Dude lose the moustache. Why do young guys love to look like a pdfile? I also never heard a woman say "You know what is missing with this good-looking guy? A moustache!" Never happens and for a good reason.
Dude lose the moustache. Why do young guys love to look like an 80s corn star? I also never heard a woman say "You know what is missing with this good-looking guy? A moustache!" Never happens and for a good reason.
Dude lose the moustache. Why do young guys love to look like an 80s corn star? I also never heard a woman say - You know what is missing with this good-looking guy? A moustache! Never happens and for a good reason.
Dude lose the moustache. Why do young guys love to look like an 80s you know what? I also never heard a woman say "You know what is missing with this good-looking guy? A moustache!" Never happens and for a good reason.
I experience 'sonder' in a slightly different way...not only am I struck by the realization that everyone has their own world, but also that people from the past did as well. historical places absolutely overwhelm me; I can hardly fathom that in these exact locations, entire lives were lived, with their own stories, dreams, and struggles.
yea, that happens to me sometimes when thinking about death and its scare factor...TO think of all the thousands of millions of people that have aldready died. Its mind blowing.
I been both atheist and astronomy enthusiast, I am no longer either of them, they promote such a lonely and cynical belief system that you are following and it will generate a lot of anxiety and possibly even depression.
How can you be a astronomy enthusiast and an atheist ? studying astronomy should make it clear to anyone that the universe we live in has a higher probability of being created than it coming to existence on its own.
Even when I was a Christian I figured that there has to be life elsewhere in the universe, even if it's not in our galaxy. After the James Webb telescope showed our universe is even larger and more full of galaxies than we knew of, my belief in such a possibility has only increased. But, due to the sheer scale and expanse we likely do and will continue to be 'alone'. I never found the idea that other life exists in the universe is scary, same for being alone in the universe.
Although I enjoy when Alex hosts discussions with guests, I somehow much more enjoy these types of individual videos. It is sort of nostalgic of Alex's old videos which may be the reason.
I agree. I also feel like these do a much better job of being concise and getting to the point. Then from there, if there is a particular moment, I am confused or want to follow up on something, I can do my own research as opposed to listening to a podcast where many of the parts I will be less interested in or find less helpful.
I feel the same. It might be because of my ADHD, but I've always found I enjoy videos more where they're basically a stream of consciousness, the kind of thing you can't really have in a 2 way discussion.
The thing that gets me the most about our consciousness following the split version of ourselves that lives is not immortality. It’s how many times my parents/siblings/etc have had to bury me in different realities, living the rest of their lives with that pain.
Thankfully at least the theory doesn't warrant immortality, it warrants you will live as long as you don't encounter an event which has a 100% chance to kill you, if that puts your mind at ease
My older brother died of cancer at the age of 23, and let tell ya, the only way to understand death is to experience it through someone else. To watch them process it, even though they can't. It's real. Death is real, and it can be very terrifying.
Agree!!! Not really sure why the acknowledgement of death is in the surface level of the iceberg; in my experience, most of us cannot even begin to grasp the idea emotionally. It should be at the very bottom, because as you say: it is real!!!
@@fillbrin Chronically ill people tend not to struggle with the concept of their own death because their lives are filled with suffering. Be thankful for good health and the quality of your life and do not squander it :)
@@DanielHatchmanit's possible to be at peace with death even if you aren't suffering disproportionately. The fact that all things are temporary is part of why they should be cherished, and you cannot have that without loss. People wouldn't be capable of things like heroic self sacrifice if the fear of death was impossible to overcome. I think rather than viewing it as an escape some people could welcome death because they believe that they have lived well and that they've had the luxury to contemplate and confront the idea before the end of their lives. At least I hope it is, because I wouldn't want to spend my whole life worrying about it.
The idea of death is terrifying. The older you get, the more you know it will.happen. You have to get used to the idea. One really cruel thing about it, is watching your partner day by day getting older and frailer.as you get older and frailer. You wonder which one of you will be left alone, to cope when you are least able to cope with day to day tasks. I came to realise that more fighting than death, is an abandoned old age. Worse than death is isolation and loneliness. My husband is , nearly 80 year old. I am mid 70's. Startling is when your new credit card comes and you wonder if you will expire before it and 50 year plans are non of your business.
You're right, one man has the ultimate answer. How absurd we monkeys be. A wise man can make any angle appealing with the right quote. It's weightless, like our made up words and interpretation of reality.
Life is a reality which CONTAINS problems to be solved,the problems are a PART of reality,which is also to be experienced. Kiergegaard is merely playing with words...
I think the reason why many of these are in the iceberg is not because when you learn about them you get an existential crisis, rather it's because when you do have an existential crisis many of these start popping up in your head without ever hearing about them.
Last Thursdayism reminds me of a quote by Marcus Aurelius..."Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what's left and live it properly."
And the last one on the list reminds me of the description of the essence of humans described by the most popular book in existence. Maybe that's why certain scientists these days have turned against the many worlds interpretation.
Also, what Marcus Aurelius meant with "live it properly" is very different than what a modern reader would think. It refers to living by the ancient greek notion of "virtue", ie living in your "natural" place in the universe. If you were born, say, a slave, Marcus Aurelius would tell you to be satisfied with what you have and do your job properly, and if you were born, say, Emperor of the Roman Empire, he would tell you the same thing. That's a convenient philosophy for him.
@@blefebvre a lot of ancient philosophies like daoism were focused on maintaining order and harmony. Suprisingly revolution and malcontent tends to lead to large amounts of human suffering
"Sonder" is actually lifted from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which is a book of new words to describe obscure emotions, and is written by an etymologist. Strongly recommend everyone reads it.
One of my earliest memories as a child was having "sonder" hit me like a train in some sort of sudden epiphany, and I tried to explain it to my mom and she was like "huh?" and I realized I didn't have the words to explain my thoughts. That stuck with me my whole life. I never knew there was a name. This is a great moment of relief for me, believer it or not. LOL. This chapter is finally closed.
oh wow, sameee!! i remember being 7 or 8 and standing in a street with people everywhere and I was overwhelmed by the thought that they think inside themselves just like I do and there are 1000s of such inner voices going on and I felt as if there is a universe in everyone around me...i still remember that was one of the most vivid experiences I had... and no one understood me and I couldn't explain this to anyone... i realized this wonder thing in teen age.. but never met anyone whose earliest memory was the samee
Ha yep, I remember being 8-9 years old and realizing one evening that to my older brother, I'm not me. I'm his kid brother. I spent a good while staring at the back of his head, freaking out at the fact that whatever world he's taking in right now (he was playing Game Boy), I'm not a part of it despite staring at him. Haha
Gee thanks for putting this thought in my head right before I double check that I've had every possible existential crisis, and proceed to have any of them that I have until now avoided.
@@alanrobertson3172 Ground News sucks too and ExpressVPN is definitely sketchy. Extremely bad look for Alex. A debate opponent could easily bring those up to discredit his sincerity.
@@alanrobertson3172How does this make him lose "credibility"? Do you all of a sudden disagree with anything he might say because he is being sponsored by a company that you dislike? His opinions or ideas do not have any value no matter how good his argument could be? Wouldn't be this more of a proof that he, to some extent, is a naive person like we all are? He does not strike me as a guy that would know much about nutrition. So don't be absurd. Credibility, you say, like he is some sort of politician trying to gain your vote 😂
It surprised me too. I guess they offered him enough money to go for it in spite of AG1 shadiness. The fact that other renowned serious youtbers have partnerships has probably also helped him board this train.
The acknowledgment of death always terrifies me, ever since I was a young kid I was always prone to getting into these moments where I would really think about the fact that I would die, the absolute nothingness, lack of existence, everything I had experienced or known left without memory or meaning. I try to stop myself from thinking about it, but when I do it just messes with me so deeply.
If consciousness is an illusion created by all our atoms which happened to be in the right place at the right time, it isn't that bad of a prospect when we die. If death means the illusion of consciousness goes away, we won't be able to perceive time. In that case, it doesn't matter that we don't exist, because inevitably, all atoms will realign to create another conscious illusion in the distant future.
well untill the universe dies and by that logic why doesnt my concioussness emerge somewhere else in the universe? Are all the physical phenomenon just right here in my brain that create my concioussness? So after all the chance doesnt seem pretty high @kugul1683
@UltraComboEditswho we are and what we know, all our memories are stored in the brain. There is no soul. We die and we cease to exist only in memories of others. Once we die we are dead we no longer exist. There is nothing after death. We don't know why we exist or if we even have a purpose. The only thing that can be done is live life as we know it and make the most of what life is. And to answer Alex's question, I think both, are we not alone or are we alone equally are terrifying.
"Why does anything exist" the strangeness of everything is something that we block out. But sometimes when I wake in the middle of the night and come back into myself I feel it deeply, the sheer unknowableness of it all and the inescapable death inevitably with no answers - it's a truly nightmarish feeling, despite all the good in life - we are 'dying in a nightmare' as Thomas Ligotti put it. Thankfully this is something I can only feel that profoundly fleetingly, which I presume is my brain protecting itself. Consciousness is as much a curse as it is a gift I suppose.
Well said, I feel like this too sometimes. Life is really strange, both Heaven and Hell at times. I feel life and death is an infinite loop, I was dead before I was born after all. Even if we knew how it all works, I dont' think we will ever know why and I don't think I want to know really.
I used to have this anytime I woke up at 3 am. It was horrible. I'm not sure why it stopped happening, but it seemed to have coincided for me with the time of my life when I stopped being religious (I was sincerely religious for the first 34 years) and healed from the brain damage of religion.
It has an easy answer. Why would nothing be the default? It's only the default because as a living being you come from nothing. So you're applying your cognitive existence to material reality. They don't have the same rules. Therefore there's no reason for nothing to be the material default.
Death truly terrifies me. The realization that one day will be my last day. I think a lot of people avoid thinking about when that last day may come to pass. They think, "oh that's far away." But we've all watched that movie we anticipated and thought, "It's over already?!?" We've got a limited amount of time on this earth. And a limited amount of time not just to "live," but to partake in the experience of human consciousness. Awareness. "Being," in this reality.
I don’t fear death. The only thing I fear is the death process - if it’s painful. The way I think about it is: 1) I didn’t exist for billions of years before I was born and that didn’t bother me. Being dead is the same thing. 2) We “die” every night when we sleep. For a few hours we are totally unconscious. We don’t experience unconsciousness so death is the same thing as when we are sleeping. Obviously I’d like to live as long as possible to enjoy life’s experiences but it doesn’t make me too sad that I won’t get to experience all I want to experience because it’s simply impossible to do so anyway.
@@karagi101I regularly have wildly amazing dreams. So much so, I often look forward to going to sleep, just to experience them. All without drugs or alcohol, if anyone thought that might be the cause. I can’t explain why, but it has happened my whole life. I can still explain in great detail some of the most amazing and realistic dreams I had as a child in elementary school… I am 46 years old now, so that was a LONG time ago. I’ve even had a few dreams, not many though, that lead to sleep walking. Waking up in a completely different location than where I fell asleep and even more interesting is, that change of location was part of the dream. I don’t mean anything magic, like I fell asleep in America and woke up in Egypt, no. I fell asleep in my bedroom and in the dream I had a reason to go to the living room and woke up there or I had a reason to go outside and woke up outside my house, all part of the dream. So much so, it didn’t surprise me at all where I woke up, what confused me was… the dream I experienced did not happen. They often involved other people, who clearly were only there in my dream. If death is something like going to sleep, I can’t wait. I have had so many amazing, beautiful, and wonderful dreams, that would be an amazing experience. I don’t know what comes next after this life or what consciousness is, but I do believe we are something more than a meat suit experiencing a a flying rock, spinning through space. I can’t tell you which religion is right or if any of them are… but I do believe our existence exceeds our physical experience here. There are waaaaaay too many near impossible conditions that were met for us to exist at all to consider this all one cosmic accident. That is not only not probable, it is most certainly impossible. Therefore… who/what created us and why is the ultimate question. I think the answer to that question exists, but is beyond our scope of comprehension and… I am okay with that for now because, I see this whole song and dance as extremely temporary. A stepping stone, a learning experience, maybe even a test. We’ll see. I hope the next step is as good as my dreams. 🙏
@@karagi101 “The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.” ― St. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Before I became Christian I would have some ground in a quote from Kurzgesagt- "Close your eyes. Count to one. That's how long forever feels." Illustrating we already passed eternity and dont remember, and (under the presumption death is the final act of life) we wouldn't be conscious to endure eternity. My greatest fear of death (besides, you know, the pain) used to be just floating in a quiet empty darkness forever and going insane from nothing to do.
It’s marketed as a super health food but due to low quantities of the ingredients is considered by nutritionists to essentially be just an expensive placebo, i.e. a scam.
@@TheDarkTemplar3791 Overpriced, overhyped, and who the heck needs 8000% Vitamin B12 per day? Not anyone who understands how the body uses it. Personally I use Naturelo, a plant based supplement with everything you need, but not in excessive amounts and costs a fraction of AG1.
I spent most of my teenage years through my 20s deeply thinking about quite a few of these and being terrified but my pursuit for understanding drove me forward as a purpose that I could indeed figure it out. Through college I continued studying religious texts, manuscripts, philosophy, psychology, and trying to understand it all. It got to a point when I was 21 that I dropped out of school from horrible anxiety and other worse health issues - I think when I started doing a dream journal and using dream analysis tools and starting quickly noticing my dreams become very vivid and seemingly lasting longer I started to see clear parallels in my waking life and that drove me mad. Lots of stuff with birds at the end of the road. But at 35 I don’t have the same fervor or endless seeking I once did. Thinking back I kind of miss it. My life can still be full of the awful anxiety of modern existence and harsh realities but I’d simply recommend..don’t trip. Nobody knows for sure. Just keep going but don’t forget to relax when you can.
I've watched other existential crisis iceberg videos but this is the best one so far, I like how you give your opinions too and not just mere explanation like the other videos
yes, it's hard, but every person who is faced existential crisis must to accept mortality and realize that it's not so bad: our loved ones will not suffering after it, they won't have some troubles, they will be like before birth. In any case it hurts, but pondering in such direction gives you more peace.
See this is one I can’t accept and has trouble me since I was a kid. When you really think about the fact that when you die, you will never exist again, for eternity. You will experience nothing for the rest of time. How do you deal with that except try not to actively think about it?
@oliverlewis9578 Well, we don't know what happens. If there is something then you'll get on with it and if there isn't then you'll never know and so youre not harmed. Either way, it's a return to the state we were in before we were born, which could be viewed as our primary state as we're "dead" for considerably longer than we're ever alive for (or thats how it appears). I dont think it's anything to be scared about. Dying is normal. Dying is natural. And I don't think nature ever does anything that ultimately harms it, and we are part of nature.
@@oliverlewis9578 you gotta just accept the fear. What helps me is using death to actually make myself feel more positive about certain things, as weird as that sounds. If I’m having a lot of social anxiety for example, I tell myself “who cares if I embarrass myself? I’m going to be dead one day along with everyone else”. Same if I’m scared to take a risk. Idk why, it just helps me to look at the positive side of death, even if it doesn’t seem like there’s much positivity to it.
"You are alone in your brain." Your description reminded of the 1930 novel, "Johnny got his gun." It's about a young soldier who was wounded in war and lost his mobility, his sight, his hearing, and his ability to speak. In fact, Metallica's song "One" was written from the perspective of the character in the book.
It’s so very sad when people you respect for their intellect start shilling for such a well known crap product that is so expensive. I know everyone needs to make a living but that sponsorship surprised me.
Omg im so happy I found this video!! I think of this stuff all the time, i just love it. Especially 'sonder'. I figured that out as a very young kid sitting in traffic and it stuck with me since. Probably influenced me becoming an EMT, actually. It grew my empathy.
Hi Alex, I've been recommended your channel for years now and I've finally sat down to watch. As a result I've binged hours of your content this month. Thank you!
When he got to the end and I suddenly realized I was intimately familiar with every single item in the iceberg... 👀 I gotta give this type of reading a break 😂 Great video, my man. It was fun to see all the different ideas compiled like this plus hearing your opinions on each of them. Stay blessed! 😌🙏
Philosophy is a somewhat lonely interest that few share, so you releasing a video is almost like getting visited by a friend! Love your content, truly, so thank you for making it. I'm cheering for more metaphysical content and would love to see you talk to or debate a fringe modern philosopher like Bernardo Kastrup or Jonathan Schaffer in the future. Wish you all the best
Another brilliant video. As someone who has studied physics I was about to say QM, when you were talking about randomness, before you jumped in. You are, by far, the most talented and entertaining person talking about philosophy. You frequently outshine your debating partners. So glad I found you.
I think what they meant by sympathy is created by self-pity is that the unconscious reason we help others is to make ourselves feel better about ourselves.
That makes it sound selfish. Empathy is something you need to practice, to go through bad things yourself to appreciate how it impacts others going through similar things. When you realize how hard life is, you want to make it better and less hard for others. Humanity's history of invention, creativity, and innovation is based on this primarily. Yeah it feels good to help others too, but I think its way more than that.
I think it means more along the lines of sympathy for others or empathy is fundamentally sparked by self-pity. Once you have an ego death like experience or are physically/mentally in a dark place your mine starts to shift on certain moral and ethical stances. This is a big part of why I lost. Hope in humanity for a while. Being at rock bottom and realizing that nobody gives a fuck (except maybe your parents or a close friend if you’re lucky) thankfully I’m not at that place anymore, but it definitely changes how you see the world, how you treat others, and your general awareness of why people lash out or act the way they do, how you play a part in that, what is the right thing to do..
@@thepunisherxxx6804 And it is. It is selfish to pursue mitigating the suffering of others if and only if you want to mitigate the suffering of others. If you don't want to do that, and yet you do it anyway through some contrivance or another then that act of altruism wouldn't be selfish. But there might be something in the contrivance which would make it selfish by proxy.
@@malikmanning1050 In part, maybe? But "self-pity" seems itself to be sparked by a kind of banal "selfishness". Can't really have "self-pity" without a "self" to "pity". This may be crass, but I don't think you've experienced true ego-death until you don't even see others as "others" or you as "you". When your experience of both "you" and "others" as independent individuals ceases to exist and starts to exist more as a collective of interdependent extensions of the same underlying qualia (matter and energy)-then that's when you've achieved something more like ego-death. At least according to the psychoanalysts. Saying stuff like, "I realized nobody really cares (about me) except for relatives and friends," seems like an angsty projection of one's own thoughs and feelings onto others that may or may not be true. To be fair, I don't know if true ego-death outside of dreamless sleep/coma is even possible without actually dying, but the best approximation I can imagine seems to be something like the erasure of all distinctions of objects as "selves" and seeing everything as dependent upon everything else (even if only to a miniscule degree).
I have a surge of existential crisis when I have this sonder feeling and think about how people have experienced horrible deaths or excruciating pain. being a slave during ancient Egypt dying collapsing under the weight of the boulders you can’t carry anymore or being tortured with unimaginable cruel methods. poor souls
I literally sometimes randomly think of that on a bad day. We are alike. And can share our suffering. It’s funny how that can be comforting even though we’ve both just learned about another sad person.
Had this same experience the other day when hearing about and seeing the videos of the JeJu disaster. Just thinking about what those people must have been thinking in their last moments… pretty chilling.
I have similar thoughts, but it's like "somewhere right now animals are being tortured, children abused, people murdered" and I'm here just living life. I don't know if it's the same as sonder but it's a thought that hits me every now and then.
Been there last year in may. Actually you learn so much and take so much with you, it's honestly a process of maturing and developing as a human being and an adult.
The "Why does anything exist" hits hard, i remember thinking about it when i was still like 9yo or some shi and whenever i think about it i was in a weird feeling where i feel like floating and feels kinda euphomeric but also filled with dread. I wish i could still do that, nowadays i don't think i have that type of "curiosity" anymore
18:11 I think I remember a documentary, where they test the two hemispheres of a person who underwent this surgery seperatly. They show pictures to just one eye so just one of the hemispheres gets input and the person has to communicate what they see. The result was something like, since only one hemisphere is capable of talking, it couldn't communicate what the other one was seeing. But the mute hemisphere was still able to respond with writing or pictures and answered what it was seeing. So it still understands and processes tasks and information but has no ability to vocally communicate it. The person can understand what the mute half us doing but cannot talk about it because the vocal half has no idea whats going on.
We should work to lighten the load of mankind, Imagine if we did... Would love to hear from your positive notes 🤍🤍sᴇɴᴅ🤍🤍ᴍᴇ🤍🤍ᴀ🤍🤍ᴅɪʀᴇᴄᴛ🤍🤍ᴛᴇxᴛ🤍±𝟷𝟿𝟽𝟾𝟸𝟻𝟸𝟷𝟼𝟿𝟽🔝🔝🔝
Hey, I remember hearing of this as well referenced by someone else! Was just wondering if you know the name of the documentary or study and could point me to the source info. Hope you’re having a great day and cheers regardless.
@@oatstime8553 I think you can find it under "Split brain experiment". The documentary I remember was in German. They repeated the experiment, though I sadly can't remember what the documentary was called
Hey, Alex! Recent apostate, here! Long time listener, first time comment! Your 2 videos - one with Ben Shapiro and the other with Bill Craig on the morality of the Bible - are so underrated. I say this because those 2 have been leading apologists for their respective faith/s/denominations for years, and I believe after that, Christianity officially died in the intellectual/scientific realm. It died - not because you are smart, or correct - but because you represent something much, much greater. The enemy of all those who rely on confident ignorance to push unsubstantiated claims on the unskeptical, infantilized, and the dependent. You represent the Internet.
Thanks for this entertaining and clarity inducing tour around the Iceberg. And for the new word: "sonder". I can still remember where I was as a child (7? 8?) when this idea hit me. I saw my experience as a globe around my head, and realized everyone else had their own globe, their whole world. Regularly this realization runs into me like a freight train...and particularly, the trappedness -that I can only be one character in the plane of existence. It makes me appreciate eastern notions of merging into undifferentiated union, or at least various ideas of incarnation. And, btw, I play for the team that finds eternal life to increase life's value, though I respect (but cannot relate to) those who fear the ennui of a never-ending existence. As for not dying from one's own perspective, whenever I am confronted by disasters and the fragility of life, I chuckle at how we are like characters in a film, where the inspiring leader spurs us on through a deadly situation with the promise that "we are going to make it!" For all the characters that survived, he was a prophet! I get out of my car...I get off the plane...I'm still alive. I don't want to think about the "until I'm not". And in a sense, I can't, or at least I won't be "here" to tell of it.
I think the statement of "We are are alone" refers to everyone around you; humans and life, and it is a experience to realize that no one can truly care or connect with you, because they do it on their own ego and goals (to feel better about themself). But when he said "We are not alone", I think you got it right. Judging by that easier level of the ice berg, he probably talked about Alien life, and the idea of complex life existing far beyond us
I am the creator of the iceberg and the "we are alone" actually refers to humanity being alone in the universe. What you talked about is sort of captured in the entries "You are alone in your brain" and the self-pity one
@@mrh0ck3y Ayy lmaos around means potential predators. Empty universe results in incomprehensible questions. Too much thinking, tho, lets go catch fish.
Coming to terms with mortality can be an unending stress on existence. I truly felt free of that fear of that outcome for years, after a few deployments. I always lived a simple life. But having survived everything, I have since gotten married and had kids. I have now unlocked a new layer of that fear/crisis. Leaving my kids behind without having them taken care of. I am now driven to make sure I have money setup for them, and some level of comfort and security.
@@angusmcculloch6653 But you could say that because it is not very important from the larger perspective the human desires and satisfying them is the only meaning we can find and we should accept it as it is.
@@stevensteven3417Mindless troglodytes can never understand that, and even if they could, they don’t have the developed self to act differently from how their biologically predetermined behaviour makes them act.
I am of the strange temperament that seeks out existential topics, I rarely feel dread anymore. I love the dark stuff for some reason. I gravitate towards the dark philosophies. Existentialism, absurdism, existential nihilism, nihilism, philosophical pessimism etc. I had my first existential crisis at age nineteen. It lasted five hours. After a completely normal night. It was a perfect storm. I went down that iceberg so damn quickly. So many thoughts went through my head. I thought something was wrong with me, but I soon felt better. I came out of that curious and with a new perspective. I didn't get depressed or anything, instead I wanted to know more. I've evolved from dread and the cosmic horror of existence, but sometimes I feel that I hate everything. The way the world works, how things don't make a lot of sense. For me seeking out the existential topics is better than hiding from them. I've always been drawn to the unknown. As long as I can remember I've loved mysteries, especially metaphysical mysteries. Like Mystery Incorporated, articles about spooky and non spooky mysteries. The existential stuff acts as grown up mysteries for me. They'll never be solved, that's the appeal and the drawback simultaneously. Personally, I think that as shitty as life can be, it is highly improbable, and we should each find something that gives us purpose. I don't think there's inherent meaning in life, but it means we must make of it what we can.
I find your conclusion to be unfittingly optimistic. None of what you said necessarily leads to freedom to create your own meaning. And many theories are directly against that. It seems like a saying people add on to give a fake sense of positivity to a worldview that doesn’t justify it.
@hmq9052 That was my first existential crisis, I've had many since. It no longer fazes me really, I just get over it. Anyway, I've considered a lot of things in them. Such as how others cope with the existential stuff. How others deal with the monotony and the absurd. Such as the people around me. I also considered the problem of suffering, how suffering and pain will always exist in life. Human and animal suffering. I said I thought about myself because it was my first existential crisis, I was nineteen, I was thrown head first into the existential things. I was a naive, intolerable mess at nineteen, I can't believe anyone put up with me. I was self centred because I had a book series I was working on, and I was dealing with an illness that threatened my life. So that's why. I was thinking of my legacy in a world where we're possibly the universe briefly conscious of itself until the heat death. My subsequent ones have gone down several of those icebergs, few of them were just about me. I've thought about a lot of existential stuff. I've considered several of the dark philosophies. I've seen a lot, observed a lot about human nature and the human condition. So I think a lot, about things far more interesting than me.
@@DrWNoLs I understand that, I was just considering the ways others respond to the existential things, with service to others, religion, love, family etc. I don't think that the meaning we create has any real meaning beyond a local level and I recognise sometimes it's just what we tell ourselves. I understand that a lot of things are determined for us. Our meaning doesn't seem so great when we zoom out. My worldview is interesting, it's getting more and more complex. The existential moments often lead to more maturity for me, as I'm only 22. I create my imagined meaning by defying the awfulness of life, and trying to live regardless. I started reading the Myth of Sisyphus a while ago, I haven't finished it. I was just trying to see a silver lining to the situation, I try and enjoy the little things in the face of the vast and gratuitous horrors of our world. I'm not for toxic positivity, and I feel all of my emotions. My normal emotional state is neutral or cheerful, but I'm not relentlessly positive. I feel every emotion deeply until it burns out. I've been through some dark places myself, and I often hate the way things are. Even if there is no meaning, intrinsic or created, I think we shouldn't let this life go to waste. It's the only thing we know we have. I am not the best at philosophy in the world, and I can have two contradictory ideas in harmony in my mind. Sorry if what I wrote was contradictory, I am always improving. Thanks for the heads up.
as a fellow existentialist (academic wise) I have found absurdism & existentialism (and sometimes witgensteinian lack of true meaning) to be quite joyful. Being void of meaning grants room for freedom, but doesn't negate us from removing care from others. As Simone once said, our freedom is enhanced, not diminished, when we work to strengthen the freedom of others.
I think at the bottom of my iceberg, to sum up many of these, is that there is either something after we die or nothing after we die, and both are terrifying.
Nothing is much scarier. Because everything we think about non existence is thought about from the perspective of existence. We will never know the feeling of nonexistence, because feeling is an exclusive trait of existing. We can’t think about non existence because when we try to think of absolutely nothing, we inevitably think of something.
I never realized how many of these iceberg points I came up with all by myself, thinking I was "brilliant" for thinking these things up, only to find out that someone else already went down that rabbit hole. I basically re-invented the wheel. I love this video, and I may do one myself going into greater detail. Thank you for the inspiration Alex!
The absolute majority of people will never have an original thought in their entire lives (It has to be meaningful can’t just be a random string of numbers) But that doesn’t mean the thought is less valuable
Same. And then I watch those videos about existential crises, or read something, and think to myself “I’m probably not smart enough to think of something entirely new, which no one has ever thought of, but every concept I’ve seen so far, has not been new to me either. Will I ever experience something that will shake my understanding of the world as profoundly as “you have no free will, you will die, you are alone, “you” are maybe only an illusion, maybe everything is a simulation OR it’s just all in my head” again? Because it’s kinda fun. And I don’t get to experience it again :(
His Schrodinger's Mustache keeps popping on and off ever since he shaved it on the live stream. I like to think his mustache is an Eldritch entity that keeps phasing in and out of our dimension and that Alex has no control over it. Someone should create an SCP profile on it.
I had the “why does anything exist” thought very early in my life. I was a “why child” and I questioned everything in general, but this, this was such an eerie feeling.
We all have existential despair..just some of us go into it little bit more wildly and surrender our thoughts...and rest of people just distract themselves until they're forced to think about it. I think about death often honestly and speculate how it'll happen!
Back in 73 I was hospitalized with a broken limb. When i was in the mess hall my mind flashed on the realization that everyone else in the room was a real entity.
Yeah no $***, what does this even mean? How do you even know what a "real entity" is? Everyone pretends and acts so confident about their opinions and life, when in reality none of us know why we exist, why were self-aware and think differently from the other creatures on this planet. Nobody knows anything unless its practical, real, scientifically proven, and utilized practically in everyday life. Everything else is speculation, delusion. We are not capable of knowing it all.
A few days ago I went through realizing my own mortality and it was a weird thing to go through because I had always known it, but I never really thought hard about how it would feel, or how it may be afterward. As well as the fact that I won't be able to stop it. It honestly changed me in a way. It's something where if you haven't really gone through and processed it, then you won't know how scary it is to go through.
I think the existential crisis about "The brain creates the flow of time" lower on the iceberg, is talking about how we perceive time to go fast or slow oblivious to the actual pace at which its moving. It's very interesting how our brain goes into subconscious mode for a few moments and then we suddenly realize how long it's been. I wish you had elaborated or have dug deeper into this.
If you have done any drugs you know that time is very subjective. If you're drunk, one moment can immediately snap into a moment an hour later, leaving you wondering where the past hour went. On the contrary, on many psychedelics and to a lesser extent, cannabis, it feels like time is frozen, or at least irrelevant, or moving extremely slowly. People on psychedelics even have felt time looping, although I haven't experienced that myself. I personally think time is like gender, it has some foundation in reality but is still completely subjective and determined by psychological and social factors
Playing guitar really highlighted this experience for me. A passage that seems like a chaotic mess played in blistering fast forward turns into a lazy Sunday stroll with enough practice. It's the same amount of seconds before and after you learn it, but the subjective experience is so different!
I thought of it more like ... the 3 dimensions we experience are exactly the same as the 4th (time) but our perception of the fourth one is the only thing that makes it FEEL different. We're all just particles swimming in a soup of physics, but our brains had to organize ONE of those dimensions differently to make it all make sense. Kind of like how colors don't exist, our minds just made them up to help us sort objects. Or like how most matter is empty space, but our minds perceive it as solid chunks we can't see through because that's the only way we can navigate reality. So maybe the mind organizes a 4th dimension as a flowing state of past and present only incidentally. I don't think there's any good reason to believe this is true, but it's an existentially alarming thought at least.
@@rubydupyIItime looping is referred to “ being in the box “ it’s where your physical body isn’t doing anything, but your brain is having a series of hallucinations. I’ve had this happen to me where I was on a good amount of fungi and I went to the restroom while my cousin was outside the door waiting for me. I was in there for 45 minutes according to him. This is how it went.. I remember walking to the restroom. Locking the door. Sitting on the toilet. Not to use it but to try ti regain control of my brain. All of a sudden I was walking through my front door. It was a single door. I opened it and my sister was there. She looked the same. Sounded the same. Seconds later. I walked through the front door again. Different color door. Different interior. Same sister. Same voice. This happened several times. I then came to a double front door. My sister looked slightly different and sounded different. I then came to.. sitting on the toilet. Struggling to pull my self up using the towel rack and wall. That happened about 3-6 times where I would get up finally and go to grab the door knob to leave the restroom and I would restart on the toilet. Struggling. At the last time, when I opened the door. I was standing in the restroom. In the corner. Not on the toilet. With both my hands clasped to my face to the point I had to remove them to take a proper breath. I’ve had similar experiences when hippy flipping taking lsd and fungi together. Just thought I would share my experience 👍🏼 oh and during this whole situation. My cousin said I never once touched the door knob or opened the door that whole time. Time also slows down to the point a minute can feel like a hour. I’ve taking several showers that felt like 30 minutes long and it was in fact 3-5 minutes tops according to my wife who didn’t know I took some acid. I took about 3-4 tabs by accident and that was the longest 16 hours of my life.
Blimey, you got popular. The last post i saw was the cosmic skeptic a couple of years ago. Your posts got me thinking that i should learn more about the historical figures mentioned so often in modern philosophical content. So thats what i did. Big shout out to ASMR historian for those nuggets. I had always been interested in philosophy after reading "What is Man? Mark Twain but got a bit sidetracked by reality. Now i have the time to delve into the mysteries of the mind I find it a most fulfilling pursuit. I was going to post my thoughts on the "Iceberg" but i could just say that my conclusion is that i have seen it and though as you mention a lot of it is repetition (or a misunderstanding) these are milestones of awareness. I did em and my outlook is f**k it, only here for a while, do like the BBC was supposed to. Inform, Educate and Entertain. But i dont actually go anywhere because people annoy me. Go figure?
I have an immunodeficiency disorder, so I am reminded of my mortality daily. Not existing has lost its edge. I no longer fear it. I welcome it now. Existing is at best, a mediocre experience. I'm 34
Seven years ago, when I was 31, I was told by a doctor that I had an autoimmune disorder. I felt like death, and I felt like dying. I had been vegan, and spent 12 hours a day inside a corporate office a stressful job. Hardly ever went outside. Today, I am not ill. I am sitting in the sunshine sipping an espresso. I'm going to climb a volcano this weekend and ski down it. I'm trying to point out that not all is ever lost, and that having a immunodeficiency disorder isn't the end.
@ianstoyan thanks, I haven't given up or anything. I remain optimistic because Pessimism will 100% be game over. If I keep on being optimistic at least there's a chance I'm wrong and life gets great. So I'm fairly neutral on life, if I live cool, if not that's ok too. I don't wanna die but I don't care to live. It's an odd place to be, but it's a fairly freeing place where there's not much fear.
@@Dovahkiin0117 I know, for one, that I wasn't existing at my best. I'm still not. Continued striving to be better is what keeps me going. The only other way I know is to give up, and that never ends well.
i had, a real close call, a close call that would have really ended my life. something that left me with a month of terror and stress. that feeling is not one i wish to ever revisit
First and foremost: it's always good to find a youtuber that's content to concede that there are things they don't understand, or are not fully familiar with, so props to you for that regarding the discussion of thermodynamics and entropy, in part around the Boltzmann brain part of the video, I think you're conflating a few ideas: the probabilistic argument is perfectly consistent - if something has a chance of happening, no matter how small, it will happen if given infinite opportunities (or infinite time) in which to happen. If the universe is infinitely large, then there's an argument that every possible scenario will occur. It's very easy to assume that, if given an infinitely large amount of time, the same is true, but that's where entropy comes in, and is also where I believe this confusion arises: Entropy is the measure of the capacity of a closed system to transfer energy, or ‘do work’ - "closed" here means no matter or energy is entering or leaving your system, or whatever it is you're looking at. In your video, you use an example of a spritz from a spray can being dispersed evenly around a room, but that there is a chance it would all randomly gather together if given enough time, but that the probability was low enough to be considered a law. The reason this doesn't happen isn't probabilistic, but is thermodynamic - if you have two objects with different temperatures that can conduct heat, if they are in contact the higher temperature one will transfer heat to the lower temperature one. Temperature is the measure of something being able to transfer heat, or do work, on another object - this transfer of energy between things which can do work is a fundamental property of matter in our universe. Here, heat and entropy are analogous - or, strictly soeaking, talking about heat and temperature is a specific thermodynamic scenario. If you have a container of hot and cold objects, if left alone their temperatures will even out. The reason for this is the same reason that the gas from the can in your example will stay evenly distributed - because any other scenario would mean there is the potential for that gas to spread out, or do work, and if it can then it will. This is why gases typically reach a thermodynamic equilibrium when evenly spaced. If you've ever encountered the expression "heat death", this is the thermodynamic state where a system is able to do the minimum amount of work - so when everything is the same temperature, or when all of your gas particles are evenly spaced. The heat death of the universe will be when it is able to do the least amount of work, or transfer the least amount of energy between its different parts. It's about 1am where I am when I type this, so I hope this comment is coherent, and hopefully it clarifies some of the ideas you were discussing in this video!
I disagree. I think childhood ends when you realize you need to be responsible for your own well being and survival in life. When the weight of responsibility and anxiety starts pushing down on your body and soul, when you see the world for what it is and realize how hard it is, how much effort is put into making our modern society run, all the things that contribute to ease the burden of life. That's when childhood is over, when that childlike ignorance for the world is gone, and you see it for what it is, see yourself for what you are.
One criteria of quantum immortality is that the potential death would need happen so quickly that you could not actually experience it. "You" do die, however because you don't experience _any_ of it, your quantum cousin is _exactly_ identical to _you_ if you had lived -- and so you both can philosophically be considered the same exact person a la Ship of Theseus. I suppose with some handwaiving one could extend it to any kind of death, but then we'd expect to hear about a _lot_ more truly miraculous survival stories actually happening (like surviving getting shot in the heart). There are some miraculous stories though -- like the one guy that survived BOTH atomic bomb drops.
27:00 It is true that the probability of any possible given event occurring with infinite time is 1, but believe it or not, probability 1 DOES NOT mean “guaranteed to happen.” If anyone is interested (and you should be because it’s really cool), look up measure theory and sets of measure 0.
what terrifies me the most is just sitting on my death bed looking back on life in a physically disabled state, full of shame, regret and guilt but completely and entirely unable to change any of it and knowing you have almost no time before you cease to exist.
That is a painful thought but honestly seems more like tip of the iceberg stuff for me, I'm sure there could be worse things you could conjure up if you really tried maybe find solace in the fact it could be worse. Figure out a way of non-attachment now while you can also.
@@donsistentialist shame, regret and guilt sounds like teenage anxieties. Unless you have a hobby or profession that hinges on other people’s suffering you should be ok. If not G.O.D has a solution it’s called dementia.🤔🤫
@donsistentialist Well, your example is still a temporary suffering that will end soon. If you've ever done strong psychedelics, you know just how silly our usual interpretation of time, reality and identity is. So you could at least find comfort knowing the ego that is suffering and worrying about these things doesn't actually exist. What's more terrifying is the background consciousness you actually are may be simultaneously experiencing all suffering every human has ever felt forever, and you were just experiencing one split in its awareness which has infinite points of consciousness.
This is a bit of a side note, but since you brought up superdeterminism and free will, I'm going to casually name drop Derk Pereboom and Gregg Caruso as two philosophers I think Alex could potentially learn from (they're also free will skeptics) and I would *love* to see one of them on a podcast sometime :)
3:00 this is like that one rick and morty episode where they make a mini world to power their spaceship, but that world gets so advanced they get make their own mini world to generate power and so on
The issue with Boltzmann brains most people forget about is genesis. It's far, far easier for a self-replicating RNA strand to randomly be created than a Boltzmann brain, and even though only a tiny fraction of those will replicate, spread, and eventually form brains, that tiny fraction is still much larger than the probability of a Boltzmann brain forming.
“Sympathy is created from self-pity”-i would imagine this means how sympathy is born from “I” statements and not “you” statements. They don’t empathize, and highlight a reason they cannot connect over connection “i wish i could take that away from you” represents self-helplessness for example
“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.” That's the Rustin Cole quote mentioned at 25:25. It's a helluva line, and very well delivered and fits with the somewhat bleak concept of the series and what happens in it. It's very dark and a little unresolved, but the first season is a really great watch.
We should work to lighten the load of mankind, Imagine if we did... Would love to hear from your positive notes 🤍🤍sᴇɴᴅ🤍🤍ᴍᴇ🤍🤍ᴀ🤍🤍ᴅɪʀᴇᴄᴛ🤍🤍ᴛᴇxᴛ🤍±𝟷𝟿𝟽𝟾𝟸𝟻𝟸𝟷𝟼𝟿𝟽🔝🔝🔝
I've never come across the word 'sonder' before, but that's a very useful word to know! I remember being struck reading Sartre when I was studying philosophy, he had the most wonderful way of describing that very thing. He talks about being in a park, taking it all in through his senses, basically being at the centre of all experience - then he sees another person, also apparently taking in the park, the centre of their own experience, and Sartre said that person "stole the world" from him. I think about that quite a lot, whenever I suddenly experience sonder.
The "B theory of time" gives me the most existential crisis of any of these. Why is it that you can go anywhere on earth you've been...but you can't go back to 2010 even though we were already there? It feels like 2010 should exist the same way that Dallas, Texas exists.
you can, because your existence now is just as real as it was yesterday, tomorrow, 5 years ago, and 3 weeks from today... you exist in all of them equally.
The concept of time is something we can’t fully comprehend. These things we may never fully understand, they lead us to fear the universe and our own existence. We are bound by time and the laws of the universe because we were made so. I have wondered a lot about the functions of time and it’s almost like the past and future does not exist. The past and future is just a label for the absence of the present.
Nick Bostrum's use of probability, and the similar uses in apologetics, are missing a pretty crucial aspect: you can't know the probability of something that hasn't been observed. We know there's a possibility of our own universe, but we can't know that other universes are even possible.
You forget the prime assumption. That there is an infinite universe in extent and time. When we have such an infinite universe it doesn’t matter what the probability of something is. It will eventually happen and not only that, it will happen an infinite number of times.
@@karagi101I think even this assumes that the probability is fixed (or at least not changing in a certain way). It’s very possible that, given infinite time, the probability of an event at any time could always be nonzero but the probability of it happening eventually is still less than one
@@karagi101 I've heard that reasoning before and I find it unconvincing. To begin with, it's unclear how that would affect a probability of 0, since 0 times infinity is basically a math way to say you're looking at the problem wrong. There's also the set issue that an infinite probability of everything would include the probability of the exact situation to avoid something ever occurring.
@@matswessling6600would it not be the case that anything that can happen (within the laws of physics), definitely will happen in an infinite universe?
I once smoked DMT, and while the visuals were spectacular and overwhelming, I stayed lucid enough to talk myself through it. With my eyes open, objects retained their shapes despite a kaleidoscopic effect. For example, a teapot might appear elsewhere in my peripheral vision but remained clearly a teapot. Rather than chaotic colors or 'psychedelic' designs, everything was surprisingly orderly-objects kept their forms but moved around. It felt as though my eyes weren’t just processing light but actively detecting and transmitting whole objects. I’m likely failing to articulate this, but it feels like Berkeley’s work might help me make sense of the experience.
my perception of the we are alone thing has more to do with never being able to be understood, like being fully isolated from other human beings just stuck in our own personhood without the ability to truly explain ourselves, rather than a broader humanity statement
Ever since I was a kid, I have seen the question, "Why?" as a child's question. It is not only open ended and non-specific, but it makes a HUGE assumption: intentional causality. Therefore, I think that ascribing any existential weight to amswering "why" questions is beyond silly, and will hamstring the ability to think clearly and ask actual substantial questions. By the way, thankfully, it is a line of questioning that brings with it its very own annihlation, by simply adding a word: "Why not?" Cheers!
@wil54 IMHO any line of questioning should have a purpose. Now I understand that mere curiosity is a valid purpose, however, it just doesn't hold any real weight. So you report what you see, and move on. However, if you are trying to find deeper answers to unlock true understanding that can lead to greater abilities or power, for instance, to flesh out a "theory of everything", then you MUST ask more specific questions and/or pose more specific hypothesis, because vague ones are impirically untestable. In other words, "Why?" Questions can point the way to answerable questions, but while most folks ascribe a deep, almost spiritual power to "why?" I see it quite the opposite way. Cheers!
@ fair dinkum! Well I suppose the almighty “why” is a nice shortcut to the gradual evolution in understanding. It is a very broad question though, and sort of shortcuts any specific concrete stuff
@@MatthewCleereWhat if death was not the end but the beginning of an eternity in hell or heaven and a day of judgement where your actions of this life are held to account, the good, the bad and everything in between and those who didn't acknowledge this truth and therefore, had no preparation are dawned with the reality of eternal pain, anguish and regret, take it from me and discover God through religion with an open heart, unbiased and sincerely seeking the truth, and you will live the best life here, your pain will be rewarded as you are patient with hope in God while others suffer with no solace, once you die if you follow the guidance of God the most important of which is believing in only One God and not associating anything with Him in worship, in Heaven you will have your hearts desire without measure and are united with your loved ones if they are also righteous. My personal tip is to learn about Islam and the miracles of the Quran. Call out to the creator of this universe if you don't believe in Him, just call out and ask Him God if you truly exist guide me to the truth,and to the true religion.
I flatly reject the notion that we know "absolutely nothing" about consciousness and "don't understand the mechanism by which it works" and aren't even "close to coming up with a solution of the mystery of consciousness". In my opinion, this whole line of reasoning is just willful obscurantism. The notion of consciousness is pretty ambiguous. To whatever degree we clearly define consciousness, to that degree, the "mystery" starts to dissipate. There's still lots to learn (as there is with any subject matter), but we've learned so much about the systems of the brain, how they relate to awareness and self-awareness, that it's ludicrous to suggest that we know nothing.
Yeah but i think he meant it more in a way that we will never be truly able to get data on conscious experience of someone else. Every conscious experience is like a lens that experiences reality differently. Yeah we can explore brain functions and figure out things needed for consciousness and what kinda causes it. But i dont think you can actually replicate consciousness or share it with someone maybe even if you build a human brain exactly the same way, to precive it and analyze you would probably need a bigger brain and an even bigger consciousness
We know of only the "what" at certain levels, not the cause or requirements for such formation (doesn't have to be organic). It's kind of like: we are starting to figure out how complicated of a system it requires, but consciousness is a "complex" system, well, a kind of self-adjusting complex complex complex complex system. Like scientists would be able to tell us: Given X input to a certain area of the brain, a range of probable outcome Y will occur (the "what") (and ofc they are also able to tell us descriptive details as well). But we are not even close to answer the question: given some material Z, do we even know how to APPROACH creating a consciousness out of it, or is this material even viable? Another way to think about it is, consciousness is holistic. It is "like" something to "be" a human, to be a bee, to be a dog or cat or horse. And altho no one can prove that "you" or your consciousness exists for certain, YOU know as a matter of fact that it does. Given this understanding, I don't think it's "obscurantist" to think that studying particular functions or causal chains of the brain will get us closer to the hard problem. And I provide you with yet another way to look at it. It's like if you asked a LLM to answer some simply question (ie just off the top of my head: "is blue a warmer color than orange?"), after some number of experiments it should be reasonable to conclude that the LLM's answer will fall into a certain domain. This is how we are approaching the hard problem and the current progress. But you should see that this tells us nothing about the "how", or even the requirements for the "how" to have existed in the first place, or if there are more than one possible types of "hows" (we do not know how sufficiently large LLMs work at the lowest levels, nor if there are multiple ways that they can arrive at the same answers).
@@Alan-di5kq I agree. Tho technically, we are able to get data, at least pieces of it, we just aren't able to get the experience ITSLEF, and that is pretty much the whole point of it being the "hard problem". I think an analogy that I've heard went smn like: "we may know certain aspects of a bat's consciousness, but we do not know what is it "like" to "be" a bat". Also in terms of technicality, we don't know what things are needed for consciousness. We know at some higher levels what happens in our brains, but that's pretty much it. I elaborated upon this point in my response to the OP. Read if interested.
For the dual consciousness segment, it's worth mentioning DID and OSDD as well. In cases of extreme childhood trauma, someone's consciousness can be psychologically split into different identities which live separately but in the same body. I've actually known plenty of people with these disorders online, and it's really fascinating to hear their experiences with it (on top of them being fantastic people of course ❤). The idea of losing control of your own mind for hours, or conversely, just coming into existence one day in someone else's body, all sounds pretty terrifying. But it seems like after a while you just get used to it like anything else
Yes, It ruins your life but it is your only experience. If you have dissociative parts it’s always been your normal in a way. Total chaos and disfunction but it’s familiar. The thought of integration terrifies some of my parts because they think they won’t exist. 😅
@@necromancer6405 I’m not sure it’s real either. It could be memory impairment. Like how you don’t remember a dream but then some you do. It’s far more like that. Like dreams if you write it down when you wake you can prompt the memory from the dream and try to get the self to see it or remember. It’s not simple to remember a black out but there are ways if you can get there but yeah I don’t necessarily think its as organised as DID makes it seem. I would say 90% of professionals I see don’t believe in DID. they just call it regression, dissociating, stuck in trauma etc. the actual organised system of DID isn’t experienced even in many labeled with that diagnosis. We just have stuff happening and can’t remember what happened. It’s usually the time in fight/flight that is missing. So what ever you did in the panic attack is gone. I’m positive it’s there just like our dreams are.
@@justmorenoise I have experience with PTSD and I could see how people could refuse to cope with it and instead make life easier by pretending to be someone else. Pretend is always pretend though. Deep down we all know it's not real.
5:20 I would not say most people know they are going to die. Most people believe in an after life and the way I see it, that's a whole lot like not believing in death at all.
Yep, it's a cheat. I kind of envy them but my brain doesn't work that way. Too much nonsense in religion, and I'm wary of any idea that just happens to be comforting to us.
believing in life after death requires you to know about death by definition - and even highly religious people are afraid of dying (except for a handful of extremists, such as those that blow themselves up with the belief that this is their ticket to heaven) and aren't 100% certain of their fate after they die.
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that everyone has their own life and their worry is misplaced
Dude lose the moustache. Why do young guys love to look like a pdfile? I also never heard a woman say "You know what is missing with this good-looking guy? A moustache!" Never happens and for a good reason.
Dude lose the moustache. Why do young guys love to look like an 80s corn star? I also never heard a woman say "You know what is missing with this good-looking guy? A moustache!" Never happens and for a good reason.
Dude lose the moustache. Why do young guys love to look like an 80s corn star? I also never heard a woman say - You know what is missing with this good-looking guy? A moustache! Never happens and for a good reason.
Dude lose the moustache. Why do young guys love to look like an 80s you know what? I also never heard a woman say "You know what is missing with this good-looking guy? A moustache!" Never happens and for a good reason.
I love how chairs are always the first example of "stuff" that exists.
Chairs are like Facebook.
Ted nugent fucking loves chairs.
you typed this while seated hahaha
I use olive trees
even for plato... chairs... just the quintessential inanimate object.
I experience 'sonder' in a slightly different way...not only am I struck by the realization that everyone has their own world, but also that people from the past did as well.
historical places absolutely overwhelm me; I can hardly fathom that in these exact locations, entire lives were lived, with their own stories, dreams, and struggles.
yea, that happens to me sometimes when thinking about death and its scare factor...TO think of all the thousands of millions of people that have aldready died. Its mind blowing.
That just messed with my head! Yikes.
That seems insane to experience that’s so cool
@@Existidor.Serial137 with B billion
I think about this sort of thing . Do your ancestry and then the tears and imagination starts in a way I’ve not known .
Everyone else: a jolly Christmas video
Alex: **The Existential Crisis Iceberg**
Babe, Christmas was last week. This week it's Iceberg's. Catch up.
Merry Christberg to you!
I just had a Deja vu while reading these posts about icebergs and mustaches. Like the Eternal Return of this mustache
♡
@@YourhighnessnonaChristmas is one week. Iceberg that would fit better with Halloween are forever.
Dude, this is the part of RUclips I was searching for. THANK YOU. This scratches the itch in my brain.
Thanks Alex, existential crisis was exactly what I needed to start the new year off!
Kind of like napalm in the morning?
Lol
As an atheist and astronomy enthusiast, the concept of "we are alone" is absolutely more terrifying than "we are not alone".
You say that, but in reality an alien species capable of getting to us is so unfathomably dangerous.....
I been both atheist and astronomy enthusiast, I am no longer either of them, they promote such a lonely and cynical belief system that you are following and it will generate a lot of anxiety and possibly even depression.
How can you be a astronomy enthusiast and an atheist ? studying astronomy should make it clear to anyone that the universe we live in has a higher probability of being created than it coming to existence on its own.
Even when I was a Christian I figured that there has to be life elsewhere in the universe, even if it's not in our galaxy. After the James Webb telescope showed our universe is even larger and more full of galaxies than we knew of, my belief in such a possibility has only increased.
But, due to the sheer scale and expanse we likely do and will continue to be 'alone'.
I never found the idea that other life exists in the universe is scary, same for being alone in the universe.
@@jasonmain6398 If only based on what humans have done upon reaching "new lands".
Although I enjoy when Alex hosts discussions with guests, I somehow much more enjoy these types of individual videos. It is sort of nostalgic of Alex's old videos which may be the reason.
I agree. I also feel like these do a much better job of being concise and getting to the point. Then from there, if there is a particular moment, I am confused or want to follow up on something, I can do my own research as opposed to listening to a podcast where many of the parts I will be less interested in or find less helpful.
I couldn't agree more. I really enjoy when talks about his journey to atheism.
Also because usually Alex always has the most insightful perspectives and thoughts in the room. So a video of him just talking is great.
I agree completely
I feel the same.
It might be because of my ADHD, but I've always found I enjoy videos more where they're basically a stream of consciousness, the kind of thing you can't really have in a 2 way discussion.
The thing that gets me the most about our consciousness following the split version of ourselves that lives is not immortality. It’s how many times my parents/siblings/etc have had to bury me in different realities, living the rest of their lives with that pain.
And there’s nothing you can do to comfort them. Yeah that thought is definitely anxiety provoking
Thankfully at least the theory doesn't warrant immortality, it warrants you will live as long as you don't encounter an event which has a 100% chance to kill you, if that puts your mind at ease
Merry Crisis to you too, Alex.
maybe christ himself is a crisis of existence! brilliant!
😂😂😂
@@noahlapuz3853Merry Christmas
@@noahlapuz3853If He does come back, the world will be in crisis for sure lol
My older brother died of cancer at the age of 23, and let tell ya, the only way to understand death is to experience it through someone else. To watch them process it, even though they can't. It's real. Death is real, and it can be very terrifying.
Agree!!! Not really sure why the acknowledgement of death is in the surface level of the iceberg; in my experience, most of us cannot even begin to grasp the idea emotionally. It should be at the very bottom, because as you say: it is real!!!
@@fillbrin Chronically ill people tend not to struggle with the concept of their own death because their lives are filled with suffering. Be thankful for good health and the quality of your life and do not squander it :)
@@DanielHatchmanit's possible to be at peace with death even if you aren't suffering disproportionately. The fact that all things are temporary is part of why they should be cherished, and you cannot have that without loss. People wouldn't be capable of things like heroic self sacrifice if the fear of death was impossible to overcome.
I think rather than viewing it as an escape some people could welcome death because they believe that they have lived well and that they've had the luxury to contemplate and confront the idea before the end of their lives.
At least I hope it is, because I wouldn't want to spend my whole life worrying about it.
@@fillbrin I think it’s exciting and will be the ultimate adventure…✨
The idea of death is terrifying. The older you get, the more you know it will.happen. You have to get used to the idea. One really cruel thing about it, is watching your partner day by day getting older and frailer.as you get older and frailer. You wonder which one of you will be left alone, to cope when you are least able to cope with day to day tasks. I came to realise that more fighting than death, is an abandoned old age. Worse than death is isolation and loneliness. My husband is , nearly 80 year old. I am mid 70's. Startling is when your new credit card comes and you wonder if you will expire before it and 50 year plans are non of your business.
Nobody knows! Kierkegaard’s quote, “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced,”
You're right, one man has the ultimate answer. How absurd we monkeys be. A wise man can make any angle appealing with the right quote. It's weightless, like our made up words and interpretation of reality.
Life is a reality which CONTAINS problems to be solved,the problems are a PART of reality,which is also to be experienced. Kiergegaard is merely playing with words...
the whole point of philosophy is to know. this attitude is akin to just giving up.
@@marklee2588Finding that there is no worthwhile conclusion, is itself a worthwhile conclusion.
No in this society its definitely a problem
I think the reason why many of these are in the iceberg is not because when you learn about them you get an existential crisis, rather it's because when you do have an existential crisis many of these start popping up in your head without ever hearing about them.
Exactlyyyy😭
Last Thursdayism reminds me of a quote by Marcus Aurelius..."Think of yourself as dead. You have lived your life. Now, take what's left and live it properly."
he was a smart cookie.
And the last one on the list reminds me of the description of the essence of humans described by the most popular book in existence. Maybe that's why certain scientists these days have turned against the many worlds interpretation.
Marcus Aurelius was a stoic. Stoicism doesn't work in the real world...
Also, what Marcus Aurelius meant with "live it properly" is very different than what a modern reader would think. It refers to living by the ancient greek notion of "virtue", ie living in your "natural" place in the universe.
If you were born, say, a slave, Marcus Aurelius would tell you to be satisfied with what you have and do your job properly, and if you were born, say, Emperor of the Roman Empire, he would tell you the same thing. That's a convenient philosophy for him.
@@blefebvre a lot of ancient philosophies like daoism were focused on maintaining order and harmony. Suprisingly revolution and malcontent tends to lead to large amounts of human suffering
"Sonder" is actually lifted from The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, which is a book of new words to describe obscure emotions, and is written by an etymologist. Strongly recommend everyone reads it.
Thanks for the tip! I've already ordered it.
@@pdcasablanca That's great I'm glad my comment actually led to someone trying it out. Very happy about that :) enjoy the book
He has a youtube channel too if anyone's interested, with an elaborative video for each word
@@escherpainting8622 Thanks :)
@@schizophrenicenthusiast Cool! I'll definitely check it out. Thanks!
One of my earliest memories as a child was having "sonder" hit me like a train in some sort of sudden epiphany, and I tried to explain it to my mom and she was like "huh?" and I realized I didn't have the words to explain my thoughts. That stuck with me my whole life. I never knew there was a name. This is a great moment of relief for me, believer it or not. LOL. This chapter is finally closed.
Cool! On a strangely related note, I remember in my mid~teens learning the word "ineffable." Always stuck with me.
oh wow, sameee!! i remember being 7 or 8 and standing in a street with people everywhere and I was overwhelmed by the thought that they think inside themselves just like I do and there are 1000s of such inner voices going on and I felt as if there is a universe in everyone around me...i still remember that was one of the most vivid experiences I had... and no one understood me and I couldn't explain this to anyone... i realized this wonder thing in teen age.. but never met anyone whose earliest memory was the samee
Dictionary of obscure sorrows
Ha yep, I remember being 8-9 years old and realizing one evening that to my older brother, I'm not me. I'm his kid brother. I spent a good while staring at the back of his head, freaking out at the fact that whatever world he's taking in right now (he was playing Game Boy), I'm not a part of it despite staring at him. Haha
Finally I found what I was feeling often and tried to explain to others.
This was an absolute pleasure to listen to. Utterly brilliant summing up. Thanks!
When you realize you have had every possible existential crisis and then have an existential crisis of running out of existential crisises
Use your imagination to generate new ones😌
@souravrudra3222 thanks 👍🏻. Maybe once I come out of the simulation the big programmer will show me some new ones.
I feel similar. I ran out of existential crisis, now for me it's like, well there's only the moment - so enjoy it cos I'm gonna die one day ;)
Too real bro
Gee thanks for putting this thought in my head right before I double check that I've had every possible existential crisis, and proceed to have any of them that I have until now avoided.
These kind of videos are the reason why I subscribed to you.
I love your openmindedness
At the bottom of my existentiel crisis iceberg, is serious people like Alex pushing commercials for AG1
AG1 is like a sect, cant stand it. I ask myself who is buyin this overpriced crap, and then checked they had 600mil revenue this year...
Absolutely. He loses credibility in my eyes.
@@alanrobertson3172 Ground News sucks too and ExpressVPN is definitely sketchy. Extremely bad look for Alex. A debate opponent could easily bring those up to discredit his sincerity.
@@alanrobertson3172How does this make him lose "credibility"? Do you all of a sudden disagree with anything he might say because he is being sponsored by a company that you dislike? His opinions or ideas do not have any value no matter how good his argument could be?
Wouldn't be this more of a proof that he, to some extent, is a naive person like we all are? He does not strike me as a guy that would know much about nutrition. So don't be absurd. Credibility, you say, like he is some sort of politician trying to gain your vote 😂
It surprised me too. I guess they offered him enough money to go for it in spite of AG1 shadiness. The fact that other renowned serious youtbers have partnerships has probably also helped him board this train.
The acknowledgment of death always terrifies me, ever since I was a young kid I was always prone to getting into these moments where I would really think about the fact that I would die, the absolute nothingness, lack of existence, everything I had experienced or known left without memory or meaning. I try to stop myself from thinking about it, but when I do it just messes with me so deeply.
If consciousness is an illusion created by all our atoms which happened to be in the right place at the right time, it isn't that bad of a prospect when we die. If death means the illusion of consciousness goes away, we won't be able to perceive time. In that case, it doesn't matter that we don't exist, because inevitably, all atoms will realign to create another conscious illusion in the distant future.
@kugul1683nicely said.
Death doesn’t have to be a bad thing. We only assume it’s bad because we don’t know what happens. But there’s no reason to assume that
well untill the universe dies and by that logic why doesnt my concioussness emerge somewhere else in the universe? Are all the physical phenomenon just right here in my brain that create my concioussness? So after all the chance doesnt seem pretty high @kugul1683
@UltraComboEditswho we are and what we know, all our memories are stored in the brain. There is no soul. We die and we cease to exist only in memories of others. Once we die we are dead we no longer exist. There is nothing after death.
We don't know why we exist or if we even have a purpose. The only thing that can be done is live life as we know it and make the most of what life is.
And to answer Alex's question, I think both, are we not alone or are we alone equally are terrifying.
"Why does anything exist" the strangeness of everything is something that we block out. But sometimes when I wake in the middle of the night and come back into myself I feel it deeply, the sheer unknowableness of it all and the inescapable death inevitably with no answers - it's a truly nightmarish feeling, despite all the good in life - we are 'dying in a nightmare' as Thomas Ligotti put it. Thankfully this is something I can only feel that profoundly fleetingly, which I presume is my brain protecting itself. Consciousness is as much a curse as it is a gift I suppose.
Well said, I feel like this too sometimes. Life is really strange, both Heaven and Hell at times. I feel life and death is an infinite loop, I was dead before I was born after all. Even if we knew how it all works, I dont' think we will ever know why and I don't think I want to know really.
Just enjoy the hotdog, amigo 🌭
I used to have this anytime I woke up at 3 am. It was horrible. I'm not sure why it stopped happening, but it seemed to have coincided for me with the time of my life when I stopped being religious (I was sincerely religious for the first 34 years) and healed from the brain damage of religion.
@@vyvy-16 Wise words
It has an easy answer. Why would nothing be the default? It's only the default because as a living being you come from nothing. So you're applying your cognitive existence to material reality. They don't have the same rules. Therefore there's no reason for nothing to be the material default.
Death truly terrifies me. The realization that one day will be my last day. I think a lot of people avoid thinking about when that last day may come to pass. They think, "oh that's far away."
But we've all watched that movie we anticipated and thought, "It's over already?!?"
We've got a limited amount of time on this earth. And a limited amount of time not just to "live," but to partake in the experience of human consciousness. Awareness. "Being," in this reality.
I don’t fear death. The only thing I fear is the death process - if it’s painful.
The way I think about it is:
1) I didn’t exist for billions of years before I was born and that didn’t bother me. Being dead is the same thing.
2) We “die” every night when we sleep. For a few hours we are totally unconscious. We don’t experience unconsciousness so death is the same thing as when we are sleeping.
Obviously I’d like to live as long as possible to enjoy life’s experiences but it doesn’t make me too sad that I won’t get to experience all I want to experience because it’s simply impossible to do so anyway.
@@karagi101I regularly have wildly amazing dreams. So much so, I often look forward to going to sleep, just to experience them.
All without drugs or alcohol, if anyone thought that might be the cause.
I can’t explain why, but it has happened my whole life. I can still explain in great detail some of the most amazing and realistic dreams I had as a child in elementary school… I am 46 years old now, so that was a LONG time ago.
I’ve even had a few dreams, not many though, that lead to sleep walking. Waking up in a completely different location than where I fell asleep and even more interesting is, that change of location was part of the dream. I don’t mean anything magic, like I fell asleep in America and woke up in Egypt, no. I fell asleep in my bedroom and in the dream I had a reason to go to the living room and woke up there or I had a reason to go outside and woke up outside my house, all part of the dream. So much so, it didn’t surprise me at all where I woke up, what confused me was… the dream I experienced did not happen. They often involved other people, who clearly were only there in my dream.
If death is something like going to sleep, I can’t wait. I have had so many amazing, beautiful, and wonderful dreams, that would be an amazing experience.
I don’t know what comes next after this life or what consciousness is, but I do believe we are something more than a meat suit experiencing a a flying rock, spinning through space.
I can’t tell you which religion is right or if any of them are… but I do believe our existence exceeds our physical experience here.
There are waaaaaay too many near impossible conditions that were met for us to exist at all to consider this all one cosmic accident. That is not only not probable, it is most certainly impossible.
Therefore… who/what created us and why is the ultimate question.
I think the answer to that question exists, but is beyond our scope of comprehension and… I am okay with that for now because, I see this whole song and dance as extremely temporary. A stepping stone, a learning experience, maybe even a test.
We’ll see.
I hope the next step is as good as my dreams. 🙏
@@karagi101 “The present life of man upon earth, O King, seems to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us like the swift flight of a sparrow through the mead-hall where you sit at supper in winter, with your Ealdormen and thanes, while the fire blazes in the midst and the hall is warmed, but the wintry storms of rain or snow are raging abroad. The sparrow, flying in at one door and immediately out at another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry tempest, but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, passing from winter to winter again. So this life of man appears for a little while, but of what is to follow or what went before we know nothing at all.”
― St. Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People
Before I became Christian I would have some ground in a quote from Kurzgesagt- "Close your eyes. Count to one. That's how long forever feels." Illustrating we already passed eternity and dont remember, and (under the presumption death is the final act of life) we wouldn't be conscious to endure eternity. My greatest fear of death (besides, you know, the pain) used to be just floating in a quiet empty darkness forever and going insane from nothing to do.
Just make sure you enjoy the time you've got while you're here.
Being sponsored by AG1 should be a moral quandary for you
not if you don't think there's free will
😂🙌😁
What's wrong with AG1?
It’s marketed as a super health food but due to low quantities of the ingredients is considered by nutritionists to essentially be just an expensive placebo, i.e. a scam.
@@TheDarkTemplar3791 Overpriced, overhyped, and who the heck needs 8000% Vitamin B12 per day? Not anyone who understands how the body uses it. Personally I use Naturelo, a plant based supplement with everything you need, but not in excessive amounts and costs a fraction of AG1.
I spent most of my teenage years through my 20s deeply thinking about quite a few of these and being terrified but my pursuit for understanding drove me forward as a purpose that I could indeed figure it out. Through college I continued studying religious texts, manuscripts, philosophy, psychology, and trying to understand it all. It got to a point when I was 21 that I dropped out of school from horrible anxiety and other worse health issues - I think when I started doing a dream journal and using dream analysis tools and starting quickly noticing my dreams become very vivid and seemingly lasting longer I started to see clear parallels in my waking life and that drove me mad. Lots of stuff with birds at the end of the road. But at 35 I don’t have the same fervor or endless seeking I once did. Thinking back I kind of miss it. My life can still be full of the awful anxiety of modern existence and harsh realities but I’d simply recommend..don’t trip. Nobody knows for sure. Just keep going but don’t forget to relax when you can.
I've watched other existential crisis iceberg videos but this is the best one so far, I like how you give your opinions too and not just mere explanation like the other videos
And I like how you explain everything in great detail and not just a simple definition anyone can just google
That lingering black screen at 15:11 when talking about the death of the universe had quite an effect and I don’t even know if it was intended haha
That whole topic section was added in post. Either it was for effect or he didn't want to find another clip of stock footage lol.
@@Joeah where'd he go >
I thought that was absolutely brilliant! If intentional then it was genius.
I thought about death every day for a long time and my conclusion was "dying is normal". And from that I was able to make my peace with it.
yes, it's hard, but every person who is faced existential crisis must to accept mortality and realize that it's not so bad: our loved ones will not suffering after it, they won't have some troubles, they will be like before birth. In any case it hurts, but pondering in such direction gives you more peace.
See this is one I can’t accept and has trouble me since I was a kid. When you really think about the fact that when you die, you will never exist again, for eternity. You will experience nothing for the rest of time. How do you deal with that except try not to actively think about it?
@oliverlewis9578 Well, we don't know what happens. If there is something then you'll get on with it and if there isn't then you'll never know and so youre not harmed. Either way, it's a return to the state we were in before we were born, which could be viewed as our primary state as we're "dead" for considerably longer than we're ever alive for (or thats how it appears). I dont think it's anything to be scared about. Dying is normal. Dying is natural. And I don't think nature ever does anything that ultimately harms it, and we are part of nature.
@@oliverlewis9578 you gotta just accept the fear. What helps me is using death to actually make myself feel more positive about certain things, as weird as that sounds. If I’m having a lot of social anxiety for example, I tell myself “who cares if I embarrass myself? I’m going to be dead one day along with everyone else”. Same if I’m scared to take a risk.
Idk why, it just helps me to look at the positive side of death, even if it doesn’t seem like there’s much positivity to it.
I view death as inevitable, and therefore the after effects inevitable and therefore devoid of reason to worry.
What will come, will come.
"You are alone in your brain."
Your description reminded of the 1930 novel, "Johnny got his gun." It's about a young soldier who was wounded in war and lost his mobility, his sight, his hearing, and his ability to speak. In fact, Metallica's song "One" was written from the perspective of the character in the book.
I don't know what gives me greater existential crisis: thinking about death OR Alex promoting AG1.
It’s so very sad when people you respect for their intellect start shilling for such a well known crap product that is so expensive. I know everyone needs to make a living but that sponsorship surprised me.
Both is at the abyss of this iceberg 😂
Boring
Yes, feels very left field to me. And right after making fun of last Thurdsdayism for being ignorant ;)
What’s wrong with ag1?
Omg im so happy I found this video!! I think of this stuff all the time, i just love it. Especially 'sonder'. I figured that out as a very young kid sitting in traffic and it stuck with me since. Probably influenced me becoming an EMT, actually. It grew my empathy.
Hi Alex, I've been recommended your channel for years now and I've finally sat down to watch. As a result I've binged hours of your content this month. Thank you!
Wlcm
When he got to the end and I suddenly realized I was intimately familiar with every single item in the iceberg... 👀
I gotta give this type of reading a break 😂
Great video, my man. It was fun to see all the different ideas compiled like this plus hearing your opinions on each of them.
Stay blessed! 😌🙏
Philosophy is a somewhat lonely interest that few share, so you releasing a video is almost like getting visited by a friend!
Love your content, truly, so thank you for making it.
I'm cheering for more metaphysical content and would love to see you talk to or debate a fringe modern philosopher like Bernardo Kastrup or Jonathan Schaffer in the future.
Wish you all the best
Thanks
1:26 - Oh, Alex . . . most of us will never have to worry about owning a house.
I miss only worrying about my next meal and who I was gonna play with at recess 😂
@@andrej2375 Right!! Can we turn back the clock now please? 😭😂
@TheCentralSun yeah but real shelter is pretty pog as well
“I don’t think I’ve ever done it since, partly because it scared the absolute LIVING shit out of me” - what an irony😂
Another brilliant video. As someone who has studied physics I was about to say QM, when you were talking about randomness, before you jumped in. You are, by far, the most talented and entertaining person talking about philosophy. You frequently outshine your debating partners. So glad I found you.
I concur. Thank you sir!!
I think what they meant by sympathy is created by self-pity is that the unconscious reason we help others is to make ourselves feel better about ourselves.
That makes it sound selfish. Empathy is something you need to practice, to go through bad things yourself to appreciate how it impacts others going through similar things. When you realize how hard life is, you want to make it better and less hard for others. Humanity's history of invention, creativity, and innovation is based on this primarily. Yeah it feels good to help others too, but I think its way more than that.
*Which is evolutionary beneficial.
"Apes together strong"
I think it means more along the lines of sympathy for others or empathy is fundamentally sparked by self-pity. Once you have an ego death like experience or are physically/mentally in a dark place your mine starts to shift on certain moral and ethical stances. This is a big part of why I lost. Hope in humanity for a while. Being at rock bottom and realizing that nobody gives a fuck (except maybe your parents or a close friend if you’re lucky) thankfully I’m not at that place anymore, but it definitely changes how you see the world, how you treat others, and your general awareness of why people lash out or act the way they do, how you play a part in that, what is the right thing to do..
@@thepunisherxxx6804 And it is. It is selfish to pursue mitigating the suffering of others if and only if you want to mitigate the suffering of others. If you don't want to do that, and yet you do it anyway through some contrivance or another then that act of altruism wouldn't be selfish. But there might be something in the contrivance which would make it selfish by proxy.
@@malikmanning1050 In part, maybe? But "self-pity" seems itself to be sparked by a kind of banal "selfishness". Can't really have "self-pity" without a "self" to "pity".
This may be crass, but I don't think you've experienced true ego-death until you don't even see others as "others" or you as "you". When your experience of both "you" and "others" as independent individuals ceases to exist and starts to exist more as a collective of interdependent extensions of the same underlying qualia (matter and energy)-then that's when you've achieved something more like ego-death. At least according to the psychoanalysts.
Saying stuff like, "I realized nobody really cares (about me) except for relatives and friends," seems like an angsty projection of one's own thoughs and feelings onto others that may or may not be true.
To be fair, I don't know if true ego-death outside of dreamless sleep/coma is even possible without actually dying, but the best approximation I can imagine seems to be something like the erasure of all distinctions of objects as "selves" and seeing everything as dependent upon everything else (even if only to a miniscule degree).
Thank you for existing alex ❤
Loved this episode. We need more of these philosophies dilemmas. More detailed dive in each
As always, Alex is super clear and I enjoy the results!
Well done! Excellent video and well explained. Thank you Alex.
How do you know?
I have a surge of existential crisis when I have this sonder feeling and think about how people have experienced horrible deaths or excruciating pain. being a slave during ancient Egypt dying collapsing under the weight of the boulders you can’t carry anymore or being tortured with unimaginable cruel methods. poor souls
Doesn't it make you more grateful for present times and secular governments?:)
@@milansvancara it does make me grateful for the priviliges i enjoy in my life but also deeply anxious because im a very empathetic person
I literally sometimes randomly think of that on a bad day. We are alike. And can share our suffering. It’s funny how that can be comforting even though we’ve both just learned about another sad person.
Had this same experience the other day when hearing about and seeing the videos of the JeJu disaster. Just thinking about what those people must have been thinking in their last moments… pretty chilling.
I have similar thoughts, but it's like "somewhere right now animals are being tortured, children abused, people murdered" and I'm here just living life. I don't know if it's the same as sonder but it's a thought that hits me every now and then.
Been there last year in may. Actually you learn so much and take so much with you, it's honestly a process of maturing and developing as a human being and an adult.
19:25 That happens because the candle is still within your render distance.
I went looking for this joke, I am glad someone said it.
absolutely, while the chunk is loaded the candle melts
The "Why does anything exist" hits hard, i remember thinking about it when i was still like 9yo or some shi and whenever i think about it i was in a weird feeling where i feel like floating and feels kinda euphomeric but also filled with dread. I wish i could still do that, nowadays i don't think i have that type of "curiosity" anymore
Around the same age I would think of my own consciousness, and I had a scarily similar feeling that you described.
I still do and when I got into deep Gnosticism my life’s been really massed up even tho Im still agnostic
18:11 I think I remember a documentary, where they test the two hemispheres of a person who underwent this surgery seperatly. They show pictures to just one eye so just one of the hemispheres gets input and the person has to communicate what they see. The result was something like, since only one hemisphere is capable of talking, it couldn't communicate what the other one was seeing. But the mute hemisphere was still able to respond with writing or pictures and answered what it was seeing. So it still understands and processes tasks and information but has no ability to vocally communicate it. The person can understand what the mute half us doing but cannot talk about it because the vocal half has no idea whats going on.
We should work to lighten the load of mankind, Imagine if we did... Would love to hear from your positive notes 🤍🤍sᴇɴᴅ🤍🤍ᴍᴇ🤍🤍ᴀ🤍🤍ᴅɪʀᴇᴄᴛ🤍🤍ᴛᴇxᴛ🤍±𝟷𝟿𝟽𝟾𝟸𝟻𝟸𝟷𝟼𝟿𝟽🔝🔝🔝
Yup! Studied it in AP Psych!
Hey, I remember hearing of this as well referenced by someone else! Was just wondering if you know the name of the documentary or study and could point me to the source info. Hope you’re having a great day and cheers regardless.
@@oatstime8553 I think you can find it under "Split brain experiment". The documentary I remember was in German. They repeated the experiment, though I sadly can't remember what the documentary was called
I’m pretty sure both sides see from both eyes because of optic chiasm. Like the right side sees from the left half of both eyes and vise versa.
Hey, Alex! Recent apostate, here! Long time listener, first time comment!
Your 2 videos - one with Ben Shapiro and the other with Bill Craig on the morality of the Bible - are so underrated. I say this because those 2 have been leading apologists for their respective faith/s/denominations for years, and I believe after that, Christianity officially died in the intellectual/scientific realm. It died - not because you are smart, or correct - but because you represent something much, much greater. The enemy of all those who rely on confident ignorance to push unsubstantiated claims on the unskeptical, infantilized, and the dependent.
You represent the Internet.
Jordan Peterson: "But what is an iceberg?"
What do you actually mean when you say "Jordan Peterson"?
@@danharte6645what do you mean when you say mean?
Well, according to Dostoevsky......
It's something that gets in the way of big ships!
Captain of the Titanic: "Let me think about that .."
Thanks for this entertaining and clarity inducing tour around the Iceberg. And for the new word: "sonder". I can still remember where I was as a child (7? 8?) when this idea hit me. I saw my experience as a globe around my head, and realized everyone else had their own globe, their whole world. Regularly this realization runs into me like a freight train...and particularly, the trappedness -that I can only be one character in the plane of existence. It makes me appreciate eastern notions of merging into undifferentiated union, or at least various ideas of incarnation. And, btw, I play for the team that finds eternal life to increase life's value, though I respect (but cannot relate to) those who fear the ennui of a never-ending existence. As for not dying from one's own perspective, whenever I am confronted by disasters and the fragility of life, I chuckle at how we are like characters in a film, where the inspiring leader spurs us on through a deadly situation with the promise that "we are going to make it!" For all the characters that survived, he was a prophet! I get out of my car...I get off the plane...I'm still alive. I don't want to think about the "until I'm not". And in a sense, I can't, or at least I won't be "here" to tell of it.
I think the statement of "We are are alone" refers to everyone around you; humans and life, and it is a experience to realize that no one can truly care or connect with you, because they do it on their own ego and goals (to feel better about themself).
But when he said "We are not alone", I think you got it right. Judging by that easier level of the ice berg, he probably talked about Alien life, and the idea of complex life existing far beyond us
I am the creator of the iceberg and the "we are alone" actually refers to humanity being alone in the universe. What you talked about is sort of captured in the entries "You are alone in your brain" and the self-pity one
Thanks!
Not being alone is scary to my lizard brain, being alone is scary to my frontal cortex.
Wdym?
Lizard ? You mean the reptilians ?
@@mrh0ck3y Ayy lmaos around means potential predators. Empty universe results in incomprehensible questions.
Too much thinking, tho, lets go catch fish.
@@mrh0ck3yIf we are not alone, we fear what is there.
If we are alone, we fear why.
Coming to terms with mortality can be an unending stress on existence. I truly felt free of that fear of that outcome for years, after a few deployments. I always lived a simple life. But having survived everything, I have since gotten married and had kids. I have now unlocked a new layer of that fear/crisis. Leaving my kids behind without having them taken care of. I am now driven to make sure I have money setup for them, and some level of comfort and security.
None of it matters. Eventually the sun will explode and it will be as if none of us ever were.
@@angusmcculloch6653 But you could say that because it is not very important from the larger perspective the human desires and satisfying them is the only meaning we can find and we should accept it as it is.
The first mistake was to have kids, prolonging the pointless suffering.
@@stevensteven3417Mindless troglodytes can never understand that, and even if they could, they don’t have the developed self to act differently from how their biologically predetermined behaviour makes them act.
@@angusmcculloch6653Don't play the game you love playing because eventually you'll just uninstall it.
I am of the strange temperament that seeks out existential topics, I rarely feel dread anymore. I love the dark stuff for some reason. I gravitate towards the dark philosophies. Existentialism, absurdism, existential nihilism, nihilism, philosophical pessimism etc. I had my first existential crisis at age nineteen. It lasted five hours. After a completely normal night. It was a perfect storm. I went down that iceberg so damn quickly. So many thoughts went through my head. I thought something was wrong with me, but I soon felt better. I came out of that curious and with a new perspective. I didn't get depressed or anything, instead I wanted to know more.
I've evolved from dread and the cosmic horror of existence, but sometimes I feel that I hate everything. The way the world works, how things don't make a lot of sense. For me seeking out the existential topics is better than hiding from them. I've always been drawn to the unknown. As long as I can remember I've loved mysteries, especially metaphysical mysteries. Like Mystery Incorporated, articles about spooky and non spooky mysteries. The existential stuff acts as grown up mysteries for me. They'll never be solved, that's the appeal and the drawback simultaneously.
Personally, I think that as shitty as life can be, it is highly improbable, and we should each find something that gives us purpose. I don't think there's inherent meaning in life, but it means we must make of it what we can.
Try thinking about things other than yourself
I find your conclusion to be unfittingly optimistic. None of what you said necessarily leads to freedom to create your own meaning. And many theories are directly against that. It seems like a saying people add on to give a fake sense of positivity to a worldview that doesn’t justify it.
@hmq9052 That was my first existential crisis, I've had many since. It no longer fazes me really, I just get over it. Anyway, I've considered a lot of things in them. Such as how others cope with the existential stuff. How others deal with the monotony and the absurd. Such as the people around me. I also considered the problem of suffering, how suffering and pain will always exist in life. Human and animal suffering. I said I thought about myself because it was my first existential crisis, I was nineteen, I was thrown head first into the existential things. I was a naive, intolerable mess at nineteen, I can't believe anyone put up with me. I was self centred because I had a book series I was working on, and I was dealing with an illness that threatened my life. So that's why. I was thinking of my legacy in a world where we're possibly the universe briefly conscious of itself until the heat death. My subsequent ones have gone down several of those icebergs, few of them were just about me. I've thought about a lot of existential stuff. I've considered several of the dark philosophies. I've seen a lot, observed a lot about human nature and the human condition. So I think a lot, about things far more interesting than me.
@VanessaVosloo What's the most enlightening book you've ever read? Not one you've written, one you've read. By someone else.
@@DrWNoLs I understand that, I was just considering the ways others respond to the existential things, with service to others, religion, love, family etc. I don't think that the meaning we create has any real meaning beyond a local level and I recognise sometimes it's just what we tell ourselves. I understand that a lot of things are determined for us. Our meaning doesn't seem so great when we zoom out. My worldview is interesting, it's getting more and more complex. The existential moments often lead to more maturity for me, as I'm only 22. I create my imagined meaning by defying the awfulness of life, and trying to live regardless. I started reading the Myth of Sisyphus a while ago, I haven't finished it. I was just trying to see a silver lining to the situation, I try and enjoy the little things in the face of the vast and gratuitous horrors of our world. I'm not for toxic positivity, and I feel all of my emotions. My normal emotional state is neutral or cheerful, but I'm not relentlessly positive. I feel every emotion deeply until it burns out. I've been through some dark places myself, and I often hate the way things are. Even if there is no meaning, intrinsic or created, I think we shouldn't let this life go to waste. It's the only thing we know we have. I am not the best at philosophy in the world, and I can have two contradictory ideas in harmony in my mind. Sorry if what I wrote was contradictory, I am always improving. Thanks for the heads up.
as a fellow existentialist (academic wise) I have found absurdism & existentialism (and sometimes witgensteinian lack of true meaning) to be quite joyful. Being void of meaning grants room for freedom, but doesn't negate us from removing care from others. As Simone once said, our freedom is enhanced, not diminished, when we work to strengthen the freedom of others.
I think at the bottom of my iceberg, to sum up many of these, is that there is either something after we die or nothing after we die, and both are terrifying.
Nothing is much scarier. Because everything we think about non existence is thought about from the perspective of existence. We will never know the feeling of nonexistence, because feeling is an exclusive trait of existing. We can’t think about non existence because when we try to think of absolutely nothing, we inevitably think of something.
And if death is like being unconscious, the awakening to the afterlife seems immediate.
@RabidLeech1 think of a dreamless sleep, that's pretty much is nothing. What's so complicated about it? Humans sure like to overthink..
We don't just live inside the universe. We are part of the very fabric of it... we are the universe becoming aware of itself.
@@stevensteven3417 I like to think about all the time before I was born. I damn sure don’t remember waking up from that.
I never realized how many of these iceberg points I came up with all by myself, thinking I was "brilliant" for thinking these things up, only to find out that someone else already went down that rabbit hole. I basically re-invented the wheel. I love this video, and I may do one myself going into greater detail. Thank you for the inspiration Alex!
The absolute majority of people will never have an original thought in their entire lives (It has to be meaningful can’t just be a random string of numbers) But that doesn’t mean the thought is less valuable
Same. And then I watch those videos about existential crises, or read something, and think to myself “I’m probably not smart enough to think of something entirely new, which no one has ever thought of, but every concept I’ve seen so far, has not been new to me either. Will I ever experience something that will shake my understanding of the world as profoundly as “you have no free will, you will die, you are alone, “you” are maybe only an illusion, maybe everything is a simulation OR it’s just all in my head” again? Because it’s kinda fun. And I don’t get to experience it again :(
@@Alex-02 Extremely well said.
@@Alex-02thx you gave me an existential crisis but it wasn't painful
The mustache disappearing during the sponsorship caught me wildly off-guard. I'm a mustache loyalist, viva la mustache!
His Schrodinger's Mustache keeps popping on and off ever since he shaved it on the live stream. I like to think his mustache is an Eldritch entity that keeps phasing in and out of our dimension and that Alex has no control over it. Someone should create an SCP profile on it.
Seems kind of odd to have that level of attachment to another man's facial hair. But, this is the internet and the internet is odd.
@@angusmcculloch6653 It's all tongue in cheek bub, don't take it at face value
@@CosmicTeapot +1 at "don't take it a face value". Excellent pun.
Could it be that the mustache itself is conscious?
I had the “why does anything exist” thought very early in my life. I was a “why child” and I questioned everything in general, but this, this was such an eerie feeling.
As someone who has been coping with existential despair for years, it's comfortable to know others have thought these things.
Same, I feel like I'm insane
We all have existential despair..just some of us go into it little bit more wildly and surrender our thoughts...and rest of people just distract themselves until they're forced to think about it. I think about death often honestly and speculate how it'll happen!
I am in existential crisis every day.
It really is
3 months after my awakening and deconstruction from Christianity I've been in the worst existential crisis. I needed this today Alex
shit kinda rocks after that part, trust
Back in 73 I was hospitalized with a broken limb. When i was in the mess hall my mind flashed on the realization that everyone else in the room was a real entity.
How did it feel?
What do you mean?
Yeah no $***, what does this even mean? How do you even know what a "real entity" is? Everyone pretends and acts so confident about their opinions and life, when in reality none of us know why we exist, why were self-aware and think differently from the other creatures on this planet. Nobody knows anything unless its practical, real, scientifically proven, and utilized practically in everyday life. Everything else is speculation, delusion. We are not capable of knowing it all.
that click, ikr
Jungle reference!
A few days ago I went through realizing my own mortality and it was a weird thing to go through because I had always known it, but I never really thought hard about how it would feel, or how it may be afterward. As well as the fact that I won't be able to stop it. It honestly changed me in a way. It's something where if you haven't really gone through and processed it, then you won't know how scary it is to go through.
Alexs current value hierarchy:
Chairs
Cups
Gnosticism
Everything else
don't forget ag1, since it's a sponsor.
I think the existential crisis about "The brain creates the flow of time" lower on the iceberg, is talking about how we perceive time to go fast or slow oblivious to the actual pace at which its moving.
It's very interesting how our brain goes into subconscious mode for a few moments and then we suddenly realize how long it's been.
I wish you had elaborated or have dug deeper into this.
If you have done any drugs you know that time is very subjective. If you're drunk, one moment can immediately snap into a moment an hour later, leaving you wondering where the past hour went. On the contrary, on many psychedelics and to a lesser extent, cannabis, it feels like time is frozen, or at least irrelevant, or moving extremely slowly. People on psychedelics even have felt time looping, although I haven't experienced that myself. I personally think time is like gender, it has some foundation in reality but is still completely subjective and determined by psychological and social factors
@@rubydupyII Yeah that's fascinating stuff
Playing guitar really highlighted this experience for me. A passage that seems like a chaotic mess played in blistering fast forward turns into a lazy Sunday stroll with enough practice. It's the same amount of seconds before and after you learn it, but the subjective experience is so different!
I thought of it more like ... the 3 dimensions we experience are exactly the same as the 4th (time) but our perception of the fourth one is the only thing that makes it FEEL different. We're all just particles swimming in a soup of physics, but our brains had to organize ONE of those dimensions differently to make it all make sense. Kind of like how colors don't exist, our minds just made them up to help us sort objects. Or like how most matter is empty space, but our minds perceive it as solid chunks we can't see through because that's the only way we can navigate reality. So maybe the mind organizes a 4th dimension as a flowing state of past and present only incidentally. I don't think there's any good reason to believe this is true, but it's an existentially alarming thought at least.
@@rubydupyIItime looping is referred to “ being in the box “ it’s where your physical body isn’t doing anything, but your brain is having a series of hallucinations. I’ve had this happen to me where I was on a good amount of fungi and I went to the restroom while my cousin was outside the door waiting for me. I was in there for 45 minutes according to him. This is how it went.. I remember walking to the restroom. Locking the door. Sitting on the toilet. Not to use it but to try ti regain control of my brain. All of a sudden I was walking through my front door. It was a single door. I opened it and my sister was there. She looked the same. Sounded the same. Seconds later. I walked through the front door again. Different color door. Different interior. Same sister. Same voice. This happened several times. I then came to a double front door. My sister looked slightly different and sounded different. I then came to.. sitting on the toilet. Struggling to pull my self up using the towel rack and wall. That happened about 3-6 times where I would get up finally and go to grab the door knob to leave the restroom and I would restart on the toilet. Struggling. At the last time, when I opened the door. I was standing in the restroom. In the corner. Not on the toilet. With both my hands clasped to my face to the point I had to remove them to take a proper breath. I’ve had similar experiences when hippy flipping taking lsd and fungi together. Just thought I would share my experience 👍🏼 oh and during this whole situation. My cousin said I never once touched the door knob or opened the door that whole time. Time also slows down to the point a minute can feel like a hour. I’ve taking several showers that felt like 30 minutes long and it was in fact 3-5 minutes tops according to my wife who didn’t know I took some acid. I took about 3-4 tabs by accident and that was the longest 16 hours of my life.
Blimey, you got popular. The last post i saw was the cosmic skeptic a couple of years ago. Your posts got me thinking that i should learn more about the historical figures mentioned so often in modern philosophical content. So thats what i did. Big shout out to ASMR historian for those nuggets. I had always been interested in philosophy after reading "What is Man? Mark Twain but got a bit sidetracked by reality. Now i have the time to delve into the mysteries of the mind I find it a most fulfilling pursuit. I was going to post my thoughts on the "Iceberg" but i could just say that my conclusion is that i have seen it and though as you mention a lot of it is repetition (or a misunderstanding) these are milestones of awareness. I did em and my outlook is f**k it, only here for a while, do like the BBC was supposed to. Inform, Educate and Entertain. But i dont actually go anywhere because people annoy me. Go figure?
You know, thinking about the absurdity of it all is a really grounding feeling when feeling fearful of death and makes me feel comfortable again
I have an immunodeficiency disorder, so I am reminded of my mortality daily. Not existing has lost its edge. I no longer fear it. I welcome it now. Existing is at best, a mediocre experience. I'm 34
Seven years ago, when I was 31, I was told by a doctor that I had an autoimmune disorder. I felt like death, and I felt like dying. I had been vegan, and spent 12 hours a day inside a corporate office a stressful job. Hardly ever went outside. Today, I am not ill. I am sitting in the sunshine sipping an espresso. I'm going to climb a volcano this weekend and ski down it. I'm trying to point out that not all is ever lost, and that having a immunodeficiency disorder isn't the end.
@ianstoyan thanks, I haven't given up or anything. I remain optimistic because Pessimism will 100% be game over. If I keep on being optimistic at least there's a chance I'm wrong and life gets great. So I'm fairly neutral on life, if I live cool, if not that's ok too. I don't wanna die but I don't care to live. It's an odd place to be, but it's a fairly freeing place where there's not much fear.
Existence at its best huh
Figure you’ve seen the “best” this existence has to offer?
Can anyone really make that judgement call?
@@Dovahkiin0117 I know, for one, that I wasn't existing at my best. I'm still not. Continued striving to be better is what keeps me going. The only other way I know is to give up, and that never ends well.
COngrats! You are alive!
i had, a real close call, a close call that would have really ended my life. something that left me with a month of terror and stress. that feeling is not one i wish to ever revisit
What was it
Did you shit the bed?
when knee surgery was cancelled 😢😢😢
What happened
"This is kinda like that scene from True Detective were Rust is being nihilistic in a car"
Ah, yes, well that narrows it down.
If Rust cooked more rather than driving around, we see him being nihilistic in a kitchen.
First and foremost: it's always good to find a youtuber that's content to concede that there are things they don't understand, or are not fully familiar with, so props to you for that
regarding the discussion of thermodynamics and entropy, in part around the Boltzmann brain part of the video, I think you're conflating a few ideas:
the probabilistic argument is perfectly consistent - if something has a chance of happening, no matter how small, it will happen if given infinite opportunities (or infinite time) in which to happen. If the universe is infinitely large, then there's an argument that every possible scenario will occur.
It's very easy to assume that, if given an infinitely large amount of time, the same is true, but that's where entropy comes in, and is also where I believe this confusion arises:
Entropy is the measure of the capacity of a closed system to transfer energy, or ‘do work’ - "closed" here means no matter or energy is entering or leaving your system, or whatever it is you're looking at. In your video, you use an example of a spritz from a spray can being dispersed evenly around a room, but that there is a chance it would all randomly gather together if given enough time, but that the probability was low enough to be considered a law.
The reason this doesn't happen isn't probabilistic, but is thermodynamic - if you have two objects with different temperatures that can conduct heat, if they are in contact the higher temperature one will transfer heat to the lower temperature one. Temperature is the measure of something being able to transfer heat, or do work, on another object - this transfer of energy between things which can do work is a fundamental property of matter in our universe. Here, heat and entropy are analogous - or, strictly soeaking, talking about heat and temperature is a specific thermodynamic scenario. If you have a container of hot and cold objects, if left alone their temperatures will even out. The reason for this is the same reason that the gas from the can in your example will stay evenly distributed - because any other scenario would mean there is the potential for that gas to spread out, or do work, and if it can then it will. This is why gases typically reach a thermodynamic equilibrium when evenly spaced.
If you've ever encountered the expression "heat death", this is the thermodynamic state where a system is able to do the minimum amount of work - so when everything is the same temperature, or when all of your gas particles are evenly spaced. The heat death of the universe will be when it is able to do the least amount of work, or transfer the least amount of energy between its different parts.
It's about 1am where I am when I type this, so I hope this comment is coherent, and hopefully it clarifies some of the ideas you were discussing in this video!
"Childhood is over the moment you realize your going to die." The Crow 1994
I disagree. I think childhood ends when you realize you need to be responsible for your own well being and survival in life. When the weight of responsibility and anxiety starts pushing down on your body and soul, when you see the world for what it is and realize how hard it is, how much effort is put into making our modern society run, all the things that contribute to ease the burden of life. That's when childhood is over, when that childlike ignorance for the world is gone, and you see it for what it is, see yourself for what you are.
@@thepunisherxxx6804exactly. Adulthood really does suck.
@@AncientGuardianOfTheGate It really does sometimes man. Its so very hard.
@@thepunisherxxx6804 yep you realize you're gonna be a wage slave for the rest of your life at around 15-17
@@thepunisherxxx6804it dies when nobody can remember what you were like as a child to remind you
One criteria of quantum immortality is that the potential death would need happen so quickly that you could not actually experience it. "You" do die, however because you don't experience _any_ of it, your quantum cousin is _exactly_ identical to _you_ if you had lived -- and so you both can philosophically be considered the same exact person a la Ship of Theseus. I suppose with some handwaiving one could extend it to any kind of death, but then we'd expect to hear about a _lot_ more truly miraculous survival stories actually happening (like surviving getting shot in the heart). There are some miraculous stories though -- like the one guy that survived BOTH atomic bomb drops.
Not neccesarily.
If you get shot, you could survive the shot but still have wounds for instance.
A scary thought would be surviving the gunshot but living in a coma with awareness.
27:00 It is true that the probability of any possible given event occurring with infinite time is 1, but believe it or not, probability 1 DOES NOT mean “guaranteed to happen.” If anyone is interested (and you should be because it’s really cool), look up measure theory and sets of measure 0.
Interesting that 1 ≠ guaranteed to happen, my (inept) mathematician brain just went out the window
love watching your channel grow 🫶🏼 day 1
what terrifies me the most is just sitting on my death bed looking back on life in a physically disabled state, full of shame, regret and guilt but completely and entirely unable to change any of it and knowing you have almost no time before you cease to exist.
Don't worry, everything will be Buried forever in history, inaccessible to anyone in few hundred years
That is a painful thought but honestly seems more like tip of the iceberg stuff for me, I'm sure there could be worse things you could conjure up if you really tried maybe find solace in the fact it could be worse. Figure out a way of non-attachment now while you can also.
@@donsistentialist shame, regret and guilt sounds like teenage anxieties. Unless you have a hobby or profession that hinges on other people’s suffering you should be ok. If not G.O.D has a solution it’s called dementia.🤔🤫
@@TheTeddyZerg wow, what kind of things do you have down at the bottom of the iceberg? my idea is i think a bit more grounded and realistic perhaps?
@donsistentialist Well, your example is still a temporary suffering that will end soon. If you've ever done strong psychedelics, you know just how silly our usual interpretation of time, reality and identity is. So you could at least find comfort knowing the ego that is suffering and worrying about these things doesn't actually exist. What's more terrifying is the background consciousness you actually are may be simultaneously experiencing all suffering every human has ever felt forever, and you were just experiencing one split in its awareness which has infinite points of consciousness.
Hot take, but I believe that religion is just a way to cope with existential crisis
I believe that too. Like to cope with death, loss, etc.
That is an extremely minty take
I wish I could be religious, I envy their peace
@@Alex-l6r9n ik but some people would lose it if they read it lol, didn’t want any crazy people after me
Opposite of a hot take
This is a bit of a side note, but since you brought up superdeterminism and free will, I'm going to casually name drop Derk Pereboom and Gregg Caruso as two philosophers I think Alex could potentially learn from (they're also free will skeptics) and I would *love* to see one of them on a podcast sometime :)
Oh i just had a rough few days, this video will cheer me up for sure
“If misery is truth then laughter is flipping off existence itself,” -random homeless guy I met on the street.
Sounds sad and angry. I wonder why? Maybe it sucks to be homeless in a simulation in December?
@@reillyyugehands481 Yeah, existence can be a really shitty sim if you can't afford the DLC.
In Advaita they say that Maya stays and ignorance goes.
@@adamhbrennanIndeed & word.
3:00 this is like that one rick and morty episode where they make a mini world to power their spaceship, but that world gets so advanced they get make their own mini world to generate power and so on
The issue with Boltzmann brains most people forget about is genesis. It's far, far easier for a self-replicating RNA strand to randomly be created than a Boltzmann brain, and even though only a tiny fraction of those will replicate, spread, and eventually form brains, that tiny fraction is still much larger than the probability of a Boltzmann brain forming.
Genesis ...😂 got me there
A Bolzman brain is an impossibility in our universe, at least.
It's just a thought experiment.
“Sympathy is created from self-pity”-i would imagine this means how sympathy is born from “I” statements and not “you” statements. They don’t empathize, and highlight a reason they cannot connect over connection
“i wish i could take that away from you” represents self-helplessness for example
Crisis precipitates change. A very happy New Year to you Alex, the best for '25, and these dwindling days of '24. Cheers! - SPHC
“I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in human evolution. We became too self aware; nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself. We are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self, a secretion of sensory experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody’s nobody. I think the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.”
That's the Rustin Cole quote mentioned at 25:25. It's a helluva line, and very well delivered and fits with the somewhat bleak concept of the series and what happens in it. It's very dark and a little unresolved, but the first season is a really great watch.
He’s a fictional character tho… if he was real I would make fun of him for that world view lmao
Aside from superdeterminism, there is also the concept of quantum decoherence in which randomness only exists at the quantum state.
We should work to lighten the load of mankind, Imagine if we did... Would love to hear from your positive notes 🤍🤍sᴇɴᴅ🤍🤍ᴍᴇ🤍🤍ᴀ🤍🤍ᴅɪʀᴇᴄᴛ🤍🤍ᴛᴇxᴛ🤍±𝟷𝟿𝟽𝟾𝟸𝟻𝟸𝟷𝟼𝟿𝟽🔝🔝🔝
I've never come across the word 'sonder' before, but that's a very useful word to know! I remember being struck reading Sartre when I was studying philosophy, he had the most wonderful way of describing that very thing. He talks about being in a park, taking it all in through his senses, basically being at the centre of all experience - then he sees another person, also apparently taking in the park, the centre of their own experience, and Sartre said that person "stole the world" from him. I think about that quite a lot, whenever I suddenly experience sonder.
5:40 I’ve spent billions of years not existing, it was nice
And soon it will be nice again!
A dreamer is convinced that there was nothing before the dream.
@@goonofhazard2203 there are no dreamers, just lumps of stardust claiming to dream
you’ve existed as long as the universe has
@@oluwatayo.x since last thursday
The "B theory of time" gives me the most existential crisis of any of these. Why is it that you can go anywhere on earth you've been...but you can't go back to 2010 even though we were already there? It feels like 2010 should exist the same way that Dallas, Texas exists.
Maybe you could go to 2010 if you knew how to get there.
you can, because your existence now is just as real as it was yesterday, tomorrow, 5 years ago, and 3 weeks from today... you exist in all of them equally.
You can't step into the same Dallas twice.
well, according to Einstein, it still exists. We just cant go back to it. Or the universe wont let us because, you know, paradoxes.
The concept of time is something we can’t fully comprehend. These things we may never fully understand, they lead us to fear the universe and our own existence. We are bound by time and the laws of the universe because we were made so. I have wondered a lot about the functions of time and it’s almost like the past and future does not exist. The past and future is just a label for the absence of the present.
Nick Bostrum's use of probability, and the similar uses in apologetics, are missing a pretty crucial aspect: you can't know the probability of something that hasn't been observed. We know there's a possibility of our own universe, but we can't know that other universes are even possible.
You forget the prime assumption. That there is an infinite universe in extent and time. When we have such an infinite universe it doesn’t matter what the probability of something is. It will eventually happen and not only that, it will happen an infinite number of times.
@@karagi101I think even this assumes that the probability is fixed (or at least not changing in a certain way). It’s very possible that, given infinite time, the probability of an event at any time could always be nonzero but the probability of it happening eventually is still less than one
@@karagi101 not everything will happen. that is a misunderstanding.
@@karagi101 I've heard that reasoning before and I find it unconvincing. To begin with, it's unclear how that would affect a probability of 0, since 0 times infinity is basically a math way to say you're looking at the problem wrong. There's also the set issue that an infinite probability of everything would include the probability of the exact situation to avoid something ever occurring.
@@matswessling6600would it not be the case that anything that can happen (within the laws of physics), definitely will happen in an infinite universe?
I once smoked DMT, and while the visuals were spectacular and overwhelming, I stayed lucid enough to talk myself through it. With my eyes open, objects retained their shapes despite a kaleidoscopic effect. For example, a teapot might appear elsewhere in my peripheral vision but remained clearly a teapot.
Rather than chaotic colors or 'psychedelic' designs, everything was surprisingly orderly-objects kept their forms but moved around. It felt as though my eyes weren’t just processing light but actively detecting and transmitting whole objects.
I’m likely failing to articulate this, but it feels like Berkeley’s work might help me make sense of the experience.
my perception of the we are alone thing has more to do with never being able to be understood, like being fully isolated from other human beings just stuck in our own personhood without the ability to truly explain ourselves, rather than a broader humanity statement
Ever since I was a kid, I have seen the question, "Why?" as a child's question. It is not only open ended and non-specific, but it makes a HUGE assumption: intentional causality. Therefore, I think that ascribing any existential weight to amswering "why" questions is beyond silly, and will hamstring the ability to think clearly and ask actual substantial questions. By the way, thankfully, it is a line of questioning that brings with it its very own annihlation, by simply adding a word: "Why not?" Cheers!
Would “how did everything come to be?” be a more mature question? It does not imply intentional causality, but it is equally as awesome.
@wil54 IMHO any line of questioning should have a purpose. Now I understand that mere curiosity is a valid purpose, however, it just doesn't hold any real weight. So you report what you see, and move on. However, if you are trying to find deeper answers to unlock true understanding that can lead to greater abilities or power, for instance, to flesh out a "theory of everything", then you MUST ask more specific questions and/or pose more specific hypothesis, because vague ones are impirically untestable. In other words, "Why?" Questions can point the way to answerable questions, but while most folks ascribe a deep, almost spiritual power to "why?" I see it quite the opposite way. Cheers!
@ fair dinkum! Well I suppose the almighty “why” is a nice shortcut to the gradual evolution in understanding. It is a very broad question though, and sort of shortcuts any specific concrete stuff
@@MatthewCleereWhat if death was not the end but the beginning of an eternity in hell or heaven and a day of judgement where your actions of this life are held to account, the good, the bad and everything in between and those who didn't acknowledge this truth and therefore, had no preparation are dawned with the reality of eternal pain, anguish and regret, take it from me and discover God through religion with an open heart, unbiased and sincerely seeking the truth, and you will live the best life here, your pain will be rewarded as you are patient with hope in God while others suffer with no solace, once you die if you follow the guidance of God the most important of which is believing in only One God and not associating anything with Him in worship, in Heaven you will have your hearts desire without measure and are united with your loved ones if they are also righteous. My personal tip is to learn about Islam and the miracles of the Quran. Call out to the creator of this universe if you don't believe in Him, just call out and ask Him God if you truly exist guide me to the truth,and to the true religion.
@lacerav5818 ugh
I flatly reject the notion that we know "absolutely nothing" about consciousness and "don't understand the mechanism by which it works" and aren't even "close to coming up with a solution of the mystery of consciousness". In my opinion, this whole line of reasoning is just willful obscurantism. The notion of consciousness is pretty ambiguous. To whatever degree we clearly define consciousness, to that degree, the "mystery" starts to dissipate. There's still lots to learn (as there is with any subject matter), but we've learned so much about the systems of the brain, how they relate to awareness and self-awareness, that it's ludicrous to suggest that we know nothing.
Yeah but i think he meant it more in a way that we will never be truly able to get data on conscious experience of someone else. Every conscious experience is like a lens that experiences reality differently. Yeah we can explore brain functions and figure out things needed for consciousness and what kinda causes it. But i dont think you can actually replicate consciousness or share it with someone maybe even if you build a human brain exactly the same way, to precive it and analyze you would probably need a bigger brain and an even bigger consciousness
We know of only the "what" at certain levels, not the cause or requirements for such formation (doesn't have to be organic). It's kind of like: we are starting to figure out how complicated of a system it requires, but consciousness is a "complex" system, well, a kind of self-adjusting complex complex complex complex system. Like scientists would be able to tell us: Given X input to a certain area of the brain, a range of probable outcome Y will occur (the "what") (and ofc they are also able to tell us descriptive details as well). But we are not even close to answer the question: given some material Z, do we even know how to APPROACH creating a consciousness out of it, or is this material even viable?
Another way to think about it is, consciousness is holistic. It is "like" something to "be" a human, to be a bee, to be a dog or cat or horse. And altho no one can prove that "you" or your consciousness exists for certain, YOU know as a matter of fact that it does. Given this understanding, I don't think it's "obscurantist" to think that studying particular functions or causal chains of the brain will get us closer to the hard problem.
And I provide you with yet another way to look at it. It's like if you asked a LLM to answer some simply question (ie just off the top of my head: "is blue a warmer color than orange?"), after some number of experiments it should be reasonable to conclude that the LLM's answer will fall into a certain domain. This is how we are approaching the hard problem and the current progress. But you should see that this tells us nothing about the "how", or even the requirements for the "how" to have existed in the first place, or if there are more than one possible types of "hows" (we do not know how sufficiently large LLMs work at the lowest levels, nor if there are multiple ways that they can arrive at the same answers).
you're fooling yourself mate
@@thepixelmonk why do you think so?
@@Alan-di5kq I agree. Tho technically, we are able to get data, at least pieces of it, we just aren't able to get the experience ITSLEF, and that is pretty much the whole point of it being the "hard problem". I think an analogy that I've heard went smn like: "we may know certain aspects of a bat's consciousness, but we do not know what is it "like" to "be" a bat".
Also in terms of technicality, we don't know what things are needed for consciousness. We know at some higher levels what happens in our brains, but that's pretty much it. I elaborated upon this point in my response to the OP. Read if interested.
For the dual consciousness segment, it's worth mentioning DID and OSDD as well. In cases of extreme childhood trauma, someone's consciousness can be psychologically split into different identities which live separately but in the same body. I've actually known plenty of people with these disorders online, and it's really fascinating to hear their experiences with it (on top of them being fantastic people of course ❤). The idea of losing control of your own mind for hours, or conversely, just coming into existence one day in someone else's body, all sounds pretty terrifying. But it seems like after a while you just get used to it like anything else
Yes, It ruins your life but it is your only experience. If you have dissociative parts it’s always been your normal in a way. Total chaos and disfunction but it’s familiar. The thought of integration terrifies some of my parts because they think they won’t exist. 😅
Moon knight
DID is highly debated as to whether it even exists among experts.
@@necromancer6405 I’m not sure it’s real either. It could be memory impairment. Like how you don’t remember a dream but then some you do. It’s far more like that. Like dreams if you write it down when you wake you can prompt the memory from the dream and try to get the self to see it or remember. It’s not simple to remember a black out but there are ways if you can get there but yeah I don’t necessarily think its as organised as DID makes it seem. I would say 90% of professionals I see don’t believe in DID. they just call it regression, dissociating, stuck in trauma etc. the actual organised system of DID isn’t experienced even in many labeled with that diagnosis. We just have stuff happening and can’t remember what happened. It’s usually the time in fight/flight that is missing. So what ever you did in the panic attack is gone. I’m positive it’s there just like our dreams are.
@@justmorenoise I have experience with PTSD and I could see how people could refuse to cope with it and instead make life easier by pretending to be someone else.
Pretend is always pretend though. Deep down we all know it's not real.
5:20 I would not say most people know they are going to die. Most people believe in an after life and the way I see it, that's a whole lot like not believing in death at all.
another gap filled in by God!
Yep, it's a cheat. I kind of envy them but my brain doesn't work that way. Too much nonsense in religion, and I'm wary of any idea that just happens to be comforting to us.
@@Existidor.Serial137 you seem to have an immature view of God
Seems religion found the cheat code, do you envy them.
believing in life after death requires you to know about death by definition - and even highly religious people are afraid of dying (except for a handful of extremists, such as those that blow themselves up with the belief that this is their ticket to heaven) and aren't 100% certain of their fate after they die.
We ARE alone is more scary to me. By a lot, its no contest.
I agree
I believe it might have to do with our bad perception of loneliness. That could be like a collective loneliness.
@@Existidor.Serial137 no, not at all. If we are the only life that’s not by accident. That means we are being watched
What if it's only us and a lot of intergalactic wasps?
Thanks for this fun and informative video Alex