suggests it may be the case that the so called "free will dilemma" is simply a biologically incomprehensible problem for humans, rather than simply accepting the obvious conclusion that free will is basically misconstrued by most people. He does this for an obvious reason: he is personally (emotionally) uncomfortable with the idea that free will is somehow controlled by other things. He just wants to go with some incoherent notion of free will and call it "unintelligible", rather than accept the obvious conclusion. In the end, it could very well be the case that humans have biological limitations in terms of their comprehension of the universe. However, we would never know if this were actually the case or if it was the case that no organism could possibly understand certain problems even in principle. Rather than suggesting: "It's as if there are questions we will never be able to know the answer to," it's more like (as Dennet says here): "Asking questions does not lead to any real understanding at all, period (whatever 'real understanding' means)". Or it could be that everything will be explained, and in way that humans can grasp. I see no reason to accept or reject any one of these suggestions. I actually have my personal views on things like "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and don't consider that a particularly difficult question to answer. Due to that fact, I don't think the idea of "brute facts" necessarily is a problem, so I'm not necessarily sympathetic to Chomsky's position.
Gotta go with chomsky on this one, dennets argument is incredibly weak and simple. What about the things we dont know or understand the questions to? we have senses that are clearly limited, what about things out of our senses reach?
@@carlosandres7006 I never said that I didn't make decisions. It's all me. I'm very determined in my impulses. I'm also very willful. I have lots of will. Freedom, though... Free from what???
Wow, I've only been seriously thinking about free will for about three months and I have a strong feeling I already understand it better than Chomsky. It's irrational to say that people who say there isn't any free will must still "believe" in it, or why did they write a book about it? If there were no free will, once they realised this, they had to write a book about it (given all the other causal conditions). We have all sorts of secondary delusions about what it would mean if we didn't have free will. Check out 'Trick Slattery, Breaking the Free Will Illusion, for a great introduction.
Actually in another speech he says that what you are saying is the only alternative ie to say well I can’t help but give this talk about the absence of free will because there is no free will. Got good laughs too actually
It seems self evident that there are limits to understanding, as much as I can empathize with you, I cannot know what it feels like to be you, or your dog, or cat. Part of the reason there are limits to understanding is that we cannot really be certain of anything, all we can say with any reasonable certainty is that what has happened in the past gives a good indication of what will happen in the future.
Can someone explain on what basis Chomsky asserts "Newton demonstrated that there are no machines. Nothing works by mechanical principles"? (th-cam.com/video/zc-AX4C7KRg/w-d-xo.html) I, admittedly with very little knowledge of Newton, thought that Newtonian physics did pretty much the opposite? I would have thought Hume would have been a better authority?
Well, you didn’t think Chomsky was saying that there literally are no machines, as in pendulum clocks and steam engines don’t exist, right? Gravity is a big part of the universe, and can’t be explained in mechanical terms. That means that the universe (seemingly) doesn’t work like a machine.
Thx. I'd never heard anything like this, so I wasn't sure of he was "channelling" Hume wrt cause and effect which would undermine the notion of a machine or whether he was referring to something else. From what you are saying it would seem to be something else - but I'm still not quite sure what Newton is saying. So could you explain how it would relate to, say, a pendulum. Is it something like, it's behaviour is predictable, yet because gravity is involved, it can't be mechanistic because we haven't been able to identify all the mechanisms involved?
This caught me by surprise too, he has a habit of saying mind bending things. I'm fairly ignorant of the topic too, but isn't he just referring to the lack of a tangible, visible mechanism explaining the universe? For example, we have a model for gravity that works well and agrees with our intuition, but apart from referring to gravitational fields we can't demonstrate what gravity or the gravitational field actually is, we can only point to the effects that we see. In a sense these concepts become axiomatic in the framework of physics.
It's really telling how robust and multifaceted Chomskys response is compared with Dennetts. He draws analogies and parallels to similar problems that are so enlightening that shed much light in a difficult question. I do like Dennett too and consider him to be fairly sharp intellectual, but Chomsky is a once in a lifetime intellect. I often crave his wisdom. I realise this is abit sucky but I don't care, easily for me one of the most influential people I have ever listened to.
More seriously, Dennett here is obviously incoherent. He essentially concedes Chomsky's position by the end, but treats his audience to a meandering and confused preamble.
It is clear that more intelligent people comprehend things others struggle to grasp, and so it would be strange not to think that scale can continue beyond human intelligence. I'm struck, though, by Newton's Statement, "There are no machines". What on earth did he mean by that? I've taken a fair amount of science, and I don't see what he's trying to explain.
Sean Ryan What Newton proved is that the World/Universe cannot be explained by mechanical principles (contact action). Gravity, for example, can't be explained by contact action - something striking against something else along a chain of causality. And yet with gravity there is interaction without contact. But we don't know how this works. May never know. Thus Newton showed the imperfection of the mechanical philosophy as being unable to explain such phenomena. It seems to me Chomsky is right simply on point of logic: that there must be a scope and limit to our cognitive capacities as a consequence of our genetic endowment. For me, if we accept scope and limits to our understanding, then this means there must - by definition - be (I believe) concepts, entities, etc, of an existential nature which we simply cannot perceive.
Thanks, got it. In my worldview, the prohibition against "action at a distance" in some way survives until quantum mechanics (if you view space-time as a thing, and fields as properties of it). I was focused more on determinism, though, which I also understand to survive at least until quantum mechanics.
As far as the limits of cognitive capacity, I point to the Turing machine, which is logically equivalent to every other computer. The difference between what it and my desktop PC can accomplish correspond to differences in calculation speed and memory. It stands to reason that the cognitive capacities of humans are, in practical terms, limited by the same concerns. We could understand anything, with sufficiently augmented memory, if we had the time. But neither time nor working memory may be sufficiently available as to make understanding of a given problem practical (or possible in a human lifetime). Humans additionally have the problem of attention span - it's psychologically prohibitively difficult to invest all our minds in understanding that doesn't provide sufficient gratification along the way.
@@adder257 The existence of the Turing Machine actually illustrates the opposite of what you imply. Firstly, a Turing machine has an infinite tape, so there's no memory limitation in that sense. It does however have a memory limitation in the sense of its limited transition table, so you are correct to say that a Turing machine is limited by its memory and processing speed; but these are only practical limitations, not fundamental ones. However, the Turing machine is fundamentally limited by its architecture. You see, the Turing machine sits at the top of the Chomsky hierarchy, which is a hierarchy of grammars and their corresponding physical realisations. Regular languages are physically realised by finite state machines, context free languages are physically realised by push down automata and decidable languages are physically realised by Turing machines. The key point about the Chomsky Hierachy is that no matter how much memory or processing speed increases you give a finite state machine, it will, in principal, never be able to recognise context free languages; and no matter how much memory or processing speed increases you give a push down automata, it will never be able to recognise decidable languages. Similarly, while a Turing machine can brute force its way to emulating some aspects of human computation, like with alpha go, it's fairly clear now that its architecture fundamentally limits it from replicating all forms of the human mind. So we can then put the human mind in its own tier that sits above the Turing machine. At this point I've shown that physical architecture applies computational limits that can not be overcome by processing and memory increases; but I have not shown that the human mind is a realisation of a physical architecture. But that's when biology comes into the argument: as far as we know, the human mind has physical limitations, and therefore by the first argument, has computational limitations. Of course, the human mind could be infinitely malleable, and effectively be a metaphysical object; but that's really what you'd have to show to show that the human mind has no computational limits.
@@MassDefibrillator The Turing machine as a hypothetical concept doesn't exist, so I limited myself to speaking of functional approximations of it. Yes, architectures can fundamentally limit what a machine can do. However, I haven't seen evidence of this yet: "Similarly, while a Turing machine can brute force its way to emulating some aspects of human computation, like with alpha go, it's fairly clear now that its architecture fundamentally limits it from replicating all forms of the human mind." It's clear that modern computers don't obviously lead to replication of all the aspects of the human mind. It's not clear whether they are fundamentally unable to do so, are simply inefficient in doing so, or could in fact do so quite well once we understand the human mind better.
To say "Dennett vs Chomsky" is a little bit like saying "Dolly Parton vs Plato". Dennett is inexistent in the world. Chomsky is the most relevant person from the US and probably one of the 10 best most important intellectuals in modern history.
definitely their are a limits to our logic and intellect capacity, it may differ from one person to another, just like individual physical capacity...even if we are talking about accumulation of knowledge through generations... it may add to quantity BUT dose it fundamentally differ in quality??. I think the most fundamental question to ask in this time: "Is their another dimension within human being of knowing other than intellect??"
A lot of Chomsky fanboys in the comments. What Chomsky defines as understanding at least in this context is that "unless you can show that something works like a machine, you haven't explained it" and thus you don't understand it. Which is also to say that if it is a machine, it can be understood by some brain. He says Newton showed that the world is not a machine and thus is fundamentally unintelligible to us. He doesn't elaborate on how Newton showed this (at least not in this clip). To say that somethings shall forever remain a mystery can mean one of two things. One is that there are things in the world that are not mechanical and thus can never be understood by any amount of cognitive capacity. The other is to attribute it the lack of sufficient cognitive capacity in humans (which is not a very interesting topic if you ask me). If we are talking about the limits of understanding in general, then a rat not being able to get the concept of prime numbers is ridiculous and irrelevant to the topic. Instead of the rat, let's use a human toddler. A toddler cannot understand a prime number maze but an adult can. Can we not say the probably a sufficiently brainy rat can figure out a prime number maze the way a sufficiently developed toddler (an adult) can understand it? What you need to show a limit to understanding IN GENERAL is to show something that can not be reduced to a machine. I would argue this as impossible. On the other hand, if we are talking about the limits of HUMAN understanding or cognitive abilities, then this is about as interesting as talking about the limits of rat understanding. Not very interesting.
I think you missed his argument. Chomsky isn’t speaking in favor of the idea of interpreting the world as a machine, he pointing out how useless the concept is.Chomsky isn’t defining understanding by the mechanical principle (things as machines), he’s stating that the mechanical principle was the means by which people intuitively tried to understand the world in Newton’s time (the mechanical principle in this context meaning that objects need to be coming in direct contact with other objects in order to act upon them). Newton disproved this by observing and measuring gravitational phenomena, which is objects acting upon one another without direct physical contact. In doing so, he drew the ire of those who employed the mechanical principle, who referred to his conception of invisible forces as “occult” (again, because they didn’t believe objects could interact without contact). In order to further understand gravity, the scientific community was forced to put the mechanical understanding behind them, which means largely abandoning the intuitive physical reasoning through which scientific methodology was implemented, and as such, opening the door to the notion that it is POSSIBLE that there is stuff we cannot understand, whereas with the mechanical model, everything was presumed to be understandable with time and effort. Here, Chomsky simply proposes that another “lowering of the bar” as to what we can presume to understand is not at all an irrational thought, and indeed similar actions were necessary to form the more complete understating of physics and mechanics that we have today versus in Newton’s time.
Every time I'm reminded of Dennett I'm like "why do I fucking hate that guy so much?" Then I listen to him for five minutes and think "oh yeah, that's why. That's exactly why."
Dennett ignores one important fact, that today, with the given conditions of most human beings, science has a lot left to do or figure... which is open to speculation rather than bold claims ...
Dennett isn't ignoring that. He is pointing out that the claim that, for humans, there are unknowable things about the universe is, itself, a bold claim given that making such a claim implies that a being that *did* know such things could not explain them to us with language even given infinite time.
Biologists, and scientists in general, need to stop ignoring social issues. All I can think of listening to this is that Dennett needs a slap in the face, becasue he's arguing with one the most important human rights activists of all time. Since Dennett has an audience of his own, and unquestionably knows what Chomsky's real dedication is, he should instead be focusing his efforts on his true responsibility (as a public intellectual) which is doing what he can (a lot, with his large reputation and audience) to bring awareness to the crimes of our time. All of which should take precedent over abstract philosophical arguments.
Dennett doesn't have any responsability to do shit (at least no more than you and me or any random Joe on the street). Don't put responsabilities upon the soulders of famous/important people. He's a philosopher, so he does philosophy, the same way a salesman sells stuff. If anyone is responsable for being human rights is everyone independently of what they do or who they happen to be. If he's well known that's irrelevant.
I love Chomsky and am not a capitalist fanboy, but belinskii is right. Dennett is demonstrably wrong, not because of some nonsense about how arguing with Chomsky makes you wrong (it doesn't), or because they should be doing something to help people more. You can extend that logic to every action anyone takes - for example, you are wrong because Chomsky might read your comment instead of helping people. You are wrong because you could be doing something more socially useful. Anything anyone does is wrong because they could be helping the poor more, or inventing eco-friendly infrastructure or... To find out why it isn't wrong to not be maximally helpful all the time, think about how ultimately, social utility would be useless in such a world because poor people helped will die regardless. Cultures saved will die regardless. knowledge discovered will more or less die with us, inevitably. There has to be something that makes any social utility - any human rights activism, etc - useful! for that to occur, for life to be worth the work of helping/preserving/advocating, people have to amuse themselves with things like abstract art, much basic scientific research, philosophy, and other essentially USELESS shit! Useless shit is actually of extreme social utility! So get outta here with that shit about being wrong because you wasted time where Chomksy could be useful.
belinskii You're an imbecile's imbecile. No, he's not an apologist for those regimes. You have such incredibly low standards. If what you say is true, why not substantiate your claim, in the initial post?
Chomsky, though defending here the notion of human limitation, none-the-less, has no problem in self-proclaiming as an atheist. Where is the logical consistency there? It seems to me that agnosticism is the more appropriate position for him to take.
Chomsky isn't an atheist in the sense you mean. He just doesn't believe in God. I doubt Chomsky would want to be interpreted as having some positive knock-down argument against God.
You do not understand what atheism is. Atheism isn't a claim on god, it is a claim on evidence. All Atheism says is in-order for a claim to be accepted as true, it must provide sufficient evidence to support that claim. Atheim does not say "god" does not exist, such a claim is meaningless until you provide a definition for god. Atheism does say that god as they have been defined by any human religion invented does not exist. None of these religions provide the supporting claim for the claims their religions make.
He is not defending the idea that human understanding might have limits. Which should hardly be a controversial view anyway. Rather, Chomsky is suggesting that the more interesting question is why we find certain obvious questions are so hard to comprehend let alone answer. He cited some examples that form the foundation of modern science, including the notion the universe is mechanical and one must seek, as did Galileo, Huygens, and Kepler and so on, to describe that mechanism. Newton came along and showed how the "intuitive" idea of a mechanical universe is wrong. That is a stark example of the limits of our understanding. Since then we provide ever more exotic and esoteric ideas and theories to explain the phenomena around us which we all appreciate is far beyond our intuition and understanding. Chomsky says we don't know if we can ever fully comprehend the universe and we still don't know anything about how our own self awareness emerges. But like the Rat in the Prime Number maze, perhaps it is beyond our physical limits to comprehend. We just don't know. Chomsky says we of course should try our best to understand and investigate, but for all our progress since the scientific revolution there are still many questions that are exactly where the great thinkers of the past pondered and wrote about them.
"Do I believe in God? Can’t answer, I’m afraid. I’m not being flippant, but I don’t understand the question. What is it that I am supposed to believe or not believe in? Are you asking whether I believe there is something not in the universe (or the universes, if there are (maybe infinitely) many of them), and that somehow stands above them? I’ve never heard of any reason for believing that. Something else? What? There are many concepts of spirituality, among them, various notions of divinity developed in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic religions... Anyway, without clarification of a kind I have never seen, I don’t know whether I believe or don’t believe in whatever a questioner has in mind." -Noam Chomsky
We are different from animals because we understand questions and they do not? And because we understand questions, then there may not be limits to our understanding? Get a job...
apparently the joke has sailed, and went several miles over your head, never to be seen or understood by you, ever again... people like you give me faith in the human species.
Oners82 What exactly did I spell wrong? Perhaps you misconstrued what I wrote, you see I wasn't calling you a "dumbass" I was calling you a dumb ass, because you are not simply a dumb person, but an unintelligent donkey. Does that clear it up for you?
oh yeah, btw, im not a hypocrite, because i never had the moral precondition of not being hatefilled in the first place. also, exactly what part reflects insecurity? just spewing nonsense like usual because mommy said you were "special"?
Dennett is saying that to avoid the whole God question. There's this big show trial that goes on with big brains: jump on Chomsky behind his back because you are too cowardly to have your intellectual ass handed to you. As Chomsky has stated, we know little about bees let alone humans. Most things are just mystical as Dennett said. Futurists promised us flying cars; where are they?
Dennett strawmanning it up. No, just because we have the ability to "ask questions" doesn't automatically mean that there are no limits to our ability to ask questions. He's just saying "Well clearly we're capable of understanding any question, so what's stopping us from understanding any answer?" No, you idiot, there are almost certainly questions that are themselves beyond our ken, not just answers. You can't just go "humans are the smartest animals on Earth, therefore they've attained the maximum possible level of intelligence in the entire universe, therefore the whole universe is ultimately intelligible to humans". That's nonsense.
Dennett isn't claiming that the whole universe is intelligible to humans, only that there is no reason to *assume* that will not *ultimately* prove to be the case. Have some epistemological humility, Steven, and don't call people idiots for calling out assumptions for what they are.
Dennet is right of course. Chomsky is outside of his element and clearly speaks out of his ass, we can clearly differentiate between knowing something intuitively and intellectually. We can't intuitively understand the size of the earth, but we can intellectually, we've measured it. We just can't comprehend that size, it's just a number, but it's a correct number. Saying we can't ever understand connsciousness just because it's unintuitive is just being lazy. Sad to see Chomsky's cult of personality cover for him here.
The distinction between knowing something intellectually and intuitively definitely exists It has nothing to do with this discussion, however Chomsky's point is just the obvious one that we readily accept animals are limited in their knowledge of languages or algebra (intuitively and intellectually) so presumably we will be thus limited about some stuff. He concludes that consciousness may be one area which is inaccessible to us due to this limit
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It almost makes me cry how much I love and respect Chomsky. All these questions I struggle with, he so easily explains them with facts and examples. He's brought so much light to my dark world.
he's a conspiracy nut. Seriously off the rails
@@graemevp4523
Nope. He's really not. The only conspiracy I've ever heard him mention is that corporations conspire to affect government policy - a view for which he provides lots of evidence.
Chomsky is a fricken Anarchist! Enough said! He's nuts
@@palladin331 So what!
I don't think Chomsky really explains anything in depth here. Can you explain to me how he proves the existence of "free will" beyond the illusion of "free will"?
Chomsky's insights are always a joy to listen to.
Not to me!
Chomsky always busy trying to make sense of things instead of criticizing other thinkers. That’s just another remarkable characteristic of this inspiring human being. BTW, in terms of this specific issue, Chomsky was clear (here and elsewhere): the thing is that some aspects of reality seem to be unintuitive to our senses (take the quantum world as a paradigm); it is NOT that our theories about them are unintuitive by definition, it is just that some aspects of the world may not be opened to human understanding as they would be if we were packed with other sensorial organs, different brain cells and, perhaps, different neurocomputational processes.
Dennett is a boring turd.
I also enjoy his sarcasm though.
We are not limited by our senses(body). Thats why we have tools. As long as we can detect a phenomenon by our senses or by tools we can come to understand that phenomenon.
Chomsky doesn't criticize other thinkers? Are you nuts? The only thinkers he praises are ones who praise him (Finkelstein, for example). Chomsky is a Marxist charlatan. His beloved Anarchy will destroy the world.
Bertrand Russell - 'Science may set limits to knowledge, but should not set limits to imagination.'
Science has reached it's limits....Consciousness has not.
Dennett never fails to disappoint.
He's much better than chompsky
@@captainbeefheart5815 He's an invertebrate compared to Chomsky -not least in his own wheelhouse of philosophy of mind.
@@hadronoftheseus8829 Nah, Dennett is much better than Chompsky in almost all areas of philosophy that he focuses on.
@@captainbeefheart5815 Dennett doesn't even understand that "strong emergence" is a strictly empty non-concept utterly devoid of semantic content and does exactly zero explanatory work.
@@hadronoftheseus8829 Sure, bro. I’m sure you’re better at philosophy than Dennett lol
Dennett thinks it's impossible to pose any question with an answer that lies beyond the capacity of humans to comprehend? What an awful example of a philosopher.
Agree! There are math problems that are simple as hell to grasp and hard to prove..e.g FLT
Dennett comes across as sarcastic, smug and a bit befuddled-Chomsky is cool and lucid, as usual.
Chomsky is also arrogant and condescending when it comes to his critique of physicists, for no reason. Don’t be a bild fanboy. Appreciate and admire all the good he has achieved and said, but understand the fact that even he can be an arrogant humanist and throw reason out of the window in certain topics.
@@RP-ch8yn There are valid criticisms that can be leveled at Chomsky. 'Arrogance' and 'throwing reason out the door' are not among them.
@@RP-ch8yn I was just listening to a talk where he was taking about how honest of a field physics is because your lies will be so easily disproven in a manner impossible in so many other fields. Sounded like a compliment to me. Can you point me to this criticism? Is this from the sit down with Lawrence Krauss he did?
@@RP-ch8yn Huh?! Never heard him criticise Physicists in this video or elsewhere. In fact he's been accused of "physics worship" i.e. as seeing it as the paragon for all rational enquiry
@@jjdemaioI’ve been a Chomsky fan for over a decade and he seems to me to have adopted a very judgmental, ivory tower attitude towards some intellectuals/scientists. I can’t tell when he adopted that attitude (and it probably has to do with certain negative life experiences), but it shows in his opinion of Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, and Steven Pinker.
"The limits of understanding" is not a bad thing.
Plato, Descartes, and Chomsky address epistemology and ontology- the nature of thought and the symbol. Plato proposes that our works are thrice removed from the truth of form. Dennett is a positivist - what you see is what there is. Descartes put in motion our Western critical thinking with the example if the ball of wax. The wax appears to be a solid. The positivist would conclude that the wax must be a solid because it looks solid. Descartes applies heat to the wax causing it to become a liquid. Dennett's positivism reaches a roadblock. We are taught by Descartes to explore the nature of things. Chomsky critically examines and tests the limits of our assumed reasoning methods not unlike Plato, Descartes, St. Augustine, Dante, Marx, etc.
We don't know the questions we are incapable of asking, like the fish, admittedly at a much higher level.
We don't know what questions we don't know to ask, but that doesn't mean that we couldn't ask them if we had reason to do so. The limit of human understanding about the universe is likely limited by what can be tested and not what can be conceived.
I take your point, but does the fact that we are aware of our limitations not, in a sense, make us "all-knowing" and therefore the fish analogy breaks down?
I don't get Dennett's position - natural language can be shown to be insufficient in its ability to prove all potential statements in a rich enough system (as per Godel)... so that immediately eliminates natural language (and mathematics as well). So, what is left? Intuition falls well short of satisfying what it means to "understand" something - worse, as Chomsky states, much of what we understand is abstracted out of "reality" and converted into theorems.
What Godel proved is that the perception of consistency is completeness. Since perceptions can always be had anew, no axioms or even a complete historical enumeration of events can suffice to contain the attributive quality of perception. This makes perception identical to causality, since attribution and perception are identical with respect to completeness. Perception doesn't eliminate natural language & math, but implicates the inclusion of "reflexive self processing" and "self duality" as extensions of mathematical logic required to scientifically model reality, extensions effectively identical to perception as elements implicated in primordial causality. See Chris Langan's CTMU & Introduction to Mathematical Logic for details.
@xxxYYZxxx, wow, I can't tell if that's just word salad or some seriously technical stuff, but I'm guessing very few around here would have a clue what it meant.
@Roberto Toscano, I was thinking the same until I heard Dennett talk about reading libraries of books and getting some understanding of an answer. I'm not sure he's right, but this idea of having some inkling of an answer is different, I think, from the sort of thing that Godel excludes, which relies on absolute proof, truth or falsehood, of a set of propositions. In fact, this is pretty much how most of our knowledge already is - scientific knowedge is probabilistic. It would be insane to say that we don't have some understanding of gravity, for instance, but we haven't a clue about its fundamental properties, and most of what we know is predictive or mathematical/propositional models, like curved spacetime or gravity as a form of acceleration. I'd go further, the more answers we have the more questions they tend to raise. So, for me, the question the person asked doesn't have a simple answer, and it will depend greatly on how we define terms.
This short excerpt does not really capture Dennett's position which he covers in detail in his books. Dennett does not deny that there may be some things beyond human understanding but he resists jumping to the conclusion that difficult concepts like consciousness and free will are in the "too hard" basket. Chomsky suggests free will may be in the two hard basket - although he is not categorical about it. To me Chomsky's point of view hinges on his statement that he thinks it is "fruitful" to recognise that some things are beyond our limited capabilities. This seems illogical. Surely this can only lead to giving up on problems that are just hard, but not impossible - reducing the fruit of human enquiry?
+lettersquash
"wow, I can't tell if that's just word salad or some seriously technical stuff"
It's word salad.
@@Kalumbatsch yea, seems salady to me too.
We do not understand what space, time, mass, charge are, yet we understand the Standard Model and fine tuning of the parameter space.
Two very respectable intellectuals! I love both of these guys. Regardless of your scientific or philosophical views, you can learn a lot from both of them.
As usual - Dennett is obfuscating.
I would not be too harsh on the guy. Dennet has very often deep insights and a sharp judgement. I don't understand why insists on 2 ridiculous claims: 1) that if you can formulate the question you must be able, at least in principle, to get the answer (however at a point he admits we have limits, so I could be misinterpreting him) 2) consciousness is an illusion (how can an unconscious being have an illusion, which is a subjective experience?) For the rest, I think he's a very good philosopher.
He's arguing against Chimsky's statement that we do indeed have limits. There's no reason to think there are limits to our potential understanding. Of course there might be limits, but to assume there are is making an assumption based off no evidence.
@@ggg148g 2) is false, Dan isn't stating illusion in this way. As per Dennett, you really have subjective experiences, but they are not what you think they are. Its like magician's trick with cards, it looks like the card is teleporting but in fact, it is not. So, what happens really, for Dennett, is a bunch of underlying brain processes with no "real magic" involved.
@@sergiootero5904 Dennet denies the possibility that humans are not able to answer a question that we raised ourselves. I think that's ridicolous because I have lots of examples of questions I can raise myself but I can't possibly answer. This said, he's a great philosopher anyway.
@@mac1414 the question is not the existence of the subjective experience, no reasonable person can deny it. Dennet is a good philosopher, he knows it. The question is whether subjective experience requires a special explanation, in addition to the "easy" questions on how the brain does what it does. I dare to disagree on this with a renowned philosopher like Dennet, also because he's not able to provide, as far as I know, convincing metaphors to support the alleged vacuity of the hard problem. No magic trick would impress anybody, no successions of pixel colors on a screen could be lived as real events, if there were no conscious beings observing those things, and if their consciousness were not something special deserving a special explanation.
Saying we can't understand something is saying we know all the things we could understand . Saying we can understand something is saying we know all the things we can't understand . Saying there is possibility of knowing something is saying we know all impossible things of our understanding .
The thing is that I know what is consciences? And many others do, but the language of interpreting this idea in particular is not conveyed efficiently, and I tried a lot and finally you'll reach a point in whatever field you're in and that is, you'll find the majority of people understand speaking correctly about some kind of science but not understanding its "essence", and you can trace that by asking an enormous amount of questions until you find that ERROR, so they came up with horrible mistakes, and it is very hard to clarify that error, it's like you have a PC without the processing capability of a certain rare task, it will do all the amazing things you want and worldwide, it'll be recognized as a world-class PC, but still not understand your command of that rare task.
And all of that, again assures the limits of language and the scary limits of understanding.
There's a quote, I don't remember who said it but it was like : I can talk to you about my understanding of a phenomenon but I can NOT give you my understanding of it.
lmao...communication takes on all kinds of forms....Consciousness isn't some one off phenomena. It's literally what governs the universe. that's what language is about in this reality.
@@Kostly And Chomsky is a master of linguistic manipulation. He is dead wrong about anarchy and Marxism.
Saying that there must be a trajectory through "bookland" that will make you understand any given thing is similar to saying that even if you don't speak Chinese or Arabic, it must be possible to write a book in Arabic that will make you understand Chinese.
Or there must be a maze, in an infinity of mazes through which a Rat could navigate on the basis of its understanding of prime numbers.
Saying that there is a trajectory through "bookland" is saying that everything is ultimately reducible to concepts that can be communicated. For your example, I imagine that Dennett would say that it is certainly possible to write a book in Arabic to help you understand Chinese because it is possible to write a book in English to help you understand Arabic.
So there might be questions that we CANNOT understand, but that we therefore do not have to bother about? Does the understanding of a question guarantee that we can answer it? (Dennett seems to presuppose that. The dog cannot understand questions about democracy, so it cannot get any answers. We can understand questions about free will and consciousness, so we can get the answers)
It weird to me to think that humans have no limits, and it's even weirder that people would argue that people don't have limits. To me the fact that people would argue against limits establishes a relationship to an empirical biological limits that we do have, limits and that there might be a biological spectrum of behavior that allows sense of self or theory of mind to be that selfish, or self centered, or hopeful, meaning self awareness and self centered-ness have emotional conflict, is a biological trait, which kinda proves what Chompsky says, people go crazy when they have to think about themselves, they lose all reason.
Which is why Chomsky is crazy.
@@palladin331 In what way?
@@AstroSquid On re-reading your comment, it is not clear what you are referring to. Could you rephrase it? Thanks.
@@palladin331 How smart do you think people are?
@@AstroSquid Not very.
Dennett is a philosopher i have very much respect. But again chomsky is right here..
Chomsky is always wrong because he is an anarchist. That is the end of the story.
It’s the free version is , no self centered. It’s how’s your consciousness going on with compromising in decision🙏🏻.
It seems self evident that Chomsky is correct. It also seems self evident that we have no choice but to proceed as if Dennett was correct and just hope for the best.
that's chomsky's position as well which is why he actually does science (unlike dennett).
In fact, I feel like I have the most control when I have abandoned even the notion of Self.
That pertains to psychology. Nothing wrong with that. But Chomsksy does not deal in psychology -- except to indoctrinate his followers with false ideology of Marxist anarchy, which is insane.
“… what’s beyond the limits? And we have some examples. Plausible examples, and there may be many others. And I think that’s a fertile direction to explore.”
What examples beyond the limits? What’s an example of that direction to explore? How could a biology experiment be set up to even find how free will operates?
Saying we can't understand something assumes you know all the things we can understand. I disagree , it only assumes what it asserts : that we can't understand some things . It means assuming knowing all the things we can understand regarding specific topic , not all things in reality . To make example , i can say we will never bulid buildings that float in sky , it only assumes knowing that in engeneering we will never have such knowledge , it doesn't assume babies will or will not be born , nuclear war can't happen etc .But let's go for topic argument and say it is what that ment . I would put tht argument on it's head and say : it is lack of humility to say we will understand everything , because it assumes we have no lack of understanding of reality .Saying we can know something also assumes you know all the things we could understand . Saying there is possibility of knowing something also assumes we know all the things we could understand because we assume we have knowledge on all possibilities . Whatever person argues it is with same outcome : 1) saying p thus x where p is ( knowing all things we can understand ) and x( we can't understand something, we can understand something , there is possibility of understanding something) . If you want to go down that path you would have to say : we don't know something we can't understand , we don't know something we can understand and we don't know there is possibility of understanding . Anything else is the same in all 3 examples : we are saying we know all things we could understand so we say something won't happen ( because we know all the things that will) , something will happen ( because we know all the things that will and will not happen so that something happens ), something might happen ( we know that all the things that are impossibe to happen so we know something is possible )
If there are types of understanding that are impossible, shouldn't the debate at least be about defining the types of problem you can't develop an understanding of.
Which Chomsky does providing several examples
I think that a problem here is that they are actually making two different points, but neither is being clear as to what the difference is. Mind you, considering that they are not directly debating with each other, perhaps that is not surprising. The difference is brought out by Chomsky's example of the prime number maze being "a total mystery" to rats. It is not a mystery, in Dennett's sense, to the rat, because the rat can't even ask the question to which it can't find the answer. There might be phenomena that humans will never understand because we can't even ask the question. It is the difference between "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns". Then again, you might have "known unknowables" and "unknowable unknowables". And does the fact that we are aware of our own limitations make us, in a sense, all-knowing? Oh, my head hurts!
"And does the fact that we are aware of our own limitations make us, in a sense, all-knowing? Oh, my head hurts!"
In my mind, that's the only way we'll ever create a theory of everything.
Chompsky immediately discredits himself by claiming infinite training would never help a rat complete a prime number maze. He can’t possibly prove that.
@@NickHolum Correct. For some reason Chomsky can’t accept all of human thoughts and experiences are simply the playing out of the laws of chemistry and physics. I think that his political philosophy might explain his reluctance to accept that we can’t have free will. His assertion that people who write books theorising that free will does not exist thereby disprove their own theory is wrong. Human beings are programmed by their DNA to be curious because it helps them survive in the world and the intuitive feeling of free will is no more than a feeling. It’s like the feeling of pain or fear or the sensation of colour or sound. - a construction of the human brain.
@@NickHolum Can you prove he can't? Can you eve coherently define your use of "prove" in this context?
I don't give a rat's ass about Chomsky's fake intellectualism. He's a Marxist. Just as big a failure as Marx himself.
The meaning of the question "what is consciousness?" is not transparent to me - I don't clearly understand it.
It seems that the disagreement hinges on what we mean by *understanding*
And what is meant by consciousness.
So Dan putters around for three and a half minutes of saying Chosmky is wrong and then says yes of course there could be limits. Got it.
Dennetts first argument was just completly wrong, Chomsky used the example of rats not being able to do a prime number maze, not that rats and monkeys can't understand democracy. The rats he referred to were shown through experiment to not understand the concept of the prime number maze, Chomsky then made the deduction, like any good sceintist would, that the limits of knowledge is species oriented, and that human beings 'could possibly' have the same limits in another form.
Go back and listen to Chomsky.
"...Newton demonstrated that there are no machines, nothing works by mechanical principles...And he's right..." -- Chomsky (around 6:45)
Chomsky confuses two questions, limits of understanding IN GENERAL and limits of HUMAN understanding. Before this he pointed out that the early scientists held that the world was a machine, and to "understand" or "explain" any phenomenon is to reduce it to a machine. This is his working definition of understanding. What he says following this is what I quoted. That is, Newton showed (and he agrees but doesn't show how Newton showed) that world is not a machine and thus fundamentally unintelligible to us or any mind for that matter. The example of the rat is irrelevant to the question of understanding IN GENERAL. Chomsky is just rambling here if you ask me.
@@a46475 "Chomsky confuses two questions, limits of understanding IN GENERAL and limits of HUMAN understanding." what is the distinction between these two in your mind? I see no distinction.
Huh?! Dude Dennett wasn't purporting to state Chomsky's position verbatim. He was just giving a flavour of it. Dennett may never have heard Chomsky give his position with the rat example
The limits of our understanding are expanding, that is to say, what we once thought were limitations are no longer. We exist in time, so the limitations of the present define us. When we cast ourselves mentally into the future we open doors into realms that may or may not have any basis in reality, but it often seems of late that reality is expanding and catching up with our ability to imagine. Reality and imagination may be synonymous some day in the future.
That's not what the limits of our understanding is though. That's just our current understanding vs future understanding. What chomsky is saying is that it is highly likely there are things we will never truly understand. This is pretty much true when we look at things like quantum mechanics. We can observe the behaviours but as the saying goes if you say you understand quantum mechanics, you do not understand quantum mechanics. It is truly unintelligible as to why they behave that way and as such is a mystery to human understanding. We can see and predict with great accuracy but understanding is another thing entirely.
@@robertpirsig5011 Chomsky gave the example of Martians that can see a concept of something that we're incapable of seeing. What I'm saying is that humans are evolving and we won't be what we are now in a hypothetical future where we're changing radically and at a pace which is thousands of times faster than natural evolution. What we now regard as essentially human may be seen as antiquated or incompatible with the social realities of civilization centuries hence. We have no basis for assuming our limitations will remain if we can't assume that we (humanity as it exists now) will remain.
Chomsky's best argument BY FAR: without limits you can't have scope. Its funny that chomsky's point about the relation of limits and scope is just never dealt with. It's irrefutable so it just gets ignored despite the fact that Dennett loves to invoke Bertrand Russel who wrote a book literally called "Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits".
Dennet is kind of dumb here. There's basically no argument given, he just calls "bizarre" the idea that we could formulate questions we couldn't answer. Well I don't think its bizarre and I've given just as much evidence. Krauss is just dumb - saying there are things we can't understand is OBVIOUSLY A MUCH, MUCH more reserved prediction than the idea that our capacity for understanding is literally unbounded (and saying there are things humans can't understand doesn't entail knowing everything they can). Dennett even throws in "now of course there could be limits" almost as if it doesn't undermine his entire premise. That's bizarre.
It just goes to show that most intellectuals are no smarter than a carpenter, chef, mechanic, or sales clerk. Other than a handful of truly special intellects most intellectuals are just more pompous morons who flatter the right people (Quine in Dennett's case). What's the difference between saying chomsky is an asshole and "chomsky is a new mysterion who likes mysteries" - the first is just invective while the latter is an outright lie. But outright lies are perfectly acceptable in the academy.
REvisiting this video after a few years, I think Dennett is even more obtuse that I did before. I almost laughed out loud when he suggested a dichotomy between biology and "mysticism," as though biology is just another word for "Truth."
Here's an arguent against Dennett, from Kant: If we look at something, we may judge it to be the product of deliberate manufacture to some end (a teleological judgment), or we may judge it as something that emerged from the blind forces of nature (a non teleological judgment). But if we judge it one way we are precluding ourselves from judging it the other way. So there is an antinomy of these two modes of judgment. Yet they must relate to each other through some over arching principle, otherwise they couldn't enter into the same survey of Nature. What is that overarching principle? Who knows? It may be beyond human capacity to understand, yet that does not mean we cannot infer its existence. But if we want to get at the thing itself, it's beyond us.
I would have enjoyed a conversation between these two
This is a mix of the Dunning-Kruger effect in effect... combined with Dennets limit of understanding. Actually rather funny, that he sets it up like this.
Chomsky is the ultimate Dunning-Kruger example.
Chomsky's understanding of the free will question is either childish, or he's being disingenuous.
the winner .... Chomsky! Dennett contradicts himself too much.
The winner is always Chomsky.
this video is more about the limits of natural science
The limits of natural science, though, are defined by the limits of our understanding. Unless you're talking about non-human beings doing science, that is.
Dennett does not understand that "infinite" is different from "everything". Chomsky says that language can generate "infinite" elements, like the decimal numbers between 1 and 2 which do not include 3. So the fact that we can generate infinite thoughts has nothing to do whatsoever with the question of whether we can understand all the mysteries of nature. We generate thoughts and sentences within the limits of our human nature. I cannot understand how some people can take Dennett seriously. He seems embarrassingly stupid to me.
What's inside a locked box? I understand the question. I can only guess the answer.
The truth of what Chomsky is saying is not so much showing that we cant know the absolute truth, but we cant know it through the scientific method.
I still don't get why modern scientists keep trying to know everything. As Chomsky says, there has to be a limit, and that limit is science itself. If we could know everything, then how would we find life interesting? And of course in this pursuit we fail to criticize science, like he who complains of others instead of looking at himself and get better. I think we're in the adolescence of human existence, and that's why we act so recklessly.
I agree about the ‘’adolescence’’ of Homo sapiens (sapiens, really?). However, I seriously doubt, at this point, we’ll ever reach adulthood…
Is there some kind of cosmic contract that humans must find life interesting? Lol… besides who says that understanding everything would be disinteresting?
Our adolescence is a direct result of religion, not science.
Dennett is a dwarf compared to Chomsky.
Jesus, Dennett is such a waffler - invoking generative grammar as an indication that Chomsky believes we can know everything.😂😂
Chomsky does believe he knows everything. Thus, the failure of his anarchistic philosophy.
I'm aware this may be a stupid question. There are many things I can choose or not choose to do e.g. kiss a girl or a man, but how many of that choice are not influenced by the culture I have internalised?
what you cannot understand you cannot identity.
You can't point to your fingertip. You can't know consciousness.
It's because you are consciousness. The Hindus gave us a path to knowing consciousness five thousand years before Descartes or Freud.
@@stevenhines5550 -- You are correct. And regarding Hinduism, our dialogue here -- you and me going back-and-forth in the comments -- is a manifestation of "The Maya," a/k/a, The World Game, The Illusion, The Magic.
It's always Now.
Call it "reality," or call it "the mind," it really doesn't matter. I think Alan Watts' description, "This Is It," are the English words that come closest to describing The Ultimate Reality.
But maybe the Taoist "description": "That which can't be named" is more apt.
@@stevenhines5550 -- Also, at this point in history, I think Brahman is becoming Shiva.
@@Unfamous_Buddha I'm just learning about it from Shunyamurti and Sarvapriyananda. I haven't read the Vedas or the Gita. My friend is encouraging me to read Yogananda's autobiography. I'm interested in your comments about maya...I think I get it but this ride is as much about understanding as it is about meditation so I'd like to learn more.
@@stevenhines5550 -- In the 60s, I read two Alan Watts' books. "This Is It," and "The Two Hands of God." The "The Two Hands of God" was about Hindu thought and how that the so-called "gods" in Hindu myth were just manifestations of our own minds (or self). "This Is It" was a collection of essays regarding cosmic consciousness via Buddhism, Taoism, Zen and Hinduism. If it wasn't for those books I don't think I would have gotten "IT."
Why does Dennett get any public exposure. His explanation of consciousness completely misses the point and he always comes off sounding arrogant and condescending. Chomsky towers above him intellectually and Dennett knows it. Arrogance and condescension is how he tries to compensate. He fails pathetically.
This pursuit of the all knowing truth is fine but no guarantee we will be better, look at all the progression we have now and we are still warring, murdering, causing huge suffering to ourselves and the planet.
I think Dennett misses the point when he says, 'humans have language', where other creatures don't. His point being - I think - that because we have language and therefore books we can gain, share, and build upon some knowledge edifice which will eventually take us to all things - an intellectual Tower of Babel.
But just like we have language (human thought), rats can run mazes. They just can't run prime number mazes - and here's the key - NO MATTER HOW MUCH YOU TRAIN THEM. So, just like they are biological organisms with scope and limits, so are we. We have human thought with incredible scope (as compared to the organisms we know of), but with scope comes limits - by definition. So, unless we're unique in all of nature, we too have limits. And, there are probably things we can't do no matter how many books we write or how many people tackle it.
Newton had to reluctantly give up the mechanistic doctrine because of the "action at a distance" (gravity); Einstein opposed the "spooky action at a distance" (quantum entanglement), but recent work in experimental physics shows that he was wrong (return to "occult forces"); quantum mechanics, although incomprehensible and utterly mysterious, is undoubtedly the most robust theory in the history of science; current physical theories, unlike previous ones, although more predictive, have less explanatory power, and hence, do not give us a deeper understanding of the world; the holographic principle, which states that there is an unexplained (mysterious?) relationship between the geometry of space-time (topology) and information; the cosmological constant (Λ), which is so finely tuned that it leads some physicists to abandon the Copernican principle; several physicists today claim that space-time is doomed; Gödel's incompleteness theorems, revisited by the algorithmic theory of information, have as a consequence that almost all mathematical facts escape reason (see Gödel, Chaitin, Calude); Turing's discovery that most problems are uncomputable; etc. No wonder that ignorabimus has become fashionable again. It makes us want to re-examine our usual assumptions about the comprehensibility of the world, or lack thereof, and question one of Einstein's most famous quotes: "The most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it is comprehensible." Today science and mathematics have consequences which many find perplexing. Personally, what I find the most incomprehensible thing about the world is that it seems incomprehensible.
You can't choose to do two thing, only one, thus no choice, and outcomes are already determined.
We can't understand how 1) the Universe can have emerged out of Nothing or 2) how it could have always existed without beginning -- no matter how hard we try. And I'm not sure it has to do with quantity of brain power. It seems our system of logic is not of the type to cope with this problem
Yes. the limitation is language itself. Read Spinoza.
Agree with Chomsky that our real limitations exist withe respect to understanding of metaphysical rules.
Rear Spinoza!
Dennett's logical fallacies and flaws are shocking. I remember sitting one evening with a friend, smoking a joint, and watching some roundtable discussion with Dennett, Gould, Freeman and Rupert Sheldrake, a couple others, and then a moderator. My friend is wicked smart, with an advanced degree. I'm nobody. After listening to Dennett and Gould bloviate like total assholes for 15 minutes I turned to my buddy and said "these guys are charlatans, the only one who is even talking about science is Sheldrake". Wouldn't you know, Dennett and Gould were arrogantly dismissing everything Sheldrake proposed - just exactly the way Dennett just dismissed Chomsky in this little video. Notice, crucially, Dennett makes absolutely zero reference to science, the scientific method, the philosophy of science, the history of science or anything else remotely related to science. He simply bloviates as ever. Compare to Chomsky. Chomsky STARTS his answer by referencing a simple maze experiment with rats to illustrate his point. Dennett is just posturing. He is implying he is above method; that he can simply hold forth without reference to science and call it obvious.
I've seen that roundtable. It was interesting to me that the one genius at the table (Freeman Dyson) was the quietest
Yeah I've no Idea what Dennett is for.
He doesn't really do straight analytic philosophy. There's very little in his work that is straight "where do we get to with these assumptions plus straight logic". It's all kind of hand wavy and suggestive and patronising analogies all the time.
I had a Philosophy encyclopedia once upon a time and he was in it. It was said that he, alone among philosophers, had engaged deeply with neuroscientists, AI experts etc and was now in a position to explain consciousness. Garbage!
Godell's incompleteness theorem (the first one) states that for any expressive enough language with a countable set of names and there is a continuum of true statements and only a countable ways of proving which ones are true and which ones are false. The contrast is between two different orders of infinity. No where is the expansion of human intelligence claimed to be bounded like Dennett seems to imply.
Really Godel did not say this. Mathematicians are constantly amused at the novel uses to which non -Mathematicians put Godels theorem
This reminds me of the question, "Is there a god?" How can we know? To think otherwise is pure speculation. It could be used as an argument for something greater than us. God?
Dennet is overrated every step of the way
Can't believe he does not grasp the notion that an infitine set (like language) does not necessarely contains everething.
He even tries to make fun of Chomsky while in the process making a fool of himself. :p
Jesus that was annoying when Krauss piped in. Put a Krauss content warning next time!
I agree with Chomsky, if chomsky wasn't right humanity wouldn't come up with Artificial Intelligence
i don't think dennet can hold a candle to chomsky
so i reject the whole premise of this video
why vs?
They are saying the same thing!
in the same spectrum,
just one is trying to defend against the argument that "we will never get it..."
the other trying to defend against the argument that "we will know it all..."
but both talking in the same spectrum
I think it's not a "we will" vs "we well not" argument.
It's more a "we maybe could" vs "we maybe could not" argument.
The rat example is a fundamentaly flawed argument. The knowledge of prime numbers might have taken humans centuries if not millenia to discover. Not to mention prior knowledge that leads to prime numbers(division, Base 10 number system, ten finger counting). For a rat to understand prime number mazes it must have use of prior knowledge to even have a chance at prime numbers. In short it's like judging a rats natural abilities against knowledge that took us thousands of years to understand.
This is not everything he said but you can apply the same way of thinking to most of his examples. Free will debate, really!? In this age where we can see the brain making a decision before the individual is aware of it.
The idea presented (and at least provisionally rejected, to his partial credit) by Dennett @ 2:04, that certain answers can't be had for reasonable questions, presumes reality is decidedly not a logical system, and that its operations can't be verified in a straightforward manner amounting to the scientific method. If such a refutation of logic is true, then it's a self-referencing paradox for it to hold in a non-logical system. In effect it would confer a psychological "messiah" status on its believer, as what else could explain the coincidence of its truth in the absence of a logically straightforward reality. Chomsky's apparent confusion @ 5:23 over something as simple as "the interaction of objects" admits of confusion (intentional or genuine?) over the equivalence of attribution (perception) and causality, an equivalence long since proven by quantum mechanics. What is the cause of Chomsky being an expert on anything if he's correct, ie that the world is not intelligible? He can't say what it is, since "perception" is simultaneously the basis of his authority, and the cat he can't let out of the bag as the very causality he can't seem to wrap his mind around.
Let me get this straight, in a comment section of a video featuring NOAM CHOMSKY & DAN DENNETT, you're claiming that I'm a "post modernist bullshitter" (to paraphrase), and that NOAM CHOMSKY & DAN DENNETT are what, straightforward and rational? The very notion that answers to reasonable questions can't be found in principle (and not for lack of trying or primitive technology, or because the answers are on the dark side of a moon in another galaxy, etc), is a positive statement that reality is NOT a logically coordinated system, ie one whereby any and all aspects are equivalent to PERCEPTION (theory, model, observation, confirmation). The sheer stupidity promoted by such a notion is beyond words to describe, which is why any criticism of these fools seems like BS to folks who think Dennett & Chomsky are on to something. These guys are posing as scientists and preaching irrationality. Dennett seems genuinely confused and possibly harmless, but Chomsky seems genuinely clueless and hence his popularity as the premier gatekeeper for the scholarly elite and every pretentious wannabe.
Just because something can be represented with a question mark in English does not mean it is a question in the logical sense. Your statement is only true for formal and self consistent systems, but natural language is not this. If I ask "how does the world work?", this looks like a logical question, but it's actually not at all, and that becomes obvious when you ask "what is the world"?
Chomsky's part is expanded on in "The machine, the ghost, and the limits of understanding", if you want to listen to the rest.
IMO, Chomsky takes the ironic stance of refuting his own position in order to demonstrate his point, although the refutation is limited. In other words, he does show that humans are limited, but our limit comes from our desire to wish that things were some other way than what we conclude they must be. The free will debate is the ultimate expression of this. It is very satisfying to hear him express the exact free will paradox I've thought about in my own head for years: everything must be random or pre-determined (or random within pre-determined limits). There's no conceivable in-between. And yet, he denies the obvious conclusion: free will cannot be what most people conceive of it. Instead, he just asserts that "nobody really believes free will is an illusion. ... there just must 'really' be an explanation out there that we just can't understand (like rats can't understand prime numbers)...(maybe)". Well, I have no problem with the "maybe" part, but that borders on inaction. There is even an obvious way to proceed, and to suggest that our inability to properly define free will as most people "feel" it should be defined just means that we are emotionally attached to some imagery, sensory or emotional experience, or otherwise incoherent concept which has no actual bearing on what "free will" really means. Thus, we are left with the functionalistic obligation to simply redefine free will in terms of social responsibility or accountability or some other such idea. And what's wrong with that? Thus, free will exists, even if everything is random within pre-determined limits. There's no contradiction if you just properly and objectively define free will.
This isn't just some abstract point, either, but has real bearings on our social dynamics, which is why if I were to dialogue with Chomsky I'd try to win him over to this point. The fact that free will, for instance, can only be meaningfully grasped in terms of randomness within deterministic limits means that our social policies should be geared with this in mind. Punishment merely for the satisfaction of the wronged against the transgressor should be recognized as nothing more than hedonism, and our social mores, folkways and morals/ethics should be geared within all this in mind and in proportion to the violations committed with specific goals in mind. They should not be based on some abstract notion of "accountability of free agents" but rather on the recognition that people have free will and yet their actions are logically necessarily explicable by things out of their control.
And yet, just as I said above, humans are emotional (illogical) creatures. We have an area of the brain or a function of the brain that reasons, and we have another area or function that is baseless and emotional, and causes us to obscure the obvious conclusions. And in fact, much of our pleasure and meaning in life comes from the exercise of the latter. So we don't delete our human nature; we just must find the proper synthesis of the two realms for our continued survival.
So again, to recapitulate, Chomsky asserts humans may be biologically limited, like rats are regarding prime numbers, and tries to give the analogy of our understanding of free will as a possible parallel. He suggests it may be the case that the so called "free will dilemma" is simply a biologically incomprehensible problem for humans, rather than simply accepting the obvious conclusion that free will is basically misconstrued by most people. He does this for an obvious reason: he is personally (emotionally) uncomfortable with the idea that free will is somehow controlled by other things. He just wants to go with some incoherent notion of free will and call it "unintelligible", rather than accept the obvious conclusion.
In the end, it could very well be the case that humans have biological limitations in terms of their comprehension of the universe. However, we would never know if this were actually the case or if it was the case that no organism could possibly understand certain problems even in principle. Rather than suggesting: "It's as if there are questions we will never be able to know the answer to," it's more like (as Dennet says here): "Asking questions does not lead to any real understanding at all, period (whatever 'real understanding' means)". Or it could be that everything will be explained, and in way that humans can grasp. I see no reason to accept or reject any one of these suggestions.
I actually have my personal views on things like "Why is there something rather than nothing?" and don't consider that a particularly difficult question to answer. Due to that fact, I don't think the idea of "brute facts" necessarily is a problem, so I'm not necessarily sympathetic to Chomsky's position.
Gotta go with chomsky on this one, dennets argument is incredibly weak and simple. What about the things we dont know or understand the questions to? we have senses that are clearly limited, what about things out of our senses reach?
I almost never experience Free Will. I have ADHD! I do everything on impulse!
That you are not aware of the origins of your own impulses doesn’t mean it’s not your decision
@@carlosandres7006 I never said that I didn't make decisions. It's all me. I'm very determined in my impulses. I'm also very willful. I have lots of will. Freedom, though... Free from what???
Wow, I've only been seriously thinking about free will for about three months and I have a strong feeling I already understand it better than Chomsky. It's irrational to say that people who say there isn't any free will must still "believe" in it, or why did they write a book about it? If there were no free will, once they realised this, they had to write a book about it (given all the other causal conditions). We have all sorts of secondary delusions about what it would mean if we didn't have free will. Check out 'Trick Slattery, Breaking the Free Will Illusion, for a great introduction.
You may think that Chomsky is being irrational, but perhaps the real problem is that you didn't grasp what he was saying.
Actually in another speech he says that what you are saying is the only alternative ie to say well I can’t help but give this talk about the absence of free will because there is no free will. Got good laughs too actually
Why’d you stop posting?
It seems self evident that there are limits to understanding, as much as I can empathize with you, I cannot know what it feels like to be you, or your dog, or cat. Part of the reason there are limits to understanding is that we cannot really be certain of anything, all we can say with any reasonable certainty is that what has happened in the past gives a good indication of what will happen in the future.
Can someone explain on what basis Chomsky asserts "Newton demonstrated that there are no machines. Nothing works by mechanical principles"? (th-cam.com/video/zc-AX4C7KRg/w-d-xo.html) I, admittedly with very little knowledge of Newton, thought that Newtonian physics did pretty much the opposite? I would have thought Hume would have been a better authority?
Newton couldn’t explain gravity by _mechanical_ terms. He called action at a distance “absurd”.
So "there are no machines" is Chomsky over-generalising Newton?
Well, you didn’t think Chomsky was saying that there literally are no machines, as in pendulum clocks and steam engines don’t exist, right? Gravity is a big part of the universe, and can’t be explained in mechanical terms. That means that the universe (seemingly) doesn’t work like a machine.
Thx. I'd never heard anything like this, so I wasn't sure of he was "channelling" Hume wrt cause and effect which would undermine the notion of a machine or whether he was referring to something else. From what you are saying it would seem to be something else - but I'm still not quite sure what Newton is saying. So could you explain how it would relate to, say, a pendulum. Is it something like, it's behaviour is predictable, yet because gravity is involved, it can't be mechanistic because we haven't been able to identify all the mechanisms involved?
This caught me by surprise too, he has a habit of saying mind bending things. I'm fairly ignorant of the topic too, but isn't he just referring to the lack of a tangible, visible mechanism explaining the universe? For example, we have a model for gravity that works well and agrees with our intuition, but apart from referring to gravitational fields we can't demonstrate what gravity or the gravitational field actually is, we can only point to the effects that we see. In a sense these concepts become axiomatic in the framework of physics.
Talk, talk and never really answered the question.
Remarkably horrendous comments even by yt standards.
dennet's like a fish who cannot speculate about the existence of things that are outside the water
unfortunately i fear you don't get how right you are. i don't mean it as a compliment
If we were fish, indeed, how could we know about things outside of the water? Think about it. We are limited by our nature.
It's really telling how robust and multifaceted Chomskys response is compared with Dennetts. He draws analogies and parallels to similar problems that are so enlightening that shed much light in a difficult question. I do like Dennett too and consider him to be fairly sharp intellectual, but Chomsky is a once in a lifetime intellect. I often crave his wisdom. I realise this is abit sucky but I don't care, easily for me one of the most influential people I have ever listened to.
Why does Dennett always sound drunk?
More seriously, Dennett here is obviously incoherent. He essentially concedes Chomsky's position by the end, but treats his audience to a meandering and confused preamble.
The dude sounds like Steve Brule.
That's kind of insulting to drunk people dude.
+MrJumbotron How do you think he is conceding chomsky's position?
+Mr Jumbotron why does chomsky sound like he is sleep talking
Chomsky
It is clear that more intelligent people comprehend things others struggle to grasp, and so it would be strange not to think that scale can continue beyond human intelligence. I'm struck, though, by Newton's Statement, "There are no machines". What on earth did he mean by that? I've taken a fair amount of science, and I don't see what he's trying to explain.
Sean Ryan
What Newton proved is that the World/Universe cannot be explained by mechanical principles (contact action). Gravity, for example, can't be explained by contact action - something striking against something else along a chain of causality. And yet with gravity there is interaction without contact. But we don't know how this works. May never know. Thus Newton showed the imperfection of the mechanical philosophy as being unable to explain such phenomena.
It seems to me Chomsky is right simply on point of logic: that there must be a scope and limit to our cognitive capacities as a consequence of our genetic endowment.
For me, if we accept scope and limits to our understanding, then this means there must - by definition - be (I believe) concepts, entities, etc, of an existential nature which we simply cannot perceive.
Thanks, got it. In my worldview, the prohibition against "action at a distance" in some way survives until quantum mechanics (if you view space-time as a thing, and fields as properties of it). I was focused more on determinism, though, which I also understand to survive at least until quantum mechanics.
As far as the limits of cognitive capacity, I point to the Turing machine, which is logically equivalent to every other computer. The difference between what it and my desktop PC can accomplish correspond to differences in calculation speed and memory. It stands to reason that the cognitive capacities of humans are, in practical terms, limited by the same concerns. We could understand anything, with sufficiently augmented memory, if we had the time. But neither time nor working memory may be sufficiently available as to make understanding of a given problem practical (or possible in a human lifetime).
Humans additionally have the problem of attention span - it's psychologically prohibitively difficult to invest all our minds in understanding that doesn't provide sufficient gratification along the way.
@@adder257 The existence of the Turing Machine actually illustrates the opposite of what you imply. Firstly, a Turing machine has an infinite tape, so there's no memory limitation in that sense. It does however have a memory limitation in the sense of its limited transition table, so you are correct to say that a Turing machine is limited by its memory and processing speed; but these are only practical limitations, not fundamental ones. However, the Turing machine is fundamentally limited by its architecture.
You see, the Turing machine sits at the top of the Chomsky hierarchy, which is a hierarchy of grammars and their corresponding physical realisations. Regular languages are physically realised by finite state machines, context free languages are physically realised by push down automata and decidable languages are physically realised by Turing machines. The key point about the Chomsky Hierachy is that no matter how much memory or processing speed increases you give a finite state machine, it will, in principal, never be able to recognise context free languages; and no matter how much memory or processing speed increases you give a push down automata, it will never be able to recognise decidable languages. Similarly, while a Turing machine can brute force its way to emulating some aspects of human computation, like with alpha go, it's fairly clear now that its architecture fundamentally limits it from replicating all forms of the human mind. So we can then put the human mind in its own tier that sits above the Turing machine.
At this point I've shown that physical architecture applies computational limits that can not be overcome by processing and memory increases; but I have not shown that the human mind is a realisation of a physical architecture. But that's when biology comes into the argument: as far as we know, the human mind has physical limitations, and therefore by the first argument, has computational limitations. Of course, the human mind could be infinitely malleable, and effectively be a metaphysical object; but that's really what you'd have to show to show that the human mind has no computational limits.
@@MassDefibrillator The Turing machine as a hypothetical concept doesn't exist, so I limited myself to speaking of functional approximations of it.
Yes, architectures can fundamentally limit what a machine can do.
However, I haven't seen evidence of this yet:
"Similarly, while a Turing machine can brute force its way to emulating some aspects of human computation, like with alpha go, it's fairly clear now that its architecture fundamentally limits it from replicating all forms of the human mind."
It's clear that modern computers don't obviously lead to replication of all the aspects of the human mind. It's not clear whether they are fundamentally unable to do so, are simply inefficient in doing so, or could in fact do so quite well once we understand the human mind better.
learned tomes lol
To say "Dennett vs Chomsky" is a little bit like saying "Dolly Parton vs Plato". Dennett is inexistent in the world. Chomsky is the most relevant person from the US and probably one of the 10 best most important intellectuals in modern history.
Even, possibly, the most LUCID of all, in particular.
I’m taking Dolly 10 out of 10
@@NickHolum me too, Plato is getting too old
Consciousness is "mystical" to Dennett...lmfao...what a weak perspective.
definitely their are a limits to our logic and intellect capacity, it may differ from one person to another, just like individual physical capacity...even if we are talking about accumulation of knowledge through generations... it may add to quantity BUT dose it fundamentally differ in quality??. I think the most fundamental question to ask in this time: "Is their another dimension within human being of knowing other than intellect??"
A lot of Chomsky fanboys in the comments. What Chomsky defines as understanding at least in this context is that "unless you can show that something works like a machine, you haven't explained it" and thus you don't understand it. Which is also to say that if it is a machine, it can be understood by some brain. He says Newton showed that the world is not a machine and thus is fundamentally unintelligible to us. He doesn't elaborate on how Newton showed this (at least not in this clip).
To say that somethings shall forever remain a mystery can mean one of two things. One is that there are things in the world that are not mechanical and thus can never be understood by any amount of cognitive capacity. The other is to attribute it the lack of sufficient cognitive capacity in humans (which is not a very interesting topic if you ask me).
If we are talking about the limits of understanding in general, then a rat not being able to get the concept of prime numbers is ridiculous and irrelevant to the topic. Instead of the rat, let's use a human toddler. A toddler cannot understand a prime number maze but an adult can. Can we not say the probably a sufficiently brainy rat can figure out a prime number maze the way a sufficiently developed toddler (an adult) can understand it? What you need to show a limit to understanding IN GENERAL is to show something that can not be reduced to a machine. I would argue this as impossible.
On the other hand, if we are talking about the limits of HUMAN understanding or cognitive abilities, then this is about as interesting as talking about the limits of rat understanding. Not very interesting.
I think you missed his argument. Chomsky isn’t speaking in favor of the idea of interpreting the world as a machine, he pointing out how useless the concept is.Chomsky isn’t defining understanding by the mechanical principle (things as machines), he’s stating that the mechanical principle was the means by which people intuitively tried to understand the world in Newton’s time (the mechanical principle in this context meaning that objects need to be coming in direct contact with other objects in order to act upon them). Newton disproved this by observing and measuring gravitational phenomena, which is objects acting upon one another without direct physical contact. In doing so, he drew the ire of those who employed the mechanical principle, who referred to his conception of invisible forces as “occult” (again, because they didn’t believe objects could interact without contact). In order to further understand gravity, the scientific community was forced to put the mechanical understanding behind them, which means largely abandoning the intuitive physical reasoning through which scientific methodology was implemented, and as such, opening the door to the notion that it is POSSIBLE that there is stuff we cannot understand, whereas with the mechanical model, everything was presumed to be understandable with time and effort. Here, Chomsky simply proposes that another “lowering of the bar” as to what we can presume to understand is not at all an irrational thought, and indeed similar actions were necessary to form the more complete understating of physics and mechanics that we have today versus in Newton’s time.
make believe
Hypothesis non fingo
Dennet pisses me off. Then again he's an arrogant reductionist so its not his fault, he's blinded by his lack of humility
Every time I'm reminded of Dennett I'm like "why do I fucking hate that guy so much?" Then I listen to him for five minutes and think "oh yeah, that's why. That's exactly why."
May I ask why you think he's wrong?
He's also a silly You Tube pseudo celebrity
Ha ha
I don't know why Mr. Santa Claus feels the need to make what he's arguing against sound ridiculous by using that mocking tone of voice.
Dennett ignores one important fact, that today, with the given conditions of most human beings, science has a lot left to do or figure... which is open to speculation rather than bold claims ...
Dennett isn't ignoring that. He is pointing out that the claim that, for humans, there are unknowable things about the universe is, itself, a bold claim given that making such a claim implies that a being that *did* know such things could not explain them to us with language even given infinite time.
chomsky
P=NP
Biologists, and scientists in general, need to stop ignoring social issues. All I can think of listening to this is that Dennett needs a slap in the face, becasue he's arguing with one the most important human rights activists of all time. Since Dennett has an audience of his own, and unquestionably knows what Chomsky's real dedication is, he should instead be focusing his efforts on his true responsibility (as a public intellectual) which is doing what he can (a lot, with his large reputation and audience) to bring awareness to the crimes of our time. All of which should take precedent over abstract philosophical arguments.
Dennett doesn't have any responsability to do shit (at least no more than you and me or any random Joe on the street). Don't put responsabilities upon the soulders of famous/important people. He's a philosopher, so he does philosophy, the same way a salesman sells stuff. If anyone is responsable for being human rights is everyone independently of what they do or who they happen to be. If he's well known that's irrelevant.
I absolutely agree with rzarectz and think Fabricio Guido is a windbag who doesn't even understand how stupid he sounds.
Oh look, another reactionary!!
I love Chomsky and am not a capitalist fanboy, but belinskii is right.
Dennett is demonstrably wrong, not because of some nonsense about how arguing with Chomsky makes you wrong (it doesn't), or because they should be doing something to help people more. You can extend that logic to every action anyone takes - for example, you are wrong because Chomsky might read your comment instead of helping people. You are wrong because you could be doing something more socially useful. Anything anyone does is wrong because they could be helping the poor more, or inventing eco-friendly infrastructure or...
To find out why it isn't wrong to not be maximally helpful all the time, think about how ultimately, social utility would be useless in such a world because poor people helped will die regardless. Cultures saved will die regardless. knowledge discovered will more or less die with us, inevitably. There has to be something that makes any social utility - any human rights activism, etc - useful! for that to occur, for life to be worth the work of helping/preserving/advocating, people have to amuse themselves with things like abstract art, much basic scientific research, philosophy, and other essentially USELESS shit! Useless shit is actually of extreme social utility! So get outta here with that shit about being wrong because you wasted time where Chomksy could be useful.
belinskii You're an imbecile's imbecile. No, he's not an apologist for those regimes. You have such incredibly low standards. If what you say is true, why not substantiate your claim, in the initial post?
I always want to be impressed with Dennett and almost (always?) never am.
and they say Mackie is boring...
Chomsky, though defending here the notion of human limitation, none-the-less, has no problem in self-proclaiming as an atheist. Where is the logical consistency there? It seems to me that agnosticism is the more appropriate position for him to take.
Chomsky isn't an atheist in the sense you mean. He just doesn't believe in God. I doubt Chomsky would want to be interpreted as having some positive knock-down argument against God.
You do not understand what atheism is. Atheism isn't a claim on god, it is a claim on evidence. All Atheism says is in-order for a claim to be accepted as true, it must provide sufficient evidence to support that claim. Atheim does not say "god" does not exist, such a claim is meaningless until you provide a definition for god. Atheism does say that god as they have been defined by any human religion invented does not exist. None of these religions provide the supporting claim for the claims their religions make.
He is not defending the idea that human understanding might have limits. Which should hardly be a controversial view anyway. Rather, Chomsky is suggesting that the more interesting question is why we find certain obvious questions are so hard to comprehend let alone answer. He cited some examples that form the foundation of modern science, including the notion the universe is mechanical and one must seek, as did Galileo, Huygens, and Kepler and so on, to describe that mechanism. Newton came along and showed how the "intuitive" idea of a mechanical universe is wrong. That is a stark example of the limits of our understanding. Since then we provide ever more exotic and esoteric ideas and theories to explain the phenomena around us which we all appreciate is far beyond our intuition and understanding.
Chomsky says we don't know if we can ever fully comprehend the universe and we still don't know anything about how our own self awareness emerges. But like the Rat in the Prime Number maze, perhaps it is beyond our physical limits to comprehend. We just don't know. Chomsky says we of course should try our best to understand and investigate, but for all our progress since the scientific revolution there are still many questions that are exactly where the great thinkers of the past pondered and wrote about them.
"Do I believe in God? Can’t answer, I’m afraid. I’m not being flippant, but I don’t understand the question. What is it that I am supposed to believe or not believe in? Are you asking whether I believe there is something not in the universe (or the universes, if there are (maybe infinitely) many of them), and that somehow stands above them? I’ve never heard of any reason for believing that. Something else? What? There are many concepts of spirituality, among them, various notions of divinity developed in the Judaeo-Christian-Islamic religions...
Anyway, without clarification of a kind I have never seen, I don’t know whether I believe or don’t believe in whatever a questioner has in mind."
-Noam Chomsky
We are different from animals because we understand questions and they do not? And because we understand questions, then there may not be limits to our understanding? Get a job...
Oners82
That's because he was being satirical dumb ass.
apparently the joke has sailed, and went several miles over your head, never to be seen or understood by you, ever again... people like you give me faith in the human species.
thats not what the other couple people thought. no need to be butt-hurt, pal.
Oners82
What exactly did I spell wrong? Perhaps you misconstrued what I wrote, you see I wasn't calling you a "dumbass" I was calling you a dumb ass, because you are not simply a dumb person, but an unintelligent donkey. Does that clear it up for you?
oh yeah, btw, im not a hypocrite, because i never had the moral precondition of not being hatefilled in the first place. also, exactly what part reflects insecurity? just spewing nonsense like usual because mommy said you were "special"?
Dennett is saying that to avoid the whole God question. There's this big show trial that goes on with big brains: jump on Chomsky behind his back because you are too cowardly to have your intellectual ass handed to you. As Chomsky has stated, we know little about bees let alone humans. Most things are just mystical as Dennett said. Futurists promised us flying cars; where are they?
"Chomsky has stated, we know little about bees let alone humans" it's funny since one of Dennet's books is titled "Consiousness Explained".
Dennet has become too militant and illogical to accept the obvious. lol
Dennett knows Chomsky is levels and leagues beyond him, and that's the only thing he's right about in this context
Don't know who this dweeb is but he can considered himself schooled by the mighty Chomsky!
Chomsky is humble, Dennett is not...
Dennett strawmanning it up. No, just because we have the ability to "ask questions" doesn't automatically mean that there are no limits to our ability to ask questions. He's just saying "Well clearly we're capable of understanding any question, so what's stopping us from understanding any answer?" No, you idiot, there are almost certainly questions that are themselves beyond our ken, not just answers. You can't just go "humans are the smartest animals on Earth, therefore they've attained the maximum possible level of intelligence in the entire universe, therefore the whole universe is ultimately intelligible to humans". That's nonsense.
Dennett isn't claiming that the whole universe is intelligible to humans, only that there is no reason to *assume* that will not *ultimately* prove to be the case. Have some epistemological humility, Steven, and don't call people idiots for calling out assumptions for what they are.
+Steven well we have teams of brains as dennett said.
Dennet is right of course. Chomsky is outside of his element and clearly speaks out of his ass, we can clearly differentiate between knowing something intuitively and intellectually. We can't intuitively understand the size of the earth, but we can intellectually, we've measured it. We just can't comprehend that size, it's just a number, but it's a correct number. Saying we can't ever understand connsciousness just because it's unintuitive is just being lazy. Sad to see Chomsky's cult of personality cover for him here.
The distinction between knowing something intellectually and intuitively definitely exists
It has nothing to do with this discussion, however
Chomsky's point is just the obvious one that we readily accept animals are limited in their knowledge of languages or algebra (intuitively and intellectually) so presumably we will be thus limited about some stuff. He concludes that consciousness may be one area which is inaccessible to us due to this limit