Christopher Ott

I go over the underlying points I'm making in this series and correct a common misconception about the connection between the brain and perception at the end. This video was recorded in Myrtle Beach, SC on October 3, 2023. The full Metaphysics series of 20 videos was uploaded from June 1 - Oct. 3, 2023.

There are two main questions materialism cannot answer. One is ontological and has to do with the mathematical laws of physics. The other is epistemological and has to do with our innate intuitions undergirding the laws of logic. In this video I use the words "material" and "physical" in their colloquial sense. This video was recorded in Myrtle Beach on October 1, 2023.

I summarize the attempts that modern materialists have made in the last 120 years to solve the problems of cause, perception, and the external world. Below are four of the books I reference in this video. * “The Philosophy of Mind,” Peter Smith & O. R. Jones, Cambridge Press, Cambridge. 1986 * “My Philosophical Development,” Bertrand Russell, Routledge, London & New York, 1959 * “Words and Things: An Examination of, and an Attack on, Linguistic Philosophy,” Ernest Gellner, with an introduction by Bertrand Russell, Beacon Press, Boston, 1959 * “Consciousness Explained,” Daniel Dennett, Little, Brown & Company, Canada, 1991 Links to my essays and websites: sites.google.com/view/chris-ott-hub "Evolution of Perception Re-Explained: A Radical New View of Reality" at Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08XLD3NNP

When using the word 'perception' in its full original sense, as it was until the late 19th and early 20th centuries, talk of consciousness is generally redundant. This is because it is already presumed included, since consciousness (wakefulness or awareness) is a necessary precondition for perceiving and so they occur in tandem.

The word 'consciousness' can mean many things. Here I clarify how I use the word, i.e. as the state of being awake, nothing more.

Philosophers talk a lot about "internal" and "external" experience. They refer continually to the external world or outer world. Some philosophers go further and claim there is no such thing as a private internal world of experience like dreams, thoughts, and memories. See, for example, "Augustine's Invention of the Inner Self" (Oxford University Press 2003). But does such talk of "internal" and "external" perception bring us any closer to explaining our experiential world? In actuality, this strange metaphysical dichotomy of in and out has resulted in numerous paradoxes and conundrums including the infamous mind-body problem. Here we begin to carve a path for a new way of explaining the same distinctions that these terms are meant to account for, without the metaphysical baggage they produce.

Now that I've defined how I'm using the word 'perception,' I talk about problems philosophers create for themselves as a result of how they try to define it -- literally in terms of its hidden metaphysical cause. Here I propose a new approach to dealing with causes that is consistent with modern trends in science, i.e. proposing a causal process rather than causally responsible occult entities.

The word perception comes from the Latin word percipere, which means to take, gather, or collect. By extension it came to mean to cognize or become aware of something. At the end of the 18th Century the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid narrowed the meaning to refer only to perception of outer objects, and differentiated perception from internal sensations such as pain. Oddly, Dictionaries followed Reid (rather than the greater philosophers of the Enlightenment before him) and it is now standard. We will be discussing the problems this change caused in philosophy. But understand that in all future videos on the topic of perception, we will use the original classical (broader) definition.

This is a redo of part 11 of this series on metaphysics. In it I attempt to better clarify the four main points in the first video. In review they are: 1. It is much harder to prove a proposition than most people realize. A philosophical skeptic is a person who, for philosophical reasons, believes absolute certainty to be strictly impossible. 2. Even logic can't fully resolve a feud between interlocutors over whether a proposition is true or not. No matter how carefully we apply logic, our logical conclusions (both deductive and inductive) are only as true as our premises. And logic cannot help us determine if they are true. For that we rely on testimony and observation, which are imperfect. If one is being consistent (has no contradictions) one is being logical, but that doesn't establish that one's opinions are true, only that one's opinions are logical. One can have a completely false system of beliefs that has no contradictions. 3. Philosophical skepticism is meant to keep us undogmatic in our beliefs, i.e. to help us maintain an open mind as we seek the truth. However, if one adopts the hardened view that knowledge is impossible, one ironically winds up contradicting himself, by making a knowledge claim while at the same time claiming we can have no such knowledge. This contradiction implies a logical error somewhere. I present an alternative form of skepticism that I call "positive skepticism." In short, positive skepticism is the prescriptive attitude that, in the face of our uncertainty about things, all things remain possible. This is in contrast to the descriptive form of skepticism that declares certainty that knowledge is impossible. I call that "negative skepticism." I assert that positive skepticism (the prescriptive attitude that, until we know otherwise, all things remain possible) allows us to maintain a very open mind, and yet does not lead us to make a contradiction, or to sink into an unjustified cynicism about knowledge all together. 4. Finally, I go over a form of logic that I introduce in my 2022 book "The Evolution of Perception Re-Explained." I believe this unique application of deductive logic leads to real epistemological certainty about at least one class of beliefs, if used properly.

Explaining the history of the Intelligence Notebooks. This video was made especially for a Zoom study group led by Christina Riley. A PDF of the Intelligence Notebooks, as well as an encapsulation of this history and the original source scans used in it, can be downloaded at this site: https://sites.google.com/view/intelligencematerials/home Filmed by Chris Ott in Myrtle Beach, SC August 5, 2023.

Many people are quick to say they are careful to rely on facts and logic. But many of the people most proud of their careful thinking are not familiar with the complex issues surrounding the discernment of what is and isn't fact, and the limits of what help logic can provide them in making that determination.

The power of artificial intelligence to replace people is exaggerated. While AI can be put to many good uses, the human being's ability to recognize a previously unrecognized possibility cannot be duplicated by machines. This renders AI essentially stupid and dependent on human beings.

The Hindu school of philosophy known as Advaita Vedanta has some things in common with my theory of The Evolution of Perception. However, the cosmology has one advantage in that it helps a person avoid the trap of imagining the world is an emanation of one's own ego -- a frightful outlook known as solipsism.

Language is an enigma. How do children learn to join signs with their referents? We seem to be simply born with this ability. Here we discuss how this is explained in Evolution of Perception.

It's very important to understand what matter is supposed to be. Here we'll explain how people came up with the idea of matter and why, looking back on it, we don't need it to explain anything. There are better ways to explain the same physical features matter was invented to explain. There's not one single physical quality we traditionally ascribe to "matter" that cannot be accounted for in terms of number, geometry, and natural laws. Observed quantities of mass, shape, weight, volume, and solidity (the markers of physicality) can all be explained more simply by an evolution of perceptual schemas. It was originally thought that a theoretical 'something' being the cause of our sensible quality experience would help explain why we all experience roughly the same thing. But no explanation of how this 'something' actually caused our sensible quality experience was forthcoming -- nor was it clear there would ever be such an explanation. It ended up being a kind of vestigial piece of our old theories that never worked. Matter itself thus became the thing to explain, and it defied explanation.

A review of types of cosmologies (Creation stories) throughout the millennia. Throughout history people have told stories about how the world formed. We talk about the incompleteness of the majority of these stories and how they compare to The Evolution of Perception.

Matter is a theoretical entity. However the properties of tangible objects, like mass, weight, and solidity, which we normally associate with materiality are readily observable. Here we describe how the Evolution of Perception theory accounts for the evolution of these material properties. Another way to say this is that although matter does not exist as a discreet substance, and therefore did not evolve, the properties like solidity we normally ascribe to matter did. And that amounts to the same thing.

What we have talked about is called 'representationalism.' But some people think it is wrong, and these people are called 'direct realists.' While there are problems with such a realism that have yet to be surmounted, there is something desirable in direct realism. It conforms with our natural intuitions.

It is customary to say that all our thoughts and experiences happen in our brain. But isn't what we mean by our world those very experiences? And if our subjective world is inside us, then there must be some second world outside of us. And this opens up a can of worms.

Look at an object. Neuroscience tells us that color, sound, fragrance, flavor, and feel (the qualities we perceive) are all subjective, produced in the brain to represent external conditions we cannot directly experience. Remove these qualities and what do you have? An occult (unseen) substance called "matter." It follows from the above that matter is a theoretical entity.

The 18th century Irish Philosopher George Berkeley wrote that we only perceive our own ideas. What he meant was that a person only ever experiences his own personal experience. The implications of this are vast.