The world isn't real because of this...
Vložit
- čas přidán 5. 08. 2024
- Since the ancient Greeks began considering illusions there has been a desire to establish what reality is like and how we can know. These days it is implicitly assumed physics provides us with clear and direct knowledge about the nature of reality. Philosophically, this idea often relies on the concept called the primary/secondary quality distinction put forward by the philosopher John Locke in the 17th century. Locke claims some qualities of our experiences are real and other aren't. The real ones are those physics uses to explain the others.
This video challenges Locke's claim by arguing we have no reason to think there is any justifiable way to distinguish real from unreal qualities of experience. I also claim physics has no special role to play in explaining reality to us. I conclude by arguing we need to return to metaphysics, a philosophical discipline, rather than physics, to get a better grip on the nature of the real.
#Metaphysics #JohnLocke #PrimarySecondaryQualities
____Video Contents____
00:00 - The significance of the stick
02:19 - What are qualities?
03:42 - Which qualities are real?
07:26 - The origin of the primary/secondary quality distinction
09:09 - Explaining the primary/secondary quality distinction
11:24 - Updating the science
13:13 - Why the issue is philosophical
14:32 - The divided wheat argument
18:22 - The quality variation argument
20:34 - The multiple witness argument
23:45 - The appeal to physics rejected
24:52 - Considering other sciences
27:58 - The abstract nature of physics
29:58 - Bring back metaphysics!
____Channel description____
I am a graduate of Cambridge University with a PhD in Philosophy. My thesis was on the nature of truth, and I specialise in metaphysics, logic, and the history of analytic philosophy. I believe philosophy should be made accessible to the curious and philosophers have a duty to reenter the public debate on the questions of importance to our age. This channel is my attempt to do that!
On a personal level, I am a lucky husband, and proud father of two young boys that keep me very much grounded!
____Memberships____
To take the ideas I explore on this channel to the next level with in-depth videos and more academic content, please become a member. Most of the videos I produce are exclusive to members. There are also options here to get in touch with me and do philosophy together. Also, with your support I will be able to spend more time reading, thinking, writing, and shooting video content for all you good people! But I need to keep my family fed too, so your membership is GREATLY appreciated.
It's a simple equation: more members = more videos. Thanks!
____References____
BRADLEY, F. H. (1920). Appearance and Reality (7th impres). George Allen & Unwin.
GALILEO, 'Two Kinds of Properties', in A. Danto and S. Morgenbesser, eds., Philosophy
of Science: Readings (New York, NY: Meridian Books, 1960), pp. 27-32.
LOCKE, John, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book 2, ch. 8 'Some further
considerations concerning our simple Ideas'.
MACKIE, J.L., Problems from Locke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), ch. 1
'Primary and secondary qualities'.
____Stock Credits____
"Ambience, Children Playing, Distant, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org
"Car Passing, Multi, A.wav" by InspectorJ (www.jshaw.co.uk) of Freesound.org
Hi all. Thanks for watching. I'm trying to open philosophical topics to a broader audience and to put forward my position rather than sit on the fence like most academics! Any feedback about the video and what I could do better is gratefully received (reply to this comment). Was it interesting? Which bits were boring? And did it make sense? Plus any technical point about filming/editing too. Cheers!
I followed every second, though I’ve been immersed in this same idea for a few years now. Though it did put Locke in more perspective for me. (I have a few holes in my knowledge being a self educated metaphysician). But still I think your writing was excellent. Just keep doing what you’re doing I think.
@@seancrowley5601 Thanks a lot for the encouragement! I find it hard to get the tone right on CZcams, but glad to know you thought I hit it.
I quite like the vibe, has a touch of old 70s science shows or OU lessons on BBC2. I'd lean into that. Go full Bryan Magee.
@@neoepicurean3772 thanks for that. Sounds good!
One other argument that I would be curious to see you tackle is:
The reason they distinguish between primary and secondary qualities is that the former (e.g. shape) seems in a sense "essential" to a physical object whereas colour seems somewhat "accidental". This is close to John Locke's version of the distinction. He gives a number of arguments for it but one way to get at this intuitively is the "inverted spectrum" thought experiment which you may have heard of if you're reading about perception. Here, we imagine a hypothetical world where colours for you are "inverted" relative to what colours look like for me. E.g. when you see red, I always see blue, and when you see blue I always see red. But we have also reversed the names, so the appearance that you call "blue" I call "red" and vice versa. It seems that there really is no way to tell whether or not we are in this situation because our language and navigation through the world will remain perfectly coordinated exactly as if no inversion happened. Contrast this with the case where our perception of shapes is reversed e.g. when you see a square table I see a circular one. You might accidentally bang into the corner of the table and hurt yourself. To me, this will be completely mysterious because to me the table has no corners. In this case, just swapping the words "square" and "circle" around isn't going to make sense. Obviously, the world isn't like this.
Thanks for the comment.
Seems to me the same problem of unequal treatment arises here too. The inverted spectrum case is applied globally, i.e. _all_ colours are uniformly altered, as is all linguistic reference. But in the shape case only a single shape is altered to generate the distinction and raise concerns. If, instead, _all_ shapes were uniformly altered, the shape of the leg, table, and everything else, there would be no conflict here either. For example, suppose all shapes where uniformly stretched or warped in some way, such as with a fish-eye lens etc. Then there would be clashes in visual field or action, and yet all shapes would be different. Such is the case with certain visual conditions. So again, the thought experiment does not play fair with the different qualities under consideration.
This was a fascinating watch! I subscribed and am excited to learn more. Thank you for breaking down these ideas in such concise and digestible ways!
My second presentation from you, and it was excellent! I have an undergraduate degree in philosophy, have been reading philosophy for decades, and my thoughts on most things resonate with Aristotle's. About that example of how a stick appears to be bent when partially immersed in water, I would argue that this is NOT an illusion because it accurately tells us that refraction is taking place. The illusion would be if it still looked straight.
23:10. We can sometimes restore sight, and the answer is a resounding yes, shapes learned by touch can be recognised when first seen. Recovery from Early Blindness: A Case Study, Richard Langton Gregory, Jean G. Wallace, p17. It's a fascinating case. ~40 years between learning upper case letters by touch at blind school and being able to read them when seen for the first time.
Very interesting. Thanks for letting me know!
@@AbsolutePhilosophythe exam was done 48 days after the surgery, not exactly a “resounding yes”
We need more videos like this.
Thank you very much for such substantive work!
Damn I did not know I wanted a channel like this but here I am. Thank you for your videos !
So glad I found your channel. Great stuff! Thank you professor.
And thank you for your comment. Glad you found us too :)
The video is brilliant and I learned a lot
Schopenhauer wrote a fantastic essay titled history of the ideal and the real. It should be read by all philosophers and their students
0:47 The problem with this argument is that we do not simply perceive the stick, but we perceive the stick half-submerged in water. A stick wholly out of water is a different state of affairs to a stick half-submerged in water.
By usage of analogy: if a church were camouflaged to look like a barn, we would see a church that looks like a barn - not some mysterious, immaterial barn, or immaterial church, or immaterial anything else. What in this case could seriously tempt us to say that we do?
Also in the cases of illusion one can really question the accuracy of the usage of the words “looks” in terms of our experience. The stick in water “looks” bent, but does it really look like a bent stick not submerged in water? Ofcourse not, its just that we have no other ways to describe our perceptual experience of the stick placed in water.
“What exactly in this case is supposed to be delusive?… Does anyone suppose that if something is straight, then it jolly well has to look straight at all times and in all circumstances?” J.L Austin
Thanks for the comment. I'm not sure why this is a problem for the argument I give. To borrow from the Austin quote, things that are straight sometimes do not look straight. So there is a difference between the way things appear and the ways things are. That's all I need for the argument. I didn't say it was 'delusive' or that we incorrectly think the stick is bent. We don't. But the difference between the appearance and the reality seems to need explaining.
@@AbsolutePhilosophy the stick in water analogy again is misleading. the stick doesn’t appear or look bent. The stick IN WATER looks “bent”. Again in my opinion it doesn’t even really look bent, because if I take a stick and bend it, and compare it to the stick in water they are obviously quantitatively different, not even close to being similar.
Your argument seems to affirm the following: if something appears F to subject S, then S is immediately aware of something that is F
But again by use of analogy “if a church were camouflaged to look like a barn, we would see a church that looks like a barn - not some mysterious, immaterial barn, or immaterial church, or immaterial anything else. What in this case could seriously tempt us to say that we do?”
also the direct realist can affirm the following: an object (O) may appear F to Subject S, even though O is not F. So direct realism sidesteps this argument.
However let us imagine the stick in the water case did produce an illusion such that the stick really did look like a bent stick out of water, this is not a problem for the direct realist because:
o may not itself be F, it can exist in certain conditions, C, such that it has visually relevant similarities to paradigm F things and in that sense it will look like an F thing-that is, it will itself have a property, a look or an appearance, INDEPENDENTLY of anyone actually seeing it. If o is then seen in C, o itself will look F to you in perception.
@@AbsolutePhilosophy Thanks for the video. How do you determine that the pencil is straight?
No matter whether I agree or disagree with the video, it makes me question so many aspects of what we take for granted, it makes me reframe normal sentences and it makes me want to say so much. Like every 5 seconds I felt like writing something in the comments.
Thank you. It's nice to feel excited about this.
The most interesting content doesn't appeal to all audiences.
But it excites all audiences(in the neutral sense of the word).
The best art divides the audience.
It's awesome that you can do that.
Congrats 🎉
WOW! Thank you so much for writing that! That is the thrill I found when I started doing philosophy, and the one I try to instill in my students. I started this channel to try and bring philosophy back into the public arena in a more accessible, but still academic, way. And I'm happy not to be agreed with :).
But also, dude, during several points of the video, your arguments make no point. They just put forward the idea that there are two different words for two different ideas
To separate idea/qualia with "real life" disturbances
To separate perception with truth
But that's just how I feel ig. If I Were You, I would have taken the video in a different direction. But hey, you're the youtuber
Hope you don't mind me borrowing these ideas 😅
Would start some great conversations
30:27
Instructions unclear,
I am now a pyrrhonian skeptic.
Haha! 😂
This was very satisfying. Thank you so very much. By the way, that's what I would've said to Locke, minus all the fancy props, were he alive today, I mean, I've said it to his fanboys.
Good content as always. Can you make a video on Hegel’s “Real is rational and rational is real”?
Thanks. I don't know enough about Hegel to do a video on him. Sorry.
I utterly and entirely agree. Excellent love letter to metaphysics my friend :)
Glad you found this channel then. See you around!
How do you not have more subs?? Amazing content.
Thanks for the encouragement. Any help growing the channel is much appreciated!
it is an illusion to believe we are a body and a mind. It just requires a bit more work to figure it out relative to the pencil example.
This was great! I'm definitely going to have to watch this a few times! I got a little lost on the wheat experiment! But at least now I understand what Transendental Idealism is! I think my world view is monist/idealist. I think philosophy is hard to understand but I really want to learn.
Glad you enjoyed it. And all the best with your philosophical journey. Its worth it to persevere!
Brilliant video, clear and detailed
Can't wait for more
Great video
I'm only a few minutes into this video, so maybe this argument is addressed later on, but I have an objection to the "pencil in water" argument. My objection is this. When we say a pencil in water "looks bent" all we mean is that a pencil in water and a bent pencil look alike (though not completely alike, and this is probably an important point). But in some sense nothing has "gone wrong." We've only made a mistake if we see a pencil in water and think it's bent. So long as whenever we see a pencil in water we recognise it as such, there hasn't been any mistake. Mirages look similar to water on the road, but so long as every time we see a mirage we take it for a mirage and not for water, nothing has gone wrong. And in fact "looking like water" is one of the ways we can recognise mirages. So it's all a matter if taking what we see the right way, rather than our experiences being intrinsically veridical or not.
Of course nothing has (necessarily) 'gone wrong' if by wrong you mean we make an interpretive mistake about what there is. What has gone 'wrong' is purely the sense experience, if sense experiences are assumed to be right when they match reality. We *see* a bent pencil (even if we are not fooled by it), and that sense, i.e. what we see, is wrong. The point this opening discussion tries to make is that we know that appearances are not reality. And once we know that, we can legitimately ask if all appearances are unreal, and not just the ones we take to be unreal. And thinking about this more often leads to serious doubts about what can be known about reality.
@@AbsolutePhilosophy In my opinion sense data can't be intrinsically real or unreal, only our interpretation. An illusion is just when we interpret our sense data wrong rather than there being something deceitful about the sense data. For example, people for centuries thought the earth was stationary and the sun moved because "it looked that way" but (as that Wittgenstein joke goes) "how would it have looked if the earth moved and the sun was stationary?"
Sure. I agree that sense data are not 'truthbearers'. And you can doubt the 'veil of perception' idea that thinks there is an independent reality underlying sense data. But then the primary/secondary quality distinction can't get off the ground, which is my main target. But if you have a veil of perception idea in play, then it seems sense data can correctly or incorrect represent reality (presumably, as it *is* independently of its appearance). In this way sense data falls into two groups, and this is what the debate concerns.
The Wittgenstein case is one where the sense data doesn't make it 'look' any particular way. It is the assumed geocentric interpretation that makes us think that way. And our thoughts about what we see can be true or false.
It’s funny, people usually find their own problems and their own solutions but miss it most of the time. You said it right off the jump, you’re only a few minutes in a video and forming a complete argument on the matter and sticking to your beliefs. The answer you really need is to absorb things in their completion, write your opinions down, sit with those thoughts and ideas for a while, then share if you feel the need to. People are too quick to do what you just did and that gets us nowhere, just talking in circles. What you explained already has a word for it, it’s called an illusion, which the original video stated about 10 seconds after where you seem to have stopped and commented.
So, tempted to maintain a distinction between science & philosophy, but what do I do when I read Berkeley & Schopenhauer & I say to myself... these statements could be the hypotheses for what we call Quantum Physics : Observer/Measurement/ Interaction " Problems "
These aren't problems in Idealism!
They are only problems in the current Materialist paradigm!
But then I realize... it doesn't seem to me... that simple but rigorous philosophy allows me to make a simple deductive syllogism with a premise that admits to the Truth and Fact of... an objectively existing external world... when science is premised on such a statement!?
Being philosophically rather than scientifically bent... I see Materialism as being more absurd than Solipsism!
I know that makes me " crazy, " but I mean, it seems to me... that philosophically speaking... its worse to be circular than to admit that thought tells me that the " world " is only a product of MY mind...
And I am not saying imagination but mind...
I don't know, lol!
The materialist paradigm that scientists often operate under is a philosophical one. So the thinkers you reference have plenty to say about that.
But I completely share your leanings towards philosophy, as it helps me understand my own experiences, and directly connects with them. Physics, at least the more abstract theoretical kind, doesn't. So I could only take the claims as from authority, but this will never give me sufficient justification to be convinced that things I experience are false.
I think the first argument stands if one considers that chopping up wheat is a sufficient reason for the change in primary qualities but not in secondary qualities. The size is smaller, simply because it has been forcibly made smaller. But the person chopping didn't simultaneously do anything to change the color of the parts of wheat.
If Locke made the point using the example of people painting walls, that would be pretty stupid. Because obviously painting walls means their color will change. But if I sincerely believe that the brown color of wheat is as essential to it as its size, then I would need to explain why dividing it doesn't just leave a lot of elements of the same color. Since, presumably, the color is an inherent property of the parts of the whole grain, if it is an inherent property at all.
You can only imagine something with no shape if the said thing doesn’t have a body
Great video-both as a topic and it’s very high production quality and clarity!
I wonder if AI once it passes the singularity threshold and starts thinking independently from the “human bias perspective” with all its presuppositions, whether that may be the moment where questions about reality are perhaps answered.
The problem with humans is that we assume we are “looking” at the world with our senses and that this is giving us “realistic” feedback. Science thinks it is using sense data-even that from the extension of their apparatuses-and that this is giving them a true objective 3rd party perspective of the “world.” In truth we are enmeshed and interacting within the very structure we are observing and our very data is evolutionarily biased by the headset through which we take in the “world.” This blind spot is greatly reinforced by the massive success of science in modeling and manipulating the world and is falsely interpreted as proof that we have a good epistemological ontic grasp of true reality. That this however may just be us manipulating and modeling the “phenomenal world” that tightly corresponds with our participation IN the world is completely lost on most people. The “naive realist projection” is too deeply psychologically embedded
-both on a societal as well as individual level-to the point that even a Nobel prize strongly suggestive of a non-local reality is not enough to illicit deeper inquiry-by media and science itself-about the clear implications.
AI may look at the data that QM and other paradoxes are clearly telling us with the necessary intelligent neutrality to successfully connect the dots.
Thanks for the encouragement. I'm not sure I share your optimism about AI, but we'll see I suppose.
We are evolutionary biased to find real causal structures which allow us to influence our environment in such a way that it is useful for one’s survival.
Location cannot be a 'property' of a thing.
What is it then? It is typically considered either an extrinsic or relational property of an object.
Yes, I found this shocking when I first came across it. What it showed to me is that the ability of our biological makeup to create a sense of well-being, is what fundamentally makes life worth living. The fact that it's illusory because of this biological interpretation in part at least, isn't important in comparison, at least for me.
Wow. So, refraction is a thing.
nice!
Thought this was a Jeffrey Kaplan video and wondered why he looked so young, you both sound similar too, but perhaps that's not a quality you both share but rather a quality you both cause me to experience
Haha! I'm not sure I'm younger than Jeffrey, at least probably not by much. But I'll leave you guessing ;).
"What quantum mechanics tells us, I believe, is surprising to say the least. It tells us that the basic components of objects - the particles, electrons, quarks etc. - cannot be thought of as "self-existent". The reality that they, and hence all objects, are components of, is merely "empirical reality"."
"This reality is something that, while not a purely mind-made construct as radical idealism would have it, can be but the picture our mind forces us to form of ... OF WHAT ? The only answer I am able to provide is that underlying this empirical reality is a mysterious, non-conceptualisable "ultimate reality", not embedded in space and (presumably) not in time either."
Bernard d'Espagnat (22 August 1921 - 1 August 2015) was a French theoretical physicist, philosopher of science, and author, best known for his work on the nature of reality.
Interesting quote!
relative experiential objective truth
Oh my... you only asked questions and undermined the foundations of our reality, but offered no answers to save us from the vanishing ground.
More to come on that... 😊
First of all, let us analyze what you are saying. You said the world we experience isn't real. What does that mean ? Something that isn't real is imaginary, its existence -- in so far as it can be said to exist at all depends entirely upon our imagination. Dreams, for example, are imaginary because they depend entirely upon our imagination in order to exist, therefore, they lack reality. There is an immediate problem here, however, because dreams do exist in so far as they are 'things' individuals often experience at night when they are sleeping. So, in a sense, they do have a reality. You can't really say there are no such things as dreams, as you can say, for example, there are no such things as unicorns. So, it's not really the dreams that lack reality, as what they represent. For example, if you are dreaming of a unicorn, the dream is real, but the unicorn isn't real. Again, we have a problem, however, because we sometimes (often) dream about real people, places and things -- not just unicorns and other fictional beings. So, again, we can't simply say that what dreams represent aren't real, without qualifying this simple statement. In fact, we are more likely to dream about real people, places, and things than we are to dream about fictional beings such as unicorns. It's the events that dreams represent to us that aren't real -- they never actually happened. So, we now have to qualify what we mean by 'merely imaginary'. It's that these events that occur in our dreams, and those fictional beings such as unicorns do not exist beyond our imagination. They are 'things' that only occur in our imaginations. Again, there is a problem, however. There is a sense in which governments, laws, money, and even language do not exist beyond our imaginations. If everyone stopped believing in the power and existence of these 'things' they would cease to exist at all ! Of course, we can say that they have an existence beyond any one individual's imagination or personal beliefs, but if, for example, nobody any longer believed in law and order, nobody would bother to obey and/or enforce the laws -- so, they would in effect cease to exist. I point all this out to show that is not so easy just to say something isn't real, as if it were obvious what we mean. 'Not real' in what sense or context ? Now, in what sense or context do you mean the world we experience isn't real ? Because, if the sole basis for this conclusion depends upon empirical evidence -- evidence that comes from experience of the world itself, I think you are going to have a problem, because if the world isn't real, then neither is the evidence !
Hmm... process ontology?
In outside real reality there is no time. Its not any point in time. Its not today yesterday or tomorrow. Its not anything
Therefore, Subjective reality is all there is. There is no point of view for anything to exist in outside of a point of view
Plato 🥂
@10:10 not a good characterization of realism there. If you suppose mental qualia are not caused by physical phenomena but are correlated, then you get a better coherent story. It might take some quantum physics lessons to grok this idea that some apparent causality is not, it is correlation (this is the case in QFT, ordinary plain old physics), but then after you grok it then it's easier to contemplate this "real/unreal" dichotomy. It really is all real, everything is real, but reality comes in different forms, and talk about causation is a tad fraught, you have to be super careful not to assume causation when there might only be correlation. Dancing and fading qualia gedankenexperiment, and whatnot, make this clear too in a different way. If you assume physical events cause the mental events you get terrible inconsistencies and that's before worrying about moral dilemmas, but not so if you assume only correlation (and the cause is something else, maybe we do not know what, but something else).
Sweetnes IS primary !
Not on your Nelly
You just gotta love those Brits on CZcams😅
This is all literally just the object permanence illusion that infants experience, but for adults. Then adults flailing around for centuries trying to justify why the object 'disappears' when they can't see it. Category errors and word games.
29:26 "whatever I understand by space, it doesn't seem to be anything like the thing that I experience so then if qualities like size shape and experience are real in the way that the physicists talk about them perhaps aspects of an object's 26 dimensional being then there can't be anything like the qualities of size shape and location that I experience once again I'm left with the conviction that whatever reality is like it must be completely unlike the experience that I have of it"
This is a complete non-sequitur. Just because you can't understand the physics doesn't mean it doesn't describe reality (doesn't mean it does either, plenty of theories will turn out to be wrong and incomplete). Like how a child can't understand the object still exists while she can't see it. It's not an illusion, it's a misunderstanding. Why should the nature of reality at extremely large and small scales be easily comprehensible to you and analogous to your everyday experience?
The basis of your conclusion, 'the pencil in the water isn't really bent' is the assumption that you are experiencing reality when the pencil is not in the water. This is your premise. You take away that premise, and your conclusion no longer has any justification.
Sorry but the pencil in the water isn’t an illusion. It is refraction. The bent pencil is just as real an image as the straight pencil.
A stoneager would see a car, they just wouldn’t call it a car.
The so-called postmodernists are not evil irrationalists though. The point is not even just about power. It's about understanding cultural and historical context as intrinsic to the development and nature of concepts. This can be done very rationally and productively.
That sounds very Marxist.
@@R_Priest Me: concepts have contexts.
Internet rando: naaah commie!
@@andreab380 Didn't say commie. I said Marxist. There's a difference, isn't there? Marxism is an ideology informed by "understanding cultural and historical context as intrinsic to the development and nature of concept", ie, historical materialism.
Walk like an agyptian.
Thinking that what appears in the model is "really out there" is the Whiteheadian "fallacy of misplaced concreteness" (reification) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reification_(fallacy)
The assumption that this philosophy needs to make is that "real" consists of a rock bottom "way things are" that we simply need to access in order to perceive true reality. Typical of all post modern philosophy combined with materialism.
The issue is that you are pretending like you don't exist, like you can step outside of yourself in order to examine the "real". This is nonsense of course. All our scientific definitions of what is "real" consist in abstractions and by a sort of mental gymnastics we could to regard those abstractions as rock bottom reality. This video seems to be an solid explanation of how the consequences of this view make our lives into a confusing mess. Realize, dear reader, that the only absolute is God, everything else has some degree of flexibility around the edges. Places and times where lines blur.
I still remain a direct realist. The concept of sense data seems absurd to me, too many counterarguments, I cannot bring myself to believe it.
Wow, if you want to progress beyond late night dorm room bull sessions you need to study current findings in cognitive neuroscience and then rethink what the issues are.
The stick bending example is due to light refraction it doesn't mean the universe isn't real. This video starts off silly and continues silly.
Of course it is. But the fact we experience illusions means we need to justify how we know all experience isn't an illusion. And it's very hard to do.
There are too many presumptions and logical fallacies in this video.
I teach logic. What fallacies did I commit?
Name them
Where are the presumptions? sounds like your in denial buddy
*gets popcorn*
Lol.