Noam Chomsky - "The machine, the ghost, and the limits of understanding"

welcome everyone I'm Melea Elswick I'm director CS man and we are extremely happy to have professor Noam Chomsky with us let me just say that he is the most quoted writer in academia alive now no comparison at all than anybody else and I think it's fair to say he is number one public intellectual in the world so please professor Chomsky okay I'll talk some about Isaac Newton and his contributions to a study of mind that he's not known for that but I think a case can be made that he did make substantial indirect but nevertheless substantial contributions I'd like to explain why there is a familiar view that the early Scientific Revolution beginning and through the 17th century provided humans with limitless explanatory power and that that conclusion is established more firmly by Darwin's discoveries theory of evolution I'm having mine specifically a recent publication exposition this view by two distinguished physicist and philosophers David Albert and David Deutsch but it's commonly held with may variance there's a corollary the corollary is ridicule of what's called by many philosophers miss Tyrion ISM that's the absurd notion that there are mysteries of nature that human intelligence will never be able to grasp it's of some interest to notice that this belief is radically different from the conclusions of the great figures who actually carried out the early Scientific Revolution also interesting to notice how in consistent it is with what the theory of evolution implies and has always been understood to imply since its origins and I'd like to say a few words about those two topics in turn start with David Humes the history of England is of course a chapter on the Scientific Revolution and in particular on the crucial role of Isaac Newton who he describes as the greatest and rarest genius that ever arose for the ornament and instruction of the species and Hume concluded that Newton's greatest achievement was that while he seemed to draw the veil from some of the mysteries of nature he showed at the same time the imperfections of the mechanical philosophy and thereby restored nature's ultimate secrets to that obscurity in which they ever did and ever will remain the mechanical philosophy of course was the guiding doctrine of the Scientific Revolution it held that the world is a machine a grander version of the kind of automata that stimulated the imagination of thinkers of the time but much in the way programmed computers do today they were thinking of the remarkable clocks the artifacts constructed by skilled artisans most famous was Jacques de volcán some devices that imitated the digestion animal behavior or the machines that you could find in the Royal Gardens as you walk through the pronounced words and when they were triggered and many other such devices the mechanical philosophy wanted to dispense with occult notions do scholastic notions of forms flitting through the air sympathies and antipathies such are Colt ideas and it wanted to be hard-headed to keep to what's grounded in common sense understanding and it in fact provided the criterion for intelligibility from Galileo through Newton and indeed well beyond well it's well known also that Descartes had claimed to have explained the phenomena of the material world in such mechanical terms while also demonstrating that they're not all-encompassing don't reach into the domain of mind his view he therefore postulated a new principle to account for what was beyond the reach of the mechanical philosophy and while this too was sometimes ridiculed it's in fact full in accord with normal scientific not scientific method he was working within the framework of substance philosophy so the new principle was a second substance his race kogatana and then there's a scientific problem that he and others faced determining its character and ask determining how it interacts with the mechanical world that's the mind-body problem cast within the Scientific Revolution that it's a scientific problem well it was for a time the mechanical philosophy was shattered by Newton as humid and with it went the notion of understanding of the world that the Scientific Revolution sought to attain and the mind-body problem also disappeared and I don't believe has been resurrected through this still a lot of talk about what it those conclusions actually were pretty well understood in the centuries that followed they've often been forgotten today john locke had already reached conclusions rather similar to Humes he was exploring the nature of our ideas and he recognized I'll quote him that body as far as we can conceive is able only to strike an effect body and Mo according to the utmost reach of our ideas is able to produce nothing but motion these are the basic tenets of course of the mechanical philosophy they yield the conclusion that there can be no interaction without contact which is our common sense intuition and modern research and cognitive science has given a lot of have given pretty much pretty solid grounds for Locke's reflections on the nature of our ideas it's revealed that our common-sense understanding of the nature of bodies and their interactions as no nowadays we would say in large part genetically determined it's a lot it's very much as Locke described very young infants can recognize a principle of causality through contact not in any other way if they recognize causality they seek a hidden contact somewhere and those in fact appear to be the limits of our ideas of our common sense the occult ideas of the Scholastic's or of Newton Newtonian attraction it goes beyond our understanding and is unintelligible at least by the criteria of the Scientific Revolution very much like him Locke concluded therefore that we may we remain in incurable ignorant of what we desire to know about matter and its effects no science of bodies is within our reach and he went on to say we could only appeal to the arbitrary determination of that all-wise agent who has made them to be and operate as they do in a manner wholly above our weak understanding to conceive actually Galileo had reached much the same conclusions at the end of his life he was frustrated by the failure of the mechanical philosophy is ideal its failure to account for a cohesion attraction other phenomena and he was forced to reject quoting him the vain presumption of understanding everything were to conclude even worse that there is not a single effect in nature such that the most ingenious theorist can arrive at a complete understanding of it actually Descartes though more optimistic had also recognized the limits of our cognitive reach occasionally he's not entirely consistent about this but a rule eight of the regular reads if the series of subjects to be examined if in the series of subjects to be examined we come to a subject of which our intellect cannot gain a good enough intuition we must stop there and we must not examine the other matters that follow but must remain from refrain from futile toil specifically that Descartes speculated that the workings of race kogatana second subjects substance may be beyond human understanding so he thought quoting him again we may not have intelligence enough to understand the workings of mind in particular the normal use of language one of his main concept he recognized that the normal use of language as what has come to be called a creative aspect it's every every human being but no beast machine is has this capacity to use language in ways that are appropriate to situations but not caused by them as crucial difference and to formulate and express thoughts that may be entirely new and to do so without bound may be incited or inclined to speak in certain ways by internal and external circumstances but not compelled to do so it's the way his lowers but the matter which was a mystery to Descartes and remains a mystery to us though quite clearly as a fact well Descartes nevertheless continued that even if the explanation of normal use of language and other forms of free and coherent choice of action even if that lies beyond our cognitive grasp as it apparently does that's no reason he said to question the authenticity of our experience quite generally he said the free will which is at the core of this is the noblest thing we have and there is nothing we comprehend more evidently and more perfectly so it would therefore be absurd to doubt something that we comprehend intimately and experience within ourselves namely that the free actions of men are undetermined merely because it conflicts with something else which we know must be by its nature incomprehensible to us that much like Lockheed had in mind divine preordination one of the leading galileo scholars Peter matcha Mar observes that by adopting the mechanical philosophy and thus initiating the modern Scientific Revolution Galileo had forged a new model of intelligibility for human understanding with new criteria for coherent explanation of natural phenomena so for Galileo real understanding requires a mechanical model that is a device that an artists artisan could construct least in principle hence intelligible to us so Galileo rejected traditional theories of tides because as he said we cannot duplicate them by means of appropriate artificial devices and his great successors adhere to these high standards of intelligibility and explanation so it's therefore quite understandable why Newton's discoveries were so stridently resisted by the greatest scientists of the day christiaan huygens described newton's concept of attraction as an absurdity Leibniz charged that he was reintroducing occult ideas similar to the sympathies and antipathies of the much ridiculed Scholastic science and he was offering no physical explanation for phenomena of the material world and it's important to notice that Newton agreed very largely agreed he wrote that the notion of action at a distance is inconceivable it's so great an absurdity that I believe no man who has in philosophical matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it as philosophical means what we call scientific by invoking that principle he said we concede that we we do not understand the phenomena of the material world so a Newton scholarship recognizes that I'd be Cohen for example or dukester house pick someone else points out that by the word understand that Newton still meant what his critics meant understand in mechanical terms of contact contact action Newton did have a famous phrase which you all know I for the phrase I frame no hypotheses and it's in this context that it appears he had been unable to discover the physical cause of gravity so he left the question open he said to us it is enough that gravity does really exist and act according to the laws which we have explained and abundantly serves to account for all the motions of the celestial bodies and of our sea the tides but while agreeing as he did that his proposals were so absurd that no serious scientist could take him seriously he defended himself from the charge that he was reverting to the mysticism of the worst Italians what he argued was that his principles were not occult only their causes were a cult so in his words to derive general principles inductively from phenomena and afterwards to tell to tell us how the properties of actions of all corporeal things follow from these manifest principles would be a very great step in philosophy of science though the causes of the principles were not yet discovered and by the phrase not yet discovered Newton the word yet is crucial Newton was expressing his hope that the causes would someday be discovered in physical terms meaning mechanical terms that was a hope that lasted right through the 19th century was finally dashed by 20th century science so that hope is gone the model of intelligibility that reigned from Galileo through Newton and he well beyond has a corollary when mechanism fails understanding fails so Newton's absurdities were finally over time just incorporated into a common sense Natural Science study them in school today but that's quite different from common sense understanding so to put it differently one long-term consequence of the Newtonian revolution was to lower the standards of intelligibility for natural science there's the hope to understand the world which did animate the modern scientific revolution that was finally abandoned it was replaced by a very different and far less demanding goal namely to develop intelligible theories of the world so as such further absurdities as say curved space-time or quantum indeterminacy were absorbed into the natural sciences the very idea of an intelligible of intelligibility is dis does itself absurd for example by Bertrand Russell who knew the science is very well by the late 1920s he repeatedly praised it places the word intelligible in quotes to highlight the absurdity of the quest and he dismisses the qualms of the founders the great founders of the Scientific Revolution and Newton others dismisses them as their qualms about action at a distance he dismisses these as little more than a prejudice although a more sympathetic and I think accurate description would be that they simply had higher standards of intelligibility and if you look at the work of leading physicists they more or less say the same thing so a couple of years after Russell wrote Paul Dirac Rhoda well-known introduction to quantum mechanics in which he says that physical science no longer seeks to provide pictures of how the world works that is a model functioning on essentially classical lines but only seeks to provide a way of looking at the fundamental laws which makes their self-consistency obvious so we understand the theories we've given up trying to understand the world he was referring of course to the inconceivable collusions conclusions of quantum physics but if modern thinkers hadn't forgotten the past he could just as well have been referring to the classical Newtonian models and which were undermined by Newton undermining the hope of rendering natural phenomena intelligible that was the primary goal the animating spirit of the early scientific revolution there's a classic nineteenth-century history of materialism by Friedrich longa translated in English an introduction by Russell longa observes that we have so accustomed ourselves to the abstract notion of forces or rather to a notion hovering and a mystic obscurity between abstraction and concrete comprehension that we no longer find any difficulty in making one particle of matter act upon another without immediate contact through void space without a material link from such ideas the great mathematicians and physicists of the 17th century were far removed they were genuine materialists they insisted that contact mediate contact as a condition of influence this transition he says was one of the most important turning points in the whole history of materialism deprived the notion of much significance if any at all and with materialism goes the notion of physical of body other counterparts they have no longer any significance and he adds that what Newton held to be such a great absurdity that no philosophic thinker could light upon it is prized by posterity as Newton's great discovery of the harmony of the universe those conclusions are quite commonplace in history of science so 50 years ago Alexander quarreied another great historian of science and scientists observed that despite his unwillingness to accept the conclusion Newton had demonstrated that a purely materialistic pattern of nature is utterly impossible and a purely materialistic or mechanistic physics as well his mathematical physics required the admission into the body of science of incomprehensible and inexplicable facts imposed on us by empiricism that is by what we conclude from observations despite these this recognition the debates did not end so about a century ago Boltzmann's a molecular theory of gases or kick relays structural chemistry in fact even Bohr's atom ones you will learn in school these were only given an instrument interpretation modern history of chemistry standard history points out that they were regarded as calculating devices but with no physical reality and Newton's belief that the causes of his principles were not yet discovered implying that they would be it was echoed it was echoed by for example by Bertrand Russell in 1927 he wrote that chemical laws cannot at present be reduced the physical laws much like Newton he hoped it would happen an expected that it would but that expectation also proved to be vain as vain as Newton's shortly after Russell wrote this it was shown that chemical laws will never be reduced to physical laws because the conception of physical laws was erroneous finally done and Linus Pauling's the quantum theoretic account of the chemical bond shortly but very much as in Newton's day the perceived explanatory gap as it's now called by philosophers that was never filled today interestingly just few years ago we read of the thesis of the new biology that things mental indeed minds are emergent properties of brains though these emergencies are emergencies are produced by principles that we do not yet understand that's a neuroscientist Vernon Mount Castle he's formulating the guiding theme of a collection of essays reviewing the results of what was called the decade of the brain last decade of 20th century his phrase we do not yet understand might very well suffer the same fate as Russell's similar comment about chemistry seventy years earlier or for that matter Newton's much earlier one in fact in many ways today's theory of mind I think is recapitulating errors that were exposed in the 1930s with regard to chemistry and centuries before that with regard to core physics though in that case leaving us with a mystery that may be a permanent one for humans as humid actually asserted throughout all this and today as well we can optimistically look forward to unification of some kind but not necessarily reduction which is something quite different talk about reductionism is highly misleading it's been abandoned over and over again in the history of science seeking unification much weaker goal sometimes in the case of classic case of Newton and what he left veiled in mystery that's may involve a significant lowering of expectations and standards well let me go back to the beginning the exuberant thesis that the early Scientific Revolution provided humans with limitless explanatory power if we look over the history I think quite different conclusion is in order the founders of the Scientific Revolution were compelled by their discoveries to recognize that human explanatory power is not only not limitless but does not even reach to the most elementary phenomena of the natural world that's masked by lowering the criteria of intelligibility of understanding well according if we accept that much as I think we should a less ambitious question arises the goals of science having been lowered to finding intelligible theories weaken sensibly can we sensibly maintain we can ask this can we sensibly maintain that humanly accessible theories are limitless in their explanatory scope so much weaker goal and furthermore does the theory of evolution establish the limitless reach of human cognitive can disseminate sense actually think about it the opposite conclusion seems much more reasonable the theory of evolution of course places humans firmly within the natural world it regards humans as biological organisms is very much like others and for every such organism its capacities have scope and limits to go together that includes the cognitive domain so rats for example I can't solve for say a prime number maze that's because they lack the appropriate concepts it's not lack of memory or anything like that they just don't have the concepts so for rats we can make a useful distinction between problems and mysteries problems are tasks that lie within their cognitive reach in principle mysteries are ones that don't mysteries for rats then may not be mysteries for us if humans are not angels if we're part of the organic world then human cognitive capacity is also going to have scope and limits so accordingly the distinction between problems and mysteries holds for humans and it's a task for science to delimit it maybe we can maybe we can't but at least it's a formula will test and not inconsistent it's not inconsistent to think that we might be able to discover the limits of our cognitive capacities therefore those who accept modern biology should all be mysterion's instead of ridiculing it because mysterion ISM follows directly from the theory of evolution everything we believe about scientifically believe about humans so the common ridicule of this concept right through philosophy of mind at what it amounts to is the claim that somehow humans are angels exempt from biological constraints and in fact far from be whaling the existence of mysteries for humans that we should be extremely grateful for it because if there are no limits to what we might call say the science forming capacity it would also have no scope just as if the genetic endowment imposed no constraints on growth it would mean that we could be at most some shapeless amoeboid creature reflecting accidents of an unanalyzed environment the conditions that prevent a human embryo from becoming saya insect or a chicken those very same conditions play a critical role in determining that the embryo can become a human can't have one without the other and the same holds in the cognitive domain actually classical aesthetic theory recognized that recognize that there's a relation between scope and limits without any rules there can be no genuine creative activity and that's even the case when creative work challenges and revises prevailing rules so far from establishing the limitless scope of human cognitive capacities a modern evolutionary theory and in fact all standard science undermines that hope now that was actually appreciated right away when the power of the theory of evolution came to be recognized one enlightening cases Charles Sanders purse and his inquiry into what he called abduction which is rather different from the way the term is used today purse was struck particularly by striking fact that in the history of science that major discoveries are often made independently and almost simultaneously which suggests that some principle is directing inquiring minds towards that goal under the existing circumstances of understanding and something similar is true for early childhood learning so if you put aside the pathology or pathology or extreme deprivation that children are essentially uniform in this capacity and they uniformly make quite astounding discoveries about the world going well beyond what any kind of data analysis could have could yield in the case of language now known that that's starts even before birth so child is born with some conception of what counts as a language and can even recognize its mother's language is distinct from another language both spoken by a bilingual woman who's never heard before this interesting distinctions determining how it works but can be done at birth and in fact even the first step of language acquisition which is generally searches taken for granted it's quite a remarkable achievement an infant has to select from the environment from what William James called the blooming buzzing confusion the infant has to somehow select the data that are language related it's a task that's a total mystery for any other organism they have absolutely no way of doing it but it's a reflexively solved problem for human infants and so the story continues all the way to the outer reaches of scientific discovery well and it may not be continuous I'm not suggesting that there's probably different capacities involved rather like Hume that purse concluded that humans must have what he called an abductive instinct which provides a limit on admissible hypotheses so that only certain explanatory schemes can be entertained but not infinitely many others all compatible with available data purse argued that this instinct develops through natural selection that is the variants that yield truths about the world provide a selectional advantage and are retained through descent with modification Darwin's notions while others fall away that belief is completely unsustainable takes only a moment to show that that can't be true and if you drop it as we must we're left with a serious and challenging scientific problem namely determine the innate components of our cognitive nature those that are employed in reflexive identification of language relevant data or in other cognitive domains take one famous case the capacity of humans which is quite remarkable - if presented with a sequence of two Kista scopic presentations just dots on a screen three dots on a screen presented with a sequence of these what you perceive is a rigid object in motion some of the cognitive principles are known but not the neural basis for or for example discovering and comprehending Newton's laws or developing string theory or solving problems of quantum entanglement or as complex as you like and there is a further task that's to determine the scope and limits of human understanding incidentally some differently structured organism some Martian say might regard human mysteries as simple problems and might wonder that we can't find the answers or even ask the right questions just as we wonder about the inability of rats to run prime number of mazes it's not because of limits of memory or other superficial constraints but because of the very design of our cognitive nature and their cognitive nature so actually if you think it through I think it's quite clear that the Newton's remarkable achievements led to a significant lowering of the expectations of science a severe restriction on the role of intelligibility they furthermore demonstrated that it's an error to ridicule what's called the ghost in the machine that's what I and others were taught at your age and the best graduate schools Harvard in my case but that's just a mistake Newton did not exorcise the ghosts rather he exercised the machine he left the ghost completely intact and by so doing he inadvertently set the study of mind on a quite a new course that made it possible to integrate it into the sciences and Newton may very well have realized this throughout his life he struggled the later life struggled vainly of course with the paradoxes and conundrums that he followed from his theory and he speculated that what he called spirit which he couldn't identify but whatever it is might be the cause of all movement in nature including the power of moving our body by our thoughts and the same power within other living creatures though how this is done and by what laws that we do not know that we cannot say he concluded that all nature is not alive going a step beyond Newton the Locke suggested Locke added that we cannot say that matter does not think that's a speculation that's called Locke suggestion in history philosophy so as Locke put it it just has God had added to motion inconceivable effects it is not much more remote from our comprehension to conceive that God can if he pleases super add to matter the Faculty of thinking locked found this view repugnant to the idea of senseless matter but he said that we cannot reject it because of our incurable ignorance and the limits of our ideas that is our cognitive capacities having no intelligible concept of matter or or physical as we still don't incidentally but having no such concept we he said we cannot dismiss the possibility of living or thinking matter particularly after Newton had undermine totally undermined common sense understanding permanently lock suggestion was understood and it was taken up right through the night the 18th century a human concluded that motion may be and actually is the cause of our thought and perception others argued that since thought which is produced in the brain cannot exist if this organ is wanting and since there's no reason any longer to question the existence of thinking matter it's necessary to conclude that the brain is a special organ designed to produce thought that much as the stomach and the intestines are designed to operate the digestion the liver to filter bile and so on through the bodily organs so just as foods enter the stomach and leave it with new qualities so impressions arrive at the brain through the nerves and are then isolated they arrive isolated and without any coherence but the organ the brain enters into action it acts on them it sends them back changed into ideas which the language of physiognomies and gesture or the signs of speech and writing manifest outwardly I'm still quoting we conclude then with the same certainty that the brain digests as it were the impressions that that is organically it makes the secretion of thought just as the liver secretes bile Darwin put the matter who agreed with this but the matter succinctly he asked rhetorically why is thought being a secretion of the brain more wonderful than gravity a property of matter a property that we understand but we just came to accept its therefore rather odd to read today what I quoted before the leading thesis of the decade of the brand that ended the last century namely that things mental indeed Minds are emergent properties of brains mount castle summary strange to read that because it was commonplace in the 18th century so it's not clear why it's an emerging thesis and it's many other prominent scientists and philosophers have presented essentially the same thesis as quotes and contemporary examples and astonishing hypothesis of the new biology of radical new idea in the philosophy of mind the bold assertion that mental phenomena are entirely natural and caused by the neurophysiological activities of the brain opening the door to a novel promising inquiries a rejection of Cartesian mind-body dualism and so on all of these reiterate in virtually the same words formulations of centuries ago the traditional mind-body problem having become unfor malleable with the disappearance of the only coherent notion of body again physical material and so on and so for example Joseph Priestley's conclusion 18th century that properties termed mental reduce somehow to the organical structure of the brain ID ingenuity which he developed in quite interesting ways an idea which was stated in different words less detailed by Hume Darwin many others and almost inescapable it would seem after the collapse of the mechanical philosophy well with the belated revival of ideas that were reasonably well understood centuries ago and our direct conclusions of Newton's discoveries we're left with scientific problems about the theory of mind they can be pursued in many like other questions of science maybe with an eye to eventual unification whatever form it may take if any that enterprise renews a task that Hume understood quite well he called it the investigation of the science of human nature the search for the secret Springs and principles by which the human mind is actuated in its operations including those parts of our knowledge that are derived from the original hand of nature so what we would call genetic endowment I'm another human core tsa's you know the arch empiricist but also a dedicated nativist supposed to be the opposite of empiricism and he had to be because he was reasonable the that this inquiry which Hume compared in principle to Newton's I had in fact been undertaken in quite sophisticated ways by English neoplatonist and work that directly influenced Kant in there's a contemporary in contemporary literature there are their names for this and sometimes called naturalization of philosophy or epistemology naturalized or sometimes just cognitive science but in fact it's the direct consequence of Newton's a demolition of the idea of grasping the nature of the world and inescapable so let me just summarize briefly I think it's fair to conclude that the hopes and expectations of the early Scientific Revolution were dashed by Newton's discoveries which leaves us with several conclusions one conclusion actually reinforced by Darwin is that while our cognitive capacities may be vast and scoped they are nonetheless intrinsically limited some questions that we might like to explore may well beyond lie beyond our cognitive reach that we may not even be able to formulate the right questions the standards of success may have to be lowered once again as has happened before they vary dramatically with the collapse of the mechanical philosophy and another conclusion is that the mind-body problem can safely be put to rest since there is no coherent alternative to Locke's suggestion and if we adopt Locke suggestion that opens the way to the study of mind as a branch of biology much like the study of the rest of the body on the body below the neck could get metaphorically a great deal has been learned in the past half century of revival of traditional concerns of the early Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment but many of the early leading questions have not been answered and may never be thank you very much we're going to open for questions and comments right away I have a question about mind body you just ended year with like maybe we should just forget that dilemma and my question to you is if you have thought about instead of a well instead of just to forget it and put it in a bracket and then we can just add another factor mind body and the senses and see what happens and I my question to you is have you have anything to say about that combination mind body in the senses yes well mind body is meaningless if there's no body there's no mind body problem and there hasn't been any concept of bodies in student I mean Newton still thought that was there was one but as he put it we haven't yet discovered it meaning accounted for it in mechanical terms but that's been given up certainly by the 20th century so there is no concept of physical the term physical is just kind of like an honorific word kind of like the word real when we say the real truth it doesn't add anything it just is what a serious truth so to say that something physical today just means you got to take it seriously but there's no further concept of physical or material or body so there can't be a mind-body problem it son for me label there's a lot of work you find plenty of articles on the mind-body problem oh that's funny I follow that 12f that's one that I understand yeah but what about senses yeah thank you added that's senses are part of the body no we if you okay I'm so and we all agree yeah this some way in which external the external world impinges on an organism and the way that happens is what we call the senses we have different senses from other organisms like you know there are other working as as much smarter than us they can see ultraviolet light hear things we can't hear and so on but we all have our scope and limit with senses too is that that we there was some kind of reduction of expectations of what an explanation should be when it was no more mechanical and not necessarily mechanical understandable and I wonder the relation between mechanical and material and yeah and also I I've just been to conference on Gregory Bateson and he's easy very into this idea of a information being a difference that makes a difference and he says that a difference is intrinsically non material so the cybernetic causalities they are non material but still mechanical and then I wonder what is the relation between mechanical and material and could there be some of the problem well there can't be a relation because there's no such thing as material that's like saying what's the relation between information and ectoplasm you can't ask that question till you tell us what ectoplasm is and nobody can tell us what material is actually when you look at modern physics you have some pretty interesting proposals there's a book I don't pretend to understand it but published by the American Physical Society so I guess it's taken seriously by a very well-known physicist I think he died recently a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study John Wheeler who argues that the only thing that exists in the world are bits of information namely answers to questions that we pose to nature that's all there is everything else is some kind of construct for those so you know from that point of view all there is is information you know it's apparently not ridiculed by physicists so I'm not able to ridicule and I understand what he means at what he's talking from the framework of quantum theory which says this what's there is our observations the questions we posed to nature and the answers it gives back to us and those are just bits of information everything else is constructed from that it's a little bit like say Eddington and Russell you know early twenties saying that all that really exists is meter readings and everything else is our construction for meter readings so if physicists had the same illusions as psychologists they were in sociologists and others they might call physics meter reading science the way modern study of society and action is sometimes is often called behavioral science it's confusing the topic with the data for it some of the data yeah you were talking about the limits of understanding a little bit and I was watching a clip on YouTube I believe it was in 1971 and you were debating with the French philosopher which is Foucault I believe I don't remember Michel Foucault and you were debating about or his arguments were more I guess that the social limits that we impose ourselves are something that needs to be taught and needs to be enforced well you were trying to say that it was something inherently in the human mind to have kindness and intelligence in order to be like social my question is what what do you think it's our limits for or to be able to go in peace in a social contest and and start struggling I believe in evolution so I think that it's an evolution thing but I think your philosophers are trying very very hard to develop or to understand in order to be more social and peacefully creatures not just philosophers all of us are in our ordinary lives raising children whatever it may be there's no real debate between I mean the debate was not about the importance of social factors of course they exist the debate was about what has taken to be contentious but shouldn't be the existence of innate factors that's very commonly denied and Foucault in fact was denying it but it's just incoherent to deny it if you deny it then our cognitive and social behavior would be like some imagined organism if you can imagine one that doesn't have any genetic program that determines what kind of organism it will be and nothing that determines that will be an insect or a mouse or a human or whatever and it therefore will be nothing it will be some amoeboid style reflection of accidental data a lot of scientists have argued that philosophers too so Quine for example famously I would say infamously argue that language but it would hold free yelled it for all behavior in fact all theories is just the result of some it's a kind of an accidental collection of behaviors they constructed by develop through conditioning I mean that's essentially like saying we're all amoebas amoeboid not even an amoeba because an amoeba has internal structure it doesn't doesn't it doesn't make any sense you can't have any structure in an organism unless there's some form of predetermination that form of predetermination will provide scope it will also impose limits and there's just no way out of that that's practically logic but yes to try to become more humane creatures is not just philosophers quest it should be quest for all of us what are the determination what are the historical or scientifical factors determining the scope of our understanding and can we assume that the scope of our understanding have progressed since say the act and well as far as we know human cognitive capacities have not changed for at least 50,000 years when humans are some small group of hunter-gatherers left Africa and spread all over the world where all their descendants I mean maybe a little more complex than that but not a lot more now we know that pretty well certain moments is like you know it's not that anyone understands the biological nature of it but there's very strong evidence so for example if you take an infant from some tribe in Papua New Guinea that hasn't had other human contact for 40,000 years and that's a possibility and you take that infant and you bring it to Oslo and raise it from infancy in Oslo it will be indistinguishable from the people studying physics and Oslo University it has the same cognitive capacities and conversely you take a you know an infant from here and put it in that drive in Papua New Guinea it will be able to do all the complex cognitive tasks that they can solve but that you and I couldn't possibly solve we couldn't survive there for a week so it looks from evidence less young from evidence like that which is maybe not conclusive but is certainly powerful it seems that cognitive capacities just haven't changed in fact humans are genetically very much alike as compared with other species natl and it's not surprising because there's apparently a common origin not very long ago the 50,000 years is nothing in evolutionary time that's a live link so chances are that whatever the cognitive capacities were 50,000 years ago they still are of course they have to be brought out like like other innate capacities they have to be elicited by experience but they're there you know and I think that's you know him wasn't thinking about evolution of course but when he talked about the common faculties that are given by the original hand of nature I think must be what he meant these were real problems in the 17th and 18th century remember that at the time of the early Scientific Revolution that was also the time of the first real explorations and explorers were finding all sorts of creatures that didn't look like Europeans like Negroes and orangutan and so on and they weren't sure how to distinguish them so which ones are some of them human or not if you if you're a Cartesian rationalist there's a sharp distinction between human and non-human Cartesian rationalism is incompatible with racism so a point that historian philosophy Howard Harold Harry Bracken has discussed at length you can't be a rationalist and a racist you either have a mind or you don't have a mind and if you have a mind it's the same there's only one you know so that's it you can't empiricists on the other hand could be racist because there's no there's you can have different properties and these were hotly debated issues in the 17th and 18th century they couldn't figure out what those other creatures were were the humans or weren't they if they were did they have rights and if so what rights and so on but of course that's long past that now there's just humans were apparently essentially all alike and what we could there could be a study of what our common cognitive capacities are in fact it's studied quite a lot so when you study what the way say infants determine continue the continuity of objects on the basis of very scattered data you're essentially asking the kinds of questions that Descartes asked the court actually people own you know unfortunately philosophers these days tend only to read the meditations but that's Descartes in fact that was kind of propaganda even pointed that alle P the famous letter he wrote to his friend Marcin where he said that the point of the meditations is to try to convince the Jesuits to take his physic seriously that's what he really cared about when he wrote principles of philosophy that means principles of science that's the real stuff and in that work and in the optics and other things he posed very interesting questions he didn't carry out the experiments but he carried out thought experiments very much the way Galileo did and but there she carried him out they'd probably come out his way so like when one was to ask the question I said imagine an infant who has had no experience with geometrical figures okay which in fact is every infant because geometrical figures don't exist in nature just some other things but so take an infant with no experience with geometrical figures present that infant with a triangle drawn on paper is that what the infant will perceive is a distorted triangle not a perfect instance of whatever crazy figure it is you know with the two lines not quite coming together one of them somewhat curved and so on and he regarded that as kind of paradoxical why should that be true and if you're a thoroughgoing and period empiricist you shouldn't permit that conclusion in fact it's a sense the conclusion is almost certainly correct it's a easy refutation of standard empiricism and his conclusion de cartes conclusion was well we must have some innate system of he was some Euclidian geometry which we impose on data to yield our understanding in fact our perception and there's quite a lot of work in the speculation and through the 18th and 17th century on how this could be in basic ideas are probably correct there's no a lot of experimental work and with infants and comparative work investigating it and that is at the beginnings of work trying to find out what our cognitive capacities are there's also work on something like rudimentary science forming how do children develop a concept that the world lacks some rational fashion a lot of this developed out of PJ's work even though doesn't stand up as it he presented it that kind of work has been pursued and that is I think the study of what you're asking how far it can go how can it go up to what kind of scientific theories we can understand that's far off if we no longer consider materialism as relevant but still we want to do philosophy there should be an endeavor there should be a point and what should the endeavor of philosophy be then if it is it pure consciousness is that what we are exploring and and if so how do we go about to explore those limits of knowledge and and how do we practically do that because many people propose for instance that they can use psychedelic substances and so are there some taboos that are stopping us from making that research that would be leaving materialism behind and moving on forward considering different aspects of our experience or whatever I'm not forgetting that right well I don't think we can leave materialism behind until somebody tells us what materialism is that's kind of elementary there was a concept of materialism right through the early Scientific Revolution right through Newton Newton still accepted it in fact the great scientists of the next century accepted it you know lagron others kept trying to develop a material mechanistic concept of the universe that went right through the nineteenth-century ether theories and so on it was finally given up in the 20th century you know finally recognized like we're never going to get it and totally different ways of looking at things were developed which have no relation to traditional materialism and Friedrich longest correct so since and nobody's ever suggested another notion it materialism just is like anything we more or less understand it includes thinking it includes reasoning and so on and so forth Locke suggestion so we can't leave it behind unless someone tells it what it is but there's no reason why we can we can't study it and we can study what the human capacity of understanding is in fact we know some things about it we know some negative things for example we can't understand the way the world works because our concept of understanding is too limited to incorporate what Newton described as an absurdity you know people like Newton and Hume and Locke were not idiots I think I'm seriously they regarded it as an absurdity for very good reasons and modern cognitive science which somehow tries to recapitulate some of this finds pretty much that so as I mentioned an infant presented with presentations which indicate that there's some kind of causality like you know when the ball rolls this way light turns red or something they will invent a mechanical cause and they don't care if it's not visible because infants understand that most of what goes on is invisible you know but there's got to be some mechanical cause otherwise the way for it to influence anything else so that does seem to be the way our minds work and that tells us something about the limits of our understanding in fact a classical crucial case and it can go on to other cases so and when we can't study it directly in principle we can study it directly it's not simple and it's not easy to understand why a rat can't understand can't deal with the prime number may even that's hard and we have good evidence that's true but why it's true is unclear nothing known about the brains of rats that explains why they can't do that if I we can explain why say the tiniest organism that seriously studied C elegans nematodes that eight hundred cells three hundred neurons entire wiring diagram known live in years of study trying to explain why this thing it goes left instead of right let's say it's just we don't know how to explain that it's there's an answer but that these are hard scientific questions when you talk about how human intelligence works it's incomparably more difficult so you can you can ask the questions you can you know cut away at them but we shouldn't we shouldn't exaggerate its kind of striking that going back to what philosophy owe to duel philosophers often appear to intend to want to get answers about humans that we can't get about insects and that's too much you know science sort of works at the edges of understanding and it faces hard questions all the way so we can sort of talk about it but if you want to seriously work on it you have to take a look at what is understood and trust even formulate questions which will which are can be investigated and will tell us more about what's understood actually is interesting work going on on this having to do with things like mark the human moral instinct in the past twenty thirty years that's become an experimental subject with interesting experimental work on universal probably universal moral principles a very important book just came out a couple of weeks ago by John McKay oh he's a philosophers now teaches law at Georgetown University who is a very acute he more or less initiated this modern study didn't publish much but other people of drawing off his a combination of reanalysis of traditional moral philosophy may lead roles and is antecedents and an analysis a lot of the critique of roles and and then on to developing experimental programs to investigate some of these questions and it's feasible maybe we can get some insight into in a human and moral concepts that are that are cross-cultural like you're going to find them at every culture and that you can find with young children the pre any serious cultural impact those are all things that can be studied and there's beginnings of studies I was wondering what do you think about the prospects of genetic engineering and how that might perhaps expand our cognitive abilities and thereby maybe also expanding the scope of what we're able to understand well in order to carry out genetic engineering you have to understand something about the genetics of the traits that you're trying to deal with so if you know Monsanto wants to genetically engineer and say rice that will be immune to some kind of disease they have to understand something about what in the genetics of rice yields the you know the susceptibility of disease when we talk about human understanding we have no clue at the genetics or so you just can't even begin to ask a question I mean that raises the question should we even try if we did know but that ethical question is pretty far off in the distance because the genetics of it aren't understood I mean my own professional work is mostly on language and even in the case of language which is a small part of our cognitive capacity a kind of a central part for a small part and there is any idea with very little idea with the genetics or it's obviously there and you can see its consequences but to try to find it it's very hard and as I said questions like that are not easy to answer about insects or tiny worms would you say that the search for deep so-called particles carriers of influence like the Higgs boson and the photon is that a search for a path back to contact action and therefore mechanical philosophy I'm sure I'd inertia for the photons ever tried to the potato sort of contact the photon Folio the Higgs boson well you know there's a slight problem in physics they can't find 90% of what the universe is made up of but you know doesn't mean an end to physics you just look harder and what they're searching for is the Higgs boson which is supposed to be there and if it is there it can account for why particles have mass other words energy otherwise just can't account for it I'm going to just assume either it's there or something different from the standard models correct but you know until it's found you can't ask whether you can't say whether it exists or whether the standard model that presupposes it is wrong that's a very life question they're spending billions of dollars trying to answer it in Switzerland CERN things like United States instantly it's given up on that quest Congress won't fund it hi I'm my name is timothy chen i'm a postdoc here at CSM bad ok yes ok so I'm professor Tom schedule you mentioned that you fought is legitimate scientific project to investigate go where the limits of human understanding lies so whether question is beyond our ability to answer I just wonder what what kind of evidence or inquiry do you think would be relevant to that so so so just an example you know in philosophy call him again host the wheel that the nature of consciousness or the explanatory craft that's something that you human beings are just never going to be able to answer and I guess there's some some affinity between his position and what you say but then an objection to him that I'm sympathetic to you said well how do you know we cannot know how do you know that if you give human beings with 10,000 years or support we suppose that we haven't gone extinct by that how do you know that you give 10,000 years people are going to come up with new concepts that they don't now have so how do you know that they are not going to be able to solve it so so I just wonder you keep you fake you think there's a scientific evidence for these questions well comp evidence would that be well first of all we're talking about empirical questions and in the case of empirical questions you never know with certainty that's what makes some empirical questions otherwise they'd be questions of logic or maybe arithmetic and even there you can ask questions but if it's empirical we were never going to know with certainty that's for sure that's true by definition so the question really is what evidence do we have and how good is the evidence well in some cases the evidence is pretty good like take the classical case what Newton regarded as an absurdity and again I think have take people like Newton seriously you know and Hume and the Huygens and the rest of them what they regard it as an absurdity is that there could be influence without contact and I well we don't know with certainty that that's the limits of human intelligence there's pretty good evidence if you study first of all we just have it from our own intuitions and from you know the history of centuries of efforts by the leading scientists to try to do --scent to overcome it finally ending in failure abandoning the quest and we also know it are beginning to understand it from just the experimental study of infants children things of the kind that I mentioned they reflexively seek some kind of contact in order to account for correlations than make sense otherwise office visits are finally given that up they said look we're never going to find it it doesn't exist but is it how strong is that evidence well you decide how strong it is looks pretty compelling to me and if it is really the limits of our understanding then nothing's going to change in 10,000 years that just as it didn't change in the last 50,000 what about things beyond that well you know it's not an easy question to ask even about other creatures like rats but you can investigate it are you ever going to get certainty no you'll never have certainty because it's an empirical investigation so that you no bother looking for as far as consciousness is concerned I was very hot topic these days in fact in philosophy it's called the hard problem everything else is an easy problem something but this is the hard problem now you go back to the 17th and 18th century they also had something called a heart problem namely how is motion possible that was the hard problem I mentioned you know Newton wrestled with it finally said it's impossible I'll just have to accept even though we can't find difficult a physical cause that was called the hard rock and philosophy Voltaire you know dedicated Newtonian I said that the fact that humans can cause motion by thought and like I can think I want my hand to go over here and something will move he said that's so inexplicable that it's got to be divine intervention he was of course a pretty dedicated atheist by the standards at the time but it looks as if we're stuck with that and there seemed to be if we look further there are many other many other things oh he takes a language which is easier study there are impossible languages you can construct things you know things that look symbol sequences which are given interpretations and so on but which have a structure that humans cannot learn I mean they may deal with it as a puzzle of some kind but they can't deal with it as a linguistic task there's by now pretty good experimental data on that well that's the kind of thing you expect to find when you look at any organism including our cognate other cognitive capacities as far as consciousness is concerned you know I'm not so convinced that it's the hard problem first of all you have to formulate it coherently what's the problem I mean I quoted Francis Crick I didn't mention him as saying that he has an astonishing hypothesis that consciousness comes from activity of the brain that's lot you know Hume I mean yes they took that for granted so that's the astonishing hypothesis and then you can go to proceed as he and others have done to ask what's going on in the brain when people are conscious okay that's serious work does it answer them suppose you could get all those questions answered does it tell you what consciousness is no leaves open the questions of consciousness and in fact you know we might ultimately be reduced to something like what Bertrand Russell thought it read his analysis of matter for example which unfortunately isn't read much but it's important I think I think it's 1928 or so he says he says look the only thing we have any confidence in is our immediate consciousness and we may be wrong about it but at least we have some degree of constant confidence in it everything else is a metal isn't an intellectual construction including our conception of objects or theory the world and so on so that's if you want the hard rock not too hard because it could be wrong but that's what we have to start with and the best you can do is human okay your political ideas and I they have a foundation on ethics yeah a ethics morality and then I want to ask you how is morality compatible with a limited limited mind better mind human as you put it if I understood you well because in limited mind and determine human I don't see a place for the free will which is the base of morality in the human world so what you think about it about free will and morality which is of course the base of politics and social yeah so human moral principles we can study like the kind of work that I mentioned John mikail others are carrying out the beginnings of experimental work which sheds light on and may ultimately shed a lot of light on what Aaron ate moral principles are what Hume was looking for for example Adam Smith and others that could shed some light on it so I think it's going to tell you much about freedom of the will a freedom of the will I think we're stuck pretty much where dick Hart was we just can't abandon believing it it's our most immediate phenomenologically obvious impression but we can't explain it and as he said if there's something which we just know to be true that we don't have any explanation for it well too bad for our explanatory possibilities but I don't see any way of getting around that there's a lot of arguments that we don't have freedom of the will and those arguments are there's a ton of literature on there and the literature is kind of interesting actually for reasons that William James discussed they said if you believe that there's no freedom of the will why bother presenting an argument you're just you're forced to do it the person you're talking to can't be convinced because there's no such thing as reasons so why not watch a baseball game that wasn't his example but you know anybody who denies freedom the will actually believes that it's there otherwise they wouldn't bother presenting reasons I mean unless they say look I'm just forced to present the I can't do anything else but these reasons yeah and it's very very odd these discussions many of them actually you may have seen some experimental work which caused a big flurry a couple of years ago some neurophysiologists discovered that if a person is going to carry and act the willed action let's say you know pick this up say there's you can find activity in the motor centers of the brain before there's a decision to pick it up okay and that was held to show okay we've undermined freedom of the will it didn't say anything all it cell says is what we ought to know anyway decisions are mostly made unconsciously by the time they reach the level of consciousness they've probably already been made but that doesn't tell anything about how decisions are made but you didn't answer me at least I didn't realize I didn't egg I perceive that I got an answer is it compatible you're teaching about determined genetically determined humans and ethics political ethics morality we will that is what I asked is it compatible or comparable it's incompatible and unexplained you said it's unexplainable I don't understand why belief in certain ethical principles should be inconsistent with the belief that we have an ability to make choices in fact they seem totally consistent maybe it's all wrong but they're consistent if somebody's determined one cannot take a choice that is that is the that's the base of I didn't I don't understand what the alleged inconsistent to use if over here it's more like what you what I thought you said before that immoral the commitment tomorrow principles basically presupposes freedom of the will but I don't see any inconsistent she attributed its some belief in genetic determinism to you but you haven't committed to anything like yeah genetic there's genetic determinism of course that's why I'm that's why we're all humans and not insect because that's our genetic endowment that's genetic determinism just what follows from it you know you have to look and see we don't know my question relates to the previous question actually um free well you know as a philosopher I'd like to pull you as a philosopher I'd like to ask you this question you know studies have shown that decisions made in the brain actually appear some moments before an individual silentium um well how can you then say that there is such a thing is free will I mean thus wiring determinism you know it proves that free will basically doesn't exist those are the experiments I was just referring to there are some experiments which show that in a willed action simple will that motor action you know picking something up there is activity and the relevant parts of the motor cortex before the decision to pick it up is conscious okay that tells us absolutely nothing about freedom of the will accept that choices are probably unconscious but I think we know that without the experiment one complicated oh yeah anything in this area we understand nothing everything's complicated yeah it's another truism you do seem to imply that the theories of physics and chemistry in some way constructs of our imagination and I wouldn't work very much okay to that but you also seem to imply some that they can be deconstructed in some way into in biology they can be deconstructed into the neurobiology of our brains but what gives you the confidence that our scientific method is scientists were I was scientific method yes this method is well what gives you enough confidence in the scientific method to believe the evidence that biology give gives others that seems to be some innate skepticism in that system of thought and me it's all I would other ends up believing in no no nothing at all not even that we do not believe anything than actually believing in our own limitations so if we are so if we are so fundamentally limited as you claimed we are how can we have any confidence in the evidences providing the fact that we are limited a pure skeptic you can give no answers to which means that they're not asking sensible questions we're only interested in sensible questions the kind to which you can even imagine an answer may be a wrong answer but if you can't even imagine an answer it may have the form of a question but it's not a question like for example if you were to ask why two things happen okay that happens I've the structure of an interrogative sentence but it has no answers no even imaginable answers so therefore it's not a question just as the structure of an interrogative the pure skeptic if one can be imagined is posing things that look like questions but aren't really as to how you can have confidence first of all you never have complete confidence if it's if it's an empirical issue in fact you know even even arithmetic you can't have complete conscience come it's known you know you can have non-standard models of arithmetic which satisfy the axioms but are different and so on so if it in empirical questions you develop consonant confidence from experience intuition experiment and so on what's called the scientific method but that's a funny term because there really is nothing that's the scientific method like when you take say a psychology course a program you do take a course in methodology but when you study physics you don't take a course in methodology there's no method other than being reasonable you know and learning from what has been done and seeing if you carry it forward and so on in fact the courses in methodology that you take say in psychology or sociology or our mostly courses in statistics and think techniques you can use but scientific method is you know just whatever way we have of dealing with the world rationally reasonably can we have confidence in it no maybe it's misleading us just as rats are consistently being misled about mazes we can understand it for them but if that's true all we can do is try to see if we can use the same rational approaches to see if we can figure out what the limits of error intellectual capacities are and we have some examples in which I think can have fair confidence like the collapse of the intuitive intuitively obvious fact content interaction requires contact I don't know much about physics so I'm going to ask this like simple simply and maybe you already answered this and do you reject the possibility of a non-physical reality interacting with this physical reality and you like acknowledge it the possibility of it through seeing the effects it might have on the physical reality I'm thinking of like the study of like the smallest entities of an atom and um yeah and also just the power of Attraction what is it well the two of us share something I don't understand physics either so that so we're in the same but in fact I don't think physicists understand it and I'm pretty open about it but see you can't ask the question about a interaction between physical and non-physical until you tell us what physical means okay if at least got to be able to tell us what physical means in order for the question to be answered but there hasn't been any concept of physical for hundreds of years um there was one in the early Scientific Revolution a very intuitive concept of the physical that's what inspired Galileo the cart Leibniz in Newton the garage you know many others all throughout the modern history of science but it's been recognized but it was already recognized after Newton that it's gone like Locke recognized Hume recognized for him it's already gone it's a total mystery beyond our intellectual capacities and that we can speculate about but it's certainly gone and no one has proposed anything else the physical these days are things that Newton would have regarded as total absurdities like curved space-time how can that be physical a quantum entanglement I mean Einstein regarded that as non-physical because it's so absurd but you know now scientists just accept it physical is just anything we more or less understand and if that's the only notion of physical we have there can't be interaction between physical and non-physical non-physical be all the things just all the things we don't understand if we ever get to understand them physical I think that they're getting right close to six o'clock by hankie you you

Channel: Andy80o

Views: 360,998

Rating: 4.8778625 out of 5

Keywords: Science, Noam, Chomsky, Newton, Hume, Mechanical, Philosophy, Descartes, Mind, Body, Locke, Galileo, Russell, Dirac, Biology, Human, Nature, Darwin

Id: D5in5EdjhD0

Length: 91min 53sec (5513 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 30 2012

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

After the lecture ~45mins is when Chomsky's real genius comes out, so if you don't have time just skip to the Q&A

[u/empty_the_tank]

I haven't found a transcription. Does one exist?

[u/paynehouse]

Haha I got a laugh at when that guy at 1:24:00 asked a question about the exact thing Noam literally just answered.

[u/good_signal]

Chomsky is my hero.

[u/Laughing_Chipmunk]

What is the title of the book he is referring to by John Archibald Wheeler ~49:00?

[u/AntonThomas]

I love this video. I first listened to it a few months ago and it mostly went in one ear and out the other as I was distracted at the time. But it was intriguing, the next day I listened again and was astonished, listening to it multiple times over the following weeks. I personally have not heard a more convincing breakdown of our limits. And these limits he articulates are far from actually limiting. I think there's real liberation in the vast frontier he paints for us, and it is incredibly inspiring to embrace the overwhelming mystery of being alive.

[u/[deleted]]

Man this thread is a bummer. Are you guys n gals always this dour? Cheer up. If you are here and spending time free listening to Chomsky, you are already smarter than about 98% of the population. Enjoy it.

Now how about at the end when Chomsky gives such a casual but brilliant answer he should have ripped off that creepy head mic and thrown to ground. He said no one has presented a coherent theory of the physical since before Newton. The physical has just become synonymous with the knowable. Come on, even if you are professional philosopher you gotta love stuff like that. Philosophy doesn't matter much unless it has a social value and that makes Chomsky one of the best. Not only does he get it, but he gets it more than almost anyone to be able to explain to it the average joe.

[u/123catsontheinternet]

This is a uniquely interesting exploration of the universe and of the human mind.

Watch it, and take some time to consider the issues raised. They will stay with you (providing valuable insight) for a long time.

When these things come up, I find it's best to just explore the possibilities and avoid the urge to argue.

[u/ploppymeister]

This part from 16:30 irks me:

"The model of intelligibility that reigned from Galileo through Newton, and indeed well beyond, has a corollary; when mechanism fails, understanding fails."

I don't see any problem with the intelligibility of action at a distance, just because babies and Newton and maybe Chomsky can't wrap their heads around it doesn't mean its not intelligible to modern physicists; most of whom I think would disagree about the limits of intelligibility. Curved space is only absurd if you don't have training in physics, its clearly not impossible to imagine. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/scientific-realism/

Watch this video and tell me that Susskind doesn't have an intelligible grasp on what mass is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqNg819PiZY