What part of
cite where Chomsky clearly states what he Chomsky means by "understanding" and "mystery" and where he soundly demonstrates how he/we can understand whatever it is he/we "will never understand".
— 180 Proof
do you not understand, Xtrix? :roll: — 180 Proof
It may be abandoned in terms of being called the "hard problem", much like gravity's (or motion more generally) non-mechanistic effects had to be accepted: we'll have to accept the fact that matter thinks, without knowing why — Manuel
The purpose of this thread is to (hopefully), get a few people interested in reading this very important article by Chomsky: — Manuel
If you have a more specific question, maybe I can help out. But I think the point here is to show how we've had to lower the standards of intelligibility in human enquiry, because we know much less than we thought. — Manuel
Aside from not understanding (intuitive understanding) how gravity works, we can point to other obvious mysteries: free will, how the world produces qualia, creativity in ordinary language use, imagination, how matter can think and so on. — Manuel
then have the gall to suggest that the world is incomprehensible because of that. It's incrediblely unbelievable. — StreetlightX
Like I said, imagine a post-scholastic Chomsky saying: "we don't know how essence, or attribute, or mode, or [insert outdated vocabulary which no one uses anymore here] works, and it's unlikely that we will ever know. We'll just likely 'move on'!". One would laugh. One does laugh. — StreetlightX
then have the gall to suggest that the world is incomprehensible because of that. — StreetlightX
He's saying we have a much different understanding today, one not confined solely to mechanistic processes -- like contact action, which was what was once meant by "understanding." — Xtrix
But the parochialism lies in the idea that it follows even minimally from the failure of the mechanic philosophy — StreetlightX
As if the whole of the intelligible was at stake in the mechanic philosophy, — StreetlightX
Chomsky is probably right about two things: (1) the mechanical philosophy has exhausted itself; (2) We probably won't end up knowing everything. But that these things have anything whatsoever to do with each other is incredibly silly. — StreetlightX
Thus, there can’t be a mind/body problem — we still have no sense of “body.” — Xtrix
We may not know everything, and perhaps one example is understanding the world in terms of bodies, material, and physical. — Xtrix
What claim do 'bodies' or 'material' have which make them anything other than a limited European set of ideas that have been in vogue for some time? — StreetlightX
I suppose we can argue that science is just a Western invention— and there’s something to that — Xtrix
The idea of contact action, which was the common sense basis for mechanical philosophy, is a human property. — Xtrix
The notion that now strikes us as the most sensible approach to causality, that finite substances are responsible for the changes they cause in other substances (then called the theory of physical influx), was at the time [that Leibniz was writing] the least popular. This was because the only way available to conceive the idea that a substance with a set of properties caused a change in another substance was through the explanation that there was a transmission of properties from the first to the second, which was held to be inconceivable. Therefore, the notions of occasionalism and pre-established harmony became popular among philosophers as elaborate avoidances of physical influx.
The idea of contact action, which was the common sense basis for mechanical philosophy, is a human property.
— Xtrix
But this is simply not true. — StreetlightX
Like, our intuitions are useless. Forget them. They're trash and philosophically uninteresting other than a good historical and cultural tale. If you want to read how absolutely bonkers our (by which I only mean Western) schemes of causality really have been, check out Steven Nadler's editied collection on "Causation in Early Modern Philosophy" (you can find it on Libgen). — StreetlightX
Like, maybe bodies and 'the physical' have a place, but that would have to be argued, and not taken for granted - certainly not in the way that Chomsky does. — StreetlightX
I don't think we can leave materialism behind until someone tells us what materialism is. 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 still accepted it, LaGrange and others still tried to develop a material, mechanistic concept of the universe that went right through the 19th century -- ether theories and so on. It was finally given up in the 20th century. Finally recognized that 'we're never gonna get it.' And totally different ways of looking at things were developed, which have no relation to traditional materialism, if Friedrich Lange is correct -- and nobody has ever suggested another notion.
Materialism is just like anything we more or less understand -- it includes thinking, reasoning, etc. So we can't leave it behind until someone explains what it is. But there's no reason we can't study it. We can study what the human capacity of understanding is. We know some negative things. Like we can't understand how the world works, for example. Because our concept of understanding is too limited to incorporate what Newton described as an absurdity. Newton and Hume and Lock weren't idiots -- we should take them 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. For example, as I mentioned, an infant, presented with presentations which indicate that there's some kind of causality -- like when the ball rolls this way a 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 but there's got to be some mechanical cause otherwise there's no way 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.
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