For me it is Cellular Automata, and more precisely the Game of Life.
Imagine a giant Excel spreadsheet where the cells are randomly chosen to be either “alive” or “dead”. Each cell then follows a handful of simple rules.
For example, if a cell is “alive” but has less than 2 “alive” neighbors it “dies” by under-population. If the cell is “alive” and has more than three “alive” neighbors it “dies” from over-population, etc.
Then you sit back and just watch things play out. It turns out that these basic rules at the individual level lead to incredibly complex behaviors at the community level when you zoom out.
It kinda, sorta, maybe resembles… life.
There is colonization, reproduction, evolution, and sometimes even space flight!
Anarchism based on mutual respect and aid. It’s truly beautiful.
Bergsons theory of mind. I wish i understood it enough to put a tldr, but its complex and has been misunderstood.
Heres another one. Michael behe’s mousetrap. He likens cellular structure as a mousetrap, with every piece forming a necesesary part, and without any one part it ceases to function.
Back when i was a creationist christian and didnt accept evolution as fact, he was a hero. Endogenous retroviral dna put that all to rest. Except maybe not.
The counter arguments were that other structures could form over time to create the minimalist structures we see today, like using scaffolding to construct a self sustaining roman bridge or replacing the wooden base of the mousetrap with the floor. Obviously behe is mistaken.
But he claims not, that he doesnt argue that variants of mousetraps can’t exist. He argues that all exist without scaffolding. We dont see cellular structures with unnecessary parts that can be acted upon by evolution. Everything already is the end product after evolution has selected away the unnecessary parts. So how can evolution be happening the way its described? We just go between different end products. Theres no structures still with scaffolding.
This keeps me up at night. Maybe theres more to evolution that we dont know yet.
On the subject of Conway’s Game of Life, one of the YouTube videos that I always have to go back to now and then is a narrated video of the game being built from the ground up in APL. It’s so wild to see the guy start with a simple expression and the algorithm taking shape as he adds to it step by step. By the end it looks like some magical incantation lol
Emergence.
Conway’s Game Of Life blew my mind when I first saw it live. The fact that it is Turing Complete is crazy too.
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Good bot
O_O…
Dudes a genius magician that practices dark arts that make magnets look easy to understand.
I am focusing on the “blow my mind” part, rather than the “beautiful” part of your question, but I am certain many philosophically-minded people would consider the following “beautiful”.
Peter Singer’s argument in “Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972)” that you and most everyone you know are probably immoral or evil and you don’t even realize it. It really affected my ideas of how to strive to live.
Here is a good video explaining the idea in detail, worth 30m of your time.
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That’s an incredibly pessimistic way to view the world… I think it’s more accurate to say that people have the capacity for both good and evil. I’m not sure that you can say that “most everyone you know” are immoral or evil. That’s quite the claim.
Though we would also have to explore what “immoral,” and “evil” actually mean. Am I immoral for purchasing and using a cell phone made with materials that were obtained through means that destroy lives and damage ecosystems?
The modern world is far too complex and interconnected for people to avoid doing things that could be considered immoral or unethical.
That’s quite the claim.
Yes, it is, and as explained in the video the original author (and also the person explaining it) admit it is quite a claim, then proceed to demonstrate the veracity of the claim. I suggest you grab a cup of jo, settle in, and watch it. It addresses the points you bring up directly.
[EDIT: Re: Quite a Claim: Yes, and thus fitting the OP’s “mind-blowing” criteria for the thread :-)]
The very short answer to “are you immoral for purchasing a cell phone” is “probably yes”.
The proposition is not an easy one (it accepts it is extreme), but it is hard to deny when you march down the logic.
Right. And it necessarily follows from that that all humans are therefore immoral. And if that’s the case, there is no longer any utility to the term “immoral.” It becomes a pointless exercise.
You’ve committed reductio ad absurdum.
Yes, most people are probably acting immorally and they are not even aware of it.
That doesn’t mean it is a pointless exercise to identify the immoral behavior and strive to reduce or eliminate it, even if it is impossible to completely do so.
Not most people. Literally every person. Or maybe you could give me an example of a person that wouldn’t be considered immoral by your metric?
You are (deliberately?) skipping over the part of awareness.
Take for example a person who is aware that they cannot act morally when making seemingly normal, banal decisions. For example, they may be aware that when they choose to buy a shiny new cell phone when they have an older-but-still-perfectly-working model, they very likely doing something immoral. Because they are aware of the moral implications of their choice, they can choose hold-off buying a new phone for as long as possible (a morally-positive choice) and perhaps - going a step further - even using that money they would have spent on a new phone to help another person in need directly.
Most people probably don’t contemplate the moral implications of the purchase of a new phone, this is true and I accept your position this. But it is clearly not “literally every person” as you have said, since it only takes a single person with awareness to disprove your statement. I am certain at least one such person exists (even if anecdotally), so I rely on the word “most” rather than “literally every”.
Ok, but buying a cell phone isn’t the only potentially immoral choice made by people regularly, it’s just one example. Modern life is a minefield with this stuff, and I’m incapable of imagining a person in modern society who is capable of avoiding every single one of these pitfalls. Hell, it could probably be argued that even existing on this dying planet could be considered immoral or unethical. Again, maybe I’m wrong and you could think of one. Maybe some ascetic living on the street in India?
Also, I don’t really agree that awareness is even relevant. You can do immoral things without being aware that the thing you’re doing could be considered immoral. The thing itself is still immoral.
Which was kind of my point; that it’s impossible to avoid in a modern, interconnected world. I probably did a dozen immoral things before breakfast this morning.
I guess we can agree on the assumption that everybody is fundamentally egoistic and focused on their personal needs, which is necessary for the survival of the species. The fact that many many people chose to take care of total strangers every day shoes there’s more to us than basic needs satisfaction. We need each other and we need to feel appreciated, which makes us gentle, generous, and caring. “Evil” is a scarecrow for children, “immoral” a tool invented by the bourgeoisie to oppress those that scare them
I’ve watched like 10 minutes and I hate it. Peter Singer is a very controversial figure as it is, on top of that the guy in the video comes off as super condescending to me and I can’t stand watching him for longer. Me personally, I don’t think it’s “immoral” to not give money to charity. And terms like immoral or evil are usually defined by the society you live in and not some random philosopher. And I bet there are good reasons his radical ideas in “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” did not get embedded in our society yet.
I’d say that charity as it exists in a capitalist society is in itself evil, and contributing to it is no better then buying indulgences.
Charity is a way to confirm and reinforce the capitalistic oppresion of the poor by the rich. That’s why it is widely promoted by churches whose interest has always been aligned with that of the wealthy and powerful. It’s a magct trick that makes rich people look generous to the public while giving them an occasion to pretend that they are good people in a taught world
I do not take issue with anything you said (your opinion is as valid as mine) - up until your last sentence, which piqued my interest.
You seem to be implying that Mr Singer’s “radical ideas” are weak, invalid, or beneath consideration because our society hasn’t embedded them yet. I would like to respond that I think the value of a radical idea cannot, and probably should not, be measured by how well society accepts it. For example, there are a some pretty famous, radical ideas from this rabbi a couple thousand years ago that have totally failed to be embedded in our society, yet his radical ideas arguably still have significant merit. I am thinking specifically of the radical idea of kindness and peace expressed in “turning the other cheek”, an idea we, as a society, have for all intents and purposes rejected.
Otherwise, I would also like to remind you that the OP just asked for ideas that blew our minds. Mr Singer’s idea, when I heard it for the first time, blew mine and I thought it fit the brief.
The presenter focuses on argument 1 because he says the other points are “obviously correct” and therefore moral. Imo that’s flawed.
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Hunger disease etc are part of a natural cycle which controls population and ecosystem balance.
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Luxuries are of no significance is not obviously true. Our economic system means that purchasing items of “no moral significance” feeds into a system which supports livelihoods and, in a functional government, provides welfare and health care to populations.
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There are multiple areas where money could be focused instead of Oxfam etc which could be seen as moral- R&D, luxuries as per 3
(It might just be that I don’t like philosophy)
Focusing on your points:
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Controlling population - this is flawed completely, the lowest birth rates in the world are in the most affluent countries. In a lot of places it is below the replacement level of 2.1 births/woman. I think it is fine to accept the premise that hunger, disease etc are very bad things.
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This is think is much more open to attack than point 2. Luxuries are of no moral significance, in my opinion is a flawed premise because it is both a “Straw Man” and a “Rhetorical Definition”.
- It is a Straw Man argument because: it is weakening any counter point by hand waving away any possible refutation by using “Luxuries” in a pejorative way (in my opinion).
- It is a Rhetorical Definition because it is using Luxuries in an emotionally charged way (again in my opinion); it is equating that you as a person, indulging in “Luxuries” are taking a moral stand. Luxuries are not required for life and thus are immoral, when those same resources could be used to save others lives.
- My refutation: Happy people are generally more productive, having access to some luxuries increases happiness, therefore having access to luxuries increases productivity.
- This leads to: a more productive society generates more tax revenue that can be used to help others. Thus paying your fair share of tax is a moral good.
- Counterpoints: Some people will become hedonistic and focus too much on luxuries. Some people will hoard wealth and forgo their moral obligation to pay their fair share of tax.
- Supporting case: We could look for a real word example…ignoring the situation that lead to it, lets examine the productivity of North vs South Korea, the amount that each country gives to international aid etc…SK gives approx $37USD/citizen, I could not find any data on how much NK gives, we can probably assume it is very low.
- What you say here is basically a “rising tide lifts all boats” argument. This is a very valid argument, again using the North/South Korea example, SK has invested heavily in R&D and as an indirect consequence, their ability to help has vastly outstripped that of the North.
- There is another point here, it seems to me that Singer is providing a “False Dilemma”; essentially saying that there are only two choices here, we either help or don’t help. One choice is good the other evil.
- I posit that there is a middle ground, we can strive for the ability to enjoy some luxuries without devolving into hedonism, whilst still helping those in need.
In conclusion. You were correct to take issue with the presenter blindly accepting premises 2, 3 & 4. The way you tried to refute point 2 however was not great. Especially since point 2 is the only premise that we can say “is self evident”.
My points are more temporally distant then those of Singer, he is stating that helping now is better than building the ability to help much much more in the future.
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I’m also no philosopher, but I’ve a penchant for ethics.
I feel like the message is diluted a bit given how much he talks about charity in our capitalist society. The question is larger, and it takes some effort to step back and view a collectivist society as it could be.
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I didn’t actually watch the video, but I have read the original essay and I thought I’d offer a few thoughts (and criticisms) of it.
An interesting consequence of his strict utilitarianism is that it follows from it that it’s actually immoral to do anything to help issues close to home in pretty much any way if you live in the West, and maybe even in other countries as well, regardless of whether that may be by donating, volunteering, or anything else of the sort.
if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.
Because of wealth disparities between countries, your money will almost always go further somewhere else. If you live in the West, this difference can be extreme, and as a result any money sent there will be able to accomplish far more than it will for people in your own area. Since your donation to help out nearby is a donation not being made elsewhere where it can do more good, it is then to be considered immoral. A similar logic can be applied to volunteering. If when you’re volunteering you are not working to make money which you could donate to much poorer countries, it’s immoral, because your personal work to do good will never be able to equal what your money could do. In fact, your life should essentially be, to the greatest extent that doesn’t reduce the amount you can make by the harm it does to you, you constantly working. He even admits as much:
Given the present conditions in many parts of the world, however, it does follow from my argument that we ought, morally, to be working full time to relieve great suffering of the sort that occurs as a result of famine or other disasters.
He even goes as far as to say the following:
we ought to give until we reach the level of marginal utility —that is, the level at which, by giving more, I would cause as much suffering to myself or my dependents as I would relieve by my gift. This would mean, of course, that one would reduce oneself to very near the material circumstances of a Bengali refugee.
If this is the case, it has important implications for political action in its many manifestations as well. Should I be campaigning for the government to adopt policies which reduce suffering as much as possible? If implemented their effect could be massively beneficial, but I don’t think this works with the arguments he makes. My individual contribution to a political movement will never be the difference between its success and its failure, so it would seem the moral decision is for me to remain effectively apolitical.
This however strikes me as being in contradiction with this later statements:
I agree, too, that giving privately is not enough, and that we ought to be campaigning actively for entirely new standards for both public and private contributions to famine relief.
I would sympathize with someone who thought that campaigning was more important than giving oneself
Ultimately, I am led to the conclusion that following his arguments, the only moral thing to do is in fact to relentlessly pursue financial gain, as donating the money one earns is far and away the most effective use of one’s time and effort to do moral good. The engineer who could have worked for Lockheed Martin designing weapons for the US military is in fact more moral than the one who turns down the job for one that pays substantially less, since it is practically certain that whoever would take the job otherwise would not donate as generously as they do. Applied to capitalists (the class of people, not the supporters of capitalism), it seems that since giving money is the moral thing to do, and giving more money does more good, making more money is the moral thing to do, as it increases one’s capacity to do good. This seems to be borne out by his statements concerning foreign aid, which indicate that it’s not just about giving what you can in the present moment, but also considering how your actions impact your future ability to continue to do so:
Yet looking at the matter purely from the point of view of overseas aid, there must be a limit to the extent to which we should deliberately slow down our economy; for it might be the case that if we gave away, say, 40 percent of our Gross National Product, we would slow down the economy so much that in absolute terms we would be giving less than if we gave 25 percent of the much larger GNP that we would have if we limited our contribution to this smaller percentage.
I find that this ends up being quite problematic, because the ability to grow one’s own wealth is functionally unlimited. It might seem that that’s not a problem if you’re giving away all your wealth, but for it to grow so you can give more, that can’t be the case, because you need to be reinvesting it. As a result you end up with this contradiction, where your are morally obligated to increase your wealth so you can do more good, but at the same time this obligation prevents you from actually putting that wealth into doing good. You could say that the not doing good with the money means that it’s no longer moral so you have to give at some point, but the problem with that is that it’s impossible to define that point. It still remains that at any given point in time the moral thing to do is to reinvest it so that if you give it next time, more will be given. Ironically, this endless pursuit of ever greater wealth is the very same thing that creates so much suffering in the world, even if its justification is usually different, so this argumentation seems to just end up reinforcing the same ills that it hopes to address.
I do like his conclusion though, directed towards other philosophers, reminiscent of a Marx quote that I’ve always been quite fond of: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.”
Does Singer explore how the limits of one’s knowledge about the impacts of their actions might play into the decisions?
Like, I could send $5 to some overseas charity, but I don’t have a good way to know how that money is being used. Conversely, I could use it locally myself to reduce suffering in a way I can verify.
It seems to me that morally I should prioritize actions I know will reduce suffering over actions that may reduce suffering but that I cannot verify. Verification is important because immoral actors exist, so I can’t just assume that moral actions that I delegate to other actors will be carried out. Since it’s easier to have good knowledge about local actions (in particular those I execute personally), this would tend to favor local actions.
Does Singer explore how the limits of one’s knowledge about the impacts of their actions might play into the decisions?
Only very briefly, and not in a way that I think really addresses your specific example:
Admittedly, it is possible that we are in a better position to judge what needs to be done to help a person near to us than one far away, and perhaps also to provide the assistance we judge to be necessary. If this were the case, it would be a reason for helping those near to us first. This may once have been a justification for being more concerned with the poor in one’s town than with famine victims in India. Unfortunately for those who like to keep their moral responsibilities limited, instant communication and swift transportation have changed the situation. From the moral point of view, the development of the world into a “global village” has made an important, though still unrecognized, difference to our moral situation. Expert observers and supervisors, sent out by famine relief organizations or permanently stationed in famine-prone areas, can direct our aid to a refugee in Bengal almost as effectively as we could get it to someone in our own block. There would seem, therefore, to be no possible justification for discriminating on geographical grounds.
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Adjacent xkcd Https://xkcd.com/350
Alright, thanks to this comment section, I now need years of free times because it’s all so fascinating I need to learn about all this!
Symbiosis in nature….it always brings up feelings of awe and wonder for me. Especially in forests. The “wood-wide web” or “mycorrhizal network” being my latest obsession . The fact that the fungi joins the trees together through the roots to allow for exchange of nutrients, water, and chemical signals between plants. And then there’s the forest canopy, and the role it plays in keeping the forest healthy.
Trees are awesome.
The incessant idea that I get when I read about quantum physics: with no observers and nothing to interact with/measure it, was the universe itself in superposition during the Big Bang? If so, did the wave function even collapse or are we just one of the possible outcomes inside of it?
did the wave function even collapse or are we just one of the possible outcomes inside of it?
If you are asking the question, wouldn’t you be observing it, therefore the wave function most certainly did collapse?
I’m hearing the echo of Descartes in there. I think, therefore I am.
EDIT: “I ask, therefore I have observed, therefore the Universe is”.That’s the wrong interpretation of “observing”. Observation is the act of measuring the properties of an object/particle by “interacting” with it. Basically if something is not being observed (I.e completely isolated) it enters superposition until such a time that it’s measured/interacted with again. Observation has nothing to do with consciousness imo, just connection to causality in the universe at large.
We are in a simulation 😉
An observer is not required for something to exist. You are misunderstanding. In quantum physics observers affect the thing they observe. That’s it.
Never said anything about it not existing. From what I understood, a particle that’s not interacting with an outside force stays in superposition by default. The universe was supposedly a single particle at the moment of the Big Bang, thus it stands to reason that it would have been in superposition if it couldn’t interact with anything else.
If you trace back the cosmological evolution of our universe you’d get a “singularity”, that is not the same thing as being a single particle. Even the physical existence of a singular point at the beginning is not accurate. A singularity in physics is a mathematical artefact signaling the breakdown of the descriptive power of the theory you are using. The common example is the singular behaviour of the electric field around a charged particle in classical electrodynamics, the singularity is a signal that you’d need to switch to quantum electrodynamics to describe the physics close to a charged particle. Similarly with cosmology: close to the beginning we have a singularity that signals the breakdown of the descriptive power of our theories, and we need to switch. What we would switch to we call a " quantum gravity theory", but we are not yet sure what that theory is.
I see what you mean, but if this is possible, then I don’t see why not the entire universe as a whole near T≈0.
If you don’t see why it’s impossible, then you don’t understand it. You can’t just lump together all the “quantum” ideas because they sound cool.
Notice that the particles in your article were “super-chilled”. That’s the exact opposite of the early universe.
So you’re saying it’s absolutely, 100% impossible that the universe in its entirety was/is in superposition at any one point?
Evolution as a concept; not just biological. The fact that you can explain the rise of complex systems with just three things - inheritance, mutation, selection. It’s so simple, yet so powerful.
Perhaps not surprisingly it’s directly tied to what OP is talking about cellular automata.
DNA still blows my mind. Some weird simple molecules that just happen to like to link together have become the encoding of how complex biological systems are constructed. Then mash two separate sets of DNA together, add a little happenstance, and you have another new being from those three things you mentioned.
There’s something interesting in here about the persistence of legacy systems that I can’t quite put my finger on. Rest assured I will be consumed by the thought for the remainder of the day.
There are plenty things that we could talk about legacy systems from an evolutionary approach. It’s specially fun when you notice similarities between software and other (yup!) evolutionary systems.
For example. In Biology you’ll often see messy biological genetic pools, full of clearly sub-optimal alleles for a given environment, decreasing in frequency over time but never fully disappearing. They’re a lot like machines running Windows XP in 2023, it’s just that the selective pressure towards more modern Windows versions was never harsh enough to get rid of them completely.
Or leftovers in languages that work, but they don’t make synchronic sense when you look at other features of the language. Stuff like gender/case in English pronouns, Portuguese proclisis (SOV leftover from Latin in a SVO language), or Italian irregular plurals (leftovers of Latin defunct neuter gender). It’s like modern sites that still need animated .GIF support, even if .WEBM would be more consistent with the modern internet.
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The scale of the universe. It’s an incomprehensible amount of emptiness.
A fact I’ve recently enjoyed spreading around: all of humanity’s radio communications have traveled about 200 light years from Earth. The diameter of the Milky Way galaxy is ~100K light years. So (in the worst case) we’re like 0.2% of the way to even being a “blip on the radar” of any alien life within our galaxy.
all of humanity’s radio communications have traveled about 200 light years from Earth
Also interesting is that because the energy of those signals is spreading out as they move away from their point of origin they become less detectable as they travel. Most signals would fall below practical detection limits before making it halfway to the nearest star. At the extreme, the Arecibo Message, transmitted with a ridiculous ERP, will be detectable to reasonably sized receivers for tens of thousands of light years, assuming they are located along the path of the beam.
It honestly pisses me off lol. I was so into space as a youngin but as Ive gotten a better grasp of the scale and what is actually possible in physics Ive realized its a massive boondoggle. Real pretty though
I still refuse to believe that we can’t overcome the limit of the speed of light. Maybe it’s something like “warpspeed”, maybe it’s something like evolving beyond the need for a physical body, but I believe that at some (far) point in our future we will solve that problem.
Speed of light is a bit of a misnomer, its really the speed of causality; the least amount of time it can take for one thing to interact with another. It will never be possible to overcome that limit unfortunately
Nah, it’s impossible with our current understanding of the nature of the universe and it’s rules. Every time that has been true of something, humanity has eventually either solved the problem or rendered it moot. This one may just take a while.
Respectfully disagree. The math speaks for itself
How shortsighted.
You should look into the effects on causality of going faster than the speed of light. If you can send information faster than the speed of light all kinds of wacky paradoxes show their heads. I used to believe what you did, that with time and knowledge we could overcome the speed of light. But after learning more about our universe I don’t think that’s the case anymore. I enjoyed this video on the topic https://youtu.be/an0M-wcHw5A
Its shortsighted to trust math?
Highly recommend the browser game Orbity.io
I just played it, such a fun game. Not exactly what I thought it was going to be when it come to the infinity of space
thermodynamics. it sets hard physical boundary to what happens spontaneously and what can’t, how much energy you need to pump in or can recover from process, but not only that - it’s very broadly applicable, including large parts of chemistry, biology, information theory and more, like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissipative_system
Frequency hopping. It’s like hiding messages in music. Always loved that idea.
Can you explain this concept like I’m 5?i searched on YouTube but the videos look extremely technical
Frequency hopping as I understand it, is just multiple transceivers agreeing to cycle through different previously agreed upon frequencies to communicate. I don’t get the music analogy.
So if you consider that different notes of music are different frequencies of sound, each radio frequency “hopped to” would be a different note on a piano being played on either end of the signal.
From Wikipedia: “Antheil and Lamarr developed the idea of using frequency hopping: in this case using a player piano roll to randomly change the signal sent between the control center and torpedo at short bursts within a range of 88 frequencies on the spectrum (88 black and white keys are on a piano keyboard). The specific code for the sequence of frequencies would be held identically by the controlling ship and in the torpedo. This basically encrypted the signal, as it was impossible for the enemy to scan and jam all 88 frequencies because this would have required too much power. Antheil would control the frequency-hopping sequence using a player-piano mechanism, which he had earlier used to score his Ballet Mécanique.”
aaaand there is the missing part of my understanding about jamming and frequency hopping radios! Thanks
