You really motivated me to study philosophy, so now im an artificial intelligence and a philosophy student at the same time, thank you for sharing your knowledge :)
For anyone who was a bit confused by Kane's coastline example allow me to explain. I make maps for a living so I guess I've gotta take this shot to show off my expertise. The length of a geometric object border (and thus also a coastline) is dependent on the scale at which you measure it. Are you measuring it from a satellite image at a scale of 1:100.000 (one centimeter is 100.000 centimeters in real life)? Than the coastline might be 500 kilometers long. From this scale is looks like a long straight line. From the altitude of a biplane flying only 10 kilometers off the ground you will notice that the coast has a lot more wrinkles. It's not as straight of a line as you thought it was from the satellite image. Thus the coast will be (drastically) larger, perhaps 2.000 kilometers long. Then, if you measure it by foot, you will notice even more little twists and turns, and you might end up at coast that's 80.000 kilometers long. You can keep scaling this down till you're measuring individual atoms and the length of the coastline is larger than the solar system.
I would add that, by the time you get to the atomic scale, there will be no determinate fact whether some particular atom (in a grain of sand, say) counts as part of the coastline. So there isn't actually any determinate property "the length of the coastline."
thank you for this video!! I’ve been struggling with this question for a while and while I’d need to think more on it this seems like a very satisfying answer.
thanks so much for these interesting thoughts. A humble request: if you happen to have references that go further in depth on topics you cover, people like me would appreciate seeing them in the description or something like that. But regardless, let me again thank you for sharing these fascinating observations.
For constructivism in general, see Nelson Goodman, "Ways of Worldmaking" A somewhat similar view of abstract objects is defended by Carnap, in the paper "Empiricism, semantics, and ontology." Though I am not really a Carnapian; in Carnap's terminology, I take it that external questions about object-frameworks are perfectly intelligible and I give a constructivist answer across the board.
I don't know if you've already made a video on philosophy of mathematics, but that's something I would be really interested in. There's a RU-vid channel called "Insights into Mathematics" run by Norman Wildberger. He is pretty adamantly against the direction taken by modern mathematics since it requires the acceptance of infinites sets and the axiom of choice. I'm somewhat interested in his critiques, only because I think it would be interesting to develop a mathematics that is more explicit about its epistemology. For example, although the delta-epsilon proofs in real analysis assume the uncountably infinite set of real numbers, it seems like you could frame them using a kind of "on-demand" logic by constructing finite systems (or at least countable systems) and using something like induction to show that the same thing applies in a system that contains it. I don't know. I'm in more of an applied math area so I wouldn't claim to have much incite on this topic. But anyways, I'm interested in Norman Wildberger's perspective, but I'm also not completely sure about his philosophical objections to infinite sets. On one hand, I think it's certainly true that we are not "using" infinite sets in our reasoning about mathematics. We use axioms that apply to infinite sets and assume their existence, but certainly proofs do not rely on enumeration of infinite sets. So it seems possible to me that you could construct a mathematical system that does not rely on the existence of infinite sets. And that construction might reveal more about the logic that actually underlies the modern set-theory approach (I'm interested in what seems to be a kind of dual relationship between objects and functions, so I wonder if you could use the kind of function-oriented nature of recursion and induction to get to the same results that modern math got to using a sort of spatial recursion on elements of an infinite set). But on the other hand, I'm not so sure that there is a fundamental philosophical problem with infinite sets or the axiom of choice. It clearly seems like the mathematics that assumes infinite sets has been extraordinarily useful, and it is amenable to useful approximation. And it doesn't seem obvious to me that our models of the world need to be capable of actually generating all of the things that they imply to exist.
I was waiting for you to say that you could chop off a finger and still call it the same hand in a sense but you just stuck with atoms haha; great video, very well explained. Thanks!
There's one interesting and important problem here. You said that we construct even ordinary objects arbitrarily. However, the observable uniformity of nature and the fact that most people seem to carve out nature into very similar objects counters the claim that objects are arbitrarily constructed. There are some processes, mechanisms, "laws", habits, etc. that make us _consistently_ construct objects as those objects and not others. We've learned a lot about this from Kant and then later from the projects of cognitive science and neuroscience. So, we construct reality according to some principles and rules, not arbitrarily.
First, I don't think this is a problem for my broader point, because it is also the case that people abstract in similar ways. So in this respect, there is no difference between concrete objects and abstract objects. I'll just copy what I said to another commenter about why I use the "arbitrary": I don't think much of importance hangs on the word "arbitrary". But there are in my view various sources of arbitrariness in the construction of objects: (a) We make arbitrary assumptions about the correct methods for inquiry. This point isn't something I discussed in this video, but I take it that various skeptical challenges, such as the problem of the criterion, force us to just assume e.g. particular theoretical virtues. (b) We draw lines in arbitrary places, so that we can say e.g. that x counts as part of the hand and y doesn't. (c) We end inquiry at arbitrary points. When we want to figure out Verity's height, we will be interested in giving this to a particular degree of precision. 5'6" is good enough for us; but we could investigate further and conclude that it's 5'6.5"... and if we continue probing far enough, the very property "Verity's height" disappears. Of course, arbitrariness can be reduced by appealing to interests. We can can point out that constructing objects such as hands serves various purposes, or that it would be a waste of time, given our goals, to continue investigated Verity's height to a greater degree of precision. I don't think this eliminates arbitrariness entirely, though.
Additionally, the fact that we can usefully model humans as constructing objects on the basis of particular principles and rules doesn't in itself do anything to show that those constructions are not arbitrary, at least in the sense that I was using the term "arbitrary". Suppose I have a jar of marbles, one red and the rest black. I allow people to take out some of the marbles and whoever takes out the red marble wins a prize. I stipulate the rule: "each person can take 5 marbles." The choice of 5 marbles is arbitrary: I could allow each person to take 1, I could allow each to take 10. It doesn't make any difference to me. Indeed, we can suppose that I choose 5 using a random number generator. So notice that everybody will do the same thing, on the basis of following a rule: everybody will take out 5 marbles, because the rule says to take 5 marbles. But taking 5 marbles is still arbitrary in an important sense.
@@KaneB Yes, this is not a counter to the main point, but rather to that specific thing. I'm not claiming there is some major difference between concrete and abstract concepts/objects. I'm just claiming that our concepts of objects are not arbitrary. I'll briefly address the points from your first comment. > (a) We make arbitrary assumptions about the correct methods for inquiry. Even if that were the case, this doesn't mean that most of our concepts are arbitrary. But I don't even think that we make arbitrary assumptions about methods of inquiry. > (b) We draw lines in arbitrary places, so that we can say e.g. that x counts as part of the hand and y doesn't. I don't believe so, exactly for the reasons I gave in the OP. If that were the case, we would constantly disagree with each other about whether, say, our necks are parts of our hands or not. But we don't. Hence, we are consistent in our drawing of borders, hence we do not draw them arbitrarily. > (c) We end inquiry at arbitrary points. When we want to figure out Verity's height, we will be interested in giving this to a particular degree of precision. 5'6" is good enough for us; but we could investigate further and conclude that it's 5'6.5"... and if we continue probing far enough, the very property "Verity's height" disappears. Again, because we always stop at 5'6 means that we are consistent about it and not arbitrary. So, none of that addresses what I wrote. And yes, we could appeal to our interests, tendencies, biases, proclivities, heuristics, etc. And we would have to conclude that there are patterns that make our concepts consistently consistent and not arbitrary. Kant wrote an entire book (The Critique of Pure Reason), where he outlines various ways we construct our concepts. Because all of our minds use these rules and the rules cannot be changed, all our concepts are built from them, hence they cannot be arbitrary. Importantly, we are not choosing these principles or rules. So it's not a similar case to your jar of marbles example. The two are sufficiently dissimilar that there is no analogy. And yes, you do understand what arbitrariness means, you even used it properly in your latest video on personites.
@@WackyConundrum >> Even if that were the case, this doesn't mean that most of our concepts are arbitrary I'm interested in the construction of objects. Methods of inquiry are part of that. >> If that were the case, we would constantly disagree with each other about whether, say, our necks are parts of our hands or not. But we don't. No, that does not follow. Are you under the impression that to say that the boundary between X and Y is "arbitrary" entails that there are no constraints whatsoever on where the boundary is conventionally drawn? >> Again, because we always stop at 5'6 means that we are consistent about it and not arbitrary. (a) Universality is compatible with arbitrariness. (b) We don't always stop at 5'6". >> Kant wrote an entire book Yeah he sucks though. >> Importantly, we are not choosing these principles or rules. So it's not a similar case to your jar of marbles example. The two are sufficiently dissimilar that there is no analogy. They are dissimilar in some respects and similar in other respects. That's how analogies work. Whether the principles or rules are chosen seems totally irrelevant in this context. Anyway, the impression I'm getting from your response is that you are just using the term "arbitrary" in a much more narrow way than I would. So fine, by your definition of "arbitrary", there is probably relatively little arbitrariness in the construction of objects.
@@KaneB > I'm interested in the construction of objects. Methods of inquiry are part of that. Yes, but then, you could only make a case that a very specific subset of our concepts are arbitrary. And then again, we construct concepts through consistent principles and heuristics. >> If that were the case, we would constantly disagree with each other about whether, say, our necks are parts of our hands or not. But we don't. > No, that does not follow. Are you under the impression that to say that the boundary between X and Y is "arbitrary" entails that there are no constraints whatsoever on where the boundary is conventionally drawn? No. If there were variable constraints or the constraints were put on a whim, we could say that the boundaries are set arbitrary. But that is not the case. >> Kant wrote an entire book > Yeah he sucks though. Yes, he sucks as a writer. Which is why I would suggest reading a guidebook. I can suggest: Bryan Hall - The Arguments of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (2011) Yirmiyahu Yovel - Kant’s Philosophical Revolution - A Short Guide to the Critique of Pure Reason (2018) Sebastian Gardner - Routledge Philosophy GuideBook to Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason (1999). > They are dissimilar in some respects and similar in other respects. That's how analogies work. And I said that the cases are sufficiently dissimilar to not work as an analogy. > Whether the principles or rules are chosen seems totally irrelevant in this context. It's very relevant. If we do not choose the principles but always construct concepts with these principles, then they cannot be changed, and hence the resulting concepts cannot be arbitrary. If we could arbitrarily or randomly choose the principles, then the results could have been arbitrary. > Anyway, the impression I'm getting from your response is that you are just using the term "arbitrary" in a much more narrow way than I would. So fine, by your definition of "arbitrary", there is probably relatively little arbitrariness in the construction of objects. Yes. I'm using it in the same sense, I believe, that you used it in your video on personites. Can you clarify what sense are you using here?
A common approach in writing software is to define abstractions. We can define a rectangle object, for instance. This object abstracts bits of data (representing the rectangle's position in space) and computations such as scaling and rotation. In practice, this abstraction is imperfect. Namely, the length of the rectangle can't be infinitely precise (think millions of decimal points) as computer memory is finite.
Great insights! Thank you for the videos! It's interesting to think about, because in many ways abstract objects seem even more "real" than concrete objects. I mean, abstract mathematical entities, like the natural numbers for example, seem to be instantiated on many different scales-from the microscopic to the human scale and all the way to the super-galactic scale. Additionally, they would seem to have application at all times-from the distant past to the far far future. Moreover, mathematical entities such as sets, functions, shapes, and numbers allow for incredibly accurate and precise descriptions and predictions of nature at many different spatiotemporal scales. When contrasted with everyday concrete objects-which we rarely doubt the existence of-such as cars, tables, and chairs, it would then seem difficult to conclude that abstract mathematical objects do not exist, especially if one accepts the existence of everyday concrete objects. P.S.: I would be very interested to hear your thoughts on classical vs. constructive mathematics, or even just the philosophy of mathematics more generally.
I’m so grateful that you are bringing this sort of insightful content to RU-vid. I was first exposed to Philosophy at school through RU-vid, but after my Philosophy BA/MA, I realised that there is very little content on RU-vid which goes in depth enough. But I feel like your content really fills this niche - humbled to have been exposed to your wonderful channel. Thank you!
I don’t have time to flesh the idea out right now, but in my opinion, I think that the chemical systems made up on the macroscopic level have causal power over the more fundamental levels. On a fundamental level we are clouds of probability like you say, but the thing that causes us to be definite is some interaction where the macroscopic levels cause the world to be in a certain way. Because otherwise it would just mean that everything we experience is by chance of particles moving with their own agenda, and their formation just so happens to form us and just so happens to have continuity in a way understandable by a complex structure that just so happened to be created by the arrangements of particles that don’t even have an actual state. Just seems a lot less likely than the macroscopic world having causal power over the small.
I guess that also depends on what you mean by "exist"; I feel like many of us define abstract objects as "things that do not exist" in our day to day life
As with most philosophical debates, it is important to step back and consider semantics before anything else. What does "abstract object" mean and what does "exist" mean. Once we clarify exactly what we are asking, then the answer will most likely be obvious. Defining "abstract object" as non-causal and non-spatiotemporal is one way to do it, but it seems like that is picking features that happen to be common to most abstract objects and turning them into the definition. A more elegant way to define "abstract object" is as a metaphorical way of discussing a collection of objects by reifying the common features of those objects. For example, the number five is an abstract object that represents the collection of all groups of five objects. The number five has all the properties that are common to any group of five objects, like a bag of five apples and a flock of five birds and so on. The number is non-spatiotemporal because there is no place in time or space that is common to all groups of five objects; they are scattered all over time and space. When we ask does the number five exist, we really should define exactly what we mean by "existence" in this context, but we could just look at it in the same way we looked at whether five was spatiotemporal. In other words, is "existence" a common property of all groups of five objects? Since many groups of five objects are imaginary or fictional, it seems fair to say that some groups of five objects exist while others do not, so "existence" is no more part of the abstraction of the number five than spacial position is part of that abstraction.
>> A more elegant way to define "abstract object" is as a metaphorical way of discussing a collection of objects by reifying the common features of those objects To me this is a fine way of thinking about abstract objects, but I'm not sure I would define "abstract object" this way. The problem is that platonists want to say that there really are e.g. mathematical objects, that these objects do not exist in space and time, that these objects have no causal powers, etc. As they see it, talk of numbers isn't simply a matter of metaphor and reification. Rather, when we say something like "the number 5 is prime", we are successfully picking out an entity and correctly describing one of its properties (analogous to "Mt. Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth"). Your definition of "abstract object" doesn't even purport to refer to such things. In which case, platonists could just grant that mathematical objects are not "abstract objects", per your definition, but then introduce a different word for what they want to talk about -- "zabstract", say. Then the debate I'm talking about is the debate about whether there are zabstract objects.
Ultimately though, I don't think much hangs on how we define the abstract/concrete distinction. We can just look at the objects that are supposedly problematic and ask what some philosophers consider to be problematic about them. So there is major debate in metaphysics about whether there are non-spatiotemporal, non-causal mathematical objects, with philosophers giving arguments for and against the existence of such objects. It doesn't make much difference whether we label these "abstract".
@@KaneB >>The problem is that platonists want to say that there really are e.g. mathematical objects, that these objects do not exist in space and time, that these objects have no causal powers, etc. As they see it, talk of numbers isn't simply a matter of metaphor and reification. Rather, when we say something like "the number 5 is prime", we are successfully picking out an entity and correctly describing one of its properties (analogous to "Mt. Everest is the tallest mountain on Earth"). I think that this can't be true because IMO any objects including mathematical ones are a matter of "metaphor and reification" An object is defined by its properties, and calling something an object is a matter of collecting all of these properties under one name, the name of the object (perhaps this is what reify means? im not as college educated as the rest of you yet). Obviously there are arbitrary lines you will have to draw in order to decide what counts as part of the object, but that has more to do with how precise youre going to be in the naming of an object rather than what an object actually is. An abstract object like the number 5 is just the name we give to the object that describes all the mathematical properties (prime, odd, etc.) that are common to groups of 5 (or any other thing that can be represented by 5). IMO the object Mt. Everest is just as metaphorical and "reified" as the number 5, but the number 5 does not describe spatiotemporalalala properties and Mt. Everest does. Its sort of hard for me to articulate the way I think about this kind of stuff, but basically its like there is a continous universe, and we draw arbitrary lines in the sand around sections of the universe and give them names and call them objects. Concrete objects are objects which describe a "line in the sand" around common localized spatial/temporal/causal (i dont really know the right word) properties of this part of the universe; Abstract objects are objects which describe a "line in the sand" around common mathematical or whatever other type of properties certain parts of the universe. At this point im sort of getting in over my head but its fun to talk. Aside from that, I love your video. It has put into better words something that I have been thinking about for a long while. I didnt really know that people actually could study this type of thing, and wish I knew people that I could talk to about this. For a long time ive been thinking about this idea of an "INFORMATIOSPHERE" which is the goofy name that I gave to this idea I had about how you can create a seemingly infinite and arbitrary amount of information about anything, and that information would still have a truth value (either its true or false). It's almost like the information about something is relative to the context you consider the thing in, and there is an infinite amount of contexts you could considet the thing in. Not really sure, but Im glad know other people think about weird stuff like this because Ive always felt that if I tried to talk to people about this sort of thing, it would get dismissed as impractical and almost pseudo-intellectual. (it definitely is impractical, and is almost pseudo-intellectual, but is nonetheless fun to think about)
@@beaupersoon5221 >> I think that this can't be true That's fine. I'm also not a platonist, and I think my view of objects is similar to yours. My point in that comment is that it seems strange to use the phrase "abstract object" in a way that simply removes platonism from the debate by definition. When philosophers talk about "abstract objects", they are trying to talk about the debate between platonists and nominalists.
Have you looked into much from Gilles Delueze on this subject? His metaphysics of Difference preceding Identity both logically and metaphysically seems very relevant to this subject.
Great video, man! I agree with about everything here-that concreta and abstracta exist in the same nonobjective non-platonist way, that defining the concrete/abstract distinction is a mess, that the concrete and the abstract intermingle etc etc. However, why not drop all the “construction” talk? It makes it sound like we got some sort of handle on ourselves, the constructors, when in fact we can raise all the same sorts of problems (problem of the many etc) there too. An additional , and to my mind more serious , problem is that the construction talk seems like an empty pseudo-explanation. We say that there are hands. And we say that there is the number five. What’s added, if anything, by saying additionally that we CONSTRUCT hands and the number five? Isn’t that just a metaphysical version of a virtus dormitivae explanation and thus no explanation at all? Anyway, great stuff! Cheers!!
A couple of reasons I like the word "construction": (1) In many cases, we can give models of the constructive processes, e.g. the work in categorical perception, where we perceive instances of a category as being further from the boundary of the category than they actually are (where the "actual values" are determined by what is measured by particular instruments). Or take a statement like "the sky is blue". We have pretty detailed models of how the human visual system works, how colour languages developed, why we might model the sky as if it were an entity, etc. It's not that we just have to say: the blueness of the sky is constructed, full stop. We can talk about how the construction happens. (2) Ian Hacking makes the point that talk of "construction" often implies alternative ways of constructing things. To say that X is constructed carries the implication that X could have been different, that we can change X or do away with it entirely. I want to emphasize the contingency of our ways of worldmaking. It's up to us whether we continue making worlds in the same ways. (Choices and the individuals making those choices are also constructed, of course.) >> It makes it sound like we got some sort of handle on ourselves, the constructors, when in fact we can raise all the same sorts of problems (problem of the many etc) there too. If it's fine to talk about hands despite all these problems, and I think it is fine to talk about hands, then what would be the problem with talking about constructors? >> Isn’t that just a metaphysical version of a virtus dormitivae explanation and thus no explanation at all? I'm not sure that I'm trying to give an explanation of anything. Maybe I am insofar as the kind of view I hold is motivated at least partially by reflecting on certain philosophical problems, such as vagueness, the problem of the many, etc. I'm a little unsure what the explanandum would be, though. It's not really an explanation of vagueness, for instance. I'm just describing some considerations that led me to endorse this view. I take it that one issue with "explaining" e.g. why opium puts people to sleep by saying that opium has dormitive virtue is that it seems that "dormitive virtue" just isn't actually saying anything more than "puts people to sleep". That is, the explanans simply restates the explanandum in different terms. I don't think this is a problem for my view since it seems to me that there is a substantive distinction between my view and the apparent alternatives. So yes, I could just say sentences such as: "There are hands" "5 is a prime number" and so on. But then lots of other people will say sentences like that as well. Platonists will say those things. Fictionalist nominalists will say those things. There are certain aspects of their positions that I do not share, and it seems to me that the word "construction" expresses something about how exactly my position differs from theirs. That's what's added by using the term "construction". But maybe there isn't really even a difference between these positions. It's not just that they are all useless pseudo-explanations (I'm not too troubled by that), it's that there isn't even an intelligible distinction here: as if one person says they believe that opium has dormitive virtue and another says they believe that opium has the sleepiness property.
Small world, this heavily overlaps with what my local university philosophy club was discussing. I'd be curious if you have any insights into our ponderings. I take a special interest in constructivism, as I'm interested in studying Buddhism, and that is the primary tool used within Buddhism to determine if something exists. Specifically if it is an aggregate of parts, it's not ultimately real - just conventionally real. I myself am still unsure if this is the right way to define reality, but I've been pleased with it so far. The club also had mixed feelings about constructivism as a metaphysical test. As that relates to the video, I don't think we explicitly covered the title. Is constructivism a good test for existence? In that framework we would be inclined to say that neither concrete nor abstract object exist, which is a thing I'm inclined to say. Of special importance in this way is the soul or the self. If the self is constructed, that would place it as something conventionally real, rather than ultimately real. Though many felt the soul had some nature or essence that was not constructed, but did have difficulty nailing it down. Do you take constructivism to this sort of thing, or the mind? Finally, do you have any thoughts on further reading for constructivism? The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a good writeup of Constructivism in Metaphysics with plenty of further reading, but other than that google seems to fail to find anything.
Thinking in this way, I think, reveals just how "smart" your visceral, subconscious brain is compared to the "actively thinking" part. In other words, your brain is so smart that it can effectively demarcate objects, immediately, with pretty good accuracy in daily life. And it can just imagine, at the drop of a hat, something like a perfect square as an approximation for a television screen. And it makes these calculations and inferences really easily. Whereas if the "philosophical" or actively thinking part of your brain had to do these tasks, it would get tangled up in the questions you are asking and effectively be unable to do it. If the thinking part of your brain could see every atom in a chair it would be at a complete loss to decide what constituted the chair, but your subconscious (not sure if that's the right term) just DOES it, and it does it so well that object demarcation is a problem that 99.9% of people and all animals don't consider.
Does this taking this view compel you toward varieties of constructivism in other domains, like metaethics? Or philosophy of mathematics? Those are exactly the kinds of things I have in mind as abstracta. (If so, then the question will be, can you still be a non-cognitivist? Mathematical statements seem to have truth-values and they just involve abstract constructions, so why not ethical ones?)
I think Sean Carroll's Poetic Naturalism deals with these issues well. In this view, there is only (precisely) the wavefunction of the universe, but there are lots of different levels of description that allow us talk about concrete objects such as atoms or hands. I guess this is a different way of saying that we construct these objects, but it puts the emphasis on them being independently existing patterns in the matter (etc) of the universe, rather than being arbitrarily constructed. Similarly, I agree that we construct abstract objects. And like the concrete objects, the abstract objects we construct reflect some underlying structure to reality (this isn't to say that all mathematical objects have some kind of manifestation in physical phenomena, they don't).
I have seen crows when encountering a boiled egg, which may be rarely created naturally in nature. The crow will always very carefully separate the yolk from the white in one piece and eat that first and then eat the white part second. I am amazed the crow abstracted the existence of the yolk in this form even though it could not see it from the outside. It could have seen a boiled cut in half by a human, but every crow. Try it for yourself next time you eat a boiled egg outside sounded by crows.
21:44 Do you mean aside from the simples? As in no mind-independent hands but there are simples oriented hand-wise. Or at all, including the concrete simples?
All objects. I gave arguments targeted towards composite objects specifically, because it's easier to illustrate the broader in those cases, but I'm a constructivist about concrete simples too.
Do abstract objects exist? Given: Existance = Persistence Whereas; ... 1. Patterns of constant relations exist, for the simple reason that the universe and all in it, is constructed of a vast, hierarchy of stable (constant, persistent) relations that requires energy (change) to change state (alter those persistent, stable, relations). ... 2. Humans identify those patterns as fragments, parts, objects, spaces, and backgrounds. ... 3. Humans combine those patterns into episodes of objects, spaces and backgrounds. ... 4. Humans identify patterns between episodes and their constituent parts ... 5. Humans predict by auto association futures of episodes, and their parts, Objects in relation to one another, or objects an their parts. etc. ... 6. This predictive capacity results over time in categorizing Episodes, objects, relations, and properties into generalizations we call categories of 'marginally indifferent relations'. ... 7. We then repeat the process with these categories. ... 8. This process scales into imagination, fictionalism, fiction, story-making, sequence-making (pathfinding), etc. And Whereas; ... 9. Human memory stores the hierarchy of these predictive sequences and resulting patterns through repetition (both temporarily and then especially during the first sleep cycle). ... 10. These relations are then re-constructed from memory whenever stimulation is provided to the network of stored sequences - always by auto-association. Therefore; ...11. Abstract objects in any sense (a) require human sense, perception, prediction, episoding, indexing, and memory. (b) must be reconstructed every time they are referenced, just like running must be reconstructed by the movement of the legs. (c) even if recorded by some symbols or marks, must be reconstructed by sense perception using from the symbols or marks. ... 12. As such abstract objects have the potential to exist (persist), but must always be constructed (reconstructed). ... 13. Any other claims is a word game. Whether we call that word game an analogy, sophistry, a pseudoscience, or a lie is merely the paradigm with which it's stated and the consequence of the utterance. -Fin-
21:20 I am not sure it is like that For a chair, it's very straightforward what we construct as "the chair" (some particular set of atoms) But for "the number one": what is that supposed to be?
Didn't you already ask me this question haha? Anyway: I share its skepticism of natural necessities, but that's about it. I don't endorse metaphysical reductionism, I don't think that there's anything special about spatiotemporal entities, etc.
We seem to hold similar views on abstract/concrete objects. Thinking about mental abstraction of concrete objects + primary/secondary properties is what brought me to Idealism. The mind independent world likely does not have any of these categorical objects like hands or trees, yet everything we encounter is one of these objects that is produced and Bounded by the Mind. As you said in the video, there is no real line between something like hands and something like the number 3, they are both ultimately mental abstractions of something that is indescribable except by other mental abstraction. Further, there is no line between the primary and secondary properties of an object, nor the properties of an object and the object itself. This is because it seems to be impossible to remove all properties of an object without destroying the object itself. In essence, we only have access to mental abstractions, and all of these are constructions of the mind. Would you say you are a materialist, idealist, or something else? Or do you just not believe in such a substance
What about the irreducible concrete object? Suppose like atoms or prions were not reducible to a composite of others objects, would you still believe those to be abstractions or would they be mind independent objects?
Yes, I'm a constructivist about simple/irreducible concrete objects as well. One reason for this is that what counts as a simple is up to us: we could make the world in such a way that any particular object is a simple. Consider a chair, for example. I can say that this chair actually has no parts; when I perform an action that would conventionally be described as "taking the chair apart", say removing the leg, what I'm really doing is just destroying one object and creating a bunch of entirely new objects. The leg is not part of the chair: the leg is an entirely new object. Similarly, chairs are not composed of atoms; rather, atoms are new objects created from chairs when certain actions are performed on the chair. I'm pretty sure this model can be made empirically equivalent to the conventional model. If it is responded that the chair is composed of parts on the grounds that I can conceive of breaking it down into different parts, well, the same will be true for any other object you care to name. If you claim that some fundamental particle is simple and irreducible, I can still conceive of breaking it down further.
I guess we can say it stops being a hand when the set of confinments which define a hand are no longer applicaple. These sets of confinments may be defined based on a certain outcome or objective of the hand. For example the hand is improtant to pick things up. So once these atomes no longer pvodie this function then it is no longer a hand.
If both are construct, could we still make some differentiation between the two. For example there are abstract constructs and concrete or physical constructs? Or would that be nonsensical?
Yeah, I think there are contexts where the abstract/concrete distinction is useful. The boundaries are vague, and it's usually the case that abstraction is required to characterize concrete objects... But so what? Similar problems arise for almost all the distinctions we draw.
Yes, I think we can construct both of those. For square circularity: take a square to be a shape consisting of four straight lines of equal length. Then in some non-Euclidean geometry this will form of a circle (imagine four straight lines placed around the equator of the Earth). There's your square circle! You might say that this isn't what you meant by "square circle". If you want a "Euclidean square circle", then we are in the realm of inconsistent geometry, and that is something that has been successfully constructed (see e.g. Chris Mortensen's book "Inconsistent Geometry").
What about those mathematical objects that can't be abstracted/constructed from physical experience? I'm thinking of inaccessible cardinals, (m,n)-categories, countable models of the real numbers axioms, Quine-style rings of set belonging (a€b€c€a), whatever you could get with different logical systems, etc... When the discussion about mathematical objects only focuses on arithmetic and Euclidean geometry, it opens the door to the argument "they're our abstractions of the world" and the counterargument "well, the world (or we) could've been otherwise ", but this misses the point At face value, your argument that abstract objects are constructed from idealisations of our experiences would not apply to the mathematical objects I mentioned above. What do you think? Does construction from abstraction have a limit? Are there some abstract objects that do exist and others that don't?
Do you extend this line of thinking about concrete objects to fundamental particles like electrons which (for the sake of argument) have no constituent parts? Also, it seems to me that the question of whether abstract/concrete objects "exist" in a metaphysical sense is a bit immaterial. More important is the question of whether propositions which purport to quantify over these objects can have a meaningful independent truth value. For example, it seems clear that the proposition "I have two hands" can have a definite truth value even if the ontology of hands is a bit vague and there are special cases where the truth may be unclear. This becomes even sharper in mathematics where mathematicians tend to do draw really strong and definite lines between truth and falsehood. How do you account for truth under your view?
>> Do you extend this line of thinking about concrete objects to fundamental particles like electrons which (for the sake of argument) have no constituent parts? Yes, but it would have taken too long to get into that in this particular video. >> How do you account for truth under your view? I'm a relativist about truth, so I don't think I'm even attempting to "account for truth" in the sense that you would be looking for.
@@KaneB I suppose, as a mathematician, I'm a bit biased in regard to truth. In a recent paper titled "The Busy Beaver Frontier" Scott Aaronson briefly made a neat argument for mind-independent truth in mathematics. The "Busy Beaver" function is well defined for all inputs and we can even prove general results about the function and exactly compute its value for small inputs, but no finite or computable collection of axioms and definitions is sufficient to exactly determine the function for all inputs. In this case, it seems that rejecting a mind-independent truth about the behavior of the Busy Beaver function requires drawing somewhat arbitrary lines in the sand. I'm inclined to think this is a pretty compelling argument for truth-value realism in mathematics but not necessarily realism about the existence of abstract objects.
Gosh it’s so difficult so quickly when you get into the weeds of it. I guess I always thought of it as, there’s the truth of things bd then how we choose to describe it (usually in the way we find most useful). So for something like your hand, an atom counting as your hand or not is decided by if we consider it useful to think of it as such when talking about it and if it’s ambiguous weather or not it fits what we’re trying to communicate to think of it as per of your hand then it just is ambiguous whether it’s part of your hand or not. I’m sure there’s all sorts of issues with this way of thinking about it but at least on. gut level that’s where I fart with this.
for the constructivist: what do you put into the word "arbitrary"? are you so sure construction is "arbitrary", and in what sense? why do we all "construct" objects in the same way? if you appeal to language here, recall that an individual does not "construct" his/her own language.
First, I don't think much of importance hangs on the word "arbitrary". But there are in my view various sources of arbitrariness in the construction of objects: (a) We make arbitrary assumptions about the correct methods for inquiry. This point isn't something I discussed in this video, but I take it that various skeptical challenges, such as the problem of the criterion, force us to just assume e.g. particular theoretical virtues. (b) We draw lines in arbitrary places, so that we can say e.g. that x counts as part of the hand and y doesn't. (c) We end inquiry at arbitrary points. When we want to figure out Verity's height, we will be interested in giving this to a particular degree of precision. 5'6" is good enough for us; but we could investigate further and conclude that it's 5'6.5"... and if we continue probing far enough, the very property "Verity's height" disappears. Of course, arbitrariness can be reduced by appealing to interests. We can can point out that constructing objects such as hands serves various purposes, or that it would be a waste of time, given our goals, to continue investigated Verity's height to a greater degree of precision. I don't think this eliminates arbitrariness entirely, though. >> why do we all "construct" objects in the same way? We don't. Or rather: I might say that two people adopt the same object-framework, but this is an idealization. If I carve up concepts in a more fine-grained way, then they will not count as the same framework.
construction is a unified process that emerges from the aggregate of cognitive functionality; it may be the case that construction actually isn't the same for all agents engaging in it, on a procedural level, but the result of it is what we would standardize as phenomenological experience. it would appear that these things all sort of occur on a spectrum rather than just being a single point of, well, "Suchness" that defines them. tl;dr construction, as with most abstract mental processes, is an average across a varied set of instances. what qualities constitute membership in that set, 🤷♂️
Isn't one problem with abstract objects like numbers is that we can't experience them? Or would someone say we are experiencing them when we construct them with our concrete objects?
I don't understand how you can say there are not concrete, stance-independent objects. What then are the fundamental particles of physics? Are these simply constructed as well? If these things exist independently of minds, don't they bear spatio-temporal relationships to one another, which you might consider the "fundamental" building blocks of shape? If they don't exist independently of minds, what kind of nature do they have? If we "carve" them out using our minds, how are we able to ascribe spatial relations to them if they don't already contain those properties?
I think a rectangle could be a concrete object, because you can look at a computer and say "that's physically a rectangle" or you could look at a rectangle sculpture and say "that's physically a sculpture, and also physically a lump of clay, and also physically a rectangle". A count of three could be a property of a group of concrete objects, just like a length of five feet could be a property of a concrete object. So rectangles and three, the examples of abstract objects in this video, could be sort of used as concrete instead of abstract, allowing them to exist. But for an abstract object like an equation, which I think can't be used as a concrete object or a measured property of a concrete object or group of concrete objects, I'm not as sure if those exist. Maybe only simples should be called real, or only simples and objects we construct to refer to things in space and time. But objects we construct to refer to things that aren't in space or time, like an equation, are not real, I think.
Every time I hear someone give a list of "problems" about concrete objects, I hear arguments that can easily lead to global skepticism (from which you do nothing) or at least someone confusing vagueness in the use of language with vagueness in objects, we shouldn't have any expectations that in order to refer to my hand I'll have to account for each fundamental particle and where it is located in time and space to avoid vagueness, that's just ridiculous. There is no 1 to 1 correspondence between reality and natural language.
Your position is also called ant-realism and it requires that you reason with constructive logic (no completed infinity, and law of excluded middle isn't axiom).
Very little of what you said made any sense to me. There are hands because we’ve got these things at the end of our arms that we use almost every second of the day and they’re obviously different than our arms so we gave them a different name. I guess I just don’t understand the end game here; what’s the point in these mind acrobatics? Isn’t this “overthinking” everything?
>>aren't you overthinking everything Yes. I'm a philosopher. This is a philosophy channel. Thinking about stuff that people don't normally think about is what we do here.
A difficult question! First, because there are various different ways of defining what counts as an abstract object. On some of those definitions, Disney and your friend group might count as prima facie abstract; on others, not so. Second, because even when an object is prima facie, the philosophers who reject abstract objects will typically give alternative interpretations of the object, or alternative interpretations of the language purportedly referring to the object, on which talk of the object doesn't actually commit us to abstract objects. We might say, for instance, that Disney exists just in case the particular concrete individuals involved in Disney institutions perform particular actions, thus Disney is concrete.
I dunno... I mean Berkeley rejected abstract objects, and even denied that we have the ability to form ideas of abstract objects. If you want to call me an idealist though, I'm not really bothered by that label
But there are actual facts about our reality, this doesn’t mean our reality is real and this does not make any assumptions about the circumstances outside reality. But atoms exist, particles exist, we can conduct experiments and we see time and time again the same result. Reality is not instable and therefore some things have to exist and be consistent. A hand has not to exist, but atoms, fields, and gravity has to exist. This is not constructed and you can not draw arbitrary lines at there definitions.
One reason I don't want to bite the bullet that abstract objects exist is that I feel like that might commit me to admitting that moral facts can in the same way. For example I feel like it takes away from the force of a albeit crude moral antirealist argument "the truth value of the statement : this cup is on the table is different from "abortion is wrong". Could you help me out with this?
Maybe I’m not understanding what you’re trying to get at but I think there just isn’t a way you can get to normative claims like that purely from descriptive claims.
I'm not sure I can help with that, since I'd be happy to grant that yes, moral facts do exist in the same kind of way. This doesn't do much to help moral realism, though. I can project my values and construct the fact that slavery is wrong. But in the same way, somebody like the Marquis de Sade will, on the basis of his very different values, construct the fact that slavery is good. Basically, we end up with a variety of different normative systems, and we can state various truths within those systems but no particular system will be objectively correct or otherwise "privileged". There are moral facts on this view, but no stance-independent moral facts. Having said that, if you want to draw a line between moral judgements and other types of judgements, you can certainly do this. You might appeal to something like argument from motivation. Moral judgements motivate behaviour; beliefs do not in themselves motivate behaviour; so moral judgements are not beliefs. So there is a significant difference between a judgment like "the cup is on the table" and the judgment "abortion is wrong." This is one way of modelling moral judgment that we might find useful. (Of course, if the only reason why you are constructing a distinction between moral and non-moral judgment is to secure the antirealist conclusion, then people might say that your distinction is objectionably ad hoc. Presumably we'd want the distinction to be doing other work.)
5:40 Don't certain idealists solve that problem? Under these theories, hands would be only divisible into observables, which would at least be more clearly either part or not part of your hand
Vagueness afflicts observables as well. You can just talk about "parts" rather than "atoms". Seems pretty obvious that there will be some observable part of the body that is neither clearly a hand nor clearly a non-hand.
Surely concrete objects are physical and can be proven to exist independently from the mind like putting the object on a physical pair of scales that topples due the existence of the object. You can't put the number 5 on scales like you can't cook Donald Duck for dinner in a physical oven. Yes we make up the abstract names and perceptions about physical existing stuff. ???
Can I put an object, say a cup, on a pair of scales? Or can I only put one part of the surface of the cup onto one part of the surface of the scales? (And what exactly counts as "the surface of the cup"?) Additionally, I can't put the number 5 on the scales, but I can put *5 things* on the scales, and maybe that's a good enough way of putting the number 5 on the scales. Similarly, putting part of the surface of the cup on the surface of the scales is a good enough way of putting the cup on the scales. Of course, it doesn't make much sense to say that we can weigh the number 5 on the abstract, but then there are lots of properties you can't weigh. Try putting redness on the scales!
Spoiler: no At least, not materially. Physical world is fully continuous. There's no objective boundaries of an object. AI making images used to struggle with that exact thing, because we as humans rely on objects to have discreet boundaries, which influences art and other media. So the abstract objects shouldn't be treated any different and considered "existing" when physical objects also do not exist. At least this is how I see it as a Schöpenhauer fan. Not to trample on empiricism, I don't mind it at all in any field.
Taking away an atom from a hand: see Mark Sainsbury's Paradoxes - The paradox of the heap. If a neurological nihilist said my hand didn't exist, I would offer to punch him. Would he or she accept? Platonism works for most mathematics.
It's difficult to say we know about them when they are a kind of knowing. It's silly to call them objects. You are just bewitching your self with language. Why not just call them "abstract ideas" or just ideas? Then the question can be reframed as how "real" are ideas, and where do the come from. Ideas are very real. They always have a physical manifestation for example in a brain or in a book. They have enormous causal influence--millions have died for or because of this or that silly idea. Where do the come from? Ultimate every idea must resolve to some set of concrete experiences. Nothing in the mind not first in the senses or the DNA. What could be more abstract and concrete than DNA? Bear in mind, I've only listened to 3:03 of your video. I wan't to get some of my thoughts out before they were influenced by yours. Another example of the abstract having real effects.
When the fist hits the chin, all idealist nonsense evaporates. Strange how idealists lead their lives as materialists but pontificate as idealists. Kane, like many others, is a word salad generator. Philosophy should be better than this. The tragedy is tha Kane is wasting his time trying to develop a profile when he could be doing more productive work as he is an intelligent person.
well I'd say that abstract objects have not exactly equal claim to exist as concrete objects: suppose humanity will be extinct tomorrow, of concrete objects there would be something left (an amount of atoms lacking of human interpretations), while, for what concern abstract objects, there would be nothing tangible left, that is to say, concrete objects does not entirely depend on human interpretation, or construction if you prefer, to "exist", while abstract objects does; also, considering this, could we say that they exist? I think what's missing is a definition of existence
