Added: 4 years ago
From: azrienoch
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  • Well... Wovon man nich schrechen kann, davon muss man scheigen... Can this discussion be had untill we find out if it is or not possible to have a unified universe theory? Meanwhyle, shouldent we just rest on the mystic, this is, simple, old dear, writters, not philosofers, to explain thing to us? We havent gone far from Grece: we still need stories to explain stuff; prove of that is most of your recent videos, Azrienoch.

    Pardon my awfull spelling, its not my language.

  • I ment "shweigen".

  • So, besides the scientific qualms, you don't accept determinism because it can't say anything about the way we experience the world? IF the laws of physics are deterministic then everything is deterministic. That's not a simplification; physics is at the heart of everything.

  • No, the laws of physics are not deterministic. Not even Newtonian physics is deterministic. Look up Norton's Dome. But aside from that, quantum physics are quite obviously not deterministic. It's an over-simplification to lump determinism and physicalism.

  • You do realize quantum mechanics is clearly not a complete theory of the universe, right? Also that there is NO WAY to prove something is truly random, you can only prove that you do not understand it. And saying Newtonian physics isn't deterministic because of one extremely hypothetical thought experiment is ridiculous. Besides, if it was all random, that's pretty far from being free will.

  • Then I suppose this discussion is over. I can't talk to someone about these things if they have a poor understanding of them. That quantum mechanics is incomplete has nothing to do with the complete parts. And I'm not sure someone with a thorough understanding of QM would refer to the movements of particles as random. They are indeterminate, and provably so.

  • Lastly, to argue with a demonstrable equation proving indeterminacy in Newtonian physics based on Newton's own premises is what is ridiculous.

  • Indeterminate, as in, there is no way to determine where it will be next. It is true that because of the uncertainty principle we cannot know the exact momentum or position of a particle and we may never be able to. Yet, can you explain to me how a fundamental limit on our ability to measure momentum or position of a particle means for sure that it doesn't follow cause and effect?

  • I'll give an example. What causes matter to pop in and out of existence? If the universe is a closed system, then it's an example of uncaused effect. If the universe is an open system, then particles are subject to physics that are literally beyond our universe, where "cause" isn't appropriate, much like when asking what caused the big bang.

  • You said something else earlier: "If it was all random, that's pretty far from being free will." This is true. But then, this video isn't about free will. It's about ignoring indeterminacy. Free will and determinism are two separate debates.

  • Good response Az. Glad to be able to thumbs up you after so long awhile.

    But in regards to your later videos, how do I "thumbs up" a comedian?

  • here's a thought from outta nowhere...determinism is how the world perceives me and free will is my struggle with the world.

    stop smoking, its stupid!

  • quantified love juice?

  • I think you simply show, with the love analogy, that the English language (or any language for that matter) is not well suited for describing such things. In fact in all of your examples (pain/love) have to do with the imperfection of describing the relativistic nature of a single event.

  • (cont 1.)You mention pricking a sleeping person in his sleep, he may not feel pain but the 'technician' might still observe the signal, this does not then mean that either is right or wrong. Only that there might be two perspectives given the event. Objectively, the event of a sleeping person being pricked, should only have one description. Which given our (humans) subjective nature may not be able to describe accurately.

  • (cont 2.)Im going to give you an analogy now, one that I think applies very well. Consider the train paradox (caused by Special relativity, please watch: watch?v=wteiuxyqtoM). Essentially, "with different reference frames there can never be agreement on the simultaneity of events". This means that two perspectives of an event which are contradictory, does NOT make either perspective wrong necessarily.

  • (cont 3.)That said, while we may not be able to determine events accurately given certain knowledge, does not make the universe non-deterministic. (sorry for the number of posts, and the late replies. I'm a new subscriber looking through some of your older videos.)

  • Armchair philosophy.

  • Troll.

  • Comment removed

  • LOl, from the 7 second mark this is classic

    talk about 'selfconcious jewboy trying to hard' LOL

    lamer tits

  • Showing the difference between pain and depression was a great point! When arguing euthanasia people often reduce the two to the same thing.

  • Notice how often you use words like "cause", "because", "source", etc. I prescribe a healthy dose of non-duality. Your reasoning seems cause and effect based even as you argue against cause and effect. Meditate for 10 yrs and get back to me.

  • Now maybe a video on the fallacy of appealing to complexity...? Or is complexity non-deconstructable?

  • Neither complexity nor simplicity is avoidable. The fallacy is in taking either so seriously that it causes us to overlook some necessary bit. That doesn't happen often with complexity (intelligent design's "irreducible complexity" would be an example), but it happens QUITE often with simplicity. Hence the video.

  • I digress.

  • Quantum theory is not at odds with special relativity, I think you meant general relativity.

  • Right, thanks. It's at odds with both, but I did mean general relativity.

  • I don't think so. Special relativity has been already successfully incorporated into Quantum Field Theory, which is a quite straightforward generalization of Quantum Theory which takes into account the postulate of special relativity that energy and mass are equivalent. The reason why general relativity is problematic is because of gravity.

  • bgturk:

    You're correct general relativity is the problem, not special.

  • Considering that we are trying to model the whole universe in our small (in comparison) brains, do you think simplification is necessary as a form of compression? How can we hope to understand anything if we do not generalize (and therefore simplify)? It won't fit in our brain!

  • Oh, yes, I don't think simplification is avoidable. But I also don't think that justifies it or makes it correct in any way. Any position, any at all, can be argue for and against BECAUSE we leave so much out.

  • Wonderfull... well said. More on this but this time simplify it.

    :)

  • the trouble with quibbles

  • LOL @ RyalsYou.

    Sadly that joke would be lost on those who aren't familiar with a certain Gene Roddenberry creation.

  • 1. Az, I don't mean to sound condescending, but it kinda seems to me like you're beating a dead horse -- yes, language cannot describe reality 1:1, or A = A. Maybe you are making nuances I don't see, or because you're dealing with determinism, and long established assumptions re language.

    I already accept the Limits of Language, so my love juices only mildy flow here.

  • 2. Yes, emotions and abstractions like love, hate, good, evil, American Idol, will probably never be able to COMPLETELY describe reality. Unless you are trying to develop a system or theory of language that WILL be able to describe said concepts...? On my own, I'm tossing around ideas on the latter.

  • 3. A. Thirty years ago I discovered Eastern Philosophy, via Alan Watts, then others. There, the limits of language are a given! As in "The Tao te Ching's" first line: "The Tao that can be spoken of is not the Tao." ... and then goes in to discuss the Tao for several thousand pages! Heh.

    B. You should look into Alfred Korzybski's massive work, "Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics, 1933.

  • 3. B., ct'd, Korzybski's theory can be stated: "The map is not the territory." An example, as you are not the same Az every day or moment, he would label you, Az(subletter)1, Az2, Az3.

    Alas, I've tried to turn you and Scoutie on to this to no avail. Ah, stubborn youth! IMHO, even if you disagree with the above, A and B, to not bring it up in your much-anticipated volume 2 is an egregious omission. Yes, I plan to do some vid responses on this! ^_^

  • Oh, but I don't think we disagree! Obviously, I can't speak to everyone, so this is directed at those who a) don't know the limits of language, and b) are determined to limit it further. I look forward to your video response!

  • Yes, I agree we don't disagree -- coming at it from different angles. You're the absurdity school, and I'm more existentialist/goofy.

    I'll have to vid some readings from Samuel R. Delany, pomo/linguist/SF writer, and college teacher. ;)

  • only Chuck Norris knows the speed of pain

  • I love this it's brilliant. Love your explanation for The Fallacy of Appealing to Simplicity my making this fallacy in your argument against Determinism. Am I wrong in assuming this was an intentional satire.(ass in the name of the video) ether way I still love this video. 5(star)Units of Love that is.

  • an infant failing to recognize continuity isn't evidence for lack of causal connections. infants can't do plenty of things. toddlers can't even recognize that one object is bigger than another because they are most often unable to represent more than one thing at a time. so it's "inducted and not itself caused", this does not follow, in my opinion.

  • Yikes. Cigarettes.

  • I'm editing and uploading the first part of my reply to this...

  • Agreed on any particular 'ism' sufficing to 'explain' all the complex interactions; but we are religious in nature, seeking a greater truth, a more noble & grander concept than the 'truth of ourselves', to justify 'my beliefs' or attain a 'better future'; perhaps in this future the science will still be irreducibly complex but the overall philosophy as it applies to 'us' oh so practical, pragmatic & simple. Imagine...

  • Interesting thoughts as always.

  • i have to think about this more, so forgive me if i'm saying something obvious. but i've been thinking lately: it seems that much of what we know about the world through science, we only know because the phenomena behave in a simple way. we only value elegant theories because we have used reductionism as a tool to learn. do you think that we might be in need of a 'paradigm shift' that helps us to analyze systems without reducing them? or is there already a way to do this?

  • brilliant as usual

  • Great explination

  • Love and intimacy are present at every level of the physical universe... just felt differently as consciousness moves through its own potentia. two sodium chloride molecules love and imbrace each other because they resonate very well together. There is only illusion and dissillusion of Self from which all the academic hyper-defining of Self eminates.

  • My love-juice quantity is voluminous.

  • We can determine what we percieve.. But we only percieve the surface of things.. Thanks nice vid to start the day with.

  • Isn't the whole point of "philosophical" simplicity a "romantic" approach to a much more complex whole? Often reserved for situations where the individual needs to convert stress into something less destructive. The simplicity is a psychological blanket which we of course can judge to be false - BUT it serves a purpose that is more complex in the holistic scheme of things. Granted, one should avoid generalizations as far as possible and practical.

  • AND - foot taken out of mouth, I do get you don't mean to imply that simplicity is "false" (yes contradiction in terms), my point was just maybe the general appeal to simplicity is a good one in some situations, but as a life philosophy? No way. I'd even go so far as to say "simplicity promotes violence". Hey I like this subject! Awesome job Az, you got me into philosophy over morning coffee. Me luvs ya.

  • From the title, I thought that this was an attack on Occam's razor. But after seeing the video, I found nothing to disagree on. (Even in physics itself, you don't describe every phenomenon by going to the most basic level of description. It'd be meaningless and almost hopeless to describe a sliding block using nothing but string theory.) I not sure if I should be disappointed or relieved.

  • It was an attack on Occam's razor.  If you found nothing to disagree with, please watch again.

  • When I consider how much time I wasted trying to sell lukewarm lemonade when I was eight...If materialists are right, I could be RICH now if I'd just been hawking love juice instead. Brilliant video! Thanks for thinking!

  • applause, applause, more, more... can love juice be "water", can love juice be "wine", can love juice be "donating blood"?

  • Wow, conceptual brilliance

  • I feel bad cause I can't give you a source for this, but I've heard from a reputable teacher (if you trust a stranger's judgment) that for seven years upon marriage there is a distinct chemical pattern associated with a love one, but it thereafter changes. This corresponds with the average time of divorce. I would say love transcends this physicality, and that is why people succesfully live together for 20+ years in loving relationships.

  • Very complicated!!!!

    Note: Must watch again tomorrow while sober. All this talk of love juice and pricks is not helping my comprehension. I might prefer to read it...any chance you could post it in the description?? =)

  • It's too long. If you (or anyone else) wants to send me your email, I'll get it to you.

  • Good video, but are you happy with it? Do you feel your point was made here? I have a notion there was far more on this left unsaid than said. Why do you think people want things simplified? Clearly there are times when very simple explanations work in lieu of more complicated ones, and the author is labelled "genius" immediately. In a nutshell, we push to find quick solutions that end up limiting our own perspectives?

  • Why wasn't absurdism included as having an appeal to simplicity?

    Is this actually a fallacy when fallacies don't themselves shows us falsehoods, yet over reduction would? Or does it? (if not, is this fallacy just another weapon of mental destruction?) And if it isn't a fallacy, is it a principle? And if it is a principle that can be simplified, does it still hold? Last question... how do we determine complicated from simple? :)

  • Absurdism, as far as I'm concerned, reduces everything to incoherency, which, I'd say, is what you get when your try to boil everything down to a single component. I can't say too much! I'm still working on a description of simple (limited number of possibilities is a short arrow in the direction).

  • You're right, there's a lot left unsaid. This is a piece of what I've been working on lately for my book. Hope you liked the peek!

  • You tease.

    Youtube is great for feedback. I hope I've helped. :)

  • Then I suppose that I am thee "love technician" of me, i.e. because that's primarily how I equate everything that I experience or know of and I have a difficult time comprehending the rationale of people who feel or claim to feel otherwise.

    Regarding 5:30: Also consider this E.g. I want someone who I love to be happy because I "want" them to be happy so basically, point is everything we want, even empathetic desires are somewhat selfish because it's still really about our own satisfaction

  • What's interesting about "being your own love technician" is that it doesn't work the same way. If I look at you and see you holding your hand and cringing, I think, "He's in pain." But I don't look at those behaviors in myself to know that I'm in pain. It's as if I do not need evidence to talk about myself.

  • I can donate love juice!

  • Yur forgetting about Universiality.

    Different levels don't interact with each other. They are separate.

    The quantum realm doesn't interfere with larger scale phenomenon.

  • Very bad... Very very bad... I can't believe you did this! The usual examples, love... pain... Yeah, nobody can measure them blah blah! There is QUALITY not just quantity. All of your argument can be refuted by the simple addition of matrices to the side of your opponent. It just pisses me off to see someone taking a good position with bad argument! Very bad... I really like you man.

  • By all means, do it. I went over ten minutes with this.

  • Sure thing...

  • I'm honestly not seeing how this defeats materialism. Aren't you misrepresenting the argument to say that it's merely a correspondence between chemicals in the brain acting as correlation to pain or love at that given point? Perhaps I'm wrong, but I assumed that materialism also had to do with impulses in the brain that create "storage", much like a Harddrive always being written and accessed, and that this factors in to experience of sensations.

  • Play that out in your head and see if it changes anything.

  • In what way do you mean? Materialism continues to make sense to me, and this is a question I've thought over many times recently. Perhaps I'll just have to wait to understand your viewpoint until I next have time to speak with you on Stickam.

  • No, I'm asking, what does the brain store? Is there a one to one correspondence? Or are there holes, just like with love and pain?

  • I would say that there is a one to one ration not in units, except in the form of degrees, which are recorded in the brain as they are sensed. Hitting oneself with a hammer on the thumb, for example, if it is rather light, will produce certain impulses that are registered as not only what we consider "pain" in our physical reactions, but also our emotional. In this sense, pain isn't a thing as much as it is an overall term for a series of happenings.

  • We may not realize the aspects of "pain" that we normally associate with the "feeling" of pain, which itself would just be one of the several resulting reactions along a chain, but they are still recorded to the extent that they can be. What would not be recorded, perhaps, may be the 'awareness of pain' that we would normally feel.

  • Why should we still avoid fires if we feel no pain? Because the composition of our bodies knowns 'pain' or 'harm' even if we are not 'aware' of the 'feeling of pain'. In truth I see a very broad and undiscovered interrelated network, but it's all based on normal material connections. This is a really basic way of talking about it.

  • i agree... ugh... perhaps you could "pwn" TheModernMystic for me? hah, joking... we can't quantify but we can "qualify" if not with one word, then many or sounds and pictures, art... but determinist do commit the most outrageous sin of reductionism, i would say... especially at a time when i think we begin to see that it's failing science: like inability to reconcile QM and GR where local and global aspects of universe "collide". even when we find out all apparent deterministic laws...

  • discover theory of everything and it will turn out to be contained in, let's say, couple of pages of equations, and we describe functioning of the brain and all social patterns we will still be facing the speeding bullets of universal processes, the sheer complexity and last but not least individuals who remain unpredictable and uncontrolable. we might transcend our current embodiment, but i bet those issuses will always remain the same way as it happens that with increase of understanding and

  • perception there is always more questions to answer, rather than less. Bah... too long. Your video: simply innumerable, let's use real numbers ;)

  • yes! the natural flaws of categorization loses all meaning when it is boxed in and quantified. your best work yet.

  • Mmmmm, love juice.

    Interesting subject, thanks for the insight.

  • If you get a chance I'd like to read your comments on my video on "free will".

  • You give me alot to think about. Much thanks.

  • you appeal to simplicity with love, why should it reduce to ONE love juice? the sensation called love might partly reduce to neuronal constructions(thus meaning that even involved at something else your love is still there). love might not describe the exact same phenomenon in every body but the reductionsit aproach might explain exactly what led each conscience to call it "love" under social contact.

  • Az, I need your love juice.

    I'm willing to pay big money.

    (another brilliant video)

  • Who wouldn't be willing to sell everything for the lord's love juice? :)

  • lmao, Shan!!

  • I love it when you give me a reason to believe what I believe... I've never "believed in" free will completely, and I've certainly never "believed in" determinism either... Now I know why ;) but I get it, the whole thing is an over-simplification, and many people don't see that. Of course, I've got a long way to go before I REALLY get it, but from my simple mind, even I can get it... that's all I'm trying to say. :)

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