Conversations with History: Hubert Dreyfus

[Barky65]

4 computers dislike this

[pioughd87]

@Barky65 Pretty sure the other 108 act like computers at social settings though ;)

[ThewildRageofGordon]

Bad reading of Plato...the cave contains both firelight and sunlight. And Plato brings out the issue of calling first; the 'epistemological drive' towards 'thaumazein being' which is already the 'knight of faith'. This guy is a bit loony.

[luxjason]

wow, this intro music is horrible

[UraharaItsumo]

@luxjason Horribly Awesome.

[rushup3dg3]

Dreyfus remarks that the flaws in GOFAI can be traced to its founding upon a certain type of "loser" philosophy which depends on the viability of mental representation. I wonder if the same could be posited of modern psychology, that it was based upon an inherently flawed position in philosophy of mind?

[MrShittyFag]

"Be ready to take risks and be open to the thing that's trying to grab you." 56:18

That's what my uncle Ernie used to tell me. Then we would wrestle for a while, and I a can't remember what happened after that...

[bestKever]

He is a great teacher, I like him more than I like my comment about him...

[ior1979]

Certainly, internet is a tool. And a powerful one. I live in Spain and I have been able to listen to this wonderful interview.

And then they say that philosophy is of no use in our world, well, the thing is that others "take over" philosophical theses that philosophers no longer accept...

[EndureTemptation]

Oh, yeah. I remember now. It reminds me of Boards of Canada (which basically is driven by oldschoolness and childhood impressions)

[EndureTemptation]

I like intro an outro music.

So .. how do you call it?, oldschool or something?

[nwatts88]

the matthrew mcconaughey host is a DISASTER

[colourmegone]

Ghandi said, "Live as if you were going to die tomorrow, learn as if you were going to live forever."

[innovative0student]

The music at the beginning is a pain to listen to.

[FaaarLeft]

@innovative0student

I disagree!! It is quite lovely and appropriate.

[pulsating123]

"physics is about the universe, it has nothing to do with me, or with the world".. he should check out nassim haramein! Eventually, going to college one will be allowed into one class, because there will only be one class, the class called knowledge. Until then, its split hairs and specialities galore

[KaileKia]

what differentiates heidegger's embodiment from classical materialism?

[Swede1965]

Was not aware of the attack on GOFAI from Heidegger/Dreyfus angle. Interesting. I was aware of John Searle, the Churchlands, and Mario Bunge critique of GOFAI (and functionalism in particular).

There are some Dreyfus lectures available for free download.

Harry Kreisler rocks!

[1888junkteam]

excellent work!

[0leander410]

He undercuts his argument by reducing the action of "intercorporeality" to the function of mirror-neurons. If this is true, this "intercorporeality" is the result of a type of neural circuitry that could easily be mapped in a computer's circuitry.

He also explains, somewhat unwittingly, how we will accomplish strong-AI, by giving robots bodies and senses similar to our own. His prediction that this could never happen is groundless, and, accordingly, he never supports it here or in his book

[soursourapples]

i thought he was using the function of mirror-neurons as one example of intercorporeality but i will have to watch again and check.

You are right that his prediction is groundless, but i believe Dreyfus' argument is really that machines can never be Dasein. I would agree with him for the time being.

[pilkingtonphil]

Its not groundless - and if you read the philosophy his work was based on you'd realise this (Merleau-Ponty's "Phenomenology of Perception). Merleau-Ponty shows how symbolice logis - that which is used in computers/machines - is actually built UPON sensory perception and not vice versa.

If this is the case trying to mimic our senses and bodies with symbolic logic is impossible - it's putting the cart before the horse.

Merleau-Ponty's masterpiece is your "ground" - all 650 odd pages of it...

[pilkingtonphil]

And regarding the notion of mirror-notions - of course this couldn't be mapped into computer circuitery. Computer works in a causal space which is pretty much linear. If a neuron creates something from nothing you're no longer in a linear causal space.

People may dream that they'll be able to create a computer outside linear causality - they won't be able because the symbolic logic the computers are based on is itself based on linear causality.

I'm sorry but I don't think you understand Dreyfus

[powereddrive]

It's interesting that in philosophy discussions that the standard fallback position is "you don't understand"

[pilkingtonphil]

Actually I argued about linear casaul spaces and consciousness being rooted in perception... but that must have passed you by. Perhaps you didn't understand ;).

[soursourapples]

i can't believe they cut him off at his most important point! That modern thinking is STILL pre-heidegerian!

[fomastephanovitch]

Wow, this guy must have been the influence for Dustin Hoffman's character Rainman.

I wanna watch Jeopardy, yeah definitely gotta get back for Jeopardy. 7.30, it's on at 7.30.

7.30

[TVAAK]

No.

[sayeed0011]

this is an excerpt from The Complet Idiot's Guide to Taoism (from google books) by toropov and hansen, p. 39.

"zhuangzi celebrates the notion of self-transcending skill. In his view, highly honed skills reach a stage where we lose ourselves in perfromance and "become on with" the world in which we act. during such activities, we seldom think about the rules we learned as acolytes. we feel ourselves "pulled" by the activity, not as someone making decisions or deliberating.

[sayeed0011]

these discussions are the most frequent places where we find mystical talk in the zhuangzi....."we should never confuse this absorption in acitoin with cosmic enlightenment. no matter how much we hone our skills, we always come to "hard places" where we have to hesitate and focus on the problem, marshalling all we have learned for this new and unique situation. then we return to the flow..."

[sayeed0011]

i am not accusing dreyfus of anything but

*heidegger* knew asian philosophy particularly taoism. it's just a fact. look at the book heidegger's hidden sources by reinhard may.

if you find any of my sayings fraudulent, offensive, i will not take offense. thank you.

[sayeed0011]

whatever my opinions and grudges, the tone of my responses has been unacceptable. i owe professor dreyfus and others an apology

[soursourapples]

This is true, but it was definitely not an influence on his early work. The book of Chuang Tzu is one of my favorite books.

[sayeed0011]

yes i admit to being fanatical in expresing my contempt and for that i apologize

but

explain to me heidegger dreyfus et al's caricature of plato and descartes-platonism has little to do with extolling theory over practice. platonism is about ethics, of living the right way. of following the good, not just be an expert and successful in the world.

and their constant comparison to wittenstein or dewey etc just to make heidegger more respectable. no theyre not all saying the same things.

[sayeed0011]

and the most damning thing about heidegger is that there is a substantial evidence that he ripped off taoism almost wholesale (you can call me a fanatic but i think its true).

being in the world is a term from a japanese book (the book of tea by okakura kakuzo published years before being and time) on taoism, and heideggers main themes technology, nature, skill and flow, letting be etc is too bloody similar to be merely a coincidence or a cofluence.

[sayeed0011]

and more: heideggers caring for things sound too much like sensitivity to things (mono no aware) from japanese aesthetics. there must be a reason it seems that people from far east, who probably wanted to be validated by europeans when they met heidegger, have no problem understandng heidegger.

for an evidence see any alan watts video from youtube and see how mysteriously similar what hes saying from what heidegger and dreyfus et all are saying.

[vertex21]

Your comments are reckless and inexplicable. It is hardly noteworthy to say that Heidegger doesn't deal with the tradition adequately. People have been talking about that for years. What you somehow manage to completely miss is Heidegger's own deep engagement with the West's philosophical questions. The East has fostered a discourse with Heidegger's philosophy, but they are hardly as close as you try to make them seem. It's not even clear that can really talk to one another meaningfully.

[sayeed0011]

hubert dreyfus and heidegger on skill: "So, what's fascinating about this is that for Merleau-Ponty (he's the first to see this), normativity, that is better and worse, goes down to the bottom of our experience. It's in our perception of objects. No philosopher, I think, had said that. When you're skillfully coping in flow, without thinking, without rules, your body and its skills are drawing you to get this optimal grip on the situation. And the situation is always completely concrete.

[sayeed0011]

It's something that you've never been in before and the other people haven't been in before and you'll never be in it again because having been in it this time has changed you.Aristotle already saw that. It was lost, sort of, until Heidegger found it in Aristotle. Aristotle says if you keep acting and getting experiences and making mistakes and learning, you will finally become phronemos, a person of practical wisdom,

[sayeed0011]

and that means you'll do the appropriate thing at the appropriate time in the appropriate way, to talk like Aristotle. And that's being a master. That's the highest thing you can be."

[YoutibYoutib]

sayeed0011:

Way to allow your own fanatical contempt for Dreyfus et al. to make you say stupid things. 35:35 and thereabouts is hardly a caricature of Aristotle for the sake of extolling Heidegger, since there Dreyfus credits Aristotle with originating the conception of skillful practical mastery which Heidegger took up and adapted to his own purposes. It's fine to think that advocates of neo-pragmatism are mistaken about all sorts of things, but that hardly licenses telling lies about them.

[sayeed0011]

there is something to dr dryfus playing fan/advocate for heidegger

(with charles taylor richard rory and other zealots).

and on the way, they manage to caricature every other philosopher that came before. plato aristotle descartes kant wittenstein yes heidegger beat them all (and over 2000 years of worldwide philosophy)!!

though no offense to americans intended here as i lived there long enough but i do admire dryfus's blind devotion a cause. only a religious extremist could be as extreme.

[GrafEberhard]

In order to learn Wittgenstein (properly), read Warren Goldfarb, not Hubert Dreyfus.

[vertex21]

Read Michael Morris on Wittgenstein. I think his book is just coming out now.

[GrafEberhard]

Sorry for multiple comments, but let it be known that Prof. Dreyfus' interpretation of Heidegger is a VERY idiosyncratic one, which incorporates Wittgenstein heavily (read Frederick Olafson and Pierre Keller on this). And Dreyfus refers to thinkers who ACTUALLY ARE influenced by Wittgenstein, such as Kuhn, Geertz and Bourdieu and takes them to prove HIS Heidegger's points. I have no reason to doubt that Prof. Dreyfus is a great teacher-just know that he has a blind spot towards Heidegger.

[GrafEberhard]

As for Prof. Dreyfus' arguments against Artificial Intelligence-it is not the sort of thing that HEIDEGGER, who hated science and mathematics, would deal with. But it is part and parcel of PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS, where Wittgenstein actually writes "machines cannot think". And just read about Wittgenstein's debates with Alan Turing. Again, nothing personal against professor Dreyfus-it just needs to be acknowledged that Dreyfus' Heidegger is Dreyfus+Wittgenstein+Heidegger­, not Heidegger.

[GrafEberhard]

Professor Dreyfus: where does it say in the TRACTATUS that it is about mental representation? TRACTATUS is not Husserl. TRACTATUS and PHILOSOPHICAL INVESTIGATIONS are about LOGIC, not about giving accounts of the human mind. Please stop distorting Wittgenstein and do not assimilate him to Heidegger (and do not attribute Wittgenstein's views to Heidegger and say Heidegger predated him-Wittgenstein's idea of public is completely different from that of SOCIAL CONFORMISM in Heidegger).

[sayeed0011]

dreyfus's heidegger is wittgenstein in disguise but you know where heidigger got his stuff? from japanese and chinese. "being in the world", "being and nothing","flow" and ecological concerns are from taoism and he pretended he was talking about the greeks. it took an american (a californian) to turn a monster like heidegger into a robert pirsig, or an alan watts. please, spare me.

[granaff]

This is so damn cool and interesting!I live in Ireland so this is the only chance really that I'll get to hear Dreyfus. Broadband can be brilliant!

[isselman2000]

Come to Berkeley and sit in his class.

[asiguere]

holy shit, thanks for this upload... currently working on hermeneutics and artificial intelligence...and smoking pot... a lot of it

boy i'm hungry

[joedimercurio1950]

A great teacher. He draws understanding from complexity not by making it simple but by exploring richness with insight.

[debevecisback]

i like hubert dreyfuss he explains heidegger so clearly. im listening and making notes from his podcasts whilst im reading being and time. im studying heidegger next semester so its going to give me a good head start.