Philosopher Charles Taylor Against Pinker, Dennett & Dawkins

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Philosopher Charles Taylor's critique of attempts to reduce human agency to mechanisms through theories of materialism, Darwinism, computational theory of mind, and behaviorism. Created for pedagogical purposes from a public 2009 "Can Human Action Be Explained?" lecture available here: • Can Human Action Be Ex...

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10 июн 2024

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Комментарии : 53

@KingoftheJuice18 Месяц назад

Thanks for sharing this. I love the part where he quotes from Pinker's book: "I can account for everything but: consciousness the self free will meaning knowledge and morality."

@jasonwblakely Месяц назад

Hilarious--I remember reading that part in Pinkers How the Mind Works but somehow in Charles's retelling becomes appropriately absurdist

@rishabhprasad5417 29 дней назад

Can you quote me the passage where that appears in HTMW?

@KingoftheJuice18 29 дней назад

@@rishabhprasad5417 No, I can't. Taylor is quoting from it in the video. He said it's at the end of the book.

@KL0098 25 дней назад

@@KingoftheJuice18 How the Mind Works, 1997, pp. 558-9

@KingoftheJuice18 25 дней назад

@@KL0098 Thanks.

@1991jj 22 дня назад

I'm here from a tweet you wrote on the tendency for academics to become silo'ed and narrow in their reading and became an instant fan. Now as I scroll through your Yt content I'm happy to see this is all up my alley. A rare W for the internet today.

@devos3212 Месяц назад

His laughter at the end of that clip lol

@maxheadrom3088 9 дней назад

I like Prof. Taylor - and watching him slap Pinker, Dennett and Dawkings is even better! (to be honest, I don't know who Dennett is ... but for some reason I believe he deserves it).

@NorthernObserver 26 дней назад

Have you ever looked at Alasdair MacIntire After Virtue or John Milbank Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason.

@anthonymccarthy4164 6 дней назад

Considering the fact that computers are modeled on, not even human minds but on a few things that human minds do, to use them as a model for the minds they are modeled on strikes me as one of the most profoundly foolish ideas in all of modernistic thought.

@michaelboguski4743 15 дней назад

We don't know how this Universe came about, but we do know we're Animals that live and die, like all the other animals.

@EspiritualidadCiencia Месяц назад

Best line: Brrhhhhuh!

@FelixReuenthal 16 дней назад

Trivial critique to a trivial worldview meh!

@tgrogan6049 Месяц назад

Well of course the answer to the question is "God did it" !

@devos3212 Месяц назад

Our brains crave certainty. “God did it” provides that certainty.

@tgrogan6049 Месяц назад

@@devos3212 people feel certain about many many false things right?

@Ryan-so4xl 28 дней назад

@@tgrogan6049are u trying to prove or disprove empiricism 😂

@tgrogan6049 27 дней назад

@@Ryan-so4xl Are your reading these words? Our senses are reasonably reliable right?

@NorthernObserver 26 дней назад

It’s funny how evolutionary theory is breaking down now. The math doesn’t work.

@Avianthro Месяц назад

Around 3:58: "...what couldn't be explained is the "perception of real, intrinsic meaning",..so claims Taylor. Au contraire...we can indeed "materialistically" (setting aside what matter is for now) explain the "perception" but cannot explain/prove whether anything we perceive to have such meaning "actually" does have it (objectively-outside of our minds). Meaning cannot be proven to be anything other than subjective, and so, a biological machine can perfectly well be "programmed" by its genes' "hardwiring" and their interactions/experiences to assign meaning to things and events-situations-conditions, and will do so according to its primary drives as a life form, and there will also be feedback loops (evolutionary) that can lead to hardwiring, genetic changes-give us our uniqueness as a person or as a species. All of Taylor's supposed refutations can also be refuted...He fails to disprove the basic thesis of "materialism". Yes, and even "consciousness" can have a materialistic explanation, whatever consciousness may be...first we'd have to agree on that. It may be that Pinker, Dennett, and Dawkins haven't done such a good job with their explaining-describing, and I'd recommend reading-listening to Sapolsky for a great critique of "free will", but this does not mean they stand refuted. Ultimately, a philosopher like Taylor is trying to please a desire (implanted, programmed into him by nature + nurture, no "free will" involved) to prove the existence of some non-materialistic-other-worldly-god-concept's realm, and yet such a realm remains unprovable-undisprovable by its definition as being beyond this world, therefore not capable-amenable of being detected-measured (the scientific method) and therefore the only one we can know as the biological machines we are in this world. He's just making arguments to confirm a bias, as all of us do, and so the question we might be able to answer is whence came his bias that he shares with the audience to whom he's lecturing. Psychology (a product of nature + nurture) precedes philosophy.

@brunischling9680 Месяц назад

If you bypass a definition of matter , you bypass also any valid argument for materialsm

@Avianthro Месяц назад

@@brunischling9680 Good point! Agreed and ditto for "spiritualism" or whatever we might call "non-materialism". Any argument must begin with some agreement as to definitions.

@glenliesegang233 20 дней назад

Two responses: look at Michael Levvin's research which shows materialism does not explain what genes and living systems do, nor how they do it. 2. Dennet, et al forget that, when they think, their verbal dominant hemispheres are actively dumbing down reality into categories and concepts, and making things, all "concrete" and therefore logical. The reality is this: the elephant in the ballroom is no longer in the ballroom when it has been carved up into bite-sized pieces, served and digested by the hundreds of materialists present. I am curious if Dennet and Dawkins and Pinker (oh my!) would find any relevance in the Tao te Ching, or simply dismiss it as more religious drivel which has no bearing on anything scientific. That book captures the essence I do not hear any materialists acknowledge: nothing exists in isolation. Reality is made up of messy "becomings" and beings are changing form and structure every attosecond. Material things "aren't." And immaterial "things," like experience, information, physical and mathematical "laws" aren't either. We dismiss the supernatural as having no scientific validity. Tell that to a woman who absolutely knows, to the minute, what time her husband or child died, even half-way around the globe.

@Avianthro 19 дней назад

@@glenliesegang233 A lot to unpack there. Sorry, but I'm just going to be as brief as possible: Agreed that "material things aren't"...all that exists is centers of force (Nietzsche). One might even say that's a spiritual universe. The "supernatural" can be totally imaginary or it can be quite real. One might even say all things that exist are supernatural since we can't explain how anything came to exist...We live in a mystery, lao Tze made that clear in his Chapter One...I love Lao Tze too. The universe is a whole greater than the sum of its parts. In matters of understanding (describing/codifying "laws") how things work, including the human mind, I will stick with LaPlace when Napoleon asked him why God did not appear in his writings on celestial mechanics: "Sire, I have no need for that hypothesis." Is that "materialistic" or just keeping things limited to what we can know via our senses and instruments, the stuff of which science is built...observations and experiments.

@hipsabad 19 дней назад

i'm of one mind with you on this, Avianthro, and your responses here just bring things back to clarity rather than to any personal project

@johnmaisonneuve9057 23 дня назад

Not convincing. When wedded to a religious point of view, just repetitive blab blab is offered. Very disappointing.

@lzzrdgrrl7379 21 день назад

Taylor's critique is materialistic theories may wish to wed themselves with christian based western culture, (after the Christ has been abstracted of course) but its logical arc of evolution is towards some variant of marxism...... In relation to Dawkin's recent 'cultural christian' remarks.....'>.....

@johnmaisonneuve9057 21 день назад

@@lzzrdgrrl7379 I understand your position and for sure Prof. Taylor is a very good philosopher. I have most of his books, including his excellent Hegel book. Philosophical attempts using Christianity as a foundational base fails every time.

@lzzrdgrrl7379 21 день назад

@@johnmaisonneuve9057 Not even challenging whether such an attempt is possible, but noting that the implications of such a failure isn't much appreciated from the secular and scientific angle....'>...

@nehran7461 17 дней назад

zip it man! tired of hearing such bullshit explanations

@nnix Месяц назад

He doesn't understand who and what he's attempting to critique well enough to even venture a valid criticism. And apparently neither do you, given that you're posting this. The God of the gaps isn't going away anytime soon, but this is nothing more than that in yet another guise. Thomas Nagel fell prey to the same woo-making, even more embarrassingly.

@jasonwblakely Месяц назад

Aristotle was a naturalist and well before the "God of the gaps". So the defense of teleology can receive both immanent and transcendent (religious) defenses. A note for philosophers!

@nnix Месяц назад

@@jasonwblakely A naturalist who confidently asserted that women have fewer teeth than men--proving that he could be as bad as induction as he was at deduction. Aristotelian scholasticism has been surpassed for a reason: it's bunk, as is teleology and theology. But you're a Catholic, so you're bound to it. Maybe you'll get past it, maybe you won't. Shrug.

@jasonwblakely Месяц назад

@@nnix true but i'm a convert. and so you have the order there wrong. i partly abandoned atheism because i couldn't see anyone capable of getting rid of teleology in the human sciences. so i am religious because of teleology, not the other way round... Godspeed!

@laputa4825 Месяц назад

No way 😳 You're telling me that after reflecting you didn't select the good ol' brute contingency? The expanding singularity of mass behind all phenomenon?? @jasonwblakely

@kdc66 Месяц назад

Mostly drivel.

@Ryan-so4xl 28 дней назад

WASP

@ruvstof Месяц назад

bla bla bla... but unconvincing...

@saliksayyar9793 Месяц назад

How so?

@Incornsyucopia Месяц назад

Yes, Dennett, Dawkins and Pinker are very unconvincing, as Taylor so clearly shows.

@anthonyzav3769 Месяц назад

@@IncornsyucopiaI find them very convincing - what did Taylor offer instead? Taylor believes in evolution but when Dawkins writes a book trying to figure out the unit of selection that natural selection works on, Taylor doesn’t like it. Does he have a better idea? Dennett presents a theory about how apparent intelligence arises out of unintelligent parts. Taylor doesn’t like it. Does he have a better idea? As for Pinker’s list - perhaps items on the list simply aren’t what we thought they were. That’s the implication of the list.

@xtrapnel68 Месяц назад

@@anthonyzav3769 Well, that would be pretty convenient for Pinker if it were true, which of course he has no way of demonstrating. As for the gene as the unit of selection... Read James Shapiro, read Philip Ball. Huge swathes of biology have moved on from Dawkins (or just ignored him) in the past 50 years, including his old teacher Denis Noble. Taylor observes that Dennett has an idea that doesn't hold logical water (he's hardly the only one to notice that emergentism is pretty logically flimsy.) I don't think that obliges Taylor to come up with an alternative.