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“Imagine you are a giant piece of salami through time,” is something I didn’t expect to ever hear. lol.

Great work Simon Thanks

An ideologue trying to explain another ideologue's stance while virtue signaling that it is a bad argument would make a very interesting in-person university lecture.

Just a thought about this last major point that according to Dembroff, being genderqueer has an essentially external component, so you can't be a closeted genderqueer person and it is possible for an oppressive regime to literally eliminate genderqueerness (disclaimer: I have no experience whatsoever in this topic so I don't know if this holds any water): As you explained, Dembroff argues that yes, a regime could literally eliminate genderqueerness and it's precisely that what makes these oppressive conservative regimes so bad. They hinder people from self-realization. But you could reply to this argument something like this: Assume that such a regime has succeeded in its goal to completely eliminate genderqueerness (in Dembroff's sense). Who does such a regime harm? The answer can't be that it harms genderqueer people, because according to Dembroff's definition there literally are no genderqueer people living under this regime. But Dembroff wants to say that the regime is bad because it hinders certain people from self-realization. Who are those people? Now you could answer that the regime in fact hinders all its citizens from self-realization in some sense because it upholds this oppressive binary ideology that has certain oppressive effects on all people. But this seems disingenous. There clearly are some people who aren't bothered at all by this regime's actions and others who are greatly harmed and completely hindered from self-realization. The right answer, it seems to me, is, that the people who are greatly harmed by the regime are those who would be genderqueer if this oppressive regime wouldn't exist. Let's call those people counterfactual genderqueers. I think for her theory to make any sense, Dembroff has to accept that you can sensibly talk about counterfactual genderqueers (as the people who are harmed by the oppressive regime, who are hindered from self-realization precisely because they are prevented from becoming actual genderqueers). Now, Dembroff's external definition applies to actual genderqueerness. You can't be a closeted actual genderqueer person. But you can be a closeted counterfactual genderqueer person (just as the people who are harmed by the regime in our example). With this terminology, I think you can describe the debate between Dembroff and her opponents (who think that there can be closeted genderqueers) as a merely semantic dispute: Should our normal, non-specified descriptor "genderqueer" only refer to actual genderqueers (as is Dembroff's position) or should it also refer to counterfactual genderqueers, so that you can rightfully describe closeted counterfactual genderqueers in oppressive circumstances as "genderqueer" too? In my view, the second option is more reasonable. Wow, this got longer than expected... Does this make any sense?

Please do not engage in cheap attacks! Bezos being better in earning money doesn't mean him being better than the others. That's manipulative.

is the hand-raising a musk reference by any chance hahaha

It seems to me that Frankfurt cases are not an actual problem. Taylor Swift's culpability in the thought experiment murder hinges on whether her decision to pull the trigger is causally connected to the death. While either choice she makes results in the same outcome for the victim because of the implant, her choice to pull the trigger and her choice not to (even after being overridden by the chip) are two completely different worlds for the purpose of assigning culpability. An interesting question to me is what happens if she had agreed to the implant, but then decided not to pull the trigger at the last moment. That scenario adds a lot of extra complications, for example the possibly of having to assign weights to different moments in time in order to assess culpability. Does her decision to get the implant at time x override her decision not to pull the trigger at a later time y when she knows it is futile? An argument for why her latter decision might override or at least mitigate the prior could be based on the idea that the implant might malfunction, meaning that even if Taylor had agreed to the implant and therefore knew it meant that a decision not to pull the trigger at the last moment w/could be futile, deciding not to pull the trigger would give the victim a better chance of survival. But this opens up a Pandora's box, because Taylor's state of mind, in particular, her awareness, consideration and perhaps even understanding, of the possible failure rate of the implant would likely play a role in assigning culpability.

One of the premises of the consequence argument is that no one ever had any choice about past events? Anyone who thinks maybe we have choice about future events is nearly guaranteed to also believe (i.e., to have the same degree of belief) that we had similar choices in the past, i.e. anyone who would question the conclusion of the argument is nearly guaranteed not to accept the premise. That's pretty close to saying that the argument is pointless.

There's nothing inconsistent about branching timelines or meta-time. We have no particular reason to think that either of them is an attribute of our universe, but logically they're possible.

These “projects” shouldn’t have their devotees. They are both true in a certain respect.

Russell, Frege and the rest of that group, it seems to me, would be more accurately said to have argued for word meaning not sentence meaning (which was conceived of as, in turn, a formulaic implication of word meaning). Ironically, though Grice opposed the view that words have meaning outside of the context of the speaker’s intentions, it strikes me that he failed to heed his own assertion when it came to trying to define the concept of ‘meaning’ - hence getting himself into that years long mess of layering intricacy upon intricacy within his attempted definition to the point of its apparent uselessness which was somewhat mentioned in passing in the video.

Thank you Professor Cushing for these lectures, I love listening to them in the car or while walking

Hello. I learn a lot from your videos. I have no access to formal education in philosophy; but, with the help of your videos, I am able to educate myself. Thank you very much.

Is this a philosophical lecture on Gender or a lecture on the Trump administration?

If the bad guys really thought it was biological truth, they wouldn't feel any need to enforce it, any more than they feel a need to force the sun to rise each morning. Of course it's cultural. The noise about trans people is almost entirely aimed at forcing narrower gender roles and identities on cis people than we would authentically live out.

Very sad to see the state of intelectualism. Transsexuality is a birth defect, a mismatch between the genetic and biological expression of sex in an individual. Transgenderism is a sort of self-hatred with tendency to body dysphoria towards the parts of ur body that inform others that ure a part of sex that u have strong aversion towards. That hatred depends on culture and what the society has agreed signals ”sex”. In a society where women wear pants and men skirts, transgender women would hate pants then. That proves that it is not a biological, but psychological problem. Transgender-acrivists are basically taking away all the progress we’ve made towards freedom of expression and puts it back in 2 boxes but require millions of dollars in surgeries and aftercare for u to fit in. Ure saying to a dysmorphic person to cut off his leg instead of teaching them theres nothing wrong with it. Unsubscribing.

Come on. You have to know that the male plant is the one that produces pollen, and the female plant is the one that produces seeds. And *_having biological sexes is not about reproduction._* Bacteria reproduce just fine without having sexes. Sex is about mixing genes from different organisms. Bacteria use a different mechanism, called conjugation. They have genes that are ready to mix, because they're on a little snippet of DNA, and genes that aren't, because they're on the bacterium's main piece of DNA. Sex is binary at (and only at) the level of gametes. There are two things that a haploid generation has to do in order to form the diploid generation: provide the stuff that's going to become the diploid generation, and find another gamete to merge with. Hauling lots of stuff for later use makes a gamete worse at finding another gamete, so there's a strong pressure for each gamete to do one thing well and leave the other function to the other gamete. If there were three things to do, for example if there were three incompatible kinds of stuff that a new organism needed, then organisms that alternate triploid generations with haploid generations would be at an advantage and they would have three sexes. At the level of individuals, it's just whatever works. There are animals that change sex. There are animals that are hermaphroditic. If you can think of a coherent idea for how it might work, there's probably something that does it that way.

The best channel on RUclips never fails to dissapoint! (Btw: that Texas bumper sticker is proof of the oncoming Blexas!!!!) I'm very excited to see new developments in this field, Jenkins, for example, is someone who I find little agreement with, but her writing certainly captures many key aspects of the gender phenomenon and it seems that her views will change as time goes on. Thank you for the excellent lecture!

There are TWO genders. MALE AND FEMALE!!!! THATS IT!!! END OF STORY!!!!

I think simplistic internalists aren't using empty terms and they're capturing how a lot of trans people and allies use the words I think a logically valid definition can be formalized this way: Someone is a woman if and only if they like to be referred to by "woman" This definition isn't circular because a woman is a person while "woman" is a word, so the term we're trying to define isn't used in the definition To illustrate this point, we can look at this definition: Someone is a blarby if and only if they liked to be refered to by "blarby" By this definition, you can easily understand what makes someone a blarby, it's a desire for a certain linguistic convention. And you can easily know if someone is a blarby or not, by asking them if they would like to be referred to by "blarby" Another point is that I don't think words have meaning independently of how they're used, and I think we can use words in any way we like If someone likes to be referred to by "woman" and when they say "I am a woman" they mean "I like to be referred to by "woman"" then it's true that they are a woman by that definition, and even a conservative should grant this. And when a conservative says "trans woman are men" and what they mean by "man" is simply someone who was born with a penis, then a trans woman isn't denying that they were born with a penis, they only dislike using the term "man" to label this concept. Furthermore, the fact that someone is born with a penis has no normative implications on how they should behave, while conservatives think it does, which doesn't seem very biological. So, Trans people aren't denying any "biological truth." They're just using words in a way that makes them comfortable. Also, I wnated to talk about this common strawman objection. For example, "if I identified as a refrigerator, I wouldn't be a refridgerator" The reason that liking to be called "refrigerator" isn't sufficient for being a refrigerator is that by "refrigerator" we mean a type of household appliance in ordinary contexts. However, gender terms aren't used by trans people the same way, they're used to talk about a person's desires to be called by certain words. By the definition I offered, identifying as a woman (liking to be called by "woman") is necessary and sufficient to be a woman. Also, I like this definition because it has no implications about a person's behavior or appearance. For example, by some definitions, if as a trans man, you like being feminine, you're not a man, which seems to enforce harmful gender roles on people.

overall i am fairly disappointed by the quality of this lecture. It is not adequate to account for such a divisive topic.

I learned that in biology, male means producing male gametes and female means producing female gametes. That hold for all plants and animals. No necessity to "relativize male and female to the kind of thing your talking about" 10:00 To account for infertile individuals: female: being made (figuratively) to produce female gametes (larger, typically immobile gametes like eggs) male: being made (figuratively) to produce male gametes (smaller, typically motile gametes like sperm)

Excellent! Perfect!! Wonderful!! Lovely!!! Keep it up mate.

Your lectures are really wonderful - I appreciate the clarity, comprehensibility and care of your language and structure! Thank's so much!

Hope to make time travel a reality

The main problem I always found with utilitarianism is that we're often unable to calculate utility. For example, if a child of mine is drowning next to a cancer researcher, a utilitarian might suggest I should rescue the cancer researcher first. Yet who is qualified to make this utility calculation? What we can easily and confidently predict is that if all parents were to neglect their children in their greatest time of need, our species would quickly go extinct. That's why we should prioritize rescuing our children. We should err towards the foreseeable over the unforeseeable, to the knowable over the unknowable. A utilitarian might -- in hindsight -- claim that it was wrong for an entire team of firefighters to die only to rescue a single elderly woman. Yet I would again insist on the knowable vs. the unknowable, on expectancies vs. outcomes. If we abandoned helpless innocent civilians to burn to death in fires, that would likely be moving us closer to our extinction. It's well-adapted behavior that firefighters attempt to rescue them even if they don't always succeed in saving more lives than risked and lost. >> They say the difference between arts and skills and moral virtues is that in arts and skills, it's best if you commit an error if you do it intentionally. A number of artists might refute the claim who swear by "happy mistakes" as having produced some of their most popular works of art. A difference to me in the arts is that mistakes aren't always malfunctional. If a person dealing with function rather than aesthetics makes a mistake, the result is often a malfunctional product. If an engineer designing rockets makes a mistake, the rockets can explode rather than flying into outer space. If a doctor makes a mistake diagnosing a patient, they can prescribe a medicine which inadvertently kills the patient rather than treating their malady. >> The third feature of moral virtues is that they are correctives. I agree with the corrective mindset, but mainly under the view that many human weaknesses are formerly-adapted traits maladapted to our present environment. For example, many of us crave fructose and derive great pleasure from its consumption in ways that were likely well-adapted prior to the agricultural revolution, but have become increasingly maladapted pleasures as refined sugar becomes widely available for a trifle sum. >> If you just prepared to walk slowly across a freeway and don't feel any fear, that's not a good property because you're going to die. I don't necessarily see the excess in courage there as the maladapted property, but rather the excess in stupidity. >> For example, take somebody in war who hears somebody who's been shot out in no man's land and just runs out there, grabs him, carries him back, and doesn't even think twice about it, doesn't bat an eye. Is that person more courageous because they don't appear to feel fear? I don't find the distinction all that meaningful as I'm not a mind reader. Perhaps the reason this soldier lacks fear in this moment is because they've courageously faced their fear so many more times than the other. We should be grateful either way that we have soldiers whose behaviors are so well-adapted to cooperative survival, and brothers in arms who protect each other tend to multiply their strength far better than those pit their individual survival against each other. >> It does seem right to say that it's a better person who finds it easy to do the right thing. I just see it in terms of frequency. A person who finds it easy to do the right thing is more likely to repeatedly do it than someone who finds it incredibly difficult. Yet it's only in this practical likelihood of repeating certain behaviors that I find the true functional distinction. >> How could it be right to say that having a moral virtue can help you do evil? I see that as often possible. For example, it would be counter-productive for our collective survival if an undercover law enforcer told the truth to the organized criminals he's investigating, even though telling the truth is generally well-adapted behavior. Virtues are merely simple guidelines to help us optimize our collective survival in my view. Undercover agents exhibit well-adapted behavior (most admirably so) despite lying repeatedly and often even to their loved ones, since they help stop the organized criminals who move us closer to our extinction.

I always rooted moral realism in collective survival as a root functional requirement, given that any ethical system which contradicts the survival of its followers is one that cannot survive itself. As with an ethical system that deems it "good" to drink poison, its shelf life is extremely short unless the majority of people who believe it aren't following it. That's a fact and has nothing to do with preferences or cultural values. So when people assert that "cruelty is wrong", I see it as a claim that cruelty is generally contradictory/maladapted to our collective survival. Whether that is true or false is another matter, and it may even be contextual, but the followers of an ethical system are either objectively moving closer towards their preservation or further towards their extinction. >> Any attempt to do that is just wrong-headed. It commits the naturalistic fallacy, says G.E. Moore. I agree, but survival isn't "good" for the mere fact that it's a natural property. It's a functional requirement. I also assert that "pain is generally functional/good/required", for example, to counter hedonists because people who can't feel pain would be unable to detect the damage they're doing to their bodies in ways counter-productive to survival. Any set of philosophers who conclude that it's "bad" for humans to consume oxygen will perish within minutes of asphyxiation along with their malfunctional ethical system. That's a non-negotiable functional requirement. >> The claim that beauty is in the eye of the beholder represents a subjectivist view. There will certainly be subjective variability with respect to what makes a "good" or "bad" software in an aesthetic/subjective sense, but any software which crashes soon after startup is objectively malfunctional and wrong in the functional sense. "Pain" will be "bad" in the aesthetic sense to all but a masochist, but it's still generally functional and required for our continued existence. There seems to be much confusion with respect to the conflation of the aesthetic "good" (as in beautiful/desirable/pleasing) with the functional "good" (as in required to even begin to evaluate aesthetics). An architectural design that hopelessly violates physics and cannot possibly be constructed is objectively malfunctional no matter how pleasing we find its design. It's a building that cannot functionally exist in reality, and therefore objectively wrong in its design. >> You see an example of somebody mugging somebody, and you say that's wrong. And they say, wait a minute. "Wrong" -- when we're not familiar with this term. Let's see if we can scan it. Tell us what it is and we'll see if we can scan for it. I would say it's counter-productive to the survival of our society, especially if everyone was allowed to mug each other. We ethically condemn it and often even go further and criminalize it under the assumption that widespread mugging in our society would be moving us closer to our extinction rather than our preservation.

Eargasmic butterflys running throughout your ears biblically accurate angels carrying you through time one big mega punch light

Time travel in hyperspace is not absolute timeline event has impacts on the other event as dot to dot, because you need to consider how this time travel journey to impact on your interstellar soul energy and parallel universe. Time travel is not a perfect solution to address extreme event such as extinction risks or to save some important guys in "past or future", but similar to direction and travel period when you're preparing to interstellar travel as daily transportation.

Let's think about how many time definition existing in mainstream physics and aerospace engineering, obviously, the most popular time including current standard liner timeline on the earth, relativitic interplanetary liner timelines, multiverse parallel timeline, holographic time frames, hyperspace time, curved time, biological time, interstellar soul energy support time, multiverse sliptime...

Time travel and group time selection in hyperspace are essential to space journey, it's the good way to rethink when our biological time meet selected group time to our proposed destination. Standard sliptime functions are current common system to bring accurate relativistic quantum loop group time to proposed object...

Thank you for the great lecture and this great rescource for digesting the content of Rousseaus essay.

Could anyone share the reading list link? I can't find it . Thank in advance.

Why did David Lewis say "personal time" instead of "proper time", as people had been calling it since something like 1911?

just a small point, plato used the metaphor 'carve at the joints' in phaedrus , not aristotle. otherwise, appreciate the vid, thanks for posting it.

General relativity can explain different clocks but sizes must change.

First!

The word “water” surely existed before science and before we discovered the essence of water (H2O). But I guess you might be able to come up with twin earth type cases in which we discover some kind of new water that’s not H2O and are forced to modify our definition of water, but I think the intuition is kind of weighed towards calling that thing “new water” or something to that effect. This is definitely an interesting question, and I don’t disagree with the general sentiment that we should treat people with kindness and respect. I think it is also worth investigating to what extent our linguistic classification practices are subject to ethical norms (and how those norms interact with other, nonethical norms that govern classification). It has been argued that misclassification constitutes harm to trans people. I don’t know if this particular kind of normative argument has been pursued anywhere else, so this might really be something unique about the trans debate. There’s obviously a difference between “let’s just call people by their preferred pronouns because it’s the right thing to do,” which I can easily get behind, and saying that “the fact that people identify a certain way simply makes it so that they just are the gender they identify with.” There are a lot of intermediate positions between sex=gender and there are two sexes on the one hand, and gender=gender identification and nothing else on the other hand. The problem is that theories that are not purely identitarian, that take into account of a person’s social perception, relationship with gender roles, perceived sex, etc. will inevitably exclusion some members of the trans community, because what it takes to be trans these days is just identification. But the pure identitarian view also cannot accommodate people who for whatever reason (intellectual disability, profound autism, diseases of the brain) do not possess much of a grasp on social norms and gender roles to have something like a gender identity. (This was an argument made by Elizabeth Barnes.) I don’t know if I’m willing to go as radical about the gender stuff as some queer theorists has gone (not if I still want to hold on to my conservative views on philosophy of language and even biology), and I think this is typical of the analytic tradition and part of the reason why we are sometimes perceived as the odd conservative branch of the humanities departments. But I’m rambling. Well, what do I know, I’m just a clueless undergrad that once took a seminar on this stuff.

Justified True Belief isn't knowledge: 1) Belief: Plato never used the term "Belief" in the Theaetetus. He used "opinion". "Opinion" is too little, "belief" is too much, "conviction" seems to be the needed middle term. 2) Truth: much of science is accepted as provisional, subject to change if necessary. If we recquire truth for knoledge, most of science will be left out. Anyway, who will decide what is truth, and with which criteria? It'll be hard to have consensus of anything but (if) the basic. Truth is too much to expect. We must accept less restrictive criteria, like non-contradiction with the rest of our knowledge, and non-existence of equally well-justified alternatives, because viable alternative means we are in doubt, not knowledge. So, what is knowledge? I say something like Best Non-contradicted Justified Conviction is better than JTB.

Thank you for a wonderful lecture.

Read Balagangadhara's Culture Differ Differently.

19:55 The Year Zero does not exist. There is a year 1, and a year -1, but no year 0.

Thoughts as I go, so I may say stuff that's addressed later in the video. "You can't have time without change." I'm not convinced. That's a lot like saying you can't have space without matter. We _don't_ have time without change. The universe is full of things with parts with parts-of-parts, and so on down to a level where stuff works very differently, and another where stuff works very differently than that. So we don't have Newtonian time or Newtonian vacuum. But that doesn't mean that a hypothetical Newtonian universe is incoherent. Certainly you can have a video with frames that are bit-for-bit identical. In that analogy, what we normally mean by "change" corresponds to the difference between one frame and the next, and the changes outside the video correspond to whatever sort of inherent time we might postulate. You can say that having it be a different time already is a change by itself, but if so, you're killing the statement instead of proving it: making it meaningless instead of even potentially true or false. "... and they agree that one of them has to be fundamental" Why on Earth would they do that? Two ways of talking about the same thing are just two ways of talking about the same thing. Buildings have foundations. Things analogous to buildings have things analogous to foundations. But there's no building-analog here. There's no metaphorical gravity, that will pull everything down unless it's stacked right. There's just an aspect of reality and two ways of talking about it. The default assumption is that, if you want to have a building-analogy, reality is the foundation and ways of talking about it are the habitable parts of the building. "Wait a moment, that's stupid" Yep, sure is. It's like saying that "bigger" and "smaller" are incompatible, and then inferring that it's somehow contradictory to be both bigger than a mouse _and_ smaller than an elephant. Event A can be space-like separated from event B, and also in the future of event C. "How long is the present" That's both vague and context-dependent. If you're talking about people thinking by having ions cross membranes over the course of a millisecond or so, then the present is long enough for one bit of awareness to be carried out but not long enough for two. If you're talking about chemical reaction mechanisms, then the present is much shorter: long enough for electron configurations to change substantially, but not long enough for atomic nuclei to move appreciably relative to the length of a molecule, then the present is much, much shorter. At the other extreme, you can talk about historical or geological processes, using a notion of the present that lasts years or centuries. And you can postulate a model of reality in which time is discrete like frames of a video, and theorize that the present is one frame long. There's no evidence for or against it, but it's perfectly coherent. Reality exists, no matter which way we're talking about it. -- "A"theorists are grammatically correct: we have languages that sweep questions like "how long is the present" under the rug. So if you say that the past exists, you're "wrong" because you've used the wrong tense. Ok. Is that a problem, somehow? -- "... require there to be tokens ..." No. A token theory requires that reality be such as to allow for the possibility of tokens. We talk about the Hadean eon as though we imagine it being observed by space aliens in an extremely heat-proof spaceship splashing down in the ocean of lava that may have been present on the surface of Earth then. Those aliens would have said "now" to refer to a time that we refer to as four-point-whatever billion years ago. Imagining them doesn't break anything about our conceptions of physics and geology. It's completely analogous to theorizing about the meaning of "there" by talking first about the meaning of "here", and then applying "there" to places that don't happen to have anyone in them. Space still is such that we can imagine someone being there, so our way of talking about "there" still works. If we start talking about the inside of a black hole (where it's impossible to get to) or the inside of a proton (where it's impossible for anything to fit that could possibly say "here"), then we can run into problems, and we may or may not have to concoct new ways of talking about space. But if it's just that there contingently isn't anyone there, then no, it's fine to start with "here" in explaining how "there" works. 'the notion of change necessarily involves a rate of change' No. Only if the thing that's changing is quantitative. If we have two situations that differ qualitatively, and the world changes so that first it's one way and then it's the other, that's definitely change. But it doesn't involve any rate. Of course, the rate at which the time changes with time does exist, and it's tautologically one: one second per second, one hour per hour, one billion years per billion years. The unit appears in both the numerator and denominator, so it cancels out. That's not interesting, and isn't going to settle any dispute about how attached we should be to grammar. "Thank goodness that's over" That works just as well about spatially distant calamities: thank goodness that's way over there, not here.

Many thanks from your Ukrainian viewer. Studying philosophy is a real consolation during chaotic time, and I really enjoy the way you present the information.

Really enjoyable - please keep dropping these segments on metaphysics

thank you

"I've talked long enough" was said as you were just getting started!!

It seems like a problem with the “culture war” is people arguing have different conceptions of sex vs gender, and so to one side those are just synonyms, and so woman is just a synonym for female. So to them, any other subjective definition of womanhood either has no basis in reality, or are repressive stereotypes which don't define a woman, like the markers of “woman as a social status” that change through time, as you touched on in the video. I know it's a touchy subject, I wish everyone health and safety and happiness, but to me there are many interesting problems in the debate, I don't think it's as simple as a desire to attack trans people as you suggest.

An equally unresolved issue, with a lot less political baggage and heat, but maybe no more light, is the question of Mathematics- discovered or invented? Perhaps the subject of a future course?

New lecture from Professor Cushing! Yess!!