Turtles All The Way Around: Wittgenstein, Things, Motives, Words & How Thought, Logic & Reason Work

This is the first lecture in a series on Wittgenstein, my favorite modern philosopher, for my classes in philosophy and logic at Berkeley City College. At UC Berkeley, I was taught that those who understand later Wittgenstein better than others understand thinking better than others, and have a shot at great philosophy, which I still believe, and seek for myself and others. It is still some of the most useful philosophy I have found, connected with everything else, in the history of human thought for understanding thinking as we and others do.

0:00 Hey everybody! Hope you're good!
0:13 The various ways this fool pronounces Wittgenstein
1:09 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Berkeley & My Time In This Town
2:15 Those Who Understand Late Wittgenstein Will Understand How Thought Works
3:29 The Plot Of These Talks On Wittgenstein: The Early To The Late
4:40 The Spirit Of Nietzsche & The Nuts & Bolts Of Wittgenstein
5:55 Turtles All The Way Down & Around (Vs. Other "Pictures")
7:57 The Problem Of Infinite Regress If Things Are Based In Things
8:43 Foundationalism, Anti-Foundationalism & The Debate
9:32 Buddhism, Codependent Arising & Things As Tangles
10:25 Heidegger, Wittgenstein & Running Up Against The Limits Of Language
10:59 Our Senses As Sensation, Many Things Together
12:02 No Sense, Not Touch, Not Sight, Is The Bedrock, Basic Sense
13:53 Object Permanence, Babies & Putting Words Together
14:41 Memory As Things When We Don't Sense Them, As Extension Of Them
15:34 Avicenna, The Unicorn, And Thought As Image, Or More...
16:35 Thought Is Similarly Interweaving Things With Emotions & Words
17:14 You Do Not Have An Ordered Understanding Of Apples
18:13 Objectivity & Words Versus Subjectivity & Emotions
19:08 Poe Says Be Both Poet & Mathematician To Be Brilliant
20:00 Plato, But Also Heraclitus, As Things, Motives & Talk Intertangled
21:10 Wittgenstein (Later, Post-Truth-Table Logic): There Is No Bedrock Element
22:00 What Does A Clarinet Sound Like? Audible Imagination, As An Element
23:27 Living Without Words? How Must We Think, Or Talk To Think?
24:33 All This Is Social & Individual Talk, Thought, Logic & Reason, Better & Worse
25:43 Are There Rules And What Do Words Do?
26:32 How Much Do We Talk Out Thought As Logic?
27:25 Should We Talk, Look, Listen Or What More To Be Logical, With Bears?
28:15 Wittgenstein Does NOT Reduce All To Talk, Or Language, Or Games
29:20 We Never Fully Talk Anything Out & Continue To Talk & Think
30:40 Oddly Buddhist & How Thought Works, Better Than Other Explanations
31:16 Cusanus, Hegel & The Circle As Infinite Right In Front Of You
31:57 Baking A Cake Is Not Having An Ordered Plan, But A Series Of Stages
32:48 Alice, A Book Without Pictures & Carroll's Pre-Formal Logic
33:50 Super-Highways, Robin Williams & Baby Buddha
35:03 Zhuangzi, The Trap & Those Who Have Forgotten Words
36:07 Wittgenstein Reading Alice To Children & Wondering Who Rules What
37:18 Using Words To Do Things, But Not Alone
38:25 The Lure Of The Secret Cellar & When We Hit Bedrock
39:08 The Cure For The Lure Is Using Many Examples To Show Range
40:08 To Say Everything Is Like Repairing A Torn Spider's Web With Your Fingers
40:56 My German Family, Science & The Resemblance Beyond Gestalt
41:36 Logical Cultures Versus What? How Would That Weave?
42:48 Wittgenstein Gives Us The Best Post-Picture

[pillmuncher]

I'm amazed that we both seem to love the same philosophers. First Laozi and Zhuangzi, now Wittgenstein. What about Nelson Goodman?

[justcody]

Around the 20:00 mark you mentioned a challenge you regularly make to your logic students, challenging them to think of a thing without sensory input or emotion. I'm not sure an inability to answer that doesnt mean reasoning is impossible without sensation or emotion. Like Tolstoy says, I do not think God is a personal being but I only treat him as a personal being because I am a person, and like a sliver of green glass held up to my eye I can only perceive all the colors around me as Green. I dont know much about Donald Davidson but I believe he made a similar case for using analogy in analytic philosophy. I'm not entirely sure where Tolstoy fits into the philosophical world other than he was deeply influenced by Schopenhauer and Afrikan Spir and credited them both with making him a christian (irony might not be a logical category but I'm sure trying to understand his credit to those men for that feat would probably be tempting to make one.)

But when the Alpha Zero computer program is determining the best possible chess move I dont think you could call it anything but reasoning could you? The process is so alien and inhuman to us that an AIs chess style is basically useless to study, human beings who try to use the style of chess AIs do almost always lose, and the majority of work in game AI today with chess is to find a way to make chess AIs play the game like a human does. This seems more like a problem with the thinker and not thinking itself, but maybe I'm wrong I've never studied philosophy I came here by accident after binging lectures on Analytic Theology.