Descartes' Trademark Proof of God - Philosophy Tube
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- čas přidán 6. 09. 2024
- How does Descartes try to prove the existence of God in his Meditations?
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Rene Descartes, Meditations
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I have three days to do a philosophy paper and am using it as an excuse to binge Abby's oldest videos
I procrastinated and am starting mine 7 days before the turn in date 😬
Literally me right now
meeeeee
lmaoo me too
Yeah I have an exam on Meditations next week and it’s the penultimate course I have before graduating. I listened to the audiobook and when I got to the third meditation I literally went “Well this is bollocks”
After this argument his point is basically:
1. Triangles exist
2. Therefore God
I love this 😂😂 but for real in meditations 2 he says he can't be certain that 2+3 is 5 and in 5 he suddenly says "ah yeah i can imagine a triangle as a shape itself". And the best part is he says he can imagine lots of shapes that he has never seen to proof that some ideas are not from outside. However he does not give one example of a shape he can imagine that doesn't yet exist in our world.
I was so excited reading the first 2 meditations, because he argued very carefully and step by step. Then in 3 and 5 he just jumps from one principle that he does not care to explain further (he just says this makes a lot of sense so it is true) to the other.
@@couch_philosoph3325 Isn't that because triangles having three sides is something true by definition?
If you recall Kant's point about math being synthetic I think it starts to make more sense as to how he can in any way doubt arithmetic while not doubting the essences of things like triangles or God.
you know what, that's actually it
@@2tehnik This makes sense from a Kantian (or broadly German Idealist) perspective, but Descartes is not claiming that the existence of God is something outside our phenomenal reality. He says that all thought must originate from within, and that if we have the idea of God in our head then that must be based on some properties which we are thinking of (namely the properties of God) and since one of God's properties is to exist, he must exist.
@@georgepantzikis7988 > but Descartes is not claiming that the existence of God is something outside our phenomenal reality
wdym?
That aside, I'm not sure I see how your reply relates to my comment. Mind clarifying?
I think, therefore I subscribed to this channel.
+Soane DeWinter Welcome!
Same
I clicked subscribe as well. But I dream vividly so I'm going to play it safe and say that I'm not absolutely certain that I subscribed.
Well said
I've been reading Descartes for nearly 5 years now and have taken courses about him at university, and no one has been able to explain his theory as simply as you. Congrats, dude! You helped me understand this better than a university professor has.
Ethics of Suicide: A subject we just Kant touch.
"I'm pink therefore I'm spam" was always a fave as a kid... And still now, come to think of it!
Oh, and suicide prevention, please... ;)
I often wonder if Descartes realised his philosophical insight and teaching of methodical doubt was so powerful that it could be used to disprove the existence of God and then thought sh..t I had better use it to prove the existence of God otherwise I am in big trouble with the Inquisitors.
im afraid descartes' methodical doubt gets nowhere near to disproving God's existence - all it does is give you a possibilty that nothing is real - and that there may be no way of proving harmony between the self and the world around it.
THANK YOU FOR THIS VIDEO! I'M STUDYING THIS AGAINST MY WILL AND YOU ARE SO HELPFUL!! X
I'm currently writing a rebuttal of the Trademark argument for my Metaphysics and Epistemology class, so thank you for the help :)
+TheGreatYukon My pleasure!
I wish he talked about Meditation 5, where Descartes tried to prove the existence of God again.
That one was just a version of the ontological argument, which was older than Descartes.. goes back to Anselm. I think Descartes was just throwing it in there to be thorough. Kant later destroyed it.
Nah, he just plagiarized Anselm haha
why did i find this channel 45 minutes before my final exam?
where do you study
Luke Skywalker and the force must exist or else George Lucas would have never had thought of them
p. Finite substance: Area between 0 and 1 on the number line.
q. Infinite substance: Real numbers between 0 and 1
pq
Please do the ethics of suicide! I wrote a paper on euthanasia , stating the reasons why I am for it, and I would like to hear of any philosophers who may have given thought to the subject.
Did you note in said paper how keeping euthanasia illegal is likely to decrease, over the next 50 or so years, the number of people wanting to commit suicide, nevermind euthanasia itself via improved palliative care? That's the best argument against euthanasia.
Where's the proof that keeping euthanasia illegal will help decrease the number of people who want to commit suicide?
What about those people with terminal illnesses, who are told that the last moments of their lives will be excruciatingly painful? What if they don't want to live through that? I think it would be entirely unethical to keep them alive if they don't wish to, especially if doing so will only increase their suffering.
I think that is the best argument FOR euthanasia.
Chris Solomon There is no empirical proof as we're talking about the future so obviously we can't prove it. Let me show you the argument:
P1 - Good Palliative care reduces the desire of someone to want to die.
P2 - Palliative care advances and progresses through funding gained from primarily governments but also some private firms, especially in other countries than England.
P3 - If euthanasia is illegal then fewer people with terminal, painful illnesses will die.
C1 - Therefore if euthanasia is illegal the demand for palliative care will increase relative to how much the demand for palliative care would change if euthanasia was made legal because more people with terminal painful illnesses would die.
P4 - If the demand for palliative care is higher this means that the provision of palliative care is more profitable for private firms and more of a pertinent issue for governments.
P5 - If provision of palliative care is more profitable then more money will be invested into research for it.
P6 - More money invested in research will lead to better palliative care.
C2 - therefore from P6 and by P1 in such a society where euthanasia was kept illegal we will end up having far better palliative care far sooner. This will result in a scenario in which we have people voluntarily living and contributing to society for far longer than before as opposed to the alternate society in which euthanasia was made legal and once someone hits 85 they have a very high chance of committing suicide via euthanasia.
P7 - The second society is morally inferior to the first.
C3 - We should not legalise euthanasia.
Hmm okay. I don't really have a rebuttal because I haven't considered the effects of improved palliative care.
Chris Solomon If you're interested Mary Warnock, a peer in the house of lords, introduced me to this argument in her book "Dishonest to God" which elaborates on how clearly our legislative system is wholly dependent on morality to make sense and how because of that religion (specifically Christianity) manages to keep popping up and influencing our legislative system because, as we all know, the religious like to claim that only they are moral and they themselves have a special understanding of morality that the irreligious do not.
The main thing about Descartes' attempt to prove God that stuck out to me since I first heard it was the 'I couldn't have thought of God unless he was real' part, I mean all you have to do is point to the concept of fiction, Tolkien thought of Middle Earth that isn't proof for Middle Earth existing.
That's not how the argument works, though. Middle Earth isn't a valid example.
Maybe not levels of reality, but level of contingent existence. Brown can only existence as a property of something else. Just like a object sustains its properties what sustains the existence of objects.
Perhaps seperately unsure, I am a imperfect being I can make mistakes and I can die. But I have knowledge that perfect being could exist though nothing in the universe is perfect. So were is my referent? imagination is powerful but it seems to me that only rearranges pre-existing ideas in seemingly new ways.
yay, been folowing for three years, and now this is finaly relevent to my studdies!
This is an interesting discussion of Descartes' arguments. The previous videos helped. Thanks for sharing!
I love your channel, dude! Can't stop watching it! Excellent work. How you only have 28k subscribers, I don't know. Keep it up.
Mark Lapeña Thanks!
+Philosophy Tube
Hi
Thank you for your channel and for the light-hearted way you present these subjects - I find it energizing!
Descartes' argument may be helped and become more logically valid, if we took levels of reality to mean:
levels of power to cause, which also means levels of permanence or stability.
A normal 3 year old and a normal 30 year old both seemingly live in the same reality - yet they do not: the abilities, understandings and emotional world of the 30 year old stretch far beyond those of the 3 year old.
A 3 year old would be utterly at a loss at the 30 year old's office - while the 30 year old would know how to use it to produce value for others and income - the latter enabling the 3 year old to be fed. Also, the 30 year old's ability to differentiate the fleeting things (less substantial, of less reality-value) and the more permanent things (and therefore the more relevant).
So practically the child and adult do live on different levels of power to cause, which Descartes calls levels of reality (since the power to cause means power to influence reality).
This also applies to different adults with different talents and outlooks.
In this sense, perceptions are caused by objects, which are caused by principles sustaining those objects, and so on. And so, the higher something is in the hierarchy of being a permanent cause - the more real that thing is.
Also the finite does depend on the infinite, since all definable forms (both tangible and abstract) are defined by the formless around and within them. A triangle is defined by the angles - the spaces between its sides.
Existence and movement are enabled by space - and enabling is an act, and that which acts - is, so space is an actual entity, albeit a formless one.
The possible counter-argument that without objects there is no space - would fail - because there are no objects without space, while there is a lot of space without objects. So objects and movement require space, but space does not require them. Therefore the formless preceded all form, all matter, all energy.
The formlessness actually contains all forms, is the source of all forms, and transcends all forms.
Mind and will are also forms, contained within the formless.
The formless is one and simple, so abilities such as awareness would be omnipresent to it.
From here it's easy to prove God.
Peace
@@PhilosophyTube humble beginnings
Aw, so cute. Baby, pimple faced, male presenting Abigail.
"You're not just going to get browness the property floating around..."
aww shit.
4:45 This discussion is in parallel with the arguments between Indian philosophers, very specifically between that of the samkhya and advaita tradition who believes in the law of pre-existing cause or sat karya vad, and the materialist school of the carvaka and the logicians(nyayikars) who believed that effect arising as an epiphenomenal quality(asat karya vad or aarambha vad).
This is Platonic Ideology (overall, it seems so).
The premise behind reality is similar to the Theory of Forms. Besides being more real or less real, formal reality and representational reality are really the problems with Universals. Substances of a finite or infinite nature are in a ontological sense, a "Particular" set (hence the principle). It is an opposition of compositions (and similarities are included) based on what I've learned.
Mathematics (most particularly in sets or pairs of numbers) plays at this a lot.
This was always my least favorite argument to the point of irrational(?) rage. Thank you for this breakdown! Even though I am seeing it 7 years or so later….
5:20 the more real argument, while it amuses me as much as you, is a call back to scholasticism's hierarchy of being and perhaps even Plato according to whom non-visible intelligible things (ideas) were definitely more real than the material world which was seen as merely a reflection of those ideas.
Oh man, you explained down the earth, thanks. Keep the philosophy alive.
I've an important exam tomorrow on this and I haven't read the discourse yet, kudos on the vid, really helped a lot!
im on youtube, procrastinating writing my descartes essay by watching this video.
Thank you for this video!! We're reading all of Descartes' meditations and I have not been able to understand how he proved God's existence (plus my professor isn't really able to convey his knowledge properly) You've saved my grade!!
My pleasure! I can't believe people still watch these old videos haha
Well, I'm watching this "Old videos" from IRAQ! :D Surprise! But no seriously, thanks for putting up these videos! You made my essay sound much better! :D Greetings from AUI-S!
This was old seven years ago??@@PhilosophyTube
What about the concept of Chaos itself? Even in seemingly certain situations, it always exists(omnipotence & everlasting) and it's a fundamental property of the universe that we (as humans at least) couldn't rationalise out of nowhere in our structured day to day lives and desire for meaningfulness. Everything is also unreliable, as all sorts of systems and structures, man-made or no are influenced(trademarked) by chaos in their lack of complete dependency.
Thanks for you video! It really helped me understand the argument of Descartes if god really does exist or not! I have to write a paper on it and you really made it make more sense, and you cleared up some principles i was confused on! thanks!
Shaylee Richards My pleasure!
+Philosophy Tube if something doesn't need to have the same properties as the thing it causes to exist then why doesn't your friend's objection to theistic evolution fail in the same way Descartes' trademark argument for God does? If the causal adequacy principle is "bullocks" then saying that God is efficient therefore we should expect the evolutionary process to be efficient should be an incorrect assumption, since that would be assuming that God and the evolutionary mechanisms he might create have to have the same property, namely efficiency. What are your thoughts?
Couldnt one argue in favor of the causal adequacy principle, using the very examples used to refute it? For instance, the example of the cake is saying that the ingredients used to create the cake, do not share the same properties as the end: the said cake. However, thats not true at all. Although, on the surface it may seem that the cake is a new substance all together, it still doesnt change the fact that its components are still acting as they did before being combined. Its like saying that red and blue no longer act like themselves when combined because they've created a new color purple.... the fact is that purple is just an expression of both blue and red acting on the same space, and purple's "new properties" are just a composite property just as its components are composited.
So to take it back to the cake example, the ingredients, when put together to make the cake, are not exibiting new properties,. just expressing their same properties in the same space. Thus creating a new "composite" property which is technically not a property at all, just our minds attempt at rationalizing the mixture.
Just a theory... i would like to hear some feedback from anyone who has a perspective.
+Aqute Nolej Would you call that also the canvas/painter theory of existentialism?
Francois Druro I like to call it the "crouching pastry, hidden painter" theory lol
+Aqute Nolej Descartes can be somewhat excused not because he flunked highschool Chemistry class but because Chemistry hadn't been invented yet. Let's take a colorful, poison gas (chlorine) combine it with an unbelievably reactive metal that you can cut with a knife, burns spontaneously in air and explodes violently in water (sodium) and what do you get?? Exploding colorful poison? No, you get table salt. This is just one example, there are literally a thousand within your view right now.
Elements do NOT retain their observable properties in compounds. Most solid things and many gases are compounds.
I liked the pace of this video it was easier to follow. Also can i say I'm watching this on my day off of my philosophy class (*cough* nerd). As to Descartes I was impressed with meditations 1 and 2 but the entire notion of God threw it for me. I mean he knew 'I' existed but took the idea of God from others to build his argument. You did introduce Descartes' belief that only a strong thing can make a strong thing, etc. Even so human beings are finite. There's a slippery slope fallacy. But even so an infinite God would have to make a finite substance to make a finite person. Even to suppose the values of a good God and a bad deceiver I found to be weak. Although Kant built onto Descartes philosophy. So I can appreciate Descartes a little more from a Kantian standpoint.
Is reality binary? Why couldn't we look at reality as an inductive argument? The more you perceive as real the stronger reality is. If someone is slowly going crazy they would slowly drift into a new reality. The things that used to be real become less real with the more evidence they get that their new reality is more real. I am not very eloquent with my typing but I hope this makes sense.
But reality exists independent of a person's perception thereof. For instance, new planets are discovered every day, but it would be factually incorrect to say that they did not exist before the moment of their discovery. In order for reality to be dependent on perception, perception must have a sort of innate quality of creation, or else the creation of reality is what causes it to be perceived, which is far more ridiculous. Therefore, no matter how distorted the perception of something may be, it still exists in the same state for the same reasons. Perception is the variable, not reality.
In Descartes’ Third Meditation, after observing the wax in different physical states, he establishes that reality is based upon perception. This is because perception was found to be through the mind (the only thing he had undoubtedly proven the existence of), so Descartes and the original commenter are simply staying in line with his thinking.
I like this format of presenting and analyzing a philosophical argument.
I could weep with joy - this channel is the only thing that can potentially save my A-level.
Hi, do you think the concept of God was created or discovered? And can you do a video about recommending philosophy books that you find interesting (not the classical works). Thanks
Avoid background music
Similar ideas of "more real" and "less real" are common in Eastern philosophy - and usually embraced with deeper understanding than in the West.
Usually, an infinite substance is considered more real, because it is eternally unchanging.
Then again, the finite substance - which is what the Western sciences mostly study and is equipped to study - is in a constant state of flux, therefore thought of as less real. Because they change all the time, they are more like illusion i.e. not what they are thought to be, less real.
Awesome video! It helped me with my homework :D
Ivy May Yay! Hope you get a good mark!
Everybody gangsta til Descartes starts dissecting living dogs
Thanks for this video! It was incredibly helpful as I am currently taking a philosophy class on all the great classics of philosophy.
Awww, so cute. Spotty, and all!!!
The funny thing is, even if you follow along his principles it still doesn't hold up, because there's some sort of fallacy of composition going on here : what Descartes is thinking about may be infinite, but that doesn't mean that the thought itself is, otherwise he'd have to conclude that the thought of a rock is solid, the thought of a brown table is brown, etc. So according to his own principles, the finite thought of infinite subtance can be caused by something as finite as the thought itself is.
So... yeah, this argument fails on pretty much all levels.
He didn't cause that thought ...you thinking about the sun doesn't mean you caused the sun .
@@abdouliverpool247 same logic applies with time
So long as we're doing mostly modern philosophy, could we look at the modern state of Aristotelian ethics?
visavis the 'properties' aspect...
Sun=energy
Animals=energy
:. life (animals) can be produced by sun bc/ of the common property 'energy'
Likewise Helium/Hydrogen may not act in similar properties
However the proton/neutron/electron 'properties' are in common
:. enabling the combination
?
X's interaction with Y cause Z to occur in X! Y is not the cause! Y is an expression of a property! The effect of Z is the outcome of by X and Y! However: how X reacts is X's property!
Philosophy Tube 0:10 "Cogito" is not "Ko-gee-toh", but "Ko-jii-toe". Yeah, i took classical Latin at Catholic School.
Nope, you're wrong. All 'g's are hard in Classical Latin, without exception. You might be thinking of Ecclesiastical Latin, which has different (and wonky, imo) pronunciations.
Sorry, that's what I meant. No idea why I wrote Classical instead of Ecclesiastical.
Matt Hoffman
You're still wrong, though.
maggit Maggit and Purple Zart are correct. 'G's and 'C's are hard according to classical pronunciation. "Cicero" is pronounced Kick-uh-roh. "Caesar" is Kai-ser.
(Cracks the Classical Latin Major knuckles) The history of pronunciation and linguistics is important for a fuller understanding of the words we work with and the affect of their communication. In that, one could argue that the classical Latin pronunciation is relevant because of the culture which actually spoke the language as its main form of communication. Yet: given we are speaking of Descartes in this case, and at that time Latin was used as a good way to communicate between languages (that is to say it was no one's first language), and that this form of Latin was indeed Ecclesiastical Latin, then we have a valid argument to that pronunciation.
However! Ladies and Gentlesirs, despite whatever language is your personal native language we are currently communicating in English. Specifically, given our kind host is PhilosophyTube, British English which means two things: One, the correct pronunciation could be that Latin, Ecclsiastical Latin, *or* British English. And two, by that argument all my American spellings are technically wrong.
Why can't an finite substance cause and infinite substance?? Where is this explained in the mediations if explained at all? Also why does Descartes say he knows he exists while not knowing ANYTHING but the says he cannot know anything if he does not know God??
... doesnt matter what every living entity choose to do... at the end of a given material time, each entity inquire about the cycle of birth and death...
How would Dascarte's respond to mythological or pagan "god" concepts?
Would his "proof" be just as apical to those gods as his own god?
What of a foreign god idea to his own god idea?
Indeed, it would just lead to a deistic god not a personal one, as most of the valid arguments for the existence of god tend to.
His argument would vindicated that God is all good (As that's a crucial step in the argument), but I suppose you could perhaps believe that and be a Deist?
the little ringing sound at 3:15 made my day
In the classical model essence precedes existence. Every prior philosopher had already thought that there was meaning to being human prior to the first human "painting." But that required God to have existed. Jean Paul Sarte believes God to not exist. So any theory that implies that essence precedes existence, since it depends upon God must not be true which means then existence must precede essence. Which means that I have to first exist and only then do human beings start to define what it means to be human, but there is no set in stone definition of what a human is or what a good human is. There aren't any a priori values only man made values. With this profound responsibility comes three accompanying emotions that we are accountable for. Once we become aware of the necessity to construct values, since we can't find any values in the world, we must build them. We feel anguish, abandonment, and despair. Now that existence precedes essence, since God does not exist, each person is responsible for the construction of good and evil or values and they insert those values for other people to see. Mankind's responsibility to fashion meaning stems from the fact that there is no objective meaning, no objective meaning to human existence because there was no God to conceive of.
what kind of a society would result from this standard of thinking in your opinion?
From the video or from what I said?
from what u said
shaun Brown Well I think that we currently live in the type of society that I just mentioned. We have the responsibility to create our own or follow someone else's "painting" of what the good life is because as I said there is no set in stone definition of what it means to be a good/moral human.
philosophy tube... my spiritual teacher in boddhidharma teachings and spiritual master in yoga say: it is no question of believe or not... ETERNITY IS TRUTH... TRUTH IS ETERNITY... it is not a problem of believing or not believing... freedom to every being is given to search the truth of all seen and unseen... the material body that turn to dust ... the spiritual body that exist and is ever-existing...
man this channel is friggin awesome
Isn't Descartes' idea of Infinite substance just a reiteration of Platonic Idealism?
The main reason, to my mind, that Descartes' proof of God fails, is that he never believed that he wouldn't discover God, so it's an extended case of begging the question...
“Having thus provided myself with these maxims, and having put them on one side *along with the truths of faith*, which have always held first place in my belief, I judged that, as for the rest of my opinions, I was free to undertake to divert myself of them." (Discourse 3, pp. 49*)
Having previously said of these maxims:
"For, *God having given each of us some light of reason to discern true from false*, I could not have believed I ought to content myself for one moment with the opinions of others, if I had not intended to use my own judgement to examine them in due course, and I would not have been able to avoid having scruples about following them, if I had not hoped to lose no opportunity thereby of finding better ones if such existed." (Discourse 3, pp. 48*)
*Descartes, R. (1968). Discourse on Method and the Meditations (trans. F. E. Sutcliffe). London: Penguin Books.
I'm interested in both future topics, but as an expat New Zealander, I'm kind of bored with talk about Nuclear weapons (we banned US Nuclear powered ships from coming into our waters in the 80s), so Suicide Prevention.
Didn't you only deal with one of his two logical proofs here? The second one is the inherent properties argument. Eg. he cannot conceive of a mountain without a valley. Therefore he cannot conceive of an infinite being without it being infinite. Its been a while since I've read Descartes and maybe I'm not doing it full justice, but I'd be interested to see your thoughts and/or refutation of that argument.
About living versus not living.The idea that animals and plants aren't living is not that wrong.Though it's usually presented the other way around.Because yes, if we look deep enough, all we find is patterns, laws, reactions. And we can see that in everything. Dogs, grass, water, planets, and even the Universe as a whole (though infinite, which could open up to ways to disprove many things discussed here, be it by including God in some finite way, or simply piling up infinity as a statistical way of saying "nobody can prove or disprove anything, ever, nothing is constant when part of an infinite world").
Everything, at small and large scales, is exclusively made out of the same material and laws. Humans are nothing more than a bubble full of rythmic reactions that keep on repeating for years and years and then shape other similar beings and keep on doing it for practically ever. Masses in space, bumping into each other, splitting in smaller stuff, then rearranging into bigger stuff, to again smash and divide. There is no difference. Life is composed of very simple laws/mechanics, and everything is alive, or the concept of life is flawed and then nothing is alive because it's pointless to compare stuff when we look at the infinitly small.
Also, cake. Cake is not simply made out of egss and flour (let's keep it to two ingredients). It's made out of ingredients with specific properties that they do share with the cake. The cake is not just egg and flour. It's egg and flour, but baked. Heated. Which influences the ingredients. Cooked egg and cooked flour do share properties with the cake. And that's excluding how the ingredients interact with one another under those circumstances. And I am not a physicist or a quantum physisist, but I'm pretty sure the same reasoning can be applied to hydrogen and helium.
And also, we can keep on going smaller when we try to compare thing with what they are made off. And eventually we get to the point where every single thing is just a complex accumulation of the exact same matter and energy, following the same rules and sharing all properties, rendering useless seeing any difference between the cake and the eggs.
How do we know there is no spectrum of existence?
But I thought, unlike the cake example, that Descartes was talking ONLY about infinite things. In other words, Perfection cannot have anything added to it to make it exist. Perfection is just infinite. It just DOES exist. Therefore, everything else (that is not an absolute infinite property) CAN be subject to change. In other words, cake CAN therefore be made by things that don't have its exact property. Does that make sense?
Do the suicide one. It's a much more taboo subject and therefore (at least in my opinion) a much more interesting one. I think it could generate a really fascinating discussion.
I don't think those are good rebuttals honestly.
The PSR is something Descartes takes to be true a priori. I don't know what he's referencing when talking about Hellium and Hydrogen having different properties, but I'd find it to be very strange if their properties weren't (theoretically) grounded on what they atomically consist in and what their structure is.
And I can see one denying the "threefold" division of reality, but I also fail to see how the argument fails. Even if one were to say that all there are are substances, how can you explain the fact of an idea of an infinite/perfect being other than that such a being exists?
omg thanks olly. Longtime watcher, decided to study philosophy, had to google something, cause I´m to lazy to read and you came up hahahahah
This is funny because I have actually had someone spout of this argument of "where else do we get our idea of infinity!? Has anyone ever observed infinity? No! It comes from God!" as a way of trying to convince me that god exists.
The only thing that I could not logically defend was that God existed, because he "trademarked" himself on us. To his defense, where did we even get the idea of God? It has to be from him himself
Excellent analysis. Excellent explanation. Excellent video. I just subscribed, and I cannot wait to start binge watching! Lol
I have annotations enabled and I'm viewing your video in my Chrome browser on my PC, but I can't click the annotation, linking to your previous video at the end of this one. I've had this problem with other videos of yours as well. Please fix.
Good video, really got me thinking. Inspires me to look into it more, which definitely means you are doing your job well :)
As for the next video, I vote for both of them lol. They both seem very interesting.
I would be happy with either.
Do both!
How can "I think stealing is morally wrong" be true or false? It's true that I think stealing is morally wrong whether or not stealing is morally wrong. Enlighten me.
Ok, so lets say its true. And? What conclusion follows that premise? None (i.e. what you think doesn't matter).
Mike F Are you asking a question?
Seriously? What you think doesn't matter. Something is either wrong or it isn't.
Mike F I agree. Stealing is morally wrong. What I think does matter, though. For if you can say that about me I can say that about those who think stealing is morally wrong. I am not a relativist.
This is so useful, thank you!
Why do you need the causal principle?
Nice. Small point: it's *John* Cottingham.
Dude you saved my butt! I wanted to cry, it's part of my finals :0 thanks so much!!!! Now I know how it works!
DesCartes ideas of "more real" and "less real" revolve around not the state of a things reality, but the certainty we can believe that thing to be reality (as you explained at the beginning of the video)
I'm sure philosophy has a better answer to DesCartes than dismissing his argument off of a misunderstanding of what he's saying...
But I find the idea "the being resembles that which made it" to be solid and one of the best philosophical arguments for God(s)
This is really well timed. I was just recently talking with several of my friends about the term qualia. Several recent videos I watched used the term and only slightly more recently did I get find a useful definition for it.
For the quick and dirty definition see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualia
Anyway we got onto the topic of questioning the existence of qualia. Like with the color brown they seem only to be able to exist as a property of something else, so it would seem to make sense to label them as existing "less" since they require something else in order to exist.
I would think this more of a trinary definition of existence than a spectral one, but none the less I am not sold on the idea that existence must be binary.
If existence only applies to physical things are we saying thoughts don't exist?
If we say thoughts exist are we equating thoughts with physical properties?
Is there a difference between what exists and what is real?
I think the topic of nuclear weapons in the context you would discuss it has less coverage in CZcams than the ethics of suicide prevention.
This channel has saved my ass so many times, extremely grateful
I feel that when you try to refute the Causal Adequacy Principle, you make the mistake of assuming that since the Creator has properties different from that which it Created, that means the principle is wrong. In fact, to say the Creator has properties different from that which it Created is wrong, BECAUSE it implies that all properties are different, while nothing could be farther from the truth: atoms make molecules, but atoms and molecules have similarities; or a cake is made by egg, but both are made by atoms, and atoms can be the same with regards to the fact they are in perpetual motion. So basically, you are focusing on the fact that there are SOME properties which the Creator and the Created DON'T share, while forgetting that there ARE some properties which they do share by virtue of being of made of the same substance. As a whole they are both different from each other, but when looked at from CERTAIN properties, they are the same, but still, them being the same in certain properties does not imply that they are the same, since other properties do exist which are different e.g. cake is not the same as egg, and Helium is not the same as Hydrogen.
This made it so much easier to understand, thank you!!
Thanks for the video. I'm a new viewer. It was interesting. Could you please provide a specific reference as to where you found the two principles (the levels of reality principle and the causal adequacy principle) identified in your analysis and used in your critique? Did you identify these principles yourself? As an amateur reader in philosophy it would be helpful to know where to get critical responses to the arguments raised by the many philosophers.
By the way, does your critique address Descartes' concept of clear and distinct ideas? This concept doesn't seem to fall into either of the two principles that you identified as being the two key arguments Descartes' God argument used or rested on. Your thoughts would be appreciated.
TylerJTube The principles themselves are in Descartes, and there are other recommended readings in the description :) Welcome to the channel!
Philosophy Tube I realize that I am taking up the losing side of this argument, but I think that there may be some merit to Descartes trademark argument. For the record I have not gone back to re-read Descartes writings - which I should probably do but I have read some secondary sources on Descartes argument. The one book I read does not identify the two principles that you have identified perhaps because this book was published in 2000. This book only identified a principle the author called the Principle of Adequate Reality. This author suggested that Descartes derived this principle from the Principle of Sufficient Reason and then goes on to show how Descrates used this principle to establish that there were different levels of reality. The author didn't seem too convinced by Descartes arguments and seemed, in my opinion, unsure about what exactly Descartes' argument was about. To me, it seems obvious that we regularly talk about levels of reality and we all understand what we mean when we discuss them. For example, we understand and agree with Descartes that colours are properties of finite substances and that colours don't exist apart in some Platonic or Scholastic form. We also recognize that we are not infinite beings etc so like Descartes we need to explain how we obtained the idea of the infinite and God. Of the two options that explain how we get this idea of the infinite: 1) through abstraction (negation), or 2) a trademark from God himself - Descartes argument and reasoning seems to me to make more sense because if our idea of the infinite is only arrived at through abstraction we are left with explaining why the external world is not merely an illusion and why the external reality conforms to the ideas and theories we have of it. In short, we would be left in Descartes' prison. Another way we routinely discuss "levels of reality" is by making the distinction that Descartes himself made between formal and representational reality. If this distinction is not acknowledged by modern philosophers then many epistemological questions simply disappear. For the record, the book on Descartes that I am reading is part of the Wadsworth Philosophers Series called On Descartes by Garrett Thomson. Please excuse any errors in the above - I am really bad at not re-reading what I write. So my question to you and anybody who does not find Descartes' argument successful is how do you get out of his prison of doubt and/or whether you feel still trapped? :)
so does Descartes believe in a Perfect Being (God) AND an Evil Genius (Devil/Demon)???
He believes in God; the Evil Demon is just a thought experiment
Explain the cake thing, how's that possible?
Good Day.
My question is what the source of the idea of God? Man can preceive traits and characteristics of man and amplify them to god like proportions in order to rationalize the concept of God but that does not exactly equate to what God actually is. Since God is something we are not which is infinite substance is it even possible to comprehend God?
***** I think it was Abu Bakr, the 1st Muslim caliph, who said "Our incomprehension of God is our comprehension of Him". Timothy winter (abdul hakim murad) said that "We can know nothing other than the Unknowable" ...
If you think about it that is true - everything around us is God's Actions, every instant of creation is actually God's actions. Nothing exists except that He created it, so it's coming from Him, is from His plan, His Designing, His Will, and points to Him, but our limited knowledge cannot contain knowledge of His Unlimited Essence, but also our knowledge cannot escape Him either, as we cannot think of anything other than what He created for us to contemplate.
Another point is that if God does not exist, the myth of God might be more of a property we tend to give the universe- the universe is the finite substance, and the story of creation is a property of it, in these same way a person is a substance and a relationship to that person or a shared past might be a property of that person (to you).
A further obvious point is that properties are very clearly subjective- strong by whose measure? Delicious by whose tastebuds? So if properties are subjective, they are not created by the finite substance they occupy, but by the finite substance observing the other finite substance.
In that case, if God exists, then the infinite substance could be given finite substance by its observer. In which case, I am God.
How do we get semantics in our minds to begin with (read the Chinese Room thought experiment). And how do we get the idea of perfection and infinity from an imperfect and finite world?
I think we don't actually think about perfection and infinite things. Think about problems of memory, It is said by Psychologists that most people tend to not be able to remember more than 7 things is asked to recall something, unless they have special training/methods. Actual infinity cannot be thought of, but only the title of it, basically. Say you want to push this very far and think of an invisible, magical, universe-wide fantasy creature made up of a substance that we are not aware of. All of these things are things that never existed in reality, as far as we know, yet we have no problem getting the picture in our head. The problem is that people make up problems that don't exist, such as that we can't think of things that don't exist, which isn't true.
Even if the reasoning were more sound, wouldn't that just prove the physicality of the concept of infinity? I notice a lot of philosophers trying to prove god and thinking they've done so when they (in theory) prove something like an infinite regress.
Instead of asking what makes a thing more real or less real, we can instead ask what makes a thing unreal. Now since we know that things just "exist", does that mean things just "don't exist" as well? Suppose something like the world not being flat. To the people who lived in the time when it wasn't yet discovered that the world wasn't flat, it was considered real to them that the world was indeed flat. For people now who know and believe that the world is round, it is real to them. In the same way, say objects like a table, we know it's real because we have experienced it enough to believe in it. For things unreal, it's not that they don't exist but that we either haven't experienced it enough or we don't believe in it. Existence of things is immaterial of whether we think or know that they're real or not. The world was obviously still round even though the "reality" for the people was that it was flat.
Suppose something like teleportation or spacetravel without oxygen tanks, it may sound like fiction to us but just because we haven't experienced it and we don't believe in it but it may surely exist and become "real" one day.
Couldn't it be a little presumptive to state without apology from our perspective that things exist or don't? I'm no expert in quantum physics, but as I understand it, gravitons have been proposed to do just that: partially exist in this reality.
Please please do the ethics of suicide prevention!!!!! There are so many angles to look at it from.
A big flaw is that no human being can actually think of the infinite to begin with. Our brains cannot represent or comprehend even as little a a trillion of any one thing, let alone a true infinity
I was wondering why I hadn't heard his argument for god before, it is pretty bad. But at the same time, it seem presupposotional apologetics is strongly influenced by this argument. It's interesting to watch the evolution of these arguments over time. Looking forward to the next video.
So I did something similar to Descartes with finding absolute certainty, and my professor pointed me out to him. I agree with you on it sounding very presuppositional. On top of that, it would seem we wouldn't have free will in this case either. If this god were real and making us think things that we have no control over otherwise.
Where did the thought of God come from?
You were a brilliant woman even back then.
Hurrah it's Friday!
try to add words and objects in the video while you talking, there is a plenty of space in there u can get use of it
Helium has different properties from the hydrogen it is made of yes, but ultimately they are made of the same properties, protons, neutrons electrons, quakrs etc. all thats different is the number? I don't understand am I missing something here? how could a professor miss that
+Jack Gilfoyle Yes they are made of the same stuff, but the point still stands that helium has quite different properties from the hydrogen that's fused to make it.
+Philosophy Tube Of course, blonde moment. Your videos are helping me with my Philosophy course. Keep it up brother
+Jack Gilfoyle No worries :)
Your arguments against the CAP don't work since your version of it is a strawman. The principle isn't that "a cause needs the same properties as the thing it causes to exist" because that is just _formal_ causation, while the CAP includes _eminent_ causation and older Scholastic versions include _virtual_ causation. _Eminent_ causation could explain the examples you give.
I've been reading Med III and it's been driving me crazy because nothing of what he was saying made any god damn sense, and I felt like I was constantly missing something. Feels amazing to know for sure that it was him, not me.
Bro that book is not a good book at all. When I read it, I said to myself you got it wrong not him, but we are the ones that lives in 21st century not him. He got it all fucked up If u ask my opinion !! We all know that chance of god's existence can not be proven by philosophers, It can only be done by physicist.
+BigBalls ReligionFucker lol yeah, Des was full of crap :p