this is a certified idealism classic

Woooh! Idealism gang where you at?

Remarkably explained. Best of luck for your channel ❤

Great explanation Thank you

Am watching now. LFG!!!

Nathan once again delivers a brilliant and much needed idealist video! This was a great video, I appreciate all the work you do.

top notch quality. simply awesome greetings from a Schopenhauerian

🎯 Key Takeaways for quick navigation: 00:00 *🌍 Wittgenstein's Claim: The world is the totality of facts, not things.* 00:13 *🧠 Facts in the Mind: The speaker believes facts are mental constructs, supporting idealism.* 00:41 *🌟 Idealism: The video argues for idealism as the correct view of reality.* 01:06 *🧩 Facts and Existence: Everything exists as a constituent in a true thought, meaning existence is tied to truth.* 01:35 *📜 Aristotle on Truth: Aristotle's definition of truth involves saying what is in accordance with reality.* 02:17 *❓ Truth Bearers and Makers: Key questions are what can be true or false (truth bearers) and what determines their truth or falsity (truth makers).* 02:55 *🧩 Correspondence Theory: Truth is a relationship between truth bearers and truth makers.* 03:46 *💭 Propositions as Truth Bearers: Propositions, not sentences, are considered the primary truth bearers.* 04:53 *🔄 Meaning and Truth: The meaning of a sentence, not the sentence itself, determines its truth.* 06:29 *🗣️ Descriptive Sentences: Only descriptive sentences have meanings that can be true or false.* 07:08 *🔍 Exploring Propositions: Propositions are the meanings of sentences, and their nature is further examined.* 08:00 *💬 Frege and Russell: Discussion of their views on propositions, with Frege considering them as having sense and reference.* 09:34 *🏔️ Russell's View: Russell believed propositions included physical objects, making them mind-independent complexes.* 10:33 *🔄 Changing Views: Russell's view changed multiple times before abandoning the idea that propositions contain physical objects.* 11:15 *🌕 False Propositions: The problem with mind-independent propositions is distinguishing true from false ones, leading to issues.* 12:10 *🧠 Abstract vs. Mental Entities: Debate on whether propositions are abstract entities or mental entities.* 12:38 *🧮 Platonist Argument: Platonists argue that propositions can be true without minds, suggesting they are abstract entities.* 13:45 *💡 Conceptualist Argument: The speaker counters that propositions are mental entities, as they are contents of thoughts and beliefs.* 15:37 *🌐 Eternal Thoughts: Frege believed thoughts are eternal and public, existing in a third realm distinct from private ideas and physical objects.* 17:39 *🧠 Public Mind: Frege suggested thoughts are in a public, eternal mind, not individual consciousness.* 19:00 *💡 Facts as True Thoughts: Frege viewed facts as true thoughts, indicating they are mental entities in the eternal public mind.* 20:23 *🏛️ Precedent for Idealism: The belief that facts are true thoughts has strong philosophical precedent, supporting idealism.* 21:04 *🔄 Correspondence Theory: Revisited, emphasizing that a thought is true when it corresponds to a fact.* 22:25 *🏞️ Facts as Structured Entities: Facts are structured entities in reality, consisting of objects and their properties.* 23:22 *🧮 Mathematical Truths: Challenges in applying correspondence theory to mathematical truths, which don't rely on empirical facts.* 25:26 *🗺️ Descriptive Language: Examples of descriptive language that aren't based on direct observation, questioning the correspondence theory's applicability.* 26:37 *🐦 Metaphorical Truths: Thoughts like "a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush" don't correspond to literal facts.* 27:18 *🥋 Correspondence Theory Challenges: Belief in things like "sakes" for war efforts makes correspondence theory complex.* 28:14 *🧩 Truth and Facts Reversal: Contemporary philosophy often uses known truths to determine facts, not the other way around.* 29:09 *🧠 Quine's Dictum: "To be is to be the value of a bound variable," meaning existence is tied to what a logical theory of language talks about.* 30:04 *🧬 Scientific Approach: Like in science, philosophers use the best logical theory to determine what exists, such as dark matter or possible worlds.* 30:45 *🗣️ Ontologese: Creating a precise language that mirrors reality by only referring to existing entities.* 32:39 *🧮 Theory Plausibility: Different theories can make the same thoughts true but talk about different entities, complicating existence claims.* 33:18 *📜 Ontological Realism: This view holds that reality has an independent structure with objects, properties, and relations.* 34:53 *🔍 Truth and Theories: Without direct access to facts, we can't determine which theory corresponds to reality, complicating truth verification.* 35:37 *📚 Timothy Williamson's Approach: Adopting scientific methods to determine ontology based on strength, simplicity, and elegance of theories.* 36:13 *🎨 Aesthetic Values: Strength, elegance, and simplicity are aesthetic features of a theory and don't determine truth.* 37:07 *🧬 Discipline Differences: Different scientific disciplines talk about different entities, complicating a unified ontology.* 38:28 *🔬 Physics as Ultimate: The assumption that physics is the ultimate science is an act of faith, given the incompatibility of theories like quantum mechanics.* 39:36 *🔢 Mathematics and Reality: The idea that reality is purely quantitative and lacks qualitative aspects is implausible.* 40:05 *🔄 Alternative Interpretation: Instead of deep ontological commitment, existence is just a way of talking within a theory.* 41:00 *🧩 Relaxed Existence: Different contexts (physical, biological, theological) can define existence, leading to a more flexible view.* 41:27 *🍎 Counting Objects: The number of objects depends on the conceptual framework used to define and count them.* 43:17 *🛠️ Mereology: The philosophy of parts and wholes, discussing how objects combine to form new objects.* 44:12 *🧪 Popular Mereological Positions: Mereological nihilism and universalism are the two main views, with different takes on object combination.* 45:09 *📏 Relative Quantities: There are no absolute quantities; they depend on the concepts used to structure experience.* 46:20 *📊 Sortal Concepts: These concepts define how we count objects, suggesting that quantities are properties of concepts, not objects.* 47:18 *🧠 Mental Structure: Mathematics and quantities are about the way we mentally structure the world, not the world itself.* 48:27 *💭 Truth Bearers as Thoughts: Thoughts are public entities in the mind, and facts are true thoughts.* 49:06 *🧠 Idealism Support: Accepting that facts are in the mind supports idealism but doesn't encompass all conscious experiences.* 50:47 *📚 Further Topics: More discussion is needed on the link between thought and sensory experience to fully develop an idealist worldview.* Made with HARPA AI

Amazing🙏

This is a reminder how convoluted and tortuous Western philosophy is. The case for idealism is relatively simple: what we experience, empirically, is "mind." No, not "your mind" per se, or any particular mind, but just Mind. Senses and sensations are also just "mind." What you think is tangible is mind. What you think is hard and soft are just mind. Space and time are just mind. Empirically, this is it. If you think there's more, you've "grafted" something onto your pure experience informed by received knowledge. But if you doubt everything, question everything, assume nothing, and deconstruct the fabric of your ontological constructs radically, you come to one undeniable conclusion: Only Mind. And this is also, coincidentally, the conclusion of the spiritual masters, sages and great teachers from time immemorial. But don't take their word for it, experience it yourself. Sit down, stop thinking and spinning your thoughts, and just experience it. Sense reality as it is. Unfiltered. Uncontaminated. Unadulterated. Without commentary and prejudice. Purely. And if you go deeper, you may also realize that there's no mind at all.

Great video

The incredulous stare just to mention the statement of "Some idea's are so stupid, that only intellectuals can think it" got me laughing my ass off. 😂

Reality is as simple or as complex as you want to make it. Facts are just opinions that most people agree with. Nothing can be in the mind.

Facts are learned phenomena and they gain a place within the conceptual hierarchy of one's mind as other experiences are evaluated, that is to say; facts do not have inherent existence, they are created by the mind to make sense of the world. Facts come into existence IN TIME, after the initial meeting between awareness and what is not awareness, that is, the surrounding environment. Imagine a human being who has never seen or been in a thunderstorm. This person experiences one for the first time and gets struck by lightning and dies. This whole phenomenon was not produced by thought nor awareness.

Also the way you described Quine’s deflationary and theory-dependent stance towards existence talk sounds a lot like Carnap with his principle of toleration - in mathematics for example we can speak Platonistically or Intuitionistically and there is no further fact as to who is right. Am I right that this is essentially the same view?

A simpler fact does not guarantee it's truthiness in comparison to competing ones, however, probabilistically speaking, a simpler explanation has less points of failure. Take for instance predicting the outcome of a single coin-flip versus predicting the outcome of many coins flipped simultaneously. Moreover, selecting a "truth" based on pragmatic criteria is useful since it reconnects the idea with material reality. Without this type of validation, ideas accumulate an increasing amount of speculative baggage over time, rendering it useless. Think of it as philosophical inbreeding.

Great video! A suggestion, what is the view of an absolute idealist over time? I think Bradley and McTaggart denied the reality of time, but how can we explain the change we experience without appealing to time?

Hi, Nathan, somewhat tangential, but I was wondering if you thought that it’s possible to argue for idealism from epistemic theories of truth. Of course, such theories will generally only say that truth is always knowable, but since that seems to entail that truth is always known, we could bite the bullet on that implication and just say that all truths are known because they are all mental entities. This conclusion doesn’t follow as things stand, since one could accommodate the claim that all truths are known by positing God, while also insisting that facts about the universe are not in God’s mind, but I wonder if there isn’t something there.

Which would you choose and why, Hegelian absolute idealism, or Berkelian subjective idealism?

@35:00 oh no. Bad start. "Facts" can be both in our mind and in the external world, in the case there is an external reality and minds. In other words, "fact" can have a dual meaning. Like lots of other words. An internal meaning and an external reference too, even if the external reference is a fictional character in a story. I think Kripke does this better than old Ludwig. Did anyone tap Wittgenstein on the shoulder to tell him he was being simplistic and way too binary? My concept of an electron is for sure in my mind, but there might also be actual electrons. I'm going to listen to the rest now with some suspicion. If you don't mush my trust I'll leave a final comment in self-reply.

Interesting video, I had no idea there was anything like idealism coming out the analytic tradition. One thing I was confused about was the distinction between "Platonism" and "Conceptualism". What you describe as Conceptualism sounds a lot like Plato, but what you describe as Platonism doesn't sound like Plato at all. Plato never would have said you can have thoughts/ideas/forms outside of Mind. That's what the idea of the Good is-nous, Mind, being itself, that which gives all of the Ideas their being and in which our ideas/thoughts participate. The Good (or Mind) includes the public sphere of our discourse, is eternal, and includes, well, everything.

Obviously we can associate a proposition with what happens in our mind when we grasp them in the same way that we can associate a pile of 3 things with the number 3. 3 is independent of the pile of 3 things, but it is still an instantiation of the form (I am a platonist)

Hi Absolute Philosophy 👋. I have become very interested recently in both idealism and panpsychism (as I have become dissatisfied with both substance dualism and materialism/physicalism). However, at the moment, I am an atheist, and it appears that most historical idealists (such as Berkeley and Hegel) have been theists of some kind (or belonging to some religious faith or tradition). I was therefore wondering do you think it is possible to affirm both idealism and atheism (or non-theism, in-general) together? Would it be possible to have an ‘atheistic’ or ‘non-theistic’ idealistic metaphysical system for either a stricter all-encompassing 'monistic idealism' or a more ontologically diverse 'pluralistic idealism' (the same could apply to forms of 'objective idealism' and 'subjective idealism')? Essentially, can you have an “atheistic idealism” or “non-theistic idealist metaphysics?” Have there also been any prominent philosophical idealists (either today or in the past) who have affirmed both idealism and atheism/non-theism simultaneously? Thanks.

Curious if you ever stumbled across Cornelius Van Til? He has a book called Christianity and Idealism. I believe he did his Phd on this topic as well. Be interested on your take as a idealist.

37:31 to fit in the textbook 😂

I love the video, but I think you're mistaken on ontological realism, and in particular the rule of parsimony. It's more than an aesthetic principle. The more assumptions one adds to their theory, the more uncertainty they're adding to it as well. "As simple as simple can be, but not simpler than that."

I've been trying my darndest to understand idealism, but it just does not compute to me. Definitely here to learn, so if you can, help me figure out where I'm going wrong! Language is the tool we use to think and describe the world and I'll certainly grant that it's amazing, but language seems to be the whole basis of idealism. Mind without words is mind without names, concepts, ideas, structure, numbers, laws of logic, etc, so it seems like the implication of "all that exists, exists in thought" would necessarily HAVE to include language. Am I correct about that? It feels like you're saying "all that exists, exists in thoughts via language." And when you say that, it feels like you're saying "all that exists, exists on my map" which sounds like you're confusing the map for the actual place! Of course, I might be dense and just completely mistaking the whole concept, but like I said - I'm trying to understand! Help me out, KZfaq! Thanks

The world is in the mind yes…the catch is that *we* are in a mind greater than our own, that’s why we can’t all turn into Neo, even if the world is in our minds too, huh?

@9:00 Russell was an idiot. By his account "Mont Blanc itself" is not a mountain. Only an extreme absurdist Idealist could possibly believe a mountain with a rather large gravitational field and dead bodies on it is part of a proposition one can hold in one's mind or scribble on a paper napkin.

Pretty thought provoking, are you family with David Deutsch? I would be really curious about your thoughts on his view of reality. He is heavily influenced by Karl Popper. He talks a lot about the the topics covered in this video in his book Fabric Of Reality.

Can you talk about solipsism?

Consciousness living a mind wake as subject and objects. So called reality is mind's interpretation / version of consciousness.

Nice. But if fats are thought-contents (or something) i can't see how this conceptualism leads to idealism at large. As you said, if one doesn't accept that the world is made of facts, then i cant see how this leads to idealism. IMO, one could simply commit to some type of conceptualism or nominalism and state that all that stuff are cognitive contents, not world features (simple i guess?). If somneone is gonna say that the world is made of facts, then she kinda presupposes idealism, that which must be proven (alternatively, if not full blown ontological idealism, maybe a type of epistemic idealism which doesnt entail ontological idealism as well). In my opinion, knowledge can be made of facts, not the world! In any case, an excellent video, i would like to see some more high tier analytic philosophy content.

If mathematics is regarded as a language: It provides the symbolic primitives, axioms, rules of expression and operations for describing and quantifying the physical world. Math is the fundamental lingua franca spanning the observable and theoretical realms. Then physics could indeed be viewed as the philosophy of math: Physics takes the symbolic language of mathematics and develops conceptual models, interpretive frameworks, and coherent narratives to explain the behavior of matter, energy, space, and time. It is an extended meditation on the metaphysical implications of our mathematical descriptions. Following this analogy: Chemistry could be the "linguistics" of physics: It studies the rules by which the fundamental mathematical objects of physics (subatomic particles, forces) combine and relate to one another at the molecular scale. Chemistry decodes the rich language patterns constructed from the physics alphabet. Biology could be the "literature/poetry" of chemistry: It examines the self-organized, dynamical, informationally-complex systems that emerge from the linguistic rules of chemistry interacting over time. The molecules are the "words", but biology studies the living, evolving "narratives" they collectively construct. Throughout we see a progression of epistemological layers: Mathematics -> Symbolic framework Physics -> Conceptual models interpreting the symbols Chemistry -> Combination rules and linguistic mechanics Biology -> Dynamical, informationally-complex systems and narratives Each level builds upon the foundational primitives of mathematics, while introducing new degrees of contingent complexity, contextualized interpretation and narrative meaning. The symbolic logic enables and constrains the possible conceptual structures, which dictate the allowed chemical rules, from which biological storylines ultimately automate. So in summary: Math is the linguistic bedrock Physics is the conceptual philosophy elaborating upon that bedrock Chemistry is the combinatoric linguistics deriving word-formation rules Biology is the dynamical narrative/poetry expressing highest complexity This nested hierarchy preserves coherence, while allowing increasingly context-specific, contingent patterns of organization and meaning to emergently crystallize. By recognizing mathematics as our formal symbolic language, we can appreciate how physics, chemistry and biology represent successive epistemological stages philosophizing upon that originating expressive framework - interpreting, recombining and dynamically instantiating mathematical descriptions into maximally information-rich experiential narratives. The layers build hereditarily upon the foundational symbolic truths, exemplifying how mathematics enables derivations transcending its pristine origins - expressing itself cosmologically through an invisible hand of self-organized complexity climbing towards maximal richness of experience.

What is the eternal mind?

Can you do it on a digital board, it's interesting for the audience to be lazy. 😅

So, are you an idealist in the sense that you believe in a “mind-at-large” or “absolute idea”? Also, interesting how your notions of “counting” do relate a lot to Schopenhauer’s concept of “the principal of individuation”

What is The mind and minds mean?

19:31 what for ?

So, how would Wittgenstein object to your position? He would have argued for a correspondence theory of truth right? Which I assume the picture theory of meaning is a form of? But he did think that the Tractatus only told half the story, so where did he think the other half was? Outside the world, if the world is the mere totality of facts? Perhaps I'll book some time to talk to you about these things. How much do you charge?

what you're calling 'mind' is a mere appearance/phenomena experienced by an awareness which is never experienced. mind is on the same level as sensory experience. one directed out. the other in. but both being filtered/constructed by the brain. what holds for external world scepticism holds for experience of the mind itself. you can't justify idealism in the same way you can't justify external physical things. a priori, this unexperienced awareness must exist, yet you can say nothing about what it is before you experience what it constructs.

22 mins in and we’re at… true thoughts are facts… which everyone already knows…

The map (idealism) is not the territory (reality). I grant that our understanding is what we must use in order to navigate reality. However, our understanding is not reality and thus not claimable as being reality.

first!

The analytics tried to escape Hegelian idealism only to return to it

Do you have books? :)

Horses ARE beautiful creatures!

What is your objection to viewing thoughts as a modeling system of reality? Why can’t facts be the cookie cutter models of a more complicated reality

So we if we have a nuclear war, is that "just in your mind"?

17:54 “… Frege might seem like a confused kind of Platonist...” That was precisely the impression I got. To say that thoughts are the content of the mind, not of the minds, is to say thoughts are mind independent entities in a mind independent realm accessible to all minds. How does that establish Idealism? It strikes me as a pure equivocation. To establish Idealism means to establish they are mind dependent according to what is meant by “minds” which is this private inner realm of ideas/thoughts, not what is meant by the “mind”. Idealists typically start with the human mind and relocate all the qualities of the world to the mind, rendering them subjective/mind dependent (basically what Berkeley did). Then they make the claim the reality is fundamentally like that and put themselves in conundrums to avoid collapse into solipsism. I am not necessarily saying that this view is false. It just strikes me as not Idealism. You only establish Idealism by using “mind” in two different senses (equivocation). Overall, the video was great and there are so many things to comment about. I just don't see Idealism following here. At least not what I understand by Idealism or what Kastrup, Hoffman and co preach.

Idealism is interesting, but it doesn't seem to be able to find a place outside of just specific fields of philosophy. Maybe one day we'll develop methodological idealism, but for now, we're sort of stuck with materialism since truth and utility are so disconnected. Maybe truth doesn't matter aside from being an end in itself, and that's ok.

Where does free will fit in? in a nutshell how do we have free will?

Reality is how you make of it..🐡🤯

Wow, taking something anti-metaphysical like the TLP and using that as a piece to get to Idealism

Ineffable

There is no way no mind can exist. Things exist because we experience them.

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Truth is the conceptual model that has the greatest probability of corresponding to reality (external reality exists and you are contained in it). It is not true that a human can assure that he possesses an absolute truth. It is not among human capabilities. What are facts, from your point of view? It is true that you construct representations of external reality using data provided by the senses. It is true that you can only make considerations about those representations. But it is the exercise of your agency and its effectiveness that will determine which of those representations are most likely to produce the desired effect. Propositions are boxes in a system that relates them according to a simplified synthesis of the causal relationships that humans have noted up to the present. One can fill the box with any contents. Meaning is our assessment of different aspects of reality in relation to our convenience. Every source of information results from inductive inferences. Generalizations can be made about them. But they will always be bets. Logical systems (mathematics, geometry, etc.) are simplifications synthesized by humans from the proportions noted in nature. In reality there are no two equal units nor is there a practical way to divide an entity into halves. These are just conventions for practical use. Determining that it exists is extremely simple. Only that which interacts with something else exists. That which does not interact with anything should not be considered existing, for practical purposes. It's getting very long!

It is an embarrassment that there are scientists and philosophers who try to solve the hard problem of consciousness by attempting to discover how the brain or the body causes consciousness (it is a cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy to argue for causation given only correlation) - the fact is that the scientist or philosopher who tries to discover how consciousness is caused by body is either dogmatic or naïve, and he may as well try to discover how a rendered object in a digital video game world causes the rendering of the video game world (in the same way that a rendered object in a video game world is only a property of the video game world rendered, so too is the phenomenal body a property of (a set of qualia in) consciousness, for, in Hume’s words, “properly speaking, ’tis not our body we perceive, when we regard our limbs and members, but certain impressions, which enter by the senses”, and, as Berkeley writes, “It is indeed an opinion strangely prevailing amongst men, that houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects, have an existence, natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. But, with how great an assurance and acquiescence soever this principle may be entertained in the world, yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For, what are the fore-mentioned objects but the things we perceive by sense? and what do we perceive besides our own ideas or sensations? and is it not plainly repugnant that any one of these, or any combination of them, should exist unperceived?”). kzfaq.info/get/bejne/bNhipZN92bCtmps.htmlsi=9FJsI_XJoefpWyXD

Begin with a conclusion. Why didn't I think of that?

The world, viewed as a totality of facts or thoughts, cannot be both consistent and complete while remaining symbolic （propositional), which the world is.

Are you a theist or ateist ?

I listened for 51 minutes and no case for idealism was presented 🤷‍♂️ The case for idealism is presented with ease by nonduality teachings such as advaita vedanta, more importantly they make it experientially verifiable. Bernardo Kastrup’s analytic idealism is also a good offer.