Hubert Dreyfus Interview - Existentialism & Philosophy (1998)

Socrates was a kind of intellectualist or rationalist and he thought that for anybody to be an expert in any domain they had to understand the principles on which they were acting in that domain otherwise he said they were just like Cooks they had a knack based on kind of uh empirical feedback they just knew what pleased people but that wasn't what you should have if you understood the domain you would have a theoretical account you could make the point like this that uh Socrates thought that cooks knew from experience what tasted good but doctors had a theory about what was good for you and he already uh Plato or Socrates Plato more had this tremendous admiration for doctors as because they were the he they thought at the time the first people who had a worked out theory of Health and that and could deduce what was good for you so Socrates went around asking e ex experts in various domains to tell him the rules by which they on which they acted and for instance in the youth ofro which is one of the very early dialogues where Plato is telling us what Socrates did Socrates runs into a prophet named ufro who supposedly knows what Pious behavior is and Socrates says to you Theo I want you to tell me the uh I don't know if he says rule or principle something like that by which you can tell which actions are Pious because ufro is turning in his father for killing a slave which is a very sort of vexed uh situation since on the one hand you're not supposed to kill people on the other hand you're not supposed to turn in your father so uh but but youth proc claims that he knows exactly which is right and Socrates wants to know the principle by which he knows that it's right to turn in his father and what ufro does however is give Socrates a bunch of examples of things that the gods have done and famous people have done that everybody agrees are Pious and Socrates and this is the first important move in in philosophy I believe says I don't want your examples I want the rule that enables you to pick out those as examples of piety uh very clever move but unfortunately ufro can't give him any rule although youth afro claims to be able to recognize piety when he sees it he doesn't have a piety recognizing principle or at least he can't find it and Socrates can't get it out of him and the dialogue ends like all these Socratic dialogues in a kind of failure to find the rule by way the pety recognition Rule and Socrates includes then that youth afro doesn't really know what piety is therefore he can't really be an expert or a prophet and then Socrates discovers that people don't know what Justice is either Statesmen don't know what Justice is and because they can't give a definition of justice and this is very upsetting to to Socrates and it turns out nobody in the whole that he can that he finds and questions can give the rules by which they operate in their uh capacity as experts so Socrates reaches this famous conclusion that nobody knows anything and he doesn't know anything either he doesn't have any rules that he operates on so that it looks like Western philosophy begins and ends right there a very unfortunate conclusion that in effect nobody knows anything Socrates knows one thing more than anybody else namely that neither he nor anybody else knows anything and that's because they've got this theoretical uh notion of what counts his uh expertise or knowledge practical knowledge and there they think there must be a theory behind it and he can't find the theory well Plato sort of saves the day for this in a most amazing and sort of uh outrageous way he his the the problem is look these people behave as if they've got a theory but they don't seem to have any Theory they can't give you any rules or principles so Plato says well they once knew the rules and principles in another life but when their souls were put in their bodies they forgot them but and this is the crucial thing the principles are still there in their soul generating the behavior even though they're not aware of it so Plato has saved the day it turns out that the job of the philosopher is what Plato calls recollection it's to get the people to remember the rules which are already there causing the experts to have this expert Behavior but which the experts have forgotten well that take I mean I won't follow it right now but that will take you right to the computer expert systems people who think the experts have the rules and it's their job to help the experts recollect the rules but um it could equally well be the case that they don't have any rules at all uh there there's a kind of interesting mistake behind it which I can put in here to to help this is sort of an illustration of the way philosophers think both the clever M way they make mistakes and then the clever way they find their mistakes um in in an expert systems book uh a computer uh scientist named Fen Bal who makes exactly the same moves as Plato though he doesn't know any he hasn't read Plato it doesn't matter Plato is so pervasive I I mean he's possessed by Plato whether he's read him or not he says we we once had to learn how to tie our shoelaces but and that means I presume that we had to go over here and under here and through here we can't even explain how we do it anymore you couldn't tell me how to tie your shoelaces but and so Fen bound says we once knew how to tie our shoelaces we can still tie our shoelaces but we can't give the rule so the rule must be compiled it must be in a part of our mental comp computer where we no longer have conscious access to it now that's the Playdoh picture but it's got a mistake in it uh the mistake is consider the analogy uh we once had to use training wheels in order to ride a bicycle and when we started we couldn't ride a bicycle without training wheels now we can ride a bicycle then we must be using invisible training wheels it's exactly the same thing I mean the fact that we needed the rues to do it in the beginning and we're not using the rule now doesn't mean the rule has gone unconscious and is invisible anymore then the the training wheels go invisible it means we're doing it in a different way just as we ride the bicycle in a different way I think experts don't use rules they need rules when they're learning to tie their shoelaces for instance but after they've had lots of experienc tying shoelaces what they do is they just know that when the shoelace looks like this do that and they don't even know it in the sense of consciously know it their brain is just so fixed that when they get a picture of shoelaces looking like this an action like that comes out and the rule has disappeared from the story it hasn't gone unconscious it's just gone uh the only time people ever actually use rules and to explain and uh direct and their behavior is either when there's some kind of breakdown and the situation is unfamiliar so that they have to go back to the principles that they learned before suppose they've got I don't know some special kind of very thick shoelaces or whatever something that makes the problem uh makes it impossible to just use the cases that they have all remembered then they might have to try to go back to the principles more likely to take a better example uh if you've learned some skill in school uh like well or let's say a skill like driving you once used rules say for parking John surl has an example of the parking Rule and John used to say that we can still Park so the rule must be unconscious but then John and I had a little discussion about this for a while and now he doesn't say that anymore I don't think uh because if that would be the that kind of philosophical move but what's important is if you got into some funny position situation where parking was very difficult maybe you were driving uh in England and everything was on the wrong side of the street and the steering wheel was on the wrong side of the car for you then you might have to go back and try to remember and apply the rule but if it's routine you don't have to think anymore I'll get my mirror in line with their steering wheel and then I'll turn 45° to to the left or right or whatever the original thing you learned Aristotle who was the person who almost saved Philosophy from the this kind of over intellectual detached theoretical way of looking at things and who was as heiger says much closer to the phenomena than the philosophers before or after uh said that this that this view of skill that you get in in Plato which I by the way is most clearly laid out in the Mino where he talks about about how even a slave boy can be led to do mathematics because the uh math is uh innate the soul still has it in it from this other life even though it doesn't remember it anymore all this seemed uh wrong to Aristotle Aristotle says someplace that when somebody has a skill they just straight way do the appropriate thing at the appropriate time in the appropriate way that's right that's the highly situational particular successful skillful way to behave and Aristotle doesn't have any uh thoughts that this is somehow innate principles that are being followed or learned principles that are being followed and because there's nothing in the phenomena that uh would lead one to think so it doesn't prove by the way to to when you describe the phenomena of skill skill ful coping and expertise by saying that the expert doesn't seem to be following any rules doesn't isn't aware of any rules that you can't describe their behavior by finding any rules doesn't prove that there aren't any rules in the brain running the whole thing but it certainly does do something that philosophers think is important it switches the burden of proof as philosophers say from if from then on it's up to the whoever is making the argument for unconscious principles or rules to show either that there's something in the phenomena or something about psychology experiments or about the brain that brings in these rules Aristotle just thought there was no evidence for them and stuck to the phenomena the interesting thing about Aristotle is that he was struggling to get out from under Plato and uh but he had been taught by Plato and he had accepted a whole lot of platonism so he there's always two sides to Aristotle the side that is interested in this uh in involved skillful coping but there's also a side that thinks that we are basically rational it comes out in the ethics in a way that people write papers and books about have for 2,000 years a seeming deep contradiction in Aristotle's ethics where he starts out by saying man is basically a political animal and the highest thing you can do is engage in the Democratic politics of the polus of Athens and then in the last book of the ethics he says the highest thing is re detached rational contemplation and doing philosophy and doing Theory and the highest thing you can do is in effect stay in your study and think about philosophy and nobody knows how to get these two things together are you supposed to be out out there going to the voting every day as to how to run Athens or are you supposed to be staying in your study doing the hard work that Aristotle was doing of working out the whole metaphysical structure of reality and I'm just bringing out the the side of Aristotle that I like and that heiger likes the there are other people say Alistair McIntyre for instance who has a much more rationalist uh understanding of Aristotle for instance Aristotle talks about choice and and deliberation and you can understand that in uh two ways you can think that he really means that you are ought to reflect and choose on the basis of that reflection or he could mean something like uh it's okay to reflect but finally the kind of choice he has in mind is that you just do one of these things rather than the other and it's this final sort of skillful opting for something that counts as choice I don't think we should get into that anymore uh let's go on it Aristotle carried the day in in rationalist form more than not and in in the Middle Ages but then dayart brings back the whole platonic Socratic uh way of looking at things by every way by being a completely theoretical detached Observer thinking that you can only find out what is really true by taking the most detached non-passionate non-committed non involved stance he writes his meditations he says when he has no passions and no jobs he withdraws into a warm room it seems to say in the that he withdraws into a stove obviously a warm room with a big stove utterly he says with no involvements and no concerns and then he can think philosophy and really get it right about reality the idea is that any uh commitments you have or emotional involvements you have or even practical needs you have will distort your uh ability to see things in this objective detached way which reveals them as they really are it sounds plausible it's a strong uh uh Direction in our tradition so deart goes back into this mode thinks that there is in the mind uh representations of the world out there and that in these representations are made up of uh elements what he calls simple Natures which which reflect uh the features the isolable features of reality out there and what we want to do is have an accurate representation or picture or description in our minds of the world outside of us this whole business of which we all sort of believe now of the inner and the outer that there is this sort of inner self we've got inner mind we've got and we have to get that into relation to this outer reality is uh cartisian uh St Augustine started it he had a lot of trouble convincing people that there was such a thing as an inner self he brought up after images and pointed out that there are sometimes things that you think you see but you don't really see so they must be in you he uh had a lot to say about the amazing thing that I think it was St Ambrose could read to himself everybody read out loud apparently up to then the idea that somebody could read to themselves suggested that there was was some kind of thinking going on privately inside of them and Augustine found that very interesting and deart is the outcome of that other tradition the the the platonic tradition on the one hand that there's all this rules representations Machinery in the mind and this augustinian tradition that there is this private Inner Space which is the mind and it's sort of filled with these principles and so you get the worst of all possible worlds from from an existentialist point of view in dayart and you get this important new idea that in the mind are what I would call people call symbolic representations of the external world that that way of talking is new and it will lead eventually right into the belief that computers are intelligent because they also have internal symbolic representations of the external world can't tell a computer from a human being on this on on that point uh if you're a cartisian so deart made that move uh and philosophers just generally followed along uh Kant said that Concepts were rules uh livets as I said says that skills are theories uh um huso thinks that concepts are hierarchies of rules it gets more and more like computer thinking as it develops until haiger comes along reacting to his teacher husel or his mentor he wasn't exactly his teacher uh he was hil's assistant but haiger really reverses everything he is standing on the shoulders of of of uh Pascal and kard and I can say more about them later but it's better on the way we're talking about it just to say kard was the first to say that involvement was more important and more basic than Detachment and uh Pascal already saw that too but haiger is the one who really works this out in being in time in 1927 he says the that theory is a founded mode of uh relating to the world and by that he means there is something more basic which is uh everyday he says dealing with entities which I call this involved coping but every day dealing with things uh dealing with equipment finding your way about in the world another expression of his uh is what we do most of the time it's what's fundamental to what it is to be a human being theory is a very special condition which arises when the breakdown when there's a breakdown of this everyday coping and we have to become detached and do the best we can but theory is not sort of the highest thing human beings do and it's not the ultimate explanation of the everyday reality that we have and it doesn't underly the skillful coping that we uh engage in all the time another way to put this is heiger had a distinction between the world and the universe the world which is this everyday surrounding of equipment like chairs and uh microphones and uh books and so forth all interrelated is where we normally live and it's the realest thing we experience there is a universe of stuff out there and we can know something about it heiger wasn't against science on my reading of him he admired science and he wasn't an anti-realist on my reading either he was a realist about science and science did tell us something about the underlying causal properties of things that this chair couldn't support me if it didn't have the properties of rigidity and so forth but all of that is uh derivative and uh he heiger would say privative you only get there by leaving out the vast amount of meaning and reality that's that's in our everyday world where we start and in terms of which we have to make sense of everything and even in science we have to have an account of how come we can talk about a universe independent of our everyday meaning he has a he has an account of that but so and the the next point is heiger also goes against the tradition in that he does not think that we deal with the World by way of inner representations descriptions uh pictures of the world which we then either get right or wrong he's very much against what he calls this he he he says the distinction between the inner and the outer between the subject and the object between uh my representations of the world and what's represented out there this is a big mistake it's a construction he says meaning it's something philosophers have made up and he says it leads to more and more constructions cuz it always is looking like it's not quite right and then they have to make up something in order to defend it and all of that heiger wants to say just isn't in the phenomenon that when I try to describe how human beings relate to the world he says we're absorbed in coping we are I think of it like an athlete in in in flow Larry Bird the the the famous basketball player says at one point that he when he's sort of intensely involved in the game he isn't aware until afterward that he's passed the ball I mean what he that doesn't mean that he acts like a robot he's very very skillful and very very sensitive and obviously he somehow takes account of it I would say his brain is obviously taking account of a very complicated situation on the in the basketball court but uh his mind isn't in isn't even turned on I mean he's so absorbed in it that he is just uh transparently responding to the overall pattern of what's going on this is haider's picture at the extreme but generally how we ordinarily deal when we're talking to somebody when we're walking around when we're getting dressed when we're entering a room he talks about to the to his students about using the door knob when you enter the classroom he says that you don't notice the door knob that you're not aware of the door knob you are just entering the classroom you use the door you go around the benches but uh you don't have to uh have any uh awareness of them um and he would further say that if the doorknob was stuck then you would become aware of it and then you would have some kind of mental what John Sur would call an intentional State a mental state say of trying to turn the door knob and believing that if you could turn the doorknob you could get the door open all that Machinery that philosophers think uh is basic and that surl thinks is basic we argue about this a lot uh heiger thinks is correct but it's not basic it's what happens when there's a disturbance what's basic is you don't try you don't think you don't reflect you don't solve problems you don't have beliefs you just cope the way you go through the door and turn the door knob or the way you drive your foot takes care of the clutch and your hands take care of the gears you can be talking about something else thinking about something else uh uh if you are an expert you will simply respond to the current situation in a highly specific way like Larry Bird in a very uh flexible way but and the more it'll be more specific and more flexible and more successful the less you think about it the less you're aware of what you're doing so that's heer's view he has three levels haiger the what he calls the ready to hand or the available is the stuff around us like the door knob that we just transparently use and he says the more it withdraws and becomes transparent the more we can successfully use it uh then he has what uh the unready to hand level the unavailable that's like the door knob sticking then there's some kind of disturbance and then we have then we become a subject with interstates trying to deal with something wrong in in the external world and then if think of it this way if the door knob were really hopelessly stuck you might have to this is a little far-fetched but just to give an example stand back completely give up even trying to get into the room and get a new theory about doorknobs uh I'll be more to be more reasonable I mean you can always either when there's a breakdown total breakdown or just out of intellectual curiosity step outside of this whole involved getting around in the world and just think about the properties of things and if you do that then you're on the theory level and there is what heider calls a switch over in which you leave out a huge amount you leave out the world in which there's space in which there are things that are near and far and you're at the same of it you leave out equipment which is seen as good for and bad for various sorts of things and the equipment has certain places in the world and it's either in its place or not in its place and you leave out meaning where meaning means sort of what good is it to to me as I'm coping or or not not reflective sort of meaning but things just showing up as making sense to do and other stuff not showing up at all because it doesn't make sense to do all that is gone and you have this switch over where you become a Pure rational reflective mind contemplating a pure meaningless nature and from there you can build a whole new thing science and philosophy all of which heideker thinks is perfectly okay as long as you don't make the mistake then of reading it back and saying it was more basic than the world and it explain it will explain the world and it was there all along underlying the world that's uh you can say It's Tricky I mean you can say that nature is there all along underlying all this stuff in the sense that it will explain it causally but what you can't say is that nature will explain the meaning of it that is the chairs are to sit on or to take a heiger example that hammers are to hammer nails nails are to build houses people do this because they need shelter and other people build the houses because they have the role of being carpenters and the whole world is organized by equipment and roles into a meaningful totality that heider calls significance that gets left out when you turn to science and philosophy and it can't be gotten back from science philosophy nature rules none of that can get you significance you that's why significance is more basic significance can lead you to science but science cannot the what science discovers cannot be used to reconstruct significance in the jargon of philosophy heiger is not a reductionist you can't reduce this meaningful significant world that we live in and share to objects natural objects following physical laws you also can't reduce it to mental entities symbols following mental rules it's irreducible and basic and richer than all of these other things and that's the world and we are in haiger language being in the world when we're coping we are absorbed in the world and we only can understand ourselves back from this collection of uh equipment and other people and so forth One summary way to put it for haiger human beings haiger says are the being the beings whose being is an issue for them or something like they have to take a stand on what it is to be and what it is to be human and what it is to be me say Bert dyus and the important that's all already interesting but what's important and overlooked I think by some people who read heiger is the only way you can take this stand is through what you do in the world if I'm if if if I understand myself at all I understand myself let's say as a teacher I can't just sort of inner have an inner view that I'm a teacher being a teacher is dealing with equipment like blackboards and chalk and textbooks and dealing with other people like students and being willing to devote your life to teaching and being involved in that and having a skill for that all that goes into my identity as a teacher so I can't even be me without this whole world of significance as that through which I'm able to be me the cartisian separation between or even a sural who's close to cartisian of an inner subject with a mind mind and a brain on the one side and the world out there on the other which suggests at least in dayart that I could be me whether there was any world or not the whole skepticism problem in dayart vanishes in haiger he claims he doesn't even want to answer the skeptic you can't even raise the skeptical question because if you talk about human being as he understands human being there couldn't be any human being except as already involved with other people and with things and so the idea sort of what if there was me and none of this existed doesn't make any sense to him for heiger who you are is the social role that you've taken over either chosen or just growing up into so being a carpenter for instance for and you can also in high have a more unique role than that you can even sort of make your own social role by taking up something from the past in your tradition and making that into a new role but it's it's still a role it's never really you in haiger just to sort of finish haiger before going to kard and heiger what's essential about you is that you are the being that take up that role or another role that you are fundamentally this this being that can take a stand on its own being and that means that you are fundamentally a nullity in heiger language you're a null basis of a nullity meaning that the most fundamental thing about you is that you don't have any particular content or identity you you've always got some content or identity because you've already come from a tradition and you've assigned yourself to some role but you could change that and the important thing about that is that you can change that and therefore you can see from that that sort of heiger will lead to sart where you are nothingness I mean the the nullity in heiger gets spelled out as the nothingness in being and nothingness in s but so but that's not the direction I I would I would go so let's go back to carard for carard who you are is basically whatever unconditional commitment you've got then in his language sometimes he talks about an infinite passion sometimes he talks I guess well unconditional commitment is probably kard language though I wouldn't know quite where to find it tick another philosopher Theologian talks about ultimate concern but I I let's stick to unconditional commitment in kard you don't become fully a self until you and this is his language relate yourself to yourself by relating to another now heiger you can see got a lot out of that by saying you don't have a self until you take up a world and roles and everything but in K guard that meant that business of relating to another have an unconditional commitment to another so that you know that you are the the uh let's say lover of Mary if that's your unconditional commitment that gives you your identity or say Martin Luther King was the person who was going to bring Justice to the black people now uh that when you have an unconditional commitment like that lots of interesting things follow carard things what's important to you is what's relevant to your relation to the person you love or what's important to Martin Luther King presumably when he gets up in the morning he never has to worry about whether life is meaningless or not what's important to him is the current decisions that have to be made if you're having a a protest March that day or something like or getting people out of jail or whatever the current thing is your whole world is organized in terms of what is relevant significant important and that is always what is tied up with your unconditional commitment kard calls that infinite by that it he means that that's World defining that is everything in your world which is infinite in the sense that it's more than just a finite set of stuff everything in your world everything that could ever possibly come into your world is defined in its relevance gets its relevance its meaning from this commitment so you have an infinite uh you have uh this mixture of the infinite and the finite to talk like carard I'm going to explain this in terms of there are six factors in the self and they they are the way kard explains what it is to be a self so you've got to do justice to the finite and the infinite that is to having a unconditional commitment to something finite that defines the world that is open to an infinite number of possible significant things you you also have something which he calls necessary the necessary and the possible have to be brought together what's necessary for you is that you are now defined as say the leader of the black people that's necessary like a definition like 2 plus 2 equal 4 Martin Luther King is the leader of the black people then the the final set of factors that kard uses when he tries to describe the self is really important for the difference between him and haiger is what he calls the temporal and the Eternal the temporal is easy I mean you obviously are living dayt day in time expressing this relationship or this commitment or this uh uh whatever you find is essential to you you express it uh in time but the Eternal which is the most interesting part and I guess it's the sort of the religious part is that this identity once you got it you got it for forever for your whole life that that's what uh that in that way is the way it's like a definition you can't just sort of drop the the love that you've got or the the unconditional commitment what's unconditional about it is nothing trumps this commitment you it it it's absolutely certain for you necessary for you and eternal in the following way that every particular moment of your life would normally be up for grabs so and reinterpreted so when you go to school you might be glad that you went to Berkeley and then it might work out badly and you think it was a big mistake to go to Berkeley and then it turned out to be a good thing to go to Berkeley and you'll never finish interpreting and reinterpreting uh what this event means or any event in your life means sart has a good description of how up to the moment you die your life is constantly up for reinterpretation and the only reason it gets a settled meaning at all in sart is that you just die at that point but then it gets an arbitrary settled move meaning that is that's how you were interpreting it when you died but for kard it's got this other kind of meaning the the moment that you get one of these unconditional commitments it's not part of this temporal stream of events that get reinterpreted it doesn't get reinterpreted if you ever get one of these defining relations it is that in terms of which everything else gets reinterpreted so everything is seen as leading up to this experience Say by Martin Luther King he finally found his calling or his vocation that's another name for these this defining commitment and once You' got a calling or vocation then everything from then on gets interpreted in terms of it and if you should ever give it up then it would be interpreted as complete betrayal of yourself and you'd be a kind of zombie afterward like the man in uh 1984 who betrays the woman he loves to because of his when when he's going to be tortured and and wishes that it was happening to her and from then on he's lost what gave him his identity and gave his life meaning and he feels that he's betrayed everything and he's just a kind of Pawn of the state from then on so kard has this idea that once you get an unconditional commitment you're uh you have eternity in time as he puts it and then your life has meaning in terms of this commitment this raises a whole lot of other problems I think we probably shouldn't go into which is what do you do if this person dies or what do you do if the cause is lost or even what do you do if the cause is one I mean Martin Luther King had a problem when he did succeed in getting Justice for the black people he was sort of lost he got involved in the Vietnam War and he got involved in other things but uh his sort of central defining commitment had been more or less achieved well kard has maybe I better say a word about that kard thinks that if you live this loss in an involved way well there are two possibilities there's the old Detachment philosophical possibility that you turn your defining commitment into to some significance some ideal so Dante turns his love of beatric when beatric dies into his love of the ideal beatric who's in heaven and he then doesn't have to worry about losing her in this life and his he still has the Eternal significance of this relationship unfortunately he loses the the finite and the temporal kard says because there's no way that you can express day by day this eternal significance if you turn it into a kind of the ideal of the love see the behind this why I had to talk about the six factors is kard thinks that if you don't have all of them in your life something finite that gives you a world something that gives you a definition and freedom to adapt and something that gives you day byday meaning in time but Eternal significance too if you don't have all of that you'll be in Despair and you won't really be your self so the question is what do you do if you lose the the finite then if you make this philosophical movement as he calls it to what he calls infinite resignation and turn this whole thing into a detached significance and and get out of the involvement then you'll be in despair the only thing you can do and he's not very clear about this I just for the record so people won't think that I'm interpreting kard there's only a few sentences where kard even hints what you should do but he says when Abraham who is one of his examples of having a defining commitment in this case to Isaac and through Isaac to the being the father of the Hebrew people when he's prepared to sacrifice Isaac he thinks that uh in kard language that by virtue of the Absurd even though he sacrifices Isaac he'll get Isaac back this is all very complicated but let me explain it in and here's another principle of mine don't I don't get caught in the fancy words try to find the phenomena what's the phenomena the phenomena is grief If you experience this loss let's talk about the love person in an involved way don't make a philosophical movement and detach yourself and think about the significance of it but really suffer the loss then what you do is you transform this definition into you being the person who loved so and so and lost so and so and that still has Eternal meaning for you uh that is it's forever significant throughout your life but you can be open to another defining commitment to somebody else or to some other cause which doesn't mean that you've sort of contradicted the previous gener commitment cuz you sort of added on to the previous commitment you're now the person who has loved and lost say Mary but has now loved the beatric or Jane um so kard thinks what he calls the night of faith is the only one who as he puts it is the joyful heir to the finite meaning the only one who can have a life that is fixed and stable and an identity that's meaningful and a life in which there's always something worth doing and have it in a way which uh is both sort of uh realistic about the insecurity of it and yet lives in it with a sense that it's secure in in the funny language of kard the Knight of Faith sees the sword hanging over the head of the beloved and yet lives as if it's the shest thing of all and kard says this is a paradox the Paradox of existence the important thing is that he's got a view of how to have a stable identity so that you're not nothing like you are in in haiger and in sart you really are the lover of Mary or the leader of the black people you can have a stable identity you can have eternity in time and you can understand the risk involved and do it anyway and if you do it right with the right kind of involvement you will always have some commitment some in to live your life by I find this is really interesting and important in kard this is the this is sort of the core truth of Christianity according to kard no other religion has has uh understood the importance of unconditional commitment and no other religion has seen according to Kart how you can get the Eternal and the temporal the finite and the infinite the necessary and freedom all together in one life I've become so uh heerz and heiger was so opposed to husel that in the end there's practically nothing left of husel that heiger accepted he was always very polite in his criticism of husel cuz he respected him and hro was his mentor and so forth but if you read between the lines or letters that heideker wrote you can see that he thinks that hro was just cartisian through and through that as long as you have this inner outer the the my world in my mind and and the external world as long as you think that as heiger puts it there's this relation where I have to transcend myself in order to get to the world uh you can't get anything right so it's not I don't in a certain way I don't think heiger really learned anything from Hil it's as if what happens in fact is that hro learned something important from heiger in Reading being in time twice husel saw that there was this life world which that haiger that was hell's name for it in haiger this world of everyday equipment and people and things in which we normally live and which is very rich in meaning and therefore HL incorporates that in his book crisis of the European Sciences which is a late book after he' read heiger twice and there it looks like hustel thinks that that's reality and that we're in it and he even says heiger like things that this is the atmosphere of Our Lives that it's not an object for us and you think or one reads it I think when I read it well it looks like HL has finally got it but then he hasn't got it he makes this amazing move he says in effect that we can still perform what he calls the transcendental reduction we can distinguish the life world from transcendental Consciousness which means the mind which is directed toward it which is self-contained and so forth and in the end what he says is that uh we can describe the life world because it is really what corresponds to a set of beliefs in us and we can describe the beliefs it's as if the world is for husel the correlative of a what's sometimes called a belief system in us so he's never really got it he never understood that we were being in the world he thought we were self-contained transcendental consciousnesses with a belief system in us that mirrored the world which gets him back to dayart so I don't think that there's anything uh that I can explain very well I'll say one more thing but it's rather technical the real thing that haiger learned from hell w was husel tried to show that logic and the idea that there were substances with properties could be abstracted from our everyday experience of perception of objects so he had in a way the priority of perception over logic and Theory that's what's new that is what's new because deart still thought theory was more basic and the perception was a confused kind of theory what heiger does is he takes that move in husel and he converts it into his version of how we get to a world of subjects sorry of substances with with properties like uh uh an object that's brown this chair for uh and but heiger thinks we get there by our the breakdown of our everyday coping skills remember I talked about that and so he transforms hell's story about how perception can be uh the basis of conception of Concepts into a story about how everyday coping can be the basis of theory and that kind of derivation is something I think that he got from huso which is really very important and interesting but that's about all the intentional Arc is that my experience with things shows up in the look of the things which then solicits more sophisticated skills in dealing with the things which then makes the things things look richer and as if they afforded more possibilities for action and there's no place in there again for reflection for mental images my knowledge isn't in me my knowledge of the chair is in the increasing richness of the uh perception of or the of the I don't even want to say perception because that sounds too inner it's in the increasing richness of my encounter with the chair uh the of course I sort of hesitated my brain is when I hesitated I was trying to think how to explain this of course my brain is changing as I get more and more experience with chairs marilo panti doesn't doubt that but it doesn't the and the changes amount to sort of recording what I'm learning about chairs but this doesn't come to me as beliefs I've got about chairs Consciousness I've got about chairs visual experiences in my mind of chairs this way my brain is changing as I deal with chairs comes to me as the way the chair changes in my world and uh that's one of the very important idea in marilo ponti and it's very hiig Gary and it's his version of being in the world he's got his version of to be sort of I am devoted to the world you could translate that in haiger I'm absorbed in the world in Mero panti I'm devoted to the world it comes to the same thing in haiger the meaning is this social traditional uh aspect of the world that I am just socialized and grow up into uh there's never any lack of meaning because I'm already taken up into a tradition by the time I'm you know just a baby even and uh everything already shows up for me in terms of this meaning Merlo panti has this interesting claim that he he says we are condemned to meaning we can't help but make sense of things and things are constantly given more and more meaning by us as we uh encounter them and cope with them uh they are not uh they don't get into this problem of uh the meaninglessness of things because they think that you only get into that if you sort of step back in this detached mode in Merlo panti if you just stare at things in a certain way they just decompose into colors and shapes and so forth like uh impressionist painters can do and then they become meaningless but our natural involvement as moving embodied coping beings is to encounter things as uh full of meaning for us soliciting various actions affording sitting or hammering or walking so yes they are all meaning people not not not for and once you get this involvement in the world way of starting then meaning will be there by the way another meaning person who's got this so clear is D Dei I I think of him as a philosopher and I teach him I teach the brothers katsov there's a place where in the brothers katov Ivan is worrying about the the meaning of life and whether he will accept the world or not and aliosha says you've got to love life first and then ask for the meaning of it you you've got to in effect duses is saying also already uh accept your involvement in the world all the good characters do and from there you can ask the meaning of it and you can ask what to do next about about it and there's another place oh yeah and if you reflect you lose your your sense of morality and you lose your involvement there's an important place where Ivon understands his role in the murder of his father and gets ready to go to the police and confess and he then is very rare for Ivon to be involved he's a philosopher he was a philosophy student that that doeski says and he's an intellectual and he uh that's he's he's the one most uh uh in Despair and most uh in danger of the brothers caramat of because he's the one who's not impulsive and when he has this impulsive idea that he will go to the police and confess he feels good and he's doing the right thing and then he thinks it over and reflects and says well it's late at night I will do it tomorrow morning and dfki says and all of a sudden something cold came over him and he goes into his room room and he he finds that the devil is waiting for him there and all kinds of bad things happen but the idea that you you live life at its best when you're involved and that you're constantly in danger of becoming uh immoral and meaningless if you step out of it and try to take a philosophical reflective view is very clear and interestingly put forth in the brothers for heiger we are in direct contact with the reality that's how we are and is by taking a stand on ourselves by way of coping with the things which are just immediately given in our environment and are full of meaning and significance in a certain way one would have thought that uh sart would take this up since sart is very influenced by being in time but sart is also influenced by Hil and in his first important philosophical book nausea he gets a much more hosan view in which the the whole thing becomes the the the meaning that haiger is so clear about and and demonstrates so well becomes all meaningless because like H sart really falls into the philosophical tradition in a strange way in NAIA when the hero Ro becomes more and more I guess you could say psychotic and gets a more and more detached view of reality the more he gets at things as they really are so when finally he is sitting just staring not doing anything and staring at a chestnut tree root in the famous center part of nausea he gradually sees the the root lose its function as a pump for the tree and lose its colors until it just finally becomes a kind of viscous meaningless something and then according to sart he's finally seen existence he's seen reality as it really is completely meaningless with all the properties and functions have been read into it by us that is a typical H sort of our individual way of taking it has given it this apparent significance but in itself it is just this meaningless viscous so goo and so s finally in that book goes in the direction of saying that a detached just staring view reveals reality as it really is and then we see that it is meaningless I think in a certain way that's right I mean if you what's right about it is if you just stare at things in a way that has no involvement in acting hasn't even got any active perception like walking around it or going up and feeling it it will just become more and more just a bunch of colors and finally maybe just a kind of Goo appearing and meaningless but the mistake is to think there and there you understand how things really are that's a very unmotivated uh implausible philosophical move and S never really goes back on it in being in nothingness he has the view that in his final ontology that is what there really is is on the one hand Consciousness which he calls the for itself which is the source of all meaning and on the other hand the mere sort of what is just what it is and has no characteristics at all the in itself which is the sort of air to the viscous chestnut tree route and the world is Meaningful for us because we give meaning the for itself gives meaning to the in itself there are elements of carard in it the for itself uses the world so to speak to try to give itself some kind of definition but the four itself and this is a bit of heiger in it is pure nothingness is really just nullity just this source of meanings that has no content or meaning so it s not doesn't believe you can get a defining commitment he thinks that whatever we are is so free that we can constantly redefine whatever we are nothing could ever become necessary for us no commitment could ever be Eternal forever and therefore we are a kind of nullity but and this is sort of the kardian piece we must have some kind of content we we need to become what he call calls an in itself for itself that is we need to become conscious and conscious of having some meaning some content so all of our activity is understood by sart as a way of trying to cover up our nothingness and delude ourselves into thinking that we have an identity a uh uh some kind of content and meaning in our lives but since we really don't and can't have it because we are pure freedom and nothingness uh we are as he says a feudal passion uh in kardian terms we would we're in despair in a way he's very KAG Guardian if you can't get the self together if you couldn't get ever uh both necessity and freedom temporal and eternal you'd be in despair kard says because the self needs that well sart says yes that's right the self needs it needs to have an identity needs to have uh its own nature its own being but it can't so life is a feudal passion and we are constantly in bad faith we are constantly busy covering up the fact that we are the kind of being that needs something which we can't have so it's sort of secularized car guard it's car guard without the possibility of uh unconditional commitments which give you eternity and it's much further along than haiger I mean further toward neoism in than haiger because in sart you don't even have the sense that you that you are some you are thrown into in in in heiger terms a world which is already meaningful and has a tradition in which you grow up and in which you can't get out uh and that much meaning is never gotten rid of in in in heiger it's considered the basic meaning that's the world we're thrown into whereas in sart that whole meaning is called into question as just something we project in order to cover up the fact that there really isn't any meaning up to uh the beginning of modern philosophy there had always been a view of human nature that man was a rational animal or man was made in the image of God or uh what else well those two at least and or maybe a social political kind of animal but some view of human nature and from which you could deduce what was best for human beings because you could see what their role in the cosmos was and then you could see that they were their best when they lived in uh Attunement or Conformity with this role and so forth this breaks at Pascal in about uh 1670 around there someplace Pascal writes the pon is this unfinished book of thoughts and he is a kind of Super Genius in that he really pictures most of the themes of existential philosophy right off he talks a lot about how we're all already involved in action we're already embarked as he puts it and uh how you've got to uh be involved first he says don't try to believe in Christianity just by believing it belief isn't what matters but act as if you believe it go through the motions go to church and kneel and so forth and that way you will become a chrisan it's the priority of of of practice and involvement is clear in in in Pascal but so are some other important themes another one is that the self is a contradiction between opposing factors that it's always been around that the self or human beings had a mind and a body but before Pascal they people some people thought the mind was essential and you could just get rid of the body it was just the Tomb of the Soul Plato said you should die to the body the they were clear that though we had minds and bodies Minds were what we really were that's the way theory for instance comes in again in rationality and Detachment and then there were always materialists and epicurian and uh other people who said no bodies are what we really are Minds give us all these kind of superstitions and religious beliefs that make our lives miserable if we could just get over them and just recognize that we're bodies we would then be able to live uh Happy comfortable lives as far as I know Pascal is the first to say we are essentially minds and essentially bodies and that these are not happily put together but are in a kind of tension and as he puts it the self is a contradiction and our job isn't to resolve the contradiction by saying our nature is to have a body or our nature is to be a mind but as he puts it to to live in the contradiction to live in the extremes and fail all the intervening space that means something like the most important thing for human beings to do is to be alive to the fact that they are living contradictions and live in these contradictions without Pride or despair as he puts it pride is what deart had because deart thought we were these self-contained Minds that could know the mind of God and despair is what he thinks monten had because monten didn't have any belief in God or eternity would just thought we were our sort of everyday embodied people and uh Pascal thinks that we're both and it's very hard to be both and that Jesus is the only one who was really both mind and body both God and humble servant and lived in the extremes of both and did it without pride and despair and we have to imitate him but now to the human nature it somewhat follows from this but you can add a little more there is no human nature I mean we've said that there is this self which is a contradiction but and Christianity in a way gives us an example of how to live with the contradiction but there isn't any answer in the old way where people thought that we were rational animals or we were creatures of God it Pascal saw that what e even Christianity I think he saw I'm not sure whether he saw this was a question of customs and re re Revelation it wasn't anything that you that a philosopher could see was our nature but the important thing is he saw that there were different customs in different cultures and uh that they were totally different and he describes some of them and he concludes from this that quotes custom is our nature that's the beginning of the um existentialist view that depending on the culture you grow up in the tradition you grow up in you will have a different view of what human nature is and there's no right answer to what human nature is except that we've got this contradictory nature that we have to uh live with and take some kind of stand on it and we are the stand we take take on it all this is already in Pascal uh you aren't just this mixture of body and and and uh mind but you are the either the prideful person who takes the prideful stand on it and says you're just mind or you are the despairing person who takes the materialist View and says we're I'm just a body so custom is the n is your nature and you are the stand you take that and one more thing that Pascal said just to put it in because it's so important is the god of the philosophers is not the god of Abraham Isaac and Jacob he had that written on a piece of paper that he had sewed into his shirt as part of his sort of religious experience and that means the god of the philosophers is the detached rational God of Plato and Socrates and dayart a God that you can fully understand and who has a kind of rational Theory of Everything and we can become friends of God Plato said or merge with with God and then we will have a detached rational Theory of Everything But the god of Abraham Isaac and Jacob is an involved God that requires a commitment from the Hebrews and and requires a choice from each Christian as to how to live their lives and even Pascal saw and this is only recently something philosophers see that you couldn't have a clear view of God I mean philosophers have always thought that God was the most clear and the most intelligible being or at least that's one direction that they thought the rationalists particularly Pascal's famous story is that that the God God is a hidden God we can't get a clear view of God there isn't a what is most fundamental in the in the philosophical tradition is what's most intelligible but for Pascal what is most fundamental is not clear not intelligible contradictory all this is stuff he saw amazingly uh early on from Pascal you go right to kard who again thinks there is this sort of structure the human self and kard thinks it's a contradiction of these opposed factors but the important thing is that these factors which is the self has to take a stand on itself and on the basis of the stand that it takes it will give itself what of a different nature and it has it can give itself see the self in kard language he says the self is a relation which relates itself to itself and then later it's a relation that relates itself to Itself by relating to another but first let's just do the this one stand you could take on being this bunch of factors is to emphasize the uh body the body like side and make enjoyment your highest good then you'd be in the aesthetic sphere well first lots of people we should say don't take any stand on being them as self and that's a theme that gets important they just live in what kard calls the present age they have what he call spiritless they just do the conforming sort of thing and they're not passionately committed at all then the next stage is you could be passionately committed to enjoyment that's already a better thing then you would be in what he calls the aesthetic sphere and then the stand you would take on yourself would emphasize the factors that go into the life of enjoyment and that will break down and lead to despair he thinks and then you could try the next commitment would be to an ethical life where you try to follow the principles and do your duty and accept your role as uh father and your social role and so forth he thinks and choose everything responsibly he thinks that will break down into the kind of absurdity that sart sees that if you try to choose everything you will find out that what you choose is completely arbitrary because there's no basis on the which to choose anything because the basis is always up for choice too and choice from nowhere he also thinks that in the ethical mode you want to get behind everything and get clear about who you are and get clear about the principles that you're acting on this is all philosophical stuff I mean he's against it it's despair but he's trying to give the most internal view of the philosophical tradition and make it as attractive as possible and he has lots of good things to say about the ethical life but in the end you can't get clear about what it is to be a human being we are just these embodied traditional skillful beings as I would put it he just says that you can't get Lucid about this is the the idea you have to act out of something that you can't choose or your choices will be arbitrary that sort of soil that sort of given experience out of which you act you can never be Lucid about and from the ethical point of view that brings about despair because the ethical person wants to be Lucid about their actions in heiger this is just taken over as the view that you can't get behind your throwing this as heiger puts it you already take up a culture you take up a a way of life you take up an understanding of being that you can never get clear about you can never get clear of you can never be detached let's say I mean a way to to get a feel for this as it is in kard and as it's worked out in Haider is think of the Consciousness raising groups where women in the70s tried to understand what it was to be feminine in our culture and what they discovered was you can say a lot about it that they take a passive role that they aren't allowed to enter conversations the way men are that uh they're allowed to cry and men aren't but you also see that that's just the tip of the ice that it is so pervasive what it is in our culture to be masculine and feminine and it's so much a question of again practices and skills not beliefs because for both those reasons that it's some embodied way of acting and standing and moving and because it colors everything you can't get completely clear about it you're thrown into it by being raised in our culture so but I was talking more back to kard about human nature so for kard again there's no nature you are the stand that you take and heiger grows out of kard it's Al uh where human being is the being whose being is an issue for it and again there's no human nature there different cultures have taken different stands on what it is to be human and each person has to take their own stand on what it is to be human you have to take it without ever being able to get fully clear about the background that you take over when you take it and uh there in hidinger this is the business of being a null basis of a nullity you can never there are several things you can never get behind your throwing this and get clear about what you're taking over uh you have to take this over and give yourself an identity but the identity is never fixed the way it is in kard it never is eternal it's always up for rech choosing because you're free and that's expressed in heiger by saying you have a certain his view of death which is really not something that happens at the end of your life but something that happens all the time to you which doesn't and it doesn't have anything to do really with demise at the end of your life death has to do with this business of never being defined by any identity and never being defined by any culture even though you've always got an identity and you're always in a culture and then we get to S which is just another version of the same thing when he says there's no human nature but there is s says a human condition that's like Pascal saying there's a structure of the self it's this contradiction there's a structure in s the final version of the structure it's very much like Pascal is again this contradiction in that sart sees that we want to be and in itself for itself that is we want to be conscious of having some fixed nature but we can't both be conscious and have a fixed nature the way he sets it up because Consciousness is freedom to give meaning and a fixed nature would have to be some fixed meaning but there can't be any fixed meaning what Darwin showed uh was that there is something like a human nature it wasn't planned by God and it could have been otherwise it's contingent but there is some way that our organism works all human organisms have evolved to work a certain way there now we would say you know there's a DNA code for what it is to be a human being being and it's being unraveled but I think if somebody said that I think that would all be wrong because that's uh about human beings and what Darwin in the genetic code is about is about human organisms about Homo sapiens about this this animal and there is such a thing and we are it but human beings are something else they're a cultural creation a cultural interpretation of uh this organism for instance in uh the Greeks time to be a human being was to be a possible hero or a bad thing to be a slave or a villain and so there were Heroes and slaves in Athens and villains there weren't for instance any Saints and Sinners in medieval times the self-interpretation of this organism as a human being was that human beings can be either Saints or Sinners and then there were Saints and there were sinners that's people become what the cultural practices interpret them to be there couldn't have been any Saints in sin in Athens uh not just that they wouldn't be recognized they wouldn't exist if there was somebody who always turned the other cheek they would just be considered a poor slavy slob that let everybody walk all over them they wouldn't be an Undiscovered Saint and there were people in medieval times who were strong and who uh would be able to lead others and to make everybody look up to them as their leader but if they did that they would be uh Sinners because of their pride they show up at the bottom of Dante's Inferno because they think that they're self-sufficient and that people should admire them and sing songs about them whereas nobody is self-sufficient everybody depends on God and Only God is what you should sing songs about so there wouldn't have been any heroes in medieval uh not g Greek style heroes in medieval times those Greek style Heroes would have been very bad prideful Sinners the moral of this is people uh create human nature uh what it is to be a human being and it changes in our culture it changes epic by epic so there's one after that after the medieval comes the modern where to be a human being is to be an autonomous self organized uh rational being who decides on the principles on which they act and is lucid and mature can't Define maturity as being a rule unto yourself and uh from Khan's point of view the Christians were just immature because they served God Kant said that with the enlightenment man reached maturity human beings reached maturity because they didn't have to they saw that they didn't have to or weren't uh obedient to a higher authority like God or like the Monarch but that they were their own highest Authority another story about human nature which an existentialist says is just another interpretation Kant says of course this is the truth and it's always been the truth the other people just missed it but now we know it and then after Kant comes the finalist version the one we're in now that human beings are uh beings who who are able to get the most out of their possibilities and the highest thing we can do is uh invent a world so open and so flexible and a and a culture so open and so flexible that everybody can develop and realize their own possibilities as much as possible can't all the others would have considered this outrageous that we were supposed to either serve rationality or God or uh the state or something Steven Weinberg in the in the New York Review of Books talks about about how science shouldn't be looked up to by people to give them guidelines about how to run their society or their lives and then he says at least not until the final science discovers the final principles and particles as if somehow at that point it might be relevant I don't get it I mean it's still not going to be relevant and there's this point where Hawking at the end of uh the Brief History of Time says that when we get it all figured out then we'll know the mind of God and if you knew the mind of God presumably you'd know lots of important things but you'll know you might know the final principles of the universe but you won't know anything important as far as human life is concerned it seems to me and I'm giving you sort of haider's view on this science gets it right could they could know that there really are electrons and they really have a certain weight and they really have a certain Spin and that might be very important for explaining and predicting how things behave but you won't be able to conclude from that what kind of thing a human being is or what kind of life is a good life and uh in that sense science is meaningless the scientific view will tell you sort of the the the genetic code and uh what human beings uh need to to survive and so forth but it won't tell you even whether survival is a good thing maybe it would be good for all human beings to die off it's not up to science to to tell us uh then we find out from our culture what it is to be a human being and it tells us that it's a good thing to be a saint or a good thing to be a hero or a good thing to be mature or a good thing to get the most out of your possibilities and science has nothing to say about that they can't tell you that that can't give you any arguments in favor of this or against this but that's the space in which people live and the space in which they make their choices and uh know whether what's worth doing and what's not worth doing uh and there's just no overlap there that as long as science stays in its place and the world and culture stays in its place and one of them is in charge of meaning and one of them is in charge of uh let's say causal properties there's no conflict and there's no problem it's only when they try to get in each other's territory one way they get in each other's territory is things like sociobiology that try to use uh uh Darwin and evolution to tell us about human uh emotions and and human uh needs the other way they get in the way which seems to be equally bad is when people in philosophy try to tell the scientists that the things they're dealing with aren't real the whole anti-realist story which tries to say that all these scientific entities are really the result of an interpretation I want to say everything else is a result of interpretation the culture is an interpretation what it is to be a human being is an interpretation what it is to be ber Gus is an interpretation but what it is to be an electron isn't an interpretation it's what you find out when you get rid of all interpretations and do what heiger calls the switch over to the present at hand that is the mere stuff that's left when you take away all meaning and all interpretation the attempt to use computers to make intelligent entities or to the attempt to give computers humanlike intelligence is very interesting to somebody like me who thinks of themselves as an applied philosopher and it was just incredible luck for me that when I went to teach at MIT in 19 uh 58 roughly it was just the beginning of artificial intelligence it got named I think in 1957 and John McCarthy was at Mi and Marvin Minsky the two of the pioneers of artificial intelligence and what's interesting about it is artificial intelligence itself is applied philosophy the whole history of philosophy a certain part of it a certain School of it let's call it rationalist uh atomistic School of it has thought that the mind was made up of representations or descriptions of the world and these descriptions were written in terms of basic symbols which corresponded to fundamental features of the world the artificial intelligence people call them AI from now on the AI people took this philosophical view over from dayart really but Hobbs also had it uh and turned it into a research program in about 1957 their idea was well let's find this this basic representation in the mind and let's find these Primitives as they call them they card called them simple Natures that is let's find the elementary symbols that reflect or represent the elementary features in the world and then we can manipulate those symbols combine them into descriptions of objects make inferences from them about what these objects will do and what we can do with them and so forth and thereby create the something just like the mind because they thought following these rationalist atomistic philosophers that that's what the mind was was a atomistic symbolic representation of reality and so I got interested in it because it seemed to me that if this was right then of course heiger and Merlo PTI were wrong because they said our basic relation to the world which is our intelligent coping relation doesn't involve mental content mental representations intentional content whatever you have there are lots of different words for this there's nothing in the mind that's like a description of the world and which then produces our Behavior we just cope with things directly so and of course the brain does something but what the brain does whatever that is is not manipulate symbols according to rules like they were trying to do with computers in those days now they're trying to make par parenthesis now they're trying to make brain like computers simulated neural Nets and heiger and I and will have no objection to that of course the brain does it in some way and of course the brain does it like a neural net and if you put enough neurons together and maybe put them in a body I think that's probably important too you could make a computer that was intelligent maybe we'll do so in a thousand years or something but what interested me at MIT in 1958 was the proposal to do this make intelligence without a body without a brain but just by using symbols put together by rules and that's only somebody in the west who came out of the philosophical tradition of dayart would ever think of such a thing the end of the time I was at MIT there was a student a graduate student named char who was trying to make a program that would have common sense and it was It was supposed to have at least the intelligence of a four-year-old child and to see whether it had the intelligence of a four-year-old child it was supposed to be able to answer questions of the sort that a four-year-old child could answer after hearing a simple story so and this is how the problem was presented and how it emerged the they were going to use Minsky's ideas of frames and Minsky had suggested that there was something there for instance the birthday party frame tells you that in B birthdays the children have parties and they bring presents and so forth and that's we know that as a kind of uh list of things and you could give the computer a birthday party frame this is what Lynette does for millions of frames um so the idea was you tell the computer the following story um uh Mary and it was Jack's birthday Mary and Jane were going to jack let's take them a kite let's take him a kite said Mary no said Jane he's already got one he'll make you take it back now what's interesting about that is that if you ask a child why were they going to Jacks the child will know it's to a birthday party though it's never said in there it just says they were it was his birthday and they were going to Jacks now that's the frame will fill that in and if they and if you ask the child and why were they bringing him a kite the child will know it's a birthday present although it's doesn't say anything about birthday presents the frame will fill it in but then comes the tough one It Ends by saying no he's already got one he's he's already got a kite he'll make you take it back now if you ask the question what does the it refer to does it refer to the kite he's already got or the kite or the new kite that he'll have to take back uh the the grammar was set up so you couldn't just look back and find out it says he's already got one that is the old kite he'll make you take it back grammatically he he they he ought to make them take the old kite back but every child presumably even by time they're four knows that you if youve got two things like that and you get a new if you got one and you get another one you have to take the new one back you can't take the old one back to the store um now the question is where is that bit of knowledge put away it's not in the birthday party frame oh if well there are two things according to this charc thesis one the rule if you've already got one thing you don't want another one just like it it's hard to know where to put a rule like that it secondly you have to take the new one back you can't take the old one back there is the real that was their upset because where in the organization of knowledge are you going to put that in the department store frame in the birthday present frame in the middle-sized dry goods frame it doesn't make any it's just a piece of knowledge we know and there's millions of pieces of knowledge presumably like that that we know which wouldn't be organizable into frames and we wouldn't know what to do with them and if you put them on just one great big list then the relevance problem appears again even worse so uh and they've never Sol it they don't know how to organize knowledge so that AR that knowledge like that is going to be in the right place but I thought when I heard it that's just the beginning of the problem take the rule if you've already got one you don't want another just like it that certainly or might apply to kites I'm not even sure but it certainly doesn't apply to dollar bills or marbles or cookies if the rule really says everything else being equal if you've got one you don't want another one just like it but this everything else being equal has packed in it the whole knowledge of The Human Condition in the rules I you have to know whether for instance cookies if you've got one cookie you might want another but if the cookie is huge maybe one is enough but then again if you're a Cookie Monster one it wouldn't be enough and uh you a whole background understanding of human coping this kid at four already has and has it in a way which is very hard to understand how it's organized and can't be captured in strict rules but only what's called cedus parabus rules which are these everything else being equal rules and then the common sense knowledge problem reappears in the everything else being equal and it was clear to me at that point that they're never going to make it that uh Common Sense knowledge just isn't going to be graspable in the form of knowing a lot of facts that it's got to be organized in some entirely different way and then I think now people are beginning to understand that it'll have to be organized in kind of skill and pattern recognition ways that don't use the computer Compu as philosophers would have used the computer namely as having in it symbols and rules but use the computer to to simulate the brain because the brain obviously does it the brain learns to match whole millions of input patterns with appropriate actions and when we understand that we'll understand something about intelligence there'll still be a huge gap by the way I'm not at absolutely optimistic about even the neural networks because they have to take the input that they get and uh how would we put it I don't want to they aren't human so you can't use Mental terms but let's use Mental terms they have to take a given input and see it as similar to input that they've already got in order to process it or take it as input they have to process it here's the way to say it as similar to some previous input because if they've learned that input like this I could draw something on the board of zeros and ones is paired with this action and then they get an input which has similar bunch of zeros and ones but not quite the same they have to see it as similar to the appropriate previous input to pair it with the appropriate action and so similarity is very important in neural net Network learning but the problem is there isn't any such thing as intrinsic similarity everything is similar to everything else and this cup is similar to me it's in the room it contains liquids uh it's warm and uh it reflects light and you could go on and on about how the cup is similar with me but then the cup is very different for me too it's it's not alive and it's uh will break if you drop it and so forth so what counts as similar the depends on us and our interests and our purposes and for instance our bodies things are similarly big if they're big with respect to the size we are and things could be similarly accessible or not accessible given the way we walk towards something overcoming barriers or stopped by barriers so my point is if a neural network is just in a box and is trying to be intelligent it's going to run into the last of my four objections I mean it may be able to do relevance it may be able to store Common Sense it uh will be able to get skills because skills are input output pairs but it won't be able to recognize the appropriate similarities and if it doesn't see the similarities we see then it will just count as stupid by our account well n was the first to talk about the death of God in the gay science and it means according to n that a certain understanding of God no longer has a grip on the culture there are still people who believe in God and uh but fewer and fewer it doesn't sort of organize the culture the way it once did the where Cathedrals were the center of things and where uh reading the Bible uh Ena people to understand what to do and the question is what happens in a culture like ours that has built everything on the idea that there is one Creator God that a combination of Plato's notion of the good which is the source of all intelligibility and the Hebrew Christian notion of Jehovah the Creator God the source of everything and The Giver of Commandments to people in this amazing culture these two grew together in in St Augustine starting it putting PL and the Bible together into a amazingly unified monotheistic God and everything in the culture was built into it as n said so that if that should collapse lots of our ethics and our understanding of what it is to be a human being will collapse with it and that what heiger calls the onto theological view of God namely The God Who is a being who is the cause and a ground of all beings that's the god that's become implausible not even it's not just a Christian God it would be the Philosopher's God n says any any sense that there is this unified uh ground of intelligibility and ethics and meaning when that goes where are we in the culture well there are several things that can happen that interest me when I when I teach about this I teach uh kard and uh dovi as the two people who tried to save the essential message in Christianity by disentangling it from philosophy and the and from science and it starts with Pascal saying the god of the philosophers is not the god of Abraham Isaac and Jacob he's already trying to get Christianity away from this one source Creator ground of everything God and but it only gets worked out in kard where it turns out that what matters is having an unconditional commitment and whoever you have this unconditional commitment for is your savior because they enable you to get yourself together and not have be in Despair and Jesus is important because Jesus is the savior that is he's the first person who showed us how to make unconditional commitments and God the Father just drops out the onto theological God kard us Jus Jesus's quote he who has seen me has seen the father and says we don't need and we don't have access anymore to that kind of uh onto theological god um we've got the Incarnation and the Incarnation shows us the unconditional commitment they're all Incarnation people that's the first way you get out of it Pascal says we have Jesus Jesus shows us how to be a human being without Despair and without PR pride and how to live in our contradictory nature and live it uh be most alive to it for Pascal you can't be happy I don't think the point isn't to be happy it's to be deeply alive to what it is to be a human being and not despairing or proud in kirkgard Jesus shows us the possibility of unconditional commitments in dovi uh again he's gotten rid of the God creator uh it shows up in the is katov in a very funny way that I don't think anybody else has noticed where for Plato God was the son and that was the metaphor for the go God was clear God was the source of all light and light was like intelligibility in DKI whenever he talks about God he always says what I loved most was the slanting Rays of the Setting Sun the rays are what's important not the sun and the rays are the symbols of the connectedness of All Creatures and what the the the Deep truth in Christianity that Jesus showed us was that we should love everybody and we should feel responsible for everybody and ask forgiveness from everybody this is all worked out in the brothers keramat of but the important thing to Dusty is that it's a way of life Christianity namely this way of life of love and connectedness and it's not a relation to some being like the sun sort of outside the world that you should uh that gives everything meaning and for DVI another important thing is that you have to save Christianity from physics and chemistry kagar didn't have that problem so dovi is very clear that you can restate and that's what's happening in the brothers katav all the Christian sacraments uh baptism crucifixion Resurrection Incarnation all of them get explained in uh existential terms in such a way that they don't conflict with the laws of physics and chemistry and D ask even considers neurons which had just been discovered and said suppose everything we did was caused by the wiggling of the tales of these little neurons that wouldn't change anything in our world of the human world where love and forgiveness and everything is the meaningful thing so the first hope is that you might be able to save Christianity by stating it in a non-philosophical non ontotheological and nonscientific way and just save the existential truth in it but if that doesn't work then the next fallback position which uh Melville for instance had in Mobi dick is to uh re uh ReDiscover polytheism where there was for Homer a plurality of Gods and gods weren't sort of s real how will I put it well let's say what they were when when when Aphrodite was around you were in a world suffused by erotic love and things showed up for you as attractive or unattractive when when Aphrodite was around Helen ran off with an attractive Foreigner Paris and left menaus when the war was over and she came back and presumably Hara the domestic God was goddess was in charge nobody blamed her or anything they said well that was afrodite she was in the world of Aphrodite but now we're all in the world of Hera and she was a gracious host and a good Hostess and a good wife and served great dinners to visiting people like Odus and there was a plurality of Worlds and in each world people had an identity they didn't see the problem is to avoid meaninglessness if if the Christian God goes it it it may look like everything is up for grabs nothing has Authority for us and we have no identities that we can count on anymore because uh if we can't make unconditional commitments anymore if we don't believe in that kind of Eternity anymore then it looks like the meaning of Our Lives is constantly up for grabs and reinterpretation but in in for the Greeks when you were under Aphrodite there was Authority namely what was important was erotic love or when you're under Hera what's important is domestic love or when you're under uh Apollo what could be important was I don't know intellectual Clarity or something like that you can live in these various worlds in each World there is meaning and in each world you have an identity and in each world the God has a kind of authority and the question maybe only left is sort of and what is a God is a god some special kind of magical thing outside the world that creates the world no Gods this is what haiger thinks gods are beings in the world that Focus the world and shine as heiger would say with such a Radiance that we can act in their light so let's suppose to take a funny example that Marilyn Monroe was a goddess in her time people say that I'm a sex goddess but they don't know what it means it means that she was the Paradigm of a certain style of being a woman and that women could understand themselves in the light of Marilyn Monroe and see how the the world would show up for them in a certain way and they would see certain possibilities so a God or a goddess was a paradigm case or a manifestation of a certain way of being and a certain style and a certain world that was so clear and so radiant that people could understand their lives in the light of that person or that thing I mean haiger thinks in his example that the the the greek temple did this it it focused a world in his language it focused the world for the people for a certain amount of time these gods aren't Eternal and they aren't the Creator gods and they don't sort of explain the whole universe but they do save people from meaninglessness because you're always if if if you were in a polytheistic culture you would always be in the realm of some God or other and in that realm in the light of that figure who could be a human being like Marilyn Monroe or could be some in for the Greeks sort of more ideal being like Apollo or Aphrodite as long as you're in the light of that your life will have meaning and you will have Direction so it seems to me polytheism is a possible thing that our culture might come back to and the hints of it I think are in this interest people have in angels angels are sort of interesting in that they're not like this onto theological one unified Creator God I don't know much about angels I haven't had time to read books about angels but I have a feeling that it's a kind of confused grope for a new kind of spirituality in which there will be individual beings they could be human beings they will be human beings really who Focus worlds and give meaning to uh people's lives for a while and why for a while one while the people are in their worlds and two while these gods have power and they will lose power like different generations of gods in Homer had power and then some new generation came along and it had power

Channel: Philosophy Overdose

Views: 36,456

Keywords: History of Philosophy, Epistemology, Ontology, Analytic Philosophy, Philosophy Overdose, Metaphysics, Social Philosophy, Bryan Magee, Husserl, Heidegger, Existentialism, Hubert Dreyfus, Sartre, Continental Philosophy, Absurd, Meaninglessness, Death, Authenticity, Dasein, Intentionality, Cartesian, Being and Time, Descartes, Consciousness, Merleau-Ponty, Subject-Object, The Self, Subjectivity, Nihilism, Jean-Paul Sartre, Beauvoir, Foundationalism, German Philosophy, Philosophy, Martin Heidegger, Modernity

Id: iAxu6pg7JU0

Length: 111min 7sec (6667 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 11 2023