Philip Clayton - How Does Metaphysics Reveal Reality?

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6 ай бұрын

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Some think metaphysics is ancient nonsense; others that it’s the bizarre occult. How does modern metaphysics contribute to our understanding of the world? It asks the most profound questions: what kinds of things exist? How does causality work? Sound too abstract? How about: does God exist? Are you a soul?
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Philip Clayton is Ingraham Professor at Claremont School of Theology. His previous teaching posts include Williams College and the California State University.
Closer To Truth, hosted by Robert Lawrence Kuhn and directed by Peter Getzels, presents the world’s greatest thinkers exploring humanity’s deepest questions. Discover fundamental issues of existence. Engage new and diverse ways of thinking. Appreciate intense debates. Share your own opinions. Seek your own answers.

Пікірлер: 99

@TheTroofSayer 6 ай бұрын

This outstanding episode resonates so much with my own thinking. The end point that I envisage for Philip Clayton's rationale is that beyond the astronaut's tether to the firm ship of reality (5:14), it must still make sense. It must *always* make sense, independently of whether or not one believes in God, soul, angels, etc. (relying on "because God" provides no get-out-of-jail-free card for the serious thinker). 4:54 - "What can you [the metaphysicist] contribute?" Expanding on Clayton's "tethered astronaut" metaphor (5:14): A better understanding of the phenomenology playing out at the subatomic domain. Cube-root scaling to the subatomic domain releases matter from its classical (Newtonian) constraints (see Geoffrey West's book Scale, 2017, for the scaling considerations that relate). This implies a phenomenology, at the subatomic domain, which is more reminiscent of Jabberwocky than the billiard-ball metaphors that continue to persist throughout the logical-positivist narrative of physicalism. 2:10 - "A certain unknowability at the quantum level, which we expressed mathematically as Heisenberg's uncertainty principle." *YES!* The phenomenology of the known versus the unknown. Hence my interest in the semiotics of CS Peirce (that guy again). 5:34 - "Is it some apprehension of a mind-like nature of reality?" The mind-like nature of reality, if we run with Peirce, is primarily associative. The Feynman diagrams are an expression of the symmetries that cascade out from the void. Those symmetries, I contend, are probably associative. 5:47 - "Has a world of dead matter produced living mind?" No. If we run with cube-root scaling and CS Peirce, the dynamic void and dynamic, associative mind are directly related. "Dead" matter is a transition state, absent of context, which resurrects into life when contexts draw upon matter's latent predispositions (quantum contextuality - Kochen & Specker, 1967, and Bell's theorem). 6:57 - "Are you telling me that we should use the scientific method to extend ourselves beyond science?" I'd like to expand on Clayton's superb answer. My response to this question would be that we are not being scientific enough, when we formulate theories that are inconsistent with *all* aspects of reality. *Everything* must hang together, and if it doesn't, we are better off if we leave the question unanswered. A notorious, persistent culprit, for example, is entropy. It's ok to leave some questions unanswered, instead of prematurely asserting answers that don't belong. We need to return to Isaac Newton's "axiomatic framework" way of thinking to emphasize consistency across axioms. All of this is imho, of course. I'm just a lowly engineer trying to unravel the contemporary pseudoscience masquerading as real science.

@larrywebber2971 6 ай бұрын

This was an outstanding episode. Thank you both!

@marlobardo4274 5 ай бұрын

The truth and beauty of metaphysics lies in always already both entirely transcending while remaining wholly immanent, embedded in the midst of that very meaning and being that make our being and knowing truly human. Metaphysics does so within both the unmanifest aspects of essence and the manifest aspect of existence as infinite consciousness experiencing an empirically discernible thus also finite [relative/particular] reality.

@dr.satishsharma1362 6 ай бұрын

Excellent... thanks 🙏

@mickeybrumfield764 6 ай бұрын

Metaphysics comes to the forefront when we appreciate that we are finite beings trying to make sense of an infinite reality.

@CrochetLover85 6 ай бұрын

the audio quality is distracting 🫤

@krzemyslav 6 ай бұрын

The best philosophy can do is to try to put all facts together and find ideas that will make them work. In this sense metaphysics as a branch of philosophy reveals reality. For example it suggests that physicalism has a problem accounting for consciousness. And because of that our theoretical understanding of what reality is made of probably has to be expanded or reformulated. I'm waiting for solution, but it ultimately has to be based on observation of reality, not only on ideas.

@simonhibbs887 6 ай бұрын

I don’t think the problem of accounting for consciousness is confined to physicalism though. The other proposed explanations all have their own gaps. How does idealism explain the physical? How does dualism account for the non-physical having physical effects? How does panpsychism explain the composition of the discrete consciousness of particles into macro scale human consciousness? They all have their own explanatory gaps. I wouldn’t count out physicalism just yet.

@dr_shrinker 6 ай бұрын

I think the problem isn’t with physicalist, I think it’s with dualists who don’t understand the nature of a thought. Physicalists and determinists aren’t people looking for answers to justify a label. They are labeled because their beliefs took them there. Once you understand that EVERYTHING can be described in physical terms, life is crystal clear and much easier. The only solution we determinists are waiting on is the reconciliation of GR and QP. Even if they are never unified, it doesn’t matter because they might not need to be unified and still be true. I may be wrong, but so far I have not heard a convincing argument for anything outside of determinism.

@simonhibbs887 6 ай бұрын

@@dr_shrinker >"They are labeled because their beliefs took them there." Sure. I think we're there because all we have evidence for is the physical, or at least that so far all of the phenomena we have been able to characterise causes for have turned out to have physical causes. We're just projecting that trend into the future for those phenomena we have not yet done that for, including consciousness.

@dr_shrinker 6 ай бұрын

@@simonhibbs887I think people place too much mystery over consciousness. Even if we cannot explain how binding works, we know that every thought is built on experiences gleaned since birth. Physical cannot be affected by non-physical. That means consciousness is physical. I’ll leave it to those who like rabbit holes to understand how blue is derived from electro chemical in the brain, I’m content, and moving in to more interesting things like …what is the basement of physics? What’s bigger than the observable universe, and why do we experience the present moment of 2024 instead of the present moments of 1755?

@digitalfootballer9032 6 ай бұрын

@@dr_shrinkerI respectfully disagree that physical cannot be affected by non physical. A person's physical health can be affected by thoughts, which are non physical. I would put depression into this category, which can damage a person's physical stature from thoughts and emotions which are not physical. Ideas can also impact the physical. An idea can be made into a physical item that did not previously exist in physical form. I think we can agree that thoughts, emotions, and ideas are not physical, can we not? At the very least, they are not tangible. A penny for your thoughts, because even though you are in the other side of the fence from me on this matter, you make some interesting arguments.

@r2c3 6 ай бұрын

reason and rationality can offer quite a leverage when employed for the right purpose...

@Geo_Knows_Things 6 ай бұрын

Metaphysics still leaves the emerging questions (consciousness, uncertainty, randomness) unanswered. It seams Clayton suggests that reality is what you accept as truth; or rather, what the apostles and disciples of a belief proclaim as truth. And his justification for it is that science neither can answer nor allow answering them. Btw, the Western scientific method is also driven by questions, not by hypotheses as Clayton says; however, it does not pretend to have answered everything; unlike methaphysics and other Eastern philosophies.

@andrewa3103 6 ай бұрын

I never knew what people thought metaphysics was. However, I am not going by Greek nor academic definitions of metaphysics. "They are incorrect". As a painter, I must leave it to interpretation, or I would have written. As a poet would not spell it all out, it needs to be interpreted also. Being a real metaphysician can not be achieved academically, studying only provides a language to be expressed. "I am metaphysics, became a philosopher". To provide the questions if asked! Metaphysician philosopher

@S3RAVA3LM 6 ай бұрын

Imagine having a box of puzzle pieces, and trying to put them together, so acknowledging the relations, seeing the unity of all, the forms within the formless, the characteristics within the non characteristic, the very table as substratum the puzzle pieces depend upon, this very brilliance or intellect, the Divine light shining forth and through all things, reflecting That very Beauty and quality back, yet this enigma of wondering how it could all be, how....imagine that! That this is seen as a secondary thing or nonsense thing...

@hakiza-technologyltd.8198 6 ай бұрын

Great

@jasonbuksh2958 5 ай бұрын

A lot of words were said but no substance was spoken

@sergeipeshek8724 5 ай бұрын

That's precisely metaphysics

@Azupiru 6 ай бұрын

By what metaphysics has Rabbi Tovia Singer determined (in only the past two days) that the Messiah is here?

@michaelwangCH 5 ай бұрын

The human brain is more than the sum of its neurons. The science-based knowledge after proven, it becomes deterministic information until we discover new evidence. But the human brain is built with purpose of learning and change, resp. the dynamic of change is its system itself. This is reason the human has to go beyond the knowing science to making new scientific discoveries and to ground the science in reality e.g. meta physics. - asking the uncomfortable questions "why".

@bradmodd7856 6 ай бұрын

It's all metaphysics (to quote Chomsky) or consciousness, experience, observation etc.....whatever is beyond metaphysics "is" an idea we built through induction. The physical may not exist, the experience exists but anything else but the experience is currently a theoretical induction. If the physical is experiencing us in the same way we are experiencing it then it might be part of a field of consciousness. Robert needs to grow a pair and talk to Bernardo Kastrup, he might be ""annoying" but he best articulates this theory.

@Soulartist13 Ай бұрын

Begin here: what is a thought?

@buttegowda 6 ай бұрын

Pls read vedanta and upanishads, you will know the nature of reality

@IsSocratesDead Ай бұрын

Absolutely amazing to see how someone, otherwise as smart as this, will tie themselves in intellectual knots, all in the effort to keep ancient, outdated, stale religious ideas alive in the face of modern science. “God is dead.” And it is now our job, and ours alone, to create beauty and meaning in our lives.

@rxbracho 6 ай бұрын

Like others, I find this to be a very weak definition of metaphysics, staying within the reductionist confines of science. True metaphysics sees the world just as physics, but rather than explaining how, it seeks to glimpse the why. Pierce beyond the facts to the very essence of space and time. And, whether materialistic metaphysicians like it or not, consciousness.

@user-dp9ch8xb5q 6 ай бұрын

Heisenberg says in his book Physics and Philosophy: Newtonian mechanics and all other branches of classical physics began to build their model from the assumption that one could describe the world without talking about God or ourselves. This possibility seemed to be a necessary condition for the natural sciences in general, but the situation has changed on this point. With quantum theory That is, quantum mechanics has proven and opened our eyes to one of the unseen worlds or the metaphysical world in which quantum disturbance emerges from the hidden worlds into the world of facts.

@simonhibbs887 6 ай бұрын

I think the issue quantum mechanics has exposed is that the concept of a separate objective observer separate from the experiment and instrument is no longer tenable. We cannot escape the fact that we are part of the system. Hypothetically objective observers are magical beings. They accesses the state of the wave function without being entangled by it. They have seemingly infinite computational power to interpret the state of systems at any scale, up to that of the observable universe. It’s an absurd generalisation. No wonder we have people here claiming that their personal consciousness creates the universe, and is the only thing that’s real, and other such self obsessed, hyperbolic megalomania. Sure guys, you’re the only thing that’s real, now go and tidy your room! The many worlds interpretation is one attempt to reconcile with this, by saying ok, fine, we can’t access the state described by the Schrödinger equation without being entangled, so we’re entangled. Since that means being in a superposition of states, that means we are in multiple states at once. We only experience one state, but the other states are equally valid, they must be equally real. Hence multiple states of existence, or worlds. That still doesn’t explain why we experience any given state, and it doesn’t explain what the probability distributions are in QM. If all states exist, what does the probability of this or that state even mean? I think we’re still missing something. One theory is that gravity somehow collapses or resolves quantum states to specific states. I think that might be on the right track, because there’s a similar issue in spacetime. If time is a dimension, and past and future states are real, then ‘now’ is a slice across block time. Similarly our current state can be viewed as a slice across the possible states described by QM. My suspicion is that neither of those accounts is quite right, but they’re useful stepping stones to a proper account of statefulness in QM and temporality in spacetime. Solve one and I think we’ll solve the other.

@dr_shrinker 6 ай бұрын

@@simonhibbs887I think the Copenhagen interpretation is flawed because of the observer effect and its implication for panpsychism. The many worlds seems more plausible to me…but I feel ALL interpretations of QP are flawed. Someone needs to reinterpret qp.

@maxpower252 5 ай бұрын

They don’t

@NavidonYoutube 6 ай бұрын

what question answered by metaphysics?

@cameron1376 6 ай бұрын

Maybe none, perhaps some. Someone has to try and make sense of it all at a more holistic level. We need metaphysics pondering to see how the reductionist pieces fit together to form the larger picture and all their possibilities.

@NavidonYoutube 6 ай бұрын

@@halcyon2864 and what is the answer?

@NavidonYoutube 6 ай бұрын

@@halcyon2864 good for you

@Samsara_is_dukkha 6 ай бұрын

A major problem for empiricist and positivist accounts of science and knowledge that hoped to eliminate metaphysics was posed by mathematics, for everyone recognized the central role that mathematics plays in science. Immanuel Kant held that mathematics is both synthetic (meaning that its statements tell us something about the world, as opposed to analytic statements, which are true because of logic alone) and a priori (meaning that they are known to be true prior to empirical experience). If Kant's claim is true, then things can be known about the world before any observations are made. In addition, such notions as absolute equality or perfect circle cannot be discovered by experiential observation because there are no examples of perfect equality or perfect circle in the physical world. This shows that mathematics and geometry must be metaphysical in nature in that they cannot be reduced to or derived solely from the physical world. This led to efforts to derive mathematics solely from logic, especially the logic of set theory, and thereby disprove Kant's claim that mathematics is synthetic. But the effort to reduce even simple arithmetic to axiomatic logic was shown decisively to be impossible by the work of Czech mathematician-logician Kurt Gödel. Thus the effort to show that mathematics need not be metaphysical has failed. Even today, some people still try to hold to empiricist, nominalist, or formalist accounts of mathematics, but those efforts too have not been successful. Thus, those who hold to a realist account of mathematics-to the view that there is a real world of numbers and mathematical theorems and that mathematics cannot be reduced to generalizations from experience-have a great deal of evidence on their side.

@jamesruscheinski8602 6 ай бұрын

metaphysics could develop how to use language?

@BRunoAWAY 6 ай бұрын

Yes

@halleuz1550 6 ай бұрын

Perhaps logical analysis is metaphysics enough.

@patientson 6 ай бұрын

Nothing dry and wet water is there for you. Whether you want to do it gradually or not depends on you. What you eat of it is what you get.

@patientson 6 ай бұрын

No man can run away from his inner members. You will face it or bear the consequences of overloading it with ignorance, wickedness, and greed. Industrialisation did so successfully. Nothing man creates can rule over his own internal systems.

@genghisthegreat2034 6 ай бұрын

We are all bathed in the phenomenon of existence. Is that state something which actually needs to be sustained, or is it validly a self-sustaining default ?

@rupesh_sahebrao_dhote 6 ай бұрын

DIFFERENT VIEWS ON WHY EXISTENCE ? Advaita :- Hey Vishistadvaita you know I am pure consciousness and rest of this universe is just a illusion or dream. Vishistadvaita:- Hey Advaita you know I am eternal along with Lord but somehow because of my bad decision I am engaged in this Maya or world and my duty now is to chant my lord's name so that I will not return back to this world and leave peacefully serving my Lord. Advaita :- You fool...if you are eternal how come you don't remember because eternal doesn't change. Vishistadvaita:- You too are fool ..Why are you getting trapped in your own dream. Dream something beautiful instead of Life and death or get out of dream right now. Hearing the above conversation Buddhist said you both are fool... everything is zero or nothing...no world...no Brahman. Then dualists came and they said you all are fools. God has created this and we just need to be slave of him. Let him enjoy life and death of ours . Then came Science and said you all are fools. This Existence is just by chance or BigBang and it doesn't has any purpose. All above philosophies are illogical and incorrect because it contradicts the premises on which it is taking out the conclusion. That is the reason, each one of them unknowingly or subconsciously contradicts other . Each one of them knows that the other party is incorrect but because of lack of knowledge they don't know How ? So they subconsciously think they are correct. They can't simply answer Why the Universe has to be the way it is ? Why it cannot be stable ? Society is based on fear and hence you will never find the truth openly circulating. Reality and Correct and logical philosophy is---- Existence and it's knowledge goes together. One cannot be without another. This Principle can be in reality only through eternal cyclic movement with division of subject and object in it. 😀

@patientson 6 ай бұрын

Both spirit and strength are spirit. But the art of spirituality is a different kettle of tea.

@smezzourh 6 ай бұрын

This is by far the worst definition of metaphysics. Philosophy of science, for instance, is grounded in science because it is its very subject of inquiry. Metaphysics on the other hand must not. Because the very questions it deals with are not scientific in nature (being, god, ultimate reality...) so metaphysicians have to be innovative in this regard so they can come up with new concepts and new methods of problem solving... Philosophers are so afraid nowadays to say anything that "challenge" science and the scientific community... it's embarrassing.

@ritchiediggs 6 ай бұрын

You’re wrong on this, friend. Very wrong. It appears to me that you may not have an understanding of what metaphysics is, seeing that you think metaphysical questions are not scientific questions. On the contrary, there are no scientific questions, if we are to call them that, that are not fundamentally metaphysical. To emphasize, all metaphysical notions are scientific, though metaphysics can deal with its own questions absent the empirical objects that natural science deals with. Should explain further? Example: if in evolution we have such a notion as algorithmic process, metaphysics investigates what we mean by algorithmic process in living things. But you can also investigate the notion of process on its own logically. All the concepts of science are metaphysical. You can study those concepts attached to the object, or you can study the concepts abstracted from the objects. You can study the elements of a cell, which include nothing but notions such as growth, entropy, exchange, process, decline, relation, termination, material, etc. but the “being” of these elements are understood abstractly, especially given that they are not found only in cells, but in other entities as well, and then they are mapped on to the object, that is the cell. You can do this in the reverse too, observe the object first, then investigate the concepts, but you cannot do just one. Both the universal and the particular, that is metaphysics and empiricism must be done to have complete knowledge of anything. I don’t know if you’re a philosopher, but I recommend you discover more on this in Saint Thomas Aquinas’ ‘The Division of the Sciences’. Rather short book. Ps: Is ultimate being not the same thing that quantum physics investigates in presumably material particles? Whenever you invoke anything in the absolute this is what metaphysicians mean by God- the question of necessary absolutes.

@kehindesalako2168 6 ай бұрын

Not true! For metaphysics can be based on science. For example, the neuroscience of vision raises the following questions of metaphysic: What things exist? Or is there an underlying reality behind the veil of our perception? Or what is real?

@smezzourh 6 ай бұрын

@@ritchiediggs Thanks Richie for your insight very interesting indeed! Here is my take on the subject and plz forgive my approximate english cuz it’s not my first langage :) - You wrote: "To emphasize, all metaphysical notions are scientific, though metaphysics can deal with its own questions absent the empirical objects that natural science deals with". Are you implying that metaphysical concepts are falsifiable? If so, we would’ve solve all metaphysical problems by saying that this one is « false/wrong » and that one is « true/robuste », etc. Like we usually do in scientific inquiry. I don’t thing that same criteria (logic, robustness, truth…) apply here and there. Maybe I’m wrong. - You wrote: "All the concepts of science are metaphysical". Same here, if all concepts of science are metaphysical, then it is a matter of « truthfulness » or « untruthfulness » (not sure if this is the wright word) at the end of the day. - You wrote: "Metaphysics and empiricism must be done to have complete knowledge of anything". I’m not sure what would be an empirical study or object of something like « the self » or « nothingness ». We know more or less what those notions mean just to get by… though empiricism in not required « to know for sure » (to have complete knowledge) what the self or nothingness mean. The are precisely metaphysical in the sense that they can not be « completely » knowable. - Your question: "Is ultimate being not the same thing that quantum physics investigates in presumably material particles?". If they are the same thing then why bother with metaphysics? It would be at best something like a langage game (Wittgenstein) and at worst pure speculation. It doesn’t help at all to play « abstractly » with the notion of material particles because science will ultimately have the last word on the subject. Again, so why bother?

@OUallday 5 ай бұрын

Classical metaphysics is the queen of the sciences. It allows the particular sciences to utter intelligibility. Its principles are used in every art and science. Being, truth, falsity, unity, multiplicity, privation, division, equality, distribution, resistance, receptivity, capacity, and so on

@NataliaCh93 6 ай бұрын

I don't believe in the simulation reality theory at all or in matrix and something like that doesn't exists and someone should do with this echo again or change rooms

@ameralbadry6825 6 ай бұрын

To interpret life we have to stick to science and physics.

@JagadguruSvamiVegananda 6 ай бұрын

Because?

@tomjackson7755 6 ай бұрын

@@JagadguruSvamiVegananda If we don't stick to those we get people like you scamming money off of us with woo woo.

@abcdefg91111 6 ай бұрын

having a bad experience in one region does not imply the others did it as well. but humans will always be limited to their own systems

@JagadguruSvamiVegananda 6 ай бұрын

@@tomjackson7755, demonic scumbags who make false accusations against the lord, god and master of Planet Earth, by definition, are ALREADY in the deepest, darkest recesses of hell. 😈

@DouglasVoigt-tu3xb 6 ай бұрын

Seems more questions than answers. Will science and physics be our saving grace? Sorry that’s another question and our time is up.

@matishakabdullah5874 6 ай бұрын

Neither reason nor rationalit is knowledge.

@patientson 6 ай бұрын

You must tweak yourself first to the point of silence to initiate both breath and strength in one step to another step. Ask Wednesday and Ostara. Fill in the blanks

@sergeipeshek8724 5 ай бұрын

So metaphysics is the science according to his explanation 😂

@ivanbeshkov1718 5 ай бұрын

Cats, apes, elephants, dolphins also have minds. Minds are not exclusively human.

@tedgrant2 6 ай бұрын

Do you want to avoid the flames of Hell fire and the scary demons ? Donate now and Jesus will save you ! (Matthew 13:42)

@ahmadali3813 5 ай бұрын

Humans have inserted themselves into a maze of doubt It's simpler than that This complex, harmonious universe, organized by precise laws, is impossible for it to have arisen on its own without a Creator. Whoever reads the Qur’an will find that God mentioned universal facts, for example, the expansion of the universe Quran :[51:47] We built the universe with ˹great˺ might, and We are certainly expanding ˹it˺. Quran:[21:30] Do the disbelievers not realize that the heavens and earth were ˹once˺ one mass then We split them apart? And We created from water every living thing. Will they not then believe?

@mikel4879 6 ай бұрын

Instead of talking stupidities, you, the metaphosician, show me the true real causal connections, uninterrupted, and only then I believe you. 😏

@tomjackson7755 6 ай бұрын

The answer to the title is, it doesn't. Metaphysics is just playing make believe to try to shoe horn in their favorite fictional character.

@simonhibbs887 6 ай бұрын

He’s not a theist, he said as much.

@Azupiru 6 ай бұрын

Well, yeah. You should be grateful that I've shoehorned myself in. You wouldn't be here if I hadn't. And actually, you kind of shoehorned me in here along with countless generations that would not exist if not for my gift to you, and all of this was designed by prophetic expectation set in a cross-cultural (Indo-European Greek and Latin vs. the Semitic languages) language game between 2400 and 1800 years ago. You just don't understand metaphysics because you aren't a metaphysician with an openness to the possible.

@tomjackson7755 6 ай бұрын

@@Azupiru You should try plausible since a story can be made up to make anything possible as metaphysicians have proved for a couple of millennia now. Can you name anything that any of them have actually ever solved?

@simonhibbs887 6 ай бұрын

@@tomjackson7755 Attitudes towards, or interpretations of scientific processes or conclusions are inherently metaphysical. They are inextricable from each other. For example the concept of the observer in science is a metaphysical proposition. Metaphysics doesn’t solve problems in the way that science does, but science operates within a metaphysical framework of concepts. It defines the language we use in science, where science expresses conclusions in that language, but the language itself doesn’t provide the conclusions. Thats a category error, which is a concept in ontology, which is a branch of metaphysics.

@tomjackson7755 6 ай бұрын

@@simonhibbs887 So you agree that it doesn't reveal reality in any way? I am of the position that the origin questions cannot be answered.(I forget what that is called) I realize that it is just as impossible to be totally justified just like that rest of the positions on origins. It is part of the reason I hold that position. We can play make believe all day but it never actually reveals anything with any actual high probability.