Good morning, everyone and welcome to Saturday’s Morning Open Thread.
Morning Open Thread is a daily, copyrighted post from a host of editors and guest writers. We support our community, invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful, respectful dialogue in an open forum.
Join us, please.
For the next couple Saturdays, I’m exploring language—its ways of working and our attempts to understand how it actually provides commonalities universal (or at least public) enough to allow communication and the philosophical schools that touch upon our human nature. The main focus of the short series (like much of contemporary philosophy) is with the inconsistency, inadequacy, and muddle which characterizes ordinary language: how do we actually communicate.
The first week we explored some limitations on language (symbols and their meanings) in a lecture on the famous "Chinese Room" thought experiment. Next we explored the basics of our present day understanding of how language works with Gottlob Frege's theory of sense and reference. Widening our net slightly, last week we discussed Occam’s Razor and Objective Morality. This week it is Thomas Nagel’s argument against the philosophical school of Physicalism.
A couple things that are good to know going in. “Physicalism” (reduced to an overall theory) is the view that fundamental reality is entirely physical; that the real world consists only of matter and energy, and that all organic and inorganic processes can be explained by reference to the laws of nature. That’s it. In its completeness, it isn’t that different than the pre-Socratic philosopher Thales who argued that the source of all things was water or the Irish philosopher George Berkeley believed that all that exist, exist only in the mind. Another thing to realize here is that Physicalism is actually the most accepted philosophical approach today.
In “What Is It Like to Be a Bat,” Nagel posits that physicalist theories cannot (in any of their versions) explain subjective consciousness. It cannot explain love or belief or an individual’s perception. Simply, we can’t truly know what it’s like to be a bat no matter how much we know about bats. The key argument, as written by Nagel, is that "an organism has conscious mental states if and only if there is something that it is like to be that organism—something it is like for the organism." I hope you enjoy the video.
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Happy Saturday!
My hope for the day is that each of you celebrates life in one way or another and finds peace in these turbulent times. Be well, be kind, and appreciate the love you have in your life.
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Grab your coffee or tea and join us, please.
What's on your mind this morning?