 You might think that complimenting my stamp collection will get you on my good side, but trust me, philately will get you nowhere. So people who have been watching Thunk from the beginning have probably noticed that I've stopped reading comments at the end of every episode. This is partially to keep the length of the episode down for people with short attention spans, and partially because some episodes just weren't worth commenting on. However, some of you have said such fascinating things about this stuff that I would be a huge jerk if I didn't take the time to at least acknowledge some of them. Engage. So this extensive and awesome comment from Death Pigeon covered most of the schools of thought about the mind-body problem that I didn't. The theory of qualia makes some distinction between actually experiencing something versus describing it to somebody, and idealism is the belief that there is no objective universe besides the one that we envision in our minds. Both of these theories seem pretty dumb to me, but I'm a little bit more practical than a lot of real philosophers. Nick Dufault and Sammy I.M. had a fantastic discussion about how free flow of information might be preferable to privacy, citing transparency of government, which is an interesting flip side to this topic. I agree that totally open information would be preferable to privacy if we could ensure that nobody abused that information to violate anybody else's rights, which has historically been the case. Maybe people should have privacy and corporations or organizations should be totally open and transparent? I don't know. Daxon rightly said that even if people are more creative without financial incentives, society still ought to try to reward inventors just on principle. I'm on board with that idea, but the patent system as it stands doesn't do that. It rewards people who file paperwork saying that they don't want anybody else making money off of an idea without paying them. We need to figure out something better. A related note, I recently learned that Benjamin Franklin refused to patent any of his numerous inventions because he thought that they should be the property of the world. I would love to see a system where innovators like Ben got rewarded without needing to be paranoid and protective of their ideas. Samantha Dufault pointed out that geeks tend to have a checklist of very specific things that you have to have done to qualify as a particular kind of geek, and that this is a really narrow minded view of how varied expressions of enthusiasm could be. Just because you don't know Klingon doesn't mean you don't have a Starfleet tramp stamp. Good point, Sam. Speaking of geeks, Aaron Hendricks, proud founder of the Geeks on Podcast and brother to that other Hendricks, has been hyping Thunk on his show, and if you want to hear four or five geeks talking about things like alternative lifestyles and science fiction, I strongly recommend that you go check them out. Death Vision came back to voice some concern about how the technological singularity might set rich people free but leave everybody else behind. Capitalism does tend to make things cheaper and more widely available, but it's much better at making things for rich people. When things like Google Glass become extraordinarily powerful, will social mobility freeze entirely? That's a really good question. Sivir left a note about how it's really fascinating to learn about the extremes of just about any human endeavor. Like even proficient can be really exciting when you know all of the thought and strategy that goes into it. Isablonthong also pointed out that it's not really a good idea to pursue excellence in one area at the expense of everything else in life, and I mostly agree with that. Many brilliant ideas come from cross-pollination between disciplines. Nick Dufault won my heart with his essay about how a high requirement that banned many hopeful women from being airline pilots was the direct result of the original equipment in airplanes being built around the very first pilots who were all men. It's a perfect example of how bigotry and bias aren't just dumb things that people think, that they're embedded in civilization itself, and that they perpetuate themselves with everything from language to technology and design, and this is so good. There were a few comments on Reddit that suggested that Ender Wigan earned his military genius through hard work and determination, not just through being born smart. Yeah, he works hard to be ready for his ultimate test, but I really feel like the book makes a bigger deal about him being already smarter than everyone else from the get-go. Maybe that's just the message that I wanted to hear at that age? Mark Rushing, who's left several very thoughtful remarks, was kind enough to link the necessary voice of skepticism and all the excitement about the confirmation of the inflation theory of the Big Bang. Also, some physicists on Reddit were kind enough to point out that I should have been saying cosmic microwave background radiation to differentiate it from the infrared kind, and that Bicep 2 isn't actually an acronym, even though its predecessor Bicep was. Dammit scientists, I am TRYING to tell everyone how cool you are. Could you please stop changing naming conventions for no reason? I was surprised most people said that they would take Cypher's Choice. Semi-IM and some others pointed out that a virtual world without any challenges in it would probably be boring, that an ideal virtual world would not necessarily be a perfect virtual world, which I think is an important distinction to make. Then, as you're pointed out, a major leap in logic that I made in my episode about complexity, that preferring simple answers to complex ones is something that both competent and incompetent people share. You are absolutely right, and I still haven't found any evidence that explicitly proves that simple people prefer simpler answers. You got me. Free will. Man. Apparently it's a touchy subject, and there are many angry philosophers on Reddit who said that I didn't do a justice, and then proceeded to argue with each other at length about what I ought to have said. String Epsilon has made several excellent comments on other episodes, but I really appreciate that he brought up how quantum mechanics throws a monkey wrench into determinism, but not necessarily free will. Quantum physics is probabilistic, not deterministic, at least to our knowledge, but it's still a problem for free will because a robot that flips a coin and does one thing if it comes up heads and another thing if it comes up tails, isn't really more free than one that just does one thing and then the other. We can't calculate exactly what's going to happen in the future. That doesn't mean that our choices aren't still totally governed by physics, but it can be a little bit comforting. I was kind of embarrassed when I finally realized that Carlos and I actually agree about free will on several levels, because when I first responded to him, I was ready for a fight. He actually has some great things to say about how whatever free will is, you have more of it if you have more choices that you could potentially make. Sorry for the confusion, Carlos. Great stuff. Many very intelligent people were upset by the implication that enthusiastic sex was the only correct sex. If you are in a monogamous relationship, there is evidence that sexual activity with your partner, even if you're not super excited about it, could be healthy for your relationship. However, if you don't have that ideal of enthusiastic consent from your sexual partner, you need explicit consent. An unmistakable verbal, yes, I will have sex with you even if I'm not super stoked about it right now. Non-explicit, non-enthusiastic consent isn't consent, it's concession, and just because somebody's laying there instead of running away doesn't make it not rape. I hope that that clarifies my position. Finally, Aaron Hendricks asked for a more detailed explanation of the double slit experiment's weirdness. Here it is in a nutshell. When you shoot an individual particle at the double slit, it actually passes through both slits at the same time in something called quantum superposition. Quantum superposition is a weird state of very small things where they exist everywhere that you'd expect to find them in an amount proportional to the probability that you would find them there. So in quantum superposition, a particle that has a 50% chance of going through one slit and a 50% chance of going through the other slit actually has half its waveform go through one and half through the other. That's why it can make an interference pattern even without any other particles to interfere with. It's interfering with itself. Measuring the particle's position that is hitting it with something so that you know which slit it goes through actually forces it to respond like a particle instead. Like it's 100% in one place, which is why it makes the two lines pattern if you're observing it. But the point that I was making is that even though that's weird, it doesn't have anything to do with consciousness. It's just about messing with or not messing with particles as they go through the experiment. Thanks, Aaron. Finally, I'd very sincerely like to thank everybody who's offered words of encouragement. When I first started this thing, I wasn't sure if anybody was going to watch it, but over 400 people have blah blah subscribed so far. I really hope that you guys think that these videos are worth blah sharing with your friends or your family or your teachers or your students or really anyone because everybody who watches them might have something else to talk about besides the weather. This is the last time I'll mention it, but if you want a free thunk sticker, I have about 15 left and I've mailed them to three countries so far so don't be shy if you live somewhere far away. Thank you very much to everyone who has helped to make thunk something worth watching. Both the viewers and the people who have helped me edit my crazy thoughts into reasonable scripts. If you have any suggestions for a future episode or if you want to go back to the ones that already exist and leave another amazing comment, please do so and I'll see you next week.