Leo Vader is probably the funniest man making video essays, and it was such a treat to talk with him about DEVS. Also, after you watch this, please look at its thumbnail because it's truly beautiful/horrifying. nebula.tv/videos/jacob-geller-jacob-and-leo-untangle-the-brilliance-of-devs
Hearing “this video contains spoilers for a variety of things; chapter timestamps in the description” and then checking to find a chapter called “Real-life physics” has me concerned
Lovely video. I have a little personal anecdote that slots surprisingly neatly into the themes of this video. 71 years ago, my grandfather took a cycling trip around the perimeter of France with a friend. He kept a diary, meticulously documenting the events of almost every day. Last month, my brothers and I embarked on the same journey, following in his footsteps. I'd avoided reading the diary beforehand, so every day I'd read about his experience at the same time that I had them myself: the places he'd visited, the food he'd eaten, the people he'd found, and at the same time we'd see the same sights. Some days we were ahead of him, some days we were behind. After a few days, I realised that something very surprising was happening. 71 years later, and 40 years after the death of this man we never knew, we stopped talking about him in the past tense. It took me a while to notice it, but it slowly became more obvious. We'd say things like "he's just 10 kilometres ahead of us now" or "he's over there as he's taking that photo". Seven decades, suddenly erased - an experience that felt almost out of time - and in those few days he felt closer and more alive than he ever had before. It was a strange experience, and something I doubt I shall ever have again.
I understand that in the sentence "essays unimpeded by predatory copyright claims like those from Big Joel", "those" are meant to be essays, but personally I think it's a lot funnier to imagine essayists flocking to Nebula to avoid to copyright scourge of RUclips that is Big Joel
I love how jacob geller videos always go into very conceptual philosophical realms while remaining absolutely accessible at every point. I feel like I notice this even more when I know more about the subjects he talks about. He explains what the word teleological means in one sentence the moment it becomes relevant, he pulls the important ideas out of quantum physics and then moves on with it. The restraint in his writing is insane. And it all comes together in such a compact way. What the hell
Not even 2 minutes in, and I can't help but think of this quote in Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett: "In the Ramtop village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away-until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence."
Speaking of Pratchett, the breathing machine in the art exhibit reminds me of the concept of keeping someone alive by sending their name through the Clacks. Keeping a person alive by remembering their name isn't strictly about existence, but it has a similar feeling. On that note: GNU Terry Pratchett
Which is nice but very silly because we immediately cease to apply such ideas to any concept boundary we're not so attached to and afraid of. This is how you can spot theatre in between real beliefs.
The premise of "Devs" really reminds me of "I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility" written by qntm in 2007, where programmers model an exact copy of their own universe by just giving it initial parameters of the big bang as input
that's technically not possible, and also, the premise is simple causal determinism (which is not even scientifically accurate, as our best fundamental physical theory works acausally deterministically), under which desert-apt responsibility and contingency don't make sense.
@@real_pattern Well, I know that from previous knowledge, and it is also expressed in the video, so you didn't watch the fucking video before commenting, which means no matter how smart you are you're fundamentally operating on anti-intellectual habits.
The problem with the physics of Devs (I know it's fiction) is that it is impossible to model the entirety of the universe and all its possible states. The universe is discrete, and there is a minimum amount of energy required for a system to change state (the Planck constant), so to simulate a universe down to this level, you require the energy of the entire universe itself. You cannot fit this fictional machine inside the thing it's simulating. Sorry if I got some physics wrong, I'm just a computer guy.
I think it's the first time an editing choice alone manages to give me chills. When the mirrors were desynchronised for the first time, I lost it a little. Usually I get chills from music or from what is said, almost never from what I see. I guess here it was also from what was being said, but the editing choice just floored me in the best way. I cannot express how impatient I am to receive "How a game lives".
It literally scared me! I paused the video, went to get a snack, and when I sat back down and pushed play I noticed one of the Jacobs was staring at me--my heart skipped a beat.
A new Jacob Geller video appears in my subscriptions with a title and thumbnail like this and I think "Oh cool, guess I'll be having an existential crisis today"
@@kadnhart6661 tbh that has been exactly my method for watching his past several videos. Except for the CoD Torture one, since that one was obviously gonna be a huge downer. I don't need to feel _that_ much despair
It's weird how good Jacob Geller is at writing essays that make me cry. So many of his essays I'll just suddenly burst into tears as his argument begins to reach its crux. Truly touching stuff.
It is an argument against determinism but it isn’t really an argument for free will either. We may not know were a particle is in a determinate moment (if it even is in any point at all), but we still have probabilities
@@lucastudios86 You mean, as in "we don't know what causes a certain event or probability to actually happen"? Yeah, that's true. I can't believe I didn't think of that lol.
Sorry to ask out of the blue, but would you be willing to expand on this statement? I think a musician would have a very interesting perspective on the topics discussed here and I can't play any instrument.
@ASingleMind I have always had this feeling of anything I play being ephemeral, in the moment, and fleeting in a comforting way. Dissipating to where no matter how good or bad it is, it will vanish from reality into the memories of anyone who heard it, who themselves will vanish someday. Live music to me is beautiful because it is an art that cannot be contained by a medium like paint on a canvas. Seeing the breath in that bag unable to be released into the world, circulating through a mechanism with no escape, it challenges my perspective and makes me question how I interact with my craft, how others do, and all that good stuff. It's a good kind of disturbing, like a knock at the door when you're hoping for a package delivery. (I hope at least some of that made sense)
@@jacobiannava honestly i think that's beautiful and i see what you're coming from. Im a digital artist/writer (i specialize in characters, and i write romance and horror) and i 100% get what you're saying.
@@jacobiannavaI find that train of thought fascinating, because in my mind it’s all ephemeral. The bag being pumped for countless breaths must end, its bag must decay, its seal must fail, and when that happens her last breath must be finally exhaled. In that sense, the machine is a feeble attempt of humanity to struggle against the universe, against entropy and its inevitable spreading. No mural will remain unfaded, no sculpture without erosion, and in the end everything that we are and were and will be will vanish from any recollection. We try, in vain, to make god from the machine, carve a niche into the world where who we are will not be forgotten, but god is not there. Even the effects of our existence, the air we breathe and the path it follows is perfectly unpredictable, impossible to control and impossible to understand due to the fundamental randomness of quantum particles (if you’d like to learn more, read into the Bell inequality and the tests to measure its validity). It’s 1:30 am. I should probably go to bed.
The bit about the simultaneous freedom and obligations inherent to both hard determinism and the total rejection of it hit something soft inside me in a way which was simultaneously deeply reassuring and completely haunting. Bravo.
I love how you not only seem to have a passion for these weirder art projects that dive deep into the human existence, but also a great talent of telling about them. You have an ability to tell a story in a way that is both calming and grippingly intense. I haven't encountered such before, and I find it truly amazing.
I've always taken comfort in the fact that, when I pass on, _I_ may end, but I will also continue in a thousand new forms; even if "me"-me simply.. ceased to be quite some time ago. It might not be the most glamorous thing in the world to have my material incorporated into the worms, the soil, and whatever plants grow in the soil - but I wouldn't have it any other way, frankly. As long as I'm contributing to the life of another being, is it really so bad mine ended?
Remember the old adage: "If a tree falls in the middle of a forest, and nobody is around to hear it, then that means the lumberjack is sleeping on the job."
@@glupik1234 do you think a forest counts as a conscious agent? If so/not so then in what manner can we speak of a forest remembering and hearing all of its trees?
Wow, Jacob. The production choices you made for this one were VERY effective, and incredibly grabbing. I always struggle to make a-reel worth looking at for the duration of a long essay, without relying on constant contrapoints scene changes, but you really solved it with the mirror gimmick.
I always felt determinism is more compatible with free will than randomness. You are determined to act like you act, you are determined to want what you actually want. You will be determined by yourself and what happens to you. You have control to react like you would.
I disagree. To me it says my will is not my own, it will be so because it will be so not because I have a say in the matter, I will align with it. Like the line about Emrakul in MTG that I can’t find, but it’s something like “she doesn’t cause things, reality simply aligns with her will”
Random but rewatching this I remembered this quote by Margaret Atwood that I feel fits really well with the subject “If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next-if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions-you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”
Semi-related fun fact, humans are closer to being the size of the observable universe than we are to being the size of a Planck length (the smallest recorded size).
Great idea. I've had a thought related to this. What if it goes on forever? What if there's always a smaller thing, and a larger thing? If that's the case, then in a way does that not make the smallest thing the largest, and the largest thing the smallest? After all no matter how large you would get, it would just be one infinitesimally small blip in the infinite scale of things, and similarly the smallest things would contain just as vast ever expanding worlds as the largest. Another image I liked is the idea that perhaps the universe is recursive. Perhaps the largest and smallest things are actually one and the same. That if you zoomed in far enough, beyond the atom, beyond the quark, you would eventually find yourself staring at galaxies - and that if you looked far enough upwards into the vast reaches of the universe, you would eventually find yourself peering out of the outer confines of a single atom.
its been a while since i watched it, but you might like the video Monumentality by Solar Sands. Imma go watch it now honestly, i remember it being very good.
"Everything that happens will happen today And nothing has changed but nothing's the same And every tomorrow could be yesterday Everything that happens will happen today"
The ending comments on 1000x Resist really got to me. Started crying, because it resonates so beautifully. There are many circumstances to ones birth, all of them out of our control. Our start, our beginning, is deterministic. Many of us who belong to minority groups do not get a choice in when we get to live. We get what we get. Sadly, i belong to a group that's highly persecuted right now, my rights being legislated away, and the public becoming more and more violent against me and any other trans person. I could choose to just throw my hands up and accept that nothing i do will have any change to it, a deterministic outlook dictates that my efforts are ultimately meaningless and at the same time, entirely predetermined. But Even if the outcome is already determined, the memory of the outcome is up to me and people like me who fight and advocate for equal rights and treatment in society. Our voices will be remembered so long as we speak. Silence causes the past to fade, not time. So I will keep speaking. So the world may remember me
Thank you for sharing your perspective. I have been disappointed recently by a certain subset of my fellow leftists coming to the conclusion that protest is pointless and ineffective, that no one in any power is listening. I was surprised to see someone laughed at me for suggesting that protest must be a part of living consciously in an imperialist state. On a previous occasion when I have felt hopeless, my sister, an erstwhile activist, shared with me a title "History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times" (2018) by Mary Frances Berry. I listened to the audio book, and I think that it has helped with my perspective. I, too, agree with that sentiment from the father who protested in Hong Kong in 1000xResist. Even though the outcome is unknown, but even if it were known that the outcome would be failure to achieve our primary goals, resistance is still necessary to demonstrate to all now and in the future that this is NOT what we all wanted, that we did NOT acquiesce and comply.
Unless we fight, how will those who look back from the future know our cause was worth fighting for? Sometimes we fight not to win, but to send a message to someone in a distant someday that we fought, and that they should too; to be the historical footnote that alerts someone to the possibility of a better world.
This was particularly interesting paired with like, the generational trauma that comes from the same circumstances. I don't want the things that my parents went through to be forgotten, I don't want what I'm going through to be forgotten. But a lot of us bear the weight of their lives in ways that we can't survive. My mother's unhappiness is something I can't keep carrying forever, even if a lot of it was because of how her life choices were limited by external factors. The ability to let them go was incredibly cathartic, and doing gives me more energy to do the things I need to do in the now.
This is so powerful. Thank you so much. I've been trying to pitch stories as a queer closeted trans SEAsian in a country where being queer is punishable by law. But all of my stories come from a place of survivalship and are often unappealing to western publishers and editors. Whenever I try to explain why I write my protagonists as such and convince them, that stories of persistence and survival are just as important I'm often shut down or come up short of what to say. You've just given me the words to express what I feel strongly in my heart. Thank you, and my your struggle and fight be just as good.
Thank you so much for this video. I've had a very bad year and have been in a very bad place mentally and feeling very helpless and hopeless. Something about "There is a now, you are in it. There is a then, you will receive it," hit very hard, as did the discussion about how determinism and non- determinism afford massive weight to actions in different ways. This video kicked my butt in the best way possible.
sorry, this is random but I wish my ex gf Jessica would talk to me 😭 she moved to texas from alaska like 10 years ago and cut contact even tho we were friends up until she left. hope things start looking up for you!
This video got me thinking about this quote from Good Omens "God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”
Assuming the citation is correct for Babbage's quote (1837), you've missed an idea that uses the same principles that created even earlier - Pierre-Simon Laplace in his book "Philosophical Essay on Probabilities." The fifth edition came out in 1825, so Babbage was not the first one to articulate this idea. Laplace's thought experiment is typically called "Laplace's Demon."
Hi, hello, Gundam fan here. Um, I am now learning that the name "Laplace" is rooted in a broader context than I initially thought, which is interesting as in Gundam it is featured as "Laplace's Box," this bizarre thing that may or may not threaten both the foundation of the world yet also offer endless possibilities, in a show that broadly has a few things to say about fate and possibilities and that, even in the face of the heat death of the universe, one can say "... even so!" All of us hold a god inside us, the god of "possibility."
You have expressed something here I could not explain to my friends when we went to see “Boy and the Heron” The past is a place we have been, and are no longer at, those we leave behind still exist there
As somebody with an intense fear of being forgotten, of being nothing to a world I care so deeply for but struggle so mightily to exist in, this. This is the hope. That nothing ever stops.
The universe itself will always carry our imprint in it in some way, but I feel that for mostly everyone who says they fear being forgotten (me included), the fear is to be forgotten by humans. That will still happen. Even if you manage to be one of the worldchangers that people remember many generations down (either positively or negatively), humanity will someday cease to exist and you will be forgotten in that way. The universe will still carry your imprint after, although it will likely be microscopically small by then. This fear is all ego driven anyway and I feel the only way to get rid of it is not to be memorable or bend physics in creative ways to feel somewhat immortal, but to chip away at the ego.
This video hit extremely hard. The idea of a deterministic universe always scared me, somehow you figured out how to make your actions have meaning in a world where everything is predetermined. This is why you're one if not my favorite youtuber.
I’ve never been afraid of deterministic universe becuase it doesn’t really affect me that much whether or not we have free will. My life happens regardless.
You don't need to be afraid of a deterministic universe, because it isn't! Basically any dynamical system, except the most simple ones, is chaotic, meaning any perturbation grows to an arbitrary size, meaning you can no longer make any predictions after a certain point (for example, even with incredibly precise measurments, you can only predict weather up to two weeks). Furthermore, because of the uncertainty principle, there is always uncertainty on the state of a system, and because the universe is chaotic, it is impossible to perfectly predict the future
@@HunsterMonter unrelated but I think it's incredible meteorology is advanced enough to predict weather at all, let alone two weeks in advance. Science is incredible
This video essay was great. I especially liked the part, where about 1000xResist and how any action, even if its purpose isn't fulfilled, holds meaning. I am also wondering if you were tempted to discuss Disco Elysium in this essay.
There's definitely something about the Pale that resonates with the concepts in this video. The idea that human consciousness is somewhat at odds with the existence of the natural universe and how it ties to themes of love, loss, colonization, imperialism, resistance, communication and the music of the anodic night club? Yeah, it's got a place here. Still, good to let new games breathe a bit on their own, and I think I'm gonna give 1000xResist a shot after this.
Bell's theorem merely proves that no self-consistent and experimentally-consistent model of quantum mechanics can be both deterministic and fully local; the Copenhagen interpretation discards determinism in favor of locality, but an alternative interpretation called "pilot wave theory" preserves determinism by discarding locality; the two models are mathematically equivalent up to the limit of precision of our ability to measure
The part about 1000x resist and iris's father made me cry because currently I'm living through something similar, considering there's police hunting down university students who'd protested for their rights and now for the lives lost right outside of the walls of my house
There's a passage in A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki that seems relevant to this, "Do not think that time simply flies away. Do not understand “flying” as the only function of time. If time simply flew away, a separation would exist between you and time. So if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being. To grasp this truly, every being that exists in the entire world is linked together as moments in time, and at the same time they exist as individual moments of time. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being."
Bro, your music choices are killing me! In the best way. From Enigma Variations at the beginning to the soubtrack of Outer Wilds at the end... adds a whole unspoken layer of meaning & reflection to the video.
Kind of reminds me of the game Seaman. During your playthrough Seaman will eventually start asking about what makes something real, and exclaiming that he exists just as much as we do, despite being in a video game
I find that mirror scene kinda funny, because even if the computer is only predicting what people will do 1 second in the future, the scene is also ignoring that some humans are goblins who will try and contradict something or someone just because they can... and one second is a long time to do something different.
@csCherry that's true, IF you also did not tell the person what they were going to say, which was my point. Using your example, the scene is essentially asking a person: "heads or tails? By the way, you will choose tails."
@@PileOfSentientTentacles Yeah, it's running headlong into a potential paradox of precognition. "Perfect" information about the future would influence the actions of a person in the present. Potentially leading the present person to behave differently from how they were predicted to act, and thereby alter the course of the future. Thereby rendering the predicted information incorrect, and making the predicting entity either wrong or a liar. To put it another way, what would happen if you told the precognition machine to predict its own future predictions, by analyzing its own mass at the moment of prediction and extrapolating? It would create a recursive loop of future information influencing the physical state of the machine, which the machine was using to extrapolate information about its future extrapolations. It's almost a temporal "halting problem", where the resolution of an event is impossible to determine, because the act of determining the result negates the outcome. The only way the precog machine could possibly work is if it were to exist entirely outside of material causality, and thereby observe all of reality without influencing it in any way. But such a machine would be useless to us, because it existing outside of causality would render it inaccessible to us.
@@PileOfSentientTentacleswell imagine you said that to someone, but were right. Then you'd be right! And because the machine takes into account it's own existence, it's going to be right.
All I can think about in that scene is how the delay is *just* enough that someone could deliberately contradict their immediate future, throwing the entire presumption out the window. All you need to do is see that in the next second, you're predicted to stay still, and that's enough time to raise your hand- or vice versa, to see you raise your hand and then refuse to do so. To bring it back to quantum: the observation of an event alters its outcome.
One of my favorite things in the graphic novel is the page where Billy Pilgrim reads a Tralfamadorian book, a series of images intended to be considered all at once. You can kind of do this with the illustrations, but the fact that the text explaining all this is laid out very carefully across all the panels from the upper left corner of one page to the lower right corner of the other page forces you to read it in a linear fashion like a human would.
the question "what is 1000xRESIST about?" could fill hours of discussion and essays. truly a monumental work that we're gonna be digesting for a long time
I just love when you do the more artsy, deep, and thought provoking essays. They remind me of both the vastness of the universe and the shortness of human life at the same time. These videos truly are moving and I enjoy then endlessly
Video reminds me of a beautiful quote that i haven''t been able to get out of my head for the past month, from, of all games, Honkai: Star Rail: "Set forth on your voyage without hesitation, Nameless... Even if the ending has been predetermined, that's fine. There are countless things that humans cannot change. But before that, on the road to the end, there are still many things that we can do. And because of this, the end will thus reveal a completely different meaning."
As terrible a blight upon the world gacha is, I will never not be in love with their worlds. There is real love and wonder instilled in their games, even if it buried by the miserable plague that is gacha.
@@mrreemann8313 It's a shame, because i know a lot of people who could get a lot out of these stories without spending a dime will never consider touching them because of the monetization system -- and I can't even say they're in the wrong for that. But I *do* think that how much of a "blight" free-to-play gacha games are is significantly overstated when compared to, say, full price live-service hero shooters with forty dollar skins. Maybe my opinion on that would change if, say, the newest COD had a narrative as unique and engaging as Star Rail's.
"I Don't Know, Timmy, Being God Is a Big Responsibility" by qntm has a somewhat similar premise to devs, but it has a bit more simulation theory tossed in. It's a pretty short story, so i'd recommend anyone give it a read.
Jacob, you have always created nothing other than pure art. But with this one, I feel like you have ascended from being one of the best analyzers there are to someone deserving of analysis itself.
The editing, the way you phrase yourself, the subtle details like colours and shapes you use, it's all come together in such an indescribably beautiful way in this video that just... *feels* right I guess? I don't know how to word it, but it feels light, warm, it feels light blue. Well done, this video is absolutely amazing
I've loved your videos for years, but I rarely ever comment. I don't want to say this one is my favorite because I have a bad memory and have liked others for different reasons...but super loved this one! I'm a street artist who's been working with sidewalk chalk since 2017...a constant lesson on impermanent art/ideas creating lasting change in abstract ways...I've gotten arrested for it multiple times now too...with the city pressure washing my chalk away...but leaving the human feces less than 30 feet away...There's some interesting symbolism in creating with an impermanent tool only to have a city spend time/money/effort/water during lvl 3 drought restrictions to wash it away. Them investing so much in trying to silence impermanent art has created an even longer lasting effect. I've won a settlement, I've started speaking at City Council regularly, I've realized the importance of local news (watch on RUclips with premium and skip the filler)...Choosing to create with an impermanent medium and stand behind my freedom to express myself has made the impermanent art thousands of times more impactful than my more conventional art. I got started with sidewalk chalk because of an idea I called the #ABCMandala . I discovered if you write the alphabet around a circle the 5 vowels are symmetrically placed and the three letters shaped like the number 3 are symmetrically placed E at the top then M & W horizontally opposite. Discovering this idea made Arrival my favorite movie.
Im glad to see such a huge channel cover 1000x Resist. It deserves all the praise it gets, and im endlessly surprised by the monumental achievement that the studio made on their first game.
This video has left me with the same emptiness that a good story would after there's no more to read, and a conflicting desire to know more. I genuinely believe these video essays are some of the most beautiful on the platform, reeling me in with promises of fun video game talks and leaving me with contemplating my existence in the universe in the most optimistic way I can. I walk away from these videos questioning video games and art and history and my place in the universe in a way that leaves me more fulfilled than before, other media that leaves me feeling this way destroys me and these videos build me back up again. Normally I struggle to show my family my interests, I tend to veer towards the nerdier and weirder side. I want to sit down with my grandma and show her this video. I want to see her understand and discuss with me. Thank you for this gift.
Something that has help me a lot with procrastination is thinking of my future and past selves as different people. Everyday I curse my past self and try to be kind to my future self by doing something small. I grew up in a catholic household and went to a catholic school, and I never understood the way they said ‘God gave you free will, and he knows your past, present and future’. How can god know the future without every action being already determined? I don’t believe in any god, and maybe that’s why I find it so difficult to not procrastinate. Either my actions matter or they don’t, in the grand scheme of things. But at least my actions will affect my self of tomorrow, and I guess that’s all that matters.
22:55 a flaw in the aliens logic there is if all moments exist in perpetuity, suffering in one moment is perpetual as well, thus should be avoided if possible. A well fed person next to a starved person doesn’t make the starvation ok since there is also a person who is fed, it means they have a responsibility to help the starving person any way they can.
What a beautiful video that fluctuated between deterministic fatalism to empowered resistance where each of your actions matters and has an echo throughout time, really superb. I adore 1000xresist and can highly recommend it to anyone who likes narrative games. Now i need to check out DEVS, it seems really interesting too.
a video essay discussing my personal thoughts on free will with amizing editing as well. when I noticed the mirrors moving independently first i got a bit scared actually. well done
The jumpscare at 12:20 (if I can even call it that) was pretty amazing. It really builds the uncertain atmosphere that circles around the entirety of the video, not just from the basis of the theory behind it, but in its presentation and selected pieces.
30:00 This line delivery combined with the editing was quite stunning. Coming from a family so strongly affected by revolution and loss, I felt a certain unexpected level of emotion from it.
36:20 statistically, ever single breath shares a few atoms with every single breath distant enough in time for sufficient mixing and diffusion unfortunately diffusion also means that iar can, very slowly, gradually, mix with other air straight through a wall, within realtively sane timescales for paper
My thoughts too. The machine breathes the same breath in and out, but each time the breath becomes composed of slightly less of itself, until it's just air, until the breath has already left the bag.
@@sydneygorelick7484 maybe in the same way we can pretend the air in the bag is still from Olivera, we pretend a person's actions are only composed from their memories and decisions. Who's to say?
I love the match-cuts. Thanks for this awesome (in all senses of the word) video. You greatly elaborated on what I obsessed over as a kid with super-determinism. The artwork with the last breath is pretty wild. I wonder how much of it was planned.
OK so im high rn, and so maybe that's kinda removed my ability to separate myself from taking every word with 100% seriousness, but like, I genuinely cried during the part about the aliens reliving the past, incredibly beautiful writing man
Maybe not related, but the video description reminds me of a quote from Alan Wake 2: "Water is the memory of the world. Water finds it's way." Great video by the way. Didn't expect such philosophical leaning, but I'm all for it. The writing was top tier and the direction, compelling.
One of the tripping points for artistic contemplation such as 'everything and everywhen is deterministic via air particle physics' is that every stumbling point has simple real-world answers that are ignored for the sake of staying in the hypothetical where the goal is to prove the hypothesis rather than test it.
Hopping over here from Nebula just to say that wow, this video is incredible. The way you weave philosophy and physics and literature and art is astounding--you make me forget that these are separate disciplines. As always, your work is thought-provoking and brilliant and makes me want to write.
Such a brilliant video! You explain things like a well read and philosophical yet compassionate friend whose company is an absolute joy. While I don't have the privilege of having such a friend in my life, I am glad I have you and your channel to look towards to. Thank you for this fantastic essay. "There is a now and you're in it, there is a then and you'll receive it", I shall forever remember this.
I rarely comment on videos but I have to say a huge thank you for 1) talking about Devs! It's also one of my favorite shows ever and I'm so glad just to see it mentioned, and 2) featuring a song from the Citizen Sleeper soundtrack at the end! It's an incredible game, and knowing that you've probably played through it a number of times as well is amazing. Awesome work!
The absolutly chilling and beautiful use of Outer Wilds' Sun Station track in the Real-life Physics section is a perfect choice. The exact same form of realisation in that section of your essay and the things you find in that part of the game. (spoiler warning) Finding out that the Nomai failed, and that the sun exploading and your life being wound back 22 minutes was the result of the simple clockwork of the universe, your sun simply set to die at this moment in time. The realisation that there was no way you could meaningfully escape this cycle and rejoin your old life. Being forced to confront the perhaps cruel but otherwise unbias hand of fate you've been delt and simply continue your search for knowlage and understanding, the only thing guiding you, like the Nomai, being The Eye. Similarly, the dawning, harrowing realisation that the universe in real life is, truly, unequivically, Random. That down to the quantum state there is no way to determine any partical's Past or Present through equasion alone. That God truly does Play Dice. It's the same feeling in both moments. Cold resignition and the knot in your stomach as you're forced to know the hand you've been delt. It's beautiful how well they mirror eachother. A perfect nod to anyone who knows that game and that track well enough.
Attack on Titan would be an interesting addition to this conversation. Eren being burdened by the knowledge of all past and present of both his ancestors and future self changes his entire character in almost an instant. I think it’s interesting the fact that he receives all this information instantly, arguably the delivery of the information is more damning than the information itself.
I've been watching your videos for a while and decided now was the time to get the lifetime subscription on Nebula. I'm not the smartest dude, and a lot of stuff goes right over my head. But as someone that wants to be smarter, more aware, more conscious of the media that I take in - I appreciate your insight and your views tremendously. Thanks dude. You put a lot of the thoughts I have into words that I personally cannot find, and I appreciate you and your content.
Jacob, don't get me wrong, man, I love you, but, since your video on Radiohead's digital museum, "Games that aren't games", I get the feeling that you don't give these subjects the treatment they deserve. You present exhibit 1, 2, 3, you agree with something from each one, and then you rush out a conclusion, an amazing conclusion indeed, but it's too brief.. You're stoping just at the moment of climax, giving us just a taste of an amazing point (thesis) that you're subscribing to. I'm not saying that you should flesh out the "discourse" around a subject, because you're not writing academic papers on RUclips, but I would encourage you to give your ideas the space they deserve. It's like you're afraid of repeating yourself or making the videos too long, which I totally get, but the "meat" is too bite-sized in comparison to the build-up. The thing is, your introductions are the most captivating I've seen on this platform. On solely your essays I check the remaining time length only after 10-15 minutes into it, because the immersion is just nuts. Your "hooks" are spot on, but the intensity slowly fades away towards the end... I've seen this style only in the last (maybe couple of) year(s) or so; I fondly remember your videos on Ico and de Chirico, Museum Theft, Soma and Fear of Depths. To be honest, I'll always tune in to your videos, no because of your style, writing or presentation overall, but because your cultural interests and the connections you draw between them are on helluva treat. So, from this perspective, you'll never get old and I hope you continue to talk about anything that you love, no matter how insignificant or mundane it may seem, because your love for the subject matter shines a blinding light that enraptures us all! Best wishes :)
Jacob, you should look into Causal Invariance, a notion popularized by the guy who made Wolfram Alpha / Mathematica. It turns out that in many cases, you can't actually trace events back like this. The explanation is simple, for any given state of a system (like the universe) it is not necessarily the case, that it has a singular possible prior state. That is, multiple possible histories may lead to a given present. If true (and it appears to be), then tracing back you will run into situations where it is ambiguous as to what possible prior history, among a plurality, was the actual history that led to this moment.
Mr. Geller, I have Nebula but Nebula doesn't have a comment section so I just, I *NEED* to say this and the Golem video are the only ones that had me in real tears by the end. This... was a balm. Thank you.
From all the years of videos watched and creators found, Jacob Geller is the most thought-provoking auteur I've experienced. How he articulates profound concepts with passion and curiosity is unique, intriguing and the hallmarks if an amazing teacher.
Leo Vader is probably the funniest man making video essays, and it was such a treat to talk with him about DEVS. Also, after you watch this, please look at its thumbnail because it's truly beautiful/horrifying. nebula.tv/videos/jacob-geller-jacob-and-leo-untangle-the-brilliance-of-devs
Balls
You realize you can release videos for free, right? Like, you just did it. It’s not like you’re incapable of it.
@@tb4546do you know how jobs work?
Machine says ill use the toilet yet i choose to go on the floor
Really makes you think
very nice editing sir
Hearing “this video contains spoilers for a variety of things; chapter timestamps in the description” and then checking to find a chapter called “Real-life physics” has me concerned
I got actual whiplash from reading the chapters
Physics no longer exists. Jacob is part of ETO, confirmed!
stop the research, we just got spoiled by a jacob geller video
As soon as he quoted Babbage, being a physicist myself I was like: This goes against the laws of thermodynamics!
Isaac Newton before the apple be like:
Jacob Geller makes videos that, when I see the title of them, make me say to myself "that is such a Jacob Geller video title"
Good, I'm not the only one thinking about this
I think about these Titles a lot.
This is also a very exurb1a title
I've had dreams narrated by this man
Lovely video. I have a little personal anecdote that slots surprisingly neatly into the themes of this video.
71 years ago, my grandfather took a cycling trip around the perimeter of France with a friend. He kept a diary, meticulously documenting the events of almost every day. Last month, my brothers and I embarked on the same journey, following in his footsteps. I'd avoided reading the diary beforehand, so every day I'd read about his experience at the same time that I had them myself: the places he'd visited, the food he'd eaten, the people he'd found, and at the same time we'd see the same sights. Some days we were ahead of him, some days we were behind.
After a few days, I realised that something very surprising was happening. 71 years later, and 40 years after the death of this man we never knew, we stopped talking about him in the past tense. It took me a while to notice it, but it slowly became more obvious. We'd say things like "he's just 10 kilometres ahead of us now" or "he's over there as he's taking that photo". Seven decades, suddenly erased - an experience that felt almost out of time - and in those few days he felt closer and more alive than he ever had before. It was a strange experience, and something I doubt I shall ever have again.
That's beautiful
That's honestly amazing, what an incredible experience
Well, that's hard to top. I'm inspired.
This is a really beautiful story, and dovetails so well with Jacob’s video. Thank you
reading this with the outro music was just 🤌
I understand that in the sentence "essays unimpeded by predatory copyright claims like those from Big Joel", "those" are meant to be essays, but personally I think it's a lot funnier to imagine essayists flocking to Nebula to avoid to copyright scourge of RUclips that is Big Joel
Litigious Joel strikes hard, and often
I love how jacob geller videos always go into very conceptual philosophical realms while remaining absolutely accessible at every point. I feel like I notice this even more when I know more about the subjects he talks about. He explains what the word teleological means in one sentence the moment it becomes relevant, he pulls the important ideas out of quantum physics and then moves on with it. The restraint in his writing is insane. And it all comes together in such a compact way. What the hell
It's so cool how Alan Wake decided to become a video essayist after all he's been through.
More like Alan Woke! Because he woke up from the nightmare and became a werewolf biker boy in the night springs dlc
Alan Wake wishes he was as good a writer
more like Alan Wishes
wait fuck. I mean, uh... it's not that MasDouc beat me to the joke, it's that he was just laying the groundwork for me to nail it better.
>_>
More like Alan Wack
Not even 2 minutes in, and I can't help but think of this quote in Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett: "In the Ramtop village where they dance the real Morris dance, for example, they believe that no one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away-until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence."
Speaking of Pratchett, the breathing machine in the art exhibit reminds me of the concept of keeping someone alive by sending their name through the Clacks. Keeping a person alive by remembering their name isn't strictly about existence, but it has a similar feeling.
On that note: GNU Terry Pratchett
Which is nice but very silly because we immediately cease to apply such ideas to any concept boundary we're not so attached to and afraid of. This is how you can spot theatre in between real beliefs.
Pratchett and Douglas Adams are capable of speaking of high truths with such a light tone. There's no need to be dramatic.
GNU Pterry
@@dopaminecloudHow so? Just curious.
The premise of "Devs" really reminds me of "I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility" written by qntm in 2007, where programmers model an exact copy of their own universe by just giving it initial parameters of the big bang as input
Oh my god I love qntm!!!
There is no antimemetics division
that's technically not possible, and also, the premise is simple causal determinism (which is not even scientifically accurate, as our best fundamental physical theory works acausally deterministically), under which desert-apt responsibility and contingency don't make sense.
@@real_pattern Well, I know that from previous knowledge, and it is also expressed in the video, so you didn't watch the fucking video before commenting, which means no matter how smart you are you're fundamentally operating on anti-intellectual habits.
The problem with the physics of Devs (I know it's fiction) is that it is impossible to model the entirety of the universe and all its possible states. The universe is discrete, and there is a minimum amount of energy required for a system to change state (the Planck constant), so to simulate a universe down to this level, you require the energy of the entire universe itself. You cannot fit this fictional machine inside the thing it's simulating. Sorry if I got some physics wrong, I'm just a computer guy.
I think it's the first time an editing choice alone manages to give me chills. When the mirrors were desynchronised for the first time, I lost it a little. Usually I get chills from music or from what is said, almost never from what I see. I guess here it was also from what was being said, but the editing choice just floored me in the best way.
I cannot express how impatient I am to receive "How a game lives".
It literally scared me! I paused the video, went to get a snack, and when I sat back down and pushed play I noticed one of the Jacobs was staring at me--my heart skipped a beat.
Same!! I wanted to express the same thing and saw you'd already said it.
RIGHT? I genuinely felt all my hairs tense up
phenomenal piece as always. honored to have heard my name in it.
Leo you are brilliant and hilarious, thank you for sharing your work
That was a long way to say "you're gonna carry that weight". And what a marvelous way that was.
bang.
A new Jacob Geller video appears in my subscriptions with a title and thumbnail like this and I think "Oh cool, guess I'll be having an existential crisis today"
I'm legit wondering if I should get a little stoned to really season the existential crisis
@@kadnhart6661*sighs and pauses video* I'm going to the dispensary later today anyway..
@@kadnhart6661 tbh that has been exactly my method for watching his past several videos. Except for the CoD Torture one, since that one was obviously gonna be a huge downer. I don't need to feel _that_ much despair
@@kadnhart6661I got clean off weed about a month ago only for this video to make me regret that decision for a couple hours
Honestly, wouldn’t you be a little disappointed if a Jacob Geller video was not titled in such a way?
THAT MIRROR THING STARTLED ME
For real, I had it up on my second monitor and nearly jumped out of my chair when I saw something move out of the corner of my eye.
Looks like the old “three kings” creepypasta ritual lmao
I normally see things in the corner of my eye that are not there so it was extra creepy holly frick.
Haha yes I'm a bit high and I did jump
@@shwing1428how was the experience of watching this high
It's weird how good Jacob Geller is at writing essays that make me cry. So many of his essays I'll just suddenly burst into tears as his argument begins to reach its crux. Truly touching stuff.
Seek help
Dont cry too much, you'll die
The Uncertainty Principle is the best argument against determinism out there. It’s literally woven into reality’s fabric.
@@mneseraphim oh okay! In what way? I am curious to learn more
The CRT static of the Universe, hehehehehe
It is an argument against determinism but it isn’t really an argument for free will either. We may not know were a particle is in a determinate moment (if it even is in any point at all), but we still have probabilities
@@lucastudios86 You mean, as in "we don't know what causes a certain event or probability to actually happen"? Yeah, that's true. I can't believe I didn't think of that lol.
As a musician: disturbed. As a human: endlessly fascinated.
Sorry to ask out of the blue, but would you be willing to expand on this statement? I think a musician would have a very interesting perspective on the topics discussed here and I can't play any instrument.
@ASingleMind I have always had this feeling of anything I play being ephemeral, in the moment, and fleeting in a comforting way. Dissipating to where no matter how good or bad it is, it will vanish from reality into the memories of anyone who heard it, who themselves will vanish someday. Live music to me is beautiful because it is an art that cannot be contained by a medium like paint on a canvas. Seeing the breath in that bag unable to be released into the world, circulating through a mechanism with no escape, it challenges my perspective and makes me question how I interact with my craft, how others do, and all that good stuff.
It's a good kind of disturbing, like a knock at the door when you're hoping for a package delivery. (I hope at least some of that made sense)
@@jacobiannava honestly i think that's beautiful and i see what you're coming from. Im a digital artist/writer (i specialize in characters, and i write romance and horror) and i 100% get what you're saying.
@@jacobiannavaI find that train of thought fascinating, because in my mind it’s all ephemeral. The bag being pumped for countless breaths must end, its bag must decay, its seal must fail, and when that happens her last breath must be finally exhaled. In that sense, the machine is a feeble attempt of humanity to struggle against the universe, against entropy and its inevitable spreading. No mural will remain unfaded, no sculpture without erosion, and in the end everything that we are and were and will be will vanish from any recollection. We try, in vain, to make god from the machine, carve a niche into the world where who we are will not be forgotten, but god is not there. Even the effects of our existence, the air we breathe and the path it follows is perfectly unpredictable, impossible to control and impossible to understand due to the fundamental randomness of quantum particles (if you’d like to learn more, read into the Bell inequality and the tests to measure its validity).
It’s 1:30 am. I should probably go to bed.
@@jacobiannavabut that live music can be contained we can record it these days
Which when that first came around some prolly saw that as magical
The bit about the simultaneous freedom and obligations inherent to both hard determinism and the total rejection of it hit something soft inside me in a way which was simultaneously deeply reassuring and completely haunting. Bravo.
That’s how it hit me too, Jacob masterfully wrote that portion
I love how you not only seem to have a passion for these weirder art projects that dive deep into the human existence, but also a great talent of telling about them. You have an ability to tell a story in a way that is both calming and grippingly intense. I haven't encountered such before, and I find it truly amazing.
YOU PUT IT IN WORDS
I've always taken comfort in the fact that, when I pass on, _I_ may end, but I will also continue in a thousand new forms; even if "me"-me simply.. ceased to be quite some time ago. It might not be the most glamorous thing in the world to have my material incorporated into the worms, the soil, and whatever plants grow in the soil - but I wouldn't have it any other way, frankly. As long as I'm contributing to the life of another being, is it really so bad mine ended?
Remember the old adage: "If a tree falls in the middle of a forest, and nobody is around to hear it, then that means the lumberjack is sleeping on the job."
Or you should reevaluate your anthropocentric frameworks. A forest remembers and hears all of its trees.
@@glupik1234the tree isnt remembered because it is never lost
@@glupik1234 do you think a forest counts as a conscious agent? If so/not so then in what manner can we speak of a forest remembering and hearing all of its trees?
@@nanashi7779who knows.
@@nanashi7779Forests (at least some) are 'concious'. The tree 'converse' through the use of fungal networks.
Wow, Jacob. The production choices you made for this one were VERY effective, and incredibly grabbing. I always struggle to make a-reel worth looking at for the duration of a long essay, without relying on constant contrapoints scene changes, but you really solved it with the mirror gimmick.
woW
Dissing contrapoints D:
@@littlemonztergaming8665 Far from it! She does it better than anyone IMO, it’s just not a technique I have the patience or budget for in my videos.
TFW you're rewatching a Jacob Geller video, and when it's done you go back to the home page and there's a brand new Jacob Feller video
Who is this Jacob feller anyway?
video essayist turned lumberjack call that Jacob Feller
That Jacob Fella sure is stellar.
Good is his writing, Hella@@WeIsDaTyrantz
@@zaidlacksalastname4905ummmmm uh salmonella
I always felt determinism is more compatible with free will than randomness. You are determined to act like you act, you are determined to want what you actually want. You will be determined by yourself and what happens to you. You have control to react like you would.
Well said. Agreed.
I fail to grasp that.
What definition of determinism are you using?
@@MarioPerez-ng9itYou have a will. And you have no choice but to exercise your will. And you cannot will what you will.
@@RedStreak24 That I can grasp, thank you.
I disagree. To me it says my will is not my own, it will be so because it will be so not because I have a say in the matter, I will align with it. Like the line about Emrakul in MTG that I can’t find, but it’s something like “she doesn’t cause things, reality simply aligns with her will”
Random but rewatching this I remembered this quote by Margaret Atwood that I feel fits really well with the subject
“If you knew what was going to happen, if you knew everything that was going to happen next-if you knew in advance the consequences of your own actions-you'd be doomed. You'd be ruined as God. You'd be a stone. You'd never eat or drink or laugh or get out of bed in the morning. You'd never love anyone, ever again. You'd never dare to.”
I want to see Jacob talk about human progress finding "the smallest thing"- germs, atoms, smaller and smaller.
Quarks?
Semi-related fun fact, humans are closer to being the size of the observable universe than we are to being the size of a Planck length (the smallest recorded size).
Jacob should follow the Eightfold way if you know what i mean
Great idea. I've had a thought related to this. What if it goes on forever? What if there's always a smaller thing, and a larger thing? If that's the case, then in a way does that not make the smallest thing the largest, and the largest thing the smallest? After all no matter how large you would get, it would just be one infinitesimally small blip in the infinite scale of things, and similarly the smallest things would contain just as vast ever expanding worlds as the largest. Another image I liked is the idea that perhaps the universe is recursive. Perhaps the largest and smallest things are actually one and the same. That if you zoomed in far enough, beyond the atom, beyond the quark, you would eventually find yourself staring at galaxies - and that if you looked far enough upwards into the vast reaches of the universe, you would eventually find yourself peering out of the outer confines of a single atom.
its been a while since i watched it, but you might like the video Monumentality by Solar Sands. Imma go watch it now honestly, i remember it being very good.
"Everything that happens will happen today
And nothing has changed but nothing's the same
And every tomorrow could be yesterday
Everything that happens will happen today"
Great song from a great album.
The ending comments on 1000x Resist really got to me. Started crying, because it resonates so beautifully.
There are many circumstances to ones birth, all of them out of our control. Our start, our beginning, is deterministic. Many of us who belong to minority groups do not get a choice in when we get to live. We get what we get. Sadly, i belong to a group that's highly persecuted right now, my rights being legislated away, and the public becoming more and more violent against me and any other trans person.
I could choose to just throw my hands up and accept that nothing i do will have any change to it, a deterministic outlook dictates that my efforts are ultimately meaningless and at the same time, entirely predetermined.
But
Even if the outcome is already determined, the memory of the outcome is up to me and people like me who fight and advocate for equal rights and treatment in society. Our voices will be remembered so long as we speak. Silence causes the past to fade, not time.
So I will keep speaking. So the world may remember me
Thank you for sharing your perspective. I have been disappointed recently by a certain subset of my fellow leftists coming to the conclusion that protest is pointless and ineffective, that no one in any power is listening. I was surprised to see someone laughed at me for suggesting that protest must be a part of living consciously in an imperialist state. On a previous occasion when I have felt hopeless, my sister, an erstwhile activist, shared with me a title "History Teaches Us to Resist: How Progressive Movements Have Succeeded in Challenging Times" (2018) by Mary Frances Berry. I listened to the audio book, and I think that it has helped with my perspective. I, too, agree with that sentiment from the father who protested in Hong Kong in 1000xResist. Even though the outcome is unknown, but even if it were known that the outcome would be failure to achieve our primary goals, resistance is still necessary to demonstrate to all now and in the future that this is NOT what we all wanted, that we did NOT acquiesce and comply.
Unless we fight, how will those who look back from the future know our cause was worth fighting for? Sometimes we fight not to win, but to send a message to someone in a distant someday that we fought, and that they should too; to be the historical footnote that alerts someone to the possibility of a better world.
"Silence causes the past to fade, not time" is a beautiful line. I hope you are well and will be well in the future.
This was particularly interesting paired with like, the generational trauma that comes from the same circumstances. I don't want the things that my parents went through to be forgotten, I don't want what I'm going through to be forgotten. But a lot of us bear the weight of their lives in ways that we can't survive. My mother's unhappiness is something I can't keep carrying forever, even if a lot of it was because of how her life choices were limited by external factors. The ability to let them go was incredibly cathartic, and doing gives me more energy to do the things I need to do in the now.
This is so powerful. Thank you so much. I've been trying to pitch stories as a queer closeted trans SEAsian in a country where being queer is punishable by law. But all of my stories come from a place of survivalship and are often unappealing to western publishers and editors. Whenever I try to explain why I write my protagonists as such and convince them, that stories of persistence and survival are just as important I'm often shut down or come up short of what to say. You've just given me the words to express what I feel strongly in my heart. Thank you, and my your struggle and fight be just as good.
The 1000xResist section ending dialogue is so beautiful.
Thank you so much for this video. I've had a very bad year and have been in a very bad place mentally and feeling very helpless and hopeless. Something about "There is a now, you are in it. There is a then, you will receive it," hit very hard, as did the discussion about how determinism and non- determinism afford massive weight to actions in different ways. This video kicked my butt in the best way possible.
sorry, this is random but I wish my ex gf Jessica would talk to me 😭 she moved to texas from alaska like 10 years ago and cut contact even tho we were friends up until she left.
hope things start looking up for you!
This video got me thinking about this quote from Good Omens
"God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players [i.e. everybody], to being involved in an obscure and complex variant of poker in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won’t tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.”
Seeing the mirrors reflections moving is like seeing a monster in the corner of your room and make me the same level of sh*t my pants
Assuming the citation is correct for Babbage's quote (1837), you've missed an idea that uses the same principles that created even earlier - Pierre-Simon Laplace in his book "Philosophical Essay on Probabilities." The fifth edition came out in 1825, so Babbage was not the first one to articulate this idea. Laplace's thought experiment is typically called "Laplace's Demon."
Hi, hello, Gundam fan here. Um, I am now learning that the name "Laplace" is rooted in a broader context than I initially thought, which is interesting as in Gundam it is featured as "Laplace's Box," this bizarre thing that may or may not threaten both the foundation of the world yet also offer endless possibilities, in a show that broadly has a few things to say about fate and possibilities and that, even in the face of the heat death of the universe, one can say "... even so!" All of us hold a god inside us, the god of "possibility."
Yeah I was sort confused why he didn’t call it what it’s known as.
I mean if you are going to go that far might as well say that zeno's arrow paradox was the first basic iteration of the idea.
You have expressed something here I could not explain to my friends when we went to see “Boy and the Heron”
The past is a place we have been, and are no longer at, those we leave behind still exist there
As somebody with an intense fear of being forgotten, of being nothing to a world I care so deeply for but struggle so mightily to exist in, this. This is the hope. That nothing ever stops.
The universe itself will always carry our imprint in it in some way, but I feel that for mostly everyone who says they fear being forgotten (me included), the fear is to be forgotten by humans. That will still happen. Even if you manage to be one of the worldchangers that people remember many generations down (either positively or negatively), humanity will someday cease to exist and you will be forgotten in that way. The universe will still carry your imprint after, although it will likely be microscopically small by then. This fear is all ego driven anyway and I feel the only way to get rid of it is not to be memorable or bend physics in creative ways to feel somewhat immortal, but to chip away at the ego.
Nothing ever stops existing except my plans for the next while when a Jacob Geller video drops.
This video hit extremely hard. The idea of a deterministic universe always scared me, somehow you figured out how to make your actions have meaning in a world where everything is predetermined. This is why you're one if not my favorite youtuber.
you're*
@@NoNameAtAll2don’t be mean, he was determined to make that grammar mistake
I’ve never been afraid of deterministic universe becuase it doesn’t really affect me that much whether or not we have free will. My life happens regardless.
You don't need to be afraid of a deterministic universe, because it isn't! Basically any dynamical system, except the most simple ones, is chaotic, meaning any perturbation grows to an arbitrary size, meaning you can no longer make any predictions after a certain point (for example, even with incredibly precise measurments, you can only predict weather up to two weeks). Furthermore, because of the uncertainty principle, there is always uncertainty on the state of a system, and because the universe is chaotic, it is impossible to perfectly predict the future
@@HunsterMonter unrelated but I think it's incredible meteorology is advanced enough to predict weather at all, let alone two weeks in advance. Science is incredible
This video essay was great. I especially liked the part, where about 1000xResist and how any action, even if its purpose isn't fulfilled, holds meaning.
I am also wondering if you were tempted to discuss Disco Elysium in this essay.
There's definitely something about the Pale that resonates with the concepts in this video. The idea that human consciousness is somewhat at odds with the existence of the natural universe and how it ties to themes of love, loss, colonization, imperialism, resistance, communication and the music of the anodic night club? Yeah, it's got a place here. Still, good to let new games breathe a bit on their own, and I think I'm gonna give 1000xResist a shot after this.
Bell's theorem merely proves that no self-consistent and experimentally-consistent model of quantum mechanics can be both deterministic and fully local; the Copenhagen interpretation discards determinism in favor of locality, but an alternative interpretation called "pilot wave theory" preserves determinism by discarding locality; the two models are mathematically equivalent up to the limit of precision of our ability to measure
“Wherever you debark was likely the train’s destination all along.”
~ Cormac McCarthy, “The Passenger”
The part about 1000x resist and iris's father made me cry because currently I'm living through something similar, considering there's police hunting down university students who'd protested for their rights and now for the lives lost right outside of the walls of my house
Thinking I need to make a "Geller videos that made me cry" playlist because lately the likelihood has been in the neighborhood of 50% of uploads.
im going to immediately steal that, shamelessly, thank you
He can't keep doing it to us
So, just a link to the channel?
yung scrole
@@WretchedRedoran eeeeeeey 😎
There's a passage in A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki that seems relevant to this, "Do not think that time simply flies away. Do not understand “flying” as the only function of time. If time simply flew away, a separation would exist between you and time. So if you understand time as only passing, then you do not understand the time being. To grasp this truly, every being that exists in the entire world is linked together as moments in time, and at the same time they exist as individual moments of time. Because all moments are the time being, they are your time being."
That's quite well put. We are part of a whole, and to disregard the world as indifferent or other is to deny our own agency
Bro, your music choices are killing me! In the best way. From Enigma Variations at the beginning to the soubtrack of Outer Wilds at the end... adds a whole unspoken layer of meaning & reflection to the video.
Kind of reminds me of the game Seaman. During your playthrough Seaman will eventually start asking about what makes something real, and exclaiming that he exists just as much as we do, despite being in a video game
I find that mirror scene kinda funny, because even if the computer is only predicting what people will do 1 second in the future, the scene is also ignoring that some humans are goblins who will try and contradict something or someone just because they can... and one second is a long time to do something different.
You can’t ”outmanouver” yourself in that sense. I can ask you heads or tails but you will never be able to pick what didn’t pick.
@csCherry that's true, IF you also did not tell the person what they were going to say, which was my point.
Using your example, the scene is essentially asking a person: "heads or tails? By the way, you will choose tails."
@@PileOfSentientTentacles Yeah, it's running headlong into a potential paradox of precognition. "Perfect" information about the future would influence the actions of a person in the present. Potentially leading the present person to behave differently from how they were predicted to act, and thereby alter the course of the future. Thereby rendering the predicted information incorrect, and making the predicting entity either wrong or a liar.
To put it another way, what would happen if you told the precognition machine to predict its own future predictions, by analyzing its own mass at the moment of prediction and extrapolating? It would create a recursive loop of future information influencing the physical state of the machine, which the machine was using to extrapolate information about its future extrapolations.
It's almost a temporal "halting problem", where the resolution of an event is impossible to determine, because the act of determining the result negates the outcome. The only way the precog machine could possibly work is if it were to exist entirely outside of material causality, and thereby observe all of reality without influencing it in any way. But such a machine would be useless to us, because it existing outside of causality would render it inaccessible to us.
@@PileOfSentientTentacleswell imagine you said that to someone, but were right. Then you'd be right! And because the machine takes into account it's own existence, it's going to be right.
All I can think about in that scene is how the delay is *just* enough that someone could deliberately contradict their immediate future, throwing the entire presumption out the window.
All you need to do is see that in the next second, you're predicted to stay still, and that's enough time to raise your hand- or vice versa, to see you raise your hand and then refuse to do so.
To bring it back to quantum: the observation of an event alters its outcome.
so, so happy to see the slaughterhouse five graphic novel adaptation used in this, even if it was just once! it's a fantastic adaptation.
One of my favorite things in the graphic novel is the page where Billy Pilgrim reads a Tralfamadorian book, a series of images intended to be considered all at once. You can kind of do this with the illustrations, but the fact that the text explaining all this is laid out very carefully across all the panels from the upper left corner of one page to the lower right corner of the other page forces you to read it in a linear fashion like a human would.
how did you leave this comment a day ago???
@@Groku200 Probably Patreon early access
the question "what is 1000xRESIST about?" could fill hours of discussion and essays. truly a monumental work that we're gonna be digesting for a long time
this is your best one yet my guy . love the abstract way you've chosen to arrange the set design and camera work to go along with the themes
I just love when you do the more artsy, deep, and thought provoking essays. They remind me of both the vastness of the universe and the shortness of human life at the same time. These videos truly are moving and I enjoy then endlessly
Video reminds me of a beautiful quote that i haven''t been able to get out of my head for the past month, from, of all games, Honkai: Star Rail: "Set forth on your voyage without hesitation, Nameless... Even if the ending has been predetermined, that's fine. There are countless things that humans cannot change. But before that, on the road to the end, there are still many things that we can do. And because of this, the end will thus reveal a completely different meaning."
Hsr mentioned!!
As terrible a blight upon the world gacha is, I will never not be in love with their worlds. There is real love and wonder instilled in their games, even if it buried by the miserable plague that is gacha.
@@mrreemann8313 It's a shame, because i know a lot of people who could get a lot out of these stories without spending a dime will never consider touching them because of the monetization system -- and I can't even say they're in the wrong for that. But I *do* think that how much of a "blight" free-to-play gacha games are is significantly overstated when compared to, say, full price live-service hero shooters with forty dollar skins. Maybe my opinion on that would change if, say, the newest COD had a narrative as unique and engaging as Star Rail's.
RAIDEN BOSENMORI MEI MENTIONED
@@grimoireweissfan6969 as acheron
JACOB GELLER VIDEO DROPPING ON MY BIRTHDAY?? THANK U FOR THE GIFT KING
Happy birthday, stranger!
@@ethanyoder9953 HEY THANKS :DDD 💗💗
happy birthday!!
I wish I could be so happy upon my birthday. I dread mine, it'll be coming too soon.
Outstanding as usual
This might be the best video I’ve ever seen in this platform
"I Don't Know, Timmy, Being God Is a Big Responsibility" by qntm has a somewhat similar premise to devs, but it has a bit more simulation theory tossed in. It's a pretty short story, so i'd recommend anyone give it a read.
He’s back, and he’s brought more existentialism with him!
Jacob, you have always created nothing other than pure art. But with this one, I feel like you have ascended from being one of the best analyzers there are to someone deserving of analysis itself.
thanks for the timestamps. don't wanna be spoiled on real-life physics
The editing, the way you phrase yourself, the subtle details like colours and shapes you use, it's all come together in such an indescribably beautiful way in this video that just... *feels* right I guess? I don't know how to word it, but it feels light, warm, it feels light blue. Well done, this video is absolutely amazing
I've loved your videos for years, but I rarely ever comment. I don't want to say this one is my favorite because I have a bad memory and have liked others for different reasons...but super loved this one!
I'm a street artist who's been working with sidewalk chalk since 2017...a constant lesson on impermanent art/ideas creating lasting change in abstract ways...I've gotten arrested for it multiple times now too...with the city pressure washing my chalk away...but leaving the human feces less than 30 feet away...There's some interesting symbolism in creating with an impermanent tool only to have a city spend time/money/effort/water during lvl 3 drought restrictions to wash it away.
Them investing so much in trying to silence impermanent art has created an even longer lasting effect. I've won a settlement, I've started speaking at City Council regularly, I've realized the importance of local news (watch on RUclips with premium and skip the filler)...Choosing to create with an impermanent medium and stand behind my freedom to express myself has made the impermanent art thousands of times more impactful than my more conventional art.
I got started with sidewalk chalk because of an idea I called the #ABCMandala . I discovered if you write the alphabet around a circle the 5 vowels are symmetrically placed and the three letters shaped like the number 3 are symmetrically placed E at the top then M & W horizontally opposite. Discovering this idea made Arrival my favorite movie.
Im glad to see such a huge channel cover 1000x Resist. It deserves all the praise it gets, and im endlessly surprised by the monumental achievement that the studio made on their first game.
This video has left me with the same emptiness that a good story would after there's no more to read, and a conflicting desire to know more. I genuinely believe these video essays are some of the most beautiful on the platform, reeling me in with promises of fun video game talks and leaving me with contemplating my existence in the universe in the most optimistic way I can. I walk away from these videos questioning video games and art and history and my place in the universe in a way that leaves me more fulfilled than before, other media that leaves me feeling this way destroys me and these videos build me back up again.
Normally I struggle to show my family my interests, I tend to veer towards the nerdier and weirder side. I want to sit down with my grandma and show her this video. I want to see her understand and discuss with me. Thank you for this gift.
Something that has help me a lot with procrastination is thinking of my future and past selves as different people. Everyday I curse my past self and try to be kind to my future self by doing something small.
I grew up in a catholic household and went to a catholic school, and I never understood the way they said ‘God gave you free will, and he knows your past, present and future’. How can god know the future without every action being already determined? I don’t believe in any god, and maybe that’s why I find it so difficult to not procrastinate. Either my actions matter or they don’t, in the grand scheme of things. But at least my actions will affect my self of tomorrow, and I guess that’s all that matters.
22:55 a flaw in the aliens logic there is if all moments exist in perpetuity, suffering in one moment is perpetual as well, thus should be avoided if possible. A well fed person next to a starved person doesn’t make the starvation ok since there is also a person who is fed, it means they have a responsibility to help the starving person any way they can.
I stop existing between Jacob Geller uploads
I guess you'll see this next time he uploads.
i hope your content never stops existing
What a beautiful video that fluctuated between deterministic fatalism to empowered resistance where each of your actions matters and has an echo throughout time, really superb. I adore 1000xresist and can highly recommend it to anyone who likes narrative games. Now i need to check out DEVS, it seems really interesting too.
devs is fucking awesome! and harrowing and horrible!
Like a quantum machine our future is uncertain until it has been observed. We truly exist with the purpose to observe the universe.
And maybe the universe exists with the purpose of being observed
I love Babbage’s discordant prognostication* of “The only way is to make the calculator BIGGER!”
* I enjoyed making that as flowery as I could 😂
a video essay discussing my personal thoughts on free will with amizing editing as well. when I noticed the mirrors moving independently first i got a bit scared actually. well done
that song from citizen sleeper could make me cry in any situation, but in this context it's just unfair. wonderful work
I love how all this talk about past and future includes a shot of Tahu in his past and future self in the epilogue of the video.
The jumpscare at 12:20 (if I can even call it that) was pretty amazing. It really builds the uncertain atmosphere that circles around the entirety of the video, not just from the basis of the theory behind it, but in its presentation and selected pieces.
30:00 This line delivery combined with the editing was quite stunning. Coming from a family so strongly affected by revolution and loss, I felt a certain unexpected level of emotion from it.
36:20
statistically, ever single breath shares a few atoms with every single breath distant enough in time for sufficient mixing and diffusion
unfortunately diffusion also means that iar can, very slowly, gradually, mix with other air straight through a wall, within realtively sane timescales for paper
My thoughts too. The machine breathes the same breath in and out, but each time the breath becomes composed of slightly less of itself, until it's just air, until the breath has already left the bag.
@@sydneygorelick7484 maybe in the same way we can pretend the air in the bag is still from Olivera, we pretend a person's actions are only composed from their memories and decisions. Who's to say?
I love the match-cuts.
Thanks for this awesome (in all senses of the word) video.
You greatly elaborated on what I obsessed over as a kid with super-determinism. The artwork with the last breath is pretty wild. I wonder how much of it was planned.
OK so im high rn, and so maybe that's kinda removed my ability to separate myself from taking every word with 100% seriousness, but like, I genuinely cried during the part about the aliens reliving the past, incredibly beautiful writing man
30:00 The delivery of these lines, combined with the editing was quite beautiful it nearly moved me to tears
Maybe not related, but the video description reminds me of a quote from Alan Wake 2: "Water is the memory of the world. Water finds it's way."
Great video by the way. Didn't expect such philosophical leaning, but I'm all for it. The writing was top tier and the direction, compelling.
I’m literally doing nothing but breathing and watching this video, but now it seems cosmically epic.
I was not prepared for the double gut punch of the Conclusion and Citizen Sleeper music
So many of the pieces analyzed here are dear to my heart, I just know this will quickly become one of my favourites from you, hell yeah Jacob!
One of the tripping points for artistic contemplation such as 'everything and everywhen is deterministic via air particle physics' is that every stumbling point has simple real-world answers that are ignored for the sake of staying in the hypothetical where the goal is to prove the hypothesis rather than test it.
Hopping over here from Nebula just to say that wow, this video is incredible. The way you weave philosophy and physics and literature and art is astounding--you make me forget that these are separate disciplines. As always, your work is thought-provoking and brilliant and makes me want to write.
god, i love the funky little sets you make for the sections where you're just talking to a camera
Your videos fill me with hope and yet existential dread.
Such a brilliant video! You explain things like a well read and philosophical yet compassionate friend whose company is an absolute joy. While I don't have the privilege of having such a friend in my life, I am glad I have you and your channel to look towards to. Thank you for this fantastic essay. "There is a now and you're in it, there is a then and you'll receive it", I shall forever remember this.
I rarely comment on videos but I have to say a huge thank you for 1) talking about Devs! It's also one of my favorite shows ever and I'm so glad just to see it mentioned, and 2) featuring a song from the Citizen Sleeper soundtrack at the end! It's an incredible game, and knowing that you've probably played through it a number of times as well is amazing. Awesome work!
the mirrors are a brilliant way to separate ideas, and seeing them come together at the end is so uniquely satisfying. Thank you as always, Jacob
The absolutly chilling and beautiful use of Outer Wilds' Sun Station track in the Real-life Physics section is a perfect choice. The exact same form of realisation in that section of your essay and the things you find in that part of the game.
(spoiler warning)
Finding out that the Nomai failed, and that the sun exploading and your life being wound back 22 minutes was the result of the simple clockwork of the universe, your sun simply set to die at this moment in time. The realisation that there was no way you could meaningfully escape this cycle and rejoin your old life. Being forced to confront the perhaps cruel but otherwise unbias hand of fate you've been delt and simply continue your search for knowlage and understanding, the only thing guiding you, like the Nomai, being The Eye.
Similarly, the dawning, harrowing realisation that the universe in real life is, truly, unequivically, Random. That down to the quantum state there is no way to determine any partical's Past or Present through equasion alone. That God truly does Play Dice.
It's the same feeling in both moments. Cold resignition and the knot in your stomach as you're forced to know the hand you've been delt.
It's beautiful how well they mirror eachother. A perfect nod to anyone who knows that game and that track well enough.
god, everything keeps happening all the time, doesn't it?
Attack on Titan would be an interesting addition to this conversation. Eren being burdened by the knowledge of all past and present of both his ancestors and future self changes his entire character in almost an instant. I think it’s interesting the fact that he receives all this information instantly, arguably the delivery of the information is more damning than the information itself.
I've been watching your videos for a while and decided now was the time to get the lifetime subscription on Nebula. I'm not the smartest dude, and a lot of stuff goes right over my head. But as someone that wants to be smarter, more aware, more conscious of the media that I take in - I appreciate your insight and your views tremendously. Thanks dude. You put a lot of the thoughts I have into words that I personally cannot find, and I appreciate you and your content.
My grandfather just recently passed away and this helped me gather my thoughts a bit and gave me a lot to think about. Beautifully written as always.
Jacob, don't get me wrong, man, I love you, but, since your video on Radiohead's digital museum, "Games that aren't games", I get the feeling that you don't give these subjects the treatment they deserve. You present exhibit 1, 2, 3, you agree with something from each one, and then you rush out a conclusion, an amazing conclusion indeed, but it's too brief.. You're stoping just at the moment of climax, giving us just a taste of an amazing point (thesis) that you're subscribing to.
I'm not saying that you should flesh out the "discourse" around a subject, because you're not writing academic papers on RUclips, but I would encourage you to give your ideas the space they deserve. It's like you're afraid of repeating yourself or making the videos too long, which I totally get, but the "meat" is too bite-sized in comparison to the build-up.
The thing is, your introductions are the most captivating I've seen on this platform. On solely your essays I check the remaining time length only after 10-15 minutes into it, because the immersion is just nuts. Your "hooks" are spot on, but the intensity slowly fades away towards the end...
I've seen this style only in the last (maybe couple of) year(s) or so; I fondly remember your videos on Ico and de Chirico, Museum Theft, Soma and Fear of Depths.
To be honest, I'll always tune in to your videos, no because of your style, writing or presentation overall, but because your cultural interests and the connections you draw between them are on helluva treat. So, from this perspective, you'll never get old and I hope you continue to talk about anything that you love, no matter how insignificant or mundane it may seem, because your love for the subject matter shines a blinding light that enraptures us all!
Best wishes :)
9:21 I don't think that's going to hold up in court
"Your Honor, the prosecution has clearly failed to define "guilt," let alone more tangential concepts like "murder" and "video evidence."
Jacob, you should look into Causal Invariance, a notion popularized by the guy who made Wolfram Alpha / Mathematica. It turns out that in many cases, you can't actually trace events back like this. The explanation is simple, for any given state of a system (like the universe) it is not necessarily the case, that it has a singular possible prior state. That is, multiple possible histories may lead to a given present. If true (and it appears to be), then tracing back you will run into situations where it is ambiguous as to what possible prior history, among a plurality, was the actual history that led to this moment.
Mr. Geller, I have Nebula but Nebula doesn't have a comment section so I just, I *NEED* to say this and the Golem video are the only ones that had me in real tears by the end. This... was a balm. Thank you.
the section about the uncertainty principle having the Nomai theme from Outer Wilds backing it... you sly dog......... dont make me cry
I was 98% certain that he would weave OW in this essay. Apparently this is how you can talk about OW without spoiling OW.
From all the years of videos watched and creators found, Jacob Geller is the most thought-provoking auteur I've experienced. How he articulates profound concepts with passion and curiosity is unique, intriguing and the hallmarks if an amazing teacher.