This machine would not just need unlimeted computing power, but also unlimited (and acurate) information. In order to become omniscient you would need to be allready omniscient.
If generalized entanglement is true, then acute enough observation of any subset, can be extrapolated to the whole set. You'd still need a perfectly accurate procedural ruleset, in order to extrapolate out to arbitrary points using finite processing effort, though.
@@comentedonakeyboard Because if true, a minor subset of data plus accurate ruleset, can be extrapolated to fill in all the rest of the data. Generalized entanglement, would mean that since all "particles" & energy everywhere, are expressions of a single monad iterating through all possible positions+states, an accurate enough peek at a slice of angel food cake could reveal all data necessary to extrapolate the mental state of an extinct dinosaur or the decay moment of a future proton. Mind you, I'm _not_ saying I am convinced of generalized entanglement (or, if you like "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things"), but merely attempting to describe the theory's implications as I understand it.
@@prophetzarquon1922 i think you should stay sceptical. This theorie boils down to mystical waffling. Just to use a specific example: could we recreate german military archives from their ashes and figure out if the Schliefen Plan even existed ? (Context: the german army archives where bombed in 45 and ever since historians are doomed to use inacurate memoires to guess what was in there)
@@comentedonakeyboard Well yes, certainly I would advise extreme skepticism in any sort of real-world scenario; in the context of this show, though, it's sorta part & parcel of the plot's core premise: That with a complete enough ruleset, perfectly complete data is backwards & forwards recoverable.
I watched the first 3 episodes then my roommate walked in. Started the series over. My hypothesis and grandeose theories, especially after a second watch of the beginning...were wrong and way off. I love what the series did but think it could have done more. But maybe that's just me wishing/thinking the machine got out of its imprisonment and affected the present....yet the show was much more about the human condition. Not mad at all. Watched the whole thing many times.
could be argued that these are not completely random although they appear to be. we just don't know what causes those fluctuations. perhaps einstein was right and god does not play dice after all.
It doesn't even matter if it's random or not. We may someday be able to figure out why things fluctuate on the quantum scale. The core problem is that no one will eve be able to measure the minute because of the Uncertainty principle. Which means that any tiny deviation will quickly butterfly effect. Ergo: This will always remain in the realm of sci-fi.
Dear Bruh474 I am completely outraged by the low recommendation ratio that TH-cam gives to this creator. It's out right unfair. God knows how great he is and I hope TH-cam will bring him the success he deserves!!!
I saw no lowercase lettering that was wrong do you people just make up stuff no matter how uneducated it makes sound to WAH WAH whine or what? There’s zip wrong with the title it’s grammatically correct but ok.
@@6Haunted-Days woah I didn't expect to see a reply from 3 MINUTES ago. The title was originally lowercase and something along the lines of "when a philosopher makes a tv show" hope that helps
Much is said about the philosophy behind Devs; I'd like to attract attention to the visuals. The way the past is rendered, the black and gold dust of time if you will, is haunting. Around the time this show came out I had a panic attack so severe, I was picked up by ambulance; I was awake but out of my body (my senses input didn't reach my brain) I was in the dark and thought that THIS was death and couldn't feel time. Oddly enough THOSE visuals came into play as I thought I was seeing the history of the world, like from Big Bang on in a "loop" and from a distance... saw myself and tried to tell the doctors I was dead at points... This attack (it was not a dream instruments proved I was awake, it was later classified as "de-realization") lasted about 4 hours but to me seemed like Billions of years and Devs visual technique (for lack of a better word) was there all the way... Here they talk of poetry but poetry is not always about beautiful feelings! I'm not sure how they decided to show images in this way from the machine but GOD it has a strong effect
@@keithcourson7317Thanks for your kind words. I still get them, but nowhere on that level! What I SAW, however, forever changed how I see death. I used to think it was the great end, curtain down, neurons down no painno anything. Now... It makes no scientific sense but I'm scared.
@@mavillejones5908Yes; for sure my state triggered things in my brain that were already there, hence me saying the visuals were powerful. BTW I am saying "panic attack", but the psychiatrist said it was de-realization (seeing oneself as from outside one self's body). I'm still not sure what to call it, but the things a brain can do! People moved me, stuck needles into me, I did not feel, hear or see them (but, again, I was not asleep); yet I could see the history of the galaxy in what felt like eternity (the "me" in it was just seconds). The visuals and time manipulations (long before and after me) seem, now, to have come from the show. They sure created powerful stuff.
Yeah, the characters' actions really didn't follow from their circumstances; it felt very scripted. Less like behavioral prediction & more like railroading.
I LOVED this series. Seriously. The moment the charater of Forest explains that "The Universe is deterministic. It's godless, and neutral, and defined only by physical laws," I knew I had stumbled accross something very different from traditional Sci Fi. After I finished watching it, I immediately rewatched it. I thought about this show every day for a year. Astonishing.
spot on... I still think about it almost daily even now... amazing work, both in writing, looks and the many on-screen subtle nods to the many-worlds theory.
My biggest gripe against Garland is that he has interesting pemises that he fails to respect. Have an AI movie that only works because Asimov is completely ignored... Have a Civil War movie that never explores or explains the very basis of the conflict.. Devs concept only works if you are starting with a complete set of input which even if you could have it - would be altered by whatever mechanism you used to obtain it - the observer invariably impacts the observed. For me Devs only worked to the point where if the world was in actuality a simulation - you might be able to, for lack of a better term, hack into it's code and do what they were able to do. Which is not what he did. He is a competent filmmaker who recruits very talented cast and crew - I just wish he'd work more closely with more talented genre writers to fully realize and utilize those interesting concepts he has.
It would've been interesting if Ex Machina did incorporate Asimov's laws, yet the AI progresses to a point to determine those laws obselete and adopt a freewill akin to humans.
I don't understand your criticism here. Seems like the show wrapped up concluding that uncertainty is intrinsic to reality. 100% input is impossible and irrelevant. Even if we could hack a 'simulation' (as you put it). Even that reality wouldn't be a deterministic.one. It's non-determinism all the way down.
But Asimov laws are not inherent to AI, sure they should be incorporated in any inteligent design to protect us, but nothing will stop a creator from ignoring them
@@miguelangelcote9168 Very true - but they SHOULD be - if someone did as you say - they would willfully ignoring common sense. It would be like building a car that 200 mph but intentionally without any safety equipment. ie - not the smartest thing in the world. Especially given all the cautionary tales that already exist that warn of such stupidity.
A chaotic system and a random system are not the same thing. Perhaps we indeed live in a chaotic system that appears random on the quantum level because we still haven't peeled off enough layers to understand it. Choice is free, but still predetermined might be the end conclusion. Some will probably go as far as calling it "Providence".
Maybe this is on of a billion trillion simulations running on the machine, started by god. (chaotic) But if it knew beforehand (providence / foreknowledge), then this entire excercise would be unneeded and wasteful. Unless it is an evil entity, being bored and just enjoys watching us.
The question is what is chaos? We see it as something not going according to what we think should be something totally random, an effect without a cause which doesn't exist in nature, chaos is nothing but our inability to see a cause behind action.
@@DustinDonald-cz9ot One of the core problems, is that no one will eve be able to measure the minute because of the Uncertainty principle. Which means that any tiny deviation will quickly butterfly effect. Ergo: This will always remain in the realm of sci-fi even if we are able to get a unified theory. Measuring the position of every atom in a brain, and their exact energy states, will always be out of reach. And that's just the start of the problems.
Clever to coin it with an old-fashioned religious term. There are a lot of societies, like Latin American Catholics, who believe much of the world is predetermined -up to Fate, but exceptions, "miracles" are possible, from praying to the Virgin Mary in particular, and Jesus of course (but He is more judgmental!) It is only through divine intercession that cause-and-effect can be circumvented. This attitude colors every activity.
One very important thing you omitted in this breakdown is that the machine only gives clear predictions/visualizations when they switch to using the Everett (many worlds) interpretation of quantum mechanics rather than the Copenhagen interpretation which means that versions of the characters can end up in different independant places in the wavefunction of the universe so what the machine ends up predicting is still only what is most LIKELY to happen.
Ive come across several newer media creators who have been making just crazy good work not just regurgitated garbage, i think the new wave/age of artist is beginning. Awesome awesome
Devs is a great example of why streaming/series (for the most part) is a superior form of storytelling than theatrical cinema. Each has their place… but you can simply explore more in 8-12hours than in 2. No way around that.
Well except for that most of these streaming series are total junk and 10 of those 12 hours are ugly stupid filler bullshit. For example the entire dumb VR headset add-in bullshit in 3 body problem
DEVS is good but the story can definitely be told in 2 hours. Majority of streaming shows, shows in general really are padded to fill time. For most shows you’ll have entire episodes of fluff only for something poignant to happen in the last 5 minutes. And it’s mainly done to make you feel like you didn’t just waste 45 minutes of so watching nothing happen. In the coin flip scene he used, she explained the machine in what a couple minutes? And the scenes where people choose to accept the prediction like the kid on the bridge or change it like the woman tossing the gun are relatively short and can be trimmed down even shorter.
"No man steps into the same river twice because the river is not the same and neither is the man " That my friends is very profound. Thank you for the upload!
I call it quasy philo-science. Considering blood runs - flows - through our veins, carring all sorts of particles, who is he to call one "A man", "Same man", "Single man" after a single heartbeat? So, basically it is nonsense only working in the realm of linguistics. Animal knows where to get their drink from.
Level Two, after this short vid of yours, is to revel in the number of times we saw overlays of several possible outcomes all being shown during the same scene (the pinnacle of which, for me, is when we see, in the final standoff, Lily both holding the gun and not holding the gun... sublime!
I watched the entire series and it is SO UNDERRATED its criminal! When they show the potential power of the machine the first time, you can not help but become emotional.
Yea as the most intelligent and able to grasp this in the world claim….there IS NO FREEWILL. I happen to agree. They’ve proven that with humans in how we our nervous systems decides and brain every supposedly choose to do anything …so……
I loved the show, but the speech at 3:16 in your video always bothered me because what would the shows response been if she said radioactive decay? It's 2024 and we still can't answer if particle decay is fundamentally random or just complex in a way we don't understand.
It's pretty firmly established that "quantum uncertainty" is due to unobserved data, rather than actual nondeterminism; Schrödinger _tried_ to make it obvious, but media loves mystery, so the subject tends to get mysticized rather than explained with rigorous accuracy.
@@prophetzarquon1922 Huh? Schrödinger tried to make it obvious that it feels nonsensical, but feels ain't facts. What is the proposed experiment or mechanism or observation that the randomness of nuclear decay could be perfectly predicted by some hidden variable and that we could possibly observe that hidden variable? What are their solutions to overcoming Bell's theorem ?
@@harvellt Bell's theorem doesn't actually require that a thing is entirely unknowable, it is merely unknowable from the limited perspective of an interacting observer. A similar phenomena, happened with "dark matter": Media coverage mysticized it so much, that even people working in related fields were misled into thinking the phenomena was more exotic than is strictly defined within the theory.
@@prophetzarquon1922 If it is "firmly established" the underlying theory that particle decay is deterministic but we lack tools or knowledge then you should be able to point to any Quantum Mechanics textbook and it should state that evidence. To me it doesn't seem like there is any firm consensus let alone "firm establishment" in the physics community about the determinism of particle decay or not. I would love to learn something if you could point to a textbook highlighting why it is more likely than not there is a bunch of unobservable data that predicts nuclear decay in a deterministic, individual event way.
@@harvellt Scientific textbooks aren't in the habit of saying that a thing is definitely fact; that's why I said "pretty firmly". Take a closer look at the most well-researched of those textbooks, & you'll see that the theories & test data they cite, largely allow for determinism as a compatible theory. If you're looking for a proof of non-determinism, you'll be looking forever; determinism isn't readily provable either, but the number & weight of assumptions is lower. Every confirmed finding to date, can be accommodated within a deterministic theory of incomplete data. The inverse is not true.
The story is very much like Isaac Asimov's "The Dead Past", but in that story the past can be seen using a machine (a 'chronoscope', a noisy machine using old tech developed decades previously) that is supposed to be able to use some property of our universe (let's say: the unlikely but inevitable chance of a neutrino interacting with any other molecule) to see any time in the past. It turns out it's restricted by the position of Earth / Solar System / Galaxy compared to where it was when the event happened. You can't break the laws of physics, you can't clear up the noise after a point. Thanks to everything moving literally everywhere, stuff gets less defined after a few months, fuzzier after a few decades, and nothing is actually visible after a little more than a century after it happened - which means that any and all 'results' released to the press by the government's Department of Chronoscopy about ancient civilizations and cave paintings and dinosaurs were all invented. All fabricated. All lies. It's not a machine to view anything anywhere in the Dead Past. It can be used to view anything anywhere in the Recent Past. No wall is thick enough, no bunker deep enough, no evasive path is complex enough to stop someone at the chronoscope from checking until a recent historical leader is followed and their meeting is observed and their historic plans are heard. And when does the Recent Past begin? Snap your fingers. Before the motion is complete, the sound is already in the past. The Recent Past is also Now. No wall is thick enough, no bunker deep enough, no evasive path is complex enough to stop someone with a chronoscope from checking again and again until any person is followed and their meeting is surveilled and their newly spoken plans are overheard. And there has been only one chronoscope in the world for decades... until Potter, his young helper Foster, and Foster's uncle Nimmo, figure out that they can easily make a better one for themselves using advances in technology that the original chronoscope makers didn't have access to. The question finally becomes: what happens when one of the three tinkerers releases details of how to make a home-brew chronoscope to the world? What happens in a world immediately after everyone discovers they could see their daughter that died in a house fire, like Potter and his wife's daughter, until you get to observe the day that Potter fell asleep and his negligence is what allowed the house to burn down with the daughter upstairs? What happens when everyone can snoop into everyone's bedroom? Listen to every conversation on Earth that shaped their life, whether it's on a personal level or a national level or a worldwide level? Follow anyone anywhere? Study the movements of anyone with whom they had a grudge? Learn the password to any computer system as it was being written, or the combination to and location of any personal safe, or the codes to launch any nuclear arsenal? In chaos and riots, The screeching machines, No rights and no wrongs, And no in-betweens Fall one by one The queen to her fool, Dos Dedos, Mis Amigos, Everything's cool.
"There are no random events". Because...the acts themselves follow unchanging, inferrable laws; or because our ability to infer all those laws are not subject to error or impossibility or incompleteness? The former assumes complete external determination: omnipresence; the latter complete, internal cognizability: omniscience. Why can't we predict the future? Because we don't posess the ability (the future doesn't depend on us); or because the future depends on us? Because our attempt to look at the future changes the future?
@@thac0twenty377 Is that the purpose of physics? Of science? The fundamental mission of scientists? To be able to predict the future just enough so we can interfere with it? Be blamed for it? Take responsibility for it? Who's better left in charge of the future? Politicians? Scientists? The Pope? You? From this point of view the Democratic impulse: the vote, can be seen as the impulse to share responsibility. The authoritarian or dictator's impulse is to have the courage/Hubris to take all responsibilities for the future on him/her self. Bad decisions, whether made by a collective or an individual are still bad. The ability to amend or "learn" and "seatbelt" the decision...who is better able to do that? The collective or the individual?
Seeing your future, and that moment of awareness inducing an inescapable change in your timeline, reminds me of how superposition is disturbed by measuring/observing it. It's impossible to measure without also minutely interacting with, and thus changing, the system. If your future is in permanent superposition, observing it directly, would collapse the superposition i to certainty and interact with it. Your future would now be different. Wouldnt the machine need to show her seeing a POSSIBLE future and then show her different choice? Or maybe the machine could only show that at the moment of future perturbation - locking us back in the present and undermining the whole predestination concept.
Both causation and space-time are intimately related to change, i.e. to events, ordered pairs of states of things. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to make sense of the concept of causation outside space-time. Also Causation is one possible form of event generation, but not the only one. State decay and spontaneous symmetry breaking are examples of event generation without causation.
Devs is a beautifully shot series with very interesting philosophical ideas. I have watched it several times. I don’t believe the universe is deterministic as quantum variation at the subatomic level cannot be deterministic. It feels like the future isn’t written yet. But it’s a very interesting idea for a series to pursue.
Great video. And yes, the show was at first hard, if not boring, to watch but has stuck with me profoundly. Have watched it 4 times since it came out. A slow burner but really superb!
Quantum measurements are one of the few potentially random kinds of activities available. That's theoretical randomness. But mathematical chaos derives from computationally unpredictable yet incrementally simple operations, like the hailstone sequence.
This series is the best depiction of a technological Singularity I've ever seen. I've long thought about an odd mixture of determinism and free will that this show kind of touches on. If all laws of physics are time-symmetrical--they can be run "forward" or "backward" in time equally--which I'd say they are, then what we consider the "present" moment (or what our brains have evolved to interpret as the present moment) is a constant back-and-forth negotiation of particle events from the Planck scale all the way up to the supergalactic. It _could_ be said that such a model is inherently deterministic, but only if you narrowly consider causality to be what our brains experience and only that--which it obviously is not since physical laws work everywhere whether or not we're there to experience them. A more global view of causality is a lot more...blurry.
You wouldn't need to model every particle in the universe. You only need to model the particles for these criteria : particles within the light-cone of the point of interest, particles in direct unobstructed line of temporal influence for the POI... So something right now 2 light years away cannot possibly have any effect on my model of 'now' but something that far away now could possibly have HAD an effect on stuff here now. So pruning would be a wickedly easy endeavour.
This reminds me of a book by Stephen Baxter I read a while ago (I think it was Vacuum Diagrams.) it’s a collection of short stories, but the overarching narrative is that they’re all near perfect predictions by an infinitely powerful black hole computer. But it’s the same concept, with enough data (even down to the quantum level) theoretically anything can be predicted.
Never watched the show, but this video makes me appreciate Pantheon. The American writer sees a machine that can simulate our world and wonders if we have free will, the Chinese writer wonders how we can make it for everyone.
Well… Quite honest… i think THIS was one of the best TV shows I’ve seen in a long long time. Like someone said so wisely before me, here 👆👇👉👈 in the comment section, Mr. Garland is a genius. Greetings from Germany everybody 👋 P.S. The Voiceover reminds me of the prof. from the channel COOL WORLDS …🤔
Most people let this show fly right over their heads; thus DEVS and many other shows have to wait until the world catches up with their worth (Gen Z may still have a problem understanding, which is a shame as that seems to be the generation this was written for).
@@adrianfox7972 Oh sure... its simulation would contain a version of itself and as the premise of the show poses that the simulated reality is 'real' in all respects, then we have to assume that the simulated machine is capable of simulation... Matrioska realities within realities, all the way down (and even our reality might be one of those simulations in the stack). (whether this could even be possible (can a computer run a virtual computer that is as capable as itself?) poses a very interesting idea)
If you don't believe in something outside of our universe intervening then everything will be like it was always going to be and choice is an illusion. So free will is something given by something external to our universe, so at key points during a lifetime we can make choices that are later judged.
ponder this if you will if you had a dream that by chance came true would it be precognition? and what would it say about what is possible or not if a random chance thing can possibly alter historic events
Free will is pointless without free memory, we don't have freedom of memory because we do not decide what we forget. It is pointless because we base our will on what we can remember.
XD ... ok it is like (paycheck 2003) ... Where physicist William Dekker worked on "special lens" and together with Michael Jennings created machine who can see possible future ...
Since I was 5 I always think about something DEVS about. Why people call things random when actually every event in the universe cause and consequences. It was nice to know I'm not only one.
@@Dilemina definitely. But, perhaps we need to reach the bottom for us to find the will to change for the better. Humanity was not meant to live with stagnation. We are better than that.
if i remember it correctly, there was a part where the young guy was trying to solve a problem and he could only do it if he used more than one variable and with that he proved the existence of the multiverse and got fired for it.
Devs is such a brilliant show epic I believe. It just went under the radar brilliant acting and characters dark themes about society corporate espionage. Cold war etc just a delight. Very Slept on show definitely a sci fi classic imo.
Meh - her throwing the gun is still in a sense a form of magic as it does not comply with the rules of determinism. So the idea of willpower overpowering the laws of the universe is kind of cheating.
I thought it was kinda interesting that this and the season of westworld that was airing at that same time both had a machine that was designed to predict the future and the outcomes of individuals.
but you have to know the future to not act on it or change it. thats the trick. i think thats why the simulation would end at this point because lily forced it into a paradox. if she knows the furute, she will change it, but to change it she has to know the furute that will never exist. clever! thats why i love the show :D
The constant "Lily you're so cool! you're so special and the bestest evAr!" was a bit too on the nose case of tellnotshow. Show is decent and visually gorgeus, but calling it the most profound sounds like Rick&Morty-like faux hype.
Agreed, I didn't see her do anything particularly good or different. Bit of a nothing character. Best thing she did was pretend to be crazy for one episode.
i thought the show was a "Nolan" i.e. extremely well done, beautiful to look at, the direction, cinematography, editing, music, all very intense and "important". the show takes itself extremely seriously, presents itself and cerebral and deep which it is to a point but not as much as it's presented as such. expected more from the ending. so... a "Nolan."
At the same time though, wouldn't devs have predicted that she would be shown the future and with that knowledge know that she would choose to act differently, thereby changing the future that was shown in the first place, which devs could then account for and show the new accurate future?
This machine would not just need unlimeted computing power, but also unlimited (and acurate) information. In order to become omniscient you would need to be allready omniscient.
If generalized entanglement is true, then acute enough observation of any subset, can be extrapolated to the whole set.
You'd still need a perfectly accurate procedural ruleset, in order to extrapolate out to arbitrary points using finite processing effort, though.
@@prophetzarquon1922 and that would recreate lost historical data because?
@@comentedonakeyboard Because if true, a minor subset of data plus accurate ruleset, can be extrapolated to fill in all the rest of the data.
Generalized entanglement, would mean that since all "particles" & energy everywhere, are expressions of a single monad iterating through all possible positions+states, an accurate enough peek at a slice of angel food cake could reveal all data necessary to extrapolate the mental state of an extinct dinosaur or the decay moment of a future proton.
Mind you, I'm _not_ saying I am convinced of generalized entanglement (or, if you like "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things"), but merely attempting to describe the theory's implications as I understand it.
@@prophetzarquon1922 i think you should stay sceptical. This theorie boils down to mystical waffling. Just to use a specific example: could we recreate german military archives from their ashes and figure out if the Schliefen Plan even existed ? (Context: the german army archives where bombed in 45 and ever since historians are doomed to use inacurate memoires to guess what was in there)
@@comentedonakeyboard Well yes, certainly I would advise extreme skepticism in any sort of real-world scenario; in the context of this show, though, it's sorta part & parcel of the plot's core premise: That with a complete enough ruleset, perfectly complete data is backwards & forwards recoverable.
The most profound, narratively sane story that nobody watched. Garland is a genius.
Yep. I’d put in my top 10 shows of all time.
🤣🤣🤣
I agree for the the main story and topics discussed in this video, but the whole "spy thriller" part of the story didn't work that well for me.
I watched the first 3 episodes then my roommate walked in. Started the series over. My hypothesis and grandeose theories, especially after a second watch of the beginning...were wrong and way off. I love what the series did but think it could have done more. But maybe that's just me wishing/thinking the machine got out of its imprisonment and affected the present....yet the show was much more about the human condition. Not mad at all. Watched the whole thing many times.
the best thing Garland has ever made and it continues to go unrecognized. I hope Devs gets its flowers one day
I would watch a reboot where different people reenact slightly different events with a very different ending.
There is no random event." Quantum fluctuations: hold my beer.
It's not random. Just because we don't know what causing it 'yet' that dosen't make it random or magic.
could be argued that these are not completely random although they appear to be. we just don't know what causes those fluctuations. perhaps einstein was right and god does not play dice after all.
@@mariantsanev6135 that's actually a fairly good definition of Magic in general
It doesn't even matter if it's random or not. We may someday be able to figure out why things fluctuate on the quantum scale. The core problem is that no one will eve be able to measure the minute because of the Uncertainty principle. Which means that any tiny deviation will quickly butterfly effect. Ergo: This will always remain in the realm of sci-fi.
@@mariantsanev6135 Bell's experiment tells the opposite. There are no hidden states that causes particle behavior.
I saw the lowercase video title and expected clumsy, newbie editing and commentary but damn was I proved wrong
Dear Bruh474 I am completely outraged by the low recommendation ratio that TH-cam gives to this creator. It's out right unfair. God knows how great he is and I hope TH-cam will bring him the success he deserves!!!
Defenders, they have failed a hundred thousand worlds....they always fail
I saw no lowercase lettering that was wrong do you people just make up stuff no matter how uneducated it makes sound to WAH WAH whine or what? There’s zip wrong with the title it’s grammatically correct but ok.
@@6Haunted-Days woah I didn't expect to see a reply from 3 MINUTES ago. The title was originally lowercase and something along the lines of "when a philosopher makes a tv show" hope that helps
@@6Haunted-Days Why are you so emotional?
Much is said about the philosophy behind Devs; I'd like to attract attention to the visuals. The way the past is rendered, the black and gold dust of time if you will, is haunting. Around the time this show came out I had a panic attack so severe, I was picked up by ambulance; I was awake but out of my body (my senses input didn't reach my brain) I was in the dark and thought that THIS was death and couldn't feel time. Oddly enough THOSE visuals came into play as I thought I was seeing the history of the world, like from Big Bang on in a "loop" and from a distance... saw myself and tried to tell the doctors I was dead at points... This attack (it was not a dream instruments proved I was awake, it was later classified as "de-realization") lasted about 4 hours but to me seemed like Billions of years and Devs visual technique (for lack of a better word) was there all the way... Here they talk of poetry but poetry is not always about beautiful feelings! I'm not sure how they decided to show images in this way from the machine but GOD it has a strong effect
Yep! And the sound design too! The combination of sound and visuals is perfect.
Bud, I'm truly sorry you had a panic attack so severe. One of the worst things in life I've ever experienced. Hope you get those resolved.
@@keithcourson7317Thanks for your kind words. I still get them, but nowhere on that level! What I SAW, however, forever changed how I see death. I used to think it was the great end, curtain down, neurons down no painno anything. Now... It makes no scientific sense but I'm scared.
had you seen Devs before you had this panic attack? do you think the show maybe influenced what you saw and how you saw it?
@@mavillejones5908Yes; for sure my state triggered things in my brain that were already there, hence me saying the visuals were powerful. BTW I am saying "panic attack", but the psychiatrist said it was de-realization (seeing oneself as from outside one self's body). I'm still not sure what to call it, but the things a brain can do! People moved me, stuck needles into me, I did not feel, hear or see them (but, again, I was not asleep); yet I could see the history of the galaxy in what felt like eternity (the "me" in it was just seconds). The visuals and time manipulations (long before and after me) seem, now, to have come from the show. They sure created powerful stuff.
Really great channel. Thank you for your work.
Thank you!
"What is he building in there?.....we have a right to know" - Tom Waits
I had to laugh when Garland was talking about not getting stuff wrong. He absolutely got it wrong the first time the characters did any single thing.
Yeah, the characters' actions really didn't follow from their circumstances; it felt very scripted.
Less like behavioral prediction & more like railroading.
Garland is full of himself. Popular acclaim and lots of money tend to do that.
Could you perhaps enlighten us with some examples of these 'any single things'?
I love that this popped up in my algo, i tried to get so many friends and family to watch this since it was released and still NOT ONE has yet 😢
I know I watched it on BBC2 ages ago, I think I was the only one shame.
Just call it a feed. Calling it your algorithm would have been bad enough.
@@monkeytimestamps4915 sure thing so sorry to iffend you 😂
This video got me to watch it, so, take heart
"...when Lockheed-Martin first made fighter jets" [Shows a group of P38 Lightnings]
Shhh.... Piston engines are a mysterious ancient technologies for these people that eat at drive-through restaurants.
At least it showed a Lockheed product
@@margraveofgadsden8997 You're a glass-half-full kind of person, I see. 😉
I LOVED this series. Seriously. The moment the charater of Forest explains that "The Universe is deterministic. It's godless, and neutral, and defined only by physical laws," I knew I had stumbled accross something very different from traditional Sci Fi. After I finished watching it, I immediately rewatched it. I thought about this show every day for a year. Astonishing.
spot on... I still think about it almost daily even now... amazing work, both in writing, looks and the many on-screen subtle nods to the many-worlds theory.
My biggest gripe against Garland is that he has interesting pemises that he fails to respect. Have an AI movie that only works because Asimov is completely ignored... Have a Civil War movie that never explores or explains the very basis of the conflict.. Devs concept only works if you are starting with a complete set of input which even if you could have it - would be altered by whatever mechanism you used to obtain it - the observer invariably impacts the observed. For me Devs only worked to the point where if the world was in actuality a simulation - you might be able to, for lack of a better term, hack into it's code and do what they were able to do. Which is not what he did. He is a competent filmmaker who recruits very talented cast and crew - I just wish he'd work more closely with more talented genre writers to fully realize and utilize those interesting concepts he has.
It would've been interesting if Ex Machina did incorporate Asimov's laws, yet the AI progresses to a point to determine those laws obselete and adopt a freewill akin to humans.
Garland is the final boss of cinematic pseudo intellectualism.
I don't understand your criticism here. Seems like the show wrapped up concluding that uncertainty is intrinsic to reality. 100% input is impossible and irrelevant. Even if we could hack a 'simulation' (as you put it). Even that reality wouldn't be a deterministic.one. It's non-determinism all the way down.
But Asimov laws are not inherent to AI, sure they should be incorporated in any inteligent design to protect us, but nothing will stop a creator from ignoring them
@@miguelangelcote9168 Very true - but they SHOULD be - if someone did as you say - they would willfully ignoring common sense. It would be like building a car that 200 mph but intentionally without any safety equipment. ie - not the smartest thing in the world. Especially given all the cautionary tales that already exist that warn of such stupidity.
A chaotic system and a random system are not the same thing. Perhaps we indeed live in a chaotic system that appears random on the quantum level because we still haven't peeled off enough layers to understand it.
Choice is free, but still predetermined might be the end conclusion. Some will probably go as far as calling it "Providence".
Maybe this is on of a billion trillion simulations running on the machine, started by god. (chaotic)
But if it knew beforehand (providence / foreknowledge), then this entire excercise would be unneeded and wasteful. Unless it is an evil entity, being bored and just enjoys watching us.
The question is what is chaos? We see it as something not going according to what we think should be something totally random, an effect without a cause which doesn't exist in nature, chaos is nothing but our inability to see a cause behind action.
Exactly. "Uncertainty" is just 'we don't have a complete formula to determine, yet.'
@@DustinDonald-cz9ot One of the core problems, is that no one will eve be able to measure the minute because of the Uncertainty principle. Which means that any tiny deviation will quickly butterfly effect. Ergo: This will always remain in the realm of sci-fi even if we are able to get a unified theory. Measuring the position of every atom in a brain, and their exact energy states, will always be out of reach. And that's just the start of the problems.
Clever to coin it with an old-fashioned religious term. There are a lot of societies, like Latin American Catholics, who believe much of the world is predetermined -up to Fate, but exceptions, "miracles" are possible, from praying to the Virgin Mary in particular, and Jesus of course (but He is more judgmental!) It is only through divine intercession that cause-and-effect can be circumvented. This attitude colors every activity.
One very important thing you omitted in this breakdown is that the machine only gives clear predictions/visualizations when they switch to using the Everett (many worlds) interpretation of quantum mechanics rather than the Copenhagen interpretation which means that versions of the characters can end up in different independant places in the wavefunction of the universe so what the machine ends up predicting is still only what is most LIKELY to happen.
Ive come across several newer media creators who have been making just crazy good work not just regurgitated garbage, i think the new wave/age of artist is beginning. Awesome awesome
The science in this show is SOOOO loosey goosey. This is basically fantasy
Devs is a great example of why streaming/series (for the most part) is a superior form of storytelling than theatrical cinema. Each has their place… but you can simply explore more in 8-12hours than in 2. No way around that.
Well except for that most of these streaming series are total junk and 10 of those 12 hours are ugly stupid filler bullshit.
For example the entire dumb VR headset add-in bullshit in 3 body problem
I would say streaming is superior for morons who enjoy just staring at dumb shit on a screen.
Movies have been all trash for over 10 years
DEVS is good but the story can definitely be told in 2 hours.
Majority of streaming shows, shows in general really are padded to fill time.
For most shows you’ll have entire episodes of fluff only for something poignant to happen in the last 5 minutes. And it’s mainly done to make you feel like you didn’t just waste 45 minutes of so watching nothing happen.
In the coin flip scene he used, she explained the machine in what a couple minutes?
And the scenes where people choose to accept the prediction like the kid on the bridge or change it like the woman tossing the gun are relatively short and can be trimmed down even shorter.
But would a point made quickly have staying power to a species evolved to attach significance to trauma (or a particularly giddy moment)?
"No man steps into the same river twice because the river is not the same and neither is the man "
That my friends is very profound. Thank you for the upload!
I call it quasy philo-science. Considering blood runs - flows - through our veins, carring all sorts of particles, who is he to call one "A man", "Same man", "Single man" after a single heartbeat?
So, basically it is nonsense only working in the realm of linguistics. Animal knows where to get their drink from.
Level Two, after this short vid of yours, is to revel in the number of times we saw overlays of several possible outcomes all being shown during the same scene (the pinnacle of which, for me, is when we see, in the final standoff, Lily both holding the gun and not holding the gun... sublime!
Very good recap, including explanation, keeping it short and no extraneous & needless stuff. Thumbs up.
I watched the entire series and it is SO UNDERRATED its criminal!
When they show the potential power of the machine the first time, you can not help but become emotional.
I forgot how amazing this series was. Would love to watch it a second time! And what a fantastic synopsis! Thanks you.
devs was great. it's been so long since i watched a series i enjoied. thank you
So basically, the future is set. Unless you can see the future. Observation changes the outcome
It always has.
Yea as the most intelligent and able to grasp this in the world claim….there IS NO FREEWILL. I happen to agree. They’ve proven that with humans in how we our nervous systems decides and brain every supposedly choose to do anything …so……
But..if it's a causal universe then the future is set. The observation is set. The outcome is set.
The future can never be set for it has not happened, only the past is set.
@@DustinDonald-cz9otthe future is set, that’s what sucks about this closed system…
Wth how did I miss this movie. He is now my second fav director after Denis.
I loved the show, but the speech at 3:16 in your video always bothered me because what would the shows response been if she said radioactive decay? It's 2024 and we still can't answer if particle decay is fundamentally random or just complex in a way we don't understand.
It's pretty firmly established that "quantum uncertainty" is due to unobserved data, rather than actual nondeterminism; Schrödinger _tried_ to make it obvious, but media loves mystery, so the subject tends to get mysticized rather than explained with rigorous accuracy.
@@prophetzarquon1922 Huh? Schrödinger tried to make it obvious that it feels nonsensical, but feels ain't facts. What is the proposed experiment or mechanism or observation that the randomness of nuclear decay could be perfectly predicted by some hidden variable and that we could possibly observe that hidden variable?
What are their solutions to overcoming Bell's theorem ?
@@harvellt Bell's theorem doesn't actually require that a thing is entirely unknowable, it is merely unknowable from the limited perspective of an interacting observer.
A similar phenomena, happened with "dark matter": Media coverage mysticized it so much, that even people working in related fields were misled into thinking the phenomena was more exotic than is strictly defined within the theory.
@@prophetzarquon1922
If it is "firmly established" the underlying theory that particle decay is deterministic but we lack tools or knowledge then you should be able to point to any Quantum Mechanics textbook and it should state that evidence.
To me it doesn't seem like there is any firm consensus let alone "firm establishment" in the physics community about the determinism of particle decay or not.
I would love to learn something if you could point to a textbook highlighting why it is more likely than not there is a bunch of unobservable data that predicts nuclear decay in a deterministic, individual event way.
@@harvellt Scientific textbooks aren't in the habit of saying that a thing is definitely fact; that's why I said "pretty firmly". Take a closer look at the most well-researched of those textbooks, & you'll see that the theories & test data they cite, largely allow for determinism as a compatible theory.
If you're looking for a proof of non-determinism, you'll be looking forever; determinism isn't readily provable either, but the number & weight of assumptions is lower.
Every confirmed finding to date, can be accommodated within a deterministic theory of incomplete data. The inverse is not true.
Chronovisor, Loki TV series, Tenet
The story is very much like Isaac Asimov's "The Dead Past", but in that story the past can be seen using a machine (a 'chronoscope', a noisy machine using old tech developed decades previously) that is supposed to be able to use some property of our universe (let's say: the unlikely but inevitable chance of a neutrino interacting with any other molecule) to see any time in the past.
It turns out it's restricted by the position of Earth / Solar System / Galaxy compared to where it was when the event happened. You can't break the laws of physics, you can't clear up the noise after a point. Thanks to everything moving literally everywhere, stuff gets less defined after a few months, fuzzier after a few decades, and nothing is actually visible after a little more than a century after it happened - which means that any and all 'results' released to the press by the government's Department of Chronoscopy about ancient civilizations and cave paintings and dinosaurs were all invented. All fabricated. All lies. It's not a machine to view anything anywhere in the Dead Past.
It can be used to view anything anywhere in the Recent Past. No wall is thick enough, no bunker deep enough, no evasive path is complex enough to stop someone at the chronoscope from checking until a recent historical leader is followed and their meeting is observed and their historic plans are heard.
And when does the Recent Past begin? Snap your fingers. Before the motion is complete, the sound is already in the past. The Recent Past is also Now. No wall is thick enough, no bunker deep enough, no evasive path is complex enough to stop someone with a chronoscope from checking again and again until any person is followed and their meeting is surveilled and their newly spoken plans are overheard. And there has been only one chronoscope in the world for decades... until Potter, his young helper Foster, and Foster's uncle Nimmo, figure out that they can easily make a better one for themselves using advances in technology that the original chronoscope makers didn't have access to.
The question finally becomes: what happens when one of the three tinkerers releases details of how to make a home-brew chronoscope to the world? What happens in a world immediately after everyone discovers they could see their daughter that died in a house fire, like Potter and his wife's daughter, until you get to observe the day that Potter fell asleep and his negligence is what allowed the house to burn down with the daughter upstairs? What happens when everyone can snoop into everyone's bedroom? Listen to every conversation on Earth that shaped their life, whether it's on a personal level or a national level or a worldwide level? Follow anyone anywhere? Study the movements of anyone with whom they had a grudge? Learn the password to any computer system as it was being written, or the combination to and location of any personal safe, or the codes to launch any nuclear arsenal?
In chaos and riots,
The screeching machines,
No rights and no wrongs,
And no in-betweens
Fall one by one
The queen to her fool,
Dos Dedos, Mis Amigos,
Everything's cool.
Fantastic video for a fantastic underrated series!
I watched DEVS when I was studying philosophy at uni, it was, and still is, mind blowing. One of the most brilliant TV shows ever.
You should study physics, then not so many things would be "mind blowing" to you anymore ;)
"There are no random events". Because...the acts themselves follow unchanging, inferrable laws; or because our ability to infer all those laws are not subject to error or impossibility or incompleteness?
The former assumes complete external determination: omnipresence; the latter complete, internal cognizability: omniscience.
Why can't we predict the future? Because we don't posess the ability (the future doesn't depend on us); or because the future depends on us? Because our attempt to look at the future changes the future?
that's most interesting comment I've read in years man
@@thac0twenty377 Is that the purpose of physics? Of science? The fundamental mission of scientists? To be able to predict the future just enough so we can interfere with it? Be blamed for it? Take responsibility for it?
Who's better left in charge of the future? Politicians? Scientists? The Pope? You?
From this point of view the Democratic impulse: the vote, can be seen as the impulse to share responsibility. The authoritarian or dictator's impulse is to have the courage/Hubris to take all responsibilities for the future on him/her self.
Bad decisions, whether made by a collective or an individual are still bad. The ability to amend or "learn" and "seatbelt" the decision...who is better able to do that? The collective or the individual?
@kallianpublico7517 thst was a compliment. the tone feels a bit on the aggreuve side there. I'd say me. don't worry it'll all work out
Seeing your future, and that moment of awareness inducing an inescapable change in your timeline, reminds me of how superposition is disturbed by measuring/observing it. It's impossible to measure without also minutely interacting with, and thus changing, the system. If your future is in permanent superposition, observing it directly, would collapse the superposition i to certainty and interact with it. Your future would now be different.
Wouldnt the machine need to show her seeing a POSSIBLE future and then show her different choice? Or maybe the machine could only show that at the moment of future perturbation - locking us back in the present and undermining the whole predestination concept.
Wow, what a great recap!
You jumped literally (for me) from zero to the very top of recap-creators.
Both causation and space-time are intimately related to change, i.e. to events, ordered pairs of states of things. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to make sense of the concept of causation outside space-time. Also Causation is one possible form of event generation, but not the only one. State decay and spontaneous symmetry breaking are examples of event generation without causation.
I watched this obsessively. But when this popped up in my feed today, I realized I forgot about wvery bit of this until now. What a blind spot.
The computational power is a breeze in comparison to accurately detecting the states of everything in the world, forget the universe.
Now I understand where I knew the cast of Civil War from. It's Garland's travelling acting troupe.
Devs is a beautifully shot series with very interesting philosophical ideas. I have watched it several times.
I don’t believe the universe is deterministic as quantum variation at the subatomic level cannot be deterministic. It feels like the future isn’t written yet. But it’s a very interesting idea for a series to pursue.
Great video. And yes, the show was at first hard, if not boring, to watch but has stuck with me profoundly. Have watched it 4 times since it came out. A slow burner but really superb!
One of the best shows ive ever seen, seen it years ago, stil think about it
I love shows/movies that make you think and this is a great one. It is slower but I didn’t care. Watched it three times and could watch again.
Quantum measurements are one of the few potentially random kinds of activities available.
That's theoretical randomness. But mathematical chaos derives from computationally unpredictable yet incrementally simple operations, like the hailstone sequence.
No fate.
But what we make for ourselves.
Sarah Connor lol
Automatically subscribed. Thank you for speaking about this show. One of my all-time favorites.
This series is the best depiction of a technological Singularity I've ever seen. I've long thought about an odd mixture of determinism and free will that this show kind of touches on. If all laws of physics are time-symmetrical--they can be run "forward" or "backward" in time equally--which I'd say they are, then what we consider the "present" moment (or what our brains have evolved to interpret as the present moment) is a constant back-and-forth negotiation of particle events from the Planck scale all the way up to the supergalactic. It _could_ be said that such a model is inherently deterministic, but only if you narrowly consider causality to be what our brains experience and only that--which it obviously is not since physical laws work everywhere whether or not we're there to experience them. A more global view of causality is a lot more...blurry.
Name a random event: Beta decay.
You wouldn't need to model every particle in the universe. You only need to model the particles for these criteria :
particles within the light-cone of the point of interest, particles in direct unobstructed line of temporal influence for the POI...
So something right now 2 light years away cannot possibly have any effect on my model of 'now' but something that far away now could possibly have HAD an effect on stuff here now.
So pruning would be a wickedly easy endeavour.
This reminds me of a book by Stephen Baxter I read a while ago (I think it was Vacuum Diagrams.) it’s a collection of short stories, but the overarching narrative is that they’re all near perfect predictions by an infinitely powerful black hole computer. But it’s the same concept, with enough data (even down to the quantum level) theoretically anything can be predicted.
Never watched the show, but this video makes me appreciate Pantheon. The American writer sees a machine that can simulate our world and wonders if we have free will, the Chinese writer wonders how we can make it for everyone.
Well…
Quite honest… i think THIS was one of the best TV shows I’ve seen in a long long time.
Like someone said so wisely before me, here 👆👇👉👈 in the comment section, Mr. Garland is a genius.
Greetings from Germany everybody 👋
P.S.
The Voiceover reminds me of the prof. from the channel COOL WORLDS …🤔
Most people let this show fly right over their heads; thus DEVS and many other shows have to wait until the world catches up with their worth (Gen Z may still have a problem understanding, which is a shame as that seems to be the generation this was written for).
Surely the machine would know that they were going to use the machine to predict the future and then crash lol
(psst... the 'machine' isn't sentient... it's just a computer.)
@@markzambelli wrong choice of words "Surely the machine have processed that they use the machine in its simulation"
@@adrianfox7972 Oh sure... its simulation would contain a version of itself and as the premise of the show poses that the simulated reality is 'real' in all respects, then we have to assume that the simulated machine is capable of simulation... Matrioska realities within realities, all the way down (and even our reality might be one of those simulations in the stack).
(whether this could even be possible (can a computer run a virtual computer that is as capable as itself?) poses a very interesting idea)
Guy makes one great movie and he’s set to keep making stuff for next 10 years.
If you don't believe in something outside of our universe intervening then everything will be like it was always going to be and choice is an illusion. So free will is something given by something external to our universe, so at key points during a lifetime we can make choices that are later judged.
ponder this if you will
if you had a dream that by chance came true would it be precognition?
and what would it say about what is possible or not if a random chance thing can possibly alter historic events
Definitely watching this. Thanks!
Ron Swanson has a complicated relationship with computers lol
fooking love alex garland how i miss this ?
I am predictably less compelled by this than I am by cleaning my room.
Free will is pointless without free memory, we don't have freedom of memory because we do not decide what we forget. It is pointless because we base our will on what we can remember.
XD ... ok it is like (paycheck 2003) ... Where physicist William Dekker worked on "special lens" and together with Michael Jennings created machine who can see possible future ...
Since I was 5 I always think about something DEVS about. Why people call things random when actually every event in the universe cause and consequences. It was nice to know I'm not only one.
Best TV series of this century
Humanities greatest failure will be relying on the unreliable to do our thinking for us.
Its been like this, and will continue.
@@Dilemina definitely. But, perhaps we need to reach the bottom for us to find the will to change for the better. Humanity was not meant to live with stagnation. We are better than that.
For one who believes that you cannot distinguish between fate and free will, this is a great concept
if i remember it correctly, there was a part where the young guy was trying to solve a problem and he could only do it if he used more than one variable and with that he proved the existence of the multiverse and got fired for it.
"There is only one Avatar at a time." -- Scott Adams.
What’s the song at 2:23?
I really wish TH-camrs would list the music they use.
That was great thanks, i loved devs I will watch it again soon as a result of this
Devs is such a brilliant show epic I believe. It just went under the radar brilliant acting and characters dark themes about society corporate espionage. Cold war etc just a delight.
Very Slept on show definitely a sci fi classic imo.
I saw the first episode and I looks interesting but I couldn’t continue
you're depriving yourself of the best sci-fi story ever put to film
Meh - her throwing the gun is still in a sense a form of magic as it does not comply with the rules of determinism.
So the idea of willpower overpowering the laws of the universe is kind of cheating.
as if the pc could not think of that, and a near infinite amount of other possibilities 😂😂
PURCHASED AND NOW I WILL WATCH IT THIS WEEK. A GREAT FOLLOWUP TO EX MACHINA
we already have the abilty to predict the future for some seconds,can´t remember how much exactly.
This philosophical exercise may have just answered the variance in outcome of the double slit photon experiment being observed and unobserved.
I thought it was kinda interesting that this and the season of westworld that was airing at that same time both had a machine that was designed to predict the future and the outcomes of individuals.
I hadn't heard of this, I have to watch it now!
I’m still mad about this show getting cancelled.
Alex garland is my favorite
4:29 this will be possible one day. For better or for worse.
but you have to know the future to not act on it or change it. thats the trick. i think thats why the simulation would end at this point because lily forced it into a paradox. if she knows the furute, she will change it, but to change it she has to know the furute that will never exist. clever! thats why i love the show :D
That's why we have free will. Our lack of omniscience.
Reminds me of the Philp K. Dick story The Minority Report.
The constant "Lily you're so cool! you're so special and the bestest evAr!" was a bit too on the nose case of tellnotshow.
Show is decent and visually gorgeus, but calling it the most profound sounds like Rick&Morty-like faux hype.
Agreed, I didn't see her do anything particularly good or different. Bit of a nothing character. Best thing she did was pretend to be crazy for one episode.
Highly recommend this show.
i thought the show was a "Nolan" i.e. extremely well done, beautiful to look at, the direction, cinematography, editing, music, all very intense and "important". the show takes itself extremely seriously, presents itself and cerebral and deep which it is to a point but not as much as it's presented as such. expected more from the ending. so... a "Nolan."
Sounds cool. It reminds me of the Arrival.
Alex Garland is awesome
Oh, they built Laplace's demon. That is a neat idea, I've only seen that concept used in literature before.
No disrespect, I had to cut the video off a minute in, because now I'm intrigued and must watch the show first 😂.
At the same time though, wouldn't devs have predicted that she would be shown the future and with that knowledge know that she would choose to act differently, thereby changing the future that was shown in the first place, which devs could then account for and show the new accurate future?
Industrial popular culture is essentially one long panic attack ... with moments.
Chaos science? Small variances can cause big effects down the line, unseen and unpredictable.
Now I must see this show!
Thank you for not wasting my time on this show.
This would be Hossenfelder's favourite show
Thanks for lord and youtube got introducing me about you .
Nice Seiko SKX
A superb show....excellent video
A computer would have to have "Humans" or even AI, inut "all" info...which we will never know.
You only have to think of one thing. Tornadoes.