I think that all things cannot be interconnected literally. I think this is because there are parts of the universe we could never actually visit even traveling at the speed of light because of the expansion of the universe.
However, I do think everything is interconnected in the sense that everything has common characteristics like obeying physics, but even this could not be true because of quantum physics.
Tiny ontology is difficult to consider in the case of abstractions. Iraq, the concept of a rock, a rock song, and a specific rock don't reasonably equally exist. You cannot show me the concept of a rock, you cannot really prove it exists beyond presuming that I have some notion that springs into motion when I am to consider the concept of a rock. Yet, Iraq exists because we say it does. Not only with the Iraqi government, but on maps, it's a demonstrable abstraction as a political-geographical region. A rock song is interesting because there are many ways to interpret/presume the phrase "a rock song" to mean. A theoretical series of waves in a timed pattern such that when forced upon air with the right force, the vibrations make the sounds that are the song. A physical recording or the sounds. A set of pages of sheet music. The thoughts, emotions, meanings, etc. originally intended to be conveyed by the song's creator at the moments of its creation. But a specific rock is something one can point to, perhaps pick up, feel, and interact with.
Thoughts often exist beyond the limitations that language allows us to properly communicate, and as such, they're at times solipsisticly stuck in Plato's Cavern. (Take vsauce's video on my red vs your red, for instance.) If an idea exists only to one person, does it exist? One could argue for a deterministic model wherein the positions of the particles of the brain are that thought, but we don't even know if human brains will generally respond to an encoded signal the same way. We haven't established that brains work specifically the same way for how consciousness works. (let alone actually addressing the hard problem of consciousness…) If modeling the thought only works for that one brain, and it is a series of physical attributes of that brain, but it requires immeasurable quantum states, such that we can't actually have the thought as a thing we can hold in some form (even as say an electronically stored digital file), does it exist? If in order to know that it exists, we have to make it cease to exist by collapsing the wave functions and obtaining a discrete value from a superposition of every possible state, would we actually find out if it exists?
Interior existence really seems to be a sort of a consciousness, and the hard problem of consciousness is inescapable for such discussions.
I follow a lot of people through various sites that spout this idea of interconnectedness like it defines us. Like it is a fundamental part of being human. And that we should submit or focus on that connectedness as our purpose in life.
They say that without having any thought or reason as to what this ¨force¨ is. There are plenty of forces in the univers that affect things and humans alike with no regard whether it is planning to have lasagna for dinner or not.
Like Gravity. Gravity is everywhere and affects everything. Even in the debts of space where you are weightless there are still things pulling you towards them ever so slightly.
I am not arguing against the theory that everything is interconnected. I belive that to be true. I just don't belive that that connection is conscious like some want to belive. Even the common things themselves pull things towards them, even though it is ever so slight.
I belive that there are many forces in the universe like gravity that connect everything to everything. From lamps in the street, my phone, Kevin Spacey and atoms themselves. I just dont belive that that connection is anything more than that.
Speaking of relationships between things/objects and humans, maybe this discussion is related to Thing Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_theory) ? Esp Bogost's idea about taking objects out of their ordinary context …
I have a problem with Bogost's OOO, specifically with the point at 11:59—"what they obviously and truly are." This reeks of an essentialism the kind that should, I think, be distrusted. To talk about a thing's "nature" or "essence"—especially in a way that their essence is "obvious" and "true"—feels incredibly arrogant, especially if that they "are" is in accordance to how we use them. How do we know what a thing obviously and truly is? Is a lamp a light source only? Is it also an aesthetic experience? Can it have multiple essences? If it is just a light source, is it the same as other light sources—car headlights, flashlights, candles? Or what about a painting: what is a painting, obviously and truly? What is it's "use" in that way?
I'm about to graduate with a BA in philosophy and boy, does all this shit just go over my head in the least interesting way possible. Like, I love philosophy, but I find all the transcendental, idealist, spiritual… "stuff," to just be just so trivial. Maybe that makes me a bad philosopher? Idk, but I have never been able to think about this crap for more than an hour without getting frustrated with the whole enterprise. Maybe I'm just a pragmatist and i don't get how any of this matters.
This game wouldn't have no self evident meaning to it without the creator declaring that "it's to show you everything is connected". You could say Goat Simulator does the same thing, and it's just as pointless. I can go outside and roll a rock around, or waste a perfectly good Pizza slice doing the same thing. Simulating a hopping multiplying penguin isn't going to do the world any better than saying Go Outside and do something, literally anything other than playing this game.
the definition of one thing is pretty tricky as well within itself. like, when i look at a chair i can name an infinite amount of "thing" just in the chair: half a chair, the other half, 1/4 a chair, 1/4 a chairleg, 1/8 a chair etc
"You try to master and be clever within a system."
I like this concept, and I think "play" benefits our understanding of all things in the way described in that quote. To explain, I'll take cutting vegetables as an example. I used to hate cutting vegetables for any reason, so when I had to I would usually find ways to get out of it or make it easier: use a vegetable peeler, toss them in a food processor, buy them pre-cut (usually at a premium), anything just to not have to do it. However, about six years ago I got a job at a grocery store doing nothing but cutting vegetables. Instead of despising my job, I decided to play. I found out the best way (for me) to peel and cut carrots. I got REALLY fast at cutting up sweet potatoes (and also developed some muscle with how often I did it). To (sort of) get back to the topic of this episode, I also developed a better understanding of those objects. I now know that the best time to get Brussels sprouts is after the first frost — they're a little sweeter then. I understand that you need to cut tomatoes with a sharp knife, or a serrated one, because otherwise you'll just squash them. I didn't just learn these things — I experienced them first hand. I was given the opportunity to just learn them (with some guidance, admittedly).
I guess ultimately what I'm trying to say is that if you have an activity that is a chore, then you'll treat it as such — just another thing you have to get done. If you say "I want to learn about X", then the knowledge necessary to learn about that thing might become overwhelming and you might just give up. If you simply take the time to play, you will better understand the activity and the objects involved. You'll also have an appreciation for the objects involved. At least, that has been my experience.
I'm a little surprised Pixar didn't get a mention. While I'd like to think I'd have been an empathetic person naturally and just by paying attention to my family, schooling, and the world around me, my empathy for objects specifically is definitely due to growing up watching Pixar movies. While Pixar is probably best known for anthropomorphizing objects or creatures we normally think of as either inanimate or non-sapient, even their movies about humans are focused on a sense of empathy. Up and Brave demonstrate the importance of intergenerational communication and empathy (while simultaneously making us feel for a mailbox, dogs, a tapestry, and bears), and The Incredibles teaches us to humanize people who are literally superhuman, which makes it easier to take our real life heroes off their mental pedestals.
Pixar was my gateway to this concept of humanizing the non-human, but the reigning champion of empathy in my world is definitely Sir Terry Pratchett. His satirical fantasy Discworld series constantly explores the nature of life, death, the will to exist, and Death. That last one is an actual recurring character in his books, and star of several of them. Death, the anthropomorphic personification of the cessation of life, is one of the most fragile and sympathetic characters of the series. He struggles with his day to day duties because his very existence, down to his human skeleton in a robe appearance, is shaped by human thought. He even adopted a daughter and took on an apprentice because of his strange and often counterproductive love of humans, which is how he manages to have adventures with his granddaughter. Death's job is obviously to make sure everyone and everything living fades from life on schedule, but on the other side of that coin it is also his job to protect life on the Discworld as a whole from enemies that would see it snuffed out. These enemies, the auditors of the universe, manage to be immortal by avoiding not only life, but any semblance of personality and characterization. To be an individual, they maintain, is to be a being with a beginning and an end, so they deliberately remain interchangeable, faceless, and dull. The auditors are Death's foil in every way. Where Death is often benign and at worst inevitable in his duties, the auditors go out of their way to interfere with life in increasingly petty ways, including attempting to assassinate their universe's equivalent of Santa. Through his frequent appearances in the Discworld books, Death teaches the reader to empathize with everything, from tiny lifeforms like deep sea anemones to human-shaped concepts like Death, War, and Time.
The Discworld books are full to the brim of fun characters, including many seemingly inanimate objects like the Luggage, which is a loyal trunk modeled after mimics, the classic D&D monster. The Luggage (and several wizards' staves in the series) is made of "sapient pearwood" and thus is literally alive and capable of thinking for itself. However, a discussion of empathy in Terry Pratchett's books would be incomplete without mentioning his warnings against a lack thereof. Through his marvelous witch character Granny Weatherwax, we are told that all evil, sin, or whatever you call badness of character starts when you treat "people as things." She says there are lots of ways to do damage, but that concept is always at the heart of it. Through Death, Granny Weatherwax, and a host of other colorful characters, Terry Pratchett teaches his readers to interact with the world with a little more empathy, and playfulness, than when we first picked up his books. I highly recommend them to anyone who reads.
I find that this is a good topic to frame the discussion of perspectives and empathy. that is, how we think about empathy and how we think about the other and how we relate to the other. in many ways, I find that it's easier to understand the similarities or viewpoints between the micro and the macro, but much less so the similarities or viewpoints between either of those and the anthro. when we think of things on the same level as ourselves, the same scale as ourselves, we have an innate, I think, instinct to focus inwardly on ourselves. there is a selfishness present at that level. but on the scales of extreme wideview or extreme smallview, we appreciate more easily and intuitively a much less centered frame of mind and a much more interconnected frame of mind. yet all of these frames of mind or points of view are incomplete. there is a certain tendency of humans to think of "nature" or "interconnectedness" as, ironically, excluding humanity or self. but humans, both as individuals and as a group, are also part of nature. and I think it's important to recognize the importance of both individuality AND connectedness.
I think this is fascinating. To me, possibly more fascinating than imagining the internal state of concrete objects is the idea of things that we consider to be 'ephemeral' in a sense having an internal life as well. When you listen to brilliant composers or improvisers talk about the "character" or "texture" or "gravity" or "direction" of a section of music it's as though they've considered it as a singular object with inherent properties and states of its own and thus its own 'internal state' of sorts. Great poets and authors talk about this similarly with sentence structure and word painting too; it's as though once a sentence has been written it has its own internal state and texture and feeling and in a way, life.
I think that the radical empathy that we are all picturing here sounds exhausting. Empathy is usually seen as active attention toward other people, animals, and things. I can't even hold more than a handful of things in my mind at one time, so how am I to have this extreme degree of empathy? Is it possible to develop a latent empathy to facilitate this process? I wonder if attempts at radical empathy lead to a transcendence of the physical world (a peering beneath or beyond the veil of "impressions" to find something greater), or if we may merely reveal our positions within our limited perspectives.
One point being touched on in the comments seems to be a lack of representation of various non-western traditions that have really expansive systems of approaching metaphysics and epistemology that overlap heavily with themes touched on in the episode. One way of approaching that could be through expounding on Buddhist and Hindu traditions in how they heavily influenced Schopenhauer and Watts.
I'm surprised an episode dealing with ontology in the western tradition didn't have any mention of the presocratics. The ideas of relation and interconnection in Parmenides and Heraclitus underlie every later project of ontology and metaphysics in the Hellenistic tradition and the Stoic conception of the cosmos is lifted directly from Empedocles and Anaxagoras. And generally the presocratics established a frame for approaching metaphysics and ontology in the west that would continue to persist (e.g. Hegel, Heidegger etc. )
I never thought about it before, but I think I naturally have empathy for inanimate objects. When I see a broken-down car or a forgotten glove, My first thought is to the feelings of the object. I think "sad abandoned glove." rather than "sad gloveless person". Perhaps it's my complete disconnect from spirituality that creates this?
I randomly empathize with non-humans all the time. It's actually easier for me to empathize with non-humans than with humans, because humans can be, and too often are totally shitty for no good reason, while non-humans are a lot less likely to. Like Boston Dynamics videos where they're kicking over the robots, or videos of shithead kids randomly destroying things make me mad and upset. I feel bad for run-down, overgrown houses that can't have people live in them, etc. I can watch videos of adult humans dying and not bat an eyelash, though, depending on my mood. But I've always had abnormal empathy responses, so maybe it's just me.
As far as the game "Everything" I would say it lobbies for a particularly human gratification. Oddly , it is the total lake of humans in the game that makes it so. I seems like we get to play as other objects, but the way we play with them is still the human way of of playing. We will only ever learn "human things" about them. The play style is a human's ideals bounding between scales; making it the most humans thing ever. A human mind alone in the universe filling every/any object it pleases with it's own mind and will inside.
Well, i think everything is interconnected. Everything is made out of atoms. Atoms are made of other stuff. And this stuff made of ther stuff. We are like atoms when compared to our galaxies, nd our galaxies may be atoms to bigger beings. This bigger beings would be atoms for other things too. So everything is the center of the universe. And everything in itself is THE universe. Other objects as well. Purpose and meaning are unnessessary. Things just are. Nothing mean anything. It just is. Everything in the nature, depends on everything at once. so its interconnected. (Alan watts). This is really cool. Everything is one. I dont know where to go from this.
I'm a bit lost at the early criticism of Watts in the video.
Nowhere does Watts denounce the "humanness" of interaction. His points on sameness are not one of retreating, but one of seeing the universe as an interconnected whole. It's to grasp you, I, stars, and shit, are all of one reality, and not disjointed, disconnected, standalone entities or things.
You absolutely can still appreciate things on "their own terms." Watts point was to highlight those things do not exist in their own isolated reality, which is how we actually see the world because this is what we make our image of "self" to be; a standalone entity of the mind, a doer of deeds, thinker of thoughts.
Unless the game omitted these points, they're central to what Watts talks about. It's all about "nonduality" and dealing with the illusion of separateness, not the denunciation of differentiation and appreciation of that.
More than "everything is interconnected" — which seems to me so obvious it's not even worth discussing — how about "Everything is everywhere"?
There are no things; whatever looks like a "thing" to us and our detectors is a manifestation, an occurrence, a salient event in one of a perhaps infinite number of overlapping "fields." ("Fields" in quotation marks to emphasise that all of this is human language metaphor.)
This is how it seems to me. The main thing wrong with this theory is, it threatens to engulf the world in an avalanche of deep Deepakchopraism, a prospect too horrible to bear.
Makes me think of Romantically Apocalyptic in which an out of control search engine has given everything from the sun to cake slices processors to calculate and best serve there function – then personality so that people can interact with them. Humanity has since been almost wiped out but all the objects keep trying to for fill there function as best they can. At one point a rock lectures the last(?) human(?) about treating it and its fellow rocks with respect, and there is a whole story about an elevator button trying to maintain standers in it's post-apocalyptic hotel.
"Is everything literally interconnected?" It would certainly appear so, even from a scientific perspective (it's a quantum world out there!).
"What is the nature of that connection (or disconnection)? I'd say its nature is quantum, although I realize that sounds a bit hand-wavy by itself. Mostly because it's a bit circular of a definition. Just a bit.
"How does that make you appreciate (or not) all things?" I find that the more I think about the massive amount of interconnected information encoded in our bodies, food, environment, relationships, emotions, activities, science, etc, the more I'm able to see things from multiple perspectives, which is quite helpful for easing judgement and being more understanding (not just of others, but of yourself and the environment). It's too easy (and human) to feel antagonized by everything, but trying to take a step back and understand why everything is the way it is allows much wider perspectives that are much less emotionally intense and seem much more fair and considerate. But one must be careful, for as you learn to appreciate things you've never really thought about, you also begin to realize that many of the things that you do appreciate are much less deserving of that appreciation than you thought because you just never thought about them enough to understand enough of their context. Our ability to ignore things we don't want to pay attention to is incredible.
(This video and channel are awesome by the way! PBS has some fantastic content going these days <3)
Thanks for this, Mike. Long time IdeaChannel viewer, but this video really…landed. Keep on making these great deep dives. I really appreciate every one.
Thanks… I now understand how everything is connected. I had an idea of how but now it seems more real. I will project a quick scope of it for you. If everything was just one thing then in all is one. If one were to look back at itself in doing so a question is created. This question if answered creates a secondary location from the one. Between the question and the answer is space and a first and second so direction of time. So from everything which was one is now divided. This division is the particle development of everything from one. The relationship between these divisions becomes the connection and the division that separates the questions from one another. So in truth this reveals that everything as one or part is only ever the singularity of the smallest part of the whole at any given moment. If in observations we were able to see the smallest part of this equation it would still only be as small as the question. Because in our ability to see this we would already be as far separated as knowing the answer. Therefore already part of the whole looking back.
Seems to kind of diminish consciousness a bit. Also, if all things have "inner existence", then does the combining of inanimate objects to create new objects (say, the combining of a rock and a stick to make a tomahawk, or any other tool/product) change the inner existence of the constituents, or is a new inner existence born?
Some one who isn't me, did mushrooms, and had a mental version of the aforementioned game, whereby they ceased to just be themselves, eventually even human; began being shapes and colors and experienced infinite infinities of infinitely different sizes. That is the best way I can suggest experiencing the aforementioned game or being not-human.
These definition of objects are subjective and ill defined. The interpretation of an arrangement of matter as a table in the first place relies on the social construct that define it as such. Even if we considered generalized objects formed by any arbitrary arrangements of fundamental particles in the Universe, we'd still be taking into account not things for what they really are (temporary field excitations in space-time), but for overly simplified abstractions (particle arrangements).
There is but one true way to actually truly understand objects for what they are, which is to understand the "Everything object", that is, the object defined by everything that exists (which must therefore encompass all space-time, future, present and past). While physicists still don't have a unified theory of everything, the task is pretty much impossible.
This is a very misleading characterisation of the ideas of watts and the other philosophies and philosophers here mentioned. Their ideas are infinitely more complex(conflicted) and cannot be summed up in such a neat way.
Teacher, He is here right now. He has been obvious for over 15 years. Yes,I can assure you that other Dimensions do exist and they often are not beneficial to our development and personal well being. Thanks for the heads up on urban franchising of our understanding. USA.
It seems quite difficult to define 'interconnectedness' and the means by which we can appreciate it. For example, if 'interconnectedness' is defined by how we use things, are we less or more connected depending on how we use them? I think the relationship between us and Interconnectedness, has something to do with our being conscious; for, it seems, that it is the 'seat' of our experiencing everything. Our appreciation of everything, may come from our understanding of the rarity and distinctness of our conscious experience. We're all a part of this 'stream' of consciousness, and therefore it may be the grounds of what gives life its Interconnectedness.
i literally discovered you 30 min ago and have seen many of your videos hahaha (thanks to wisecrack) and i would love if you could make more videos on this subject or related, is really interesting.
Psychedelics not only show you this, but let you experience the blissful, loving interconnectedness of everything. Experiencing it is so much more profound than merely knowing it.
I saw the title and I was hoping for something to do w/ Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently, or the BBCamerica TV show… Ah well this is good too. I'm always ready for Dirk Gently. Everything is connected.
The stoics believed in a deterministic universe, the logos. So if you believe dat everything that happens is predetermined and there is no free will, then all the things/everyone that now exist are/is supposed to be here. When the things cease to exist they return back to the logos. So will we when we die. In that way you could say everything is "interconnected". This stoic view reminds me a bit of Sagans' star stuff.
If in no other way, all things are connected through gravity. The smallest electron exerts gravitational pull, however small, to masses astronomically far away. I'm not sure a photon exerts gravity, being massless, but gravity acts on photons too, or we would not get the gravitational lensing we've been hearing about.
great video. I feel the interconnected nature of the world we inhabit helps us achieve integrity and integrated existence… essentially it asks us to love ourselves because at the end of the day our projections of the world are more us than anything else. The diversity of the world reveals more of who we are each day and, in my opinion, hopes that we begin appreciating what we are, what the world is.
am I high? I feel high right now.
I think that all things cannot be interconnected literally. I think this is because there are parts of the universe we could never actually visit even traveling at the speed of light because of the expansion of the universe.
However, I do think everything is interconnected in the sense that everything has common characteristics like obeying physics, but even this could not be true because of quantum physics.
Tiny ontology is difficult to consider in the case of abstractions. Iraq, the concept of a rock, a rock song, and a specific rock don't reasonably equally exist. You cannot show me the concept of a rock, you cannot really prove it exists beyond presuming that I have some notion that springs into motion when I am to consider the concept of a rock. Yet, Iraq exists because we say it does. Not only with the Iraqi government, but on maps, it's a demonstrable abstraction as a political-geographical region. A rock song is interesting because there are many ways to interpret/presume the phrase "a rock song" to mean. A theoretical series of waves in a timed pattern such that when forced upon air with the right force, the vibrations make the sounds that are the song. A physical recording or the sounds. A set of pages of sheet music. The thoughts, emotions, meanings, etc. originally intended to be conveyed by the song's creator at the moments of its creation. But a specific rock is something one can point to, perhaps pick up, feel, and interact with.
Thoughts often exist beyond the limitations that language allows us to properly communicate, and as such, they're at times solipsisticly stuck in Plato's Cavern. (Take vsauce's video on my red vs your red, for instance.) If an idea exists only to one person, does it exist? One could argue for a deterministic model wherein the positions of the particles of the brain are that thought, but we don't even know if human brains will generally respond to an encoded signal the same way. We haven't established that brains work specifically the same way for how consciousness works. (let alone actually addressing the hard problem of consciousness…) If modeling the thought only works for that one brain, and it is a series of physical attributes of that brain, but it requires immeasurable quantum states, such that we can't actually have the thought as a thing we can hold in some form (even as say an electronically stored digital file), does it exist? If in order to know that it exists, we have to make it cease to exist by collapsing the wave functions and obtaining a discrete value from a superposition of every possible state, would we actually find out if it exists?
Interior existence really seems to be a sort of a consciousness, and the hard problem of consciousness is inescapable for such discussions.
Next week's video should be: Are There Separations Between Anything?
'Alan Watts – Face your own shadow' – youtube, everything is interconneted in the sense that existence is a drama, a deception.
The onion without any seed in the center, forgetting the leaves of the onion are the part we eat (live). Lol.
Radiolab's Solid as a rock, it's math (or tortoises?) all the way down.
This episode contains significantly more marijuana than past episodes.
Radical Empathy?
The Enrichment Center reminds you that the Weighted Companion Cube will never threaten to stab you and, in fact, cannot speak.
I follow a lot of people through various sites that spout this idea of interconnectedness like it defines us. Like it is a fundamental part of being human. And that we should submit or focus on that connectedness as our purpose in life.
They say that without having any thought or reason as to what this ¨force¨ is. There are plenty of forces in the univers that affect things and humans alike with no regard whether it is planning to have lasagna for dinner or not.
Like Gravity. Gravity is everywhere and affects everything. Even in the debts of space where you are weightless there are still things pulling you towards them ever so slightly.
I am not arguing against the theory that everything is interconnected. I belive that to be true. I just don't belive that that connection is conscious like some want to belive.
Even the common things themselves pull things towards them, even though it is ever so slight.
I belive that there are many forces in the universe like gravity that connect everything to everything. From lamps in the street, my phone, Kevin Spacey and atoms themselves. I just dont belive that that connection is anything more than that.
Speaking of relationships between things/objects and humans, maybe this discussion is related to Thing Theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_theory) ? Esp Bogost's idea about taking objects out of their ordinary context …
I have a problem with Bogost's OOO, specifically with the point at 11:59—"what they obviously and truly are." This reeks of an essentialism the kind that should, I think, be distrusted. To talk about a thing's "nature" or "essence"—especially in a way that their essence is "obvious" and "true"—feels incredibly arrogant, especially if that they "are" is in accordance to how we use them. How do we know what a thing obviously and truly is? Is a lamp a light source only? Is it also an aesthetic experience? Can it have multiple essences? If it is just a light source, is it the same as other light sources—car headlights, flashlights, candles? Or what about a painting: what is a painting, obviously and truly? What is it's "use" in that way?
I'm about to graduate with a BA in philosophy and boy, does all this shit just go over my head in the least interesting way possible. Like, I love philosophy, but I find all the transcendental, idealist, spiritual… "stuff," to just be just so trivial. Maybe that makes me a bad philosopher? Idk, but I have never been able to think about this crap for more than an hour without getting frustrated with the whole enterprise. Maybe I'm just a pragmatist and i don't get how any of this matters.
Everything is connected at least by space, time, and gravity. Unless there's a Multiverse.
Well, I did miss, for some reason, a little of Charles S. Pierce's semiotics…
Came here expecting a video on quantum physics, I'm pleasantly surprised 🙂 Beautifully scripted and edited, thank you for this
This game wouldn't have no self evident meaning to it without the creator declaring that "it's to show you everything is connected". You could say Goat Simulator does the same thing, and it's just as pointless. I can go outside and roll a rock around, or waste a perfectly good Pizza slice doing the same thing. Simulating a hopping multiplying penguin isn't going to do the world any better than saying Go Outside and do something, literally anything other than playing this game.
When we read works like the metamorphesis by franz kafka are we empathisizing with objects or men?
the definition of one thing is pretty tricky as well within itself.
like, when i look at a chair i can name an infinite amount of "thing" just in the chair: half a chair, the other half, 1/4 a chair, 1/4 a chairleg, 1/8 a chair etc
everything is sexist everything is homophobic … oh wait!
wrong channel !! :v
one cannot exist without the other
you can be "everything" in Second Life and have been able to for more than 10 years . . .
Errand Signal's analyses was better.
"You try to master and be clever within a system."
I like this concept, and I think "play" benefits our understanding of all things in the way described in that quote. To explain, I'll take cutting vegetables as an example. I used to hate cutting vegetables for any reason, so when I had to I would usually find ways to get out of it or make it easier: use a vegetable peeler, toss them in a food processor, buy them pre-cut (usually at a premium), anything just to not have to do it. However, about six years ago I got a job at a grocery store doing nothing but cutting vegetables. Instead of despising my job, I decided to play. I found out the best way (for me) to peel and cut carrots. I got REALLY fast at cutting up sweet potatoes (and also developed some muscle with how often I did it). To (sort of) get back to the topic of this episode, I also developed a better understanding of those objects. I now know that the best time to get Brussels sprouts is after the first frost — they're a little sweeter then. I understand that you need to cut tomatoes with a sharp knife, or a serrated one, because otherwise you'll just squash them. I didn't just learn these things — I experienced them first hand. I was given the opportunity to just learn them (with some guidance, admittedly).
I guess ultimately what I'm trying to say is that if you have an activity that is a chore, then you'll treat it as such — just another thing you have to get done. If you say "I want to learn about X", then the knowledge necessary to learn about that thing might become overwhelming and you might just give up. If you simply take the time to play, you will better understand the activity and the objects involved. You'll also have an appreciation for the objects involved. At least, that has been my experience.
I Saw That 9:18 Cut
I'm a little surprised Pixar didn't get a mention. While I'd like to think I'd have been an empathetic person naturally and just by paying attention to my family, schooling, and the world around me, my empathy for objects specifically is definitely due to growing up watching Pixar movies. While Pixar is probably best known for anthropomorphizing objects or creatures we normally think of as either inanimate or non-sapient, even their movies about humans are focused on a sense of empathy. Up and Brave demonstrate the importance of intergenerational communication and empathy (while simultaneously making us feel for a mailbox, dogs, a tapestry, and bears), and The Incredibles teaches us to humanize people who are literally superhuman, which makes it easier to take our real life heroes off their mental pedestals.
Pixar was my gateway to this concept of humanizing the non-human, but the reigning champion of empathy in my world is definitely Sir Terry Pratchett. His satirical fantasy Discworld series constantly explores the nature of life, death, the will to exist, and Death. That last one is an actual recurring character in his books, and star of several of them. Death, the anthropomorphic personification of the cessation of life, is one of the most fragile and sympathetic characters of the series. He struggles with his day to day duties because his very existence, down to his human skeleton in a robe appearance, is shaped by human thought. He even adopted a daughter and took on an apprentice because of his strange and often counterproductive love of humans, which is how he manages to have adventures with his granddaughter. Death's job is obviously to make sure everyone and everything living fades from life on schedule, but on the other side of that coin it is also his job to protect life on the Discworld as a whole from enemies that would see it snuffed out. These enemies, the auditors of the universe, manage to be immortal by avoiding not only life, but any semblance of personality and characterization. To be an individual, they maintain, is to be a being with a beginning and an end, so they deliberately remain interchangeable, faceless, and dull. The auditors are Death's foil in every way. Where Death is often benign and at worst inevitable in his duties, the auditors go out of their way to interfere with life in increasingly petty ways, including attempting to assassinate their universe's equivalent of Santa. Through his frequent appearances in the Discworld books, Death teaches the reader to empathize with everything, from tiny lifeforms like deep sea anemones to human-shaped concepts like Death, War, and Time.
The Discworld books are full to the brim of fun characters, including many seemingly inanimate objects like the Luggage, which is a loyal trunk modeled after mimics, the classic D&D monster. The Luggage (and several wizards' staves in the series) is made of "sapient pearwood" and thus is literally alive and capable of thinking for itself. However, a discussion of empathy in Terry Pratchett's books would be incomplete without mentioning his warnings against a lack thereof. Through his marvelous witch character Granny Weatherwax, we are told that all evil, sin, or whatever you call badness of character starts when you treat "people as things." She says there are lots of ways to do damage, but that concept is always at the heart of it. Through Death, Granny Weatherwax, and a host of other colorful characters, Terry Pratchett teaches his readers to interact with the world with a little more empathy, and playfulness, than when we first picked up his books. I highly recommend them to anyone who reads.
I find that this is a good topic to frame the discussion of perspectives and empathy. that is, how we think about empathy and how we think about the other and how we relate to the other. in many ways, I find that it's easier to understand the similarities or viewpoints between the micro and the macro, but much less so the similarities or viewpoints between either of those and the anthro. when we think of things on the same level as ourselves, the same scale as ourselves, we have an innate, I think, instinct to focus inwardly on ourselves. there is a selfishness present at that level. but on the scales of extreme wideview or extreme smallview, we appreciate more easily and intuitively a much less centered frame of mind and a much more interconnected frame of mind. yet all of these frames of mind or points of view are incomplete. there is a certain tendency of humans to think of "nature" or "interconnectedness" as, ironically, excluding humanity or self. but humans, both as individuals and as a group, are also part of nature. and I think it's important to recognize the importance of both individuality AND connectedness.
What does "batting with the weight on" mean exactly? @13:00
baseball something or other but that is not a common phrase ?
this should be linked to the PBS space time episodes, that talk about causal horizons
Most everything is connected, in ways both measurable and not. Ignore your connection to other things both sentient and not at your own peril.
I think this is fascinating. To me, possibly more fascinating than imagining the internal state of concrete objects is the idea of things that we consider to be 'ephemeral' in a sense having an internal life as well. When you listen to brilliant composers or improvisers talk about the "character" or "texture" or "gravity" or "direction" of a section of music it's as though they've considered it as a singular object with inherent properties and states of its own and thus its own 'internal state' of sorts. Great poets and authors talk about this similarly with sentence structure and word painting too; it's as though once a sentence has been written it has its own internal state and texture and feeling and in a way, life.
"WHAT, WHAT!!"
I think that the radical empathy that we are all picturing here sounds exhausting. Empathy is usually seen as active attention toward other people, animals, and things. I can't even hold more than a handful of things in my mind at one time, so how am I to have this extreme degree of empathy? Is it possible to develop a latent empathy to facilitate this process? I wonder if attempts at radical empathy lead to a transcendence of the physical world (a peering beneath or beyond the veil of "impressions" to find something greater), or if we may merely reveal our positions within our limited perspectives.
In "Everything" you cannot play as the text at the bottom of the screen…
One point being touched on in the comments seems to be a lack of representation of various non-western traditions that have really expansive systems of approaching metaphysics and epistemology that overlap heavily with themes touched on in the episode. One way of approaching that could be through expounding on Buddhist and Hindu traditions in how they heavily influenced Schopenhauer and Watts.
I'm surprised an episode dealing with ontology in the western tradition didn't have any mention of the presocratics. The ideas of relation and interconnection in Parmenides and Heraclitus underlie every later project of ontology and metaphysics in the Hellenistic tradition and the Stoic conception of the cosmos is lifted directly from Empedocles and Anaxagoras. And generally the presocratics established a frame for approaching metaphysics and ontology in the west that would continue to persist (e.g. Hegel, Heidegger etc. )
I was really hoping this was gonna be about Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
The way you explain why you haven't released your PBS appreciation video sounds more like a plea for time from your tyrannical overlords. 😀
I never thought about it before, but I think I naturally have empathy for inanimate objects. When I see a broken-down car or a forgotten glove, My first thought is to the feelings of the object. I think "sad abandoned glove." rather than "sad gloveless person". Perhaps it's my complete disconnect from spirituality that creates this?
I randomly empathize with non-humans all the time. It's actually easier for me to empathize with non-humans than with humans, because humans can be, and too often are totally shitty for no good reason, while non-humans are a lot less likely to.
Like Boston Dynamics videos where they're kicking over the robots, or videos of shithead kids randomly destroying things make me mad and upset. I feel bad for run-down, overgrown houses that can't have people live in them, etc. I can watch videos of adult humans dying and not bat an eyelash, though, depending on my mood.
But I've always had abnormal empathy responses, so maybe it's just me.
As far as the game "Everything" I would say it lobbies for a particularly human gratification. Oddly , it is the total lake of humans in the game that makes it so. I seems like we get to play as other objects, but the way we play with them is still the human way of of playing. We will only ever learn "human things" about them. The play style is a human's ideals bounding between scales; making it the most humans thing ever. A human mind alone in the universe filling every/any object it pleases with it's own mind and will inside.
It's a romantic idea that all things living and non-living have wills and existences, but it can still only ever be a theory.
this was too uch too fast….
its a "matter" of "opinion"
PBS!!! I LOVE U
oh no you might set off the darksouls fans
inb4 i get flamed, finished 1 and 2 with mouse and keyboard
Well, i think everything is interconnected. Everything is made out of atoms. Atoms are made of other stuff. And this stuff made of ther stuff. We are like atoms when compared to our galaxies, nd our galaxies may be atoms to bigger beings. This bigger beings would be atoms for other things too.
So everything is the center of the universe. And everything in itself is THE universe. Other objects as well. Purpose and meaning are unnessessary. Things just are. Nothing mean anything. It just is. Everything in the nature, depends on everything at once. so its interconnected. (Alan watts).
This is really cool. Everything is one. I dont know where to go from this.
I'm a bit lost at the early criticism of Watts in the video.
Nowhere does Watts denounce the "humanness" of interaction. His points on sameness are not one of retreating, but one of seeing the universe as an interconnected whole. It's to grasp you, I, stars, and shit, are all of one reality, and not disjointed, disconnected, standalone entities or things.
You absolutely can still appreciate things on "their own terms." Watts point was to highlight those things do not exist in their own isolated reality, which is how we actually see the world because this is what we make our image of "self" to be; a standalone entity of the mind, a doer of deeds, thinker of thoughts.
Unless the game omitted these points, they're central to what Watts talks about. It's all about "nonduality" and dealing with the illusion of separateness, not the denunciation of differentiation and appreciation of that.
Everyone should watch the episode "One is All, All is One" from Fullmetal Alchemist.
Very relevant to this episode.
Everything is connected trough bacon
Kevin Bacon
More than "everything is interconnected" — which seems to me so obvious it's not even worth discussing — how about "Everything is everywhere"?
There are no things; whatever looks like a "thing" to us and our detectors is a manifestation, an occurrence, a salient event in one of a perhaps infinite number of overlapping "fields." ("Fields" in quotation marks to emphasise that all of this is human language metaphor.)
This is how it seems to me. The main thing wrong with this theory is, it threatens to engulf the world in an avalanche of deep Deepakchopraism, a prospect too horrible to bear.
I guess I'll find out when I die.
Makes me think of Romantically Apocalyptic in which an out of control search engine has given everything from the sun to cake slices processors to calculate and best serve there function – then personality so that people can interact with them. Humanity has since been almost wiped out but all the objects keep trying to for fill there function as best they can. At one point a rock lectures the last(?) human(?) about treating it and its fellow rocks with respect, and there is a whole story about an elevator button trying to maintain standers in it's post-apocalyptic hotel.
"Is everything literally interconnected?"
It would certainly appear so, even from a scientific perspective (it's a quantum world out there!).
"What is the nature of that connection (or disconnection)?
I'd say its nature is quantum, although I realize that sounds a bit hand-wavy by itself. Mostly because it's a bit circular of a definition. Just a bit.
"How does that make you appreciate (or not) all things?"
I find that the more I think about the massive amount of interconnected information encoded in our bodies, food, environment, relationships, emotions, activities, science, etc, the more I'm able to see things from multiple perspectives, which is quite helpful for easing judgement and being more understanding (not just of others, but of yourself and the environment). It's too easy (and human) to feel antagonized by everything, but trying to take a step back and understand why everything is the way it is allows much wider perspectives that are much less emotionally intense and seem much more fair and considerate. But one must be careful, for as you learn to appreciate things you've never really thought about, you also begin to realize that many of the things that you do appreciate are much less deserving of that appreciation than you thought because you just never thought about them enough to understand enough of their context. Our ability to ignore things we don't want to pay attention to is incredible.
(This video and channel are awesome by the way! PBS has some fantastic content going these days <3)
snap haha deep
Thanks for this, Mike. Long time IdeaChannel viewer, but this video really…landed. Keep on making these great deep dives. I really appreciate every one.
Thanks… I now understand how everything is connected. I had an idea of how but now it seems more real. I will project a quick scope of it for you. If everything was just one thing then in all is one. If one were to look back at itself in doing so a question is created. This question if answered creates a secondary location from the one. Between the question and the answer is space and a first and second so direction of time. So from everything which was one is now divided. This division is the particle development of everything from one. The relationship between these divisions becomes the connection and the division that separates the questions from one another. So in truth this reveals that everything as one or part is only ever the singularity of the smallest part of the whole at any given moment. If in observations we were able to see the smallest part of this equation it would still only be as small as the question. Because in our ability to see this we would already be as far separated as knowing the answer. Therefore already part of the whole looking back.
Too many memes for me to follow along.
Love your outfit though!
Quantum entanglement.
20:38
6:55
The Slow Regard of Silent Things, by Patrick Rothfuss. Read it. It's relevant, I promise, and also brilliant.
Thanks for the game recommendation … but this video is a huge bunch of BS. On (almost*) every level.
(though the game seems fun)
*= the game is the only exception.
Difference is identity – Identity is difference.
To say "all things are One" implicitly assumes their individuality, and vice versa.
CRINGEBAIT TITLE
Seems to kind of diminish consciousness a bit. Also, if all things have "inner existence", then does the combining of inanimate objects to create new objects (say, the combining of a rock and a stick to make a tomahawk, or any other tool/product) change the inner existence of the constituents, or is a new inner existence born?
This gives capitalism a whole new perspective o__O
??? do objects have "will" ???
we should have empathy for objects ???
This looks quite unreasonable…
When it comes to idea channel I need a confused "???" button beside the thumbs up and thumbs down buttons.
Some one who isn't me, did mushrooms, and had a mental version of the aforementioned game, whereby they ceased to just be themselves, eventually even human; began being shapes and colors and experienced infinite infinities of infinitely different sizes.
That is the best way I can suggest experiencing the aforementioned game or being not-human.
These definition of objects are subjective and ill defined. The interpretation of an
arrangement of matter as a table in the first place relies on the social
construct that define it as such. Even if we considered generalized
objects formed by any arbitrary arrangements of fundamental particles in
the Universe, we'd still be taking into account not things for what
they really are (temporary field excitations in space-time), but for
overly simplified abstractions (particle arrangements).
There is but one true way to actually truly understand objects for what
they are, which is to understand the "Everything object", that is, the
object defined by everything that exists (which must therefore encompass
all space-time, future, present and past). While physicists still don't
have a unified theory of everything, the task is pretty much
impossible.
If objects have an interior existence, we cannot know it. It would be beyond the bounds of our cognition.
This is a very misleading characterisation of the ideas of watts and the other philosophies and philosophers here mentioned. Their ideas are infinitely more complex(conflicted) and cannot be summed up in such a neat way.
Do you also use Everything, the Windows search utility? 🙂
Teacher, He is here right now. He has been obvious for over 15 years. Yes,I can assure you that other Dimensions do exist and they often are not beneficial to our development and personal well being. Thanks for the heads up on urban franchising of our understanding. USA.
Skeptical Commentator Strawman: Radical empathy? Feeling for things?
That's the type of pc hippie bs that's going around now that'll re-elect Donald Trump in 2020.
Thanks!
Amazing
It seems quite difficult to define 'interconnectedness' and the means by which we can appreciate it. For example, if 'interconnectedness' is defined by how we use things, are we less or more connected depending on how we use them?
I think the relationship between us and Interconnectedness, has something to do with our being conscious; for, it seems, that it is the 'seat' of our experiencing everything. Our appreciation of everything, may come from our understanding of the rarity and distinctness of our conscious experience.
We're all a part of this 'stream' of consciousness, and therefore it may be the grounds of what gives life its Interconnectedness.
Yep! 🍻❤️✌🏽️🌍🌌
i literally discovered you 30 min ago and have seen many of your videos hahaha (thanks to wisecrack) and i would love if you could make more videos on this subject or related, is really interesting.
there is a seed in the ground. when it grows up, it will see all the world for what it is. until then, all it has is faith.
i am so lost
When that video game designer says that all things equally exist, does he include thoughts alongside the water and the rocks?
Psychedelics not only show you this, but let you experience the blissful, loving interconnectedness of everything. Experiencing it is so much more profound than merely knowing it.
first i watch shoeonhead's video about a brave little toaster and now this. Gonna take my body pillow out on a date now.
somehow I misheard bicycle as "Liza Minelli" which thoroughly confused me.
I LOVE BOGOST
Who do I talk to about this? I find this extremely interesting.
Yes.
I saw the title and I was hoping for something to do w/ Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently, or the BBCamerica TV show… Ah well this is good too. I'm always ready for Dirk Gently. Everything is connected.
Love this channel
The stoics believed in a deterministic universe, the logos. So if you believe dat everything that happens is predetermined and there is no free will, then all the things/everyone that now exist are/is supposed to be here. When the things cease to exist they return back to the logos. So will we when we die. In that way you could say everything is "interconnected".
This stoic view reminds me a bit of Sagans' star stuff.
If in no other way, all things are connected through gravity. The smallest electron exerts gravitational pull, however small, to masses astronomically far away. I'm not sure a photon exerts gravity, being massless, but gravity acts on photons too, or we would not get the gravitational lensing we've been hearing about.
I just noticed…this episode was released on 4/13. HUSSIE. WHY.
LAME
There's an astronaut in it
Ah yes I know a fella named Slvad..or uh Dirk who always goes on about how this nonsense helps him solve cases. A detective he fancies himself.
Schopenhauer is not an idealist, he hated german idealism^^ I think he is sth between idealism and materialism
You talk fast.
Delicately
great video. I feel the interconnected nature of the world we inhabit helps us achieve integrity and integrated existence… essentially it asks us to love ourselves because at the end of the day our projections of the world are more us than anything else. The diversity of the world reveals more of who we are each day and, in my opinion, hopes that we begin appreciating what we are, what the world is.
Radical Panpsychists be like: