Noam Chomsky: Do We Have Free Will?

[Music] thank you no the last time we we stopped talking at free will we spoke about a lot of things we spoke about Consciousness the mind-body problem why materialism is actually not as succinct and fully defined as we really think it is um but I think let's just start off where we left off um what is free will to you and I want you to go through each view perhaps compatibilism incompatibilism determinism let's say libertarianism and why your views differ from whatever they are and which view you most likely consider to be your own you left out one my favorite Common Sense let's forget the fancy talk and just have a look at what we all know okay I love that okay uh every person acts acts as though they believe in Freedom of the will that includes the people who deny that they have freedom of the will they act as if they believe it that's why they present arguments to try to show that there's no free will no point in preventing arguments if if there isn't any if we're just automata what's the point of presenting arguments it's just like two thermostats intercommunicating so they will act 100 of the time as if they believe they have free will give reasons and so on all right that's Point number one second question is does science have anything to tell us about this answer no nothing at science can tell us we can deal with determinism we can do with Randomness but that's it that was true in the 17th century it's true today so two points everyone acts 100 of the time as if they believe we have free will you can't turn to science because it tells you nothing about it except that we can't handle it so that leaves two possibilities one is we're all a hundred percent deluded we're acting in contrary to the facts 100 of the time second possibility is there's something missing in human science okay take your choice actually if you don't if you believe there isn't any choice then you can't take it but the way everyone acts they can act as if they have a choice between those Alternatives it doesn't matter much what the sophisticated series tell us this is essentially what we're left with and in fact it's if you look at the scientists who do study voluntary motion there are good good they don't talk about free will they talk about trivial things like they cannot decide to lift my finger or something and their conclusion I think maybe we've discussed this I don't remember but if you go to people like Emilio it's a little bit of Jamie and the major scientists who deal with this they have a state of the art review in the Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in which they go through what's ever been what's been learned about controlling the minimal activities I believe lifting your finger and then they say they say as they put it we'll put this fancifully and what they say offensively is we've been done we've come to understand something about the puppet and the strings but we have nothing to say about the Puppeteer yeah it's just a total mystery that's where we're left I mean it often gets me thinking about I remember very young um not to call you old in any way but when I was very young I remember watching a video of you and Mikhail Foucault Michelle Michelle Foucault perhaps my French is not too great but I remember your discussion with him and you guys were talking about uh morality and so many deep topics that I remember watching this video enjoying it so much because it's something you don't often see online I mean you most CC politics that are badly influenced by buyers and and fallacies of thought Etc um you guys were talking about a lot of topics and and Foucault often talks about things like addiction putting people into prison Etc the topic of Free Will cannot Escape morality so when you talk about Free Will let's say libertarianism compatibilism and maybe a hard incompatibilism how do these approaches navigate morality this is such an important topic I think as part of this niche well to distinguish the questions of Free Will from the questions of moral responsibility those are different topics I mean they're related but distant almost all the uh philosophical tendencies that you just mentioned almost entirely are concerned with questions of moral responsibility they're not concerned with the question of can I decide to lift my finger and that's the question of freedom of will uh they were considered there are concerns about if there is no freedom of will how do we assign moral responsibility well that's a question you can't ask but it's only a meaningful question for those who think there's no Free Will and in my opinion nobody has that opinion they may say they have it but they act as if they don't believe it but I'm injury I don't really care what I don't think it's interesting what people think they believe I think what's interesting is what they do believe yeah and what they do believe you can determine from their actions again it's a very striking fact that a hundred percent of our actions including those of people who claim they don't have a free will a hundred percent of their actions uh reflect a belief an unacknowledged belief that they do every will so since that's a hundred percent of human behavior it's kind of an interesting question why people deny what they believe but it's a separate kind of question and these questions of moral responsibility do arise if you acknowledge that you have freedom of choice but that's not the domain in which the tendencies that you describe function s sorry continue no sorry it seems to me and uh in congruity if we do believe that we have free will then these questions can arise quite seriously if we claim hypothetically that there's no free will then you get into complicated philosophical questions but I don't personally see much point in exploring them because they're based on a hypothetical assumption which doesn't apply I think the most difficult part about discussing Free Will for me is that there are two domains one is the metaphysics of whether or not we do have a free will or not and then you also get the moral responsibility aspect now there are a group of philosophers today Pier boom uh gray Caruso I mean directly Greg Caruso and Daniel Dennett have a book called Just Just Desserts primarily based on the fact that Free Will has such an important aspect when it comes to how we interact with each other and what we do what are your thoughts on that do you think this is this is relevant why are we talking about this it's an amusing discussion in your free time if you have nothing else to devote yourself to I don't find it very interesting I mean there is an interesting if you like metaphysical question do we have free will uh well again we're left with what I said before we always act everyone as if we have free will Cheyenne Stills there's nothing about it then we can make a choice maybe human science it just has its limits which I think there's every reason to believe I think we are organisms We're Not Angels if we're organisms we are like other organisms every single one has scope and limits and that's true for all of our capacities as well uh people question that only for our mental capacities I don't see why those should be different from any other capacities in the case of every other organism their cognitive capacities has scope and limits in the case of humans metaphorically speaking below the neck you know meaning we've everyone agrees yes we have scope and limits there are those who claim and fit it's a huge number maybe most philosophers that up here something escapes the natural world it's kind of methodological dualism which I see no reason to accept seems to be much more pernicious than traditional metaphysical dualism which was in fact normal science take a look at they covered it was simply normal science and said he could try to argue that everything in the world has a mechanical explanation including most things about human beings but then he noticed correctly in fact that there are certain aspects of ordinary human life which don't have a mechanical interpretation for me certainly particularly interesting is that one of the main ones in the discourse is just what you and I are now doing the ability to carry out a normal conversation with others creative making up new Expressions new thoughts maybe never occurred in the history of the world and able to allow others to comprehend the inner workings of our minds by means of verbal communication and he argued that that's beyond the bounds of mechanical explanation and therefore like any good scientist postulated a new principle in his metaphysics and new substance British kogi times Well turned out he was wrong turns out there isn't a mechanical explanation for anything so in particular not for normal verbal interaction uh well that left us that's Newton basically true there's no mechanical explanations for anything in the world he regarded that as a complete absurdity even but he was stuck with it then very quickly within a couple of years in fact Came John Locke who said yes Mr Newton has demonstrated to us that the what we call the material world has properties we can't comprehend we're just just a fact so maybe organized matter whatever or matter turns out to be has the property of generating thought yeah that's I think the answer to the question don't think it's been improved on since so that's what we're left with we have scope and limits like everything else in the organic world and it may be that the explanation for the freedom of will that all of us act as if we believe we have maybe it's just beyond human cognitive capacities if so it wouldn't be unique now if you had to Define Free Will versus let's say agency or Choice as a linguist I mean it's one of the most influential linguists on the planet how would you differentiate these three words three eight like agency free will and freedom of choice I guess I think they're the same Free Will means free agency free agency means Free Will okay I don't see a difference between them I have so many questions for you what I'm going to do is because the first podcast got so much engagement I've got a lot of questions for you from the from the viewers and the listeners so let me start with the first one the one is from Dean this is Professor Chomsky in 2012 you once had an interview with Peter hallwood and would Professor Chomsky comment on Spinoza's philosophy of mind and what did he mean by saying to Peter hallwood and I quote putting aside considerations of Spinoza's subtle ideas question mark end quote espinoza's work still relevant and of any value today and was Spinoza then going into the right direction let's say closer to the truth per se Spinoza was a brilliant Innovative thinker it's very intriguing to try to understand what he was saying uh my own personal opinion is that the arguments he presented will be challenging and intriguing don't hold up so if you run through the equation today axiomatic system in the ethics state it's kind of interesting to see how his mind is working but I don't think the argument's holder let's go let's move into the next one right this is about intellectual Freedom please ask why does Professor Chomsky believe oh wait sorry the question is why do so many linguists disagree with Chomsky and why is behaviorism so popular best of all I don't agree with that most linguists disagree with you but I'm just going with the questions no I think it's correct my own conception of what the study of language is about is shared by very few others including the department that I helped found and have taught in most of my life and I do give talks there are people listen with interest but they don't look at Linguistics this way through all my life it's always been a small minority okay it's the way it is uh I just see the field differently on the other hand if you look at the tradition which goes back 2500 years a pretty much fall within the tradition up until the 20th century from Classical Greece classical India up through the early 20th century language was understood as basically the same as thought in French language was described by simply orderable thought we know honorable isn't too narrow it could be visual any sensory motor system but the basic idea was to was that language is the generator of thought and thought is what is generated by language that was a standard view for millennia early 20th century it changed early 20th century came the behaviors structuralist period which broke quite sharply from this that my own work beginning mid 20th century which was uh could take a major step forward thanks to developments in mathematics the development of the mathematical theory of computation Alan Turing Kurt girdle others that made it possible for the first time to make a clear and sharp distinction between something that Aristotle had brought up but nobody knew what to do with that is the distinction between possession of knowledge and use of knowledge so if you look at the whole tradition say Descartes or Galileo or others who puzzled about this they were always talking about production how do we produce thought always no discussion of what is thought because that requires the distinction between generation and production which are two quite different things possession of knowledge in Aristotle sins is generation of an infinite number of thoughts here's the array of thoughts that are possible for human beings production is a much more complex thing it means selecting something when I speak to you I am somehow selecting something out of that over infinite array and then going through the procedure of implementing the first part we're back in a total mystery the mystery of how you make choices nobody has anything to say about that but at least we can now make the distinction and we can study the generation and the nature of thoughts name here they are here are the thoughts then we can turn to the question of with production there's two questions how do I select something out of that array total mystery heard away Implement what I've selected yes we can study that that's the problem of implementation of production it's kind of an input output problem so yeah we can deal with it just as we can do with perception it's an input output question so you hear a sound you'd carry a mechanical manipulations and it leads to one of the thoughts those are topics we can deal with but there's a big mystery right in the middle how do we go from the generation of thoughts which we can study and learn a lot about what's the nature of thought a lot of progress on that but the move from that to how we select one what I'm doing what you're doing that remains total mystery as much of a mysterious lifting my finger and that's where we now stand well that's a view of linguistics that very few linguists accept they're interested in production and perception okay I am interested in the tradition of to a millennia two and a half Millennia I think was on the right track and the Gap that they couldn't deal with generational thought we now can deal with we can learn quite a lot about it about the nature of thought and the nature of language and I think we found a lot about that but it's just not the main interest of most linguists or cognitive scientists or philosophers a Philosophers totally refused to live in it so you take the leading philosophers the 20th century philosophers of language say coin probably the most influential the one I knew quite well studying with him we never agreed on this for him the language is as he put it a conflicts of dispositions to respond period uh Eric Bloomfield the great theoretician of modern structural linguistics language as a matter is he put it a habit and training and so on training by some sort of reinforcement procedure it's totally untenable it's nothing like that disaster basically said nothing about it said languages and social contract of some kind European structuralism doesn't discuss the question but notice it in the long sweep of history as a gap the Gap is early 20th century behaviorism and structuralism which just put these questions aside picking up in mid 20th century now informed by the mathematical theory of computation we can look at the Gap in the tradition and reconstitute the tradition in modern terms while recognizing that there is a gap that we don't know how to fulfill namely how to choose out of the infinite said I mean that's not something it's something familiar in other areas so take mathematics I suppose you have a formalized theory of arithmetic say deanos formalization of arithmetic the formalization is generative it says here is the infinite number of possible proofs and as axioms can be regarded as a generative system which generates the infinitely many possible proofs the proof each proof is a kind of a geometrical object if you look at it formally what does a mathematician do who's trying to prove something doesn't run through the Axiom system how he does it is totally mysterious no mathematic lesion can tell you it's just some creative act you know I will that's what we're doing every moment of the day instantaneously we're instantaneously picking something out of the array of possible thoughts and implementing it uh girl there was quite great in being regarding this as one of the most amazing things in the world he couldn't go much beyond that but he was right to be amazed by it Descartes was right in postulating some new substance to try to deal with it but it remains as much of a mystery as it was for Galileo and the scientists of the early 17th century Scientific Revolution who were deeply puzzled by this Galileo himself regarded the alphabet as the most spectacular of human inventions because it was able to somehow to represent this not answer the question but at least they're represented this astonishing mystery of hell with a finite number of symbols which is all we have maybe large but finite we are somehow able to construct infinitely many thoughts and even to convey to others the inner workings of our mind though they now have access to it he regarded this as an invention be unique in human history but that's as much of a mystery to us as it was to the group scientists of the early 17th century um no you mentioned Quine and I think it's important like equine once mentioned I'm going to paraphrase but you mentioned that we've spent so much time studying the typical yet if we had spent more time studying the atypical let's say Madness in quotes we could learn a lot more about the human mind so Quan one said something along these lines I can't remember the exact quote it was in part it was part of my textbook as my masters and so and it's a while back but along those lines um there's people like jail Austin from Oxford um if you think about the way their philosophy works and you talk about language and words the choice of words we use because I am fascinated by mental health and how we construct diagnoses how the ICD or the DSM form what are your thoughts on these I mean the fact that we can we we now give terms or terminologies to certain scopes of experience because clearly well from my perspective there's a spectrum and yet we somehow find ways to give definitions along the line um what are your thoughts on that jail Austin I mean he describes it very well with his Oxford philosophy um but yeah what are your thoughts on that well John Austin I happen to know pretty well in the 1950s he visited uh however repeatedly and we got to be quite friendly uh started when I was a graduate student there and continued actually almost until his death and met him weeks before he died he was working at the time on a theory of language detailed theory of language which in my opinion was on the wrong track but it was interesting it was a very smart train I don't think he left anything published about this and his literary executors seemed to have left it out as far as I can see but he was developing a theory of language based essentially on uh sounds symbol correlation so he was a very Learned philologist philology was one of his main interests and he was interested in questions like for example if you take the English words glamor Geo and grammar Jr they have the same origin but they went in different directions and he wanted to relieve this to the sound symbolism he pointed out it's well known that gee if you look at the English vocabulary G ill appears in lots of words that have some vague kind of semantic similarity like glare glimmer and gleam and so on a lot of them have and he thought that was quite significant most others think it's kind of an accident but he wanted to try to develop a theory based essentially on this primitive observation and expanding personally I don't think they would have gotten very far but everything Wilson did was quite interesting and a very intriguing mind well as far as I know this has been left up out of his posthumous public record I haven't seen any reference to it even though he was teaching courses on this in his last semester at Oxford seems to be gone but he was one of the people I could talk to about these things he didn't agree but we could discuss it it was the philosopher that Harvard and impossible look at the linguists and yeah is so along that line I mean because Joel Austin he spoke about a lot about for example I remember I think it was the Oxford Handbook of philosophy and Psychiatry or the Oxford textbook of philosophy and Psychiatry I'm apologize if I'm wrong to anyone who's listening but um he mentions a chair for example when you ask someone what is a chair people Define it very differently some people think of it as something that you sit on some people think of something with four legs or something with a back wrist and so when you ask someone what is depression um it's very difficult for you to now try and vocabularize and experience that's so diverse what are your thoughts on mental illness and the way we describe these things or these terms well I happen to be here a very simple-minded person I like to pay attention to the simple things like what's a chair what's mental depression I don't think we can say anything about that but if we ask what's a chair that turns out to have been very interesting questions like what you just said some people say it's something with a back or something with legs and notice that gets back to a point that Aristotle raised very significant point which has been mostly forgotten his example was house but could have been shared he said if we want to define a house incidentally he was talking about metaphysical terms what is a house but you can easily translate that into cognitive terms which for him were about the same because he saw basically no difference between the thing and the word for the thing the word for things just a reflection of the things so they're about the same so let's talk about the meaning of house not what is a house well Aristotle pointed out that it has two components in his metaphysics it was form and mattered so the matter of a house is the bricks the Timbers and so on that a physicist could identify the form of a house is the intention of the designer the characteristic use and the thing with mental things something a physicist couldn't find looking at a house and I think he's quite right so something could look exactly like a house but not be a house because it was intended for some other purpose maybe a library of them a stable for horses maybe something else well that tells you something very same with chair you can look at it for for us for people a chair or something that is characterized by the fact that we use it in certain ways Wittgenstein pointed out once that if it's your chair started to speak we wouldn't know what this what it is because a chair has to have certain formal properties in Aristotle sense that's a very significant fact because it raises the question how does an infant know this how does an infant know all of this very complex set of properties and it does become very complex when you begin to explore how does an infant know then well we now have experimental work mainly by Lila glideman late cognitive scientists which showed that children acquire the meaning a word with very few presentations two or three presentations they know the whole meaning of the word how how do they know I mean you ask crime and Wittgenstein others as its Association can't be no associations could give you the fact that Aristotle noticed that the nature of an object and the meaning of a word is something that can't be detected from its physical properties no possible learning theory can get you then so it's another one of those Mysteries it's something about how we're designed humans are somehow designed so that our Concepts all of them the simplest ones like chair are very intricate constructions based on properties that cannot be identified in the physical object well one thing that means is that contrary to widespread believe there is no notion of reference in human language the things that we do carry out the actions of referring as John Austin pointed out Peter Strauss and other Oxford ordinary language philosophers in the 1950s we do carry out actions of referring but it doesn't follow that the language has a relation of reference it doesn't there are no excremental objects that the words of our language refer to there were internal mental objects which we use in the action of referring and something different that means language has no semantics in the sense of very good torsky Corner Quine and others just doesn't have semantics incidentally that would not have bothered foreign because they didn't see any point instead of language anyway it's just maybe a useful way of getting examples of Coronet who ended pretty well just even didn't even understand why people speak ordinary language why don't they speak formal languages where everything's well defined you know but so this conclusion wouldn't have bothered them but it should bother all the people who think that language as a relationship or that it has a notion of Truth or that you can do model theoretic semantics or all of those people should be concerned with this that's practically all the philosophy of language and all of what's called formal semantics and doesn't bother them because they're not really interested in these issues that just in Practical concerns and let's make it work better well as I said that's a departure from 2500 years of tradition in my view regression of structuralism and behaviorism you asked me for why everyone's attracted by this well there's an interesting study which May provide the answer there's a very good cognitive scientists at Northeastern University in Boston Iris for rent PE or ENT she's done very interesting studies and on many topics and one of them leads to the conclusion that we are sort of innately behaviorist that is if you just look at people's Common Sense attitudes they tend to give empiricists she said tend to give radical empirical standards and it's kind of like a natural intuition just like infants or automatically accept the mechanical philosophy so if you do experiment this is done 60 years ago right let me shot if you give infants a presentation a guy like this you know two things moving in as a fixed relationship it'll automatically assume that there's an invisible barrier connecting them because otherwise it couldn't have happened well that's the mechanical philosophy which was disproven by Newton but it's part of our intuition which is probably why it was fixed upon in the first place and empiricism seems to be the same it kind of automatically try to give Imperial stanzas when they're refuted you sometimes hang on to them anyway that's I think a disease of philosophy and Linguistics I should say that Austin strassen and others were not subject to this they broke out of it they didn't recognize awesome famously that words language generally are something you do you do things with that's the production side it's not the internal side which he was interested in but has nothing to say about I went just there's so many things to touch on there that I actually have to think about which part I actually really want to go down but as someone who's intrigued by the mental health aspect of this topic do you think we um look this is not a political podcast and I try my best to avoid Politics as much because I want this to be philosophical very metaphysical as much as possible as well but do you think that the way social media The Way We Chat nowadays our lack of the use of the English language because we obviously uh have shortened many terms many words um do you think all of this plays a role into the way we are medicalizing mental illness or do you think mental illness is rising or are we just medicalizing human experiences well we certainly I think that this is not an area that I know very well I should say but it's an interesting one I've certainly been interested looked into it psychiatry has moved extensively towards treatments by pharmaceutical means and others that probably makes reasonably good sense in many areas there are significant advances made in treating many Parkinson's for example by medical means I mean at my age I have the few friends that are still alive and in their last years many did have mental diseases like Alzheimer's Parkinson's and so on and they were treated effectively especially Parkinson's medically it did maintain their lives productive happy Lions will be young would have been possible 50 years earlier so I don't disparage this at all I think a lot of good can be done uh probably there is over medicalization uh there's a natural tendency if you have a you know if you have a hammer you look for nails famous idiom you have pharmaceutical means you try to apply them it's probably also true of the surgery and there's good evidence that surgeries overused that many let me just tell you a personal thing back about it I mean in medicine we say we often say ourselves I mean surgeons cut that's just what they do they see something they cut it that's what I mean skip the personal board but it's common it's well known in the medical profession it's a cardiologists that there's pressures in the hospitals to do to treat things surgically uh for several reasons one it's because we know how to do another it's a very lucrative for the hospitals they make a lot of money on it if you can treat a heart disease by medication or by telling people to change their Lifestyles they're not going to make any money so there's a lot of profession pressure on cardiologists to go for the knife for several reasons some good some not good I personally happen to have been benefited from this and might say that 40 years ago when I I mean I'm pressing 94 so when I was in my 50s I hope when I'm 94 I'm as cognitively as engaged as you because it's amazing the cardiologist who was a personal friend and a factor leading figure in the field who was kind of isolated in the field because he believed in putting off surgical intrusion until the very end if there was no other possibility and there were some cardiologists did suggest surgical treatment and I went to talk to him and said don't bother with it we can handle it just by mild medication and some obvious lifestyle changes it worked perfectly never had any medical intervention still taking a lot of pills that's easy anyhow I think that's pretty common and you can see the reasons and I think the same is true of psychiatric treatment it has successes if it's used intelligently it can be effective and I've seen personal cases rid of others but it can easily as a temptation to overuse it to treat everything with drugs where other things are necessary partly this is something here we're getting into politics I'm afraid but the whole medical system has been subjected to the neoliberal assault on human beings turn everything into uh market-based commercial applications I mean I can tell you cases of that I know very well and there are many others where somebody goes to a doctor that it has to be done in 15 minutes if it takes more than 15 minutes a supervisor comes in and tells the doctor sorry you got to stop because we have to be maximally efficient we have to meet market conditions the worst possible medication means the doctor can't get to know you to figure out what your life is like what your problems are think about the way a traditional doctor used to do the doctor was kind of like a personal friend got to know you and so on can't do that have to do it in 15 minutes because that's the way you're efficient a lot of life has been marketized that way and it's very it's very very destructive and we see it in all sorts of things and it turned to another domain uh suppose you you got a bank statement and it looks wrong and it looks like there's an error in it so you want to get in touch with the bank to see if they can fix it well you know what happens you call the bank you get a recorded message which says that we love you and just stay on the line and then some music starts playing and every once in a while you get a recorded voice and after you've spent 45 minutes finally something a recorded voice comes along and says do you want to speak to a person and you say yes I'd like to speak to a person and finally you get to speak to a person they say oh sorry this is the wrong number call that number wrong and then you go online well economists tell you that's very efficient but Economist measures it's efficient it means the company doesn't spend any money doesn't cost them anything of course use something but economists don't count to that's not part of economic theory if you wish two hours your problem we don't count that so it's very efficient but very destructive of life if the bank would hire a few more people you could have saved 45 minutes they would have had an extra person to pay well according to economic theory that's not efficient because economic theory and its political implementation and neoliberalism just makes their lives harsher more brutal same in the medical profession but it saves money so therefore it's fine that's why the rich are getting super rich and everyone else is staying poor yeah I'm sorry we're getting into politics but it's pervasive I mean that's affecting the medical profession as well it's very difficult not to get into politics when you have a philosophy podcast so I I don't think there's a need to apologize um but on that topic exactly what you're talking about um I think it aligns well while we spoke about Free Will and now we're talking about the way people use the internet social media Etc how are people's free wills being challenged or controlled because of the way economists businessmen social media enthusiasts and marketers and marketing people control us because clearly that's a way to control free will in a way is we don't have as much control as we used to be what are your thoughts on that no we can go back to my favorite philosopher David Hume uh I love David 50 years ago he wrote the first major work and what we now call political science or political philosophy it was called first principles of government if you open it the first paragraph says something like this he says it more eloquently but this is basically it he said he said I'm Amazed by the easiness with which the many submit themselves to the few power is in the hands of the governed those who are governed but they don't use it they submit themselves to the power of the few and he says how can this miracle come about he says well it has to be what we now call manufacture of consent in position of consent somehow people are induced to consent to rule by the Masters though they don't have to be they could take power themselves so the main principle of government is how to control people so that they don't use the power that they have well I think this right on target that's how the few manage to keep control and to master us and there are massive Industries devoted to this they are so common we don't pay attention to them like take the advertising industry hundreds of billions of dollars are spent every year to try to induce you to do things which are harmful to you and instructive to the destructive to the world namely to become a mad do a consumer literally hundreds of billions of dollars a year are spent to do this from infancy there are no now fields of Applied psychology literally which study how to get children to nag their parents about literally 50 years ago the advertising industry realized that there's a big group of people who they aren't targeting children and they said we've ignored them because children don't have money but we've overlooked the fact that children can nag their parents and get them to get things from them that was a big Insight so now if you watch television with you your children me my great-grandchildren if you watch television with them and two-year-olds full of advertising here's something you have to have you know a four hundred dollar talking dog or something so get your mother to buy it for you that starts from infancy and the mother gets irritated buys it the kid looks at him and throws it away and get the next thing well that's very profitable it's destructive of her Alliance destructive of the environment uh but it's a way to make money so that's David's um led to a huge effort I mean let me give you a personal anecdote again first time I went to a baseball game it was in 1937. the kids were interested in the baseball players what was happening and so on I didn't go for many years until one of my grandchildren wanted me to take him to a baseball with me I took him advertising everywhere the walls are covered with advertising the baseball uniforms to the players have ads on the back the game has to stop every once in a while for Ed for advertising for television I mean every aspect of life has been overwhelmed by the effort to make you a totally irrational consumer it's hard to get away from it by now people just regarded as like the area you breathe you don't ask about it but it's a massive technique of controlling you and it covers everything else up to the media and teaching and all sorts of things it's part of the it's become in the last 40 years the neoliberal years when economists have had a big impact and aligned very closely with the needs of the business world it's been overwhelming the effect on the public has been devastating what it's led to is a mood of anger disillusionment District contempt for institutions which is all over the place very destructive basically leading to a kind of neo-fascist tendencies in government so it's no small matter not David basically ahead of rain exactly I mean manufacturing consent was one of the first books of yours that I did read um I've read dozens afterwards I mean you are an excellent writer but I I'll never forget the feeling I had when I read manufacturing consent it it changed the way I perceived everything you get almost this it's almost like reading 1984 it's got the you've got it's got this big brother feel to it where you're like you're being controlled um for good reasons yeah exactly the reason my question to you is how then do you believe that we have sort of a free will when clearly we can't control this when it is controlled by others how are we able to navigate this dichotomy for us it's quite easy if I was if you and I were living in Russia or China wouldn't be easy if we were carrying out this conversation in Russia let's say you could expect the secret police to come in and drag us off to a concentration camp okay same in China not here not for you not for me so we're we live in a highly controlled societies but we have a lot of freedom it didn't come by Magic you can tell where you live what a struggle it was to attain it well not that significant much here in the United States but pretty hard people you know about a century ago Eugene dibs was tossed into jail for daring to say the kinds of things that I say now about what war is uh that Wars the health of the state you know that's the United States it's been a battle here too but nothing like other places but it's been when a lot of Freedom's been won which means we have the opportunity to tear side the very thin veil of propaganda control we can do it and break through you read the newspapers a lot of what they say is quite valuable and important you have to know how to navigate your way through the means of control and marginalization that are built in for institutional reasons but it's not that difficult it's not quantum physics you can do it pretty easily help other people do it you mentioned social media that's been a it could be something liberating ways for people to explore and learn interact unfortunately it hasn't been that way most of what it does is isolate people in small self-reinforcing bubbles when you hear you kind of naturally gravitate towards things that you approve of and where you get approved and then attitudes get solidified you don't hear Alternatives you get you lose empathy the ability to think openly has been destructive I mean uh doesn't have to be like the can break out of that but it takes exercise of the free will that fortunately we have no the I have so many more questions for you my question for you is there are still some questions from the from the audience that that I have for you do you have time to answer a few of them let's go along a little bit longer yeah let's go for some of them let's see right so the one says okay this is quite a long one it says hello hello Professor Chomsky um I've been confused about Professor chomsky's insistence about Newton's destruction of the mechanical philosophy which if I understand correctly is based on a reintroduction of an occult Force namely gravity to explain the motion of bodies I thought that Einstein's theory of relativity explained this by supposing bodies move according to the easiest geometry in their region of space-time conceptually similar to a ball on an incline except non-euclidean not because of an action at a distance so if this is true if this is true then why totally abandon the traditional Cartesian dualism if maybe like gravity things can be explained mechanically after some time a long one I'm sorry about that uh that's a very common error including leading physicists who don't understand what the issue was about the mechanical philosophy uh Newton showed that the mechanical philosophy didn't work there is no material world that conforms to the mechanical philosophy Newton regarded this in absurdity so did leibniz uh poygons the other great physicists of the day and in fact what and they were correct what happened is that the idea the hope to develop an intelligible World disappeared science changed its goals lured them didn't care anymore about whether you have an intelligible world just whether you have intelligible theories of the world that's a big difference so Newton's theories were perfectly intelligible alignments could understand them perfectly well Newton understood them but they weren't what Newton called a physical Theory one that explained the world in intelligible terms Einstein's theory is intelligible the theory but not the world it describes it's in a total abandonment of the mechanical of any notion of intelligibility of the world given it all up so it's like Newton's theory yes the theory is intelligible but it doesn't bear on the questions that the great scientists who founded modern science were concerned with we've given that up Nobody Cries anymore in fact when you get to say Bertrand Russell who knew the Sciences will he said the search for intelligibility is ridiculous put it aside it took a long time for this to settle in but now it's just become scientific Common Sense we just abandoned the goals of the Scientific Revolution Newton enlightenments other great figures we abandon their hopes we just lower our sights to try to develop intelligible theories Newton's was intelligible but not quite right Einstein's is intelligible does a little better but it all abandons the aspirations that led to modern science given all those up so yes we we've been with there's no longer anybody mind problem because there's nobody okay we just oh we don't care all we need is an intelligent leglock pointed out let's try to do in the wake of Newton let's try to find a intelligible theory of how mental actions take place that we've abandoned any hope of trying to find out what matter is so uh Newton himself said we know so little about matter that for all we know all matter is alive uh Arthur Reddington century ago went beyond that he said we know so little about matter that for all we know all matters conscious like Adams we don't know that they're not conscious because we don't know anything about matter uh well same with Einstein's theory yes the theory is quite intelligible teacher at the students they understand it but it has abandoned the hopes and the aspirations That animated modern science those have been given up this was actually understood by 19th century historians of science like Friedrich longer take a look at his great book on materialism he points out that modern materialists have simply abandoned traditional materialism they're willing to accept Notions like force and field and so on which they understand but have no material basis because we've given that up well that was the mid-19th century we should be able to understand it today science just abandoned the goals of the Scientific Revolution very important moment in the history of science took some time to sink in so if you take a look at Newton he himself said look I I can't give a physical explanation for anything his famous comment I do not make hypotheses within that context said I'm sorry I I have no hypothesis about science that's why his major work is called mathematical principles it's not called principles of philosophy philosophy and Science in those days it took a long time even at Cambridge University Zone University they didn't teach Newton's theory for about I think 50 years because they weren't physical theories they were just mathematics and so it's not science and finally science just abandoned hope so we're not interested in this anymore we have lower goals okay probably the right move but there's no longer any dualism because there's nobody no matter the same is true of Consciousness the discussion of Consciousness is very misleading it's a fine philosopher young philosopher Galen strawson Peter Strauss and Son who's written extensively about this and I think he's right he's pointed out that the whole contemporary discussion about Consciousness is completely backwards uh it's it's not there's no problem of Consciousness Consciousness we understand better than anything else we have a perfect understanding of Consciousness I can describe in detail what my Consciousness is so can you what we don't understand is matter so we don't understand the relation between Consciousness and matter because we don't know what matter is as Arthur Reddington but it for all we know all matters a lot it's conscious and she stress in himself pursues this tries to develop the pan psychism I don't agree with him in that but I think it's basic observation is correct version Russell said the same thing Century boom he said what we know best is consciousness better than anything else that's what we're most confident about what we know most about the rest of our intellectual Explorations or attempts to ground this in something and there we run into trouble because we know what matter is that's basically correct I think so the literature sorry I was trying to Galen we're going to chat very soon about the Mind Body problem Consciousness Etc and Philip Goff possibly I think next week I have an interview with him so the pan psychism debate is going to start uh we're going to chat about that in quite a bit detail before we get there I mean I mean well as we conclude so no this is the final question from one of the last listeners they want to know from you gnome what are your secular metaphysics um in terms of teleology what do you really believe is the point of all of this why are we here what is the purpose of all of this this is one of the questions the last one I have for you from from the listeners the purpose of life the meaning of life is what we give to a period other than that has no purpose in the lives of the trees in my backyard we have the opportunity which the trees don't have to make something of Our Lives that will be the remaining and purpose what we choose to do with this opportunity to have a number of years on Earth what do we do with it that's the meaning of life you're not going to find it anywhere else I love that um look I know as this is something I always do and I didn't get the chance the last time we had a lot of technical errors and a lot of difficulties but um who if you had to give me your Mount Rushmore of philosophy or science combine them perhaps give us five at least um who are the people you suggest we read try to get a deeper understanding of not in philosophy but the nature of reality science and the universe if you were to give us five people you'd recommend and these are the people that inspired you most would they be actually the people I've found most inspiring over the years like Russell or you know or people who worked out pretty clearly or articulated pretty clearly things I had mostly pretty much figured out by myself we bring to philosophy everyone understanding or questions or confusions sometimes people help us clear them up but there's no list you can point to could be anyone it could be heraclitus yes the profound question how can we cross the same river twice it's a very profound question when you stop to think of it raises all kinds of questions well that was pre-socratic so we can start there or we can look at the delphic Oracle know their self it's a good good advice try to figure out what kind of person are you what kind of creatures are we and so on so let's start with that you get from philosophy what you bring to it what are the kinds of questions and concerns that are that you have tried to think about for yourself come to some conclusions may be wrong maybe incoherence maybe you can find someone who has Wittgenstein but it can help the fly out of the fly model that's what you should be looking for have yet to name your mind Rushmore philosophy or would they be I know it's a tough question it's putting you on the spot but I know hume's definitely up there um if you had to add three more people to that list who would they be too many people in fact some of them would be people you never heard of it's fine I barely even went to school and literally I mean one of the most influential people in my life personally happened to be an uncle who never went past fourth grade but was one of the best educated people I've ever met in my life and that actually was a lady analyst uh profound inside into people political world science other things literally never went past fourth grade that's what you find everyone um what is his name I mean I'd love to know his name his name was Milton cross died many years ago one of the people who made novshomsky the net the man he is today it's great to know that uh two more names at least David look personally David hume's one of my favorite of all time um he realized in one of the most tragic uh submissions in the history of philosophy at the end of his life he did publish a kind of a afterward to a new publication of the Treatise in which she said everything he had tried to do all of his life was a failure actually Galileo said the same thing at the near the end of his life he said I was hoping to show that the world is intelligible it's a total failure he said I cannot find an intelligible explanation of the tides which was true we can't in the mechanical philosophy and in fact I think you find other moments in the history of philosophy and science where people have asked hard serious questions and at the end said it all failed you know if they left us with insights and questions like this I've mentioned yeah gnome this is I mean the podcast is called Mind Body Solution obviously searching for the answer to the Mind Body problem um your final words on the Mind Body problem and what you think we should do about it should we care about it how can we go about solving this problem how should we end this comment the first step we should take is asking is there a man very problem you have to ask that question before you try to solve it and the answer to that question is no there is no mind body problem there has been none since Isaac Newton as John Locke recognized because we do not have a concept of body body matter physical and so on it's just whatever there is if you look at modern physics they don't know uh you can read uh in fact I just recently did read a debate in a quantum physics journal that a friend sent me which is half a dozen leading Quantum physicists debating the question what is a particle they don't know a number of different answers speculations and nobody knows we don't know what matters so there's no point about a problem so therefore there's no solution to it uh the nearest you can come to a solution is block suggestion I repeated he put it in his theological framework but we can drop the Theology and the way he put it he said right after a meeting about a year or so after Newton's principia appeared he said something like this just as the incomparable Mr Newton has shown that God assigned to matter properties that we cannot comprehend so God might have super added to matter the property of thought meaning some organized forms of matter whatever matter is a yield thought right through the 18th century that was pursued seriously by in human many others lemon tree and finally Joseph Priestly and scientist philosopher we've worked on it extensively Finds Its way into Darwin's early notebooks then pretty much forgotten reinvented in the late 20th century uh zuid Francis Crick called an astonishing hypothesis with the churchlands called the radical new idea in history of philosophy and basically just repeating the Luck's suggestion in the same words often repeating Priestly I mean it's useful to study the history of philosophy there are a lot of insights which have been forgotten I mentioned the millennial history of linguistics which was forgotten in the structuralist behaviorist period but should be revived but uh you you don't find answers you find questions that need answers yes and that Inspire us to look into them but with the mind-body problem there's not going to be a solution because there's no problem in the first place that no as we end this off I remember one of the comments in our last conversation was great to see gnome no longer chatting about politics and Ukraine look I believe it's very important that you should be and I'm glad you are doing that but um the the comment followed on by saying it's so great to see him talking about philosophy metaphysics Etc so my last question to you is why should we be doing this why is philosophy important why should people be asking the deeper questions about the reality of nature the world or the mind go back to the delphic Oracle 2500 years ago first question we should be asking is know thyself move on to Socrates a couple of years later an unexamined life is not worth living once we get that for we can say we at every infant wants to understand how the world works any parent knows that children are annoying because they keep asking why I want to understand then a lot of Education treatment of children is designed to beat that Curiosity out of their heads so let's recover the infancy and try to understand ourselves try to understand the world there's nothing that we can think of that's more important including its applications so I think the question is easy answers thank you so much gnome I honestly enjoy and relish this time with you I hope we get to do it again sometime how are you feeling any any final words from your side nothing more I really appreciate your time thanks so much now for joining me one more time very good to be with you enjoyed talking to you [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: Tevin Naidu

Views: 35,940

Keywords: Understanding Free Will, Morality & Life's Meaning With Noam Chomsky, TevinNaidu.com, Noam Chomsky Philosophy, Free Will Explored, Moral Responsibility Debated, Meaning Of Life Insights, Consciousness And Choice, Determinism And Freedom, Philosophical Perspectives, Life's Greater Purpose, Ethical Implications, Human Autonomy Discussed, Reality Of Choice, Existential Questions Answered, Nature Of Decision, Free, Will, Morality, Noam Chomsky On Free Will, MbS&x%

Id: ZYiv790TfzI

Length: 81min 15sec (4875 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 31 2023