Everything We Don't Know Too

if a tree falls down in the forest and no one is there to hear it does it make a sound how do you know taking it one step further if you hear the tree hit the ground but don't see it why do you trust your sense of hearing this might seem like a ridiculous question but the truth is that despite our total Reliance on them our senses deceive us all the time you hear this audio and some of us hear yanny while the others hear Laura you think you hear your friend laughing in the other room only to come out and see it's just the TV a stick that looks bent in the water turns out to be straight when you pull it out you spend what seems like hours walking through a dark and creepy Forest but then wake up and realize you were just dreaming the world is a strange place and for all the knowledge we've managed to gather as a species there's still a lot more that we don't here is everything we don't know too [Music] I think therefore I am you've likely heard this phrase before coined by 17th century French philosopher Renee Descartes the simple declaration serves as the foundation of all modern philosophy it's a statement of knowledge and assertion that if I know nothing else I at least know I exist while this may not seem like a revolutionary idea at first glance it's actually quite significant philosophers since the time of Socrates have wondered whether or not it's possible to know anything because it always seems that the more questions we ask the fewer answers we're left with Descartes himself was renowned for his astonishing ability to doubt everything no matter how trivial no matter how seemingly obvious he treated all of his ideas with a radical level of skepticism believing that doing so would eventually lead him to the truth this skepticism led him to ask a question that science still hasn't been able to answer how do I know I'm not dreaming right now or even more frightening how do I know that my mind isn't being deliberately misled by some Evil Genius think of it like the movie The Matrix it's possible that at this very moment you're hooked up to a giant machine that is feeding you all the sensory data you're currently experiencing you aren't really watching this video it's just the machine making you think that you are while unlikely technically it is possible and there's no way we can disprove it this is why some people argue that we live in a simulation do we or don't we we just don't know Descartes argues that our inability to rule out this scenario forces us to doubt everything we think we know a state of radical skepticism in which we can't trust anything we experience or think fortunately Descartes offers us a way out even if we are forced to doubt everything the one thing we cannot doubt is the fact that we're doubting if we can doubt then we can think and if we can think then there must be a mind doing the thinking so while we may never know whether or not the world around us is an illusion or if we even have physical bodies we can rest easy in the knowledge that we have Minds that we exist right well not so much later philosophers from Kierkegaard to Heidegger criticized a card's claim arguing that the existence of thoughts does not necessarily imply the existence of a thinker Friedrich nietzsch even went so far as to say that the idea that there is something called thinking is itself an assumption all we can really say then is that something is happening what that thing is we just don't know if you're rolling your eyes at this point it's understandable to most people this all sounds like a bunch of over intellectualized nonsense with no bearing on the actual world even if we do live in The Matrix I still know that two plus two equals four that the sun is going to rise tomorrow and that the Earth beneath my feet is solid well hold up on the last Point part of the reason why it's so difficult to say whether we truly know anything is because we live in a dynamic Universe where nothing is ever stable everything in existence is always moving and always changing including the Earth itself even as you watch this video The Very face of the planet is evolving plate tectonic theory is a relative newcomer to science first pioneered in the 1960s our understanding of how the Earth shifts and moves is still fairly Limited we've discovered certain things like the fact that the Earth's Rocky crust is in the form of plates that sits on top of mantle of liquid magma as this magma circulates and churns it pushes the plates around knocking them into each other and creating earthquakes volcanoes and mountains what this means is that contrary to what we think the ground beneath our feet isn't solid it's constantly changing and if it is how can we say we know it tomorrow an earthquake could reshape our continents and so the best we can ever have is a rough approximation of what we think it used to be not what it actually is maybe I'm just trying to strong arm a metaphor here but it seems like whenever we investigate what we think we know our ideas start to crumble it's an interesting Quirk of reality really the simpler a question is the harder it can be to answer it's for this reason that many people fear death because we simply don't know anything about what happens after it yet I cannot help but think that the fear that we don't know anything about death presupposes that we know what life is because in reality we don't know either while it's easy for us to tell the difference between living in non-living materials say like an apple versus a rock but when we try to pin down a precise definition of life things get complicated all life forms whether a plant or animal bacteria or fungus are composed of cells and are able to meet certain basic fundamental conditions these include responsiveness metabolism energy transformation growth and reproduction for instance when you smell food you respond to by feeling hungry eating a sandwich then starts your metabolic process which allows you to convert calories into energy this energy is then used to do things like grow muscles or attract a mate but this is what life does not what life is the main problem is that the primary feature of life is that it's always changing in definitions by their nature are meant to be static perhaps if we knew where life came from we'd have a better sense of what exactly it is unfortunately we don't know this either of course one day science will figure this stuff out the secrets to life the Earth and everything else will be unlocked all it takes is more advanced technology more sophisticated methods and we'll be able to know the answers for certain won't we here's the thing though science isn't ever 100 certain when researchers at the European Organization for nuclear research otherwise known as CERN announced the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. they did so by stating that their observations had passed the crucial threshold of five Sigma certainty to most people this term is nothing more than academic jargon but Sigma in this context is the statistical unit of measurement used to determine how probable it is that a given result is correct the higher the value the more likely a particular finding is true with five Sigma being the gold standard representing a one in a million chance that a given observation is inaccurate though there's still a chance you may think I'm splitting hairs here after all one in a million is as good as true isn't it well no a 2011 experiment conducted by CERN reportedly found that a series of nearly massless ghost particles called neutrinos had traveled faster than speed of light this was of course impossible as the finding violated Einstein's principle of Relativity yet the experiment passed with a Six Sigma confidence meaning that it had a staggering one and a half billion chance of being false and yet it was for later experiments all failed to replicate the original results and the first experiment was written up as a fluke science is very good at explaining what is happening and how it happens but not really why it's happening pass any scientific Revelation through a series of why questions and you'll always get to a point where we just don't know take gravity for instance when an apple falls from a tree and hits Isaac Newton on his head we know it's gravity we can even measure it as 9.8 meters per second but when it comes to explaining why this happens almost 350 years later we're still clueless every other physical force in the universe electromagnetism strong and weak nuclear force has a corresponding subatomic particle yet we still don't know what the particle responsible for gravity is physicists have theorized the existence of something called a graviton that similar to the exposon requires massive amounts of energy to detect in fact it's predicted that it would take a mass spectrometer to the size of Jupiter operating at 100 capacity to identify one but why is the graviton so hard to find why is it that physics behaves like this and is it possible that it could work differently the notion of alternate physics is most commonly associated with the Multiverse Theory the idea that there isn't a single universe but an infinite array of different universes we don't know if this is true of course but if it is then it's possible that among these countless variations there exists other types of physics maybe in another Universe gravity isn't so difficult to measure maybe instead electromagnetism is the Rogue Force confounding their scientists but it isn't just other universes that may operate under alternative sets of physical laws even our own universe may be subject to alternate forms of physics that we've yet to discover in 2022 researchers at Columbia University programmed in AI to study video footage of different physical phenomena and then search for the minimal set of variables that described its observations footage included things like a pendulum a lava lamp and a fireplace when the AI returned its results the researchers found that they could identify some of the variables that the artificial intelligence had defined but not others the belief is that the AI was applying novel sets of physical laws currently unknown to humans unfortunately since the program can't communicate what it's thinking the exact variables remain a mystery however it does raise an interesting question if we were to meet an alien species is it possible that they might use alternate laws of physics Ted Chang's Novella story of your life the inspiration for the 2016 film arrival explores this idea fair warning there's spoilers ahead in the story humans make first contact with aliens after dozens of spaceships suddenly appear in orbit but rather than wanting to take over the planet it seems that the Extraterrestrial visitors just want to talk to get the conversation going both humans and the aliens work together to slowly decipher one another's language as well as the respective approaches to physics it quickly becomes apparent that the scientific and mathematical Concepts that are Advanced to us like calculus are Elementary to them surprisingly though the reverse is also true the aliens to play Strange seemingly convoluted methods to describe basic principles like velocity while both methods provide accurate results each is highly specific to the species that developed them eventually it's explained that the aliens don't perceive our universe as causal instead they witness all events as happening simultaneously this accounts for their weird set of physics Chang's story of your life raises interesting questions surrounding Concepts like time perception Free Will and subjectivity forcing us readers to wonder if there's such a thing as objective reality how do we know that the reality we experience is independent of our own consciousness this problem has plagued philosophers since antiquity Plato in particular is known for having proposed the idea of the realm of forms a non-physical immaterial plane from which the physical world manifests science actually functions on a similar principle assuming that there is an objective reality that exists beyond our senses which can be observed and measured despite our best efforts though no one has ever confirmed the existence of an objective reality in fact given that everything we know has to come first to us through our senses and therefore our own subjective perception it's impossible to prove an objective reality we'll just never know in his book The spell of the sensuous philosopher David Abram argues that the very idea of an objective reality isn't representative of the universe we live in in actuality Abram says we exist in the realm of inner subjectivity a term he borrows from the German philosopher Edmund Hospital this form of reality rather than being a separate and isolated phenomenon is created by the collective experience of all its participants the universe doesn't exist as an object of our subjective perceptions instead it rises out of our very interaction with it if this idea sounds a little out there consider quantum mechanics where our mere observations literally affect the state of matter just by measuring a photon of light we're able to change it from a wave to a particle so maybe there's no such thing as subjective reality maybe all that exists is our Collective inner subjective experience there's simply no way of knowing plunging into the depths of uncertainty is never Pleasant that's why humans came up with reason and Science in the first place we want to feel as though we know things it gives us a sense of control when an otherwise chaotic unpredictable and sometimes dangerous universe for the majority of my life I was agnostic about most things if there wasn't what I deemed to be rational scientific proof to support an idea I just didn't believe it but the more I learned the more I realize how limited my own experience is and just how much we as a species don't know ordinary matter accounts for just five percent of the entire universe the rest of it 95 of everything that exists is a complete and total mystery we just don't know it seems naive if not outright arrogant to close myself off to new ideas just because they don't fit within my current understanding of how things work tomorrow the Earth could shift Life as we know it could completely change and everything that science has taught us could turn out to just be a fluke but rather than meeting this dilemma with fear or outright rejection of scientific principles we should take it as an opportunity to learn embracing uncertainty as a means of Transforming Our perception to me this seems like the only rational path forward because as it turns out everything we don't know is well everything for all the progress the human race has made on this planet all the philosophy science and reason there are just some things we might never know to the best of our knowledge we're the only species on this 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Channel: Aperture

Views: 259,772

Keywords: aperture, aperture explained, what is aperture, shower thoughts, psychology, aperture and depth of field, what is aperture?, documentary, depth of field, psychology facts, brainy dose, psychology facts about human behavior, practical psychology, personality psychology, psychology says, psychoanalysis, brainydose, structuralism, functionalism, neuroscience, self improvement, philosophy, deep brain stimulation, psychological facts, phillosopher, theoretical, phillosopher thoughts, unordinary

Id: HEs6h9QTs4k

Length: 16min 24sec (984 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 16 2023