https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HsXxgQy4xLQ
NOTES:
1) Free Will originates as a legal, philosophical, (and theologically moral) question that means we are responsible for our actions. Without free will we are not responsible for our actions. Yet human cooperation is dependent upon responsibility for our actions. So we DO possess free will, within our domain of executive function, agency, choice, and competency. Since all choice is predictive, and all predictions are idiosyncratic, and all idiosyncratic predictions are error-prone, strict determinism isn’t possible. What we mean is that we are bound by limits (via negativa) not determinism (via-positiva). And therein lies the vast hole in philosophical justificationism.
Many pseudo-profound questions in philosophy if not all of them are due to (a) attempts to define what a word means (as if externally constructed) rather than what we mean by a word (that we have constructed). A deception by suggestion. (b) The use of the verb to-be to posit an equality or relation that is unstated – a deception by suggestion. (c) The use of incomplete sentences violates the grammatical requirement for complete, continuous, recursive disambiguation – again, another example of the use of deception by suggestion.
The fact that the economics of thinking, speaking, and listening advantages the low cost of suggestion, is offset by the extraordinary pretense of knowledge, pretense of truthfulness, and pretense of honesty, and pretense of cunning – when it’s just suggestion (deception).
I don’t know of any purportedly profound question in philosophy that is not a deception by suggestion that takes advantage of the norms stated above.
2) Chris relies on a set of paradigms and their corresponding vocabularies and logics as semi-mathematical (not pseudomathematical) semi logical (not sophistry), and semi-scientific (not pseudoscientific) and philosophical (sophistry and pseudoscience) ANALOGIES, rather than a single operational(classical, existential, material, observable, falsifiable, and testable) paradigm. Then he conflates those paradigms, vocabularies, and logics with literary analogy and supernatural analogy. This is best understood as an admixture of paradigms, into a complex literary analogy. In this way he uses conflation to merge the spectrum of logics available to humans, such that he can claim, by analogy and conflation to create a paradigm, vocabulary, and logic that attempts to unify mental experience, material existence, and metaphysical causality. He does this as a substitute for producing a causal chain of existential and observable (whether by logical instrumentation or physical instrumentation) in a hierarchy of paradigms using a single consistent system of measurement and causality (Science).
I’ve explained elsewhere that what he intuits is correct, but his lack of reduction to causal (operational) chain is just that: a meta-fictionalism (a conflation of the fictionalisms). With that understanding, we see he’s not wrong so much as storytelling instead of ‘science-ing’.
We have enough understanding of the brain at this point that we can explain all of human experience as emergent from a trivially simple principle of organization of the growth of the nervous system. Those of us that have worked on AI, especially those of us older who have gone through the two previous AI winters, appear to have left behind previous generations of thinkers – of whom philosophers are the primary casualty.
There are three people, or maybe four, that have a grasp on the solution: Wolfram, Joscha Bach, and myself, with a bit of help from Jeff Hawkins, David Deutsch, and Gerard T’ Hooft. (I won’t publish for another year.) The average person – at least the audience of your video/podcast – can understand the phyisical production of the hierarchy of reaction, proprioception, awareness, sentience, and consciousness, and what a greater (future) scope of consciousness might look and feel like. There is nothing mysterious about consciousness. It turns out to be as simple an emergence as was Proprioception (embodiment).
I wasn’t aware that you were running a contest for videos on the subject or I’d have submitted one.
3) I’m usually a critic of Kaststrup but he’s doing a good job in this interview. And Kastrup reminds me once again that I wish I had the patience of teaching academics. I lose patience with this nonsense. 😉
4) Buddha (India) and Jesus(Levant) both are trying to solve the problem of scale that occurred by the restoration of trade after the bronze age collapse and (here it comes) the collapse of the elites during that period. So, how do those without power, without wealth, without knowledge, and without insurance by family, clan, and tribe, maximize cooperation? Meaning, they sought to solve the problem of the prisoner’s dilemma that limits cooperation. And as a consequence, the problem of the production of commons, in low-trust societies. (Europeans can out compete largely because high trust civs can produce extraordinary commons that produce cooperateive and monetary velocity).
So, Why jesus and buddha? Indo european religions are aristocratic and treated the lower classes as domesticated animals. Just as we abandoned slavery in the modern era because with the development of steam, then fossil fuels, slaves are more expensive than employees, the old world had the same problem with the underclasses.
Christianity and Buddhism allowed the merger of the ethics of the powerful and able, with the powerless and unable, by the virtue of ‘not doing wrong’ instead of the aristocratic demand for heroism in the production of commons.
(FWIW: Yes I post my notes on YT videos.)