Ep. 22 - Awakening from the Meaning Crisis - Descartes vs. Hobbes

Vervaeke contrasts Descartes and Hobbes on artificial intelligence, arguing Descartes' rejection of mechanical mind reveals deep problems in the Scientific Revolution's view of meaning and the self.

Key Takeaways

The Scientific Revolution's account of matter as meaningless creates the meaning crisis
Descartes' rejection of Hobbes stems from his scientific commitments, not mere religious bias
Reasoning presupposes purpose, meaning, and normative standards that mechanistic matter cannot account for
The isolated individual self is a shared root of both Lutheran faith and Cartesian rationalism

What the video covers

Recaps prior episode on Luther, the Protestant Reformation, and the rise of individualism, secularism, and the Protestant work ethic
Presents Descartes' Cartesian graphing and his quest for certainty as a response to the anxiety of his era
Identifies a tension between Luther's acceptance-based faith and Descartes' demand for certainty, both sharing an isolated individual self
Explains Hobbes' proposal that cognition is computation and that artificial intelligence could be built from matter
Argues that Hobbes' materialism threatens the human soul and exacerbates cultural narcissism by undermining the notion of a true self
Defends Descartes against claims that his rejection of Hobbes was merely religious, framing it as rooted in scientific premises
Argues reasoning is purposive and normative, depends on meaning and truth standards, which matter as described by science lacks
Discusses secondary qualities and qualia as subjective features the Scientific Revolution removed from the physical world
Examines Descartes' cogito and the problem of the self and introspection
Previews a follow-up on Pascal and the rise of pseudo-religious thinking

Chapters

Why does Vervaeke defend Descartes against accusations of bad faith?

Vervaeke argues that the claim Descartes rejected Hobbes only because of Catholic belief misrepresents his intellectual integrity. Descartes' objections instead arise from central commitments of the Scientific Revolution, such as the idea that reasoning requires purpose and meaning.

What argument does Descartes use against Hobbes's artificial intelligence proposal?

Descartes argues that genuine reasoning acts on purpose, aims at truth, and depends on meaning and normative standards. Since mechanical matter lacks these features, a purely material computer cannot truly reason.

How does the video connect Hobbes's materialism to the meaning crisis?

By claiming matter is meaningless and the soul unnecessary, Hobbes's view undermines the notion of a true self and unique identity. This exacerbates cultural narcissism and the sense that the universe is purposeless.

Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown

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[Music] you [Music] welcome back to awakening from the meeting crisis last time we took a look at Martin Luther and the deep impact in our culture of grammar made by the Protestant Reformation and we talked about things like cultural training for

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narcissism Sapientia obsolescence the division of church and state which furthers secularism and the rise of the Protestant work ethic and how that's got integrated with emergent corporate capitalism that we then took a look some initial responses by Pascal to this

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change and the loss of the cosmos and being replaced by the infinite spaces that terrify we looked at an individual who tried to respond to that a brilliant genius from the heart of the Scientific Revolution and that's Rene Descartes he

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creates a new psycho technology the psycho technology that is at the core of the scientific enterprise as understood today and that's Cartesian graphing and the whole proposal is that we could render everything into equations and that if we mathematically manipulate

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those abstract symbolic propositions we can compute reality and that Descartes saw in that a method for how we could achieve certainty and that he understood the anxiety of his time as being provoked by a lack of certainty and the

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search for it and this method of making the mind computational in nature would alleviate the anxiety that was prevalent at the time and so I noted that we had we had two different elements in our grammar that are in significant tension

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with each other from and they and they both they share that's that's what's so interesting about them I think they share they overlap significantly in the idea of the isolated individual mind whereas Luther's going to put an emphasis on conscience

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well des cartes going to put in emphasis as we'll see we began to see last time I will now call consciousness although of course these two words are highly related in nature but on one side we have the the grammar from Luther telling

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us that we need to accept without question without evidence without argumentation and then Descartes is we should only accept that when we have certainty and neither one of those is viable for us they're both pathological in a very deep way but we saw that

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Descartes nevertheless proposes this new method a method again it's similar in so many ways to essential features of the Protestant Reformation a method cut off from tradition a method cut off from institution a method that relies just on

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the individual mind in relationship to itself so although in some one way in one sense these two grammars the Lutheran grammar and the Cartesian grammar seems so opposed in our culture and these grammars are at war in our

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current culture war the war between an idea an understanding of faith as a radical acceptance and knowledge as the pursuit of logically derived certainty although they are that that grammatical tension is at the core of a lot of our

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cultural Wars nevertheless these two views are so deeply bound together because of their mutual influence and their shared commitment to the isolated individual self Descartes has a couple of contemporaries as I mentioned Pascal will come back to Pascal in a bit but we

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also talked about Hobbes right and Hobbes comes up with the radical proposal that following on Descartes if cognition is computation and if matter is real then we can build a material computer and we could artificially make Nishan artificial intelligence is a

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product of the Scientific Revolution and is part and parcel of right the advent of the meaning crisis in modernity now what I want to do is take some time to look at these two interactions that I've mentioned draw them out a bit we have

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Descartes versus Hobbes and then we have Descartes and Pascal what we can learn from these interactions because they're pivotal and we are now going to remind ourselves that the idea of artificial intelligence is deeply relevant to both the Scientific Revolution and the

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meaning crisis I've shown you how it's relevant to the Scientific Revolution and I pointed out last time that it is deeply relevant to the meaning crisis because Hobbes with the proposal of artificial intelligence proposes to finish the swath of death that has been

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created by Galileo killing the universe for example and what Hobbes is doing is killing the human soul and of course that's going to exacerbate the cultural narcissism because if we no longer have souls then finding our uniqueness and

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our true self the self that we're going to be true to becomes extremely paradoxical in problematic if you don't have a soul what is it to be true to your true self and what is it that makes you really unique and special from the

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rest of the purposeless meaningless cosmos so these are going to be crucial questions now I want to take a look at how Descartes responds to Hobbes because that's going to make clear to us again both the scientific import and the

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existential relevance of the AI project and it'll also make clear deeper problems that we are now facing in the meaning crisis alright now here's where it's important to make make clear how we should treat Descartes so it's very fashionable

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philosophically and cognitive scientifically to blame Descartes for many many mistakes there's a famous book by DiMaggio a book that in other respects I think very highly of des cartes error right and we'll talk about all this stuff later

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however I mean if I were to put it in a sentence I wish I had made des cartes mistakes Descartes is titanically brilliant and the mistakes he makes are so foundational to our culture so woven into our cultural grammar that

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overcoming them is not going to be an easy task why I say this is because I want to look at how Descartes actually rejects Hobbes's proposal of artificial intelligence and why that rejection is still scientifically philosophically relevant to us today but how it makes

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our existence problematic what I want to say is there is often a claim made that Descartes rejects hobbes materialism because descartes is Catholic and that his motivation is religious and then there is the innuendo that Descartes is actually operating sorry for this pun in

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bad faith he's merely trying to preserve his religious beliefs I think this completely misrepresents and is a disservice to des cartes intellectual integrity Descartes does not respond to hobbes out of his religious faith descartes responds to hobbes out of the

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fundamental machinery and central claims of the scientific revolution and i want to take a look at that because i want to show you how problematic our worldview is becoming and has become so Hobbs proposes basically right this idea

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of artificial intelligence Descartes says that that's wrong and he has a series of arguments against Hobbes that are very telling and what Descartes basically does is argue about the central claims that are being made by the Scientific Revolution the central

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claims that are being made are claims that matter is real and reality is mathematically measured and that the meaning and value of things is not in the things themselves so let's go through this very carefully okay so Descartes says well Hobbes if you are

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making an argument if you're engaging in reasoning as opposed to just computation you actually care right you have a goal you're held to a standard of truth because whatever I'm doing when I'm reasoning I'm working towards the goal

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of truth which means I'm acting on purpose and secondly truth depends on meaning if I ask you is the following claim true to rip Nick Nick peeking bucka bucka is that true you presumably can't tell me if it's true or false

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because you first need to know what I just meant truth depends on meaning so reasoning acts on purpose it acts in terms of meaning and it cares about standards or goals it works according to a normative standard of how we ought to behave

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okay notice this this is at the heart of reasoning this goes centrally to a lot of useless time I would say I'm just going to be somewhat harsh here but a lot of useless time in the current culture wars of discussions of

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rationality I actually a scientist who scientifically studies rationality in human reasoning and it is often surprising to me how little of the science of rationality advocates of rationality make use of how difficult and this is what I'm going to show you

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it is to integrate notions of rationality with a scientific materialism I'm not anti materialistic that's not what I'm doing here I'm trying to show you that people who advocate a model of rationality that is ultimately Cartesian that rationality is

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about behaving purely logically in an attempt to get certainty in our truths sam harris for example comes to mind are not paying attention to their criticisms of that model made by the very self same descartes do not advocate one side of a

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phenomena without paying attention to central criticisms made about it by its progenitor because what's descartes saying to hobbes he's saying well look look what's central to reasoning normativity how things ought to be meaning and purpose and hobbes and i'm

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gonna i'm gonna act on de cartes but behalf here and we I can do this I think in all integrity and legitimacy because we have Hobbes as letters to de cartes and de cartes response and de cartes response are often contemptuous so you

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can almost hear Descartes saying ha you idiot you can't have a material reasoner because what is the scientific revolution saying about matter it's saying that matter is inert it has no purpose right there is no meaning in matter we've already been doubting that

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since akhom Occam's razor remember what it actually cuts and it acts in terms of ought to be not how things are no science doesn't act in terms of how things ought to be it acts only in describing and explaining how things

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actually are it has no values so science it's teaching us that the world is purposeless matter is meaningless there's no normative standard or structure in matter it's just actually how it is and how it actually is is valueless so hobbes matter lacks meaning

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purpose normativity it's inert how could you possibly get all of those things out of matter how could you if you're a reasoner you care about the truth and yet truth depends on meaning purpose at least the pursuit of truth and normative standards

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of how things ought to be and none of those are in matter well Hobbes responds and says well you know what it's life what I can have is I can have little I have like my abacus and it's automated and I have little

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pieces of paper on them and write the pieces of paper are manipulated much like the letters on your computer screen and if they're manipulated in the right way I get a meaningful sentence the cat is on the mat and then Descartes says

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Hobbes you're being an idiot because you're making a fundamental mistake here first of all you're English I'm French I don't have this I have this physically these are two very different things yet we're both thinking about the same miaow

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miaow creature there's no meaning there's no intrinsic meaning in these material marks if waves on a shore happen to mark scratch the pebbles right so that this word appears on the beach would you think the ocean is talking to

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you that'd be ridiculous it's just random grooves cut in the sand by the water it has no intrinsic meaning these things only have meaning because they are associated with ideas in your mind and those ideas actually possess meaning see do you see what Descartes

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saying he's saying look you have a view of matter that makes the rationality that you're holding out to be so central actually deeply deeply problematic see this is what we need to pay attention to when we invoke rationality as a standard

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of course we should invoke rationality as a standard but first of all two things we should note the idea that rationality is just the logical manipulation of propositions is something we should question because I've shown you already Lee already

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that's not historically accurate that's a particular view that we see from Descartes secondly Descartes himself rejects that because he realizes that rationality is caring about the truth on purpose according to normative standards and values and none of that machinery

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can actually be found in the scientific model of matter so you know what is actually deeply mysterious in our culture right now although it is invoked religiously and I mean that is exactly the notion of rationality itself this is

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not me advocating irrationality not at all I am against the ad vacations of it as if it is a philosophically unproblematic phenomenon that is irresponsible and seriously misleading okay is that it no there's more des cartes going to say

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more in order to say that we need to go back to Galileo what more does Descartes say to Hobbes what more does Descartes say to Hobbes Hobbes says well look Galileo had this problem alright and we've talked about it but let's go over

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it again mathematics is the language of reality ultimately a platonic idea right and then you get the idea that there are two kinds of properties there are the properties that are immeasurable by math those are the primary properties the

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primary qualities the ones that are mathematically measurable and although the term isn't quite used this way in de cartes time shortly thereafter it's going to come to take on this meaning the mathematical properties or properties that are in the object

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regardless of whether or not anybody is paying attention to them looking at them involved with them so if I can measure it mathematically it's in the object its objective but of course Galileo faced the fact that many qualities of

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experience and notice how this is you know part and parcel of this whole scientific revolution and the calling into question of experience Galileo noted that many qualities are not mathematically describable how beautiful something is right how sweet the honey tastes how wonderful the Rose

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smells and then he has an important idea here the these are these were called secondary qualities and the idea here is and notice how this follows on procurement Copernicus these don't exist in the object they exist in my mind they're part of that

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veil that might the experience places between me and the world a part of the way in which my mind doesn't touch the world these are purely subjective qualities purely in the subject object thrown against thrown against object thrown against because matter resists me

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subjective I can throw it under me I can dominate it now notice what des cartes saying des cartes going to pick up on this right philosophers have a nice way of talking about these secondary qualities they have invented this term

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called qualia that's plural the secondary qualities and the idea here is they're purely subjective they exist only in the mind and that these make up an important part and there's all kinds of debate about this I'm not going to

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try and resolve that here but somehow these qualia are central to consciousness they're part of the fabric and/or the content or and/or the nature of consciousness remember I said that Descartes is emphasizing consciousness now here's the idea what the Scientific

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Revolution showed it one of its big insights is this is in the world in matter and this is not in the world it is only in mind and then what you can say to Hobbes is the following and many

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philosophers I've said it repeatedly Thomas Nagel comes to mind and many others right matter does not possess these properties the qualia consciousness therefore there is no way to manipulate matter to generate qualia consciousness that's really really devastating because it brings with it

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the possibility that the AI not only will the AI not have meaning not have purpose not have any normative values the AI will also not have any conscious awareness of its cognition it will not possess consciousness now Descartes

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brings in one other important aspect to this which isn't quite as explicit but it was very quickly derived from other people around him see what does this happen in Descartes right by the time of Descartes is we've seen this slow

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withdrawal everything is withdrawing from the world into the mind the mind is getting isolated trapped inside of itself and then Descartes right famously worries about that he says I want to doubt everything tried to find something I cannot doubt he makes what I into my

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mind other people that said this this isn't original to me but I think it's important he makes a mistake about this notion of certainty there's two notions of certainty there's a logical notion in a psychological notion the logical

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notion of certainty is something like absolute deductive validity it's impossible for the premises to be true impossible and the conclusion false that's different from psychological certainty psychological certainty is an inability to doubt so you find something certain because you are incapable of

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doubting it the problem is these are not identical by any means think of the radical bigot the radical bigot I am NOT I hope such a person but they're radical bigoted cannot doubt certain things they cannot doubt this superiority of the

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white race or some other such garbage they're psychologically incapable of doubting it precisely because of the depth of their ignorance and bigotry so they have psychological certainty but it is certainly not logical certainty there is no direct connection between

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psychological certainty and logical certainty but what Descartes does is he thinks that if he pushes this far enough it will somehow become identical to this and it never does and that's part of the problem we face because he realizes to

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be honest I mean so what he does is he says I'll doubt everything I can possibly doubt and and then he even doubts the math because he realizes that his commitment to math is still ultimately based on an aspect of

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psychological certainty because there could be some evil genius perhaps like the matrix who's actually programming his brain unbeknownst to him to make him believe in the axioms of math and before you say that's ridiculous come to realize how much modern physics has

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rejected the axioms of Euclidean geometry even though they were once taken to be absolutely unquestionable so why am I saying all of this because what Descartes comes to the point where the point that he thinks he finds that

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connects these two together is he cannot doubt that he exists but cuz in order to be subject to illusion his mind must exist so even the most comprehensive set of illusions guarantees to him the existence of his mind this is the famous

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cogito ergo sum I think therefore I am it's not an argument there's no argument there I think therefore I am there's no that's not a logical argument it's not a logical argument it's a statement of where psychological certainty becomes indistinguishable from

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logical certainty because the idea is in order to be suffering from an illusion I must exist notice what's happening we used to have the mind in touch with the world then the mind is at least in touch with the math and now all we have left

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is this all that the mind actually touches is itself that's what consciousness is I notice how weird consciousness is like that when I tell you how do you know if I ask you how do you know the cups there

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you'll say well I see it I interact with it if I ask you how do you know you're conscious you just say I know I'm conscious by being conscious what does this mean with Hobbes well Descartes saying that aspect that's

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the touchstone of reality the mind touching itself Hobbes is nothing that matter has matter doesn't have because what the Scientific Revolution did was take all of that contact out of the world and it took it I'm even willing to

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say it's not even in the math it's just here so these are devastating problems I would put it this way if you are an advocate and you should pay very serious attention to artificial intelligence because I'm trying to show you not only

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is it going to change the world socioeconomically politically culturally trying to show you it's going to change your understanding of who and what you are and it is going to interact with the meaning crisis in profound ways right

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but if you're interested in this and if you are doing something work on it and some of the scientific theoretical work I do is an attempt to contribute towards the development of AI alright you need to pay attention to a distinction a

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distinction that was made famous by John Searle between weak and strong AI I don't like those terms because we ki implies something defective because the we never used the word weak as a compliment why do I say that because we

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ki is the project of just making machines that can do things for us that typically intelligent animals or human being could do your laptop computer is weak AI and there is there is nothing weak about this in a social or value sense it is a

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legitimate and real pursuit that computer revolution has transformed the world right there is nothing deficient or defective or people who want to make weak AI you depend on weak AI we carry around these Star Trek computers in our

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phone and we go to automatic banking machine all of this is profoundly altered our lives okay so when I use this word I am not using it a pejorative sense perhaps sir Oh was I don't know but I'm not but here's what is of value

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in Sorrells distinction between weak and strong AI weak AI does not really advance our scientific understanding in the following way and this is a way that matters this is how you would succeed at strong AI and when I say it right it

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should make it should show you how difficult strong eyes a lot of people now talk use this term artificial general intelligence to talk about strong AI what is strong AI strong AI is to make a computer that not does just

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some intelligent things or models what it's like but is actually an instance of mind it's to succeed in Hobbes's project it is to make a mind but that but to succeed in Hobbes's project requires you do the following if I'm actually making

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a material mind how do I know I've really succeeded if when I make this I can give an answer if I can give an explanation of how Descartes is wrong if I can answer all of de cartes objections

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in an explanatory fashion not just yelling at him Descartes silly silly silly but I build a machine in and then I could say look given how the machine is built and operate here is my scientific explanation for how you can get purpose

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meaning normativity consciousness and that contact with realness that they car talked about that's strong AI and that's a lot harder that's why people who are invested in that project are a lot more cautious about predicting when we will

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have AGI the fact that computational machines are going to change our society in the next 10 to 20 years is undeniable they're just some sort of intellectual Luddite if you try to resist that but the idea that that immediately

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translates into a profound understanding of the nature of the mind is a second question and people the people I respect the people I think are doing the best work in strong AI people pursuing AGI are a lot more cautious about whether or

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not we're going to be able to answer descartes and show in a deeply explanatory evam evidence-based way how Hobbs is right so we are still with that problem now I'm I work in cognitive science that we are still at that

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problem we're still wrestling with this problem right now and there are many people on both sides of this issue I do not want to misrepresent one side I mean most people in the professional business think that Hobbs is ultimately right

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they take seriously de cartes challenge if they're good scientists and most of them are there are many at the minority but it's not a small minority there are many of these scientists who think that Descartes might be fundamentally right ok so this is still

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very much an open an important question that goes to the core of us now you may think some of you perhaps also if you have a religious orientation and I'm not insulting you here I am not insulting you because you might think well Hobbes

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tries to kill the soul and these arguments from Descartes they sort of preserve the notion of a soul and that's great because if I have a soul then of course then immortality is a real possibility for me well be careful you

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may not want the Cartesian baby okay even though you're trying to throw out the materialistic bathwater because the problem with de cartes solution is it's existential cost it's existential cost because what Descartes was basically arguing for is that mind and matter are

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essentially different they share no fundamental properties mind moves on purpose it moves according to values it works in terms of meaning and qualia it cares about and pursues the truth and it has this kind of contact with itself

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that no material thing has whereas matter is extended in space and time displays force transfers energy so all the properties that mind has matter doesn't have and all the properties that matter has mind doesn't have so Descartes of course came to a plausible

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conclusion that mind and matter are two radically different kinds of things mind is a completely immaterial substance matter of course is a completely material substance and you may say yay here's the problem if mind and matter share no properties how do they causally

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interact how do they causally interact here I'm going to show you mind over matter I'm thirsty I desire water because water is good so I'm going to move on purpose so notice all these mental terms desire and want and I value the water and I'm

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gonna move on purpose and here I do I move and I get some water that's mine making matter change but how can I do that mind has no energy doesn't take up space alright doesn't have any force what

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about the reverse can matter ever a cause mind here we go behold I'm going to start with a completely material event and it's going to end up in a completely mental event ow two pieces of matter slam into each other and the end

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result is pain what's pain well that's a qualia it's a quality about the value of your experience how much does pain weigh does it even mean make sense of what color is it what's it's an electromagnetic radiation what's its

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chemical structure so look your experience is moment-to-moment mind and matter are intimately interacting in a bi-directional matter mind and matter intimately continuously doing this and yet de cartes whole position the way he responds to hobbes makes it impossible

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that they can interact because they share no properties in virtue of which they can interact because he used that gap to argue against hobbes because it's the gap between matter scientific matter and mind that de cartes uses against

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hobbes but the problem is that gap undermines your whole existence because what does it mean it means you are radically cut off from yourself your relationship between your mind and your body is a complete and utter mystery the most intimate aspects

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of your experience the taste of this water is absurd because there's no way that the taste which is a mental thing and the water which is a physical thing could in any way be related to each other but it's worse because look around

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you there's another person how do you know what's going on in their mind do you directly see their mind of course not well how do I know are they utter words well no they don't they make sounds when

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we talked about remember what Descartes says to Hobbes there's nothing in the sounds that's meaningful their face moves and they make gestures and they express their emotions so what you're saying is you get what's going on in somebody's mind because of the way their

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physical body moves and makes other physical things like air move but if there is no connection between mind and matter and your body is a purely material thing and I hope you don't disagree with that then there's no way

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by paying attention to body I can figure out what's going on in mind because there's no connection between them this is called the problem of other minds how do I know and Descartes seriously worried about this how do I know that

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the rest of you are not just mindless automatons not just zombies how do I know this because the only the only mind that my mind touches according to Descartes is itself well at least the mind is still in

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contact with the world with Descartes right John because the math touches the world aha be careful there des cartes given us two different answers he said the math tells us what's real and it's objective but the mind touching

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itself in consciousness is ultimately the touchstone and I use that touchstone of reality it's purely subjective and so what we have are these two different standards of realness subjective consciousness objective math and so what our society our culture has now done

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historically is Carine back and forth between them you get you know the empiricists and the positivist right no science tells me what's real and then all you say well how do you know it's not a dream oh well haha silly silly silly nobody

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really pays any attention of that and what you get are insults you get insults and ad hominem arguments it's like well no no answer oh well you know it's and then we invoke rationality and what do you mean by rationality and how does

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rationality fit into this mathematically realized world when we don't have any mathematical material way of talking about purpose and truth etc it's very problematic so you swing the other way and you come over here and you're the Romantics I don't mean the rock group

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and I don't mean like romantic love right we'll talk about these guys in a bit right so what's ultimately real is my spear subjective experience right but then the problem with that is well how is that to be in touch with the world how is that

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to be in touch with other people how's that to be in touch with reality at all it leaves me totally disconnected this how would I know it it's not just all that and so I go back and forth and back

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and forth so what Descartes actually gay wasn't a secure way of being in contact with reality he gives us a completely unstable grammar of realness and our culture is riven by these two demands and we swing back and forth between a subjective and

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an objective account of realness as we swing back and forth between attempts to understand the relationship between mind and body and between mind and mind so notice what we have here we have a loss a perspectival and participatory knowing

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we found we've seen a gradual loss of contact with the world a loss of contact with tradition and history loss of contact with our own bodies loss of contact with other people other Minds loss of contact with reality and then

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you say well that Leith Descartes gives me contact with my own mind right least I have that right I have my little tiny Cartesian Lutheran Island and at least that's where I can make my my last stand well do you because you have to be

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really consistent right if you're going to be Cartesian and logical you have to be consistent and here's the problem you can't invoke historical cultural notions of the self see when Descartes says cogito ergo sum and he says and you may

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say well therefore I know that I exist what does what's this I that exists is it is it all of john byrne vacay well right because it kept that first of all it can't be anything I'm introspect because a lot of my introspection is

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false are wrong right is it based on my memories well my memory is certainly capable of making all kinds of mistakes it always does in fact well what about my history well what access do I have to my history

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and how do I measure that history mathematically my memories certainly not trustworthy according to standards of certainty and I don't have any mathematical way of gaining access to my past all that you have contact with is this moment of self-awareness right now

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isolated atomic moment now take that completely isolated content lists having no autobiography no contact with its body no contact within the world no contact with other minds and then place it inside Pascal's infinite spaces that terrify that completely atomic empty

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self adrift in empty infinite spaces of terror and that's what you get that's where you are if you think through things carefully according to the fractured tortured tensions of our current cultural grammar that's how you get into the meaning crisis now Pascal

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was aware of this and like I said he is as great a mathematical genius as Descartes he on his own rediscovers from axioms forward recreates all of Euclidean geometry as a as a adolescent on his own he says brilliant he's part

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of the Scientific Revolution he invents the barometer as a way of merit measuring air pressure but he has a transformative experience we talked about those and they convinced him that what Descartes is trying to achieve the certainty is not possible and that

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the meaning crisis is powerful Pascal makes a distinction but what he calls the spirit of geometry we have to think of that in cartesian terms I would say today the spirit of math or the spirit of computation and what he calls the

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spirit of finesse and he is fear his concern is that we have lost this and we have come to think of all of knowing and being in terms of the spirit of geometry and this is a theme this Pascal Ian

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theme as you've been seeing it running through this history we have slowly lost procedural know the importance of procedural knowledge knowing how to do things we've lost perspective all knowing knowing what it's like and we've lost participatory knowing knowing that is

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part and parcel of how we are bound up with something else someone else in a process of mutual transformation reciprocal revelation because that's what finesse is to do something with finesse right when if I do something with if I'm doing

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a move in Tai Chi and I do it with finesse right it's like jazz right there's an element in there right that I can't capture in terms of mathematical propositions it's knowing how in terms of knowing the right timing the right

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placement when you're kissing someone else right you have to do it with finesse at the right timing the right placement the sensitivity to the content knowing what it is like to be you knowing what it is like to be the other

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person and then get that getting those two perspectives to have a participatory relation to be in a relation of mutual revelation with each other what's necessary to kissing someone well and so Pascal is pointing out that what has been lost in the Scientific

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Revolution is all these other kinds of knowing and being and these are the kinds of knowing and being that he found present in the transformative experience that he had it was for him a religious experience but we've seen that these transformative

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experiences are not necessarily religious there are always spiritual but they're not often sorry they're not always officially I should be careful they're not always things that reinforce established religious beliefs or propositions sometimes they challenge the beliefs that the person has had as

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we've seen sometimes they lead to entire religious or at least non-religious propositions nevertheless Pascal is onto something to my mind when he argues that the loss of the spirit of finesse has left us bereft of the capacity for

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transformative truth transformative knowing and so we're now stuck where Socrates was at the beginning of the actual revolution we have scientific knowledge but remember Socrates rejected it because although it was rigorous and even plausibly true it did not afford

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transformation self transcendence into wisdom but of course all that self transcendence is gone because now I don't believe in self transcendence because of the Protestant Reformation and I don't have to go through personal transformation according to Descartes look at what they could saying you do

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not have to be transformed in order to come into contact with ultimate reality all you have to do is use the right method do the right computation so all of this part of the axial revolution is being lost

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that's what Pascal is putting his finger on and he's doing it extremely well so what I want to do next is to follow up a little bit more on Descartes and take a look at Conte and the rise of the pseudo religious

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ideologies and the main problem facing us in the West today we face these undeniable at least that we're being rational crises environmental economic socio-political cultural Wars we need deep fundamental transformation transformations of cognition consciousness culture community but we

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have lost the psycho technologies the spirit of finesse the traditions in the institutions for affording that because what the thing that used to do that was religion but we've lost religion and as I'm going to show you next time we tried

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secular or pseudo religious alternatives and they drench the world in blood thank you very much for your time and attention [Music] you you

Topics:DescartesHobbesartificial intelligencemeaning crisisScientific RevolutionProtestant ReformationcogitomaterialismVervaekephilosophy of mind

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