Rabbi Dr. David Gottlieb - Jewish Philosophy: The Brain is Everything - Part 1

there's a subject which is close to my heart because it's philosophical it's very important jewishly and it's pretty deep philosophically and scientifically i think i can explain it i can explain it reasonably clearly i'll start it today and if you find it to be simply too far out or uninteresting then i'll pick something else for tomorrow but this i think is is really is really crucial we talk about the soul there are people who will tell you soul are you joking listen uh under your cranium there's mush meat and meat is a purely mechanical stuff and you are a meat machine and everything you do is just determined by how the meat under your cranium how the electrical impulses are carried through and how the transfer of iron ions across the synapses and all the rest that's all it is talk about something spiritual something in addition that isn't physical has anything to do with the way you behave or what happens to you who's this just without any uh reason rationale whatsoever they will tell you we are materialists we know the world is made out of material substances molecules atoms particles and they operate according to the laws of science and that's all there is to it now people say lots of things the question is what reasons they have to say them what reasons they have so i want to put this question to the believers in that materialist model what reason do you have backing up your statement that the brain is everything the brain and just the brain and only the brain does everything what reason do you have i just tell you by way of laying some groundwork materialism the idea that the world is all physical is not in the philosophical world agreed upon a book came out from oxford university press a year and a half ago called the waning of materialism 27 papers by 27 leading philosophers all of whom were writing against materialism and the two leaders of the anti-materialist movement weren't represented there david chalmers and thomas nagel so there are some very eminent contemporary philosophers who are against materials anybody who thinks it's open and shut that everybody knows just isn't familiar with that literature let's start going down the garden path now so you tell me the brain is everything nothing more than the brain i have a toothache what is that toothache what is it and they'll tell you the two think there's something going on in the brain certain neurons are firing in certain patterns at certain speeds and that is the two things there's nothing but the brain the toothache is an event in the brain okay now i ask what reason do you have for thinking that what reason do you have for thinking that the toothache and your worry over next week's paycheck and your hopes about summer vacation and your thrill over listening to renee caposo play the beethoven violin sonatas all the aspects of your experience are just things going on in the brain what reason do you have for thinking that the answer you get is well we have a correlation we've done many many studies that's exaggeration but all right we've done many many studies where whenever you have a toothpick to think this part of the brain is active and whenever you worry that part of the brain is active and whether you're thrilled that part of the brain is active and whenever you're hopeful that part of the brain is active we have many many studies we've isolated the parts of the brain that are active when you are having these experiences and just as a foot though i tell you that's greatly exaggerated but let's leave that aside let's assume assume that they're right they've done these these studies they found these correlations correlations when you have these in these experiences those are those aspects of the brain are active and vice versa does that mean that the experiences are what's going on in the brain not obviously the fact that a and b accompany one another they're found together they go hand in hand doesn't mean they're identical um human beings at least until recently all had mothers every live human being had a mother that doesn't mean he was his mother it meant that human being and mother go together whenever you have even b you're going to find a mother that doesn't mean they're identical what if you find a mother you'll find another human being otherwise you wouldn't be a mother it doesn't mean they're identical or as one temporary philosopher uh put it jon searle lightning and thunder go together but lightning isn't thunder and thunder isn't lightning right yeah i was there oh you were there he just put out a new book he's finished over 50 years of teaching at berkeley and he just put out a new book which i found ordered from amazon i'll get to the states next week i'm going to pick it up in your session he's unbelievable john johnson huh no no but he's a very very good philosopher you know certain things i don't know the youth but he's very very good philosopher he's also not a materialist well he's sort of a materialist anyway um so the fact that you have a correlation doesn't mean the two things are identical in order to show the two things are identical you've got to go further than just correlation now the question becomes well what further thing must you do what must you add to finding them always together to take the further step and conclude it's not a and b that are correlated together but they're the same thing now in science there's an answer to that question or indeed for two different kinds of cases there are two answers so the name of the project now is this let's try to understand how science does it when science is successful in showing that a b are identical let's see whether we could transfer that method to experience and the brain if we can transfer it then a person could have good reason to say yes and we think that experience is just what's going on in the brain if you can't transfer it then there's a gap you have a correlation and you're claiming identity there's a gap there that gap has to be fulfilled if the way it's done in good science and acceptable science isn't going to work then tell me something else but you can't just wave your hands and say there's a correlation and jump to the conclusion that there's an identity so what we want to do is take a look at how science discovers identities sometimes science does that how do science do that what's behind it what are the guts of the process of discovering that and then see whether it can be transferred to experience and the brain is it clear what we're up to okay there are two different types of cases where science does this one sort of includes the other but they're important to distinguish and then important along the way to ask what kind of case experience in the brain is one is sound what is sound you all know the answer to that question sound is patterns of airwaves patterns of motions of air molecules how did science establish that how did they establish this sound has been a matter of discussion for thousands of years we've known for thousands of years lots of things that sound does we know how sound behaves we know what causes sound we know what effect sound has that we know for thousands of years we just didn't know what sound is let's let's give some illustrations of this material sound is made by banging on drums and crackling fires and people talking or singing or thunder or these are cases of sound we know more or less what makes the sounds we know that sound travels through the air we know the farther away you are from the thing that makes the sound the weaker the sound is we know that if you can you can construct a room which is so tightly sealed that a person who stands this in the middle of the room and has a bass drum and bangs the drum outside nobody hears anything obviously the walls of the room are containing the sound you have echoes that means the sound bounces the sound is made here it's a wall over there and somebody else hears it as if it's coming from over there because the sound bounces off the wall and reaches him so it sounds really behave like physical things okay that's nice but what is the sound he's banging on a drum over there george is over there george hears him banging on the drum he hears the drum sounds something's getting from the drum to george but i'm standing in the middle nothing goes through me i don't feel anything you know so where is it what is it it's very peculiar the way it behaves it behaves like a physical thing but if i ask well so what physical thing is it that's where science was the whole human race was until i don't know 150 years ago whenever they came up with the idea yeah but light light's a problem even to today yeah but let's just take sound says where it's successful now somebody said well the air is in between and true the drum is over there and george is over there they bang on the drum and he hears it you don't feel anything in between but that's because there are very subtle very light motions of the air which your skin is not sensitive to and it's the motion of the air that carries the sound from the drum to the person or wherever the sound goes beethoven would hear his notes by his ear when he became deaf yeah okay so that means sound is carried through solids as well and it is of course um i you're right i should that's interesting point i shouldn't uh say only that it sounds it's pat it's certain pattern of of molecular motion sound could be carried through water sound can be carried through through solids it doesn't have to be airways well we typically deal with ourselves to carry two areas but that's quite true so now and this by the way makes predictions there's veer in a vacuum there won't be any sound that wasn't something we could be confident about before someone said that there are some uh airwaves or waves through material okay now we say science has discovered that sound is airways or material waves how do they discover that what kind of reasoning led to the conclusion that that's what they are not correlated but that's what they really are well here's the way the reasoning goes i know lots of things that sound does and that's all i know the only thing i know about sound is what it does how it behaves now i ask myself do material waves of motion do those things are they there when he bangs the drum and he hears it are there material ways in this case airwaves between here and there yes there are does the solidly packed room stop airwaves from getting out yes it does and then we can explain why you don't hear the sound outside when you bang something to make airwaves do they get weaker as they move further and further away yes they get weaker can airwaves bounce off walls yes they can they can't have so far what you do is this you start with a concept that's defined what's called functionally it's defined by how it functions all you know about it is how it functions then you search you know deep sea level in the least populated town in nebraska you do you search and you find q and you ask yourself would you do all those things all those things that sound does would q do all those things if q will do all those things q will therefore explain all the things the sound does then we conclude that q is sound that's how it's done that's how it's done again you're starting with a concept that has only a functional definition all i know about sound is what it does i haven't got a clue what sound is i find something that does all those functions that i'm allowed to conclude that that something is what sound is okay are we clear so far that's one type of identity that science discovers then there's another type which is a little more complex it includes this but includes something else as well we say that science has discovered that water is h2o water is h2o not correlated with h2o water in fact is h2o here you have a double job not a single job at a double job on the one hand like sound we know lots of things that water does water dissolves various substances that water freezes at a certain temperature of water evaporates boils at a certain temperature and it nourishes plants and nourishes people unless it's taken in certain ways in which case you kill people we have lots of information about what water does but in addition to that we have samples of water the stuff that comes out of the tap you know what's lying in the pool what you get off the television coast we have samples of water so now if somebody wants to convince me that water's h2o he has to do a double job number one like in the case of sound he'll have to show me that h2o will do what water does if i have a conglomeration of h2o when i lower its temperature below zero degrees centigrade will it become a solid if i raise this temperature to 100 degrees centigrade will it boil and not get any hotter will a conglomeration of h2o nourish plants will it nourish people will it drown people if it's you know there's too much of it first thing you want to know is does h2o do the things that water does but that's not enough i have to also have reason to think that what's in my glass is h2o that's an independent consideration and we do that because for example if you put an electro electric current through h2o then it um disassociates into hydrogen and oxygen you say well look what seems to be going on is the electrical current is breaking up the molecules and you end up with the two um the two um elements you know the two elementary elements of um of hydrogen and oxygen also conditions under which you could take hydrogen oxygen and fuse them into water so that's not functional that's looking in the glass and saying i have reason to think that this stuff in this glass is made out of h2o now i want to illustrate to you why both of these are important because if you had only one and not the other you would not be forced to say that water's h2o suppose h2o does all of the stuff that water does but when you attack the stuff in the glass hydrogen and oxygen just don't come out they just don't come out electricity or radiation or you just you just don't find any hydrogen oxygen in there then i think people might say okay h2o does all the stuff that water does but maybe there's another chemical compound that also does all the stuff that water does and maybe water is that other chemical compound since i can't i can't show that the stuff in the glass is h2o jumping to the conclusion that water's h2o is not is without foundation maybe the stuff in the glass has a different chemical composition that we haven't been able to discover and maybe that also does the things that were that h2o does so i wouldn't be able to conclude it if i couldn't work on the stuff in the glass if on the other hand i i attack the stuff in the glass let's say with electricity and out comes hydrogen oxygen but when i take the formula h2o and ask when will it freeze and when will it boil and will it nourish plants over the toilet i get negative answers no it's it freezes at minus 20 degrees centigrade and it boils at 130 degrees centigrade and and uh three three drops of it will kill grass and so on then what i said i would say well then water can't be so i when you pass the electricity through the glass of glass of stuff and you get hydrogen oxygen maybe electricity is changing it electricity is not just separating it out into its elements but it's changing it it's mangling it that's why you get hydrogen oxide in order to be convinced that water is h2o since when i my concept of water has two parts two dimensions one part is functional i know a lot of things that water does and number two are samples of water to be convinced that water is h2o i got to handle both of them the functional and the samples i handle a function by saying you think the water is h2o show me that h2o will do what water does and i handle the samples by saying show me reason to think that the sample is made of hydrogen and oxygen indeed h2o not h3o or h2o2 that's heavy water and so so that's how it works with water with water you have h2o the formula that does all the things that water does and you have a way of getting reason to think that what's in the glass is made of hydrogen oxygen and then you can conclude that water is h2o have we got it so far those are the two known ways that science discovers identities so now the question will be well does either of these patterns fit experience and the brain can we use either of these patterns to show that experience just is what goes on in the brain the first question we have to face this is the first i would say subtle point is what kind of comparison shall we make sure we compare experience and brain to sound and airwaves or shall we compare experience and brain to water and h2o is experience something about which we have only functional information we know lots of things that experiences do we know how they behave we know under what conditions they are caused and what effects they have or has experienced something that in addition we also have samples of now i'm trying to be careful not to let my my prejudices show here does samples have to be a physical thing no they just have to be samples of experience we are now questioning whether experience should be understood as physical or not question is whether well how about some examples i gave you already today how about a toothache you have a sample of sound you can create you can recreate it over and over and you can measure what happens but you can't like have a sample of sound okay that's an interesting yeah but i'm starting from the other end i'm starting the other end i'm starting from the before i know what it is you say you can't have a sample because it's a process it's it's motion right but that's after you've already discovered what it is i'm talking now about before you discover what it is before we discovered that sound is a certain process all we had was functions that's all we knew about it with water we have functions and samples before we understand what it is the samples of water set the bar higher they make the the the the challenge harder in order to convince me that water's h2o you got to do a double job well what about a toothache is it a sample so you can have if you're having the experience like in that while you're having it you have a sample yeah and i think that's all the time isn't it when you're awake aren't you experiencing something all the time when you're awake yeah it's a weird way of thinking of a sample but yeah right i mean there are there are samples of stories you've never had you know like standing on top of mount rivers you've never had that experience okay but there are lots of samples you have that okay it's hard to escape the idea that this is absolutely crashingly obvious that we have experiences we know them by having them i'm just mentioning this partly for the recordings and to give you an insight into how weird contemporary philosophy is there are contemporary philosophers minority thank god who denied us they say there are no experiences now how to deal with them other than to say why don't you drive a cab i don't know you know the most obvious thing is that they're experiences there's nothing more obvious than that i can have experience with toothache and someone say it's psychosomatic there's nothing wrong with your tooth he might be right they say like impressions have no ontology or something not familiar with that phrase but um i'd have to see in context i don't know what it means but you know someone might say your pain is psychosomatic there's nothing wrong with your tooth he might be right but he can't tell them not having any pain that would just be you know or there are no pains and you've never experienced anything that's just beyond belief okay so that means that in the case of experience there's a double job if you want to convince me that experience is what goes on in the brain you have a double job to do number one show me that what goes on in the brain has the same functions this experience and number two show me that what goes on the brain is the experience take the sample and show me that that's what's going on in the brain now the burden of my argument it's not mine is the argument of many contemporary with philosophers is that you may be able to do the functional job but you're not going to be able to do the sample job not just because science hasn't yet cracked that problem get some more money from nih and uh and and just hire some more researchers and we'll get it you know next decade but because it's a problem that in principle is beyond dealing with that's the direction in which we are going to go let's start with the functional stuff first where it does work and then i don't forget beyond that today even tomorrow by the way i'll rehearse everything i'll review everything because this is not exactly simple stuff and after 23 hours you might have some responses you want to share what do we know about the way experience behaves well we know a lot of things that cause experiences when somebody steps on my foot i feel a pain and when somebody bangs on a drum i have a auditory experience that's not sound sound is the motions of the air the hearing is an auditory experience they're not the same at all indeed he can bang on his job if i stick my fingers in my ears i don't have an auditory experience the sound is there but i'm not hearing it or eat the wrong things you know you'll have a stomach ache or for me anyway listen to beethoven you know i had a thrill so there are a lot of things that cause experiences and we all know this and there are effects that experiences have for example somebody steps on my foot and i have the pain therefore that probably will issue in some kind of behavior on my part i might yell or i might take more drastic action of one kind or another considering the person who stopped my foot um who knows right i might go for an aspirin we know lots of things that cause experience i mean there's lots of effects that experience has now somebody says look i show you very clearly that what carries those functions is what's in the brain okay let's see well look when he steps on your foot there's neural impulses that go all the way up to the brain we can trace them we can show them to you indeed if we cut the neural tract you won't feel anything so obviously it goes up to the brain and then various parts of the brain start working and then when you yell ouch go for an aspirin or take action concerning the person step on your foot those are all dictated by neural impulses coming from the brain and shooting out to the muscles in various ways it seems quite reasonable to say that functionally when you're talking about what causes experience and we're talking about the effects that experience have what mediates it is events in the brain i wouldn't say there are no problems there but it seems quite reasonable to say that somebody said that it's brain events that mediate the things that experience does or the things that cause experience i think they could make a reasonably good case for that that's not where the problem lies where the problem lies is in finding the actually felt experience in the brain that's like finding the h2o to h2o in the glass of water now there are two ways to do this in principle you can go in one of two directions you can either say okay i'm having a toothache let's see if i can sort of pull the toothache apart separate out separated out into its elements into its most elementary pieces and find that when i pull it away and and and clear off all the sand and look at it under a microscope i see neurons that's what they are the feeling of pain is you know is neurons and then i could say so you see it's built that's like passing electric current through the water and getting h2o you're taking the sample and you're pulling it apart into its elements and finding that indeed it's made up of the stuff you want it to be made up of when you pass the electric current through the water you get hydrogen oxygen hydrogen oxygen so you say okay so you see it's made of hydrogen oxygen here the idea would be to start with the experience and pull it apart and and and to unravel it and um look for its simplest parts and find out that they're neurons that's one way to do it the other way to do it would be to start the other end go into the brain and study the way the neurons work study how they come together study how they interact with one another study how complexes of neurons work until you can see a toothache in the brain that's building it up from the neurons to get the toothache now people have tried this both have tried it intuitively in both directions and come up with nothing and then in addition to that they've come up with reason to arguments why you can't come up with anything so let me just try to introduce you to the intuitions today as i said tomorrow we'll go back over all of this and then tomorrow i'll introduce you to some of the arguments that show that you're not going to be able to do it let's start with what i'm experiencing at this moment okay so i'm seeing things hearing things i feel my body against the chair i feel the gentle breeze of air in the in the in the in the room um not smelling anything i'm not tasting anything at the moment but i have those three sensory areas operate in my experience and somebody says well okay let's just boil it down boil it down okay subtract what i'm feeling subtract what i'm hearing let's just talk about what i'm seeing so without just eliminating two sensory areas and just talk about vision okay see this gigantic variety of shapes and sizes and colors textures okay let's talk about color leave a side shape leave aside size leave aside perceived texture there's such a thing as perceived texture when you see something you can see what it would feel like leave that all aside let's talk about color okay but now color is made up of hue and saturation and brightness or something there's like three elements in color let's just talk about hue capacity what's this opacity okay so let's just talk about hue that's what corresponds the physical terms to the wavelength of the light okay okay so now look at this brown object and just a number of different use okay take that spot just that spot and consider the hue that you are experiencing on that spot any neurons in sight do you see neurons peeking around the corner do you say listen when i had tactile states and auditory and visual very complicated lots and lots of things going on at the same time and when i took the visual to all these different shapes and sizes and colors and some of the sun it's very very complicated but i'm boiling it down boiling it down color no but color has three three dimensions just you are we getting closer and closer to neurons can you sort of see and dim outline neurons hiding behind the screen there say oh yeah yeah yeah that's just a bunch of neurons i don't think we're getting anywhere it's all experience it's all experience okay it's a piece of experience but no less experience no more transparently physical no closer to electricity passing from neuron to neuron than we were before the project of taking the experience apart pulling it apart looking at its simplest elements and discovering the simplest elements or neurons just doesn't seem to be going anywhere it's not at all like uh we can consider someone's examining the brain before microscopes and he has magnets and he has they knew about electricity at that time because look this thing this thing has electrical properties it has magnetic properties i wonder why it does that wonder how it does that don't know then you get microscopes that are more and more powerful and finally the neurons come into you wow look at that you know about 100 billion of them underneath your skull okay fine now they have synapses and look at this stuff's going back and forth between those center what that stuff is it turns out that that stuff is electrically charged wow look at that that's where the electricity of the brain is it's in those things going back and forth between those legs see that's how you could do it you start off with gray matter doesn't look like it's got little you know long tiny thin bags of stuff in it with legs that's transmit stuff from place to place but when you go into it more and more deeply you finally find those bags with the legs at the end and the stuff going across and then you can say yes now i see the electricity and the brain is made up of interactions between neurons is anything like that happening with the experience i pull it apart i eliminate aspects i slice it huh kind of maybe in a way we can change parts of the brain and then find correlative changes in the experience yeah so we can say this experience of me being here is a combination of my experience visually which we can alter in the brain it's a combination of my experience in memory i'm comparing the sound of those birds the sound i heard yesterday i can feel all these different things and when we change a little bit of the brain we see a corresponding change like almost like a mirror image reflected in the experience so it almost seems like you can break down the experience and the component experiences not indefinitely like not like water into h2o yeah but the pieces the experience is made up of seem to correlate with even smaller pieces that the brain's made up of okay good now let's go back to the beginning of this hour where did we start at the beginning of this hour i asked what evidence can the scientific world present for thinking that experiences experience is what goes on in the brain and i said the evidence that they will present is correlation right yeah that's what i said now you're repeating that okay but then i said correlation doesn't prove identity a can be correlated with b and to be different things like thunder and lightning are correlated but blender is not like the water in h2o what do we have beyond correlation and the sound and vibration what do we really have beyond correlation okay so what we have in what an h2o beyond correlation is that the h2o formula explains what the water does you say why does water boil at 100 degrees centigrade because h2o will uh function that way will vibrate that way because i can say that the brain explains the experience i don't think so that we tell you i don't think so the brain doesn't explain why it feels that way it only would explain it if you assume that the brain is intact that's bad that's right but that's exactly the assumptions and vibration then what do we have beyond the core every time there's a vibration there's a sound because we can poke the brain and somebody will think they're hearing a sound but there's no vibration because we can i can use the definition of sound which is the material waves or the airwaves to explain what the sound does if you ask me why when i have a very tightly closed uh room and you're banging the drum and people outside don't hear it that's not just correlated i can explain it it's airways banging against the walls of the room and outside nothing but the banks because they're too weak to make the walls bank i can actually explain why it does what it does in straight physical terms that's what we need that's exactly what now in the case of the function of experience i think we could explain it there we could explain it how is it that stepping on his toe resulted in punching him in the nose i'll tell you what he stepped in the toe and then the neural impulses went up to the brain and the brain then send signals to the muscles and the muscles that led to the punch that's all physical three flaps stepping on the front of the foot is physical the punch is physical and the in-between is also physical that's a very good explanation explanations can't cross that physical non-physically well maybe yes maybe no that's what we're experimenting that's what we're trying that's what we're trying to to that's what we're trying to assess not assuming that if i assume that my my discussion will be worthless i'm trying to see how to cross that across that barrier and i'm saying let's use the ways in which science has successfully crossed the barriers and see if they apply here crossing the barrier in the case of the sample means not just finding a correlation but showing that the there's reason to think that the samples actually made up of this stuff the explanation is still just like a story sure it's metaphysics i don't know what happens when you relations are so reliable i don't say why you call it metaphysics i drop the sugar in in tea and the sugar dissolves in the tea and i know the sugar is made of certain molecules and the molecules have certain electrical uh forces and the t what you're observing is mechanical but the explanation is metaphysical why do you call it physical because it's not chemical it's pure chemistry causes like one thing causes another thing that's the definition you can watch something happening and you're seeing a physical process but explaining which part of the process is causing another part of the process you're telling a story yeah but that's true for billiard balls also and it wasn't my hope that it would go in the pocket they got it there by pushing it with the q sleeve so i'm telling you which part caused it we have good reason to think that don't we i mean if you ever have good enough reason to to tell us something about causation but like i don't know i'm trying to argue that all causal explanations are really like a story that explain correlation like you never really have anything beyond correlation oh but now you're talking about different kind of correlation you're doing david hume now and and human's critique of causation i've used it many times in it and it's important for us but it's not the same it's not the same correlation we're talking about now we're not talking uh it's or not same correlation it's a correlation to an entirely different purpose um here i'm talking about finding two things associated with one another i'm not talking about one thing causing another at all i'm talking about identity we're talking about identity and not causation like the identity of the brain activity right right uh the the the person who wants to say that experience is brain events doesn't want to say that experience that experience is caused by brain death no because then you have to say they were different cause and effect can't be identical no he wants to say what to say every time you have a pain a toothache you have this brain this brain process and it's not that the brain process causes the toothache right but it is the toothache right so then what is so convincing that the sound the vibration is the experience of the sound what's convincing about it is what's convincing about it is that i can explain why the sound does what it does imagine that every time imagine imagine every time there were a sound imagine every time there were a sound the the air turned purple yeah so would i say oh so sound is purple color i would not say that that wouldn't be good enough i would want to know does the purple explain what the sound does if it doesn't then it's just an accompaniment why should i say it is the sound every time there's a sound there's purple color so there's two things now and i have to explain both of them i wouldn't say the sound is the purple color just because it's associated explain you didn't explain why the vibrations in in some medium cause the sensation of the call sound well the best you can do is say well it vibrates like the inner eardrum biology which affects the brain that's right that's and those are still correlative events good so let's if for the person who believes that the sensation is in the brain he can explain it also right it's just things that happen in the brain if he doesn't subtract that part this is an important point people have raised this point subtract that part but all the other things that sound does we can explain by saying that it's airways even that the the sopranos voice shatters the glass right we can explain that that sound is inherently a subjective experience no no not sound hearing is an experienced sound is an experience but sound doesn't nobody ever asked what sound is before they heard something like that's true that's what the sound only exists in an experiential yeah you can talk about the vibrations of racism yeah but that's not what we're talking about no no no you don't know that but the fact that the fact that hearing it caused me to ask the question doesn't mean the question is about the hearing i can ask lots of questions you only know that there's a thing called sound because you're here correct but that still doesn't help that's how i know there's something to look for that's all i see footprints in the sand you're saying you're comparing vibrations and motion to sound and saying these two are the same that's right take this example why would you think that there are different things to begin with you don't think that they're different you don't know that the the the sound waves exist you're faced 300 years ago with all of what you know about what sound does and no candidate for what it is no candidate what sound does that's what does that mean that means you know what kinds of events cause sounds and you know some of the effects that sounds have you're very well acquainted with those effects that sounds can have yeah like making things like making things vibrate yeah making sure how can a sound make something vibrate the vibrations make something vibrant you don't know that all you know is she's singing and the glass breaks back then okay right so now you ask well so somehow her singing did that what is the thing that actually did it the thing where we say she's singing that is me ex that's an experience that i'm having not at all that's how you know she's singing doesn't mean that's her singing her singing is in your mind if you go to sleep she doesn't stop singing right but the sound the of it like the the notes you know no notice just a way of describing the sound the sound is something in between her and you the sound obviously is what you hear you hear the sound and it's something and nobody knows what it is that's what you mean when you say something like that that's right the functional devices behavior what does the thing do how does it interact with other things and i can know that without knowing what it is i'll give you a very brutal example when early computers were invented in the 70s early 70s a guy i think at mit created a program which was interactive you type things in and then it answers you back he called it eliza and it was playing and playing the role of a psychotherapist now the program it's a turing test the program yeah well i just see it's very crude the program was made on basic word association hello how are you tell me how do you feel today the machine asks say oh i feel rotten tell me why you feel rotten that's all programmed in right you know tell me about your childhood no your father your mother did you have any pets right people swore that they got better psychological service from this that they got from people but it's just just based on word association right it did pass the turn so now uh no not really if you can't tell the difference just said that they only got better uh service from from the computer even though they did no no they didn't know then it was a computer they didn't know it but they hear that that's what the test is yeah not exactly the test is where you have two people inputting to you and you ask them both questions and you uh two two inputs and you can't tell that and you get to ask any question you want by making word that to say that associations the computer didn't even know what rotten meant until you explained why you felt wrong it never knew what rotten meant exactly it's just an rot that's all absolutely enables it to figure out and by the way it would be very easy for a sophisticated person to defeat a computer at a because there are certain ambiguities in language norm chomsky pointed some other map that are based on human experiences which um unless you program all human experience into the into the computer you