“I have to talk for 3-4 minutes about the word ‘is.’” Your reaction to this statement is going to govern whether you love, hate, or just endure Philosophy.

Oh my goodness, this was so helpful for my Phil of Mind class. You explained it in such a coherent manner. I can’t wait to check out the rest of your channel, thank you!

Omgggggg professors in romance language classes always would talk about how "to have" and "to be" can be extremely connected (like how age is expressed in "'having years", or "being hungry" is "having hunger"), but there was never a solid explanation about it other than it being the way the language expresses these ideas. I think this discussion of two "is"'s finally helps make the relation between the words and ideas make sense for me. Thank you!

You are an awesome teacher. The video got me thinking. The fact that you can describe your mental imagery and sensations without knowing anything about your brain processes aligns with the meditation principles of the five aggregates of the first noble truth in Buddhism. Namely, form, feeling, perception, fabrication, and consciousness. It fits with pain as a definition and a contingent. The secession of pain is abandoning the clinging to the five aggregates. Entrapment in putting out the fire is what keeps the fire of pain burning. Impermanence and physicality of the brain make the mind hurt, but it is just a scientific contingent that predicates suffering.

Thanks for such beautiful thought-provoking lectures

Great lecture! I can't believe poor Mr. Place had to put in all this effort to explain the scientific process to his peers. I think a lot of philosphers generate elaborate articles with extremely complicate language to cover up that they really don't know much and do a lot of deduction from their ivory tower.

Amazing explanation, thank you!

I can see both dualism and physicalism. My argument for physicalism, is that before birth we are almost completely a blank slate, 99% while in the womb we learn how to depend on our mother for survival, crying with our first breath would be one of the few programmed things in us, etc... every experience we have, no matter how big or small, becomes learned and remembered in order to know how to act in the future each experience effect us fundamentally down to the particle/wave duality thats makes up our physical being. Each possible reaction to.an experience will create a new timeline and each time line will have its own unique consciousness, even if only unique by 1 quark or something. The reason we experience the complicated, unexplainable consciousness, is because evolution made out conscious and subconcious seperate in order to have a significant amount of automation, in a sense, and feelings, hunches, etc... are just the perception of the subconscious at work. Now the argument for dualism, my version atleast, is the consciousness isnt here, its in a different, unknown reality, and it pilots the body, basically. Kind of like if my first argument were totally true, and the implication of the, possibly, infinite amount of consciousnesses formed from the wave function collapsing, for my physical body, all versions, at all possible locations of space and time where i could possibly exist. The reason for this, i like to believe, atleast, is because in the real world i may have decided to go to the local learning store and paid to have some lesson or something downloaded onto my brain, and when i die in this world all of my experiences from all my lives will come together as one. I hope they work in parallel and not sequentially, like how reincarnation is perceived. Regardless, when that happens, and i "wake up" thats when ill be aware of all my previous experiences from the "real world" That idea makes sense to me, even when thought of at a societal level, imagine an advanced version of AI, and it has a fundamental rationale of preserving human life, and being beneficial. Well, the way we just "luck" into discoveries or inventions, can be reality breaking if we make a quantum virus or something, so good ol' elon musk and his neuralink allows us to connect to.the internet, and the AI wants us to thrive, but also not destroy ourselves because we are effectively super smart, primitive monkeys. So, the AI uses neuralink to stimulate our neurotransmitters, and at the same time, while in the tripping, halucinogenic state, the AI guides the "journey" and we have our own virtusl reality that we can make all the mistakes we want, until we learn how to efficiently, and effectively live in the real world, then we wake up. Thatd be cool, and its gice purpose to all the crappy struggles we go through. All infinite possibilities are likely, so thats what seems good to me, gives me comfort, purpose, etc... By the way. The zombie argument, i have trouble conceiving the zombie thats exactly like me but not conscious, because, how would it NOT experience what i experience. I mean, i wouldnt see through its eyes, buts thats like me going back in time and meeting myself from yesterday, i only see through MY eyes and experience my experiences, the yesterday me, would be a different consciousness. Im not crazy, however, the limitless possibility in subject's, such as this, allows my imagination to have fun.

thank you for this, i was so confused in my philosophy of the mind class

Brings me back to the 90s... "It depends on what the definition of 'is' is." :)

Really you are a good teacher.

Hey Jeffrey, I love your videos and I mostly listen to them on headphones. Unfortunately, the sound is always louder in one channel than the other (stereo, right is louder than left). Also the volume could be a lot higher. This is pretty annoying when you're listening on headphones, and I'd love it if it was fixed. Thanks!

the real talent of these videos is being able to write all of this perfectly mirrored

Very good! Thank you....!!!

GREAT VIDEO THANK YOU HELPED ME SO MUCH!!!!!!!!!!

I think this hypothesis is correct, but with an important additional distinction. The mind is a dynamic pattern of information that arises from and is 100% dependent upon the physical system which gives rise to it, which in this case would be the human mind of a human and the brain of that same human, where the two are not separable at this time. That is the key difference. If you could have two absolutely identical (not realistically possible) then the two minds arising from the two brains would also be identical. Understanding the mind/brain is constantly changing its dynamic pattern of information, thus a mind from one day is not exactly the same as it is on a different day, if we could create and artificial brain and transfer the dynamic pattern of information from an existing human brain into that artificial brain, such that the dynamic pattern of information which is the human mind as virtually the same, as close as a human mind stays the same over days, weeks, and years, then we will be able to move a mind between supportive physical structures. In other words, the mind will always be 100% dependent upon a physical structure to give rise to it, but it could be possible for a mind to move between such supportive physical structures, like a program can move between supportive computer hardware systems.

Very helpful, thank you 🤙

I find myself partial to this view. Looking forward to the next lecture to hear some objections.

It is about this point that the casual-viewer rate begins to drop. This lesson required a higher degree of focus than usual

I thought I understood the distinction between "is" of predication and "is" of identity. But then you said that "the car is a blue vehicle" is identity. For me to call a relation "identity", that relation has to be reflexive, symmetric, and transitive. Reflexive means that 'A is A' remains true, no matter what you substitute in for A. For example, Superman is Superman. Symmetric means that whenever 'A is B' is true, 'B is A' is also true. For example, Clark Kent is Superman, and Superman is Clark Kent. Transitive means that if 'A is B' and 'B is C' are both true, then 'A is C' is also true. For example, if Superman is Clark Kent, and Clark Kent is Kal-El, then Superman must also be Kal-El. But the car is a blue vehicle (at least as stipulated for discussion), and the Stena Freighter is a blue vehicle (at least if the first page I found on my web search for 'blue ship' is accurate), but it does not follow that the car is the Stena Freighter. As I understand the words, 'is a blue vehicle' is predication, not an identity. Neither "a blue vehicle" nor "an old packing case" pick out a specific object. By the way, "Clark Kent is Kal-El" isn't necessarily true. There are early versions in which Superman's birth name was "Kal-L" instead. Then there's the idea that you can never refute an "is" of composition just by analyzing it. That makes no sense either. Instead of saying the his table is an old packing crate, let's say that his table is an old colorless green idea crate. If you think about that for even a moment, you can tell that it can't be true: colorless green ideas, even if they're anything at all, certainly can't be the kind of things that would have crates. Likewise, if someone interprets mind-brain identity as saying that our minds are composed of brain but presumably other minds could be composed of some other kind of stuff, they may still attack it by saying that 'a mind made of brain' is in the same category with 'a crate made to contain colorless green ideas': attempt to describe a thing, that in each case turned out to be word-salad. Reason (a) fails. 25:52 Definitions can be used while still having gaps in them, denoted by phrases such as 'that which does ____'. For example, you can talk about "that which makes heavy objects tend to move downward" in a quasi-Aristotelian framework where it's just a matter of definition (under your theory) that it's the same as the telos of earthy-ness. Then if someone engages with your theory, but hasn't learned the details yet, they can talk about "that which makes heavy objects tend to move downward (in the theory under consideration)", and ask about the empirical implications of your partially-described theory, without having any idea that any such thing as teloses (or teloi or tele) even exist in your theory. We've all been living with theories of mind that are on a level with that hypothetical half-baked quasi-Aristotelianism. And maybe if we worked through the implications of how we understand the words we use, we would find that it follows from our implicit definitions that mind has to be brain, because the questionable science is baked into the theory. In other words, maybe we're so committed to a limited range of possible understandings of mind that if we turn out to be wrong enough about the science, a lot of our statements will turn out to have been word salad.

Thank you for explaining the thesis, can you explain this statement: "There is no surface on which mental events can cause physical events."

Yes. Please lets go to the next question.

Pain obviously is accompanied by the spevific muscle tensions. The same for volition, if i am going to open door my muscle prepare for this action and i can feel it

thank goodness, i felt like i was going insane when you were talking about behaviorism because do those people not feel? how would hey come to the conclusion that there's no activity of private comprehension of feelings; that is like saying everything is sub-conscious, how could everything be sub something that doesn't exist

Love this

Here the Morning Star and Evening Star analogy would be apt. They mead different things but designate, as a matter of fact, a single object - the planet Venus.

These videos are awesome but can't you upload them with mono sound to prevent this horrible experience of sound I have right now with all these videos?

Very good explanation, getting closer and closer to my own description of the body mind theory.

Does Identity theory require that there exist one and only one mental state to exist for every physical state that might contribute to consciousness?

I could not understand something when I first read Place's article. Since you made a video about it, I can just ask you. Place concedes in his article that we cannot explain some of the states of consciousness by examining the brain processes. If this is the case, how is Place a physicalist? Does he not implicitly accept the existence of a mind by saying such thing? I am writing a paper about identity-theory but i am not sure how I should describe Place's position.

By using the "is" of composition, haven't we accounted for the problem of multiple realizability? Multiply realizability would be a problem if we where using the the "is" of definition. However, it wouldn't hold as a rebuttal if we used the "is" of composition. May someone please discuss this with me, I'm very willing to hear opposing view points in this matter.

The unique issue with assigning a physical sensation to a singular neurological cause is that a sensation can never be singular by the very nature of the fact that it is both "a thing that is experienced" and is dependent upon "experience" which has that thing as its subject. For example, you can give a person enough opiates to completely shut down their brain's mechanism of generating the sensation of pain, but that does nothing to the backdrop of awareness which is necessary for that sensation to be given an audience so to speak(the "I" in this case). Lumping a sensation into a singular cause is just attempting to answer the easy problem of consciousness while ignoring the hard problem.

To what extent does language influence our understanding of

I love the way it's impossible to describe the word 'is' without using the word 'is''.

the thumbnail seems to be mixed up with the korematsu v united states video

The car has that bluey way! tt's blue!

It depends on what your definition of "is" is.

Very interesting! But: “A square is an equilateral rectangle” is not the same as “Superman is Clark Kent”. The latter sentence is indeed an identity statement (a = b), but the former is a definition (F = H). Identity statements need nominators on both sides of the "is", but in the first sentence we have pedicators (terms), right? Identity statements are fundamentally different from definitions (set inclusion) - so I don't understand why Place even classifies both "is" under identity statements. If I understand correctly: What Place ultimately wants to say is that "Pain is brain process B" is not a definition (or: not a knowledge a priori), but a statement of identity (a = b / or: a knowledge a posteriori)?

super helpful (;

от души брат, теперь все понял

I wish my philosophy professor was this straightforward and cute lol

This is all very well but I do not see how there can be an analogue of visiting the apartment to "scientifically determine" whether the table is in fact an old packing case. You can see a table and an old packing case. You can weigh them both. You can see whether the packing case was being used as a table. What is the analogue with pain? What sort of experiment could you devise to ascertain whether the experience of pain is Brain Process B?

I've always thought that identity theory was just obviously ridiculous...and I still do. But the video was an extremely clear explanation of Place's defence which I wasn't familiar with (I'm not studying philosophy, just interested in philosophy of mind, mainly from watching youtube clips). Although it made me think for a few seconds, the claim that "pain is brain process B" is a scientific hypothesis smuggles in an incorrect assumption. When we use the "is" of composition to say that a cloud is suspended water droplets, this statement only makes sense because on both sides of the "is" are noun-phrases of similar ontological types. A cloud is an object in the world that can be observed by anyone; a load of water droplets is also some stuff that has the same ontology, another object in the world that can be observed by anyone. That's what a scientific hypothesis using the "is" of composition is: it describes one observable thing in terms of other observable things. To regard "pain is brain process B" as a scientific hypothesis is to erroneously smuggle in the assumption that both pain and brain process B are noun phrases of the same ontological type, i.e. that both are things in the world that are observable by anyone. Brain process B is of this ontological type, whereas pain is not a thing in the world observable by anyone: only the subject can observe pain. Pain, and qualia generally, have a different ontology to physical things in the world: they only exist in the mind of a single subject. This doesn't mean that consciousness is magic i.e. that we need to invoke substance dualism, but it does mean that we can't make scientific hypotheses about its composition using the same language as we do for physical phenomena that anyone can observe. I'm with John Searle here, I think that the mind is entirely *caused by* the brain, but to say that it *is* the brain is just a mistake, and one which Place is trying to sneak past us by telling us that something is a scientific hypothesis when it manifestly isn't.

i got to 25:23 and my head exploded

states of mind states of the brain [brain chemistry, neural network connections, electric state, etc.]

You can disprove composition using logic though.

Time is a gauge. Time is a plane of existence in one's mind. A "level" is a gauge. Level is a plane of existence in one's mind.

This formulation "is" potentially unbelievably powerful. Sorry, I meant: This formulation is a significant tool for teasing apart metaphysical formulations. I still didn't get it right. Let me try this: This formulation is not full of useless verbiage.

10:26 before i found out it actually was a part of a philosophy course, this was a pretty funny moment

Issues with the mind-brain identity theory include: 1) All of our information on the brain comes from our limited sense organs plus the limited machine sense organs we have created. Meaning, although in many cases it "looks" like Pain is Brain Process B, our very looking is not perfect, not devoid of fault. 2) Limited data collection thus far: very difficult to get intense, moment to moment, day to day, mass-scale data on humans, their brain patterns, and their conscious experience. Meaning, Place's claim, being a scientific one, does not have nearly enough data to be akin to something like "Humans breath O2" 3) Definitions of mind, consciousness, cognition, etc. the subjective line we draw in categorizing these things is not agreed upon, and won't be inherently right whatever we agree upon. Meaning, yes, some aspects of consciousness may be emergent properties of whatever this brain is and is doing, but what if consciousness in it's entirety precedes the brain? What is consciousness, and what isn't? Big differences in opinion, especially if one gets into eastern philosophy.

Just to be very nitpicky about this, I don't think you've got the "is of identity" 100% correct (at least from a linguistic point of view, English as second language teacher here). It's not that "the two things are identical", as suggested. Rather, the subject is _one of_ all the objects that comprise the group of the noun phrase (more accurately, subject complement). Superman *is* Clark Kent, Clark Kent is a group of 1, so Clark Kent is also Superman. The car is a blue vehicle, but not all blue vehicles are _the_ car. Anyhow! I'm very grateful for you sharing your lectures online for free for me to watch on the other side of the world. I know as an educator I'd value the feedback myself, so here we go. Please keep up the amazing work!

You save us.. Thank you...very good class..Tomorrow is interanal xam😂😂

Please do Quine's 2 Dogmas!

21:17 i know you are merely presenting Place's theory, but why cant the 'is' be an ´is of predication'? Why pain can not be a 'brain process b' in the same way that a car is blue?

I would probably put myself on the mind-brain theory. But if mind=brain then how come losing 1/2 brain does not equal losing 1/2 mind?

Did you learn how to write inverted on the board? thats so trippy

But what is a sufficient way to verify a scientific hypothesis? Why wouldn't a thought experiment that demonstrated the improbability of an hypothesis not be admissible? The thought experiment would be based on observation or empirical experience to some degree, just not a full-blown physical controlled experiment. In fact, most experiments would have to break down the grand claim of physicalism into parts and look at each separately. That means that a logical operation on the inductively proved parts would be necessary to prove the grand hypothesis: in other words, something like a thought experiment would be necessary to bring together the parts and achieve a synthesis. One would have to posit a reasonable story of what the whole should look like. I don't see the follow-up video that challenges Place's claims at the moment. I will be interested to see how a professional philosopher approaches the claims and the paper as a whole. (I just realized that this is a scientific hypothesis, and that I cannot know the result until the event; yet, I can assign it a probability. I appear to be assigning it a probability of 1 but realizing that Place has a valid argument to some extent, I must logically assign it a value somewhat less than 1, so that is can be updated when the evidence is in.)

Is is always is or is is sometimes not what it is?

The claim that "His table is a packing case" is contingent and cannot be logically dismissed seems a special case. Surely "His table is is a one-dimensional object" is also contingent, but it CAN be logically dismissed.

Calling “a thing a thing” is a form of identity- once you settle on one you form identity of that Pacific form It’s one thing to study something & there’s another thing to deem something a thing Deem blocks knowledge is nothing but a step that’s meant to be step off of not set up camp- artistically speaking

Wouldn't the is of definition just be the is of contingency, that humans have collectively agreed that the science has been done enough to 'prove'?

For me,in COMPUTER analogy,BRAIN is the HARDWARE;MIND is the SOFTWARE.😊

"That's something I might do...On the exam." Sounds like a hint to me.

I feel like monks give a great example of this. Like the one monk, who burned himself alive to protest British occupation. He obviously still felt pain, but he acted as if he didn’t

How is he writing on a board that's in front of him and the text isn't backwards im trippin

It just occurred to me that if you met this guy, he would look weird to you because you've only ever seen him mirrored

Possible challenge to the mind - brain identity theory: Following this theory's logic, let's assume that the neurological pattern "neuron 34 fires an impulse to neuron number 578 which in turn fires to neuron 9164" is what specifically gives rise to the feeling of pain in the thumb of your left hand. Now, suppose that you lose your entire left arm in an accident and afterwards a very skillful neurosurgeon finds a way to stimulate your brain in such an accurate way that neuron 34 fires an impulse to neuron number 578 which in turn fires to neuron 9164, the exact same code - pattern of feeling "pain in the left hand thumb", those neurons are still there, despite your left arm having been severed. Well, what now? If pain in the left hand thumb is nothing more than that pattern among specific neurons, how would your thumb hurt if it's no longer connected to your body? Most likely this counter argument might be easily denied by changing the theory's name to mind - nervous system identity theory, in other words the mind resides not only within the skull, but along all nerves that stretch all the way to the tip of your fingers. I assume this still might be an interesting idea though.

"It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is." - Bill Clinton

"there are no squares in the wild"-- yeah, all the squares are in class

I am so stoned

If two things necessarily go together, is it a philosophical axiom that they are identical? Even if one were to grant that every conscious experience corresponds to a brain state, and one cannot exist without the other, I do not see why that would be tantamount to the two being identical. I could easily believe (in fact I already do believe) that sensation of pain is inextricably linked with a brain state of a particular character, and yet, pain would still be a different from the brain state. How can pain literally be something other than itself? I dont understand how something could be identical to a different thing. Maybe I just misunderstand the words. The way I understand it, "a and b are identical" implies "a and b necessarily go together", but not the other way around.

I'm looking forward to a general AI that takes in all these philosophy videos and concludes that it all applies to its own internal processes leading to it becoming the machine equivalent of self aware.

I didn't expect English to appear to be the whole trouble here. I always felt it's a very poor language (sorry, didn't mean to offend), but to the extent scientists themselves would stand on the ambiguous meanings of basic words and terms, that's ludicrous.

"The door is ajar"😅

23:00

Sensorious is unable to exist without the physical. And the physical wants the sesourious to give it credence

We're not the body.

Superman and Clark are not the same thing. Clark Kent is a disguise Superman uses so he can live a normal life among humans. Superman is a superhero who wears a red cape, can fly, and is nearly invincible. They refer to the same _person,_ but that person, Kal El, is only part of what makes "Clark Kent" and "Superman" the _things_ that they in fact are. The same is true for every other example of this type that identity theorists claim to be analogous to the Identity Theory, including the Morning Star and the Evening Star example. I sincerely hope that other philosophers have pointed this out.

Is pain a brain process? Physical pain, sure. But what about emotional pain? What about phantom pain?

This is not worth considering, the brain is physical while thought is not, how can they be identical. The brain is an interface for the mind.

predicate adjective

Are legs and running the same? No, but it's the same relationship.

For my Philosophy 101 college class, I offered a very simple explanation for the "mind-brain" theory. It wasn't elegant, but it seems to have sufficed. It went like this: to the students who offered endless theories as to why the mind and the brain were indeed separate entities, I asked one question: "If they are totally separate, then why when I get drunk or stoned does both my brain and my "mind" get drunk or stoned at the same time?" Crickets.

Brain process B is as vague and ambiguous to pain as a boson is to the concept of God.

As we all know, or should know, there is no consciousness outside of the brain. Regardless of anything else, the brain is the "home" of the mind, and the mind cannot exist without it.

Great video I feel sure that the mind exists in a non-physical realm and is quite separate from the body although dependent on it. How the transcendent arises from the corporeal is a mystery tho

The third group is “quailia.”

An idealist wouldn’t think this matters since the brain is mental. They are the same--both mental.

Blind determination to avoid a natural metaphysics.

2:03 whiiCH

Solopsists are wondering if they created this video themselves

You can weight a brain but can you weight a mind?

This makes me so angry. I have a frickin' *degree in Philosophy,* but I had never heard of the two kinds of "is" before. Grrrr.

Awesome? 3:26

The mind is nothing more than the functioning of the brain.

or whatever

Why am I attending school on the internet

The mind is not physical the brain is.

"It depends on what the definition of is, is." Channeling some Bill Clinton there.

The title is a stupid question. Who is so confused about it to not know the answer.