7 ms·

That's fascinating. How did Newton "eliminate body" and demonstrate that "the world is not a machine"? Chomsky must be referring to specific texts here. Anybody

That's fascinating. How did Newton "eliminate body" and demonstrate that "the world is not a machine"? Chomsky must be referring to specific texts here. Anybody know what they are?

matiasz 8y ago
I think Chomsky is referring to gravity’s action at a distance, which Newton regarded to be absurd. I’ve heard Chomsky say that, after Newton, “physical” has come to mean “what we more or less understand” — that is, the physical is no longer identical to the material (body), in the sense of a world filled with nothing but billiard ball–like atoms bumping into each other. In the quotation above, Chomsky says that John Locke understood these points, so it may be worth looking at his work.
Barrin92 8y ago
Chomsky defends monism in regards to the mind-body problem. For him there is no coherent distinction between a physical body and a non-physical mind, there is no clear boundary between what is physical and what is not physical. He takes Newton's gravity as an example. In the traditional mechanistic worldview 'bodies' or objects interact like cogs in a machine by direct contact with each other. With the discovery of gravity the material realm was expanded to forces like gravity which operate at distances, or electromagnetism which doesn't describe things in terms of physical objects but rather immaterial rules. So according to Chomsky the definition of what is 'physical' kept expanding and became more and more abstract, and our view of the world has very little to do with the mechanical clockwork world of earlier centuries.
- otakucode 8y ago
  I'd have to agree with Chomsky. It would be tremendously difficult to contort ones thinking greatly enough to be able to explain things like why those who suffer total facial paralysis lose the ability to feel anger, then the ability to recall what feeling anger was like, then the ability to recognize anger in other people and other similar body-mind interactions while still holding on to some idea of there being a "non-physical mind" in the manner usually proposed. In my own opinion, 'mind' is a property, not a thing. You need a thing to exhibit the property, just like you can't simply have a box full of "hot" without some material exhibiting it, and consciousness is a property we're sure human brains can have (by definition if nothing else). Going beyond that is difficult, and you're guaranteed to fail if the first thing you do is seek to eliminate all the material while trying to retain the property. I am unaware of what Newton wrote to 'demolish the body', but I wonder if it is related to chaos theory, complexity, and similar intractable interconnections that limit pure reductionist mechanical understandings of things. We don't quite know how to bridge the gap from "we know we can not discount even the smallest detail without predictions deviating" to "yet we can predict complex systems with reductionist views and attain great accuracy if we restrict how much accuracy we want." Those two things are both true, and seem to be in direct conflict with one another. Should we ever be able to bridge that gap, it would probably herald a new golden age and be a far more important development than anything that has come before.
  - sgt101 8y ago
    "to be able to explain things like why those who suffer total facial paralysis lose the ability to feel anger, then the ability to recall what feeling anger was like, then the ability to recognize anger in other people" I have never heard of this before and I can find no information about this on the internet. I know people who have had facial paralysis (my uncle had MND and lost everything) and they were really really angry (at times) and I do not remembering that they lost empathy when I was interacting with them. My uncle struggled to express himself when using the eye tracker, but the last time I saw him he made jokes and asked me about my daughter, I think that that's empathic.
    - otakucode 8y ago
      I originally read about the phenomenon years ago in a (audio)book, but I cannot recall which one. It may have been one of Oliver Sacks' books, or part of a course from The Teaching Company or the Great Courses Plus. They discussed related research that claimed to have found strong evidence for depression in patients paralyzed from the neck down which was greater than the life changes and such could account for. I was never clear on how they could possibly manage to separate the things to be able to make such a claim and the facial paralysis emotional involvement seemed to make much more sense. There is a great deal of evidence already linking facial involvement to emotion, such as the classic study where participants held a pencil in their teeth, which causes an involuntary 'smile', lessening the negative emotional response when watching sad videos, so it seemed to be reasonable. It's not that the people become un-empathetic, but literally when shown a photograph of a face expressing the emotion of anger, they can not identify that it is the emotion being displayed. That is the most extreme extent that takes the longest to manifest as I understand it. If a person told them "I am angry" or there were other outward displays (raised voice, etc), I don't doubt they would deal with it appropriately. Issues with recognizing emotions in others based on facial expressions are not all that rare. It is very commonly found in men who abuse others that they are incapable of recognizing the expression of fear in the face of those they are abusing. I managed to find one related study that you might find interesting reading, though I hope to find better resources eventually: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamafacialplasticsurgery/fullarticle/2487385 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamafacialplasticsurgery/fu... My personal view is that this paper is probably closest to being correct about the nature of emotion and the body: https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(13)00211-8 https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S136...
mistermann 8y ago
I feel the same way....after reading that, I feel like I have no idea what was demolished, or how. (Not meant as a criticism btw, just saying.)
- goatlover 8y ago
  Old school materialism was demolished in which the world is basically made up of the substances we perceive. Instead, we find out that solid objects are mostly empty space, forces are fields acting over a distance, Relativity has counter intuitive results for time, space and mass, and QM demonstrates that matter and energy behave in spooky ways. The material world went from something solid we could touch, see, smell, etc. to something ghostly and mathematically abstract. Scientists call it physical. The old material world turns out to be largely an illusion of our senses and minds, replaced by physical theories. Plato's cave is inverted. The scientist wonders outside the cave of the solid objects to find ghostly forms instead.
- matiasz 8y ago
  Chomsky discusses this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aydw2neS1W8&feature=youtu.be&t=6m47s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aydw2neS1W8&feature=youtu.be...
hyperpallium 8y ago
Mechanical: the contact theory, that one thing can only affect another by being in contact with it e.g. the teeth of gears. Unfortunately, gravity ("spooky action at a distance") does not require contact, so the mechanical theory fails. Which can be stated figuratively as "the world is not a machine". "The machine, the ghost, and the limits of understanding: Newton's contributions to the study of mind" at the University of Oslo, September 2011 https://youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0
- ealloc 8y ago
  I've read Chomsky's opinion on this before in his essay ""Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding", and I think he misunderstands the physics. He seems to think Newton accidentally disproved the concept of locality through his theory of gravity. It's true that philosophers largely gave up on locality in the 18th century because of Newton, but that was only temporary: In the 19th century the principle of locality came back with a vengance after Maxwell. Today the principle of locality is a key component of the Standard model: The Hamiltonian of the standard model is local, meaning you can compute what happens at a point in spacetime knowing only what is going on in an infinitesimal region around it. Even outside the standard model, LIGO proved that graviational waves exist, and therefore gravity is a local phenomenon. Einstein was famously prepared to give up on quantum mechanics because it seemed to violate the principle of locality, which he thought was more important. That is still debated sometimes, though whether quantum nonlocality exists seems to be a matter of interpretation and is also different from the kind of locality chomsky is talking about. Locality is still a key principle in physics.
  - hyperpallium 8y ago
    > what is going on in an infinitesimal region around it A "field" is just a name for spooky action at a distance. It's a description, not an explanation. There is no mechanical contact, only "locality" of a field. Or are you saying that fields are really mediated by particles... so there is mechanical contact?
    - 8y ago

That's fascinating. How did Newton "eliminate body" and demonstrate that "the world is not a machine"? Chomsky must be referring to specific texts here. Anybody know what they are?

matiasz 8y ago

I think Chomsky is referring to gravity’s action at a distance, which Newton regarded to be absurd. I’ve heard Chomsky say that, after Newton, “physical” has come to mean “what we more or less understand” — that is, the physical is no longer identical to the material (body), in the sense of a world filled with nothing but billiard ball–like atoms bumping into each other. In the quotation above, Chomsky says that John Locke understood these points, so it may be worth looking at his work.

Barrin92 8y ago

Chomsky defends monism in regards to the mind-body problem. For him there is no coherent distinction between a physical body and a non-physical mind, there is no clear boundary between what is physical and what is not physical. He takes Newton's gravity as an example. In the traditional mechanistic worldview 'bodies' or objects interact like cogs in a machine by direct contact with each other. With the discovery of gravity the material realm was expanded to forces like gravity which operate at distances, or electromagnetism which doesn't describe things in terms of physical objects but rather immaterial rules. So according to Chomsky the definition of what is 'physical' kept expanding and became more and more abstract, and our view of the world has very little to do with the mechanical clockwork world of earlier centuries.

otakucode 8y ago
I'd have to agree with Chomsky. It would be tremendously difficult to contort ones thinking greatly enough to be able to explain things like why those who suffer total facial paralysis lose the ability to feel anger, then the ability to recall what feeling anger was like, then the ability to recognize anger in other people and other similar body-mind interactions while still holding on to some idea of there being a "non-physical mind" in the manner usually proposed. In my own opinion, 'mind' is a property, not a thing. You need a thing to exhibit the property, just like you can't simply have a box full of "hot" without some material exhibiting it, and consciousness is a property we're sure human brains can have (by definition if nothing else). Going beyond that is difficult, and you're guaranteed to fail if the first thing you do is seek to eliminate all the material while trying to retain the property. I am unaware of what Newton wrote to 'demolish the body', but I wonder if it is related to chaos theory, complexity, and similar intractable interconnections that limit pure reductionist mechanical understandings of things. We don't quite know how to bridge the gap from "we know we can not discount even the smallest detail without predictions deviating" to "yet we can predict complex systems with reductionist views and attain great accuracy if we restrict how much accuracy we want." Those two things are both true, and seem to be in direct conflict with one another. Should we ever be able to bridge that gap, it would probably herald a new golden age and be a far more important development than anything that has come before.
- sgt101 8y ago
  "to be able to explain things like why those who suffer total facial paralysis lose the ability to feel anger, then the ability to recall what feeling anger was like, then the ability to recognize anger in other people" I have never heard of this before and I can find no information about this on the internet. I know people who have had facial paralysis (my uncle had MND and lost everything) and they were really really angry (at times) and I do not remembering that they lost empathy when I was interacting with them. My uncle struggled to express himself when using the eye tracker, but the last time I saw him he made jokes and asked me about my daughter, I think that that's empathic.
  - otakucode 8y ago
    I originally read about the phenomenon years ago in a (audio)book, but I cannot recall which one. It may have been one of Oliver Sacks' books, or part of a course from The Teaching Company or the Great Courses Plus. They discussed related research that claimed to have found strong evidence for depression in patients paralyzed from the neck down which was greater than the life changes and such could account for. I was never clear on how they could possibly manage to separate the things to be able to make such a claim and the facial paralysis emotional involvement seemed to make much more sense. There is a great deal of evidence already linking facial involvement to emotion, such as the classic study where participants held a pencil in their teeth, which causes an involuntary 'smile', lessening the negative emotional response when watching sad videos, so it seemed to be reasonable. It's not that the people become un-empathetic, but literally when shown a photograph of a face expressing the emotion of anger, they can not identify that it is the emotion being displayed. That is the most extreme extent that takes the longest to manifest as I understand it. If a person told them "I am angry" or there were other outward displays (raised voice, etc), I don't doubt they would deal with it appropriately. Issues with recognizing emotions in others based on facial expressions are not all that rare. It is very commonly found in men who abuse others that they are incapable of recognizing the expression of fear in the face of those they are abusing. I managed to find one related study that you might find interesting reading, though I hope to find better resources eventually: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamafacialplasticsurgery/fullarticle/2487385 https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamafacialplasticsurgery/fu... My personal view is that this paper is probably closest to being correct about the nature of emotion and the body: https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S1364-6613(13)00211-8 https://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/fulltext/S136...

mistermann 8y ago

I feel the same way....after reading that, I feel like I have no idea what was demolished, or how. (Not meant as a criticism btw, just saying.)

goatlover 8y ago
Old school materialism was demolished in which the world is basically made up of the substances we perceive. Instead, we find out that solid objects are mostly empty space, forces are fields acting over a distance, Relativity has counter intuitive results for time, space and mass, and QM demonstrates that matter and energy behave in spooky ways. The material world went from something solid we could touch, see, smell, etc. to something ghostly and mathematically abstract. Scientists call it physical. The old material world turns out to be largely an illusion of our senses and minds, replaced by physical theories. Plato's cave is inverted. The scientist wonders outside the cave of the solid objects to find ghostly forms instead.
matiasz 8y ago
Chomsky discusses this here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aydw2neS1W8&feature=youtu.be&t=6m47s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aydw2neS1W8&feature=youtu.be...

hyperpallium 8y ago

Mechanical: the contact theory, that one thing can only affect another by being in contact with it e.g. the teeth of gears. Unfortunately, gravity ("spooky action at a distance") does not require contact, so the mechanical theory fails. Which can be stated figuratively as "the world is not a machine". "The machine, the ghost, and the limits of understanding: Newton's contributions to the study of mind" at the University of Oslo, September 2011 https://youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0 https://youtube.com/watch?v=D5in5EdjhD0

ealloc 8y ago
I've read Chomsky's opinion on this before in his essay ""Science, Mind, and Limits of Understanding", and I think he misunderstands the physics. He seems to think Newton accidentally disproved the concept of locality through his theory of gravity. It's true that philosophers largely gave up on locality in the 18th century because of Newton, but that was only temporary: In the 19th century the principle of locality came back with a vengance after Maxwell. Today the principle of locality is a key component of the Standard model: The Hamiltonian of the standard model is local, meaning you can compute what happens at a point in spacetime knowing only what is going on in an infinitesimal region around it. Even outside the standard model, LIGO proved that graviational waves exist, and therefore gravity is a local phenomenon. Einstein was famously prepared to give up on quantum mechanics because it seemed to violate the principle of locality, which he thought was more important. That is still debated sometimes, though whether quantum nonlocality exists seems to be a matter of interpretation and is also different from the kind of locality chomsky is talking about. Locality is still a key principle in physics.
- hyperpallium 8y ago
  > what is going on in an infinitesimal region around it A "field" is just a name for spooky action at a distance. It's a description, not an explanation. There is no mechanical contact, only "locality" of a field. Or are you saying that fields are really mediated by particles... so there is mechanical contact?
  - 8y ago