Stop me if you've heard this one . Descartes is drinking in a bar when the bartender asks , ' You want another ?'. Descartes responds , ' I think not " and vanishes .
@@vinaychawla5162 Descartes' famous statement is "I think therefore, I am". So when he says he that he doesn't "think" he wants another drink, it means he doesn't exist. Therefore he vanishes :D
Lil crazy that this episode was put out when I was 12, and now I'm 21 working on my own philosophy degree. Thanks for the homework help! Very entertaining seeing you with baby face, as someone who started watching your work more recently.
These philosophy videos are amazing and relatable to younger audiences becuase of all the rerences. Im happy to have known about this channel early on but especially now since im taking a philosophy class in College. Not to mention Olly is much better at relaying philosophical concepts than can my Professor.
Thankyou so much, you saved my butt today for the philosophy test. Watching this made me have that "dear god i finally get it" moment. Keep it up man, your videos are super helpful!
Required reading : Norman Doidge - "The Brain that Changes Itself". This work which covers countless cases evidencing neuroplasticity at work is a game changer in my opinion regarding the way we think about the brain, the mind, the will and consciousness. Its is baffling to me that now that neuroplasticity is about 30 years old and is basically proven it is still hardly considered much. Partly I think because it basically proves that through effort we can indeed change our brains and consciousness. Medical science/pharmaceutical industry have no interest in promoting anything that requires some kind of independent action on our part. Pills or surgery are what they prefer.
I wont deny, I really didn't like your style when I first watched ages ago, now im studying for exams, these videos are fantastic, thank you for putting these up!
I'm studying for an essay due next week, and this video is one of the best on this subject I have come by. This is really going to help me flesh out the structure. Really, thank you!!!
Thank you! this is a really easy way to understand the concept, I read 10 journals and learned more from your video than I did from them! Cheers! I am new to philosophy so your channel is very helpful.
I've been a fan of this channel for years, and finally went back to college to study some philosophy myself! Thanks for making such great educational content
Wonderfully done! Thanks! I do believe Descartes was on to something - but I don't think it is an either or. I think body and mind/soul are separate - but while they are connected together on earth, they can impact each other.... Upon death - they separate and become truly distinct.
This discussion reminds me of the times I've discussed with people the existence of souls. Every time I have that discussion, it always reaches the same dead end: what is a soul? People generally say it's a non-specific part of us that transcends our physical bodies, and imply that our memories and personality with be intact in any afterlife there might be. However, the problem with that is that is it brings into question what purpose our organic brains serve if our experiences and identities aren't physical. If people sustain a head injury, they can get amnesia and lose part of our memory and even our self-perception; some victims can be turned into radically different people because of it, which shouldn't happen if those things aren't physical. Can our souls sustain damage? What sense does that make? Is our mind the same as our soul? If so, then that would be a good argument against what Descartes said. While I'm at it, some cultures believe in astro-projection, an out-of-body experience, and the brain is a lot more than just a chemical reactor data storage (you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who disagrees with that), both of which could be considered evidence to support what Descartes said.
Elfos64 mind and soul are different mind is restless soul is peace...Do meditation and u will understand...All answers are in our soul...Sometimes the light voice that comes and tell us which way to go is our soul
4:17 "throws up" - my single pet peeve of the English language is that this phrase has no other meaning to me except "to vomit", and it will not leave my brain. Love this stuff!
Oh Man! You're very good at this. I ove philosophy and I believe you're way is one of the coolest way to discuss it and explain its fundamental concepts. Thanks
Well that's what Descartes gets for meditating. Any time someone sits there and thinks about what they are observing, it will feel like the mind is even observing itself thinking, which makes it seem like there are at least two separate things: one part that is thinking and the other part that is observing the thinking. Well, we do have two halves of the brain so maybe that has something to do with it but I wouldn't even think it too strange to simply have a couple of processes happening in the brain at once. In fact, several things must always be happening in the brain, just most of them aren't at the conscious level. My brain tends to be conscious of too many things at once, which makes it a feeling of being bogged down in the morning before my first cup of coffee but I'm under no illusion that the cup of coffee scares off the other perceptions as if they were separate things.
I don't think Decartes understood that he was consciousness, not the thoughts themselves. Identified with his mind when the mind is but a tool that we find hard to see objectively. When you acquire the skill of watching the mind and see the thoughts flowing by, you have much more control over your reality.
i like samkhya indian philosophy, it posits that mind ie discursive thinking mind is a part of the body, it places the dualism between Awareness, on one hand, and Body-Mind-World on the other. This works for me.
Million thanks for this video!! You just saved me from a disastrous philosophy exam!! If our philosophy professor could explain at least one tenth of what you did, the whole class would have become a bunch of philosophers by now lol (:
I've always found it interesting that cognition means to think or process, yet the brain is sometimes visualised as a system of gears and cogs. Kind of like in the early days of biology when it was believed that the brain was more mechanical and not electrochemical as we now know to day. I've always thought that's where the word "cognition" came from, but don't know enough about linguistics to challenge this idea.
My mind seems to go where my body goes? Really? If I watch a live stream of a tornado in USA on my virtual reality headset while I am sitting on my couch in Norway where is my mind at that moment? Is my mind in USA observing tornado? Is my mind in Norway without realizing it is there? Does it even mean anything to name the location of my mind?
Great Question. I think part of it is the phrasing. Even though it may not go in its entirety wherever the body is going, the physical and biological attributes of the body does have an impact on states of mind and the thoughts it thinks up. To even access the virtual space of Norway the body will have to be attached to the VR device in order for the mind to access it. Furthermore, one can also argue whether what you are accessing is the actual physical region of Norway or just a stream of Norway within the virtual space of the internet. Those two are definitely not the same and therefore it isn't as easy to simply say your mind is visiting the physical space of Norway. Having said all that, with developments in the technology of VR interesting questions can be hurled at Descartes' Dualism which should be looked into.
@@ashraykotian1 Isn't a " normal" brain not very capable of handling different levels of reality at once ? You are reading an Agatha Christie, totally into the mystery and at the same time you are enjoying the hot cup of coffee? You know they exist outside of each other's level but don't really have a problem juggling them at the same time. And you can enjoy the taste of coffee, at the same time you descend to the level of the coding of letters, which form words, where you go deeper on a level to put the words in the context of a sentence, And yet deeper where the sentence adds up with other sentences to form a story. Where on an even deeper level without the aid of book/ letters/ words etc you imagine the story in your head and make it come alive. All the while enjoying a cup of coffee. And now even more with 3d cinema, Video games, Vr and post modernism and lol drugs - we juggle more and more with different levels. and usually have no trouble finding our way back to the " reality" level........or if you read a lot of Philip K. Dick, you come back to A level of reality but it might not be the original one and maybe you can't tell anymore. Having had an older sister who started hearing voices/ drug abuse and all - people getting lost in realities - became one sort of reality to me. I remember also reading a book - gothic novel - rather antiquated - Melmoth the Wanderer - where characters inside the story start telling their own stories about people who also tell a story (and the original story is left dangling for chapters on end) and the book weaves it's way back to the original story - but doesn't play fair......it skips a level somewhere.... And you definitely felt like you somehow had crossed a river but there was no bridge and how did you get there... The brain can juggle a lot of stuff / simultaneously / reality levels without becoming totally lost.
As much as I respect Descartes as a scientist and mathematician, his philosophy has always struck me as a case of "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" in the sense, that even if you could somehow prove his theories, they are so abstract and removed from the physical world that there would essentially be nothing gained even intellectually by doing so. For instance, even if you could prove that the mind was somehow a separate metaphysical material from the rest of the world, the mind still seems to only be able to control one body and can only observe and interact with objects and events of the res extensa, and treating the mind is separate from these things seems to have no effect on neuroscience or other medicine, so there is basically no practical applications for this fact. Even intellectually, beyond the simple idea that "its kind of an interesting thing to know" there isn't a whole lot you can do with this knowledge beyond go up to your friends and say "hey guys, did you know your mind and body are made of separate metaphysical materials?" Unless I'm mistaken, knowledge of this fact can't really be used to prove anything else, and it has no practical impact on the world, so to me it falls under the same category of questions as "what if the entire universe, including you and all your memories of the past, was actually created in the last millisecond?" of unprovable questions that, while interesting to think about, don't really matter
I concur, there has to be a pragmatic structural element that exists in order for a philosophical basis to be observed on. I love to hear philosophical theories on life history or the human psyche, but when the physical or mental aspects of the human mind and body are being the subject of supposition to address there has to be a modicum of scientific facts to be present to debunk in order for the criteria of the subject matter to have theoretical elements to forge a speculation on.
Your mind is separate from you body;but because your head is on your body it dictates what your body does.However if your head could be transplanted on to another body it would govern what that body does as the neurons and signals would be linked to your new body.
I think you're thinking of the brain as the mind. The mind, at least in this context, is your consciousness, or the way you experience and process the world, whereas the brain is just another part of the body.
I was raise Roman Catholic, but i always figured growing up that the "Holy Trinity" was designed to represent an extension of dualism, splitting the mind further into two parts. The Father, son, and holy spirit. The Mind symbolised by God, The Body symbolised by Jesus and the Soul whose presence in relation to God is talked about directly. The Mind and Soul distinction is made where the soul is the involuntary emotional stuff.
This is really thoughtful. Descartes missed the point, the fact that he doubted everything made his doubts a property of his own mind and not that of the thing itself. Therefore, I believe everyone is a product of their own thoughts.
3:30 I haven't yet finished the video but I couldn't agree more on this point! I only learned of substance monism through Spinoza's geometric proof a couple months ago, yet, when describing Decartes dualism, I found this exact point to be the fallacy in Decartes argument because of it.
The question still stands, but not so much with the mind or thinking anymore, but with just experiencing. The base idea of Descartes' that there is the experiencer within the body that experiences still seems true, it still feels true. Consciousness is weird.
Being able to doubt the body but not the mind may not prove that the mind and body are distinct, but the mind and body have tons of actual properties that are distinct. A mind is a person's experiences, memories, desires, thoughts, and all of that sort of stuff. The key detail is that it is all abstract. If you somehow had a detailed inventory of my mind that included everything of value, every memory, every emotion, every secret, then in principle you might be able to use my mind in a way that is totally disconnected from my body. For example, if someone had the amazing ability to create a computer simulation that contained a artificial person who had my mind down to the last detail, then that would be my actual mind in the computer because it has all the properties of my mind. On the other hand, your brain has radically different properties from your mind. Your brain is made of cells, chemicals, and various physical things. Those cells perform functions that allow your mind to work, but the cells themselves are unimportant. If you remove one cell and replace it with another cell that performs exactly the same function, then your mind hasn't been changed in the slightest even though your brain clearly has been changed. Your brain has a position in space by definition. Your mind has no position in space by definition. That's not obvious since the mind has no one universally accepted definition, but just imagine you had some impossible experience like leaving your body and simultaneously experiencing many places in the world. This never happens, but if it did happen you could describe it as, "My mind left my body and was in many places at once." No matter how physically impossible that experience might be, it is not absurd. On the other hand, it would be very confusing to say, "My brain left my body and was in many places at once." This is because your brain is a physical object and so by definition it can have only one location, while things that are nonphysical are very commonly thought of as being in many places at once. For example, "The Lord of the Rings" is a story, not a physical object. The answer to "Where can I find The Lord of the Rings?" is many places. A book is a physical object that has a position in space, but a story is nonphysical and can be in many books simultaneously because the story itself has no position in space. The only reason we can't do something similar with minds and brains is that we currently have no technique for copying brains and so in real life each brain has a distinct mind.
He's "on to something", but I think it's something more spiritual, than philosophical. Let's answer some of those unpopular questions:- "How does a non-physical mind affect a physical brain?" How does a magnet affect iron filings through a bit of paper without even touching the paper? "How can a non-physical thing affect a physical thing?" Magnetism isn't physical, but the effect is observable and predictable. It's entered into "physics" but since it isn't composed of particles and doesn't fit in the radio frequency spectrum either, nobody can define what it _is_, only what we know it _does_. Because we know, and can control what it _does_ we have to accept that it exists, and is _real_. In fact, we know less about magnetism than we do about gravity, and both are sketchy subjects in physics. ;) "Why do peoples minds change depending on what you do to their brains?" If I think I like you, and you cut off my toe, I may well change my mind on that. Does that mean my mind is in my toe? Maybe, just the bit that thought it liked you? No. If I was madly in love with a woman, or she with me (I am, but this is a hypothetical) and one of us became hideously deformed though some mishap, the nature of that relationship would probably change, but wouldn't necessarily break. Is my mind in my lover? "Why does my mind seem to go where my body goes?" Again, why do lovers tend to travel together? Some people become "inseparable". Is your mind _incapable_ of going places without your body? Do you never dream, or even "day dream"? What about planning a vacation? Is it not fair (if uncommon) to say that your mind may visit exotic locations, return to your brain and tell it how good it was there so that your brain decides it would be great to go to this place with your mind when circumstance allows? These ways of looking at the world are not popular in contemporary society, but I don't think they are particularly _inaccurate_.
Cure4Living Energy is part of physics. True. But pure energies are not physical things. There's no matter, no mass. Electrons, atoms and bacteria have matter and mass. That's what I'm equating to "physical". Even light is partly composed of photon partials, which have mass, and are physical. Radio waves, are *not* physical, in any way. They are in the magnetic realm. Waves of electro-magnetic energy. We still use the term "ether" to describe the radio spectrum. It is "ethereal" to our senses. That was the point I was making. Are you sure that mental waves, brain-waves / whatever are _not_ as physical as a radio wave, and we just haven't built a mental "quantum mechanic" camera / mind radio yet?
bobsobol First off I think you may have misinterpreted Descartes with the whole magnet thing. You see, Descartes would argue that magnetism IS physical substance, in the that it takes place in a physical space (in that it has extension), it is caused by and affects physical things, and can be measured physically. By physical substance, Descartes does not merely mean that it is made out of particles and so on. Secondly, why are you making the supposition that the mind affects the brain? While it is very clear that certain activity in the brain corresponds with emotions in the mind (such as the release of neurotransmitters in the brain corresponding to emotions in the mind), it is in all cases a jump to conclusions to suggest a causal relationship here. On grounds can you claim that one causes the other? Is it not equally possible and reasonable to suggest that they just happen to act the way they do without any cause and effect between brain and mind?
Thanks to youtube and I was able to find this part of youtube , you are really good at explaining those concepts of philosophy which I love :) thanks for making these videos and please continue making , I love philosophy and physics!
I can't speak for Descartes, but I for one cannot doubt the existence of my body, or of the material world generally. I can doubt *specifics things about it*, but not that it exists in some form or another; I cannot conceive of my self wholly disembodied existing in no material world, I must conceive of myself as being in some body in some world. The body I think I have and the world I think I exist in might not be the real ones, but there's going to be some one or another.
Before we can determine if the mind and body are separate - we need to define what the "mind" is. Many people think the mind is just a physical thing made up of neurons and a network of cells. But if the brain is really just a device or an interface ( like a quantum transformer) that enables the higher self to interface and connect with the physical body, then who we are and what we are exists separately.
Mind is dependent on body. Religious people disagree, but they are already outside of "philosophical" in their reasoning. Socrates disagrees, too, in Plato's Meno. Mind is more properly thought of as the processes a computer does after it is plugged in and turned on. The body gives mind its power and allows it to function. This is a great analysis you have given of Descartes, but he is holding on to some false beliefs about the nature of mind being distinct and separate from body. It is,sorta, but only like the functions of a computer are distinct and separate from the material (plastic and metal) that make up the computer. A computer can serve many roles, like a mind can, but all of those roles depend on the soundness of the hardware. Even examples that seem to refute this (e.g. Stephen Hawking, an exceptional mind in a broken body) actually confirm the relationship. Develop the metaphor---you will see that the broken plastic casing and keys did not interfere with his processor and RAM, which were the required material components supporting his advanced intellectual functions, his "mind".
Before I comment I want to add that I found this to be the best comment section on YT I've encountered I actually saved some of them. Q: 4:20 "How does a non-physical mind affect a physical brain?" Decartes' Answer: "The Pineal Gland" In "DMT: The Spirit Molecule" Rich Straussman (M.D.) elaborates. Since DMT (produced in the Pineal Gland) is a schedule 1 narcotic scientific research into this area is being BLOCKED by the gov't (/sarcastic applause).
Finding anything self-evident would be refuted on the same basis and in the same way. Excluding things that are self-evident (known because of what I think of them) from knowledge leads to skepticism. For Descartes skepticism was a methodology, a starting point...not an endpoint.
It's like having a bunch of marbles and arranging them in a specific order to create a shape. The total number of marbles remains the same, but the order? The information lies in the arrangement of those marbles. This is the separation that dualists refer to: hardware and software!
I think the biggest problem with dualism is the concept of a non-physical substance. Defining a mind as non-physical means that it can't effect physical substances, which is something that minds certainly do.
Regarding the part about two pens, you would still have to sum the properties such as mass, etc. The "pen" should weigh twice as much if there were two pens there.
how would you describe yourself - as a dualist or as a materialist? Why? What evidence is there for your view? What benefits does your view have, or why might you want it to be true? What drawbacks does your view have, or why might one want it to be false?
I've come up with a way to test Descartes' duality theory! According to dualism as I understand it, the mind is a non physical entity, that gets stimuli from physical things, such as the eyes, nose, and tongue, but is itself separate from these and all other physical things. In essence it is composed entirely of substances not found in the physical world, and should therefore neither be dependent on such substances, nor physically affected by them. so my test goes like this: 1. train your mind to ignore all physical stimuli (ignore pain, pleasure, hunger, anything that might distract from pure concentration in the mind) 2. take test based entirely on cognitive reasoning (math, logic, etc) 3. take basic senses and coordination test (make sure that your senses are functioning properly before you conduct the experiment) 4. starve yourself for forty days, spend the last two days without water and smoke excessive amounts of marijuana or other high inducing (or better yet, hallucinogenic) drugs during throughout your fasting period 5. test your senses, especially sight, again to make sure that you are at a level where you are at least capable of reading words on a page and comprehending instructions. 6. focus hard, ignore all physical pain, weakness and nausea and just take the logic test again if the mind is a separate entity from the body, then the only effect the body should have on the mind is sensory input. If you can ignore pain, weakness and nausea, and if your perception of the test questions is not impaired (i.e. you can read and understand the test question) then you should be able to perform at about the same level on the test as you did when you were sober, since your Res Cogitans should not have been affected by all the Res Externas that you've been putting into your body. The only effect those things should have on the mind is distracting from its regular operating routine, therefor a person who can ignore physical stimuli should be able to perform at the same cognitive level regardless of what he or she does or does not put into their body. if the mind is affected beyond sensory impairment then it is a physical thing like the rest of the body
you know, I don't really mind, but I keep forgetting that the new comments on youtube post your comments to google+ by default, and I never remember to turn it off
Descartes' reasoning would make sense if we were to consider the possibility of our body not actually existing where we think it exists (say, The Matrix-esque type situation), in which case, the mind is free to wander about the virtual world while the body stays put. Also, speaking of The Matrix, what about virtual reality, if/when it becomes so advanced that we actually feel as though we're in a different place? Would that prove the distinction between mind and body? Or will it just be explained through sensory inputs in our brain? Is there a difference? (maybe the "mind" is just a concept that we made up to explain how our brain interprets its perception of things. But that leaves the existence of "perceiving" as a question. It's really REALLY hard for something to explain itself fully. Maybe even logically impossible? I mean, for example, you can't explain what you're saying right now at all times without going into an infinite loop...)
Firstly, 10 kudos points to Olly for using the phrase "Pyrrhic victory." Secondly, I'm still not sure the reasoning holds up. Because, even in a Matrix situation, the mind being deceived about its location doesn't show that it's not separate from the body. You still run into all the same problems regarding thinking not being a property of a thing, how physical and non-physical things are able to interact, etc.
Virtual reality was that "advanced" when books where invented. I've felt I was actually in a story reading late at night, playing a 1st person adventure (and Elder Scrolls or such) I have suddenly remembered how to turn my head after a long session and realised that I am _not_ the avatar I have been playing in the game world years before Windows 95 was released. So, you're talking about history as a potential future event. My mind frequently goes lots of places without my body. Sometimes it is guided by another, and sometimes it goes off all on it's own. ;) Of course, the Buddhist way of looking at this issue, is that it is possible that the body doesn't exist at all, and it is simply an "imaginary friend" that our minds create to stop them feeling lonely. In that case, anything we observe in the world is a figment of our imagination, and no amount of _evidence_ is proof of anything other than the solidity / constancy of our own imagination. That's also where the "I think, therefore I am" comes from. You can be sceptical of everything you perceive, because you cannot be completely sure that your senses of perception even exist. You may only _think_ they do. The fact that other people tell you they do and that they see the same can easily be explained by the fact that those people are figments of your imagination. Of course they are going to tell you what you think they should. ^_^
NothingsPerfect That's, quite possibly, confusing the mind and the brain again. The brain is being tricked into believing it's in the Matrix ,in the film. From the reaction of Neo when he sees the real world outside of it suggests that his _mind_ already knew it wasn't really going anywhere or doing anything. In fact, inside the Matrix, _he_ knew something was wrong with the world, which was why he was looking for a _truth_ he couldn't explain, just as many people feel about this world. (especially philosophers)
bobsobol for the sake of continuing the matrix analogy, the matrix would not be proof of the separation of mind and body, any more than the advent of prosthetic limbs is proof of the separation of hand and body. In a matrix like situation, the people are physically hooked up to a computer through a physical connection to their brains which overrides sensory input and records responses. the brain has been disconnected from the rest of the body, but it's still the brain (which is part of the body) doing all the thinking and processing. even if you went so far as to say that their brains were uploaded into the matrix, so their brains were left in their bodies, but their conscious was still floating around in the matrix, this would not be proof of separation. files on my computer exist in the physical world as tiny laser-cut divots in my hard drive. copying those divots to an external hard drive proves that they are physical things which can be copied, not that they are some extra physical substance that exists independently of computers
Good comparison. But is there a difference between a picture or sound and the sensory inputs or laser etchings that compose that picture when interpreted correctly?
Perhaps the difference between body and mind is similar to the difference between energy and matter, which we have shown have different properties yet interact successfully and can even be converted from one to the other.
Descartes doesn't commit the masked man fallacy. Descartes says that we can KNOW that matter can be doubted and that we KNOW that thinking things cannot be doubted. He doesn't say that we know one and dont know the other. He is stating that we have knowledge that two things are discernible so they are not identical.
Could you go into a little bit more detail about the masked man fallacy and how it applies to Descartes' argument? If i understood you correctly, you said that Descartes made the mistake of conflating his perception / knowledge of the properties of a thing (in this case his mind on one hand and objective reality on the other) with the actual properties of a thing and that Leibniz' Law only applies for two things which are the same in all their *actual* properties. I think if you make this argument, you are basically arguing that Leibniz' Law can never be applied, since you never know the actual properties of a thing, but always only your perception or knowledge of it, right? This would therefore make a better argument for the complete uselessness of Leibiniz' Law rather than Descartes particular use of it.
I would say that advancements in neuroscience would provide much insight into support of abolishing such distinctions, such that we may be able to provide a road map to a more egalitarian way of thinking for ethics than out traditional religious roots
I have to admit, I've thought about this before. Because of the advent of quantum physics, teleportation, I've become thinking: When you step into a teleporter and teleport to a remote location, what's essentially happening is that you're being killed in the sending teleporter and you're being born at the receiving end of the teleporter. What happens then is we label the person that has come out of the teleporter with the same label of the person that went in. So I have to ask, is you actually you when you step out of the teleporter? When the mind and body are separate entities, which would be connected by some sort of identification radio link to prevent your mind controlling other bodies, it would be no problem because what comes out of the end would be you. But say if it was the other way round, lets say your mind and soul were connected to each other, well then when the body dies, you will die too, It's just that someone else will take your place that would look and behave exactly like you. So yeah, you could either create the most amazing machine ever conceived of, or you just made the perfect killing machine to create the perfect look-alike. The worst thing is that you can't just tell someone to try it out, because there's no real physical way to tell the difference. Try to sort that one out Philosophy Tube. The thing is, Dualism seems like a cop-out of some bigger theory, like "Are we actually real", because of our senses and what not, I'd describe it as some sort of escape route about whether we actually exist or not.
All the questions you close with to this day have a great deal of scholastic thought going into them. I dont think you can land on dualism just from "I think therefore I am" but I do think its a cumulative case. A much more interesting case for that matter. Also I've never really agreed that he actually creates the masked man fallacy, which is itself an epistemological problem. It has to do with when a subject confuses two objects, whereas Descartes is only affirm that the subject and object are different things. It would be to say that I did not know that I AM the masked man. Which is another conversation entirely.
In my phil class, I always noticed that Descartes seemed to come across as a bit of a berk, and that he also wound up arguing pretty much for the standard views of the time (e.g. souls as existing in dualism). He didn't seem super-critical of why this was the case.
Your old videos are nothing like your new ones lol. I work with nonphysical energy systems of the body, so I independently arrived at Descartes' theory before I knew it existed just now. The physical brain is the causal control system for the physical body, but our thinking takes place in a nonphysical body, the mindbody. And the reason it goes where your physical body goes is because the nonphysical mind is what produces the physical body. That's why stresses show up as illness/disease in seeming odd places in the body, because the mind is the same shape as the body and the part of the mind getting stressed will affect the part of the body it corresponds to. So in this scenario, evolution takes place from simple life to complex life because the nonphysical mindbody only has a very slight quantum mechanical influence on physical matter. So things have to start extremely simple as the nonphysical gets a foothold in the physical world, and the mind grows with the organic systems. This is also why we will know in our minds we want to do something new but end up doing what is habit, because it takes time and energy for the nonphysical mind to remap the physical brain via QM influence. So long story short: the physical world is 100% deterministic, and our minds are tied to it yet free from it, so we can set goals and intentions and steer the deterministic world nondeterministically. The rate at which we accomplish that is directly proportional to the mental focus and intensity we give to our intentions.
You may very well doubt your body exits, however if you slam your finger in a car door I think you would become a believer very quickly. DISCLAIMER ! This comment is not to be taken literally , please do not do this at home.! This comment is for entertainment purposes only!
So I think the modern version of the problem is this: how separable and/or distinct are the mind and the brain? Or put differently, is consciousness, the mind, et cetera reducible to neurophysiology? Now, I say that the mind must be different from the brain. However, this is largely founded in my belief in free will, which you may not share. I can't square my experience of what I perceive as my own free will with a deterministic model of the mind, such as would be necessitated if the mind was simply the brain. But then again, I can't deny that my mind seems to inhabit my brain: activity of my mind can be detected somewhat in the patterns of electricity in my brain, physical changes to my brain would affect my mind to some extent and chemical phenomena in my brain affect my emotions directly. So while I like to jump straight to idealism and say "none of it's real, b*tches," I recognize that I can't logically defend that, and it just seems improbable given sensory experiences. Substance dualism, as we see in the video, runs into obvious problems. So barring idealism, substance dualism and materialism, what is left? Neutral monism and property dualism would seem like other names for materialism. If anyone can explain the distinction, please do. So here's what I arrive at: there is only one type of substance, and the matter that we observe is a subset of it. There is also a subset that we cannot observe, and the mind spans every point on the continuum between non-observable substance and observable substance. We have no experience of non-deterministic matter, because it is part of the subset that we cannot observe, but it exists and plays a role in the mind, which is non-deterministic and therefore free. I don't know, it sounds so ridiculous when I say it like that, though.
Very interesting. I have a pretty limited understanding of philosophy, but I just watched a video about the Critique of Pure Reason and it seems like you're saying this question is kind of invalidated because it lies in the realm of synthetic a posteriori knowledge (i hope i used that right), so it's impossible to find a discernible truth within the question because our subjective lens of experience prevents it. However, Kant himself posited that speculating about things like the ghost in the machine or free will does have a point because there is a reality being observed or, perhaps in the case of dualism, felt. If you take a moment to consider what it FEELS like to exist, it seems like we are a "thing" INSIDE a different thing, CONTROLLING it. So, perhaps there is a piece of "us" (my philosophy friend called it the transcendent I) existing within some incorporeal realm of consciousness that simply interacts with the physical world through our bodies and is interoperated by our subjective lens. Could it also be possible that our existence in the noumenal world is not so much ACTING UPON our physical bodies, but rather A RESULT of our brains possessing consciousness? Like, our mind is perceived to exist in a non-physical realm because of the physical structures of our brain? I don't fucking know. I don't even know if my understanding of the concept is even close to correct. Metaphysics. I just Kant do it.
Interesting, so you're basically saying that the universe could basically be an agreed upon set of rules and is coming into existence because we are here to look around and wonder if it is actually there or not. Just like when you look at a particle it changes?
Mmmm, well not exactly. Like, our body is the machine with which we experience the world, and our brain is the control panel that collects this information, yes; but whether or not that information is "real", or changes somehow based on whether or not it's being observed (which is what i think you're getting at), is maybe more of an existential question. A perfectly valid question, but not exactly what I meant. In regards to dualism, I was just speculating that the unprecedented complexity of our brain might create a need for this perceived non-physical existence to be something greater than either the body or the mind, in order to give us a sense of one-ness and self. Like, we refer to our body parts and beliefs and whatever as mine, but if YOU are made up of things that are youRS, then who's things are they really? Well, they belong to the thing that is ESSENTIALLY you, the sum of all these parts, the transcendental I. So like, our physical and mental selves are not separated, exactly, but rather summarized in something greater. But I'm not even sure exactly what I'm saying in any case, so...yeah.
I think in modern times dualism has kind of been resurrected as transhumanism and the idea of the mind as information. It wasn't until very recently (mid 20th century) that people started thinking of information as being a property that is realizable in any form of matter, similar to res cogitans and res extensa but different in that information is separate from but also dependent on a physical matter substrate. So now people can understand things like uploading their brain to a computer simulation or android body through a kind of New Dualism.
I'm only a few weeks into any kind of study of philosophy - just a novice, and just started reading on the subject, but just want to say to your comment that software can and does manipulate hardware. I also went through an extensive program in Electronics.
I'm confident this has already been mentioned in the comments, but I admit I'm too lazy to look so here I go. Our brains are essentially elaborate organic computers. When I run software on my desktop computer does that mean that I suddenly manifest mechanical res cogitans? Or is it more likely that I have executed a sophisticated series of instructions regarding where to send pulses of electricity through elaborate silicon pathways? Human thoughts are the product of a biological software which produce such exquisite results that we have the ability to question how it happens at all. But they are still the result of physical processes despite how much we may wish to grant some extra special properties to them. So far the only place I've ever experienced thoughts able to exist without a physical form is Star Trek (and they are really cool!) Anyhow, thanks for all you do! You are the only person I've listened to who goes this deeply into these topics who doesn't make my eyes glaze over in mere moments. Usually they don't glaze over at all. : ) Keep up the great work.
SpaceKingDinosaur Perhaps, although we maybe shouldn't forget all the objections to computational theories of mind... Funnily enough I have a script in the wings waiting on artificial intelligence and theories of mind, so you may well get your day to have this discussion and get a comment featured in the show!
Eek! What have I done?! I will clarify that I meant the computer example more as an analogy, but overall I stand by my statements. You make a good point, we shouldn't overlook the objections. I haven't found them compelling so far, yet the way you present things may shed new light on it for me. Oh, this is so exciting!
(3:31) I'd argue the masked man scenario is not analogues to Descartes. While knowledge over something is ones property, the ability to gain knowledge about something is the property of the relation of that thing to you, which is a shared property between the two. For example in the scenario since you can gain information about location of your father and you can gain information of location of the masked man, they could be the same person. But if for some reason you can not gain information about your fathers location (IDK what that would mean, maybe he is stuck outside time and space) and you can gain information about the masked man, then they can not be the same person. The whole point here is that you can not (it is impossible to) gain true information regarding your body, but you can do so regarding your mind.
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Stop me if you've heard this one . Descartes is drinking in a bar when the bartender asks , ' You want another ?'. Descartes responds , ' I think not " and vanishes .
made me laugh for a solid 2 minutes
Hilarious
Mind explaining?
@@vinaychawla5162 Descartes' famous statement is "I think therefore, I am". So when he says he that he doesn't "think" he wants another drink, it means he doesn't exist. Therefore he vanishes :D
That's hilarious!!!
This channel is the only thing helping me pass second year philosophy
Lil crazy that this episode was put out when I was 12, and now I'm 21 working on my own philosophy degree. Thanks for the homework help! Very entertaining seeing you with baby face, as someone who started watching your work more recently.
i have an essay due tomorrow and this really helped!!!
+kelly w. Good luck!
same
lol same
Same
I know this was 2 yrs ago but how was ur essay........ and can I have it, if it was a A
These philosophy videos are amazing and relatable to younger audiences becuase of all the rerences. Im happy to have known about this channel early on but especially now since im taking a philosophy class in College. Not to mention Olly is much better at relaying philosophical concepts than can my Professor.
These are my favourite sorts of comments.
How did your course go? And how are you doing today, 6 years later? Have a good one, and I hope everything turned out well!
This was crystal clear. You have a gift for teaching. Many thanks for posting this.
Thankyou so much, you saved my butt today for the philosophy test. Watching this made me have that "dear god i finally get it" moment. Keep it up man, your videos are super helpful!
Required reading : Norman Doidge - "The Brain that Changes Itself". This work which covers countless cases evidencing neuroplasticity at work is a game changer in my opinion regarding the way we think about the brain, the mind, the will and consciousness.
Its is baffling to me that now that neuroplasticity is about 30 years old and is basically proven it is still hardly considered much. Partly I think because it basically proves that through effort we can indeed change our brains and consciousness. Medical science/pharmaceutical industry have no interest in promoting anything that requires some kind of independent action on our part. Pills or surgery are what they prefer.
I wont deny, I really didn't like your style when I first watched ages ago, now im studying for exams, these videos are fantastic, thank you for putting these up!
Just discovered this channel and now I'm binge watching every video until my mind is too exhausted to keep going. This is an amazing channel!
I'm studying for an essay due next week, and this video is one of the best on this subject I have come by. This is really going to help me flesh out the structure. Really, thank you!!!
"This video is about the link between Descartes, Keanu Reeves, and Yu-Gi-Oh."
Ok, you have my attention.
Thank you! this is a really easy way to understand the concept, I read 10 journals and learned more from your video than I did from them! Cheers! I am new to philosophy so your channel is very helpful.
Just found your videos for the first time, and I am in love with the way you breakdown difficult concepts!
+wendytrust No worries! Welcome to the community!
I've been a fan of this channel for years, and finally went back to college to study some philosophy myself! Thanks for making such great educational content
Found this one cuz I'm trying to answer a question in Neuroscience lol. You did a good job explaining the Dualism~
Wonderfully done! Thanks!
I do believe Descartes was on to something - but I don't think it is an either or. I think body and mind/soul are separate - but while they are connected together on earth, they can impact each other.... Upon death - they separate and become truly distinct.
This discussion reminds me of the times I've discussed with people the existence of souls. Every time I have that discussion, it always reaches the same dead end: what is a soul? People generally say it's a non-specific part of us that transcends our physical bodies, and imply that our memories and personality with be intact in any afterlife there might be. However, the problem with that is that is it brings into question what purpose our organic brains serve if our experiences and identities aren't physical. If people sustain a head injury, they can get amnesia and lose part of our memory and even our self-perception; some victims can be turned into radically different people because of it, which shouldn't happen if those things aren't physical. Can our souls sustain damage? What sense does that make? Is our mind the same as our soul? If so, then that would be a good argument against what Descartes said. While I'm at it, some cultures believe in astro-projection, an out-of-body experience, and the brain is a lot more than just a chemical reactor data storage (you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who disagrees with that), both of which could be considered evidence to support what Descartes said.
OOBEs (out of body exps.) are just lucid dreams.
Elfos64 mind and soul are different mind is restless soul is peace...Do meditation and u will understand...All answers are in our soul...Sometimes the light voice that comes and tell us which way to go is our soul
Please keep these going you're really good at explaining..
Mohammad Mahjoub allahuakbar
He HAS kept going! And he still makes amazing videos!
@@joaovictorhasse1630 except she has now
4:17 "throws up" - my single pet peeve of the English language is that this phrase has no other meaning to me except "to vomit", and it will not leave my brain. Love this stuff!
Phenomenal explanations, I am truly grateful for your passion for teaching. Thank you!
Oh Man! You're very good at this. I ove philosophy and I believe you're way is one of the coolest way to discuss it and explain its fundamental concepts. Thanks
Well that's what Descartes gets for meditating. Any time someone sits there and thinks about what they are observing, it will feel like the mind is even observing itself thinking, which makes it seem like there are at least two separate things: one part that is thinking and the other part that is observing the thinking. Well, we do have two halves of the brain so maybe that has something to do with it but I wouldn't even think it too strange to simply have a couple of processes happening in the brain at once. In fact, several things must always be happening in the brain, just most of them aren't at the conscious level. My brain tends to be conscious of too many things at once, which makes it a feeling of being bogged down in the morning before my first cup of coffee but I'm under no illusion that the cup of coffee scares off the other perceptions as if they were separate things.
I don't think Decartes understood that he was consciousness, not the thoughts themselves. Identified with his mind when the mind is but a tool that we find hard to see objectively. When you acquire the skill of watching the mind and see the thoughts flowing by, you have much more control over your reality.
i like samkhya indian philosophy, it posits that mind ie discursive thinking mind is a part of the body, it places the dualism between Awareness, on one hand, and Body-Mind-World on the other. This works for me.
So much more entertaining than my philosophy class, and I learned! Thanks
Million thanks for this video!! You just saved me from a disastrous philosophy exam!! If our philosophy professor could explain at least one tenth of what you did, the whole class would have become a bunch of philosophers by now lol (:
Sheron Merin Mathew These are one of my favourite types of comments! Good luck on your exam!
I have a final paper based on dualism and Ryle's essay and it's safe to say you saved me. Thank you
You are so awesome. You made this so much easier than my professor did. I have an exam tomorrow. Thank you!!!!
I've always found it interesting that cognition means to think or process, yet the brain is sometimes visualised as a system of gears and cogs. Kind of like in the early days of biology when it was believed that the brain was more mechanical and not electrochemical as we now know to day. I've always thought that's where the word "cognition" came from, but don't know enough about linguistics to challenge this idea.
My mind seems to go where my body goes? Really? If I watch a live stream of a tornado in USA on my virtual reality headset while I am sitting on my couch in Norway where is my mind at that moment? Is my mind in USA observing tornado? Is my mind in Norway without realizing it is there? Does it even mean anything to name the location of my mind?
Great Question. I think part of it is the phrasing. Even though it may not go in its entirety wherever the body is going, the physical and biological attributes of the body does have an impact on states of mind and the thoughts it thinks up. To even access the virtual space of Norway the body will have to be attached to the VR device in order for the mind to access it. Furthermore, one can also argue whether what you are accessing is the actual physical region of Norway or just a stream of Norway within the virtual space of the internet. Those two are definitely not the same and therefore it isn't as easy to simply say your mind is visiting the physical space of Norway. Having said all that, with developments in the technology of VR interesting questions can be hurled at Descartes' Dualism which should be looked into.
@@ashraykotian1 Isn't a " normal" brain not very capable of handling different levels of reality at once ? You are reading an Agatha Christie, totally into the mystery and at the same time you are enjoying the hot cup of coffee? You know they exist outside of each other's level but don't really have a problem juggling them at the same time. And you can enjoy the taste of coffee, at the same time you descend to the level of the coding of letters, which form words, where you go deeper on a level to put the words in the context of a sentence, And yet deeper where the sentence adds up with other sentences to form a story. Where on an even deeper level without the aid of book/ letters/ words etc you imagine the story in your head and make it come alive. All the while enjoying a cup of coffee.
And now even more with 3d cinema, Video games, Vr and post modernism and lol drugs - we juggle more and more with different levels. and usually have no trouble finding our way back to the " reality" level........or if you read a lot of Philip K. Dick, you come back to A level of reality but it might not be the original one and maybe you can't tell anymore. Having had an older sister who started hearing voices/ drug abuse and all - people getting lost in realities - became one sort of reality to me. I remember also reading a book - gothic novel - rather antiquated - Melmoth the Wanderer - where characters inside the story start telling their own stories about people who also tell a story (and the original story is left dangling for chapters on end) and the book weaves it's way back to the original story - but doesn't play fair......it skips a level somewhere....
And you definitely felt like you somehow had crossed a river but there was no bridge and how did you get there...
The brain can juggle a lot of stuff / simultaneously / reality levels without becoming totally lost.
Brilliant!!! Thank you. Post more please
We regard our position to be behind our eyes, because that's where our vision is.
love the humour and the relevance to what I am studying. Thank you, it was a big help.
As much as I respect Descartes as a scientist and mathematician, his philosophy has always struck me as a case of "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" in the sense, that even if you could somehow prove his theories, they are so abstract and removed from the physical world that there would essentially be nothing gained even intellectually by doing so. For instance, even if you could prove that the mind was somehow a separate metaphysical material from the rest of the world, the mind still seems to only be able to control one body and can only observe and interact with objects and events of the res extensa, and treating the mind is separate from these things seems to have no effect on neuroscience or other medicine, so there is basically no practical applications for this fact. Even intellectually, beyond the simple idea that "its kind of an interesting thing to know" there isn't a whole lot you can do with this knowledge beyond go up to your friends and say "hey guys, did you know your mind and body are made of separate metaphysical materials?" Unless I'm mistaken, knowledge of this fact can't really be used to prove anything else, and it has no practical impact on the world, so to me it falls under the same category of questions as "what if the entire universe, including you and all your memories of the past, was actually created in the last millisecond?" of unprovable questions that, while interesting to think about, don't really matter
I concur, there has to be a pragmatic structural element that exists in order for a philosophical basis to be observed on. I love to hear philosophical theories on life history or the human psyche, but when the physical or mental aspects of the human mind and body are being the subject of supposition to address there has to be a modicum of scientific facts to be present to debunk in order for the criteria of the subject matter to have theoretical elements to forge a speculation on.
I have a philosophy final tomorrow.This helped. Thanks!!
Good luck!
These are amazing things to think about!!
Your mind is separate from you body;but because your head is on your body it dictates what your body does.However if your head could be transplanted on to another body it would govern what that body does as the neurons and signals would be linked to your new body.
I think you're thinking of the brain as the mind. The mind, at least in this context, is your consciousness, or the way you experience and process the world, whereas the brain is just another part of the body.
So, I used to watch this while revising for my A-Levels, 3 years on I'm back here again while writing my diss xD
More people should refer to their dissertation as their “diss”
I imagine how hard was to made this video... congrats and thanks
Thanks so much for this. You really helped me understand this a lot better. I feel like a have an actual grasp on mind body dualism now.
I was raise Roman Catholic, but i always figured growing up that the "Holy Trinity" was designed to represent an extension of dualism, splitting the mind further into two parts.
The Father, son, and holy spirit. The Mind symbolised by God, The Body symbolised by Jesus and the Soul whose presence in relation to God is talked about directly.
The Mind and Soul distinction is made where the soul is the involuntary emotional stuff.
Another great video Olly! I vote for Plato's Republic
this getting me through my uni essays now! Thanks for making! :D
+PuddingCat101 My pleasure! Welcome to the channel!
I laugh'd a lot when I saw "it's time to d-d-d-d-d-ual-ism" ahhahahahha
we cringed at that in class rip
This is really thoughtful. Descartes missed the point, the fact that he doubted everything made his doubts a property of his own mind and not that of the thing itself. Therefore, I believe everyone is a product of their own thoughts.
3:30 I haven't yet finished the video but I couldn't agree more on this point! I only learned of substance monism through Spinoza's geometric proof a couple months ago, yet, when describing Decartes dualism, I found this exact point to be the fallacy in Decartes argument because of it.
may actually make an a in philosophy now.. thanks for the post helped a lot!
The question still stands, but not so much with the mind or thinking anymore, but with just experiencing. The base idea of Descartes' that there is the experiencer within the body that experiences still seems true, it still feels true. Consciousness is weird.
Being able to doubt the body but not the mind may not prove that the mind and body are distinct, but the mind and body have tons of actual properties that are distinct.
A mind is a person's experiences, memories, desires, thoughts, and all of that sort of stuff. The key detail is that it is all abstract. If you somehow had a detailed inventory of my mind that included everything of value, every memory, every emotion, every secret, then in principle you might be able to use my mind in a way that is totally disconnected from my body. For example, if someone had the amazing ability to create a computer simulation that contained a artificial person who had my mind down to the last detail, then that would be my actual mind in the computer because it has all the properties of my mind.
On the other hand, your brain has radically different properties from your mind. Your brain is made of cells, chemicals, and various physical things. Those cells perform functions that allow your mind to work, but the cells themselves are unimportant. If you remove one cell and replace it with another cell that performs exactly the same function, then your mind hasn't been changed in the slightest even though your brain clearly has been changed.
Your brain has a position in space by definition. Your mind has no position in space by definition. That's not obvious since the mind has no one universally accepted definition, but just imagine you had some impossible experience like leaving your body and simultaneously experiencing many places in the world. This never happens, but if it did happen you could describe it as, "My mind left my body and was in many places at once." No matter how physically impossible that experience might be, it is not absurd. On the other hand, it would be very confusing to say, "My brain left my body and was in many places at once." This is because your brain is a physical object and so by definition it can have only one location, while things that are nonphysical are very commonly thought of as being in many places at once.
For example, "The Lord of the Rings" is a story, not a physical object. The answer to "Where can I find The Lord of the Rings?" is many places. A book is a physical object that has a position in space, but a story is nonphysical and can be in many books simultaneously because the story itself has no position in space. The only reason we can't do something similar with minds and brains is that we currently have no technique for copying brains and so in real life each brain has a distinct mind.
The mind is an emergent property of the physical brain.
He's "on to something", but I think it's something more spiritual, than philosophical.
Let's answer some of those unpopular questions:-
"How does a non-physical mind affect a physical brain?" How does a magnet affect iron filings through a bit of paper without even touching the paper?
"How can a non-physical thing affect a physical thing?" Magnetism isn't physical, but the effect is observable and predictable. It's entered into "physics" but since it isn't composed of particles and doesn't fit in the radio frequency spectrum either, nobody can define what it _is_, only what we know it _does_. Because we know, and can control what it _does_ we have to accept that it exists, and is _real_. In fact, we know less about magnetism than we do about gravity, and both are sketchy subjects in physics. ;)
"Why do peoples minds change depending on what you do to their brains?" If I think I like you, and you cut off my toe, I may well change my mind on that. Does that mean my mind is in my toe? Maybe, just the bit that thought it liked you? No. If I was madly in love with a woman, or she with me (I am, but this is a hypothetical) and one of us became hideously deformed though some mishap, the nature of that relationship would probably change, but wouldn't necessarily break. Is my mind in my lover?
"Why does my mind seem to go where my body goes?" Again, why do lovers tend to travel together? Some people become "inseparable". Is your mind _incapable_ of going places without your body? Do you never dream, or even "day dream"? What about planning a vacation? Is it not fair (if uncommon) to say that your mind may visit exotic locations, return to your brain and tell it how good it was there so that your brain decides it would be great to go to this place with your mind when circumstance allows?
These ways of looking at the world are not popular in contemporary society, but I don't think they are particularly _inaccurate_.
Cure4Living Energy is part of physics. True. But pure energies are not physical things. There's no matter, no mass. Electrons, atoms and bacteria have matter and mass. That's what I'm equating to "physical". Even light is partly composed of photon partials, which have mass, and are physical.
Radio waves, are *not* physical, in any way. They are in the magnetic realm. Waves of electro-magnetic energy. We still use the term "ether" to describe the radio spectrum. It is "ethereal" to our senses.
That was the point I was making. Are you sure that mental waves, brain-waves / whatever are _not_ as physical as a radio wave, and we just haven't built a mental "quantum mechanic" camera / mind radio yet?
bobsobol First off I think you may have misinterpreted Descartes with the whole magnet thing. You see, Descartes would argue that magnetism IS physical substance, in the that it takes place in a physical space (in that it has extension), it is caused by and affects physical things, and can be measured physically. By physical substance, Descartes does not merely mean that it is made out of particles and so on.
Secondly, why are you making the supposition that the mind affects the brain? While it is very clear that certain activity in the brain corresponds with emotions in the mind (such as the release of neurotransmitters in the brain corresponding to emotions in the mind), it is in all cases a jump to conclusions to suggest a causal relationship here. On grounds can you claim that one causes the other? Is it not equally possible and reasonable to suggest that they just happen to act the way they do without any cause and effect between brain and mind?
Greg Smith 2years ago
That can easily be debated in Nietzsche's explanation of good and evil being able to coexist in each other.
Thanks to youtube and I was able to find this part of youtube , you are really good at explaining those concepts of philosophy which I love :) thanks for making these videos and please continue making , I love philosophy and physics!
Currently discussing this in my PE dissertation. Very interesting.
I can't speak for Descartes, but I for one cannot doubt the existence of my body, or of the material world generally. I can doubt *specifics things about it*, but not that it exists in some form or another; I cannot conceive of my self wholly disembodied existing in no material world, I must conceive of myself as being in some body in some world. The body I think I have and the world I think I exist in might not be the real ones, but there's going to be some one or another.
Before we can determine if the mind and body are separate - we need to define what the "mind" is. Many people think the mind is just a physical thing made up of neurons and a network of cells. But if the brain is really just a device or an interface ( like a quantum transformer) that enables the higher self to interface and connect with the physical body, then who we are and what we are exists separately.
Mind is dependent on body. Religious people disagree, but they are already outside of "philosophical" in their reasoning. Socrates disagrees, too, in Plato's Meno. Mind is more properly thought of as the processes a computer does after it is plugged in and turned on. The body gives mind its power and allows it to function. This is a great analysis you have given of Descartes, but he is holding on to some false beliefs about the nature of mind being distinct and separate from body. It is,sorta, but only like the functions of a computer are distinct and separate from the material (plastic and metal) that make up the computer. A computer can serve many roles, like a mind can, but all of those roles depend on the soundness of the hardware. Even examples that seem to refute this (e.g. Stephen Hawking, an exceptional mind in a broken body) actually confirm the relationship. Develop the metaphor---you will see that the broken plastic casing and keys did not interfere with his processor and RAM, which were the required material components supporting his advanced intellectual functions, his "mind".
If my mind is independent of my body why is it my personalty changes with its environment?
thebatmanover9000 If you strip away the emotional bias, a mind without a brain makes no more sense than shitting without a butt.
Wow thank goodness I came across this video. Thank you so much, it was really helpful and made the essay writing much easier!!
Before I comment I want to add that I found this to be the best comment section on YT I've encountered I actually saved some of them.
Q: 4:20 "How does a non-physical mind affect a physical brain?"
Decartes' Answer: "The Pineal Gland"
In "DMT: The Spirit Molecule" Rich Straussman (M.D.) elaborates. Since DMT (produced in the Pineal Gland) is a schedule 1 narcotic scientific research into this area is being BLOCKED by the gov't (/sarcastic applause).
+asdfjk; Fascinating.
Finding anything self-evident would be refuted on the same basis and in the same way. Excluding things that are self-evident (known because of what I think of them) from knowledge leads to skepticism. For Descartes skepticism was a methodology, a starting point...not an endpoint.
It's like having a bunch of marbles and arranging them in a specific order to create a shape. The total number of marbles remains the same, but the order? The information lies in the arrangement of those marbles. This is the separation that dualists refer to: hardware and software!
you make very interesting, well made videos. all the other philosophy videos on here are so long and boring. keep it up!
Why do you hate the metaphysical
I think the biggest problem with dualism is the concept of a non-physical substance. Defining a mind as non-physical means that it can't effect physical substances, which is something that minds certainly do.
my knowledge can only go so far man this makes my head ache
You're getting my through my philosophy of religion A level, thank you!!!! :P
Regarding the part about two pens, you would still have to sum the properties such as mass, etc. The "pen" should weigh twice as much if there were two pens there.
how would you describe yourself - as a dualist or as a materialist? Why? What evidence is there for your view? What benefits does your view have, or why might you want it to be true? What drawbacks does your view have, or why might one want it to be false?
I've come up with a way to test Descartes' duality theory! According to dualism as I understand it, the mind is a non physical entity, that gets stimuli from physical things, such as the eyes, nose, and tongue, but is itself separate from these and all other physical things. In essence it is composed entirely of substances not found in the physical world, and should therefore neither be dependent on such substances, nor physically affected by them.
so my test goes like this:
1. train your mind to ignore all physical stimuli (ignore pain, pleasure, hunger, anything that might distract from pure concentration in the mind)
2. take test based entirely on cognitive reasoning (math, logic, etc)
3. take basic senses and coordination test (make sure that your senses are functioning properly before you conduct the experiment)
4. starve yourself for forty days, spend the last two days without water and smoke excessive amounts of marijuana or other high inducing (or better yet, hallucinogenic) drugs during throughout your fasting period
5. test your senses, especially sight, again to make sure that you are at a level where you are at least capable of reading words on a page and comprehending instructions.
6. focus hard, ignore all physical pain, weakness and nausea and just take the logic test again
if the mind is a separate entity from the body, then the only effect the body should have on the mind is sensory input. If you can ignore pain, weakness and nausea, and if your perception of the test questions is not impaired (i.e. you can read and understand the test question) then you should be able to perform at about the same level on the test as you did when you were sober, since your Res Cogitans should not have been affected by all the Res Externas that you've been putting into your body. The only effect those things should have on the mind is distracting from its regular operating routine, therefor a person who can ignore physical stimuli should be able to perform at the same cognitive level regardless of what he or she does or does not put into their body. if the mind is affected beyond sensory impairment then it is a physical thing like the rest of the body
If only it were legal...
you know, I don't really mind, but I keep forgetting that the new comments on youtube post your comments to google+ by default, and I never remember to turn it off
Descartes' reasoning would make sense if we were to consider the possibility of our body not actually existing where we think it exists (say, The Matrix-esque type situation), in which case, the mind is free to wander about the virtual world while the body stays put.
Also, speaking of The Matrix, what about virtual reality, if/when it becomes so advanced that we actually feel as though we're in a different place? Would that prove the distinction between mind and body? Or will it just be explained through sensory inputs in our brain? Is there a difference?
(maybe the "mind" is just a concept that we made up to explain how our brain interprets its perception of things. But that leaves the existence of "perceiving" as a question. It's really REALLY hard for something to explain itself fully. Maybe even logically impossible? I mean, for example, you can't explain what you're saying right now at all times without going into an infinite loop...)
Firstly, 10 kudos points to Olly for using the phrase "Pyrrhic victory." Secondly, I'm still not sure the reasoning holds up. Because, even in a Matrix situation, the mind being deceived about its location doesn't show that it's not separate from the body. You still run into all the same problems regarding thinking not being a property of a thing, how physical and non-physical things are able to interact, etc.
Virtual reality was that "advanced" when books where invented. I've felt I was actually in a story reading late at night, playing a 1st person adventure (and Elder Scrolls or such) I have suddenly remembered how to turn my head after a long session and realised that I am _not_ the avatar I have been playing in the game world years before Windows 95 was released. So, you're talking about history as a potential future event.
My mind frequently goes lots of places without my body. Sometimes it is guided by another, and sometimes it goes off all on it's own. ;)
Of course, the Buddhist way of looking at this issue, is that it is possible that the body doesn't exist at all, and it is simply an "imaginary friend" that our minds create to stop them feeling lonely. In that case, anything we observe in the world is a figment of our imagination, and no amount of _evidence_ is proof of anything other than the solidity / constancy of our own imagination.
That's also where the "I think, therefore I am" comes from. You can be sceptical of everything you perceive, because you cannot be completely sure that your senses of perception even exist. You may only _think_ they do. The fact that other people tell you they do and that they see the same can easily be explained by the fact that those people are figments of your imagination. Of course they are going to tell you what you think they should. ^_^
NothingsPerfect That's, quite possibly, confusing the mind and the brain again. The brain is being tricked into believing it's in the Matrix ,in the film. From the reaction of Neo when he sees the real world outside of it suggests that his _mind_ already knew it wasn't really going anywhere or doing anything. In fact, inside the Matrix, _he_ knew something was wrong with the world, which was why he was looking for a _truth_ he couldn't explain, just as many people feel about this world. (especially philosophers)
bobsobol for the sake of continuing the matrix analogy, the matrix would not be proof of the separation of mind and body, any more than the advent of prosthetic limbs is proof of the separation of hand and body. In a matrix like situation, the people are physically hooked up to a computer through a physical connection to their brains which overrides sensory input and records responses. the brain has been disconnected from the rest of the body, but it's still the brain (which is part of the body) doing all the thinking and processing.
even if you went so far as to say that their brains were uploaded into the matrix, so their brains were left in their bodies, but their conscious was still floating around in the matrix, this would not be proof of separation. files on my computer exist in the physical world as tiny laser-cut divots in my hard drive. copying those divots to an external hard drive proves that they are physical things which can be copied, not that they are some extra physical substance that exists independently of computers
Good comparison. But is there a difference between a picture or sound and the sensory inputs or laser etchings that compose that picture when interpreted correctly?
Perhaps the difference between body and mind is similar to the difference between energy and matter, which we have shown have different properties yet interact successfully and can even be converted from one to the other.
Descartes doesn't commit the masked man fallacy. Descartes says that we can KNOW that matter can be doubted and that we KNOW that thinking things cannot be doubted. He doesn't say that we know one and dont know the other. He is stating that we have knowledge that two things are discernible so they are not identical.
Could you go into a little bit more detail about the masked man fallacy and how it applies to Descartes' argument? If i understood you correctly, you said that Descartes made the mistake of conflating his perception / knowledge of the properties of a thing (in this case his mind on one hand and objective reality on the other) with the actual properties of a thing and that Leibniz' Law only applies for two things which are the same in all their *actual* properties.
I think if you make this argument, you are basically arguing that Leibniz' Law can never be applied, since you never know the actual properties of a thing, but always only your perception or knowledge of it, right?
This would therefore make a better argument for the complete uselessness of Leibiniz' Law rather than Descartes particular use of it.
Very good point my friend. Would be interesting if he responded
I would say that advancements in neuroscience would provide much insight into support of abolishing such distinctions, such that we may be able to provide a road map to a more egalitarian way of thinking for ethics than out traditional religious roots
I have to admit, I've thought about this before.
Because of the advent of quantum physics, teleportation, I've become thinking:
When you step into a teleporter and teleport to a remote location, what's essentially happening is that you're being killed in the sending teleporter and you're being born at the receiving end of the teleporter.
What happens then is we label the person that has come out of the teleporter with the same label of the person that went in.
So I have to ask, is you actually you when you step out of the teleporter?
When the mind and body are separate entities, which would be connected by some sort of identification radio link to prevent your mind controlling other bodies, it would be no problem because what comes out of the end would be you.
But say if it was the other way round, lets say your mind and soul were connected to each other, well then when the body dies, you will die too, It's just that someone else will take your place that would look and behave exactly like you.
So yeah, you could either create the most amazing machine ever conceived of, or you just made the perfect killing machine to create the perfect look-alike.
The worst thing is that you can't just tell someone to try it out, because there's no real physical way to tell the difference.
Try to sort that one out Philosophy Tube.
The thing is, Dualism seems like a cop-out of some bigger theory, like "Are we actually real", because of our senses and what not, I'd describe it as some sort of escape route about whether we actually exist or not.
Teleporting? WHERE IS IT? Why did no one tell me it was finally made!
Thanks for this easy to understand video, I'm using it as a reference in a paper I have to write on dualism. (You're adorable BTW :p)
+Karli Stern You're welcome!
All the questions you close with to this day have a great deal of scholastic thought going into them. I dont think you can land on dualism just from "I think therefore I am" but I do think its a cumulative case. A much more interesting case for that matter. Also I've never really agreed that he actually creates the masked man fallacy, which is itself an epistemological problem. It has to do with when a subject confuses two objects, whereas Descartes is only affirm that the subject and object are different things. It would be to say that I did not know that I AM the masked man. Which is another conversation entirely.
In my phil class, I always noticed that Descartes seemed to come across as a bit of a berk, and that he also wound up arguing pretty much for the standard views of the time (e.g. souls as existing in dualism). He didn't seem super-critical of why this was the case.
Thanks for the video, it was very informative and up energy. Keep up the good work!
Your old videos are nothing like your new ones lol. I work with nonphysical energy systems of the body, so I independently arrived at Descartes' theory before I knew it existed just now.
The physical brain is the causal control system for the physical body, but our thinking takes place in a nonphysical body, the mindbody.
And the reason it goes where your physical body goes is because the nonphysical mind is what produces the physical body. That's why stresses show up as illness/disease in seeming odd places in the body, because the mind is the same shape as the body and the part of the mind getting stressed will affect the part of the body it corresponds to.
So in this scenario, evolution takes place from simple life to complex life because the nonphysical mindbody only has a very slight quantum mechanical influence on physical matter. So things have to start extremely simple as the nonphysical gets a foothold in the physical world, and the mind grows with the organic systems.
This is also why we will know in our minds we want to do something new but end up doing what is habit, because it takes time and energy for the nonphysical mind to remap the physical brain via QM influence.
So long story short: the physical world is 100% deterministic, and our minds are tied to it yet free from it, so we can set goals and intentions and steer the deterministic world nondeterministically. The rate at which we accomplish that is directly proportional to the mental focus and intensity we give to our intentions.
You may very well doubt your body exits, however if you slam your finger in a car door I think you
would become a believer very quickly. DISCLAIMER ! This comment is not to be taken literally , please
do not do this at home.! This comment is for entertainment purposes only!
The mind is in the body. The body is part of the mind. Who says we don’t think with our whole bodies?
If you have not already, could you do a video on nihilism?
I have, it's here - ruclips.net/video/3EqorjVSdUI/видео.html
+Philosophy Tube cheers
Ahh, it's too short. Oh well
Death By Astonishment wow, that must be exhausting
thanks...new subscriber appreciates your talent as a teacher
Great video.
Wow this helped me understand that Descartes is an even worse critical thinker than I had already thought
So I think the modern version of the problem is this: how separable and/or distinct are the mind and the brain? Or put differently, is consciousness, the mind, et cetera reducible to neurophysiology?
Now, I say that the mind must be different from the brain. However, this is largely founded in my belief in free will, which you may not share. I can't square my experience of what I perceive as my own free will with a deterministic model of the mind, such as would be necessitated if the mind was simply the brain.
But then again, I can't deny that my mind seems to inhabit my brain: activity of my mind can be detected somewhat in the patterns of electricity in my brain, physical changes to my brain would affect my mind to some extent and chemical phenomena in my brain affect my emotions directly.
So while I like to jump straight to idealism and say "none of it's real, b*tches," I recognize that I can't logically defend that, and it just seems improbable given sensory experiences. Substance dualism, as we see in the video, runs into obvious problems. So barring idealism, substance dualism and materialism, what is left?
Neutral monism and property dualism would seem like other names for materialism. If anyone can explain the distinction, please do.
So here's what I arrive at: there is only one type of substance, and the matter that we observe is a subset of it. There is also a subset that we cannot observe, and the mind spans every point on the continuum between non-observable substance and observable substance. We have no experience of non-deterministic matter, because it is part of the subset that we cannot observe, but it exists and plays a role in the mind, which is non-deterministic and therefore free.
I don't know, it sounds so ridiculous when I say it like that, though.
Me doubting a thing is not a property of the thing, but the thing being doubtable is.
Well done.
Very interesting. I have a pretty limited understanding of philosophy, but I just watched a video about the Critique of Pure Reason and it seems like you're saying this question is kind of invalidated because it lies in the realm of synthetic a posteriori knowledge (i hope i used that right), so it's impossible to find a discernible truth within the question because our subjective lens of experience prevents it. However, Kant himself posited that speculating about things like the ghost in the machine or free will does have a point because there is a reality being observed or, perhaps in the case of dualism, felt. If you take a moment to consider what it FEELS like to exist, it seems like we are a "thing" INSIDE a different thing, CONTROLLING it. So, perhaps there is a piece of "us" (my philosophy friend called it the transcendent I) existing within some incorporeal realm of consciousness that simply interacts with the physical world through our bodies and is interoperated by our subjective lens. Could it also be possible that our existence in the noumenal world is not so much ACTING UPON our physical bodies, but rather A RESULT of our brains possessing consciousness? Like, our mind is perceived to exist in a non-physical realm because of the physical structures of our brain? I don't fucking know. I don't even know if my understanding of the concept is even close to correct. Metaphysics. I just Kant do it.
Interesting, so you're basically saying that the universe could basically be an agreed upon set of rules and is coming into existence because we are here to look around and wonder if it is actually there or not. Just like when you look at a particle it changes?
Mmmm, well not exactly. Like, our body is the machine with which we experience the world, and our brain is the control panel that collects this information, yes; but whether or not that information is "real", or changes somehow based on whether or not it's being observed (which is what i think you're getting at), is maybe more of an existential question. A perfectly valid question, but not exactly what I meant. In regards to dualism, I was just speculating that the unprecedented complexity of our brain might create a need for this perceived non-physical existence to be something greater than either the body or the mind, in order to give us a sense of one-ness and self. Like, we refer to our body parts and beliefs and whatever as mine, but if YOU are made up of things that are youRS, then who's things are they really? Well, they belong to the thing that is ESSENTIALLY you, the sum of all these parts, the transcendental I. So like, our physical and mental selves are not separated, exactly, but rather summarized in something greater. But I'm not even sure exactly what I'm saying in any case, so...yeah.
My mind is... a series of electrical impulses and chemical stuff that happens in my brain.
I think I may be too literal for some of this stuff 😂
I think in modern times dualism has kind of been resurrected as transhumanism and the idea of the mind as information. It wasn't until very recently (mid 20th century) that people started thinking of information as being a property that is realizable in any form of matter, similar to res cogitans and res extensa but different in that information is separate from but also dependent on a physical matter substrate. So now people can understand things like uploading their brain to a computer simulation or android body through a kind of New Dualism.
I'm only a few weeks into any kind of study of philosophy - just a novice, and just started reading on the subject, but just want to say to your comment that software can and does manipulate hardware. I also went through an extensive program in Electronics.
Information, that's the answer.
Descartes was not sober when he came up with this
I'm confident this has already been mentioned in the comments, but I admit I'm too lazy to look so here I go. Our brains are essentially elaborate organic computers. When I run software on my desktop computer does that mean that I suddenly manifest mechanical res cogitans? Or is it more likely that I have executed a sophisticated series of instructions regarding where to send pulses of electricity through elaborate silicon pathways? Human thoughts are the product of a biological software which produce such exquisite results that we have the ability to question how it happens at all. But they are still the result of physical processes despite how much we may wish to grant some extra special properties to them. So far the only place I've ever experienced thoughts able to exist without a physical form is Star Trek (and they are really cool!)
Anyhow, thanks for all you do! You are the only person I've listened to who goes this deeply into these topics who doesn't make my eyes glaze over in mere moments. Usually they don't glaze over at all. : ) Keep up the great work.
SpaceKingDinosaur Perhaps, although we maybe shouldn't forget all the objections to computational theories of mind... Funnily enough I have a script in the wings waiting on artificial intelligence and theories of mind, so you may well get your day to have this discussion and get a comment featured in the show!
Eek! What have I done?! I will clarify that I meant the computer example more as an analogy, but overall I stand by my statements. You make a good point, we shouldn't overlook the objections. I haven't found them compelling so far, yet the way you present things may shed new light on it for me. Oh, this is so exciting!
great explanation bro
i think "the mind" is an energy that every single living thing shares. I think an individual's brain is a conduit of that mind energy.
(3:31) I'd argue the masked man scenario is not analogues to Descartes.
While knowledge over something is ones property, the ability to gain knowledge about something is the property of the relation of that thing to you, which is a shared property between the two. For example in the scenario since you can gain information about location of your father and you can gain information of location of the masked man, they could be the same person. But if for some reason you can not gain information about your fathers location (IDK what that would mean, maybe he is stuck outside time and space) and you can gain information about the masked man, then they can not be the same person.
The whole point here is that you can not (it is impossible to) gain true information regarding your body, but you can do so regarding your mind.