I’ve definitely been eagerly awaiting the video this week! As I’m applying to colleges and thinking about the future (I’m in my senior year of high school), I just wanted to say how profound of an impact you have had on my interests. (And I’m the type of person where my interests are pretty much the most important thing to me.) I mean, I probably won’t major in philosophy, given that I also adore math and physics. But I’m doing what I can to get my friends to have an appreciation of philosophy, since I think the public’s perception of it (especially in the sciences) is absolutely tragic! I’ve probably watched every video on your channel at least once over in the two years since I found it. Anyway, I just wanted to say that your work has definitely meant a lot to me, regardless of whether you take a break, upload unscripted videos, or whatever else!
I enjoy your lectures very much. Keep safe and keep posting your fascinating content. I graduated in 1988 and am now retired and really like hearing about developments since then.
The metaphysics of audio transmission might aid in part the dynamic content that captures a wide, accurate stereo image of the philosophical content (what the world is like or this audio world) through audio, and so making it feel like recording music, ambient soundscapes, or anything requiring stereo which arguably gives listeners in non locales a sense of the speakers content of mind, if that happens to be true. So a mic with acardioid condenser capsules working in 20Hz - 20kHz frequency range and has maximum 143db SPL can aid in this metaphysical/audio (trans local) pursuit.
the computer analogy is fitting, people often regard a screen being the computer the itself, but then ignores the keybaord and mouse aspect of it due ot them being human interfacing devices, and perhaps driven by how the screen displays the states and the "being" of a computer, hence somehow more correlated to the metaphysical idea of a computer itself, but then disregard the fact that a computer can be without all those interfacing devices and exist on its own, like a socially isolated kid at school is still a kid despite his/ her representation towards the other kids
In bed with Kane. This feels romantic. Is the zebra at the zoo just a donkey painted to look like a zebra? The incentive exists for zookeepers, assuredly. We could probably come up with a conspiracy theory that involves the claim "At least the majority of zoos don't have any zebras." It's possible, but most of us just aren't that interested to verify things. Maybe it doesn't seem like it's realistic. The point I'm making badly has something to do with interest. Much to my dismay, most of the people I know just don't have much interest in metaphysics other than when it is in the context of philosophy of religion. Even then, people sometimes like to see a problem formulated. But try getting most people to read a published article about that problem. This relates to another issue, which is that getting anywhere in advancing the conversation, or just one's capacity to be involved therein, quickly becomes a daunting task. Wading in metaphysical debates at the water level of your ankles is easy and pleasant; it doesn't take an extraordinary commitment. But there is a real doozy of a cliff that, should your interest lead you over it (usually this will be a problem that "bothers" you or makes you sufficiently uncomfortable), your life will have to change in some way. You are going to have to make room to become competent, and it's an investment I think most people can't or don't want to make. So, there seems to be "two metaphysics". People who have made room in their lives to become acquainted with the requisites (weirdos) may find they are bothered, sometimes in pleasant ways, by considerations like mereological nihilism. Sometimes you just appreciate the creativity, and other times you just want to refute things you think are stupid. But if most of the people in my life who are unaware of my "philosophical double life" knew how much the problem of meta-skepticism bothers me, they would (maybe correctly) think I was psychologically troubled. Everyone is a metaphysician until their interest level is capped, at which point metaphysics becomes stupid. I could just as easily have substituted "philosopher / philosophy".
I think metaphysical commitments can have indirect consequences, because depending on the metaphysical commitment, any particular philosophy might turn out differently. Even doctrines outside of the realm of metaphysics can be influenced by a philosophy's metaphysics. Now all you need is such a philosophy to be influential. Now you've got a case for why metaphysical commitments might actually matter, even though they don't seem to matter at first glance. Take for instance the pessimism of Arthur Schopenhauer as something that cannot be separated from his metaphysical beliefs and which has considerable influence, to this day.
Yep, you're right i think. I also think you can dilite that to saying "if you take metaphysical commitments seriously, that is in a total way, not just propositionally cognizant, things will change". But most people seem to work "perfectly fine" with a cognitive and performative disomance between what they say is their metaphysical commitment and how they act and think consequentialy. I always found this fascinating.
Hi Kane. On the subject of mereological nihilism/universalism, I was wondering, have any philosophers tried using mereological universalism as a basis for a moral system? For example, I am an agent with desires and interests, and doing certain actions will satisfy some interests or frustrate some desires. Decisions that frustrate all of my desires and satisfy none of my desires are pretty poor decisions. But the unrestricted combination of me and another agent creates a further composite agent with desires and interests. So a psychopath torturing a baby is a composite agent making a very poor decision regarding its interests. "The point of view of the universe" is just the largest composite agent, and talk about categorical reasons are just reasons that satisfy the interests of the largest composite agent that you are a part of. I don't think I've seen anyone else express this view, but I also haven't really read into mereology at all. Are there any universalists who have defended this position?
Idk I sort of think that if the mereological nihilist claims there are no observations, while their opponent does not, then like, maybe we have to be careful not to look at this observational difference the wrong way. Maybe we shouldnt say "observing something debunks the mereological nihilist while observing nothing confirms them". Instead we should say "observing observations debunks the mereological nihilist and not observing them confirms them." Like, if theory X expects A to exist, we try to observe A. If theory X expects observations to exist, we try to observe observations, we dont try to just observe generally. And if we don't observe any observations, that shouldnt make us think we won't observe anything else. Our own observations on the first layer should be like something entirely detached from the second layer observations that are being observed, like some kind of metalanguage or something. Idk if I can really justify that but it seems like the right angle to work at idk.
Not really. Mereological nihilists are more likely to say perceptions (observations) are processes, not objects. This idea that observations debunk MN is just a category error.
Arguably a video can be either quick and cheap but not good. Or quick and good but not cheap. Thirdly cheap and good but not quick (takes time to bring quality to videographer content). The metaphysics of videography has observational consequences too, like if finding the flicker reduction parameter this mitigates the light source interfering with sensor uptake of photons etcetera. This would make the video cheap and good but time consuming given have to focus on technical details, but it might give a clue to a metaphysical puzzle of the nature of god as an all powerful and all knowing god (given the problem of evil) could not be good. Who's the god of the video?
I have no problem with weird philosophies and philosophical proposals. E.g. I liked your video titled "Nothing" very much. Personally I enjoy philosophy more as an intellectual exercise and some kind of so to speak kinky distraction than as an depot of life-changing explosive ideas that can blow up my mind. And as far as I know philosophers personally (well, actually I used to know one many years ago) I suppose that your professional problem is that you take philosophy and its figments way too serious. I know, I know, some philosophical ideas and theories had profound impact on human history, unfortunately I'd add, but I think that the only safe way of dealing with all that intellectual shit is by taking it with a huge grain of salt. Otherwise it may turn out to be highly toxic, psychologically.
first and foremost, take care of yourself. I think you've made a category error, observations and perceptions aren't objects, they're processes. they are what the things do, where miriological nihilism doesn't describe what the things do or emerge into, it only addresses what the things are.
This is not a comment on your video, just a collection of bits arranged comment-wise. (it seems easier to take mereological nihilism seriously when talking about information in computers rather than physical objects in the real world) (though probably "mereology" is the wrong term when talking about whether bits compose "real" composite data such as strings or hash tables or subroutines or whatever.)
TLDR The self does not exist. It is just bunch of particles in space flowing into more likely configurations (ie entropy increasing). Sometimes they happen to form thoughts that have the delusion of existence.
When by "chair", you just mean an assortment of atoms that is arranged in the shape of a chair, then a mereological nihilist won't have any issues with granting that "chairs" exist. In the same way, there's no problem to accept that "you" can make an "observation". This only becomes a problem when you assert that "you" are anything other than an assembly of your fundamental parts, with each working exactly the same way that you would expect them to based on their basic properties. To say that the mereologist has been proven wrong by the question is just to insist on your own assertion and claim that it's universally entailed by the word "observation". That just seems like equivocation. And I believe that metaphysics do have epistemic consequences. Namely, you would just have to observe how something new comes about from combining multiple parts that isn't described by just the behavior of its fundamental parts. The reason why you think that this observation is impossible to make is because you're already too committed to mereological nihilism, but that doesn't make it impossible in theory.
@@francescodefilippo190 That depends on what you mean by an "emergent property". An example that helps with differentiating this would be to look at a random experiment, like a coin flip, which does not have the property of "being predictable", and compare that to composing 1000 coin flips and taking the average, which then does have the property of "being predictable". Because this composite experiment has a property that none of its components have, this could be called an "emergent property". But the point is that we don't need "the set of 1000 coin flips" as its own metaphysical entity - the emergent property in this case is a mathematical consequence of the behavior of the individual coin flips. This could be contrasted to a different kind of emergent property that doesn't follow from just describing the behavior of the individual coin flips. For example, you could notice that the average always suddenly goes to 100% when you decide to flip 1000 coins, even though you would expect 1000 coins to have an average of 50% based on the behavior of the individual coins. This is possible in theory, but hard to imagine, because the example that would falsify this mereological nihilist model isn't what we observe in reality.
@@kappasphere i mean more things like consciousness. I don't know what views you hold about it, it's just the most interesting example. If it really is something (i think of it as a process more than a thing) it would mean that objects really exist, because it is a consequence of the whole brain or some subset of it, so there is more than the sum of the parts, as they usually say
@@francescodefilippo190 I was actually thinking of consciousness too, but didn't use it for illustration because it's both too controversial and too complicated to use it for that. But that is to say that I already thought up the two earlier "categories of emergence" with consciousness in mind, and the explanations that I gave are completely analogous to how I view consciousness. "there is more than the sum of the parts" also describes the coin flip example in the same way, and therefore also is addressed by my earlier comment. But one thing that differs between the examples of consciousness and repeated coin flips is that I wouldn't grant this easily that consciousness is an emergent property of the whole brain in the first place. This is because most of the properties of consciousness that we would observe/describe can actually be attributed to each one part of the brain. So it's misleading to be talking about the emergence of consciousness as a whole, and at this point it would be like saying that "being sand-like" is an emergent property of amassing a sufficient number of sand grains, which I don't necessarily disagree with, but I feel would be somewhat missing the point.
@@kappasphere maybe i understand what you mean: being sand-like would be for example the capability of flowing, that just one grain can't accomplish. I wouldn't mind it, but usually when they talk about this stuff it's a lot easier to see how, say, from a grain by grain description of the flowing sand you could get the flow ad a whole, while to me it's baffling to understand how the combined electrical activity of something like one billion neurons corresponds without adding anything to the conscious experience. In the case of the coin the predictability is a rule of statistics by which we calculate P(x) in the classical way (by the way, did you know that chances are a bit more likely for the coin to land on the same side as the beginning up side?). It's difficult because there are few things i can see where you have a qualitatively different parameter to measure that is not reducible to any of the parts, but i know emergence is quite hard to grasp, i read something about it and there are several points to demonstrate before one can talk of emergence (backward causation being the weirdest, together with absolute novelty, thresholds, substrate independency exc)
