A Negative Hippopotamus
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ต.ค. 2012
- This is Part I of an interview about the "Philosophy of Nothing" with Stephen Mumford, a Professor of Metaphysics at the University of Nottingham.
These PhilosophyFile videos are created by Brady Haran working with philosophers at the University of Nottingham.
A run-down of Brady's channels:
periodicvideos.blogspot.co.uk/...
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Still waiting. I want PhilosophyFile back !
Hi everyone - I've seen your comments about the missing "Part II"
Since this was filmed, PhilosophyFile went on a long hiatus and I apologise.
We are now talking about bringing it back to life. Fingers crossed, as the are fun films to make.
In the interim I have suffered a nasty (and multiple) hard drive failure, so I will need to dig around to find the original interview.... But rest assured I have NOT forgotten it.
Yes please!
It has been two years. what happened ?
He has forgotten it
How can we know that there isn't a part 2? It's so hard to prove a negative. The search could go on for years!
...
man where's the second part of negative hippo??? been a year already..
now, the REAL question here is: is four years without videos to be interpreted as this channel having the negative property of being video free? and, therefore, what makes this channel video-free? is it negative videos? and if so, can we watch them?
I have been waiting for part 2 for an eternity!
"All existing hippopotami are not in this room."
Glad these vids are back!
Still no part two? You can't leave us hanging like this.
I hope you'll bring this stuff back at some point. Well, I do know you work like a machine, and produce a lot of other content, so it's very understandable for you to take a long hiatus from this. All that being said, I love philosophy.
Please bring back to life this channel!
5:29 "high degree of confidence" is key. It's very interesting to philosophize about "absolutes", but in the actual world, having a "high degree of confidence" is usually more than enough to live a reasonably good life, finding food, building skyscrapers, and rocketing past Alpha Centauri.
This channel needs more videos!
I've been waiting for the second part of this vid for god knows how long :(
so interesting! thanks brady and thanks professor.
This is philosophy and grammar school level.
I can hardly imagine that Bertrand Russel would have deducted a "negative" from the inability to prove an unobservable property.
I love listening to this stuff.
I love this stuff! Excellent video.
When is part II coming out. Love this channel, more please :)
No part 2?
What if there is a Hippopotamus in one of those books on the shelf?
I have only just discovered this channel and it would be nice to have some more philosophy please :)
Where is part 2??
Feel like this was just the philosophical explanation between discrete and continuous variables
Note: I just thought of this while watching this video, no idea if it is an accepted philosophical idea or if there is some flaw in my thinking.
It seems true that the second part does not exist. Though I've yet to find a negative Part 2.
Sorry this reply is late getting back to you.
What premises are you talking about? The premises that religions are based on?
where is part 2?
its been such a long time!
when the second part of this interview will be uploaded? Please, i'm quite interested on it!
Please Brady, I love Numberphile but it would be great if you could make other videos for channels such as PhilosophyFile!
When is the next one coming out Brady don't tell me you've forgotten about this channel ??
I listen to this every night before I sleep. His voice is so calm and soothing
Re infinite positive properties:
How?
A finite space has a finite bekenstein bound, from my layperson understanding of the concept that means there's also a finite upper bound on how much information it takes to completely describe everything within that space? And once you've completely described something can you really go on adding properties to the list and count them as new?
Unless I'm missing something (which is probable I guess) the list might be huge but has to be finite.
Brady it's been 2 whole years! Bring out the second part to this video already!!
charlichigo comment above (or somewhere,depending on how TH-cam arrange comments these days)
This comment is still true.
Not that this would resolve the issue of infinity brought up, but it seems as though the "positive" and "negative" properties would involve different types of infinities (like the difference between countable and uncountable). I mean, for each "attribute," like height, there seems to be one positive property I possess, but infinitely many negative properties, so, although there are infinitely many attribute like height, each one might have an associated infinity of negative properties.
I love the fact that Brady pans out at 3:00 to ensure us that there is not a hippo in the room lol
But if you just define a property as a characteristic a thing has (and not something it doesn't have), surely the debate about whether negative properties are things disintegrates before your very eyes?
A reasonably easy way to translate, "there is no hippo in the room" can be seen by expanding the sentence into, "there is no thing/object which is a hippo in the room". This suggests the following conditional structure: "For any object it is not the case that (it is a hippo and it is in the room)" If there are no hippos, whatsoever this is trivially true because the first conjunct fails (it is thus made true by all the objects in the world none of which have the property of being a hippo); If there are hippos they make the claim true since none of them have the property of being in the room.
When does Part 2 come? Please, this is a bad cliffhanger!
Going off of what I've already said, think of two pictures. One has that very room without a hippo, and the other is that very same room with a hippo. Both are possibilities within space. Only one is true at one time, according to the law of excluded middle. What do you think about my idea?
No more videos? :(
in what case is the "set of things u know of" identical to the "set of things"?
I subscribed to all your many of your channels!!!
do any of the books reference the idea of a hippopotamus?
I love how the camera pulls out to prove that there isn't a hippo in the room.
Hey, Brady, you should totally do a video on Kurt Gödel's Second Incompleteness theorem, it relates to some of the side conversation that has taken place here, and it mind blowing as well :D
Please bring this channel back
wasn't this uploaded somewhere else? ive definitely seen this before
We want more!
"Its also true that there is not a hippopotamus in this room"
*Checks for hippos*
But we know dark matter exists( and is present everywhere) since it influences greatly our universe in observable ways. But when you try to search for it in a finite space, although it should be present around us as normal matter is, we just can't detect it. If you can't detect it, but for other (good)reasons strongly believe that it should be there, does it exist or not?
This is great, now my right brain won't feel so left out.
In that room there are the wavefunctions of every particle belonging to every hippopotamus, so you could say there is some, just a little bit, of hippopotamus in the room. So a cursory inspection stating otherwise would be false, showing that it is indeed difficult to prove the absolute truth of a negative statement.
Which object makes true "that chair is blue"?
what makes the negative property true are the locations of all hippopotami in existence
please please upload part 2
Part 2 of this video is not on TH-cam.
you guys need to make more videos.
Any word on part 2?
What about making distinctions between reality and existence? The reality of a negative property doesn't seem to me to necessarily entail some existence. Can we have Prof. Mumford comment?
WTF Brady, I want more videos on this channel!
But isn't zero a potential property as well? Would it lay in the specificity of the claim for it to be true or false? For instance, it wouldn't necessarily be true that there are no hippos in that room because there could be a small figurine in his desk. But if he said that there are zero living adult hippos in that room we could be completely certain that this were true.
Am I missing something?
One thing that may be added to the comment regarding infinite properties is the different sizes of infinity. You MAY have infinite positive properties as is posited but if so you have at least infinity x infinity negative properties so, depending on the exact wording the original definition could still stand
this makes something simple into the most complicated discussion ever.
No part 2... :(
Thank Numberfile. Subscribed!
But how do you know that though? How do you know the identity of every single object in the room, including those that are undetectable, like the intangible, unknowable hippopotamus.
What about the statement "there is only one chair in the room"? Does that fall under the same scrutiny?
Isn't one half of the statement that you're not in the room that has everything in it while the other half is the properties of the room that separate it from the one with everything in it? Though we lazily say it all at once.
LOVED IT
There seems to be a negative second part of this video.
Why are there no new videos? WHY? NOOO!!!
where is the part two?
I feel like this issue is much more simply handled via something like set theory. You can establish guidelines for what is in the room, create the set of all items that satisfy those guidelines, and then use basic set theory to make logical statements as to whether something exists within the set. With regards to proving a negative in that "you haven't looked hard enough" that comes down to the robustness of the initial guidelines, allowing you to establish a confidence interval for your search.
I'm wondering. Shouldn't the hypothetical hippopotamus be pluralized?
If there is a singular non existent hippopotamus in said room, by extension there is an infinite number of non-existent hippopotamuses.
Though perhaps one should use the term hippopotami since it can be either the plural or singular form of the noun.
Holy shit Brady. This is just mind bending. Unbelievably, I need to go back to Numberphile or Sixty Symbols and think about some number theory or quantum phenomena to ease the pressure on my brain that this video just created.
And where is part 2 ????
Yay more Philosofile!!!
Sherlock Holmes : John, did you noticed what the dog was doing?
Watson: What!? Sherlock, come off it. The dog was doing Nothing.
Sherlock: Precisely.
At the end Stephen says he can say with a high degree of confidence that there is a chair in the room (possibly alluding to Descartes' Cogito), but can't say it a certainty. Surely the same is true of the absence of the hippopotamus, if you define your terms-
The room is the region enclosed by the four walls, floor and ceiling etc
A hippopotamus is a large mammal exceeding 1 square foot in volume, visible to the human eye at a given wavelength, can be detected by touch etc.
We demand a property of more videos!
Dear Stephen Mumford, Professor of Metaphysics at the University of Nottingham. I don't know if you'll see this, however to that X isn't the case , is not to make it a negative property at all. It is merely stating a numerical concept of Zero. Which if I may add, Professor Mumford, is undefined. So, Zero isn't negative anymore than it is positive.
In a way, to say there is not hippopotamus in the room creates a hippopotamus in the room, since our minds are in the room, and there is an image of a hippopotamus in our minds.
And just to clarify what I meant previously, if we suggest that all objects in the room being not hippopotamuses as the solution, we now have to ask what makes something a non-hippopotamus. And so we end up right where we started, and search for the property that makes an object a non-hippopotamus.
love the camera swing, just to see if there isn't a hippo somewhere
Where is part 2 Brady?
" a quality that is common to a whole class but which is not necessary to distinguish it from others in the same class"
Where is part 2?????
But what if you say 'there is a chair in the room' and find no chair, this concluding that the statement was false (as opposed to this example where there is an easily placeable chair). Surly this is the same problem as with not finding a hippo, in that there is still ambiguity?
What chair?
While I agree with your first statement, I don't think that's what it says in the video. The argumentation hinges more on the concept of 'negative' properties, which merely comes down to a semantic issue.
I.e., I'm in a room with a hippo and I'm able to observe the "hippo"-property of the room. Now the hippo walks out through the door. Does the room still have a hippo property? If not, wouldn't that mean that we're unable to say if there's a hippo in the room?
...ctd
A suggestion for Dr Mumford: go out and buy a very small ceramic hippopotamus and then place it behind one of your books in a very non-obvious way (or somewhere in your lecture hall before anyone arrives to class). Then, when you discuss this again, you can give a very similar argument to this, and when you say "but the hippo may be very small", you can pull your ceramic model out of hiding, thus visually demonstrating the point that it's hard to prove a negative with 100% certainty.
This video actually concludes that there is a certain hippopotamus in every room. The chair is actually a little bit of hippopotamus, because there is an infinite number of non-chairs corresponding to it!
listening to this guy talk is like giving my brain a massage.
How to prove there is no hippo around?
Define your finite place: The room in question. How much space is in there?
Check every existing thing in the room: Chair, shelves, books, humans, camera, other stuff, air....
Prove that none of them is a hippo: It's not a hippo because it's a chair...
How much space does chair hold? How much space do shelves hold? All of them fill all of rooms space.
There is no place where hippo could fit, therefore it's not there.
Depends what you define as the hippo.
I'm going with the common definition thank you. No "no true scotsman" BS here.
QueenSalis You didn't actually answer or define anything. I'm assuming you mean the animal? Unsure what the irrelevant 'no true scotsman' fallacy has to do with this. Even with a pre-defined set of rules, there is no way to be 100% certain. Since you cannot prove every atom in a given location is not a part of, or is not a hippo, you cannot be 100% sure. It's not a fallacy, the evidence points towards human error rather than no hippo.
Well I don't really care. I'm not here to play the definition game.
James en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hippopotamus
1. It's a mammal (which means it's multi-cellular, and not made up entirely of a single atom).
2. It's not invisible.
One can easily use those two properties of a hippo to show that there is no hippo in the room.
I thought of it this way: ANYTHING "could be" in the room, like outlines that could be colored in when something is there. Get rid of all the extra lines, just imagine the picture of the room w/ an outline for a hippo. From that thinking, lacking a hippopotamus is a true property. As anything could possibly be there, or could possibly pop up there w/o notice, saying that there is no hippopotamus is a true statement among the infinite possibilities of the "whole picture" and what it has or lacks.
He has fantastic hair. And seems so chill.
I hadn't really thought about it that way, but that's a very good point. Even a TV broadcast might claim to be live, but actually be delayed and he could have entered the room since it was recorded. I guess the only way is if you could see him out the window or something.
Isn't any description about a fictional object inherently true due to what being fictional means?
this could go on forever....
I don't find this "lack of omniscience" argument sufficient to prove that negative properties fail to exist. It would seem to me that when dealing with an issue of definition, it is necessary to create a hypothetical situation in which it is absolutely true that the hippo is not in the room, and then to argue as to whether or not this is a property of the room. But I suppose it depends on how we define a property. Would anyone offer a definition?
thanks. Now if you wanted to go into semantics, how do we know there isn't a picture of a Hippopotamus or the word Hippopotamus in one of the books on the shelf.
what I consider to be a hippopotamus and what you consider to be one could be completely different. subjective reality man.
part of this video reminded me of the old how many teeth dose a horse have dilemma, am looking forward to the other videos in the series.