16 Matching Annotations
  1. May 2024
    1. Spinosa was the great enemy of decart's idea which is 00:23:42 that organisms are mathematically determined from what is in the sperm and the Egg

      for - adjacency - Spinoza - Descartes

      adjacency - between - Spinoza - Descartes - adjacency relationship - Spinosa was the great enemy of Decartes idea which is that - organisms are mathematically determined from what is in the sperm and the Egg - It is a version 300 years earlier of the central dogma of molecular biology - which has been the disaster that has affected biology ever since

  2. Apr 2023
    1. If the metaphysical foundations of our society tell us we have no soul, how on earth are we going to imbue soul into AI? Four hundred years after Descartes and Hobbs, our scientific methods and cultural stories are still heavily influenced by their ideas.

      Key observation - If the metaphysical foundations of our society tell us we have no soul, - how are we going to imbue soul into AI? - Four hundred years after Descartes and Hobbs, - our scientific methods and cultural stories are still heavily influenced by their ideas.

    2. He began a process that would move past merely separating mind and matter, and toward a worldview that saw only matter as real. A contemporary of Descartes, Thomas Hobbes, went further and suggested that thinking arose from small mechanical processes happening in the brain. In doing so, Vervaeke points out, he was laying the ground for artificial intelligence:…what Hobbes is doing is killing the human soul! And of course that’s going to exacerbate the cultural narcissism, because if we no longer have souls, then finding our uniqueness and our true self, the self that we’re going to be true to, becomes extremely paradoxical and problematic. If you don’t have a soul, what is it to be true to your true self? And what is it that makes you utterly unique and special from the rest of the purposeless, meaningless cosmos?

      Quote - Descartes created the mind / body dualism - Thomas Hobbes reduced consciousness to physicalism - by claiming that thinking was an epi-phenomena of atomic interactions

  3. Sep 2022
    1. The idea that analysis must precede synthesis is old, of course. Galileo Galilei and René Descartes already thought it was necessary to distinguish between an analytic and a synthetic step in dealing with any problem.

      Langlois/Seignobos talk about this in their text Introduction aux études historiques (1879) as well, focusing especially on the analysis portion to have a solid base of historical information from which to build and create a synthesis.

  4. Aug 2022
    1. In fact,Descartes argued that the only sure indication that another body possesses ahuman mind, that it is not a mere automaton, is its ability to use language inthe normal way;

      Turing test precursor

      When did Turing pose his test? Year?

    2. Descartesalso arrived, quite early in his investigations, at the conclusion that the studyof mind faces us with a problem of quality of complexity, not merely degreeof complexity. He felt that he had demonstrated that understanding and will,the two fundamental properties of the human mind, involved capacities andprinciples that are not realizable by even the most complex of automata.
  5. Jul 2022
    1. Mechanical and vitalist systems existed concurrently, and although it might seem easy to distinguish them,when we come to look at most specific characters and their thought, the distinctions appear blurred

      Mechanical philosophy and vitalism were popular and co-existed on a non-mutually exclusive spectrum in the seventeenth century.

      Mechanical philosophy is a philosophy of nature which arose broadly in the 17th century and sought to explain all natural phenomenon in terms of matter and motion without relying on "action at a distance" or the idea of a cause and effect that occurred without any physical contact or direct motivation.

      René Descartes, Pierre Gassendi, and Marin Mersenne all held mechanistic viewpoints.

      See also: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitalism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_philosophy

      Link to: - spooky action at a distance (quantum mechanics)

    1. we need to understand what the tradition is that he is feeding from and how what his orientation is he is 00:01:21 taking his own work to be an extension of the work of immanuel kant now if you have not noticed anything in the history of philosophy of mind please 00:01:33 notice descartes and kant those are the two principal landmarks so many others but kant had died at the very start of the 19th century kant was working within a 00:01:46 physical framework that was newtonian in which space and time are simply blocks containers within which things unfold mechanistically that was the metaphysics available to 00:02:00 kant was asking with that metaphysics how do we come to know anything now he had the cogito of descartes very much on his mind but also the the empiricists 00:02:14 concerns with the role of the senses following the tradition of hume and kant attempted to resolve this by noting that there were some things that could not be learned from the world that had 00:02:27 to be in place before any knowledge of the world can happen at all he called these the synthetic a prioris those things that well nothing forces the manas but we can't begin to make 00:02:38 sense of the notion of knowledge without prior notions of time and space and causality this is a difficult position to occupy and can't argumentation was developed in very many ways and gave rise to very many 00:02:53 different kinds of science thereafter for the thing in itself this shell is not knowable rather i encountered a phenomenon of the shell the phenomenon of the shell 00:03:11 through mediated through the senses and the body and i can never thus get to the shell itself this is of course the paradox underlying all representational theories 00:03:22 of perception which is that they seem to leave you estranged from the world and not in contact with the world all knowledge seem to be mediated through the sensors so it need you need 00:03:34 to bootstrap knowledge with these synthetic api ras for accounts this is immanuel kant dies at the start of the 19th century and then about 00:03:45 1870 something like scientific psychology starts to emerge and there's a wide variety of approaches they're drawing among other things from kant but they're not following one 00:03:58 unified agenda funux comes in here and he sees himself as taking kant seriously and he's going to develop in his context in the 1920s and 1930s 00:04:10 the notion of a synthetic a priori changes now instead of the physicalist model of time and space and as containers that we have with kant the body is the ultimate synthetic a 00:04:22 priori for von neux cool epistemology or how a being comes to know the world will only be ever understood through careful attention to the structures of and processes of the body

      Uexkull's work, and formulation of the Umwelt must be contextualized in his predecessor Kant's ontological framing to be understood.

      Based on the Newtonian mechanistic view of the world, Kant postulated that there must be some knowledge that must be known about the world prior to a (human) being being born into the world and called this synthetic apriori knowledge.....namely time, space and causality, the things that a Newtonian, mechanistic worldview assumes at the outset.

      Since any object of the world can only be known through the 5 senses, we are estranged from reality, and there must be some knowledge we must have prior to sensing the world that helps us make sense of it.

  6. Nov 2021
    1. in the old view of enlightenment reason emotion got in the way of reason and motion was the 00:08:34 enemy of reason reason was what you know sort of like mr. Spock on Star Trek you know who is you know super reason no emotion or whatever not true suppose 00:08:49 that you had a stroke or a brain injury that wouldn't allow you to feel emotion and there are such strokes and brain injuries rep Antonio Damasio and his 00:09:01 wife Hana figured out some years ago and published in a book called des cartes error is that you can't reason without emotion emotion is necessary and it's 00:09:14 easy to see why if you cannot feel emotion then like and not like mean nothing to you and you do not know what to want think about it 00:09:27 if you couldn't feel anything if you wouldn't know what it meant to like or not like something or if somebody else or you couldn't tell if someone else would like or not like what you were doing you wouldn't know what to want you couldn't set a goal and this is what 00:09:41 happens to people with such brain injuries they act randomly they don't know how to plan they don't know how to structure their lives or set rational 00:09:53 goals because rationality requires emotion very very deep finding

      "If you do not feel emotion, you do not know what you like or not like, and you do not know what you want.....you couldn't set a goal...and this is what happens with people with such brain injuries. They act randomly. They don't know how to plan. They don't know how to structure their lives or set rational goals, because rationality requires emotions."

      This is a hugely profound statement that Lakoff talks about. Without emotions, we cannot make choices, and without choices we cannot set goals and without goals there can be no intentionality behind actions.Can one imagine a human life without setting goals? We take this so much for granted as a normative human behavior, but our social lives would be profoundly different without this intimate connection between emotion and rationality.

    2. many of you were brought up with the 00:03:57 idea of Enlightenment reason critical thinking an Enlightenment reason had a number of properties and it turns out that most of them are not true 00:04:10 Enlightenment reason is useful in many situations we'll talk about why it's useful and why it's been popular and so on but it's inadequate grossly inadequate for understanding what hew 00:04:22 means for human beings to understand the world and to think so what we're going to do is talk about real reason which is coming out of the neural and sciences and what the properties are so 00:04:36 there's a certain myth that comes out of enlightenment reason it says you know I think therefore I am says Descartes reason is conscious you know what you think it's just not true for most of 00:04:50 your thought it's unconscious mainly about 98% consciousness is a tip of the iceberg you know how do you get 98% there are two ways one if you look at 00:05:03 what you're conscious of versus what your brain is doing the roll is about fifty to one your brain is doing 50 times as much as you're conscious of and there's another way to look at it if you 00:05:15 take a sentence and you say what can the next sentence be in a paragraph and what do you have to fill in to understand all the possible next sentences the answer is that you need to fill in 50 times as 00:05:29 much as it's in that sentence roughly so it's about 98% unconscious you're not even aware that you're filling this in but you're not moreover consciousness could not in 00:05:42 principle in principle be you know you you couldn't have reason being conscious because most of your reason is done in parallel circuitry but consciousness is 00:05:55 linear so you have massively parallel circuitry but you're tracing out a linear path through it and that is means you can only be aware of a tiny portion of what you're thinking now

      Refuting Descartes and Enlightenment myths. Lakoff justifies how neuroscience findings of the processing of the unconscious mind leads him to the statement that 98% of our thoughts are unconscious.

      What emerges into conscious knowing then is a small percentage of what the rest of the processing brain "knows".

      The conscious mind therefore has no direct access to that 98% of what is going on to surface the 2% it is aware of. If we extend knowledge into processes that are beyond simply neural processes, however, this knowledge gap becomes even more pronounced.

      Since human physiology of modern hominins is the evolutionary terminus point of billions of years of evolution, with at least 3 different prior Major Evolutionary Transitions (MET) embedded within our various body structures, our "conscious mind" is the governor over a thriving, cohesive planetary population of billions of cells and trillions of microbes of whose ongoing metabolic processes we are completely ignorant of.

      Witness the development of disease within our bodies. The con-specific is unaware of it often until late stage symptoms appear and warrants a doctor's visit..

  7. Oct 2020
    1. This should be a space where you can create the identity that you want to have. You can write yourself into existence.

      I like this sentiment. Had René Descartes been born a bit later might he have said "Blogeō, ergo sum"?


      [also on boffosocko.com]

  8. Dec 2019
    1. with all its intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins, still remained a work of inconceivable difficulty and labour

      Victor's understanding of biological systems as machines was typical of nineteenth-century biology and physiology, and the debates between mechanists and vitalists, which still partially embraced the mechanistic perspective of human life advanced by Rene Descartes (1596-1650), and others.

  9. Feb 2019
  10. Jun 2017
    1. Nothing in a dream can be true

      Descartes: I think therefore I am?

      he can doubt everything - everything is a dream - but he knows he is true because he can think and convince himself that nothing exists.

      I have convinced myself that there is nothing in the world — no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Doesn’t it follow that I don’t exist? No, surely I must exist if it’s me who is convinced of something. But there is a deceiver, supremely powerful and cunning whose aim is to see that I am always deceived. But surely I exist, if I am deceived. Let him deceive me all he can, he will never make it the case that I am nothing while I think that I am something. Thus having fully weighed every consideration, I must finally conclude that the statement “I am, I exist” must be true whenever I state it or mentally consider it. (Descartes, Meditation II: On the Nature of the Human Mind, Which Is Better Known Than the Body).

  11. Apr 2017
    1. If “humans”refers to phenomena, not independent entities with inherent propertiesbut rather beings in their differential becoming, particular material(re)configurings of the world with shifting boundaries and properties thatstabilize and destabilize along with specific material changes in what itmeans to be human

      This concept stands much more in line with Hume's take on human consciousness as another bundle of sensory impressions instead of Descartes' cogito (with this video as a refresher). If a "human" is the phenomena of collision and configuring of boundaries, there isn't a core "you" that exists outside these interactions between the human and nonhuman.

  12. Mar 2017
    1. we discuss our doubt together, therefore we are.

      I was trying to think of a better way to tie this in with kpolizzi's comment, but I'll just say I enjoy this as a twist on Descartes' "I think therefore I am." "We doubt together" indicates a shift to thinking about our existence as a community rather than as individuals.