My admiration for Sabine is almost boundless. So many “I don’t knows” which is fine in a Universe with so many things we can conceive that are determinable. There’s no shortage of answerable questions!
Mathematician here 😊. I feel like the reason many lay people think they have discovered grand theories is because of the Dunning-Kruger effect. They just aren’t aware of how little they know. After getting my degree in higher math, I feel much tinier and much dumber. I have been humbled by just how much knowledge there is out there. Also, Sabine is my hero. I’m studying physics now because of her ❤
Sabine is my favorite living physicist. She defines pragmatism and in her ideas, she is always succinct. I imagine her to be more honest, unbiased and humble than most people, though I have never known her. Such qualities always seem to help make any person more believable.
Sabine no es una escéptica, es demasiado razonable para eso, el escéptico suele ser imbécil, esta mujer es una buscadora de la verdad, que es otra cosa Sabine is not a skeptic, she is too reasonable for that, the skeptic is usually an idiot, this woman is a seeker of truth, which is something else
@@jorgeratin3383 "We cannot see if Schrodinger's equation contains frogs, musical composers or morality. So we cannot say whether a God is needed or not needed. Leaving to the individual the choice of opinion for or against a God." Richard Feynman 1964 Cornell series of 9 lectures
@@nancygerette reminds me of the Shermer/Theroux discussion on how social feedback loops impact the individual in the context of cult followers and their leaders. Also reminds me of the evolution of the Peterson persona from a seeker to a knower. It also makes me wonder if the observation of such dynamics motivated parts of the theology behind warning of elevating a material thing to the status of an idol and subsequently worshipping it. I suppose the underlying takeaway is that individual statements must either be independently verified, irrespective of context, or accepted as belief rather than knowledge.
I've never listened to her. Now, she's up there with Robert Sapolsky as far as dispensing truth goes. It's so frustrating not being a genius. We NEED your minds. 😮❤
I love Sabine! The most sensible physicist who can communicate rationally, logically and in a manner that is comprehensible to all. And she covers so many fields outside physics too. What a gem!
You forgot to mention that Sabine's channel is one of the most brilliant communicators on the planet. By listening to her broadcasts I find myself actually able to understand more than I ever imagined being able to. Different ideas like the block universe make so much more sense now. And the whole thing about time. My mind has been expanded in ways I never thought was possible.
This was absolutely fantastic. I’ll be listening to it again and mulling the ideas for a long time. I’m definitely going to buy her book, and I just subscribed to her TH-cam channel. Thank you so very much for introducing me to this wonderful person!
This was fascinating. As a fan of both, I think Michael did an amazing job with the questions and topics he picked here for Sabine, outside of the purely scientific zone.
I follow Dr. Hossenfelder's vlog & find it quite educational at a level aimed at the level of we curious lay types & get a kick from her personable humour. Thank Sabine on my behalf, please.
Many good questions well answered. I'm currently reading her "Existential Physics" and find it refreshing. Her instrumentalist perspective is most refreshing (see Dewey's instrumentalism). I like her use of "ascientific". Many ascientific notions are notions that are claimed to be derivative from science but are really just confusions of metaphysics with science. She makes her own meanings. She is responsible for her life.
Dr. Hossenfelder is a true hero. In Germany we have a nice verb that became uncommen, it is called "verbrämt", If something is "wissenschaftlich verbrämt" this means something is scientifically dressed up. And so Dr. Hossenfelder's telling is true that many scientist hide behind a wall of mathematics, at least the ones that know mathematics, the other ones hide behind a wall of technical terms like social scientists, political scientists and educators. All these people are a real pain in the a..! This is why we need strong persons as Dr. Hossenfelder, who may not have many friends in the scientific community especially not under physicists, but the people that like her do like her very intensely! Keep on! Kind regards from Germany!
The reason her viewpoint is a very tiny minority viewpoint among the Physics Community is because the Observer Affect has been verified and repeated tens of thousands of times over the last 100 years !. Quantum Mechanics is the most succesful scientific theory of all time. Her attempts to debunk Quantrum Mechanics and Non-Locality through Super-Determinism makes 99 % of all Physicists laugh.
One thing that I have come up with in the shower, many times, and I believe it to be true is, "I think I'm hungry...." That's my great contribution to the theory of everything.
This lady, Sabine Hossenfelder is a genius for sure and I love the way she can be critical of mainstream mathematical physics and think out of the box at the same time.
I loved this conversation the first time and am watching it again. Full disclosure. I am a committed Catholic. The questions discussed here are essential to the struggle to understand the world. I have been frustrated with many other discussions which treat a long list of untestable ideas as "theoretically and potentially true". A further frustration is that many scientists exploit their expertise with technical jargon and math unreachable to the average person, implying that big questions are "too big" for "regular folk down there." Shermer's questions are wonderful, and Sabine's answers and explanations are clear. I love her agnostic honesty...where I once lived. I often feel like many scientists prefer to live above the heavens where the smart people go in order to avoid the poor, silly people down below...creating intellectually silly theories of almost anything...which is preferable to even considering the existence of a mind/being/creator outside of the material world. Thanks very much!
@@david203 Sure. I could jave left that out and still made my point. I find it interesting, though, that you and Mr. Ling cue in on this one word. That says as much about you as it does about me. Really! Enough said!!
Sabina is an amazing lady! In all of the academic professions from philosophy to physics including engineering, economics, finance, business and politics, people try to baffle you with bullshit. At times, it can be a real challenge to separate the facts from the fiction and to recognize the swindlers and con artists. I think at some point all of us have been fooled by someone myself included.
@@NeedsEvidence Yes, I realized that I spelled Sabine's name with and "a" at the end instead of an "e". It was an honest mistake, but thanks for pointing this out.
@@Danny_6Handford Don't worry. But what bugs me is that virtually all English-native hosts interviewing Dr Hossenfelder on their podcasts pronounce her first name wrong, like it was as difficult as rocket science.
@@NeedsEvidence There are many things that bug me in this world, but spelling or pronouncing someone’s name wrong is not one of them, unless it is done intentionally to criticize the person or to disrespect the person. It may not be rocket science, but with all of the world’s languages and dialects that go with them and even if we use some of the amazing technologies that have been developed like “Google Translate”, it is still possible to pronounce or spell words wrong. What is really amazing to me and did not see coming in my lifetime is the technology now available to virtually communicate to just about anyone anywhere in the world. As long as we can learn how to filter out the nonsense, the scams and the fake news, we should be able to increase trust amount each other.
On female sensitivity: A friend sent me a video clip he’d taken on the train in Germany. Two women were discussing the problems they had being sensitive to the electromagnetic fields in their homes. They suffered terribly from them attributing all sorts of petty ailments to their sensitivity. My friend pointed out that they were all travelling on an electric train and were in a much more intense electromagnetic field than you find in any normal home.
An example if the problem being all in their heads. A made up problem. If you canconvince a oerson he she has braincancer. That person can conjur up a terrible headache just with their imagination.
Not all electromagnetic fields are the same. They vary in direction, frequency, amplitude, orientation (polarization), and in the distributions of all these quantities in space and time. So you can't compare EM fields in two places unless you know exactly what quantities you are comparing.
@@asystole_ As someone else pointed out, it was discussed in the video. But beyond that, I'd like to note that some types of stupidity are - broadly - gendered. Like any male/female comparison, there's a bit of overlap. So like, you can say "men are stronger than women". There's some overlap, the strongest women are stronger than many men, but broadly, the statement is true. Empathetic stupidity is more of a woman thing. So like astrology, crystals, the idea of different types of alcohol making you behave differently (I'm fine on vodka, but guuurl, on tequila, watch out!). Things that involve being "in tune" or "in touch" with the environment they're in. For men, the stupidity is usually more self-promotional. Attempting physical stunts beyond their capability, being entirely certain of the soundness of their thinking (like the example Michael gives of overwhelmingly men sending him crackpot theories), etc. When you hear the "women don't want to date nice guys", that's an extension of that kind of stupid. It's not some weird tactic to shame women into dating them, they think that they're amazing and cannot comprehend why they're not inundated with attention. Then they do a terrible job of figuring out what it is about them that keeps them from getting that attention because they're so subconsciously convinced of their own above average worth. There's probably a better term for it, or more concise examples, but basically, whereas women's crazy ideas tend to be focused on connectedness, men's crazy ideas tend to be focused on self-superiority. And it's probably a scale, not scope thing. Like most of us have these gendered traits, just not maybe to the "I've proven Einstein wrong because I'm a genius!" level.
I love how she looks at, and describes -- equations and mathematics. I think it helps that she came at Physics from Mathematics, instead of Mathematics from Physics, where it is basically a toolbox. Math is a language we use to describe relationships between things in the universe. It allows abstractions of abstractions of abstractions. Which can be really useful. But it's still a language. And language isn't the things it describes. I majored in Atmospheric Science, and I did NOT go at it from mathematics... I kind of sucked at mathematics after Algebra 2, though I aced Geometry. I did NOT ace Analytic geometry, or anything after it through Diff Eq. Lotta "C"'s and sometimes only the second time I took the courses. However, I found it eye-opening how we came up with equations to describe fluid dynamics, and it was obvious to me that we were just describing things as best we understand them with the language of mathematics. So does "math" exist? Kind of depends on what we mean by existence. It exists in our heads and on paper. It can be passed along. In that sense it exists. But when we get into discussions like this, you get into Sabine's talk of the past and future and present all exist, and we "invented" this language, so the language exists, so it exists in all of the universe, therefore it is a structure that just exists in the universe ... but I think we're getting into religion here, frankly. I do NOT think we can copy consciousness without literally biologically reproducing ourselves. I think ....and I know this is ascientific ... that consciousness is an integral part of the universe and has some fundamental structure we haven't found the source of yet. If we ever do.
Free will and wine drinking. Obviously we can and do learn from past mistakes. So tomorrow Sabina can drink less wine than today. But assuming determinism, she only will drink less wine tomorrow than today if she is already on a determined path that will lead to that outcome. Could she have done otherwise? Yes but she would have had to have been on a different determined path stretching back to the initial conditions of the universe to have done so. That is very straightforward and shows that what we ordinarily think of as free will and I dare say, what Michael Shermer has in mind, is not compatible with determinism.
At 51:24, Michael talks about being agnostic vs. atheist, which is actually two questions. Gnostic/Agnostic refers to what someone knows and theism/atheism refers to what someone believes or has a lack of belief of. If you do not know if a god exists, then you are agnostic. You can still be a theist or an atheist either way. I don’t know for sure what Michael or Sabine believe, but if I was to guess, I would think neither are convinced a god exists, or in other words, they lack the belief in a god or gods. This would make both of them agnostic atheists. Michael did mention hard atheist, however, and this often is interpreted as a strong conviction or belief that no god exists. This belief is often backed up with reasons (knowledge) to support the lack of belief. So in this case you might say they are a gnostic atheist. Honestly, though, if we do not have conclusive evidence, either way, does’t that mean we are all agnostic and its just a matter of degree?
great conversation. Sabine is well spoken, concise, and bold. at 49:02 Sabine goes on to state that a belief in God and belief in the Multiverse as derived from mathematics are both religious beliefs and unnecessary to describe what we observe.
I don't know. I'm the MOST comfortable with "we don't know". It is, in fact, the most honest point of view. And I agree with Sabine .... we will probably never know. I, in fact, believe that we can't ... due to the nature of infinity.
We know a little bit more about Nature as time goes by, because science is designed to correct itself. But progress in science has never been linear with time: sometimes progress happens in big leaps, sometimes in tiny incremental steps. Not being able to know everything doesn't stop us from learning more about lots of things.
I forgot where I read this but decades ago someone once said "biological systems are islands of negative entropy". So just as you can expend energy to store some of the energy in a clock's mainspring, biological systems can expend energy to do error detection then error correction (explains why Michael's 6-yo can heal faster than Michael)
It isn't clear what point you are making by presenting these particular facts. Neither of the speakers in this video denied the truth of the laws of thermodynamics.
@@david203 I was talking about the physicists' view of entropy always heading in one direction (from order to chaos). But biological systems get around this by using energy to implement negative entropy to implement repair. Their ultimate trick is to use an insane amount of energy to create a new copy via sexual reproduction.
I have an average level of science education (primary and secondary) which is to include a basic physics class. My dad was a bio-chemist, and I suppose I have his sensiblities--though not his brains. So, I have found personalities like Sagan, Dawkins, Tyson, and Hossenfelder to be so interesting, even as I have a difficult time following some of the concepts they discuss. It's comforting to know there are people who are intelligent and deeply interested in finding out what is true, rather than making up woo woo (the bible, the koran, or Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, big tent preachers....or pull just about any number of names out of a hat filled with woo woo). Our world is filled with woo woo. It seems to have been the default setting for as long as we've had language. Science is hard. Woo woo is easy--and more profitable.
It does astonish me how easily and often today the idea of free will is relinquished, given the huge logical problem with denying it. For if we are seriously saying that all our thoughts are in the long run determined by the mindless forces and particles of the material universe, such that we could not possibly have thought differently, how can we know any of our thoughts to be true or false - including our denial of free will? As has been said, the problem with determinism is that if it is true we can never know it to be true since our thoughts are determined, including determinism. It is a self-refuting position. Free will is essential not only to moral responsibility but to reason, logic and therefore science. What Sabine and Michael are saying ultimately is that we know we don't have free will, but let's all pretend for the sake of our mental and social health that we do - which scarcely seems a rational approach.
1:12:00 there is a little man in my head who suggests to me what i should do, and he lays awake at night wondering if there is a little man inside _his_ head telling _him_ what to do. how can you have free will if you can't listen to your thought and then decide if it's a good or a bad thought? we don't even know hos _will_ works, let alone free will. on god's free will: no one can "give you" free will. if there is a god, then i'm his creation and i live in his creation, that's god's will not mine, let me_decide_ to live here, let me _design_ my own universe, _then_ i have free will. how can i have free will when there are commandments? god makes laws, provides you will a painful alternative to obeying those laws, then says "you chose freely" - i can only swear at him. free will is just a "gotcha" that allows you to be sadistic and burn someone alive while claiming to be moral, if we have no choices in life we are not culpable, religists HATE that, they want an excuse for hell so they have an excuse for heaven.
Not sure how Michael struggles so hard to imagine death, it's exactly the same as all the time before birth, complete non-existence. For me it's was a literally unremarkable place, for infinite time into the past. Nothing to be afraid of.
Isn't it so mind blowing that we didn't exist for an infintity of time before we are born and then sudenly we emerge and exist for a relatively very breif amount of time and then we die and we (probably) never exist again for infinity! I think that is so weird, even though it is normal.
@@coreywiley3981 The same thing is true of any individual banana, or any individual blade of grass. How is that weird? Are you astonished at the mashed potatoes on your plate, and how it didn't exist for billions of years and after you eat it it will cease to exist for the rest of eternity? Myself, I've gotten used to this. It does not seem weird.
I think a lot of technical/academic publications are written because in career terms, it's true - publish or perish, promotion-wise No paper-citations or counts, no tenure. Brutal, but true. So you get stuff published in many fields that while not actually wrong, doesn't genuinely help increase understanding.
It's nice to have the academic freedom to publish interesting conjectures, because it's always possible that one of them will trigger a real paradigm of change. But it would also be nicer if there were some standard of making such papers have a sufficient rationale to make them believable.
The principle of observational equivalence - the foundational principle operating as the equivalence principle in physics, the principle that Einstein used to formulate his theories of special and general relativity, also tells you that any object, of any size, can only be modeled probabilistically when you cannot observe it. That, right there, proves that there is no qualitative difference between the quantum and classical worlds, other than the fact that the classical world is observable. It also proves the equivalence between a particle observer of quantum mechanics, and a human observer - showing that observation is fundamental to any statement that can be formulated relative the physical world. This equivalence is what allows one to draw valid inferences that are mathematically supportable from the position of the human observer. This equivalence can then be used to infer that observation must be the source of the determinism we see in the Universe, but that obervation is also a radiator of entropy, and that 'observation' and 'locality' are fundamental to each other, because by radiating entropy an observer is correspondingly concentrated to a point of low entropy. Modern physics is still completely stumped about this. The next major discoveries will not come from some egghead who has spent 30 years on some deep detail of reality. It will come from someone able to perform a fundamental conceptual inversion of the concepts we all understand, to reveal something foundationally new about them - while keeping the resulting effect as unremarkable as it is now. The fact that both of you are making fun of people trying to be creative in ways you no longer are - while being unable to even approach the foundational questions of life - was my motivation for leaving this comment. I welcome you to try and falsify my above statements - good luck!
It all reminds me of Kamakurka and Herr Seele's comics strip "The disappearance of Nothing," followed by "The Return of Nothing." By then the newspaper that published the comics strips had received so many complaints from readers that it stopped publication.
43:30 I disagree with Sabine here. If a process is "testable" then it is in fact science. Including testing whether it will rain carrots. The idea it will rain carrots (as Sabine mentioned) is a very stupid conjecture, but it is science in that it can easily be refuted by the fact it never rains carrots.
We don't say, "What is the purpose of a neutron star?" so likewise a scientist would not of necessity ask, "What is the purpose of a biosphere?", which is perhaps akin to the question "What is the purpose of life?" But one does ask, "What is the purpose of the Antikythera Mechanism?", and likewise, "What is the purpose of this or that component of the biosphere (such as an organelle in a cell)?" If life is the same kind of thing as a neutron star or a galaxy, i.e. a naturally occurring phenomenon of physics, then why do we ask the purposes of the workings of one but not of the workings in the others? Why does one natural phenomenon of physics posses a collection of "purposes" while the others do not?
Yes its a skeptical feast. But you really should not advertise that you are not an Independent Free Thinker. Sabine constantly stating 'I don't know' or 'we don't know' is not proof that there is nothing bizzare going on in the world of sub-atomic particles. Forget 'Quantum Eraser'. Just in 'Delayed Choice', a Photon has to 'know' that in the Future it will be analysed, measure, observed, etc. Thats called Future Influencing the Present. There is no way around it. A Photon will go through a double slit as a Wave unless it knows that in the future, a measuring device is going to be put in place. Knowing that, the photon goes through a single slit as a particle even though there is no one measuring or observing it when it goes through the slit. Of course, another explanation is that it did go through the double slits as a Wave and when a Measuring Device was put in place, another Universe came into existence where the Photon went through as a single Particle.
@@augustadawber4378 The only bizarre thing that is going on in quantum mechanics is the fact that almost nobody (Sabine included) seems to remember that they were taught these eight words in high school: "A quantum is a small amount of energy.". That definition makes quantum mechanics completely trivial. :-)
@@Thomas-gk42 Why would I get the Nobel for telling you about high school knowledge, kid? You didn't just fail in physics, you also totally failed in "sarcasm" class. ;-)
Einstein said: The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has limits. Quasi one and a half hour of genius! Right Frau Doktor Hossenfelder!
The fine-tuned argument for intelligent design assumes that there is something essentially special about us. It has the same basis as the argument that the world is the center of the universe. It can be counter-argued that this universe is simply the one that is. If it didn't exist, if the laws of nature were different then an entirely different universe might have come into being. The fact that this universe evolved us means nothing in particular.
The universal fine-tuning argument (not ID) says that humans were not created special, evolution made us special. And we are special, no other animal comes close to us. The Physical Constants point to a created universe.
@@briansmith3791 Unless there are many Universes, each having a random set of constants. This would mean a kind of cosmic version of evolution: most Universes wouldn't survive, because the constants wouldn't work to make atoms, etc. Of the Universes that are consistent enough to survive, we are the result not only of that particular Universe, but this locality of the Universe, with the Earth being a certain distance from the Sun, and having a Moon, and the Earth having a certain composition, etc. In other words, we are in a very rare place in a very rare Universe such that life and DNA could occur. Furthermore, we've had a unique geologic history, with dinosaurs dying out, ice ages to test us, etc., leading up to homo sapiens. And, unless we kill ourselves off, there will be further growth, too. Why are we only in this rare place and time? Because it required this rare place and time, for the arising, randomly, of a life form that could be self-aware, could grow in intelligence, and could, finally, reach the peak of development: the ability to make TH-cam comments and feel that they were worth our time and energy. There is no need to invent a super-intelligent God when random chance alone is sufficient.
@@david203 As Sabine Hossenfelder says, " the multiverse ideas are pseudo-science". There is zero evidence for the existence of any other universe. Even if we could discover some observable evidence for them, (which we can't), we will never know the values of the Laws and Constants which govern them. They could have the same values as this universe. We are left with probably the only evidence we'll ever have on this subject : One observable universe with the inherent Physical Constants. As the atheist physicist Leonard Mlodinow recently said, " It's either a multiverse or God, i have no other answer".
In this video there is a of talking about things in terms of our conceptualisations of such things rather than what those things may be, 'in themselves'. There seems a danger of confusing epistemology with ontology of conflating sensations with conceptualisations and both of these things with any 'objects' that may exist in external reality. As to wether things actually exist in external reality as substancial 'objects' or alternatively as 'processes' between insubstancial forms that are themselves akin to processes is at present beyond my understanding but would seem to bear upon the contrary doctrines of materialism and idealism.
So the whole immortality (of matter or information) I believe I understand the argument: that the theory is such that you should be able to effectively project back the configuration of the matter/information that constitutes a person in order to recreate the person. The issue is that does not recreate the actual sentient being in the sense that it recreates the person who can continue living. You are recreating the organism that is the person in the past, so that organism will still die when the time is projected forwards again. In other words you are not, even in theory, bring a person back to life. The best you can do is recreate that being in the past who will still not "live" in the now. ...if that makes sense at all.
The question of why we can't imagine being dead is an interesting one, and it points to the philosophy of nonduality. It points to our identification as primarily an observer rather than an object of observation. What if what we take to be "we" (or "I") is more real than our mind or body? What if the only entity that truly exists is an Observer who can only be described as pure witnessing consciousness? Then we would have at least an intuition that we aren't limited to this body and mind, that our existence is somehow never born and never dies. And, in fact, that is what people who achieve self-realization perceive, directly and not through the physics of having a body. This might seem unlikely or complex, but it's actually far simpler than either physics or religion: it says that the laws of physics, and spacetime, are all real, but illusory. It says that prior to matter and energy is consciousness, but not a mystical consciousness based in pseudoscience (like a misinterpretation of quantum mechanics), but a directly perceived awareness of just being aware. Such a pure subjective consciousness would be zero-dimensional, being located somehow at the origin not only of matter and energy, but at the origin of life, peace, happiness, creativity, and intelligence as well.
I can tell you exactly how to imagine not being conscious anymore. I died once. It's just like not being born yet. That's the best way I can explain it. So, if you can think back to that, there you have it. No memory of it all. I could not be more sure, now, that you only get one life, and then you don't exist anymore. I'm actually a bit of a medical anomaly, since I was without oxygen for over 10 minutes. They were already telling my parents that I would never regain consciousness, or if I did, I would be a complete vegetable. That is really about as dead as you can get, and still be revived, I guess. I remember the moment I slipped away, very clearly. But then there was less than nothing. I just didn't exist anymore. I actually died twice, but the second time I don't consider a real death, because I didn't slip away like that. You definitely know the moment that you leave your consciousness behind. Unless you're killed really quickly, I guess.
I hope you find a place to publish your experiences, as they are of interest, probably, to many. What I'm getting from this is that dying is like returning to the pure consciousness that we were before mind and body impressed us with their conditioning.
you cannot remember before you were born. you also didnt "die once". Death is permanent...no "coming back"...everything else by definition is not death.
Thank you Sabine for clearly stating something that brought me back to the concept of God. When scientists thought up the multiverse, it clearly seemed as outlandish as God creating everything. I was a convinced atheist for 25 years, but science kept changing until it began to appear to be as much of a belief as the multitude of religions currently available. So the mystery of life from our restricted perception of reality is "choice". Every thinking person, which includes, well everyone, has as valid a perspective of reality as anyone else.
I agree with much you say. When speaking of the Physical Constants and the fine-tuning argument, Richard Dawkins said "we approach these things with presuppositions". On the subject of a Creator, he agreed he "doesn't want there to be a God, he prefers the universe to be based on the Darwinian Principle". When the observable evidence is laid out, our view on God/no God comes down to a choice.
People like Chopra found a safe and convenient place in Quantum Physics to put their ignorance. It is beyond our understanding, so it’s basically magic. Magic makes everything possible, so it’s a great way to tell people what they want to hear. Cyclical deliciousness.
1:10:00 YOU cease to exist whenever you are not conscious. If YOUR unconscious material substrate is copied perfectly into a room on the moon and YOUR original material substrate incinerated in an instant here on earth then it would seem to YOU that YOU had been teleported to the moon and YOU would be surprised that it happened. The trick is to realize that YOU cease existing when YOU are not conscious and that what YOU are is a thought instantiated by a very complex material process (taking note that 'process' is an abstract notion that depends for its existence on a material substrate to supply all the little particles whose collective *movements* constitute the process). Does 'movement' reside within the purview of physics, considering the fact that 'movement' is not made of matter? Or does 'movement' reside within the purview of philosophy? Or does 'movement' sit on the border between the two where it merges mind and matter?
The Greeks two and a half thousand years ago wondered about the 'The One and the Many'. Moving on to the mid 20th century, Heidegger wrote in Being and Time about 'The Ground of Being' (the ONE) from which all entities (the MANY) emerge. Is it not true therefore that there can be no information in The ONE in and of itself as there is no differentiation until entities, (energy fields/particles), 'emerge'. It seems that information is not a thing in and of itself. Information is about relationships between entities and seems to be entirely meaningless independent of entities? If all the individual entities being consumed by a black hole are destroyed and become entirely undifferentiated from the Ground of Being, the question of whether or not information is destroyed appears to be moot?
I don't think that entropy/thermodynamics is the main reason we age. I think our DNA has evolved to make us age, deteriorate, and die, just as fungi have evolved to process the dead organisms on a forest floor so that they can be recycled into new life. We can see DNA getting shorter with each mitosis in the lab, and the fixed number of telomeres (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere) may be one mechanism for limiting the lifespan of many organisms. Dying of individuals confers an evolutionary advantage on the species, and so makes more sense than a more abstract explanation based on entropy.
Quite a twist when thinking about the idea of survival of the fittest eh? Ever noticed like how the psyche will block negative things out subconsciously? Like.. you know how people will forget traumatic events n shit? There's Soo so much contingencies going on with our existence that we don't really get to appreciate.
I am a physicist and I will explain the reason why our scientific knowledge disproves the idea that consciousness is generated by the brain and that the origin of our mental experiences is physical/biological (in my youtube channel you can find a video with more detailed explanations). My arguments prove the existence in us of an indivisible unphysical element, which is usually called soul or spirit. Physicalism/naturalism is based on the belief that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, but I will discuss two arguments that prove that this hypothesis implies logical contradictions and is disproved by our scientific knowledge of the microscopic physical processes that take place in the brain. (With the word consciousness I do not refer to self-awareness, but to the property of being conscious= having a mental experiences such as sensations, emotions, thoughts, memories and even dreams). 1) All the alleged emergent properties are just simplified and approximate descriptions or subjective/arbitrary classifications of underlying physical processes or properties, which are described DIRECTLY by the fundamental laws of physics alone, without involving any emergent properties (arbitrariness/subjectivity is involved when more than one option is possible; in this case, more than one possible description). An approximate description is only an abstract idea, and no actual entity exists per se corresponding to that approximate description, simply because an actual entity is exactly what it is and not an approximation of itself. What physically exists are the underlying physical processes and not the emergent properties (=subjective classifications or approximate descriptions). This means that emergent properties do not refer to reality itself but to an arbitrary abstract concept (the approximate conceptual model of reality). Since consciousness is the precondition for the existence of concepts, approximations and arbitrariness/subjectivity, consciousness is a precondition for the existence of emergent properties. Therefore, consciousness cannot itself be an emergent property. The logical fallacy of materialists is that they try to explain the existence of consciousness by comparing consciousness to a concept that, if consciousness existed, a conscious mind could use to describe approximately a set of physical elements. Obviously this is a circular reasoning, since the existence of consciousness is implicitly assumed in an attempt to explain its existence. 2) An emergent property is defined as a property that is possessed by a set of elements that its individual components do not possess. The point is that every set of elements is inherently an arbitrary abstract idea which implies the arbitrary choice of determining which elements are to be included in the set; what exists objectively are only the single elements. In fact, when we define a set, it is like drawing an imaginary line that separates some elements from all the other elements; obviously this imaginary line does not exist physically, independently of our mind, and therefore any set is not a physical entity but just an abstract idea and so are all its properties. Any property attributed to the set as a whole is inherently an abstract idea that refers to another abstract idea (the set) and not to a physical entity. So any emergent property is by its very nature an arbitrary abstraction that refers to another arbitrary abstraction (the set). Since consciousness is a precondition for the existence of subjectivity/arbitrariness and abstractions, consciousness is the precondition for the existence of any emergent property, and cannot itself be an emergent property. Both arguments 1 and 2 are sufficient to prove that every emergent property requires a consciousness from which to be conceived. Therefore, that conceiving consciousness cannot be the emergent property itself. Conclusion: consciousness cannot be an emergent property; this is true for any property attributed to the neuron, the brain and any other system that can be broken down into smaller elements. On a fundamental material level, there is no brain, or heart, or any higher level groups or sets, but just fundamental particles interacting. Emergence itself is just a category imposed by a mind and used to establish arbitrary classifications, so the mind can't itself be explained as an emergent phenomenon. Obviously we must distinguish the concept of "something" from the "something" to which the concept refers. For example, the concept of consciousness is not the actual consciousness; the actual consciousness exists independently of the concept of consciousness since the actual consciousness is the precondition for the existence of the concept of consciousness itself. However, not all concepts refer to an actual entity and the question is whether a concept refers to an actual entity that can exist independently of consciousness or not. If a concept refers to "something" whose existence presupposes the existence of arbitrariness/subjectivity or is a property of an abstract object, such "something" is by its very nature abstract and cannot exist independently of a conscious mind, but it can only exist as an idea in a conscious mind. For example, consider the property of "beauty": beauty has an intrinsically subjective and conceptual nature and implies arbitrariness; therefore, beauty cannot exist independently of a conscious mind. My arguments prove that emergent properties, as well as complexity, are of the same nature as beauty; they refer to something that is intrinsically subjective, abstract and arbitrary, which is sufficient to prove that consciousness cannot be an emergent property because consciousness is the precondition for the existence of any emergent property. The "brain" doesn't objectively and physically exist as a single entity and the entity “brain” is only a conceptual model. We create the concept of the brain by arbitrarily "separating" it from everything else and by arbitrarily considering a bunch of quantum particles altogether as a whole; this separation is not done on the basis of the laws of physics, but using addictional arbitrary criteria, independent of the laws of physics. The property of being a brain, just like for example the property of being beautiiful, is just something you arbitrarily add in your mind to a bunch of quantum particles. Any set of elements is an arbitrary abstraction therefore any property attributed to the brain is an abstract idea that refers to another arbitrary abstract idea (the concept of brain). Furthermore, brain processes consist of many parallel sequences of ordinary elementary physical processes. There is no direct connection between the separate points in the brain and such connections are just a conceptual model used to approximately describe sequences of many distinct physical processes; interpreting these sequences as a unitary process or connection is an arbitrary act and such connections exist only in our imagination and not in physical reality. Indeed, considering consciousness as a property of an entire sequence of elementary processes implies the arbitrary definition of the entire sequence; the entire sequence as a whole is an arbitrary abstract idea , and not to an actual physical entity. For consciousness to be physical, first of all the brain as a whole (and brain processes as a whole) would have to physically exist, which means the laws of physics themselves would have to imply that the brain exists as a unitary entity and brain processes occur as a unitary process. However, this is false because according to the laws of physics, the brain is not a unitary entity but only an arbitrarily (and approximately) defined set of quantum particles involved in billions of parallel sequences of elementary physical processes occurring at separate points. This is sufficient to prove that consciousness is not physical since it is not reducible to the laws of physics, whereas brain processes are. According to the laws of physics, brain processes do not even have the prerequisites to be a possible cause of consciousness. As discussed above, an emergent property is a concept that refers to an arbitrary abstract idea (the set) and not to an actual entity; this rule out the possibility that the emergent property can exist independently of consciousness. Conversely, if a concept refers to “something” whose existence does not imply the existence of arbitrariness or abstract ideas, then such “something” might exist independently of consciousness. An example of such a concept is the concept of “indivisible entity”. Contrary to emergent properties, the concept of indivisible entity refers to something that might exist independently of the concept itself and independently of our consciousness. My arguments prove that the hypothesis that consciousness is an emergent property implies a logical fallacy and an hypothesis that contains a logical contradiction is certainly wrong. Consciousness cannot be an emergent property whatsoever because any set of elements is a subjective abstraction; since only indivisible elements may exist objectively and independently of consciousness, consciousness can exist only as a property of an indivisible element. Furthermore, this indivisible entity must interact globally with brain processes because we know that there is a correlation between brain processes and consciousness. This indivisible entity is not physical, since according to the laws of physics, there is no physical entity with such properties; therefore this indivisible entity corresponds to what is traditionally called soul or spirit. The soul is the missing element that interprets globally the distinct elementary physical processes occurring at separate points in the brain as a unified mental experience. Marco Biagini
How does Sabine define what is and isn't science if not whether something is "Testable"? What other criteria is there? Her personal opinion on whether she does or doesn't like the hypothesis?
Note that the human organism's onboard, sensory-environment mapping computer uses the current state of its onboard map(s) as both 'map' of 'as is', and as its 'blueprint' for its 'to be' states (see "Turing machine") -- i.e. as its 'program(s)' to 'instruct' its subsequent sensory environment mapping/'interacting' ['sensory input'-conditional decision] [re]actions. As for compelling evidence (if not "proof") that _what_ we humans transmit (or "communicate") to each other with our language is [a 'facsimile' of] our 'on-board' sensory-environmental (se-) maps, and that our internal (neurological) se-maps function as our brain's [if…then…] conditional response "program(s)": I am confident that every reader of this 'meme' will be familiar with the concept of a "lie". When we humans "lie" to each other, we are using our language to transmit a false map in the guise of a "true", i.e. ["in good faith"-] accurate and [hopefully] reliable, map to one or more of our fellow human beings for the purpose of manipulating (or "programming") their subsequent decisions and behavior in a way that is primarily in our own, rather than their own best interest. Exactly the same result would be achieved if we presented a deliberately inaccurate roadmap to a traveler who asked us for directions. Note that "the scientific method" has proven to be our species' most effective, accurate, and self-improving (sensory and "scientific technology enhanced"-sensory) environment mapping technique/technology/algorithm so far devised. Why is that? (Teach your children. Explain why "it works out that way" to your fellow citizens. Drop the affectatious "Scientific Truth" misnomer. Grok "scientific" methodically reproducibly demonstrable and testable "sensory (and equally 'clearly documented and understandable scientific and engineering technology enhanced'-sensory) observable evidence", verified [and re-verified, and IV&V re-verifiable, etc., etc.] against "the territory" itself (to the extent, given the inherent limitations of our sensory apparatus, and the intriguing implications of quantum mechanics, that we can consistently ascertain the existence and nature thereof as such.) For example, the 'category name' in the scientific nomenclature to indicate a "scientific evidence"- supported linguistically encoded map is "theory". And note that, like any other 'map', the scientific paradigm implicitly and explicitly recognizes a "scientific theory" as inherently 'provisional', pending the unambiguous discovery of consistently verifiable sensory observational evidence to the contrary. We ("human civilization") are [i.e. hopefully will soon recognize ourselves as] an intelligent, self-aware, self-designing, and self-improving, information processing I/O circuit -- a.k.a. a "[human societal] network" (HSN). Take _particular_ note of the word "we" in that statement (because, in addition to the conventional "network" definitive reasons, "we" is "quantized" - I'll explain later, or you can go ahead and deduce the physical, logical, and phenomenological significance of that for yourself, based on the nature of "the speed of light" [Hint, "connect the dots", if you will]. Note that, as a self-organizing, 'auto-catalytically' self-sustaining network of 'specialized' living 'individuals', this HSN will come to recognize itself as an intelligently self-aware [by means and in terms of its "popularly"/"culturally" shared 'se-map' of itself as such (serving as its 'DNA', if you will] "super-organism". If we keep this in mind, and operate accordingly, our potential as such might be virtually limitless. Our new [or hopefully very-soon-to-be] 'Constitutional Bill of Fundamental Human Rights', as the official minimum, and minimal (sufficient to ensure one's own, and likewise the "individual integrity" of one's fellow human beings) civic code of ethics for the individual citizen, and for all organizations thereof (civic, private, corporate, and government), and "the law of the land", is [i.e. hopefully very soon will be] our foundational self-organizing network (SON) protocol and network operating system (NOS). Note that, as if by 'providence', and unlike most other species, we humans have been 'blessed' (if you will) with the ability to produce our offspring incrementally - one at a time - thereby enabling us to intelligently control and manage our population with both arithmetic precision and without violating the Fundamental Human Rights of a single individual, in order to precisely balance the individual's Right to a "humane" and "optimum" environment (whatever, as a scientifically-informed democracy, we decide that should be) for the health and happiness, and 'se-environment mapping ["intelligence"] developmental potential' (e.g. one that is biodiversity-rich, instead of a "bacterial lifestyle"-grade monoculture) of the individual human being, and for the sustainability and extraterrestrial advancement and survival potential of our species, with the right of competent (I recommend we scientifically and democratically define) citizens to bear and support at least one offspring -- the well-being of the child being the primary consideration. So, Thank You for this video. (And until this 'blueprint' is realized -- 'Careful with those maps, Eugene'.) P.S. "Information": A specific pattern of momentum 'pulses' (waves) as input to a particulate mass object (PMO) I/O device, which 'reroutes' that input (maps it to) a correspondingly specific output pattern and trajectory of momentum "pushes", and/or stores [a portion of] it as a reconfiguration of its internal circuitry/structure/'point-radial momentum' ("mass")'. RE Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: regarding the inherent 'ambiguity' between 'the motion through space over time' of a "spatially extended (i.e. "mass">0) quantum particle" and the presumed specific "point" position of presumed 'fixed' spatially extended 'surface' of such a presumed 'hard particle' at a given duration=0 "instant" in/of "time". It has to do with the fact that "mass", i.e. [the 'manifestation' of] "spatial extension" at every [self-relative] "size scale", is fundamentally comprised of "[self-relative] motion" [a.k.a. "acceleration"/"push"/"momentum" - as in point-radial fluid vortexual 'acceleration-flow' of the otherwise 'scale-uniform superfluid medium' (SUM) [that Einstein 'categorized' as "spacetime"] -- i.e. through/as "space" over/as "time" -- and simply does not exist (is not "physically[/phenomenologically] manifested') as such at a single "instant" (a [mathematical limit] 'point' on the clock, of interval duration = 0) of time. (Even a "snapshot" photograph requires the aperture to remain open for a non-zero duration of time). And since "mass" particles are also "waves" (propagating point-radially with respect to the "EMR" waves they 'encounter' in their own 'inertial reference frame'), we can model the problem as follows: It's easier to determine the 'spatial extension/size/location' "over time" of a large cluster of ping-pong balls (wavefronts) by bouncing a single ping-pong ball [moving in a different (i.e. 'orthogonal' as opposed to 'parallel'/"the same" - since "photons" don't overtake each other) direction] off of it [at] several [different] times than using the same method to identify the spatial extension/'location over time' of another' single ping-pong ball (wavefront of [nearly] the same wavelength) over time. ----- i.e. the interaction of the waves results in the phenomenological "standing" Fourier waveform that we call our "sensory awareness" (and our other internal "consciousness" activity). And note that the only function -- and "meaning" -- of the _[self-]relative_ "size", or "scale", of the component waves that additively constitute such a waveform is in the '[self-] engineering' (if you will) of its structure. FULL DISCLOSURE: Yes, this _is_ "just another" linguistically encoded "mind program" -- analogous in this respect to each and every one of the countless other such linguistically encoded and transmitted "worldviews" [societal network coordinating 'shared se-maps'] contrived by our species since we evolved and began using our "language" to encode and share our personal 'onboard neurological maps' of our 'sensory-(and /or 'se-simulator'-generated)-experiential environment("s") with our fellow humans -- the only distinguishing innovation being the author's primary engineering purpose for _this_ "linguistically-encoded mind program" (or 'se-map') is not 'simply' to "program your mind" (or "simply provide you with a map of your environment"), but to "program your mind with an enhanced ability to program itself". Anyway, that's [my abbreviated linguistic encoding of] _my_ map. What's yours? [Note that, and consider why, I'm genuinely interested in, and "tolerant" thereof.] See also "What is a Worldview" (th-cam.com/video/AVAmY1HvExI/w-d-xo.html) Please 'decipher' and make 'beneficent use' of this to the maximum extent you are able. Thanks again.
My undergraduate major was Physics, and I dig F=ma=GMm/r^2 and E=mv^2=mc^2 and it has its place in predicting the outcome of measurements and the building of things. I love the mystery of the single electron whose wave nature manifests itself when "it" passes through two slits and "throws a dice" (when "it" emerges beyond the slits) to determine whether it should avoid going to a place of wave destructive interference and go instead to a place of constructive interference, but the idea that a photon or an electron is a "real" thing that is both a wave and a particle is (beg your pardon) absurd. The idea that conscious awareness is just a spectator in a deterministic universe - like a mouse trap that has some "spiritual" aspect that "wants" to catch a mouse and snaps. Everything we do is completely controlled by elector-chemical processes and "forces". We "think" we have a choice in taking the blue capsule or the red capsule, but the choice is totally the result of electrons and protons and the forces they foster. Whether reality is deterministic or not (under the principal of "uncertainty" where the micro world "plays" with dice to determine the future) "we" are merely spectators and have absolutely NO control over our decisions. And the material world might not even "Know" (or "care" that conscious awareness exists and history would have unfolded EXACTLY the same way if we were all "zombies" like a play without an audience. There are people who want so very much to believe that there is an afterlife where we will be reunited with out loved ones and will remember their names, in spite of the FACT that our memories are recorded totally by the way neurons are configured as we attain them and will be destroyed when our bodies turn to dust (or ashes if we choose to be cremated). They would have to believe that memories are not recorded by a material configuration but are stored in some "spiritual vault" where they can be restored to our "resurrected" body in an afterlife. It is all "Floxy Noxy" and Physicist should concentrate on making theories that have useful consequences. Neither Newton nor Einstein nor Sabine Hossenfelder know ANYTHING about he nature of reality. But I am one of Sabine's followers because I love her accent. :-) I would like to know how Sabine can explain the UAPs that can stand motionless in hurricane winds and can go from zero to Mach 1 instantly without any period of acceleration -- that must muster a G force of a thousand without any apparent means of propulsion. And move through air without a shock wave. And do weird things that highly intelligent pilots would regard as trivial "cat and mouse games" with airplanes.
It is impossible to change one's velocity without experiencing a period of acceleration: the proof is one of those equations that you just wrote and said that you "dig". If you truly understand Newton's laws of motion, then why would you ever accept pseudoscience as real instead of as fraud?
@@david203 What makes you think that I accept "pseudoscience", David?? I can't answer the question you asked because it implies that I accept pseudoscience, and I don't. Perhaps you should be more specific,in your question which came across as a "complaint"
When Sabine is talking about "knowledge" there, it's in, as I understand it, a deterministic sense. The sense that if you follow the trail of a particle backwards, you "know" where it's coming from. And if you are tracking everything in a space large enough to contain any particles it could have interacted with (i.e. if you're following it back 1 second, you'd need to track everything within 1 lightsecond, since nothing outside that boundary could interact with the particle in question), you can show what path it took over the last second, affected by everything else it interacted with. Scale this up, you've got a deterministic model of the entire universe. So yes, you, the ambulating pile of proteins and water, dies. Your subjective memories are gone. But you can back up from that dust until you "see" how it was constituted into neurons. That's the knowledge she means, the traceability of particles and energy through time.
@@michaeltorrisi7289 Such determinism works in practice only for very simple interactions. When there are many causes and effects, such as tracing the causes of a particle's trajectory backwards in time through many real-world interactions, determinism fails completely. This can be modeled easily through certain equations, such as the "logistics equation", which have a simple definition, yet for certain initial conditions give chaotic trajectories. Similarly, in principle, the random heat motion of molecules should sometime result in a low-entropy situation where most of the molecules are located close together, resulting in greater density and pressure in one place as compared to another. In practice, even if you wait for the lifetime of the universe, you will never observer such a low-entropy situation happen for a typical number of molecules in the gaseous state. To see such a thing happening, you have to go all the way down to just a few molecules, which takes a great deal of energy to achieve in a lab setting, and never occurs in nature.
@David Spector Perhaps I did a poor job of laying out what I'm saying. Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you're saying. So to clarify, what I'm getting from you is that because in practice, it is impossible for us to find a space where we can track the disposition of all matter and energy (for a variety of reasons, like the difficulty of bringing the sum of matter and energy in a space to a low enough amount to track, the Uncertainty Principle, etc.) that determinism cannot exist. If that is what you're saying, my point is that it's not about what humans can perfectly describe, but what is. For example, we cannot map out every digit of pi, since it's an infinite non-repeating string. That failure doesn't mean that pi doesn't have an exact value, just that we don't have the means to map it. Not having the means to map it doesn't make it untrue or even unprovable. From a theoretical standpoint, a deterministic system means that everything in the system adheres to static laws (and by static, I mean lacking true randomness as a non-random dynamic law can be expressed as a more complex static law). If there exist laws of physics that describe how things act and interact (whether we can describe those laws or not), then definitionally, the system is deterministic and a sufficient computational device COULD, again theoretically, describe the disposition of any particle at any time forward or backward. I think there IS a plausible argument against physical determinism in quantum physics, because of the whole probability field thing. There may be actual, true randomness in the universe and THAT would break determinism. Something cannot be both random and deterministic. So personally, I'm up in the air on determinism, although since physics seems to work at scale, I tend to lean towards determinism.
There really isn't much debate among non-philosophers as to what constitutes free will. The concept can be summarized as follows: "Jones is free with respect to action X if it is within Jones' power to do X or not to do X; no antecedent factors determine that he either will, or will not, do X." There has been quite a bit of debate about this definition among philosophers, because they realize that certain problems can't be solved when using it, but the definition given here is nevertheless the one which most closely captures our intuitions about what it means to say that an action was performed freely.
exactly because predetermination mean in a way causality. what happened in the past determinate the future but past and future doesn't exist only now exists and the funny think is that we can never prove it.
Loved the conversation, going to buy her book. The video editing caused some overlap in speech and at times seemed like you were each responding to a different question.
I suggest that the main difference between postmodernist mumbo-jumbo and a scientist using technical language is that you can quiz the scientist and present the material in a simpler way (which Sabine does really well). You can't do the same with post-modernism.
If this Mem-self could be created, it would lack the emulator (your physical system) to get anywhere close to a person that could be mistaken for you. If that Mem-self were loaded into a different emulator, it would not be you. Over the course of a lifetime, concepts, biases, and such change. To complicate this, your mem-self in a totally unique physical, emotional, or community environment would behave differently. What would be the point of all this?
38:18 - Well, these 2 have never heard of Dr Jim Tucker and Ian Stevenson and their fantastic research on children who recall past lives. Food for thought if you ask me.
and how do you know these past lives aren't just memories of their ancestors hard coded into their DNA and they actually vision what happened in the past from the perspective of them??
@@anestos2180 How can it be memories of their ancestors hard coded into their DNA when the people in the past lives were NOT their ancestors. They are proved to be completely different people who lived in different areas.
@@anestos2180 Of course reincarnation is not proved by science. It is still under investigation. But the leader in the field Dr Jim Tucker who has thousands of documented cases in his database says that they have enough evidence to make the statement that "at least some people seem to reincarnate". You should watch his talks on TH-cam. It's fascinating stuff. They study this phenomena using the scientific method. It's not pseudo-science.
@@david203 You obviously have not read research on reincarnation. I recommend you to first read just one book by Jim Tucker. He is a scientist. So it's not pseudo-science.
A reality in time has it's state at a point in time and is different at another point in time. Only your reality at a point in time can encounter other realities at that point in time if you happen to be at the same location. Reality can't be moved in time without changing it's stat. There is no beginning or end in time, just dispersed points in time. Our living state begins at the birth point in time and terminates at the death point in time. Beyond those points we have a different state. Change of state is unidirectional in time. However, there doesn't seem to be a point before there was no change. Perhaps the limitation is with our perception.
In Hindu Vedic tradition, they had a set process of communicating with their ancestors or with their loved ones who are dead, which is called “ Pitru Paksha” or “ Shraadh.” It is hoped that when people die, they will travel to the land of their ancestors, stay there and return. They eventually get a new body and return.
Shraddha means "belief", and is in some ways the opposite of science. Instead of improving with time, shraddha becomes increasingly stagnant and incorrect. The Vedic tradition has given us a great pair of related philosophies, yoga and advaita vedanta, which can be validated in our own experience, but it has also degenerated into the Hindu worship of gods, belief in reincarnation, and mystical ritual, none of which is based on evidence or verifiable truth.
Question - Are Our Lives Predestined or Not? : This is not a personal problem, it is a philosophical question. Our lives are both predestined and they are not. Both yes and no. And both answers are true for all questions about life. In a way, everything is predetermined. Whatever is physical in you, material, whatever is mental, is predetermined. But something in you constantly remains undetermined, unpredictable. That something is your consciousness. If you are identified with your body and your material existence, in the same proportion you are determined by cause and effect. Then you are a machine. But if you are not identified with your material existence, with either body or mind - if you can feel yourself as something separate, different, above and transcendent to body-mind - then that transcending consciousness is not predetermined. It is spontaneous, free. Consciousness means freedom; matter means slavery. So it depends on how you define yourself. If you say, ”I am only the body,” then everything about you is completely determined. A person who says that man is only the body cannot say that man is not predetermined. Ordinarily, persons who do not believe in such a thing as consciousness also do not believe in predetermination. Persons who are religious and believe in consciousness ordinarily believe in predetermination. So what I am saying may look very contradictory. But still, it is the case. A person who has known consciousness has known freedom. So only a spiritual person can say there is no determination at all. That realization comes only when you are completely unidentified with the body. If you feel that you are just a material existence, then no freedom is possible. With matter, no freedom is possible. Matter means that which cannot be free. It must flow in the chain of cause and effect. Once someone has achieved consciousness, enlightenment, he is completely out of the realm of cause and effect. He becomes absolutely unpredictable. You cannot say anything about him. He begins to live each moment; his existence becomes atomic. Your existence is a river-like chain in which every step is determined by the past. Your future is not really future; it is just a by-product of the past. It is only the past determining, shaping, formulating and conditioning your future. That is why your future is predictable. Skinner says that man is as predictable as anything else. The only difficulty is that we have not yet devised the means to know his total past. The moment we can know his past, we can predict everything about him. Based upon the people he has worked with, Skinner is right, because they are all ultimately predictable. He has experimented with hundreds of people and he has found that they are all mechanical beings, that nothing exists within them that can be called freedom. But his study is limited. No Buddha has come to his laboratory to be experimented upon. If even one person is free, if even one person is not mechanical, not predictable, Skinner’s whole theory falls. If one person in the whole history of mankind is free and unpredictable, then man is potentially free and unpredictable. The whole possibility of freedom depends on whether you emphasize your body or your consciousness. If you are just an outward flow of life, then everything is determined. Or are you something inner also? Do not give any preformulated answer. Do not say, ”I am the soul.” If you feel there is nothing inside you, then be honest about it. This honesty will be the first step toward the inner freedom of consciousness. If you go deeply inside, you will feel that everything is just part of the outside. Your body has come from without, your thoughts have come from without, even your self has been given to you by others. That is why you are so fearful of the opinion of others - because they are completely in control of your self. They can change their opinion of you at any moment. Your self, your body, your thoughts are given to you by others, so what is inside? You are layers and layers of outside accumulation. If you are identified with this personality of yours that comes from others, then everything is determined. Become aware of everything that comes from the outside and become non-identified with it. Then a moment will come when the outside falls completely. You will be in a vacuum. This vacuum is the passage between the outside and the inside, the door. We are so afraid of the vacuum, so afraid of being empty that we cling to the outside accumulation. One has to be courageous enough to disidentify with the accumulation and to remain in the vacuum. If you are not courageous enough, you will go out and cling to something, and be filled with it. But this moment of being in the vacuum is meditation. If you are courageous enough, if you can remain in this moment, soon your whole being will automatically turn inward. When there is nothing to be attached to from the outside, your being turns inward. Then you know for the first time that you are something that transcends everything you have been thinking yourself to be. Now you are something different from becoming; you are being. This being is free; nothing can determine it. It is absolute freedom. No chain of cause and effect is possible. - Your actions are related to past actions. A created a situation for B to become possible; B creates a situation in which C flowers. Your acts are connected to past acts and this goes back to the beginningless beginning and on to the endless end. Not only do your own acts determine you, but your father’s and mother’s acts also have a continuity with yours. Your society, your history, all that has happened before, is somehow related to your present act. The whole history has come to flower in you. Everything that has ever happened is connected with your act, so your act is obviously determined. It is such a minute part of the whole picture. History is such a vital living force and your individual act is such a small part of it. Marx said, ”It is not consciousness that determines the conditions of society. It is society and its conditions that determines consciousness. It is not that great men create great societies. It is great societies that create great men.” And he is right in a way, because you are not the originator of your actions. The whole history has determined them. You are just carrying them out. The whole evolutionary process has gone into the making of your biological cells. These cells in you can then become part of another person. You may think that you are the father, but you have just been a stage on which the whole biological evolution has acted and has forced you to act. The act of procreation is so forceful because it is beyond you; it is the whole evolutionary process working through you. This is one way in which acts happen in relation to other past acts. But when a person becomes enlightened, a new phenomenon begins to happen. Acts are no longer connected with past acts. Any act, now, is connected only with his consciousness. It comes from his consciousness not from the past. That is why an enlightened person cannot be predicted. Habits are mechanical; they repeat themselves. The more you repeat something, the more efficient you become. Efficiency means that now consciousness is no longer needed. If a person is an efficient typist it means that no effort is needed; typing can be done unconsciously. Even if he is thinking about something else the typing continues. The body is typing; the man is not needed. Efficiency means that the thing is so certain that no effort is possible. With freedom, effort is always possible. A machine cannot make errors. To err, one has to be conscious. So your acts have a chain relationship with your previous acts. They are determined. Your childhood determines your youth; your youth determines your old age. Your birth determines your death; everything is determined. Buddha used to say, ”Provide the cause, and the effect will be there.” This is the world of cause and effect in which everything is determined. If you act with total consciousness, an altogether different situation exists. Then everything is moment to moment. Consciousness is a flow; it is not static. It is life itself, so it changes. It is alive. It goes on expanding; it goes on becoming new, fresh, young. Then, your acts will be spontaneous. The more alive you are, the less repetitive. Only a dead man can be consistent. Living is inconsistency; life is freedom. Freedom cannot be consistent. Consistent with what? You can be consistent only with the past. An enlightened person is consistent only in his consciousness; he is never consistent with his past. He is totally in the act. Nothing is left behind; nothing is left out. The next moment the act is finished and his consciousness is fresh again. Consciousness will be there whenever any situation arises, but each act will be made in complete freedom, as if it is the first time that this man has been in this particular situation. That is why I answered both yes and no to your question. It depends on you, whether you are consciousness, or whether you are an accumulation, a bodily existence. Religion gives freedom because religion gives consciousness. The more science knows about matter, the more the world will be enslaved. The whole phenomenon of matter is of cause and effect: if you know that given this, that happens - then everything can be determined"
Existence from nothing is like asking, "where was I before conception?' Its impossible to image what life was like before you (I) existed. Consciousness has a built-in fail safe which "protects" us from knowing nothing, i.e, the void, blackness, outer darkness, etc. Therefore "nothing" does not exist from a conscious or non-conscious point of view.
You clearly have never been under partial narcosis. The "void" is perfectly real if you shut down the higher brain functions. It's also kind of fun. ;-)
The whole "nothing" thing is a non-argument. It's an argument of semantics. In terms of the creation of the universe it's not about describing nothing as a void or empty space because this is describing something which requires a receptacle of some sort: an empty box in which the space resides. So this is not describing an absence of something. The best word I feel can be used to describe the pre-creation state would be "eternity" avoiding using the word to describe infinite time, forwards or backward. You have an eternal environment from which the universe was born or created. Yes, this is irking toward some religious context (I am Christian so I have no problem with this), but I'm using the word "eternity" to distinguish between a vessel in which time occurs, which is our universe, and one in which time (or any parameter of this universe) is absent.
Free Will is not a granted state of being in the Universe. It is potential connected to the cognitive striving effort to understand True Goodness and to Seek Truth. Please see my book: Free Will is an Activity (Michael A. Perez).
Parallel universes at an Engineering Company. A Co. has two foremost engineers vying for different models, but the Board of Directors can only select one. Engineer A wants a blue wire with accompanying hardware which differs from B's model which uses a red wire and other hardware. In two days the Board of Directors must decide on which model to fund, by taking a vote But the very next day one of the Board members is talking to a neighbor, who sees the Board member sneeze twice. The neighbor thinks to herself, "If the Board member sneezes a third time, I'll recommend a certain remedy and that the Member should stay home. and rest In parallel universe #1, the Member doesn't sneeze, doesn't stay home, and votes for the engineer's model with the blue wire. In parallel universe #2, the Board Member sneezes, and with the recommendation of the neighbor, stays home. The result is that the Board votes for the engineer promoting the red wire... Wrong choice! The client was displeased with the model, crashing the Co. due to lack of funds. Did the neighbor cause this? Question: How much energy is involved in the neighbor's thought to intervene on behalf of the Board member? Did a single fleeting thought disconnected from the Co. sink it? Was she a spy who deliberately did this, paid by an enemy of the Co?
iPhone photography incorporates a concept called the Live Picture, where the camera actually captures a very short video set of frames. If you could capture all the information from the universe that described a moment in the existence of a life, does that mean you could recreate the life? I don’t see a strong tie between the Christian concept of a soul that exists beyond the mortal life, and the physicist’s definition of the information available post Morten.
My admiration for Sabine is almost boundless. So many “I don’t knows” which is fine in a Universe with so many things we can conceive that are determinable. There’s no shortage of answerable questions!
Mathematician here 😊. I feel like the reason many lay people think they have discovered grand theories is because of the Dunning-Kruger effect. They just aren’t aware of how little they know. After getting my degree in higher math, I feel much tinier and much dumber. I have been humbled by just how much knowledge there is out there. Also, Sabine is my hero. I’m studying physics now because of her ❤
You better not learn physics from her, though. Her physical intuition is atrocious. ;-)
Sabine is my favorite living physicist. She defines pragmatism and in her ideas, she is always succinct. I imagine her to be more honest, unbiased and humble than most people, though I have never known her. Such qualities always seem to help make any person more believable.
Sabine is a treasure. A skeptic of science and a good educator.
Sabine no es una escéptica, es demasiado razonable para eso, el escéptico suele ser imbécil, esta mujer es una buscadora de la verdad, que es otra cosa
Sabine is not a skeptic, she is too reasonable for that, the skeptic is usually an idiot, this woman is a seeker of truth, which is something else
@@jorgeratin3383 "We cannot see if Schrodinger's equation contains frogs, musical composers or morality.
So we cannot say whether a God is needed or not needed.
Leaving to the individual the choice of opinion for or against a God."
Richard Feynman
1964 Cornell series of 9 lectures
She's not a skeptic of science, she is a good Scientist.
@@jorgeratin3383 La búsqueda de la verdad presupone un cierto escepticismo.
She's smart
Sabine is a wonderful communicator, and a wonderful person!!
Not bad for a mathematician. It's great to see her dive right into internet penising.
I love that Sabine is very strict in restricting her answers to her area of expertise. Socrates would be proud!
Thats the Way!
If only others like ndtyson would do the same thing they would be far more credible.
Climate change is not one of them
She stopped doing that.
@@nancygerette reminds me of the Shermer/Theroux discussion on how social feedback loops impact the individual in the context of cult followers and their leaders. Also reminds me of the evolution of the Peterson persona from a seeker to a knower. It also makes me wonder if the observation of such dynamics motivated parts of the theology behind warning of elevating a material thing to the status of an idol and subsequently worshipping it. I suppose the underlying takeaway is that individual statements must either be independently verified, irrespective of context, or accepted as belief rather than knowledge.
I've been hooked on Sabines YT channel now for a couple of years. She does a good job of explaining complicated subjects.
its always complicated when your opposed
@@chrisbennett6260 That sentence isn't complicated, but it sure is incomprehensible.
@@gandydancer9710 fine
@@chrisbennett6260 Why write if you don't wish to be understood?
Use sentences that make sense next time.
I've never listened to her. Now, she's up there with Robert Sapolsky as far as dispensing truth goes. It's so frustrating not being a genius. We NEED your minds. 😮❤
I love Sabine! The most sensible physicist who can communicate rationally, logically and in a manner that is comprehensible to all. And she covers so many fields outside physics too. What a gem!
Sabine is such a smart, special, and nice lady. She has to give a lot to humanity ❤
And there is the SEO bot. ;-)
You forgot to mention that Sabine's channel is one of the most brilliant communicators on the planet. By listening to her broadcasts I find myself actually able to understand more than I ever imagined being able to. Different ideas like the block universe make so much more sense now. And the whole thing about time. My mind has been expanded in ways I never thought was possible.
He actually didn't forget to mention that.
This was absolutely fantastic. I’ll be listening to it again and mulling the ideas for a long time. I’m definitely going to buy her book, and I just subscribed to her TH-cam channel. Thank you so very much for introducing me to this wonderful person!
I love Sabine's pristine fidelity to her understanding and beliefs.
This was fascinating. As a fan of both, I think Michael did an amazing job with the questions and topics he picked here for Sabine, outside of the purely scientific zone.
I cant help but think the universe is like any other container ... even if its IP5000 sealed ... its bound to leak somewhere
Sabine visibly dying inside at the mention of Deepak Chopra is comedy gold
Chopra the charlatan. I can’t stand to listen to that man so I don’t LOL.
35:25
Why even bring that goofball into the conversation?
Deepocket Chopra shows there is money in gobble de geek.
Thank you, miss Hossenfelder, for promoting real science!
I follow Dr. Hossenfelder's vlog & find it quite educational at a level aimed at the level of we curious lay types & get a kick from her personable humour. Thank Sabine on my behalf, please.
Many good questions well answered. I'm currently reading her "Existential Physics" and find it refreshing. Her instrumentalist perspective is most refreshing (see Dewey's instrumentalism). I like her use of "ascientific". Many ascientific notions are notions that are claimed to be derivative from science but are really just confusions of metaphysics with science. She makes her own meanings. She is responsible for her life.
Love Sabine Hossenfelder!
Dr. Hossenfelder is a true hero. In Germany we have a nice verb that became uncommen, it is called "verbrämt", If something is "wissenschaftlich verbrämt" this means something is scientifically dressed up. And so Dr. Hossenfelder's telling is true that many scientist hide behind a wall of mathematics, at least the ones that know mathematics, the other ones hide behind a wall of technical terms like social scientists, political scientists and educators. All these people are a real pain in the a..! This is why we need strong persons as Dr. Hossenfelder, who may not have many friends in the scientific community especially not under physicists, but the people that like her do like her very intensely! Keep on! Kind regards from Germany!
The reason her viewpoint is a very tiny minority viewpoint among the Physics Community is because the Observer Affect has been verified and repeated tens of thousands of times over the last 100 years !. Quantum Mechanics is the most succesful scientific theory of all time. Her attempts to debunk Quantrum Mechanics and Non-Locality through Super-Determinism makes 99 % of all Physicists laugh.
I've been a fan of Sabine ever since I attended her public lectures at the Perimeter Institute of Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
One thing that I have come up with in the shower, many times, and I believe it to be true is, "I think I'm hungry...." That's my great contribution to the theory of everything.
there is of course a direct correlation between flow and gut bacteria activity, related to decibel and echo parameters, known as "sandwiches law"
This lady, Sabine Hossenfelder is a genius for sure and I love the way she can be critical of mainstream mathematical physics and think out of the box at the same time.
It is easy to be critical of the mainstream and think outside of it. The hard thing is to transcend what one is taught to accept without question.
I loved this conversation the first time and am watching it again. Full disclosure. I am a committed Catholic. The questions discussed here are essential to the struggle to understand the world. I have been frustrated with many other discussions which treat a long list of untestable ideas as "theoretically and potentially true". A further frustration is that many scientists exploit their expertise with technical jargon and math unreachable to the average person, implying that big questions are "too big" for "regular folk down there." Shermer's questions are wonderful, and Sabine's answers and explanations are clear. I love her agnostic honesty...where I once lived. I often feel like many scientists prefer to live above the heavens where the smart people go in order to avoid the poor, silly people down below...creating intellectually silly theories of almost anything...which is preferable to even considering the existence of a mind/being/creator outside of the material world. Thanks very much!
So what does your belief in Adult Santa have to do with this? ;-)
None of your statements of appreciation of Dr. Hossenfelder seem to have anything to do with your being a committed Catholic.
@@schmetterling4477 "poor, silly people down below." No need to respond. That's not the major point of my comment.
@@gardenladyjimenez1257 You didn't answer the question. Adult Santa is of no help when it comes to serious conversation. ;-)
@@david203 Sure. I could jave left that out and still made my point. I find it interesting, though, that you and Mr. Ling cue in on this one word. That says as much about you as it does about me. Really! Enough said!!
Finished her book last night. It is now my favorite physics book. No make that my favorite book overall. Of course the Moral Arch is second.
Sabina is an amazing lady! In all of the academic professions from philosophy to physics including engineering, economics, finance, business and politics, people try to baffle you with bullshit. At times, it can be a real challenge to separate the facts from the fiction and to recognize the swindlers and con artists. I think at some point all of us have been fooled by someone myself included.
Sa-bi-ne
@@NeedsEvidence Yes, I realized that I spelled Sabine's name with and "a" at the end instead of an "e". It was an honest mistake, but thanks for pointing this out.
@@Danny_6Handford Don't worry. But what bugs me is that virtually all English-native hosts interviewing Dr Hossenfelder on their podcasts pronounce her first name wrong, like it was as difficult as rocket science.
@@NeedsEvidence There are many things that bug me in this world, but spelling or pronouncing someone’s name wrong is not one of them, unless it is done intentionally to criticize the person or to disrespect the person.
It may not be rocket science, but with all of the world’s languages and dialects that go with them and even if we use some of the amazing technologies that have been developed like “Google Translate”, it is still possible to pronounce or spell words wrong. What is really amazing to me and did not see coming in my lifetime is the technology now available to virtually communicate to just about anyone anywhere in the world. As long as we can learn how to filter out the nonsense, the scams and the fake news, we should be able to increase trust amount each other.
On female sensitivity: A friend sent me a video clip he’d taken on the train in Germany. Two women were discussing the problems they had being sensitive to the electromagnetic fields in their homes. They suffered terribly from them attributing all sorts of petty ailments to their sensitivity. My friend pointed out that they were all travelling on an electric train and were in a much more intense electromagnetic field than you find in any normal home.
How does that relate to "female" sensitivity aside from the fact that the two people in your anecdote were women?
@@asystole_ Sabine talked about this female sensitivity.
An example if the problem being all in their heads. A made up problem. If you canconvince a oerson he she has braincancer. That person can conjur up a terrible headache just with their imagination.
Not all electromagnetic fields are the same. They vary in direction, frequency, amplitude, orientation (polarization), and in the distributions of all these quantities in space and time. So you can't compare EM fields in two places unless you know exactly what quantities you are comparing.
@@asystole_ As someone else pointed out, it was discussed in the video. But beyond that, I'd like to note that some types of stupidity are - broadly - gendered. Like any male/female comparison, there's a bit of overlap. So like, you can say "men are stronger than women". There's some overlap, the strongest women are stronger than many men, but broadly, the statement is true. Empathetic stupidity is more of a woman thing. So like astrology, crystals, the idea of different types of alcohol making you behave differently (I'm fine on vodka, but guuurl, on tequila, watch out!). Things that involve being "in tune" or "in touch" with the environment they're in. For men, the stupidity is usually more self-promotional. Attempting physical stunts beyond their capability, being entirely certain of the soundness of their thinking (like the example Michael gives of overwhelmingly men sending him crackpot theories), etc. When you hear the "women don't want to date nice guys", that's an extension of that kind of stupid. It's not some weird tactic to shame women into dating them, they think that they're amazing and cannot comprehend why they're not inundated with attention. Then they do a terrible job of figuring out what it is about them that keeps them from getting that attention because they're so subconsciously convinced of their own above average worth. There's probably a better term for it, or more concise examples, but basically, whereas women's crazy ideas tend to be focused on connectedness, men's crazy ideas tend to be focused on self-superiority. And it's probably a scale, not scope thing. Like most of us have these gendered traits, just not maybe to the "I've proven Einstein wrong because I'm a genius!" level.
Great podcast! Well done, sir! Thanks a lot!
I love how she looks at, and describes -- equations and mathematics. I think it helps that she came at Physics from Mathematics, instead of Mathematics from Physics, where it is basically a toolbox. Math is a language we use to describe relationships between things in the universe. It allows abstractions of abstractions of abstractions. Which can be really useful. But it's still a language. And language isn't the things it describes.
I majored in Atmospheric Science, and I did NOT go at it from mathematics... I kind of sucked at mathematics after Algebra 2, though I aced Geometry. I did NOT ace Analytic geometry, or anything after it through Diff Eq. Lotta "C"'s and sometimes only the second time I took the courses. However, I found it eye-opening how we came up with equations to describe fluid dynamics, and it was obvious to me that we were just describing things as best we understand them with the language of mathematics.
So does "math" exist? Kind of depends on what we mean by existence. It exists in our heads and on paper. It can be passed along. In that sense it exists. But when we get into discussions like this, you get into Sabine's talk of the past and future and present all exist, and we "invented" this language, so the language exists, so it exists in all of the universe, therefore it is a structure that just exists in the universe ... but I think we're getting into religion here, frankly.
I do NOT think we can copy consciousness without literally biologically reproducing ourselves. I think ....and I know this is ascientific ... that consciousness is an integral part of the universe and has some fundamental structure we haven't found the source of yet. If we ever do.
Couldn't wait enough for such an episode! Thx guys!
Free will and wine drinking. Obviously we can and do learn from past mistakes. So tomorrow Sabina can drink less wine than today. But assuming determinism, she only will drink less wine tomorrow than today if she is already on a determined path that will lead to that outcome.
Could she have done otherwise? Yes but she would have had to have been on a different determined path stretching back to the initial conditions of the universe to have done so.
That is very straightforward and shows that what we ordinarily think of as free will and I dare say, what Michael Shermer has in mind, is not compatible with determinism.
Sabine is a truther physicist . Much love to you Sabine.
'Super-Determinism' and 'Unknown Variables' are the Physicist's version of 'God works in mysterious ways'.
Sabine does her best to rescue the realism from the constant speculation that we survive death in some form. Arcane fears are a distraction.
Thank you Sabina 😊
At 51:24, Michael talks about being agnostic vs. atheist, which is actually two questions. Gnostic/Agnostic refers to what someone knows and theism/atheism refers to what someone believes or has a lack of belief of. If you do not know if a god exists, then you are agnostic. You can still be a theist or an atheist either way. I don’t know for sure what Michael or Sabine believe, but if I was to guess, I would think neither are convinced a god exists, or in other words, they lack the belief in a god or gods. This would make both of them agnostic atheists. Michael did mention hard atheist, however, and this often is interpreted as a strong conviction or belief that no god exists. This belief is often backed up with reasons (knowledge) to support the lack of belief. So in this case you might say they are a gnostic atheist. Honestly, though, if we do not have conclusive evidence, either way, does’t that mean we are all agnostic and its just a matter of degree?
Wow, Sabine said what I have been saying for decades - the purpose of my life is to gain knowledge and pass it on. The end.
great conversation. Sabine is well spoken, concise, and bold.
at 49:02 Sabine goes on to state that a belief in God and belief in the Multiverse as derived from mathematics are both religious beliefs and unnecessary to describe what we observe.
Great conversation with a great guest! Well done!
I don't know. I'm the MOST comfortable with "we don't know". It is, in fact, the most honest point of view. And I agree with Sabine .... we will probably never know. I, in fact, believe that we can't ... due to the nature of infinity.
We know a little bit more about Nature as time goes by, because science is designed to correct itself. But progress in science has never been linear with time: sometimes progress happens in big leaps, sometimes in tiny incremental steps. Not being able to know everything doesn't stop us from learning more about lots of things.
1:01:43 computability and free will
I forgot where I read this but decades ago someone once said "biological systems are islands of negative entropy". So just as you can expend energy to store some of the energy in a clock's mainspring, biological systems can expend energy to do error detection then error correction (explains why Michael's 6-yo can heal faster than Michael)
It isn't clear what point you are making by presenting these particular facts. Neither of the speakers in this video denied the truth of the laws of thermodynamics.
@@david203 I was talking about the physicists' view of entropy always heading in one direction (from order to chaos). But biological systems get around this by using energy to implement negative entropy to implement repair. Their ultimate trick is to use an insane amount of energy to create a new copy via sexual reproduction.
I have an average level of science education (primary and secondary) which is to include a basic physics class. My dad was a bio-chemist, and I suppose I have his sensiblities--though not his brains. So, I have found personalities like Sagan, Dawkins, Tyson, and Hossenfelder to be so interesting, even as I have a difficult time following some of the concepts they discuss. It's comforting to know there are people who are intelligent and deeply interested in finding out what is true, rather than making up woo woo (the bible, the koran, or Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, big tent preachers....or pull just about any number of names out of a hat filled with woo woo). Our world is filled with woo woo. It seems to have been the default setting for as long as we've had language.
Science is hard. Woo woo is easy--and more profitable.
In other words... you know nothing about science, either. ;-)
I agree heartily , thanks
It does astonish me how easily and often today the idea of free will is relinquished, given the huge logical problem with denying it. For if we are seriously saying that all our thoughts are in the long run determined by the mindless forces and particles of the material universe, such that we could not possibly have thought differently, how can we know any of our thoughts to be true or false - including our denial of free will? As has been said, the problem with determinism is that if it is true we can never know it to be true since our thoughts are determined, including determinism. It is a self-refuting position. Free will is essential not only to moral responsibility but to reason, logic and therefore science. What Sabine and Michael are saying ultimately is that we know we don't have free will, but let's all pretend for the sake of our mental and social health that we do - which scarcely seems a rational approach.
Well said. How is it she proposes to know this when there is no way to test it. Is it just a belief for her?
1:12:00 there is a little man in my head who suggests to me what i should do, and he lays awake at night wondering if there is a little man inside _his_ head telling _him_ what to do.
how can you have free will if you can't listen to your thought and then decide if it's a good or a bad thought? we don't even know hos _will_ works, let alone free will.
on god's free will: no one can "give you" free will.
if there is a god, then i'm his creation and i live in his creation, that's god's will not mine, let me_decide_ to live here, let me _design_ my own universe, _then_ i have free will.
how can i have free will when there are commandments? god makes laws, provides you will a painful alternative to obeying those laws, then says "you chose freely" - i can only swear at him.
free will is just a "gotcha" that allows you to be sadistic and burn someone alive while claiming to be moral, if we have no choices in life we are not culpable, religists HATE that, they want an excuse for hell so they have an excuse for heaven.
Sabine brilla como una supernova, ilumina todo lo que la rodea
Sabine shines like a supernova, lighting up everything around her
Not sure how Michael struggles so hard to imagine death, it's exactly the same as all the time before birth, complete non-existence. For me it's was a literally unremarkable place, for infinite time into the past. Nothing to be afraid of.
Isn't it so mind blowing that we didn't exist for an infintity of time before we are born and then sudenly we emerge and exist for a relatively very breif amount of time and then we die and we (probably) never exist again for infinity! I think that is so weird, even though it is normal.
It is astonishing what appears from nothing, given infinite time.
@@coreywiley3981 The same thing is true of any individual banana, or any individual blade of grass. How is that weird? Are you astonished at the mashed potatoes on your plate, and how it didn't exist for billions of years and after you eat it it will cease to exist for the rest of eternity? Myself, I've gotten used to this. It does not seem weird.
I think a lot of technical/academic publications are written because in career terms, it's true - publish or perish, promotion-wise No paper-citations or counts, no tenure. Brutal, but true. So you get stuff published in many fields that while not actually wrong, doesn't genuinely help increase understanding.
It's nice to have the academic freedom to publish interesting conjectures, because it's always possible that one of them will trigger a real paradigm of change. But it would also be nicer if there were some standard of making such papers have a sufficient rationale to make them believable.
The principle of observational equivalence - the foundational principle operating as the equivalence principle in physics, the principle that Einstein used to formulate his theories of special and general relativity, also tells you that any object, of any size, can only be modeled probabilistically when you cannot observe it.
That, right there, proves that there is no qualitative difference between the quantum and classical worlds, other than the fact that the classical world is observable.
It also proves the equivalence between a particle observer of quantum mechanics, and a human observer - showing that observation is fundamental to any statement that can be formulated relative the physical world.
This equivalence is what allows one to draw valid inferences that are mathematically supportable from the position of the human observer.
This equivalence can then be used to infer that observation must be the source of the determinism we see in the Universe, but that obervation is also a radiator of entropy, and that 'observation' and 'locality' are fundamental to each other, because by radiating entropy an observer is correspondingly concentrated to a point of low entropy.
Modern physics is still completely stumped about this. The next major discoveries will not come from some egghead who has spent 30 years on some deep detail of reality.
It will come from someone able to perform a fundamental conceptual inversion of the concepts we all understand, to reveal something foundationally new about them - while keeping the resulting effect as unremarkable as it is now.
The fact that both of you are making fun of people trying to be creative in ways you no longer are - while being unable to even approach the foundational questions of life - was my motivation for leaving this comment. I welcome you to try and falsify my above statements - good luck!
It all reminds me of Kamakurka and Herr Seele's comics strip "The disappearance of Nothing," followed by "The Return of Nothing." By then the newspaper that published the comics strips had received so many complaints from readers that it stopped publication.
43:30 I disagree with Sabine here. If a process is "testable" then it is in fact science. Including testing whether it will rain carrots. The idea it will rain carrots (as Sabine mentioned) is a very stupid conjecture, but it is science in that it can easily be refuted by the fact it never rains carrots.
You have my attention know Sabine. I really do love watching you.
We don't say, "What is the purpose of a neutron star?" so likewise a scientist would not of necessity ask, "What is the purpose of a biosphere?", which is perhaps akin to the question "What is the purpose of life?" But one does ask, "What is the purpose of the Antikythera Mechanism?", and likewise, "What is the purpose of this or that component of the biosphere (such as an organelle in a cell)?" If life is the same kind of thing as a neutron star or a galaxy, i.e. a naturally occurring phenomenon of physics, then why do we ask the purposes of the workings of one but not of the workings in the others? Why does one natural phenomenon of physics posses a collection of "purposes" while the others do not?
Don't understand this. What are physicists saying that annoys you?
@@david203 Nothing. I'm just asking some questions.
Enjoyed this a lot, great guest! 👌
This is a skeptical feast. Thank you both.
Yes its a skeptical feast. But you really should not advertise that you are not an Independent Free Thinker. Sabine constantly stating 'I don't know' or 'we don't know' is not proof that there is nothing bizzare going on in the world of sub-atomic particles. Forget 'Quantum Eraser'. Just in 'Delayed Choice', a Photon has to 'know' that in the Future it will be analysed, measure, observed, etc. Thats called Future Influencing the Present. There is no way around it. A Photon will go through a double slit as a Wave unless it knows that in the future, a measuring device is going to be put in place. Knowing that, the photon goes through a single slit as a particle even though there is no one measuring or observing it when it goes through the slit. Of course, another explanation is that it did go through the double slits as a Wave and when a Measuring Device was put in place, another Universe came into existence where the Photon went through as a single Particle.
@@augustadawber4378 Panpsychism, eh? I can’t say it’s a skeptical point of view. It’s just dualism in new clothing
@@augustadawber4378 The only bizarre thing that is going on in quantum mechanics is the fact that almost nobody (Sabine included) seems to remember that they were taught these eight words in high school: "A quantum is a small amount of energy.". That definition makes quantum mechanics completely trivial. :-)
@@schmetterling4477 Your wonderful easy explanations make me wonder once more, which year you got the noble prize.
@@Thomas-gk42 Why would I get the Nobel for telling you about high school knowledge, kid? You didn't just fail in physics, you also totally failed in "sarcasm" class. ;-)
Einstein said: The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has limits. Quasi one and a half hour of genius! Right Frau Doktor Hossenfelder!
The fine-tuned argument for intelligent design assumes that there is something essentially special about us. It has the same basis as the argument that the world is the center of the universe. It can be counter-argued that this universe is simply the one that is. If it didn't exist, if the laws of nature were different then an entirely different universe might have come into being. The fact that this universe evolved us means nothing in particular.
Yes! Thank you! We are a superb random confluence that don't appreciate our own unique value.
The universal fine-tuning argument (not ID) says that humans were not created special, evolution made us special. And we are special, no other animal comes close to us. The Physical Constants point to a created universe.
@@briansmith3791 Unless there are many Universes, each having a random set of constants. This would mean a kind of cosmic version of evolution: most Universes wouldn't survive, because the constants wouldn't work to make atoms, etc. Of the Universes that are consistent enough to survive, we are the result not only of that particular Universe, but this locality of the Universe, with the Earth being a certain distance from the Sun, and having a Moon, and the Earth having a certain composition, etc. In other words, we are in a very rare place in a very rare Universe such that life and DNA could occur. Furthermore, we've had a unique geologic history, with dinosaurs dying out, ice ages to test us, etc., leading up to homo sapiens. And, unless we kill ourselves off, there will be further growth, too.
Why are we only in this rare place and time? Because it required this rare place and time, for the arising, randomly, of a life form that could be self-aware, could grow in intelligence, and could, finally, reach the peak of development: the ability to make TH-cam comments and feel that they were worth our time and energy.
There is no need to invent a super-intelligent God when random chance alone is sufficient.
@@david203 As Sabine Hossenfelder says, " the multiverse ideas are pseudo-science". There is zero evidence for the existence of any other universe. Even if we could discover some observable evidence for them, (which we can't), we will never know the values of the Laws and Constants which govern them. They could have the same values as this universe.
We are left with probably the only evidence we'll ever have on this subject :
One observable universe with the inherent Physical Constants.
As the atheist physicist Leonard Mlodinow recently said, " It's either a multiverse or God, i have no other answer".
In this video there is a of talking about things in terms of our conceptualisations of such things rather than what those things may be, 'in themselves'.
There seems a danger of confusing epistemology with ontology of conflating sensations with conceptualisations and both of these things with any 'objects' that may exist in external reality.
As to wether things actually exist in external reality as substancial 'objects' or alternatively as 'processes' between insubstancial forms that are themselves akin to processes is at present beyond my understanding but would seem to bear upon the contrary doctrines of materialism and idealism.
My favorite physics rule:
Nothing happens in no time.
And more happens the larger the duration. In general, of course.
So the whole immortality (of matter or information) I believe I understand the argument: that the theory is such that you should be able to effectively project back the configuration of the matter/information that constitutes a person in order to recreate the person. The issue is that does not recreate the actual sentient being in the sense that it recreates the person who can continue living. You are recreating the organism that is the person in the past, so that organism will still die when the time is projected forwards again. In other words you are not, even in theory, bring a person back to life. The best you can do is recreate that being in the past who will still not "live" in the now. ...if that makes sense at all.
The question of why we can't imagine being dead is an interesting one, and it points to the philosophy of nonduality. It points to our identification as primarily an observer rather than an object of observation.
What if what we take to be "we" (or "I") is more real than our mind or body? What if the only entity that truly exists is an Observer who can only be described as pure witnessing consciousness?
Then we would have at least an intuition that we aren't limited to this body and mind, that our existence is somehow never born and never dies.
And, in fact, that is what people who achieve self-realization perceive, directly and not through the physics of having a body. This might seem unlikely or complex, but it's actually far simpler than either physics or religion: it says that the laws of physics, and spacetime, are all real, but illusory.
It says that prior to matter and energy is consciousness, but not a mystical consciousness based in pseudoscience (like a misinterpretation of quantum mechanics), but a directly perceived awareness of just being aware. Such a pure subjective consciousness would be zero-dimensional, being located somehow at the origin not only of matter and energy, but at the origin of life, peace, happiness, creativity, and intelligence as well.
Hi Michael. I'm old enough to remember that bike race. Good to see you still in action.
I can tell you exactly how to imagine not being conscious anymore. I died once. It's just like not being born yet. That's the best way I can explain it. So, if you can think back to that, there you have it. No memory of it all. I could not be more sure, now, that you only get one life, and then you don't exist anymore. I'm actually a bit of a medical anomaly, since I was without oxygen for over 10 minutes. They were already telling my parents that I would never regain consciousness, or if I did, I would be a complete vegetable. That is really about as dead as you can get, and still be revived, I guess. I remember the moment I slipped away, very clearly. But then there was less than nothing. I just didn't exist anymore. I actually died twice, but the second time I don't consider a real death, because I didn't slip away like that. You definitely know the moment that you leave your consciousness behind. Unless you're killed really quickly, I guess.
I hope you find a place to publish your experiences, as they are of interest, probably, to many. What I'm getting from this is that dying is like returning to the pure consciousness that we were before mind and body impressed us with their conditioning.
@@david203
You cannot use the word consciousness to describe death.
you cannot remember before you were born. you also didnt "die once". Death is permanent...no "coming back"...everything else by definition is not death.
Heiight, width, and lenght do not usually change on objects. They are non changing dimensions. Time does move so that dimension seems quite different.
Why does humanity not know that everyone is on the Consciousness spectrum?
❤❤❤
Thank you Sabine for clearly stating something that brought me back to the concept of God. When scientists thought up the multiverse, it clearly seemed as outlandish as God creating everything. I was a convinced atheist for 25 years, but science kept changing until it began to appear to be as much of a belief as the multitude of religions currently available. So the mystery of life from our restricted perception of reality is "choice". Every thinking person, which includes, well everyone, has as valid a perspective of reality as anyone else.
I agree with much you say. When speaking of the Physical Constants and the fine-tuning argument, Richard Dawkins said "we approach these things with presuppositions". On the subject of a Creator, he agreed he "doesn't want there to be a God, he prefers the universe to be based on the Darwinian Principle".
When the observable evidence is laid out, our view on God/no God comes down to a choice.
People like Chopra found a safe and convenient place in Quantum Physics to put their ignorance. It is beyond our understanding, so it’s basically magic. Magic makes everything possible, so it’s a great way to tell people what they want to hear. Cyclical deliciousness.
1:10:00
YOU cease to exist whenever you are not conscious.
If YOUR unconscious material substrate is copied perfectly into a room on the moon and
YOUR original material substrate incinerated in an instant here on earth then
it would seem to YOU that YOU had been teleported to the moon and
YOU would be surprised that it happened.
The trick is to realize that YOU cease existing
when YOU are not conscious and that
what YOU are is a thought
instantiated by a very complex material process
(taking note that 'process' is an abstract notion that
depends for its existence on a material substrate to supply
all the little particles whose collective *movements* constitute the process).
Does 'movement' reside within the purview of physics,
considering the fact that 'movement' is not made of matter?
Or does 'movement' reside within the purview of philosophy?
Or does 'movement' sit on the border between the two
where it merges mind and matter?
The Greeks two and a half thousand years ago wondered about the 'The One and the Many'.
Moving on to the mid 20th century, Heidegger wrote in Being and Time about 'The Ground of Being' (the ONE) from which all entities (the MANY) emerge. Is it not true therefore that there can be no information in The ONE in and of itself as there is no differentiation until entities, (energy fields/particles), 'emerge'.
It seems that information is not a thing in and of itself. Information is about relationships between entities and seems to be entirely meaningless independent of entities?
If all the individual entities being consumed by a black hole are destroyed and become entirely undifferentiated from the Ground of Being, the question of whether or not information is destroyed appears to be moot?
The Greek and Heidegger were idiots. So what, though? So nothing. :-)
56:00 mathematics is a representation of human logic, human logic is a different story ...
I don't think that entropy/thermodynamics is the main reason we age. I think our DNA has evolved to make us age, deteriorate, and die, just as fungi have evolved to process the dead organisms on a forest floor so that they can be recycled into new life. We can see DNA getting shorter with each mitosis in the lab, and the fixed number of telomeres (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telomere) may be one mechanism for limiting the lifespan of many organisms. Dying of individuals confers an evolutionary advantage on the species, and so makes more sense than a more abstract explanation based on entropy.
Quite a twist when thinking about the idea of survival of the fittest eh?
Ever noticed like how the psyche will block negative things out subconsciously? Like.. you know how people will forget traumatic events n shit? There's Soo so much contingencies going on with our existence that we don't really get to appreciate.
I am a physicist and I will explain the reason why our scientific knowledge disproves the idea that consciousness is generated by the brain and that the origin of our mental experiences is physical/biological (in my youtube channel you can find a video with more detailed explanations). My arguments prove the existence in us of an indivisible unphysical element, which is usually called soul or spirit.
Physicalism/naturalism is based on the belief that consciousness is an emergent property of the brain, but I will discuss two arguments that prove that this hypothesis implies logical contradictions and is disproved by our scientific knowledge of the microscopic physical processes that take place in the brain. (With the word consciousness I do not refer to self-awareness, but to the property of being conscious= having a mental experiences such as sensations, emotions, thoughts, memories and even dreams).
1) All the alleged emergent properties are just simplified and approximate descriptions or subjective/arbitrary classifications of underlying physical processes or properties, which are described DIRECTLY by the fundamental laws of physics alone, without involving any emergent properties (arbitrariness/subjectivity is involved when more than one option is possible; in this case, more than one possible description). An approximate description is only an abstract idea, and no actual entity exists per se corresponding to that approximate description, simply because an actual entity is exactly what it is and not an approximation of itself. What physically exists are the underlying physical processes and not the emergent properties (=subjective classifications or approximate descriptions). This means that emergent properties do not refer to reality itself but to an arbitrary abstract concept (the approximate conceptual model of reality). Since consciousness is the precondition for the existence of concepts, approximations and arbitrariness/subjectivity, consciousness is a precondition for the existence of emergent properties.
Therefore, consciousness cannot itself be an emergent property.
The logical fallacy of materialists is that they try to explain the existence of consciousness by comparing consciousness to a concept that, if consciousness existed, a conscious mind could use to describe approximately a set of physical elements. Obviously this is a circular reasoning, since the existence of consciousness is implicitly assumed in an attempt to explain its existence.
2) An emergent property is defined as a property that is possessed by a set of elements that its individual components do not possess. The point is that every set of elements is inherently an arbitrary abstract idea which implies the arbitrary choice of determining which elements are to be included in the set; what exists objectively are only the single elements. In fact, when we define a set, it is like drawing an imaginary line that separates some elements from all the other elements; obviously this imaginary line does not exist physically, independently of our mind, and therefore any set is not a physical entity but just an abstract idea and so are all its properties. Any property attributed to the set as a whole is inherently an abstract idea that refers to another abstract idea (the set) and not to a physical entity. So any emergent property is by its very nature an arbitrary abstraction that refers to another arbitrary abstraction (the set). Since consciousness is a precondition for the existence of subjectivity/arbitrariness and abstractions, consciousness is the precondition for the existence of any emergent property, and cannot itself be an emergent property.
Both arguments 1 and 2 are sufficient to prove that every emergent property requires a consciousness from which to be conceived. Therefore, that conceiving consciousness cannot be the emergent property itself. Conclusion: consciousness cannot be an emergent property; this is true for any property attributed to the neuron, the brain and any other system that can be broken down into smaller elements.
On a fundamental material level, there is no brain, or heart, or any higher level groups or sets, but just fundamental particles interacting. Emergence itself is just a category imposed by a mind and used to establish arbitrary classifications, so the mind can't itself be explained as an emergent phenomenon.
Obviously we must distinguish the concept of "something" from the "something" to which the concept refers. For example, the concept of consciousness is not the actual consciousness; the actual consciousness exists independently of the concept of consciousness since the actual consciousness is the precondition for the existence of the concept of consciousness itself. However, not all concepts refer to an actual entity and the question is whether a concept refers to an actual entity that can exist independently of consciousness or not. If a concept refers to "something" whose existence presupposes the existence of arbitrariness/subjectivity or is a property of an abstract object, such "something" is by its very nature abstract and cannot exist independently of a conscious mind, but it can only exist as an idea in a conscious mind. For example, consider the property of "beauty": beauty has an intrinsically subjective and conceptual nature and implies arbitrariness; therefore, beauty cannot exist independently of a conscious mind.
My arguments prove that emergent properties, as well as complexity, are of the same nature as beauty; they refer to something that is intrinsically subjective, abstract and arbitrary, which is sufficient to prove that consciousness cannot be an emergent property because consciousness is the precondition for the existence of any emergent property.
The "brain" doesn't objectively and physically exist as a single entity and the entity “brain” is only a conceptual model. We create the concept of the brain by arbitrarily "separating" it from everything else and by arbitrarily considering a bunch of quantum particles altogether as a whole; this separation is not done on the basis of the laws of physics, but using addictional arbitrary criteria, independent of the laws of physics. The property of being a brain, just like for example the property of being beautiiful, is just something you arbitrarily add in your mind to a bunch of quantum particles. Any set of elements is an arbitrary abstraction therefore any property attributed to the brain is an abstract idea that refers to another arbitrary abstract idea (the concept of brain).
Furthermore, brain processes consist of many parallel sequences of ordinary elementary physical processes. There is no direct connection between the separate points in the brain and such connections are just a conceptual model used to approximately describe sequences of many distinct physical processes; interpreting these sequences as a unitary process or connection is an arbitrary act and such connections exist only in our imagination and not in physical reality. Indeed, considering consciousness as a property of an entire sequence of elementary processes implies the arbitrary definition of the entire sequence; the entire sequence as a whole is an arbitrary abstract idea , and not to an actual physical entity.
For consciousness to be physical, first of all the brain as a whole (and brain processes as a whole) would have to physically exist, which means the laws of physics themselves would have to imply that the brain exists as a unitary entity and brain processes occur as a unitary process. However, this is false because according to the laws of physics, the brain is not a unitary entity but only an arbitrarily (and approximately) defined set of quantum particles involved in billions of parallel sequences of elementary physical processes occurring at separate points. This is sufficient to prove that consciousness is not physical since it is not reducible to the laws of physics, whereas brain processes are. According to the laws of physics, brain processes do not even have the prerequisites to be a possible cause of consciousness.
As discussed above, an emergent property is a concept that refers to an arbitrary abstract idea (the set) and not to an actual entity; this rule out the possibility that the emergent property can exist independently of consciousness. Conversely, if a concept refers to “something” whose existence does not imply the existence of arbitrariness or abstract ideas, then such “something” might exist independently of consciousness. An example of such a concept is the concept of “indivisible entity”. Contrary to emergent properties, the concept of indivisible entity refers to something that might exist independently of the concept itself and independently of our consciousness.
My arguments prove that the hypothesis that consciousness is an emergent property implies a logical fallacy and an hypothesis that contains a logical contradiction is certainly wrong.
Consciousness cannot be an emergent property whatsoever because any set of elements is a subjective abstraction; since only indivisible elements may exist objectively and independently of consciousness, consciousness can exist only as a property of an indivisible element. Furthermore, this indivisible entity must interact globally with brain processes because we know that there is a correlation between brain processes and consciousness. This indivisible entity is not physical, since according to the laws of physics, there is no physical entity with such properties; therefore this indivisible entity corresponds to what is traditionally called soul or spirit. The soul is the missing element that interprets globally the distinct elementary physical processes occurring at separate points in the brain as a unified mental experience. Marco Biagini
Proof indeed..Don't you see it? Another lone genius. A fine example of what Sabine talked about!
This looked so interesting, but why, oh why, did it have to be so damn LONG? Please learn how to explain your insights BRIEFLY, so others can benefit.
Great to see Sabine's new book discussed, btw "Gospel of Judas" got a huge media blitz back in 2006 it's amazing that anyone managed to miss that!
How does Sabine define what is and isn't science if not whether something is "Testable"? What other criteria is there? Her personal opinion on whether she does or doesn't like the hypothesis?
Your comment lacks context.
@@david203 It's a youtube comment, not a dissertation bud
FYI
BN ebooks cannot be read on a Kindle.
Ordinarily this would have been a deal-breaker, but I purchased your book anyway.
Note that the human organism's onboard, sensory-environment mapping computer uses the current state of its onboard map(s) as both 'map' of 'as is', and as its 'blueprint' for its 'to be' states (see "Turing machine") -- i.e. as its 'program(s)' to 'instruct' its subsequent sensory environment mapping/'interacting' ['sensory input'-conditional decision] [re]actions.
As for compelling evidence (if not "proof") that _what_ we humans transmit (or "communicate") to each other with our language is [a 'facsimile' of] our 'on-board' sensory-environmental (se-) maps, and that our internal (neurological) se-maps function as our brain's [if…then…] conditional response "program(s)": I am confident that every reader of this 'meme' will be familiar with the concept of a "lie". When we humans "lie" to each other, we are using our language to transmit a false map in the guise of a "true", i.e. ["in good faith"-] accurate and [hopefully] reliable, map to one or more of our fellow human beings for the purpose of manipulating (or "programming") their subsequent decisions and behavior in a way that is primarily in our own, rather than their own best interest. Exactly the same result would be achieved if we presented a deliberately inaccurate roadmap to a traveler who asked us for directions.
Note that "the scientific method" has proven to be our species' most effective, accurate, and self-improving (sensory and "scientific technology enhanced"-sensory) environment mapping technique/technology/algorithm so far devised. Why is that? (Teach your children. Explain why "it works out that way" to your fellow citizens. Drop the affectatious "Scientific Truth" misnomer. Grok "scientific" methodically reproducibly demonstrable and testable "sensory (and equally 'clearly documented and understandable scientific and engineering technology enhanced'-sensory) observable evidence", verified [and re-verified, and IV&V re-verifiable, etc., etc.] against "the territory" itself (to the extent, given the inherent limitations of our sensory apparatus, and the intriguing implications of quantum mechanics, that we can consistently ascertain the existence and nature thereof as such.) For example, the 'category name' in the scientific nomenclature to indicate a "scientific evidence"- supported linguistically encoded map is "theory". And note that, like any other 'map', the scientific paradigm implicitly and explicitly recognizes a "scientific theory" as inherently 'provisional', pending the unambiguous discovery of consistently verifiable sensory observational evidence to the contrary.
We ("human civilization") are [i.e. hopefully will soon recognize ourselves as] an intelligent, self-aware, self-designing, and self-improving, information processing I/O circuit -- a.k.a. a "[human societal] network" (HSN). Take _particular_ note of the word "we" in that statement (because, in addition to the conventional "network" definitive reasons, "we" is "quantized" - I'll explain later, or you can go ahead and deduce the physical, logical, and phenomenological significance of that for yourself, based on the nature of "the speed of light" [Hint, "connect the dots", if you will]. Note that, as a self-organizing, 'auto-catalytically' self-sustaining network of 'specialized' living 'individuals', this HSN will come to recognize itself as an intelligently self-aware [by means and in terms of its "popularly"/"culturally" shared 'se-map' of itself as such (serving as its 'DNA', if you will] "super-organism". If we keep this in mind, and operate accordingly, our potential as such might be virtually limitless.
Our new [or hopefully very-soon-to-be] 'Constitutional Bill of Fundamental Human Rights', as the official minimum, and minimal (sufficient to ensure one's own, and likewise the "individual integrity" of one's fellow human beings) civic code of ethics for the individual citizen, and for all organizations thereof (civic, private, corporate, and government), and "the law of the land", is [i.e. hopefully very soon will be] our foundational self-organizing network (SON) protocol and network operating system (NOS).
Note that, as if by 'providence', and unlike most other species, we humans have been 'blessed' (if you will) with the ability to produce our offspring incrementally - one at a time - thereby enabling us to intelligently control and manage our population with both arithmetic precision and without violating the Fundamental Human Rights of a single individual, in order to precisely balance the individual's Right to a "humane" and "optimum" environment (whatever, as a scientifically-informed democracy, we decide that should be) for the health and happiness, and 'se-environment mapping ["intelligence"] developmental potential' (e.g. one that is biodiversity-rich, instead of a "bacterial lifestyle"-grade monoculture) of the individual human being, and for the sustainability and extraterrestrial advancement and survival potential of our species,
with the right of competent (I recommend we scientifically and democratically define) citizens to bear and support at least one offspring -- the well-being of the child being the primary consideration.
So, Thank You for this video. (And until this 'blueprint' is realized -- 'Careful with those maps, Eugene'.)
P.S. "Information": A specific pattern of momentum 'pulses' (waves) as input to a particulate mass object (PMO) I/O device, which 'reroutes' that input (maps it to) a correspondingly specific output pattern and trajectory of momentum "pushes", and/or stores [a portion of] it as a reconfiguration of its internal circuitry/structure/'point-radial momentum' ("mass")'.
RE Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle: regarding the inherent 'ambiguity' between 'the motion through space over time' of a "spatially extended (i.e. "mass">0) quantum particle" and the presumed specific "point" position of presumed 'fixed' spatially extended 'surface' of such a presumed 'hard particle' at a given duration=0 "instant" in/of "time". It has to do with the fact that "mass", i.e. [the 'manifestation' of] "spatial extension" at every [self-relative] "size scale", is fundamentally comprised of "[self-relative] motion" [a.k.a. "acceleration"/"push"/"momentum" - as in point-radial fluid vortexual 'acceleration-flow' of the otherwise 'scale-uniform superfluid medium' (SUM) [that Einstein 'categorized' as "spacetime"] -- i.e. through/as "space" over/as "time" -- and simply does not exist (is not "physically[/phenomenologically] manifested') as such at a single "instant" (a [mathematical limit] 'point' on the clock, of interval duration = 0) of time. (Even a "snapshot" photograph requires the aperture to remain open for a non-zero duration of time). And since "mass" particles are also "waves" (propagating point-radially with respect to the "EMR" waves they 'encounter' in their own 'inertial reference frame'), we can model the problem as follows: It's easier to determine the 'spatial extension/size/location' "over time" of a large cluster of ping-pong balls (wavefronts) by bouncing a single ping-pong ball [moving in a different (i.e. 'orthogonal' as opposed to 'parallel'/"the same" - since "photons" don't overtake each other) direction] off of it [at] several [different] times than using the same method to identify the spatial extension/'location over time' of another' single ping-pong ball (wavefront of [nearly] the same wavelength) over time. ----- i.e. the interaction of the waves results in the phenomenological "standing" Fourier waveform that we call our "sensory awareness" (and our other internal "consciousness" activity). And note that the only function -- and "meaning" -- of the _[self-]relative_ "size", or "scale", of the component waves that additively constitute such a waveform is in the '[self-] engineering' (if you will) of its structure.
FULL DISCLOSURE: Yes, this _is_ "just another" linguistically encoded "mind program" -- analogous in this respect to each and every one of the countless other such linguistically encoded and transmitted "worldviews" [societal network coordinating 'shared se-maps'] contrived by our species since we evolved and began using our "language" to encode and share our personal 'onboard neurological maps' of our 'sensory-(and /or 'se-simulator'-generated)-experiential environment("s") with our fellow humans -- the only distinguishing innovation being the author's primary engineering purpose for _this_ "linguistically-encoded mind program" (or 'se-map') is not 'simply' to "program your mind" (or "simply provide you with a map of your environment"), but to "program your mind with an enhanced ability to program itself".
Anyway, that's [my abbreviated linguistic encoding of] _my_ map. What's yours? [Note that, and consider why, I'm genuinely interested in, and "tolerant" thereof.]
See also "What is a Worldview" (th-cam.com/video/AVAmY1HvExI/w-d-xo.html)
Please 'decipher' and make 'beneficent use' of this to the maximum extent you are able. Thanks again.
This posting hurts my head--at least the small part I could tolerate reading. Is there an actual point here?
"When we are saying "only God knows," we are saying, no one knows." - Christopher Hitchens -
The people who are saying "only god knows" are usually the people who didn't pay attention in high school science class.
Isn't Michael's last question taken from "a hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy"?
My undergraduate major was Physics, and I dig F=ma=GMm/r^2 and E=mv^2=mc^2 and it has its place in predicting the outcome of measurements and the building of things. I love the mystery of the single electron whose wave nature manifests itself when "it" passes through two slits and "throws a dice" (when "it" emerges beyond the slits) to determine whether it should avoid going to a place of wave destructive interference and go instead to a place of constructive interference, but the idea that a photon or an electron is a "real" thing that is both a wave and a particle is (beg your pardon) absurd. The idea that conscious awareness is just a spectator in a deterministic universe - like a mouse trap that has some "spiritual" aspect that "wants" to catch a mouse and snaps. Everything we do is completely controlled by elector-chemical processes and "forces". We "think" we have a choice in taking the blue capsule or the red capsule, but the choice is totally the result of electrons and protons and the forces they foster. Whether reality is deterministic or not (under the principal of "uncertainty" where the micro world "plays" with dice to determine the future) "we" are merely spectators and have absolutely NO control over our decisions. And the material world might not even "Know" (or "care" that conscious awareness exists and history would have unfolded EXACTLY the same way if we were all "zombies" like a play without an audience. There are people who want so very much to believe that there is an afterlife where we will be reunited with out loved ones and will remember their names, in spite of the FACT that our memories are recorded totally by the way neurons are configured as we attain them and will be destroyed when our bodies turn to dust (or ashes if we choose to be cremated). They would have to believe that memories are not recorded by a material configuration but are stored in some "spiritual vault" where they can be restored to our "resurrected" body in an afterlife. It is all "Floxy Noxy" and Physicist should concentrate on making theories that have useful consequences. Neither Newton nor Einstein nor Sabine Hossenfelder know ANYTHING about he nature of reality. But I am one of Sabine's followers because I love her accent. :-) I would like to know how Sabine can explain the UAPs that can stand motionless in hurricane winds and can go from zero to Mach 1 instantly without any period of acceleration -- that must muster a G force of a thousand without any apparent means of propulsion. And move through air without a shock wave. And do weird things that highly intelligent pilots would regard as trivial "cat and mouse games" with airplanes.
It is impossible to change one's velocity without experiencing a period of acceleration: the proof is one of those equations that you just wrote and said that you "dig". If you truly understand Newton's laws of motion, then why would you ever accept pseudoscience as real instead of as fraud?
@@david203 What makes you think that I accept "pseudoscience", David?? I can't answer the question you asked because it implies that I accept pseudoscience, and I don't. Perhaps you should be more specific,in your question which came across as a "complaint"
When Sabine is talking about "knowledge" there, it's in, as I understand it, a deterministic sense. The sense that if you follow the trail of a particle backwards, you "know" where it's coming from. And if you are tracking everything in a space large enough to contain any particles it could have interacted with (i.e. if you're following it back 1 second, you'd need to track everything within 1 lightsecond, since nothing outside that boundary could interact with the particle in question), you can show what path it took over the last second, affected by everything else it interacted with. Scale this up, you've got a deterministic model of the entire universe. So yes, you, the ambulating pile of proteins and water, dies. Your subjective memories are gone. But you can back up from that dust until you "see" how it was constituted into neurons. That's the knowledge she means, the traceability of particles and energy through time.
@@michaeltorrisi7289 Such determinism works in practice only for very simple interactions. When there are many causes and effects, such as tracing the causes of a particle's trajectory backwards in time through many real-world interactions, determinism fails completely. This can be modeled easily through certain equations, such as the "logistics equation", which have a simple definition, yet for certain initial conditions give chaotic trajectories.
Similarly, in principle, the random heat motion of molecules should sometime result in a low-entropy situation where most of the molecules are located close together, resulting in greater density and pressure in one place as compared to another. In practice, even if you wait for the lifetime of the universe, you will never observer such a low-entropy situation happen for a typical number of molecules in the gaseous state.
To see such a thing happening, you have to go all the way down to just a few molecules, which takes a great deal of energy to achieve in a lab setting, and never occurs in nature.
@David Spector Perhaps I did a poor job of laying out what I'm saying. Or perhaps I'm misunderstanding what you're saying. So to clarify, what I'm getting from you is that because in practice, it is impossible for us to find a space where we can track the disposition of all matter and energy (for a variety of reasons, like the difficulty of bringing the sum of matter and energy in a space to a low enough amount to track, the Uncertainty Principle, etc.) that determinism cannot exist. If that is what you're saying, my point is that it's not about what humans can perfectly describe, but what is. For example, we cannot map out every digit of pi, since it's an infinite non-repeating string. That failure doesn't mean that pi doesn't have an exact value, just that we don't have the means to map it. Not having the means to map it doesn't make it untrue or even unprovable.
From a theoretical standpoint, a deterministic system means that everything in the system adheres to static laws (and by static, I mean lacking true randomness as a non-random dynamic law can be expressed as a more complex static law). If there exist laws of physics that describe how things act and interact (whether we can describe those laws or not), then definitionally, the system is deterministic and a sufficient computational device COULD, again theoretically, describe the disposition of any particle at any time forward or backward.
I think there IS a plausible argument against physical determinism in quantum physics, because of the whole probability field thing. There may be actual, true randomness in the universe and THAT would break determinism. Something cannot be both random and deterministic. So personally, I'm up in the air on determinism, although since physics seems to work at scale, I tend to lean towards determinism.
There really isn't much debate among non-philosophers as to what constitutes free will. The concept can be summarized as follows: "Jones is free with respect to action X if it is within Jones' power to do X or not to do X; no antecedent factors determine that he either will, or will not, do X." There has been quite a bit of debate about this definition among philosophers, because they realize that certain problems can't be solved when using it, but the definition given here is nevertheless the one which most closely captures our intuitions about what it means to say that an action was performed freely.
Thanks for pointing out that philosophy has been bullshit since 500BC. ;-)
I understand just from watching these conversations!!!
You understand everything better just from this video? Amazing.
I will definitely read her book.
No free will doesn't necessarily mean every thing is predetermined. The universe is just happening, being itself. Just saying.
exactly because predetermination mean in a way causality. what happened in the past determinate the future but past and future doesn't exist only now exists and the funny think is that we can never prove it.
Huh?
34:30 could information from another person get added to another person or persons as the info is getting reformed
You mean like a fly and a person merging in the movie The Fly? That's a movie, friend. Just a movie.
Very good show
Sorry but why does Michael keep cutting Sabine off when she is talking are they having a delayed video or audio issues?
Probably just a bad habit.
Loved the conversation, going to buy her book. The video editing caused some overlap in speech and at times seemed like you were each responding to a different question.
This was slightly annoying yes
Good video editing is not so easy to do. Even finding a good video editor program is difficult.
Great show Mike you breathe life into an otherwise flat field of numbers and more numbers…
I suggest that the main difference between postmodernist mumbo-jumbo and a scientist using technical language is that you can quiz the scientist and present the material in a simpler way (which Sabine does really well). You can't do the same with post-modernism.
And by 'post-modernism' you simply mean pseudoscience presented by the under-educated?
If this Mem-self could be created, it would lack the emulator (your physical system) to get anywhere close to a person that could be mistaken for you. If that Mem-self were loaded into a different emulator, it would not be you. Over the course of a lifetime, concepts, biases, and such change. To complicate this, your mem-self in a totally unique physical, emotional, or community environment would behave differently. What would be the point of all this?
38:18 - Well, these 2 have never heard of Dr Jim Tucker and Ian Stevenson and their fantastic research on children who recall past lives. Food for thought if you ask me.
and how do you know these past lives aren't just memories of their ancestors hard coded into their DNA and they actually vision what happened in the past from the perspective of them??
@@anestos2180 How can it be memories of their ancestors hard coded into their DNA when the people in the past lives were NOT their ancestors. They are proved to be completely different people who lived in different areas.
@@anestos2180 Of course reincarnation is not proved by science. It is still under investigation. But the leader in the field Dr Jim Tucker who has thousands of documented cases in his database says that they have enough evidence to make the statement that "at least some people seem to reincarnate". You should watch his talks on TH-cam. It's fascinating stuff.
They study this phenomena using the scientific method. It's not pseudo-science.
Children have vivid imaginations, especially when encouraged by researchers. So what? That isn't evidence, it's imagination.
@@david203 You obviously have not read research on reincarnation. I recommend you to first read just one book by Jim Tucker. He is a scientist. So it's not pseudo-science.
A reality in time has it's state at a point in time and is different at another point in time. Only your reality at a point in time can encounter other realities at that point in time if you happen to be at the same location. Reality can't be moved in time without changing it's stat. There is no beginning or end in time, just dispersed points in time. Our living state begins at the birth point in time and terminates at the death point in time. Beyond those points we have a different state. Change of state is unidirectional in time. However, there doesn't seem to be a point before there was no change. Perhaps the limitation is with our perception.
Huh? Are you under the impression that you write with meaning?
@@david203 AH?
In Hindu Vedic tradition, they had a set process of communicating with their ancestors or with their loved ones who are dead, which is called “ Pitru Paksha” or “ Shraadh.” It is hoped that when people die, they will travel to the land of their ancestors, stay there and return. They eventually get a new body and return.
Shraddha means "belief", and is in some ways the opposite of science. Instead of improving with time, shraddha becomes increasingly stagnant and incorrect. The Vedic tradition has given us a great pair of related philosophies, yoga and advaita vedanta, which can be validated in our own experience, but it has also degenerated into the Hindu worship of gods, belief in reincarnation, and mystical ritual, none of which is based on evidence or verifiable truth.
Question - Are Our Lives Predestined or Not?
: This is not a personal problem, it is a philosophical question. Our lives are both predestined and they are not. Both yes and no. And both answers are true for all questions about life. In a way, everything is predetermined. Whatever is physical in you, material, whatever is mental, is predetermined. But something in you constantly remains undetermined, unpredictable. That something is your consciousness.
If you are identified with your body and your material existence, in the same proportion you are determined by cause and effect. Then you are a machine. But if you are not identified with your material existence, with either body or mind - if you can feel yourself as something separate, different, above and transcendent to body-mind - then that transcending consciousness is not predetermined. It is spontaneous, free.
Consciousness means freedom; matter means slavery. So it depends on how you define yourself. If you say, ”I am only the body,” then everything about you is completely determined. A person who says that man is only the body cannot say that man is not predetermined. Ordinarily, persons who do not believe in such a thing as consciousness also do not believe in predetermination.
Persons who are religious and believe in consciousness ordinarily believe in predetermination. So what I am saying may look very contradictory. But still, it is the case. A person who has known consciousness has known freedom. So only a spiritual person can say there is no determination at all. That realization comes only when you are completely unidentified with the body. If you feel that you are just a material existence, then no freedom is possible.
With matter, no freedom is possible. Matter means that which cannot be free. It must flow in the chain of cause and effect. Once someone has achieved consciousness, enlightenment, he is completely out of the realm of cause and effect. He becomes absolutely unpredictable. You cannot say anything about him. He begins to live each moment; his existence becomes atomic.
Your existence is a river-like chain in which every step is determined by the past. Your future is not really future; it is just a by-product of the past. It is only the past determining, shaping, formulating and conditioning your future. That is why your future is predictable.
Skinner says that man is as predictable as anything else. The only difficulty is that we have not yet devised the means to know his total past. The moment we can know his past, we can predict everything about him. Based upon the people he has worked with, Skinner is right, because they are all ultimately predictable. He has experimented with hundreds of people and he has found that they are all mechanical beings, that nothing exists within them that can be called freedom.
But his study is limited. No Buddha has come to his laboratory to be experimented upon. If even one person is free, if even one person is not mechanical, not predictable, Skinner’s whole theory falls. If one person in the whole history of mankind is free and unpredictable, then man is potentially free and unpredictable. The whole possibility of freedom depends on whether you emphasize your body or your consciousness.
If you are just an outward flow of life, then everything is determined. Or are you something inner also? Do not give any preformulated answer. Do not say, ”I am the soul.” If you feel
there is nothing inside you, then be honest about it. This honesty will be the first step toward the inner freedom of consciousness. If you go deeply inside, you will feel that everything is just part of the outside. Your body has come from without, your thoughts have come from without, even your self has been given to you by others.
That is why you are so fearful of the opinion of others - because they are completely in control of your self. They can change their opinion of you at any moment. Your self, your body, your thoughts are given to you by others, so what is inside? You are layers and layers of outside accumulation. If you are identified with this personality of yours that comes from others, then everything is determined.
Become aware of everything that comes from the outside and become non-identified with it. Then a moment will come when the outside falls completely. You will be in a vacuum. This vacuum is the passage between the outside and the inside, the door. We are so afraid of the vacuum, so afraid of being empty that we cling to the outside accumulation. One has to be courageous enough to disidentify with the accumulation and to remain in the vacuum. If you are not courageous enough, you will go out and cling to something, and be filled with it.
But this moment of being in the vacuum is meditation. If you are courageous enough, if you can remain in this moment, soon your whole being will automatically turn inward. When there is nothing to be attached to from the outside, your being turns inward.
Then you know for the first time that you are something that transcends everything you have been thinking yourself to be. Now you are something different from becoming; you are being. This being is free; nothing can determine it. It is absolute freedom. No chain of cause and effect is possible.
- Your actions are related to past actions. A created a situation for B to become possible; B creates a situation in which C flowers. Your acts are connected to past acts and this goes back to the beginningless beginning and on to the endless end. Not only do your own acts determine you, but your father’s and mother’s acts also have a continuity with yours. Your society, your history, all that has happened before, is somehow related to your present act. The whole history has come to flower in you.
Everything that has ever happened is connected with your act, so your act is obviously determined. It is such a minute part of the whole picture. History is such a vital living force and your individual act is such a small part of it. Marx said, ”It is not consciousness that determines the conditions of society. It is society and its conditions that determines consciousness. It is not that great men create great societies.
It is great societies that create great men.” And he is right in a way, because you are not the originator of your actions. The whole history has determined them. You are just carrying them out. The whole evolutionary process has gone into the making of your biological cells. These cells in you can then become part of another person. You may think that you are the father, but you have just been a stage on which the whole biological evolution has acted and has forced you to act. The act of procreation is so forceful because it is beyond you; it is the whole evolutionary process working through you.
This is one way in which acts happen in relation to other past acts. But when a person becomes enlightened, a new phenomenon begins to happen. Acts are no longer connected with past acts. Any act, now, is connected only with his consciousness. It comes from his consciousness not from the past. That is why an enlightened person cannot be predicted.
Habits are mechanical; they repeat themselves. The more you repeat something, the more efficient you become. Efficiency means that now consciousness is no longer needed. If a person is an efficient typist it means that no effort is needed; typing can be done unconsciously. Even if he is thinking about something else the typing continues. The body is typing; the man is not needed. Efficiency means that the thing is so certain that no effort is possible.
With freedom, effort is always possible. A machine cannot make errors. To err, one has to be conscious. So your acts have a chain relationship with your previous acts. They are determined. Your childhood determines your youth; your youth determines your old age. Your birth determines your death; everything is determined. Buddha used to say, ”Provide the cause, and the effect will be there.” This is the world of cause and effect in which everything is determined.
If you act with total consciousness, an altogether different situation exists. Then everything is moment to moment. Consciousness is a flow; it is not static. It is life itself, so it changes. It is alive. It goes on expanding; it goes on becoming new, fresh, young. Then, your acts will be spontaneous.
The more alive you are, the less repetitive. Only a dead man can be consistent. Living is
inconsistency; life is freedom. Freedom cannot be consistent. Consistent with what? You can
be consistent only with the past. An enlightened person is consistent only in his consciousness; he is never consistent with his past. He is totally in the act. Nothing is left behind; nothing is left out. The next moment the act is finished and his consciousness is fresh again. Consciousness will be there whenever any situation arises, but each act will be made in complete freedom, as if it is the first time that this man has been in this particular situation.
That is why I answered both yes and no to your question. It depends on you, whether you are consciousness, or whether you are an accumulation, a bodily existence. Religion gives freedom because religion gives consciousness. The more science knows about matter, the more the world will be enslaved. The whole phenomenon of matter is of cause and effect: if you know that given this, that happens - then everything can be determined"
Existence from nothing is like asking, "where was I before conception?' Its impossible to image what life was like before you (I) existed. Consciousness has a built-in fail safe which "protects" us from knowing nothing, i.e, the void, blackness, outer darkness, etc. Therefore "nothing" does not exist from a conscious or non-conscious point of view.
You clearly have never been under partial narcosis. The "void" is perfectly real if you shut down the higher brain functions. It's also kind of fun. ;-)
The whole "nothing" thing is a non-argument. It's an argument of semantics. In terms of the creation of the universe it's not about describing nothing as a void or empty space because this is describing something which requires a receptacle of some sort: an empty box in which the space resides. So this is not describing an absence of something. The best word I feel can be used to describe the pre-creation state would be "eternity" avoiding using the word to describe infinite time, forwards or backward. You have an eternal environment from which the universe was born or created. Yes, this is irking toward some religious context (I am Christian so I have no problem with this), but I'm using the word "eternity" to distinguish between a vessel in which time occurs, which is our universe, and one in which time (or any parameter of this universe) is absent.
For sure get her book. She's great.
Free Will is not a granted state of being in the Universe. It is potential connected to the cognitive striving effort to understand True Goodness and to Seek Truth. Please see my book: Free Will is an Activity (Michael A. Perez).
But you have no Grand Theory of Everything? And no corrections to Einstein? Just a definition of free will?
She's awesome !!!!!
Configurations can be destroyed. Therefore, they, as they were, cannot be retieved.
Parallel universes at an Engineering Company. A Co. has two foremost engineers vying for different
models, but the Board of Directors can only select one. Engineer A
wants a blue wire with accompanying hardware which differs from B's
model which uses a red wire and other hardware. In two days the Board
of Directors must decide on which model to fund, by taking a vote But
the very next day one of the Board members is talking to a
neighbor, who sees the Board member sneeze twice. The neighbor thinks
to herself, "If the Board member sneezes a third time, I'll recommend
a certain remedy and that the Member should stay home. and rest In
parallel universe #1, the Member doesn't sneeze, doesn't stay home,
and votes for the engineer's model with the blue wire. In parallel
universe #2, the Board Member sneezes, and with the recommendation of
the neighbor, stays home. The result is that the Board votes for the
engineer promoting the red wire... Wrong choice! The client was
displeased with the model, crashing the Co. due to lack of funds. Did
the neighbor cause this?
Question: How much energy is involved in the neighbor's thought to
intervene on behalf of the Board member? Did a single fleeting
thought disconnected from the Co. sink it? Was she a spy who
deliberately did this, paid by an enemy of the Co?
iPhone photography incorporates a concept called the Live Picture, where the camera actually captures a very short video set of frames. If you could capture all the information from the universe that described a moment in the existence of a life, does that mean you could recreate the life? I don’t see a strong tie between the Christian concept of a soul that exists beyond the mortal life, and the physicist’s definition of the information available post Morten.
Information cannot describe consciousness, so don't worry about it.