Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Curt Jaimungal: What is Existence, Exactly?

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Starting point is 00:00:12 Wayfair, every style, every home. When you say that you exist, what is it exactly that you're claiming? That there's a physical body at a particular location, that there's a continuous stream of consciousness? Well, presumably you'd still be you with a prosthetic arm and also that stream that you think of as continuous gets continually interrupted every night when you sleep. We're confident about our own existence, yet we can't articulate exactly what we're so confident about other than some unspecific reference to patterns. Today, let's take on the frightening task of

Starting point is 00:00:46 analyzing existence. To make this more palatable and less psychiatric hospital-inducing, let's distance this from the analysis of the first person that can lead you to the dark night of the soul, and let's just talk about the dark night. Batman doesn't exist. Firstly, sorry to break it to you. Secondly, this is such an elementary sentence with penetrating and wide implications not just for philosophy, but for your existence.

Starting point is 00:01:12 That Batman sentence is the philosophical equivalent of dividing by zero. It seems to crash the system that we used to make sense. So, why? After all, clearly Batman's just pixels and ink and a character and a story, a fictional vigilante who fights crime in a made-up city, et cetera, there's no controversy here. Well, let's think about it. If Batman doesn't exist, then who exactly are we talking about? What is this Batman that we're so assuredly declaring

Starting point is 00:01:43 is non-existent? It's like saying, this sentence is false, or I'm not thinking about how zoomed in Kurt is on every single video. Here's the problem in logical form. When you utter what philosophers call a negative singular existential, which is a sentence that denies some particular individual exists, you appear to be either number one using a singular term, so a word that purports to pick out one specific individual, like Batman or Santa, to refer to something, or two, you're predicating the non-existence of the referent of that term. So predicating just means to attribute a property to something. For instance, the apple is red, predicates the red of the apple, a reference is what that term points to. For example, what Batman is supposed to

Starting point is 00:02:32 pick out, that person, that character, but just a moment. So how can a singular term successfully refer if there's nothing to refer to? It's like successfully pointing at nothing. If you point at nothing, are you pointing at something? What would that even mean? Okay, so let's consider these negative singular existentials. Santa Claus doesn't exist. Pegasusus doesn't exist. Pegasus doesn't exist. Your Canadian girlfriend doesn't exist. I know she does. She's traveling. I get it.

Starting point is 00:03:02 The proof that I'm the most sagacious philosopher alive doesn't exist. Now that one's clearly false. If these sentences are meaningful and true, then language has a superpower. Like the ability to talk about nothing as if it were something. That's either incredibly impressive or considerably broken. Of course, there is the alternate. view, that language doesn't even refer to anything, but that's just not the route that we're going to take here. If you want to explore that topic more, then there's this podcast with Elon

Starting point is 00:03:35 Bernholz about language as a cognitive parasite, which refers without reference. Bertrand Russell had a solution that's so dexterous that it dominated philosophy for like 60 years. Russell said that existence isn't a property of individuals at all. Existence is a second-order property. Well, what is a second-order property? The way that I think about it is like this. First order properties are those being red, being tall, being happy. So properties that an individual can have. A second order property is like being instantiated, being widespread, being rare. These are properties that properties have.

Starting point is 00:04:17 That's the way that I think about it. It's properties of properties. And it's not precisely this, but it'll suffice for the sake of the uninvolved task of understanding mere existence. By the way, instantiated just means you have it. least one instance. So for instance, being a ballerina is instantiated because you can find a ballerina. But being a unicorn is not instantiated because it seems like unicorns don't exist. Now, according to Russell, when you say dragons exist, you're decidedly not saying that certain individuals have the property of existence, even though you think you are. Instead, you're saying

Starting point is 00:04:50 that the property of being a dragon has the second order property of being instantiated. In logical notation, we incorrectly believe that we mean the following, so there exists an X, such that X is a dragon, and then we'll put this negation here to say that this doesn't hold. Okay, now, what about names like Batman? Russell would say that they're not genuine singular terms. They're disguised, definite descriptions. That is, phrases of the form, the so-and-so, that pick out a unique individual by description. Batman is shorthand for something like the Caped Crucest.

Starting point is 00:05:26 of Gotham. This means that the sentence Batman doesn't exist has a completely different logical form, so an underlying logical structure, then it's grammatical form, so how it appears in English. To Russell, Batman doesn't exist is just shorthand for this hairy formula on screen here, which translates to that it's not the case that there exists exactly one Cape Crusader. The special sauce here is that Russell eliminates the singular reference to Batman itself. So instead, you're denying a certain property. That's what he means when he says that existence or denying the existence of something is not exactly about first order, it's about second order.

Starting point is 00:06:07 In this case, the property that you are the unique, caped crusader, and whether that's instantiated. For many, many years, maybe decades, almost everyone thought, man, Russell, you solved it, bro. Then in 1970s, Saul Kripke published Naming and Necessity. This was a bombshell, much like there are a few bombshells in philosophy. There's Wittgenstein and his tractatus. There's the critique of pure reason. And there's naming and necessities up there. So Saul Kripke demonstrates that the descriptive theory of Russell, which is what we referred to earlier, was subtly and fatally flawed.

Starting point is 00:06:44 By the way, subtly and fatally flawed is also the alternative name of your favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics. Kripke pointed out that names and descriptions behave differently in modal context. So context involving possibility and necessity and sentences with may, and this could be the case, and this must be the case, this so-and-so is necessary. So let me stop being so abstract and say, Peter Parker may not have been bitten by a radioactive spider. We say that's true. We can also say the guy bitten by a radioactive spider may not have been bitten by a radioactive spider. Okay, that's, we'd say, is false.

Starting point is 00:07:21 It's contradictory. Now, if Peter Parker just meant the guy bitten by a radioactive spider, these sentence should have the same truth value. They don't. Therefore, names aren't disguised descriptions. Instead, it seems like names are more like rigid designators. They pick out the same individual in every possible world where that individual exists. Descriptions ordinarily aren't rigid as they can pick out different individuals and different possible. world. Think about it like this, like Shakespeare. Shakespeare was synonymous with the author of Romeo and Juliet, then anyone competent with English would recognize that Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet. It's an analytic truth. It's truth just by the meaning of the words, like bachelors are unmarried males. However, this isn't exactly the case since it takes empirical investigation to discover who wrote what. Indeed, there are some people who think Francis Bacon wrote Shakespeare's plays. I have a dear friend who studied for many, many years,

Starting point is 00:08:24 who actually wrote Shakespeare's plays, and he's not convinced William Shakespeare did. Another example is that I can successfully refer to Feynman, while believing he was a famous bongo player who invented the hula hoop, and I'd be wrong about everything except his name, but I'm still thinking about Feynman the physicist. This is why names aren't equivalent to the description speakers associate with them. Look, another way to think about, this is that names don't have descriptive meanings. Names directly point straight at their bearers like a philosophical laser pointer. That's where he clashes with Russell. Okay, so now we're back to our original problem, except more abjectly. Like, if Batman is directly a referential term,

Starting point is 00:09:05 then what happens when there's nothing to refer to? What is existence? What is non-existence? It's a laser pointer aimed at empty space, except we somehow know exactly what is point? at? Enter Alexius Mainong, and I'm going to mispronounce that like mad, and I apologize. He proposed something so outlandish that Russell spent years trying to refute it. Perhaps the domain of quantification, the collection of everything that we can talk about, that we can quantify over, basically what everything ranges over, it includes things that don't exist. To Meinong, existence is an actual property, a genuine property, of individuals, but just not everything has it. So this is the more intuitive answer that you probably already had in the back

Starting point is 00:09:54 of your mind. At least for me, this is what resonates most intuitively. It doesn't mean it's right. It's just intuitive. It's basically saying everything can be an object that we can talk about and we can make statements about them, but only some of these objects have the property of existence. So being an object doesn't require existing. Seems obvious. Now there's something called the comprehension principle for objects. It just means that for any set of properties, there's an object having exactly those properties. Some objects exist like a USB cord on my desk, and some objects don't, like Batman. And on this view, then just Batman doesn't exist. It's just a perfectly fine, coherent proposition. It just says, that object,

Starting point is 00:10:37 designated by Batman, lacks the property of existence. Big deal. Batman's in the domain of quantification, yeah, you can refer to him and predicate properties of him, but he doesn't exist. He's an object without existence. This makes existence a discriminating property like being red or being tall. That is, some things have it. Some things are red. Some things are tall. Some things are small. Some things are cool. Some things are not. And some are are simple. So what's the problem? Russell said, look, there are super awkward consequences of allowing non-existent objects into your ontology. Consider the round square. By Minong's naive comprehension principle, there's an object. that's both round and a square, but then that violates the principle of non-contradiction,

Starting point is 00:11:25 the logical law that says nothing can have incompatible properties. So Mynong's theory entails contradictions. Furthermore, what about the tall man, an object whose only properties are being tall and being a man? Well, is he bearded or clean-shaven? It's neither. As stated, he's just incomplete with respect to facial hair, but that would violate the principle of the excluded middle. That is that everything must be either P or not P. Every object should either have or lack a given property. At least according to Russell, of course, there are alternative views like intuitionist logic. And there are also other views like dialetheism, which allows contradictions or says

Starting point is 00:12:04 contradictions even exist without exploding. I talked to Graham Priest about logic over here. The last problem that Russell had with the Minongian view is that the existing Golden Mountain, which is, say, characterized by being golden, being a mountain and being existent, by a naive comprehension, there's exactly an object with these properties, but then it exists. So we've just thought something into existence. Here's where it starts to get refined. Most modern Menongians, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, again, modern Menongians forgive me.

Starting point is 00:12:39 They've developed, of course, sophisticated versions of minongianism that avoid these problems. For instance, and I'll just say this because this has come across in the research, and I just, I don't have a grasp of it enough to explain it. So there's nuclear and extra nuclear strategies. As far as I understand, this divides properties into two types like a nuclear property, which are ordinary properties that characterize objects like being red, being tall, being dashingly, good looking, etc. And then there are extra nuclear properties, which are higher order properties about an object's metaphysical or even logical status, like existing, being possible, etc. The comprehension principle only applies to nuclear properties. Since existence is extra nuclear,

Starting point is 00:13:22 that means you can't define that existing Golden Mountain into existence. The round square also has nuclear properties of roundness and squareness, but it has the extra nuclear property of being impossible. Then there's an extra refinement by Edward Zoltov, I'm pronouncing that correctly, of the dual copula strategy. This says, and again, as far as I understand, objects can have properties in two manners. So one is encoding. You can have a property as part of one's nature or definition, like how a character in a novel has properties. And then there's exemplifying, actually instantiating a property into reality, like how you actually have properties. Sherlock Holmes, for instance, would then encode the property of being a detective, but doesn't exemplify it.

Starting point is 00:14:04 Instead, Sherlock exemplifies being fictional. The round square encodes roundness and squareness without exemplifying either. So there's no contradiction. These solutions work, but now we need spreadsheets to track which properties or which type and which mode of predication is in play, meaning that philosophy has become accounting except without job prospects. Then in my research, I came across a recent approach of accepting that all genuine singular terms refer and that everything exists, but insist that apparently empty names like Batman refer to abstract artifacts just created by humans. This means that Batman

Starting point is 00:14:44 refers to an abstract object created by DC Comics. This abstract object exists in the same way that numbers and stories exist. So when people say Batman doesn't exist, they're expressing a true proposition that Batman isn't concrete. This respects direct reference, so names refer without description, as well as classical logic, the standard logic that probably makes intuitive sense to you, which has been covered on this channel before, I'll place links on screen and in the description, basically every meaningful sentence is true or false, while avoiding Maenongian non-existence. The cost, however, is that it's revisionary about ordinary usage. What I mean is that when someone says Santa doesn't exist,

Starting point is 00:15:22 they're saying Santa doesn't exist in any manner whatsoever. They're usually not making some subtle distinction about abstract versus concrete existence. Some philosophers refuse to let descriptivism die. They've developed versions that survive Kripke's attacks. The three ones I'll vaguely gesture at are the following. There's metalinguistic descriptivism. so Batman means the bearer of Batman, whoever or whatever is called by that name. Is it circular? Perhaps. I haven't convinced myself of it. Then there's causal descriptivism.

Starting point is 00:15:56 So Einstein means the person standing at the origin of the causal chain underlying our use of the word Einstein. And then a causal chain is what? Well, maybe it's something like a historical sequence of uses connecting our current use back to some initial baptism. This handles Kripke's examples while maintaining descriptive content. There's also something called wide scope descriptivism. The description takes wide scope over modal operators. So Superman may not have been strong. That sentence doesn't say that strong guy from Krypton may not have been strong. But rather, that actual strong guy from Krypton is such that he may not have been strong. Now you see what a giant Saul Kripke was, that much of philosophy after Kripki are attempts to either take Kripke further or knock Kripke down, and it's so tricky

Starting point is 00:16:46 to do either. Most philosophers that I've encountered find these constructions to be artificial. Computer science faces the same issue every time you write code. No pointer exceptions are just failed attempts to refer to some non-existent object. Object-oriented programming basically implements sophisticated Mignonism, in that you can declare objects without instantiating them, giving them a kind of being without existence. Your average code base believes in more non-existent objects than medieval monks. The problem gets even more unsettling with AI and knowledge representation. How should ChatGBTGPT handle fictional characters? It needs to know Harry Potter facts to answer questions about books, but it also needs to know not to apply those facts

Starting point is 00:17:30 to reality. The Frang Problem, which I talk about here with John Verveke, is about representing what doesn't change when something happens, extends directly to fiction. Current AI systems don't handle this well, but of course, that's current AI systems. AI systems are constantly evolving. There's also self-referential issues here. You can't even state this problem without already taking aside. When you talk about the problem of empty names, you're assuming some names are empty, which already rejects Mynong's view.

Starting point is 00:17:58 If you call it the problem of apparently empty names, then you're suggesting that they're not really empty, which seems to assume Mynong was right. Even saying the problem of negative existentials assume some of these statements are true, which rules out certain solutions from the start. So where are we now? After almost a century of just back and forth, back and forth, we have three primary theoretical options. That's descriptivism that we talked about,

Starting point is 00:18:24 where names are disguised descriptions. The cost is that it's seemingly false given crypti's arguments, so you have to find some counter to them. Number two is mynongianism, that your domain does include non-existence. Then the cost is you have profligacy, some metaphysical profligacy or fecundity, it's too much, there's also complexity here. Or three, abstract realism. Everything exists, but some things are abstract. The cost, as I mentioned,

Starting point is 00:18:50 is that it doesn't seem to mean what we mean by existence. You think you're choosing the best theory, but it's more like you're choosing your preferred form of theoretical compromise. Geez, there's so much that I haven't touched in this episode, and it's already going on for so long. If you'd like, feel free to subscribe, because I'm going to cover, well, what does Heidegger say about what existence actually is. It seems like the majority of what I've talked about here and in my investigations into philosophy that most are treating it linguistically. But that's not precisely what I mean when I say existence. That's just how does existence function in sentences? That's one aspect of existence. Now, unless you're someone who thinks that a concept is completely defined by its

Starting point is 00:19:27 linguistic relations, there are people, like I mentioned Elon Bernholz, who believe that, even many computationalists like Yoshabakh. Then, unless you're them, you'd find these investigations that I've outlined here to be unsatisfying. You'd say it's just, it's not complete, and I'd agree with you. But pointing to exactly what that is, I can't do. Also, on this channel, I'm going to explore at some point in the near future, what does Leibniz mean when he's asking, why is there something rather than nothing? That's about existence. There's also Von Idwajan, if I'm pronouncing that correctly, again, oh, geez, I apologize, who wonders if existence is actually even a single thing. Then there's also an interesting view on time that I'd like to tackle, called presentism.

Starting point is 00:20:06 So, does the past and the future exist? We tend to think if you're a block universe person that the past and the future exist, or if you're most people you'd say the past exists and the future is open, but there is another view that says neither the past nor the future exists. All that exists is somehow the present. What's real is the now. Of all of these views, if you're wondering which one is correct, my professional opinion, after all this study,

Starting point is 00:20:32 is that the correct view is whichever one I'm defending at the moment. Kurt here, note, since the recording of this particular video, I've recorded an entire podcast on the philosophy of time going over presentism, for instance, with one of the giants in the field of philosophy of physics, Simon Saunders. It should be out now, but if it's not, feel free to subscribe. The Economist covers math, physics, philosophy, and AI in a manner that shows how different countries perceive developments and how the impact markets. They recently published a piece on China's new neutrino detector. They cover extending life via mitochondrial transplants, creating an entirely new field of medicine. But it's also not just science. They analyze culture. They analyze finance, economics,

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Theories of Everything with Curt Jaimungal - Curt Jaimungal: What is Existence, Exactly?

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