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@pilosopera
[P]eople are by nature changeable. It is easy to persuade them about some particular matter, but it is hard to hold them to that persuasion. Hence it is necessary to provide that when they no longer believe, they can be forced to believe.
"The Prince," Niccolo Machiavelli
“I mean, what does left or right mean?”
‘What is a philosopher? —That is perhaps an anachronistic question. But I will give a modern response. In the past one might have said it is a man who stands in wonder; today I would say, borrowing words from Georges Bataille, it is someone who is afraid.
-Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson, (Minneapolis; University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 49. (via chasingthales)
Indulge your passions for science, says she, but let your science be human, and such as may have direct reference to action and society. Abstruse thought and profound researches I prohibit, and will severely punish, by the pensive melancholy which they introduce, by the endless uncertainty in which they involve you, and by the cold reception which your pretended discoveries shall meet with, when communicated. Be a philosopher, but, amidst all your philosophy, be still a man.
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Nature
Not to listen to a question [is] not enough to prove to have already answered it, still less to have gone beyond it.
Jean-Luc Marion, "Thomas Aquinas and Onto-theo-logy"
Every kind of priority gets noiselessly suppressed. Overnight, everything that is primordial gets glossed over as something that has long been well known. Everything gained by a struggle becomes just something to be manipulated. Every secret loses its force. This care of averageness reveals in turn an essential tendency of Dasein which we call the “levelling down” of all possibilities of Being.
Martin Heidegger, “Being and Time”
We have to make up our minds to acknowledge—however painful this acknowledgement is—that man is, of all creatures, the only one who, through his violence, his barbarism and his sadism, can really show himself to be inhuman to the point of heinousness, precisely because he also possesses the possibility of being human. Man is the only animal who tortures and knows how to refine cruelty. Inhumanity is the other side of our coin, which proudly bears the ideal of the dignity and the greatness of man.
Dominique Janicaud, “On the Human Condition”
Are We Living Inside a Computer Simulation?
The popular film trilogy, The Matrix, presented a cyberuniverse where humans live in a simulated reality created by sentient machines.
Now, a philosopher and team of physicists imagine that we might really be living inside a computer-generated universe that you could call The Lattice. What’s more, we may be able to detect it.
In 2003, British philosopher Nick Bostrom published a paper that proposed the universe we live in might in fact really be a numerical computer simulation. To give this a bizarre Twilight Zone twist, he suggested that our far-evolved distant descendants might construct such a program to simulate the past and recreate how their remote ancestors lived.
He felt that such an experiment was inevitable for a supercivilization. If it didn’t happen by now, then in meant that humanity never evolved that far and we’re doomed to a short lifespan as a species, he argued.
To extrapolate further, I’d suggest that artificial intelligent entities descended from us would be curious about looking back in time by simulating the universe of their biological ancestors.
As off-the-wall as this sounds, a team of physicists at the University of Washington (UW) recently announced that there is a potential test to seen if we actually live in The Lattice. Ironically, it would be the first such observation for scientifically hypothesized evidence of intelligent design behind the cosmos.
The UW team too propose that super-intelligent entities, bored with their current universe, do numerical simulations to explore all possibilities in the landscape of the underlying quantum vacuum (from which the big bang percolated) through universe simulations. “This is perhaps the most profound quest that can be undertaken by a sentient being,” write the authors.
Before you dismiss this idea as completely loony, the reality of such a Sim Universe might solve a lot of eerie mysteries about the cosmos. About two-dozen of the universe’s fundamental constants happen to fall within the narrow range thought to be compatible with life. At first glance it seems as unlikely as balancing a pencil on its tip. Jiggle these parameters and life as we know it would have never appeared. Not even stars and galaxies. This is called the Anthropic principle.
ANALYSIS: Building the Universe Inside a Supercomputer
The discovery of dark energy over a decade ago further compounds the universe’s strangeness. This sort of “antigravity” pushing space-time apart is the closest thing there is to nothing and still is something. This energy from the vacuum of space is 60 orders of magnitude weaker that what would be predicted by quantum physics.The eminent cosmologist Michael Turner ranks dark energy as “the most profound mystery in all of science.”
We are also living at a very special time in the universe’s history where it switched gears from decelerating to accelerating under the push of dark energy. This begs the question “why me why now?” (A phrase popularly attributed to Olympic figure skater Nancy Kerrigan in 1994 when she was attacked and crippled by an opponent.)
If dark energy were slightly stronger the universe would have blown apart before stars formed. Any weaker and the universe would have imploded long ago. Its incredibly anemic value has been seen as circumstantial evidence for parallel universes with their own flavor of dark energy that is typically destructive. It’s as if our universe won the lottery and got all the physical parameters just right for us to exist.
Finally, an artificial universe solves the Fermi Paradox (where are all the space aliens?) by implying that we truly are alone in the universe. It was custom made for us by our far-future progeny.
Biblical creationists can no doubt embrace these seeming cosmic coincidences as unequivocal evidence for their “theory” of Intelligent Design (ID). But is our “God” really a computer programmer rather than a bearded old man living in the sky?
Currently, supercomputers using a impressive-sounding technique called lattice quantum chromodynamics, and starting from the fundamental physical laws, can simulate only a very small portion of the universe. The scale is a little larger than the nucleus of an atom, according UW physicist Martin Savage. Mega-computers of the far future could greatly expand the size of the Sim Universe.
ANALYSIS: Artificial Universe Created Inside a Supercomputer
If we are living in such a program, there could be telltale evidence for the underlying lattice used in modeling the space-time continuum, say the researchers. This signature could show up as a limitation in the energy of cosmic rays. They would travel diagonally across the model universe and not interact equally in all directions, as they otherwise would be expected to do according to present cosmology.
If such results were measured, physicists would have to rule out any and all other natural explanations for the anomaly before flirting with the idea of intelligent design. (To avoid confusion with the purely faith-based creationist ID, this would not prove the existence of a biblical God, because you’d have to ask the question “why does God need a lattice?”)
If our universe is a simulation, then those entities controlling it could be running other simulations as well to create other universes parallel to our own. No doubt this would call for, ahem, massive parallel processing.
If all of this isn’t mind-blowing enough, Bostrom imagined “stacked” levels of reality, “we would have to suspect that the post-humans running our simulation are themselves simulated beings; and their creators, in turn, may also be simulated beings. Here may be room for a large number of levels of reality, and the number could be increasing over time.”
To compound this even further, Bostrom imagined a hierarchy of deities, “In some ways, the post-humans running a simulation are like gods. However, all the demigods except those at the fundamental level of reality are subject to sanctions by the more powerful gods living at lower levels.”
If the parallel universes are all running on the same computer platform could we communicate with them? If so, I hope the Matrix’s manic Agent Smith doesn’t materialize one day.
To borrow from the title of Isaac Asimov’s novel I Robot, the human condition might be described as I Subroutine.
What Eve did not understand was that she would find in the forbidden fruit not death but the idea and the sensation of death; that it was possible for her to see the angel [of death in the person of the serpent] and not succumb. She suddenly realized that life and death are not two separate domains; they meet in man, not God. It is possible to live ‘with’ death; all one needs to do is to turn one’s back on the living. It is possible to be dead and not know it.
Elie Wiesel, “Messengers of God”
Intercommunication between cultures in time and space is possible only because what makes men human is common to them, and acts as a bridge between them. But our values are ours, and theirs are theirs. We are free to criticise the values of other cultures, to condemn them, but we cannot pretend not to understand them at all, or to regard them simply as subjective, the products of creatures in different circumstances with different tastes from our own, which do not speak to us at all.
Isaiah Berlin, The Pursuit of the Ideal
Acting, as man’s capacity to begin something new, “out of nothing,” not reducible to a calculated strategic reaction to a given situation, takes places in the non-temporal gap between past and future, in the hiatus between the end of the old order and the beginning of the new which in history is precisely the moment of revolution.
Hannah Arendt (via fuckyeahexistentialism)
...a response is never worth more (and is often worth less) than the question that fostered it with a genuine questioning.
Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being
The essense of the 'question' is to open up possibilities and keep them open.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
“Scumbag Continental Philosopher”
I didn’t make these, but you know when something is so true that you just like to look at it and appreciate how true it is? these are that
Things that change force themselves on our attention far more than those that remain the same. That is the general rule of our intellectual life.
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
"Philosophy is about possibilities: logical, metaphysical, human, social, and political possibilities. That’s why philosophy is so abstract: it keeps its distance from the world. That’s also why philosophy is a tool of criticism: it focuses our attention on ways the world might be. Philosophy’s focus on the possible is the source of its distinctive beauty, and also its special dangers."
Joshua Cohen to photographer Steve Pyke (via fuckyeahphilosophy)
Imbedded in a cosmos where everything was immortal, mortality became the hallmark of human existence. Men are "the mortals," the only mortal things in existence, because unlike animals they do not exist only as members of a species whose immortal life is guaranteed through procreation. The mortality of men lies in the fact that individual life, with a recognizable life-story from birth to death, rises out of biological life. This individual life is distinguished from all other things by the rectilinear course of its movement, which, so to speak, cuts through the circular movement of biological life. This is mortality: to move along a rectilinear line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a cyclical order.
Hannah Arendt, On the Human Condition
