What is a beautiful concept or idea that continues to blow your mind?

aCosmicWave@lemm.ee to Asklemmy@lemmy.ml – 336 points –

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!

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The concept of emergence blows my mind.

We have this property in our universe where simple things with simple rules can create infinitely complex things and behaviours. A molecule of water can’t be wet, but water can. A single ant can’t really do anything by himself, but a colony with simple pheromone exchange mechanisms can assign jobs, regulate population, create huge anthills with vents, specialty rooms and highways.

Nothing within a cell is "alive", it’s just atoms and molecules, but the cell itself is. One cell cannot experience things, think, love, have hopes and dreams, or want to watch Netflix all day, but a human can.

The fact that lots of tiny useless things governed by really simple rules can create this complexity in this world is breathtakingly beautiful.

Kinda ties into your example :)

Reminds me of the statement that you can't dissect a rabbit to find out why it's cute

Won't stop me from trying [joking]

Don't, rabbit necropsies are the worst smelling thing you'll ever encounter.

How come? Why rabbits specifically?

Not sure why, just that I was in a building when one was being performed and it stunk up the whole place to the point I almost went home because I was going to vomit. My boss put out a bowl of liquid that neutralized the odor, thank god.

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.

Galaxies are not evenly distributed in space. Instead, when you look at the universe, galaxies are grouped in giant strings that look like a neural connections in a brain.

It blew my mind when I learned that we're in a relatively dark, empty part of space compared to what's out there. It really put into perspective for me how difficult space travel will be for us as we continue to advance.

Space is incomprehensibly big and its getting larger over time. We will never have meaningful travel outside the solar system. If humanity started traveling in space from the moment we evolved, we would be able to travel the length of the milky way around two times. Space is basically a boondoggle. Our solar system still contains lots of resources though, so its not totally worthless.

Yea ... like Star Trek, with warp speed and everything, is basically all limited to our single Galaxy ... and that's not unrealistic given their technology.

Like in that space-faring future, the galaxy is basically the new continent and the inter-galactic divide the new great ocean that no one has ever crossed.

And here's the other thing I try to visualize:
Matter - both dark and "normal" - falling like water into these gravitational canyons that we see as giant strings, while the empty spaces in between expand and accelerate. The dynamics of this thing are mind-breaking.

The scale of the universe. It's an incomprehensible amount of emptiness.

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

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

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.

People working together to solve problems without personal profit as the main incentive.

Open source software

Dear God, it's beautiful. (And genuinely seriously important)

It kills me how much more of it there'd be, and how much better off we'd be in general, if we weren't forced to spend so much of our lives working for other people.

Now we're at a top 3 idea which haunts me. We have everything to make life so amazing now, but we just can't let go of these defunct paradigms that drag us down into a lower common denominator existence.

BitTorrent. I only need to share a file once and it could potentially reach millions of people. It's old tech now but it feels like magic to me.

One of the best pieces of software ever. And it actually works, that's the crazy thing!

Part of the beauty and awe I get whenever I reread that famous excerpt from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot is the sense of how ephemeral and delicate our existence, and even the very human concept of "existence", is. We are infinitesimally small and yet, through no fault of our own, our days, how we fill them, and the people we know hold some measure of importance to us. And it will all be gone - eventually. It's a very somber note yet it makes me feel a certain sense of peace.

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

Thermoses. They keep hot stuff hot. They keep cold stuff cold. No touchscreen or controls whatsoever. How does it know?

On the chance you're not just making a funny - The walls of your house keep inside stuff inside and outside stuff outside. A thermos is just a wall for heat, whether that heat is trying to get in or out.

How little food intake is enough to sustain extensive (physical) activity.

The little birds running on the beach with every wave, eating mini things. How can those be enough to sustain that much running? And it'll have to sustain them when they're not eating too.

A human can not eat for several days and still stay active. An incredible adaptation. I food conversion, storage, and priority dissolution in a complex system.

A human can not eat for several days and still stay active.

I'm looking at my bulging waist and feeling incredibly guilty right now!

I'm looking at my plentiful plate of lasagna with another eyes rn.

I think about this a lot too! It feels wrong that so little material can allow so much work to be done. Feels like moving a mars bar should take a significant amount of the mars bars energy to move stuff around, but you could do a lap around the block and still not deplete what it gave.

  1. Free software
  2. Group theory, Church notation and Lambda Calculus making many things in Math under one roof
  3. Design of CPU and Operating Systems. Both fields are made by geniuses.

I was kinda oblivious to the world of FOSS until simultaneously switching to Lemmy and also resuscitating an old computer by installing Linux. It took a long time for me to wrap my head around the fact that people are just cranking out parts of OS's, or pw managers, or file zip utilities for shits and giggles in their free time, and not even charging for it. A game or two as a passion project I could understand, but who sits down after work and plods through a zip utility?

After years and years of "if the service is free, you're the product" it really takes some time to rewire my brain. It's almost enough to make me wish I went into software instead of mechanical, so I could pitch in on something.

Alan Watts contextualizes our daily lives as the outer, "fine spray" at the edge of the big bang --still exploding. Planets "people-ing" and your daily schedule, relationships, accuisition of goods, etc. is just the complex late stage of the big bang explosion. The explosion is chaos but as time goes by order slips in and creates "complexity". This is all still an explosion.

It would have to be Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem. Such a beautiful proof that shakes mathematics to its core.

The science communicator Veritasium made a nice video about it: https://youtu.be/HeQX2HjkcNo

I first learned about it in Douglas Hofstaedter's masterpiece Gödel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Second the Gödel Escher Bach recommendation. Don't really hear about that one these days.

The Elitzur–Vaidman bomb-tester, specifically (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elitzur%E2%80%93Vaidman_bomb_tester).

Next, that I can buy and program a computer for 0.30 USD that's half the size of a grain of rice (ATtiny10). There are cheaper too, but that's the one I like.

Finally, on to the horrifying: Boltzmann brains. The idea that given a reasonable interpretation of the laws of thermodynamics, and long spans of time, the most common form of brain in the universe ought to be one that forms due to random fluctuations. It exists for long enough to have exactly one thought (e.g. recall a false memory), then dissipates.

This ought to be by far the most common form of conscious mind in the Universe. In a sense, you could say it 'blows' the general case of minds.

Since you are a mind, statistically, you ought to be a Boltzmann brain. You may not be, but are unable to prove otherwise, even to yourself. So either we have some things left to learn about thermodynamics, or the most probable outcome at all times is that you cease to exist immediately after having your current thought (although I hope you don't). Sleep tight!

The butterfly effect. The phenomeon that tiny seemingly insignificant changes can result in massively different outcomes. Someone out there could read this post and get distracted and leave home for work/school/shopping a bit later than they would've and avoid a major accident. But conversely, someone could also get distracted by this post while crossing the road and... you know... die...

Fascinating, yet terrifying at the same time.

I think the butterfly effect is much more interesting when you think about incredibly far reaching effects that are essentially impossible to predict. Someone running late and getting into an accident might actually be relatively easy to predict.

Instead: someone reading this post is running late. Because of this a different car following behind them gets caught at a red light they shouldn't have gotten caught at. As they hit the brakes for that light, their passenger lurches forward and accidentally sends a nonsensical text to their friend. Their friend reads that nonsense text, and in their confusion spills their coffee on the floor. A person walking by slips on the coffee, hits their head, and dies.

The person running late just killed a person miles away, and they have zero idea that it even happened.

Black holes and the uncertainty of what lies behind the event horizon. The possibility that inside a black hole, a whole new universe could exist without us ever knowing. When tripping through life taught me one thing, it is that many things can be seen as part of a huge fractal, and that view fits right into the interpretation that black holes are nothing else than universes in universes. After all, our big bang might just be another ordinary black hole, reaching critical mass.

Of course I can not prove it, but I love thinking about it.

Anyone able to ELI5 why wormholes and dimensional pockets are prevailing theories on black holes?

Like, I’ve got a lot of sci-fi under my belt and I need to figure out the sci part of it.

Anyone able to ELI5 why wormholes and dimensional pockets are prevailing theories on black holes?

Like, I've got a lot of sci-fi under my belt and I need to figure out the sci part of it.

I think the only reason those specifically are most well known, is because they capture popular imagination.

Basically, because it's impossible to see inside black holes to know what's going on, there's very few ways to validate ideas. Therefore, outside of a select number of external observational techniques (like radio signals and gravitational waves) to place some limitations, ideas about what happens beyons the event horizon are in the realm of pure math, which people don't care about unless it either A. Verifiable, or B. Just sounds really cool.

Black Hole hypotheses therefore tend to go one of a few ways:

Scenario 1

Scientist A: Hey if you use this math, black holes can do this thing

Scientist B: That requires this other thing which isn't true, to be true, and/or breaks this fundamental law

Scientist A: This hypothesis is my precious brain baby and if you talk shit about it I will shatter your knees

Scenario 2

Scientist A: Hey if you use this math, black holes can do this thing

Scientist B: That requires an assumption we can't, or have yet to, verify is true (almost always somehow related to string theory)

Scientist A: This hypothesis is my precious brain baby and if you talk shit about it I will shatter your knees

Scenario 3:

Scientist A: Hey if you use this math, black holes can do this thing

Scientist B: Okay the math checks out as one of X number of possibilities with that same math, but there's know way to tell which, if any of these would be true (equations with multiple valid solutions, almost always related to spacetime topology)

Scientist A: Heehee numbers do funni

ETA: The specific subcategories of hypotheses you mentioned also have an inherent advantage of not having to deal with singularities. Why that's good: Einstein's theories say infinite density impossible. With singularity, can't connect quantum theory to relativity theory. No quantum gravity make math bb's big sad. Solution? Instead of squoosh matter really tiny, just send it somewhere else! They aren't the only frameworks that avoid singularities, but definitely the coolest sounding and least complicated

Thank you! I love this breakdown. I had a suspicion it was like this all along but lack the astrophysics background.

Not sure why astrophysicists are so quick to pull a Tonya Harding, though.

They hate to admit it, and it's definitely less in-your-face most of the time because of the expected formality of the scientific community, but physicists, and specifically those trying to make advancements like we see around black holes, are SUPER arrogant. For the first 2 scenarios listed, they usually only make a formal paper out of the discovery to later defend the drawback as something they can "work around". Either by "oh we'll definitely eventually figure out how to emperically verify this haha. Look how well it works, you'd be crazy not to believe in this", or the more extreme "This obviously constitutes a whole rewrite of our understanding of physics because my solution is so elegant except for the parts where it literally doesn't work"

That last one is less prone to arrogance because topology is working with an insane amount of unverifiable possibilities already, so they don't really tend to get too attached to any given solution.

I can't remember if it was a youtube video or a paper or an article or what, but I saw something explaining that, based on one interpretation of Einsteins equations, past the point of singularity, space and time invert. This would mean that the longer the black hole exists around in "our" universe (in absolute terms), the larger it becomes on the inside, and the larger it gets on the outside, the longer the inside universe would persist. I feel like you would have liked it, if only I could remember what it was. :(

The thing I saw postulated both that the universe would reuse the matter the black hole absorbed, and that there would be infinite branching universes since each would develop their own black holes, but then you have an issue with regards to running out of matter at some point. Though I guess that could be solved if you assume every black hole must converge at the end of their containing universe's lifespan, and all matter would be reused in whatever blackhole absorbs the blackhole containing that parent universe? Oh hey, we're back to fractals again!

Personally I'm a fan of the idea of black holes as topological stars that fall in line with string theory, but there have been so many hypothetical frameworks coming out in recent years that are just fascinating to think about.

Anarchism based on mutual respect and aid. It's truly beautiful.

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.

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.

Peter Singer - ordinary people are evil

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.

Did you watch the video? You are both making the same point.

I haven't. I'm currently at work and can't watch. I was mostly pointing out that it becomes a pointless exercise when you realize that every human on the planet is considered immoral

Pointless might be a bit of a stretch. Change begins with recognition - perhaps some of the grand constants must be mutable in order for progress to be made.

I probably did a dozen immoral things before breakfast this morning.

Sure, certainly, yes, I'll accept your admission at face value, but could you have done fewer?

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 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.

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 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.

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

The presenter focuses on argument 1 because he says the other points are "obviously correct" and therefore moral. Imo that's flawed.

  1. Hunger disease etc are part of a natural cycle which controls population and ecosystem balance.

  2. 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.

  3. 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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.
  1. 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.

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.

You should have a look at Sebastian Lague's programming videos on Youtube. He models various things (eg: predator/prey/ant colonies, slime growth) using a few very simple rules. They're just beautiful. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-iSQQgOd1A

Noether's Theorem:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noether%27s\_theorem

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/noether.html

Fundamentally, it allows us to logically infer the conservation laws from the laws of motion of a given physical system using relatively simple math. It always applies, no matter if we're talking about massive systems or quantum ones.

I think the concept is even more beautiful than you described:

A symmetry in a physical system implies a conservation law.

As a physicist, since the beginning of your studies you learn to appreciate and seek symmetries in various systems. At first, it’s mostly on an intuitive way to help you understand or simplify a problem. But at some point you learn about Noether’s theorem and see the even deeper meaning and power of symmetries.

For example, symmetry in movement in space (meaning I can move my entire system and it stays the same) implies conservation of momentum.

And symmetry in time translation (meaning if move the entire system a through a same interval in time and it still behaves the same way) implies conservation of energy.

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?

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?

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.

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

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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9xAKttWgP4

O_O....

Dudes a genius magician that practices dark arts that make magnets look easy to understand.

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.

You can design and order custom genes online to make e-coli do different things.

The beautiful idea that blows my mind, is how much better the comment section for a question like this post presents is on Lemmy, than Reddit!

Several things are regularly in my "ponder and wonder" list, the most recent being:

  • Chaos theory
  • Higher dimensions (>4)
  • The actual scale of space versus our normal human scale
  • The idea of social/societal evolution (how can we be better together as a species)

I can get lost for a while in any of these topics.

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!

You might want to check out the novel Bloom by Wil McCarthy. It uses Conway's Game of Life and other cellular automata to illustrate several plot points.

Thank you! This is right up my alley and I will definitely check it out.

What are some other rules to the excel example you gave, kinda want to try programming something like this to see how it’d play out

Just look up "The Game of Life." It's not really a spread sheet, that's simply how it's displayed (grids of pixels that are either living, dead, or food) and it just kinda simulates an ecosystem in the most very, very basic of ways. All you can do to influence the game is change what a grid contains, with the goal (if you can say it has any) of keeping a sustainable system going.

Yep! The spreadsheet is just an analogy I used to help unfamiliar people visualize what I was talking about.

The actual rules for Conway's Game of Life are as follows:

  1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if by underpopulation.
  2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
  3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overpopulation.
  4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction

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.