The Modern Intellectual Tradition

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"The Modern Intellectual Tradition" is a lecture series available on Audible that tracks the development of modern philosophy from Descartes to Derrida.

Somewhere along the way - around Kant, I think, or maybe they next guy, one of the Germans - we get the idea that God is evolving. That the creation of Earth and humans was and continues to be an attempt for God to understand himself. That fits so nicely with what I keep seeing reverberations of in consciousness. Human consciousness is evolving and expanding at a stupendous pace. What the ordinary developed mind today is conscious of is far more complex and elaborate than the most advanced thinkers from the XVIIe siècle. I'm not talking about the knowledge - though that too, of course - but of the very concept of consciousness itself. We think in larger connected meshes with higher rates of experience change. That stretches our consciousness from the moment we are born. Even my generation cannot claim to be as conscious as "Kids These Days."

Lecture 1: Introduction

Lecture 2: Scholasticism and The Scientific Revolution

Aristotle

All the things that are, in any sense, fit in 10 logical categories like properties, activities, etc. One category is primary; relatively independent physical objects: tables, chairs, people, books. Those are parusea (sp?) or primary substance. They exist in the fullest sense of the word exist. Other things are properties, characteristics, relationships, etc of primary substances. Think subject / predicate: The dog ... is walking. The fox ... is red.

Doctrine of the four causes: Material, efficient, formal, final. A ship in the harbor has four causes: Material: The wood, nails, canvas, ropes, etc. Formal: the arrangement of the material that would make a ship. Efficient: The activity that leads to the matter and form being brought together: build it. Final: The purpose of the thing or the "towards which" of the ship; the final cause of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The final cause of a rock is to lie on the ground. The final cause of a ship is to transport things over water.

Sookey or soul - the aliveness of a being, not necessarily eternal as in Christianity. Three levels: Plant (metabolism, growth, nutrition), Animals (moving, sensitive, passionate), Human Beings (rational, think, speak).

Side note: Animals have norms, like, "Don't eat out of the garbage when the humans are looking."

Aquinas

The Catholic church rejected him at first, since he was new and rejecting the new is the church's final cause, but it is also the church's final cause to adopt things which become popular and claim they are the source of those things, so they eventually accepted Aquinas.

Aquinas + Aristotle = Scholasticism.

Copernicus

Heliocentric.

Giordano Bruno

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giordano_Bruno

Infinite space, infinite stars, infinite planets, infinite ensouled beings, burned at the stake.

Galileo

New Science of Mechanics

Drops any reference to substantial forms and final causes. Uniform motion and rest are dynamically equivalent (not accelerating, no being acted upon).

The Catholic Church was uncomfortable with him because he disagreed with Aquinas, who was obviously divinely integrated with Catholicism.

Lecture 3: The Rationalism and Dualism of Descartes

Foundationalism

What can we know with certainty?

  • Archimedian point to stand upon, foundation of certain knowledge.
  • Start by trying to doubt everything, thereby to see what cannot be doubted.
    • Stick a yardstick in water, it looks bent, pull it out, it's straight, we cannot trust our senses to capture truth.
    • What about experience in general? At night I dream of things that are not real. I cannot trust experience in general.
    • 2 + 2 = 4? Triangles sum to 180 degrees? Maybe an evil genius has me in a jar, and shows me deceptive triangles.
  • I think; I exist. I think therefore I exist.
    • Something must be doing the thinking.
    • The ideas themselves are, in fact, ideas. (may not represent anything real, but the idea itself is real)
      • I think I think therefore I think I am.
  • Logically Perspicuous / Light of Nature / Natural Light of Reason
    • I think therefore I am exposes that the natural light of reason is a real thing. (aside: bullshit)
  • Spacial Extension is the separation between ideas and things. Ideas and mind have no spacial existence, no mass, and are the only thing that we know to be true so far.

Attempted Proof of God

  • Must come without spacial extension - can only come from his mind.
  • By The Light of Nature, the cause of a thing must be at least as great as its effect.
  • I can conceive of infinity. (aside: he can't)
  • I am finite and imperfect (he doesn't know that), so I can't be the cause of the idea of infinite or an infinite god.
  • Only god is infinite.
  • The cause must be at least as great as its effect.
  • Therefore God exists.

Attempted Proof of Material Substances

  • God made me with an inclination to believe in material substances.
  • God is not a deceiver.
  • Material substances must be real.

Locke's Empiricism, Berkeley's Idealism

Locke

  • Empiricism: All ideas come from experience.
  • Atomic theory, in effect: There are real things out there, and my senses perceive characteristics of them, but all I know of them is the perception, not the thing.
  • We cannot perceive the underlying thing / the unknown support.
  • Lock believes we can see causation; when we see one object strike another object, we are observing the causation upon the struck object.

Berkeley

  • Idealism.
  • There is nothing underlying what we experience for us to concern ourselves with. The experience is everything.
  • If there were two things, experience and substance, and they were entirely distinct things, how could they interact? How could substance induce experience?
  • Nobody is a Berkeleyan, nobody would say that there is no such thing as matter.
    • But why not? How is us running in a simulation (mind only) different from us running on vibrating strings?

Neo-Aristotelians; Spinoza and Liebniz

Remain closer to Aristotle than others in the new science. Retain the notion of substance.

How can the new scientific picture of the world and of god be reconciled with the most reliable metaphysics we know, Aristotle's metaphysics of substance?

Spinoza

Substance implies independence.

  • Only one substance can be independent; the whole.
  • The whole is that one substance, which we can call god or nature, as we please. (Pantheism - everything is god)
    • The whole includes the mind and the body.
    • This thing is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of physicality or materiality, which is one of the the infinite attributes of the whole or god or nature.
    • My mind is a mode or modification - a finite modification - of the infinite attribute of mind of the whole or god or nature.
  • Spinoza is not today what we would call a pantheist, but a panentheist - nature is in god, but god is more than nature. But in Spinoza's time, the distinction wasn't made.
    • Schelling later pointed out that Spinoza saw god as infinite, and nature as finite, hence had the distinction existed, Spinoza would have called himself a panentheist.
  • Minds and bodies do not causally interact.
    • Related through psycho-physical parallelism. Two parallel chains of events.
      • Non-Canon: The synchronization code is murder, but god is infinite (and infinitely busy).
    • The nice thing is that we don't have to explain how they interact.
  • Everything is god, god is perfect, god is purely rational, this means that the world is causally determinant through and through.
  • We have no free will, god has no free will, there is no such thing as free will.
    • When my mind recognizes that it cannot control what happens, that it can only control its attitude about what happens, it paints a pretense of free will on top.
      • This is closely aligned with Dennett, Sapolsky

Leibniz

Polymath - one of the independent inventors of calculus.

  • The substances of the universe must be independent.
    • The many substances must not causally interact.
    • Reality is thus composed of simple indivisible substances. (atoms)
  • His atoms are monads.
    • Because they cannot causally interact, each must contain what he called "intelliki" an inner principle that unfolds all the reactions to interactions with other things.
  • First reference to "Cahoone" in this lecture series, I think. Definitely confusible with an abstract term, if one did no know the speaker's name.
    • I think I want to tell that as a story about Academic Versus LLM. Need to figure out how to frame it in case the example case reads it.
  • One must be able to determine everything about a monad from its own internal nature, including all interactions with all other things.
    • A stone rolling down a hill has an extremely large finite set of relations to all the stones that make up the hill (and the universe), that are all getting updated.
  • Each monad has appetition, governing its motion, like rolling to lower its center of mass.
  • Sounds pretty batshit, but ultimately atoms aren't that different, in that they "know" to be attracted to other masses, they "know" about cohesion, etc.
  • Monads aggregate, my body is a collection of bare monads. A rabbit might have a bunch of small monads collected in a rabbit monad, which may considerably simplify the combinatorial explosion of relation and internal knowing.
  • Space and time are internal to the monads.
  • God coordinates all monads in an enormous pre-established harmony. A very busy god / string theory / sub-nuclear-physics to astrophysics.

The Enlightenment and Rousseau

18th century.

  • The model of republican government was Greece and Rome.
  • Historically, the idea of progress did not particularly exist.
    • Ancients did not have a long enough or accurate enough historical record to see progress on a long time scale.
    • Fall of Rome and The Dark Ages showed that in the before before, there was something greater.
  • Political freedom, education, and science somehow go together.
  • Opposed to superstition, aristocratic and church authority, and cultural tradition.
  • Les Philosophes saw themselves as part of a new modern tradition.
    • Kant: Dare to think for yourself.
  • Vast majority of Europeans at the time were uneducated peasants.

Isaac Newton

  • Late 17th
  • Mathematical Principles of Modern Philosophy

The Encyclopedists

  • Diderot

Voltaire

  • Writer, not a philosopher.
  • Imparter of norms to the less educated.

Adam Smith

  • An Inquiry Into The Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations
  • Three ways to organize economy
    • Tradition: Children do what their parents did.
    • Government Command
    • Free Market / Unorganized
      • Spontaneous Order
  • Bernard Mandeville: Private vice can result in public benefit, eg: self-interest via competitive reward.

Rousseau

  • Strange and troubled person. Friend of Diderot and Hume. Banned in France, house stoned.
  • "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains."
  • Initial Essay Contest: Can the recent advance in the arts and sciences be said to hold true for progress in morals? Is our morality improving as we know more and have more.
    • His response, not just "no", but "Hell No!" They have debased us.
    • Cosmopolitan learning does not improve our souls or make us better people.
    • Our education of our children, in fact, trying to educate our children into this new more competitive world, is only teaching them to ape their parents without maturing their inner disposition.
  • Discourse on The Origin of Inequality Among Men
    • Superiority of primitive man in the state of nature.
    • Healthiest most independent lives, foraging alone, owning nothing but the simplest tools, unable to develop vices.
      • Note: He was living in 1700s Paris, which was quite different to contemporary upper class urban life.
    • The first evil is ownership. Property is the foundation of inequality.
    • Making individuals dependent on each other leads directly to wealth power dynamics.
    • Amour Propre v. Amour de Soi
      • Amour de Soi: Love of self - healthy
      • Amour Propre: Love in the eyes of others - can become diseased, as in avarice and unhealthy obsession with comparing oneself to others. Drives inequality.
  • Voltaire: One longs, in reading your book, to walk on all fours, but since I have lost that habit for sixty years, I feel unhappily the impossibility of resuming it.
    • Rouseau recognized there was no way back, and was not advocating for it.
  • If we cannot return to nature, we can at least organize society into a self-ruling society of equality.
    • The peasants around the oak tree are not smart enough to be duped. Their wants are too simple to be tempted.
  • Inspired Robespierre's Committee on Public Safety and The Terror.
  • "Is a rich junkie free?"
    • Two notions of freedom: I am free when you get out of my way. I am free when nothing else determines my actions.
    • A person who is otherwise unconstrained from acting as they please - a wealthy rock star - who is addicted to heroin and has a steady, secure supply for their habit. Is that person free?
    • If being free from smack is liberation to be one's true self, getting them clean is liberation, even if they say, while under the control of it, that they don't want to be so liberated.
      • If we say that, because we believe acting not in service to a perverting addiction is a greater purpose, then what are the perverting addictions?
      • If the person's true self is the measure, we can't use smack-addicted man as the measure of true self's intent.
    • The higher self *is* defined by what is best for the community.
    • Once one has joined together with a community, if they refuse to follow the good of the community, they must be forced to be free.
      • They are not being coerced, they are being brought to freedom.
      • Clearly has risky overlap with bad things.

7: The Radical Skepticism of Hume

Another legend of the Enlightenment is David Hume, an empiricist, atheist, and foundational skeptic. Hume spent ten years, from age 18 to 28, on his most celebrated work, A Treatise of Human Nature. Not well-received in its time, it is now considered one of the most important works in modern philosophy.

His work was founded on the premise that things which are true by definition are the only rationally knowable things, rejecting Descartes' argument for the existence of god and matter. To Hume, beyond rational statements like "2 + 2 = 4" which are true by definition, all observable phenomena are subject to revision based on later contrary observations and therefore cannot be said to be true. This also led him to the conclusion that we know today as, "Correlation does not imply causation."

For some, that presents Hume as not believing that a coin, if dropped, would necessarily fall. One can only know that it was observed to do so every time in the past. But Hume also said, "Nature is always too strong for principle." Our inability to know that it will fall, as a matter of absolute truth, does not stop nature from doing it.

We have since observed hovering coins when dropped inside the space shuttle, and I think that shows the beauty of Hume. In his attempt to remove god from moral behavior as philosophical truth, he did not find that morality could be reached by reason alone; but he also found that nothing else in nature could be. He reconciled morality and science in the opposite way; they are both only our best estimates of what is most good. Both are always subject to advancement.

And that's great for philosophers and scientists. But it is not how most people operate. Most people run on norms like "commies are bad" or "trans people are just people." When scientists and philosophers fixate on, "Well, it depends...," they lose the majority of the commoners.

I think we need a new generation of Mr. Rogers or Voltaire. Deeply educated philosophers who turn our best estimates of what is most good into simple rules, presented in an approachable form, and using contemporary influencer methods.

Tying the end to the beginning

I don't feel like I tied the last two paragraphs into the first four.

Looking at the last sentence in the first paragraph, the reason it was not well received was all about social norms. In 1740, society in Europe was strongly connected to Christianity. The church was just getting over the shift from Aristotle's scholasticism to Descartes' Natural Light of Reason, and here Hume comes to toss it all in the dumpster. Abandoning or updating norms is hard, the mechanism is not built for that, it literally is made of long-term neural pathways that have been strengthened through long-term conditioning.

Activating Influencers

America has a lot of aspiring influencers. Most of them are already facing the frustration of working in a crowded market. Most are already facing the problems of income falling behind inflation in the majority of income fractiles. Soon, if the most troubling trends continue, they will be trapped in a collapsing economy.

There should be tens or hundreds of thousands of people with the skills to change the course of cognition, and the motive to do so.

They will be up against centralized state media like TikTok ( https://old.reddit.com/r/BlackPeopleTwitter/comments/1nmfh71/i_might_have_preferred_the_chinese/ ), Facebook, Twitter, ABC, CBS, Disney, GPT, Grok, Amazon AI, Google AI, FoxNews, Truth Social, OANN, etc.

Decentralized social media, including group-based things like Slack and Discord and decentralized identity systems like Bluesky, will remain viable for propagating information.

Unknown-if-state-media sites like YouTube are probably best treated at least with suspicion.

So: How to begin pre-seeding influencers with the norms necessary to expand decentralized social media, seek the science and philosophy based norms, and propagate them as things spiral?

Activating Influencers 2

John Oliver is a good parallel for Voltaire: https://old.reddit.com/r/law/comments/1nnm5ab/john_oliver_argues_disney_should_legally_fight/

He hits the cerebral-but-approachable, sardonic, witty flavor of Candide perfectly. He appeals to an educated audience that is paying attention; he adds strength and depth to the awareness of the problem, and reaches high-consideration folks with only surface knowledge of the story, but he's over the head of a lot of people.

To win elections and foster broad collective action, we also need something closer to the level of Mr. Rogers. Easily consumable dogma like "immigrants make us stronger by adding a different perspective" or "buying things from gross collaborators like Disney hurts free speech," wrapped in charming stories done as short vignettes capable of trending on Splatter.

Activating a broad collection of Mr. Rogers's may be best chaperoned by a smaller collection of Voltaires.

Notes

  • Legendary Bits
    • Relations of Facts v. Matters of Fact: True by definition is certain, but uninteresting. Matters of fact are interesting, but necessarily uncertain.
    • Constant Conjunction v. Necessary Connection: Correlation does not imply causation.
    • A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god. "Intelligent Design" has a wrong-direction-knees shaped hole in it.
  • My Take
    • "Nature is always too strong for principle."
    • Initial goal was a moral philosophy without god.
    • Concerned that moral philosophy appeared to be based in sentiment or feeling.
    • Tried to establish that moral philosophy could be rational.
    • Instead concluded that nothing interesting is rational.
    • Which is equally good/bad.
  • Moral Philosophy based in sentiment or feeling.
  • Non-believer, no use of god or transcendent in his work.
    • As a Librarian: Got in trouble for ordering "indencent" books.
    • World waited to see if he would repent on his deathbed. He did not.
  • Pushed empiricism beyond Locke and Berkeley
  • All knowledge and all ideas derive from experience.
  • 2 and only 2 categories exhaust all knowledge:
    • Relations of Ideas
      • "All bachelors are unmarried", "2 + 2 = 4".
      • The "by definition" thing.
    • Matters of Fact
      • Made true by a statements relation to impressions which confirm it.
      • "There are bachelors in this room" - you have to check.
  • Each type of knowledge brings good news and bad news.
    • Relations of Ideas: Good: Universally certain. Bad: And so they are uninteresting.
    • Matters of Fact: Good: Real ideas about the real world. Bad: Never certain, never true by necessity.
  • Causality:
    • Two notions of causality
      • Constant Conjunction: Whenever I see A, I see B.
      • Necessary Connection: A and B are necessarily connected if B must occur whenever A occurs. (causation, though Cahoone doesn't say if Hume believes it is directional)
  • Does Necessary Connection exist in the real world?
    • How can we know?
    • If we see object A strike object B, and the resulting movement in object B, and we see it a million times, we have seen it a million times, but we have not yet seen it the million and one-th time.
    • There is a belief that the future will resemble the past, but that is a belief, not knowledge. It is not True (big T true).
    • [editorial] to me, this is foundational science. Science is about our current best known model. It is delighted and excited to be disproven.
  • Hume claims, then, that science is not empiricism. OK, fine, but science is better.
  • --- So far, I believe Cahoone ---
  • Cahoone Says: Hume believes that we have not reason to believe that the coin will drop.
    • I only have experience of what Cahoone has said that Hume said. I do not have experience of what Hume said. Therefore, I have no knowledge of what Hume said, and no reason to believe that what Cahoone says has a necessary connection to what Hume said. :p
    • There is no rational reason to believe in induction, not even probable. But Cahoone keeps saying "probable knowledge". Knowledge and true are very different from probable.
    • Cahoone says that Hume says that it is not rational to leap from "things fall" to "an unseen force makes them fall" as a matter of truth.
      • That's fine, I think Cahoone actually managed to understand Hume on that one.
      • That's why it's called "The Theory of Gravity" - because it aligns over and over and over again, but we have not yet observed gravitons or gravity waves (or maybe we have recently?)
      • But that's radically different from "I expect things in gravity wells to fall." I am observing the existence of the gravity well with proprioception and my eustacean tubes.
      • OK, I'm going to try to stop ranting about Cahoone and listen to the next 8 minutes at 2x speed.
  • ...eight more minutes of blabla with examples of what "no predictive capability" means...
  • Hume kills it on "intelligent design" with the "broken design" retort.
    • A partly orderly world can only prove a partly orderly god.
  • However, that does not mean that Hume does not expect the apple to fall. He does, and he acknowledges that this is a disconnect between what is real and what is known. That the flaw is not in what is real, but a shortcoming in what we know.
  • "Nature is always too strong for principle." - principles say we cannot know that the apple will fall; nature ignores the principles and the apple falls.
  • Reason cannot reach reality. And it's a very huge field of stuff that cannot be reached by reason.

Kant's Copernican Revolution

The mind does not just experience reality, but actively constructs those experiences.

  • Started as a mathematical physicist for the 1st half of his life, working on stellar formation.
  • Famously punctual. Supposedly was late only one day; the day he read Rousseau.
  • Critique of Pure Reason; theory of knowledge
  • Critique of Practical Reason; ethics
  • Critique of Judgment; art
  • Believed if Hume were right, science is in trouble.
    • Necessarily true knowledge about the world is required.

Counter-Hume Breakdown

Creates a third category of knowledge, where Hume had 2.

Hume's Categories

  • Relations of ideas
    • à priori: independent of experience
    • true by definition alone
  • Matters of fact
    • à posteriori: requires experience
    • not true by definition alone

Kant's Criteria Dimensions

  • Dimension 1
    • Analyticity (predicate is contained in the subject)
    • Synthetic Statement (predicate contains new information)
  • Dimension 2
    • à priori: (goes before; does not require experience)
    • à posteriori: (goes after; requires experience)

Kant's Breakdown

à priori (not based on experience) à posteriori (based on experience)
analytic (true by definition, no new information in predicate) Hume's Relations of Ideas No such thing
synthetic (new information in predicate) Kant's Greatest Innovation in Philosophy Hume's Matters of Fact

Synthetic à Priori: Not all knowledge derives from experience.

How so?

Copernican Revolution: Rather than imagining that our cognition conforms to objects of experience, what if objects of experience conform to our cognition?

What if the cognitive apparatus has a way of handling experience which implicitly imposes a structure on or organizes our experience? What if we do transcendental processing on the input?

Cahoone says transcendental in this context means processing that happens between when the stimulus hits your sensors and when you experience it. It's a processing step to which you do not have access because it happens before experience; but it was not from nature, it was in you. There's no spiritual implication in Kant's use of transcendental, here. (Note: I prefaced this with "Cahoone Says" because I think the spiritual thing is just the other boot that hasn't dropped yet)

What if cognition is active, and not merely passive.

"Throughout the history of Western thought, philosophers have tended to act as if the mind is a kind of passive register of impingements of sensory experience."

If it were true that our cognition imposes itself on what we perceive, then we could have certainty about things that will happen tomorrow. Not because we are certain that the world will not change, but because we are certain that our cognition will impose itself in the same way.

If I am a pessimist today, I can be certain that things are going to suck tomorrow.

Cahoone mis-states the parallel postulate in a way that set my teeth on edge, but it is a good example if you look at the real version: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_postulate

moving on

The cognitive faculty is composed of 3 components:

  • intuition
    • 2 a priori forms; space and time. Out of all the things I perceive, there are empirical facts, but there are also things that I know independent of experience; I always know that the thing I am experiencing must be in space and time. If I experience it tomorrow, it must exist in space and time.
  • understanding
    • 12 different categories that the mind imposes on experience.
    • The concepts of substances and their properties, and the concepts of necessary connection, are part of the a priori categories of understanding.
    • The necessity between events in the world is something the mind structures into experience.
  • reason

Hume said that we believe tomorrow will be like today out of habit.

Kant says it is part of how the mind is programmed to organize experience.

Kant must say that all our knowledge is limited by the bounds of possible experience. We can only know things which can be experienced. And its only those things, the objects of possible experience, to which the a priori forms and a priori categories of intuition and understanding apply.

All of us, together, are experiencing an objective world. The world is really here, the things are really here, the things have features, they have existence over time, they're made of materials, they have causal relationships.

We don't have a priori knowledge of what process causes those causalities, but have a priori knowledge that some process causes things.

What about things independent of their experience by us, before there were humans to experience them? What is the nature of things when a human does not experience them? Kant says: That we cannot know.

So he's got one ball in each court: There are real things out there, but we can only say they exist by virtue of them being experienced. The thing in itself may or may not exist independent of experience. To us, it is and only is what it appears to be; we cannot say anything about the thing that causes the appearance.

Kant 2

Marx

Did well enough on the critique of capitalism, but the "and so instead we should..." part was a bit thin.

Also; even if the direction thing were addressed, I feel like there's an implicit gap in risk management (aside from price/production optimization of commodity goods).

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