Hey, Vsauce. Michael here.
Where are your fingers? Seriously. It's a pretty easy question.
You should be able to answer it. But how do you know?
How does anyone know anything? You might say, well,
I know where my fingers are. I'm looking right at them. Or, I can touch them, I can feel them, they're
right here and that's good. Your senses are a great way to learn things. In fact, we have way more than the usual
five senses we talk about. For instance, your kinesthetic sense, proprioception. This is what the police evaluate
during a field sobriety test. It allows you to tell where your fingers
and arms and head and legs in your body is all in relation to each other without having to look or touch other things. We have way more than five senses, we
have at least twice as many and then some. But they're not perfect.
There are optical illusions, audio illusions, temperature sensation illusions, even tactile illusions.
Can you turn your tongue upside down? If so, perfect. Try this.
Run your finger along the outer edge of the tip of your upside down tongue. Your tongue will be able to feel
your finger, but in the wrong place. Our brains never needed to develop an understanding of upside down tongue touch.
So, when you touch the right side of your tongue when it's flipped over to your left side
you perceive a sensation on the opposite side, where your tongue
usually is but isn't when it's upside down.
It's pretty freaky and cool and a little humbling,
because it shows the limits of the accuracy of our senses, the only tools we
have to get what's out there in here.
The philosophy of knowledge, the study of knowing, is called Epistomology. Plato famously said that the things we know are things that are true, that we believe and that we have justification for believing.
those justifications might be irrational or they might be rational, they might be based on proof, but don't get too confident because
proven is not a synonym for true. Luckily, there are things that we can know without needing proof, without needing to
even leave the house, things that we can know as true by reason alone.
These are things that we know a priori.
An example would be the statement "all bachelors are unmarried."
I don't have to go survey every bachelor on earth to know that that is true. All bachelors are unmarried
because that's how we define the word bachelor.
Of course, you have to know what the words bachelor and unmarried mean in the first place. Oh, you do? Okay. Perfect. That's great.
But how do you know?
This time I mean functionally, how do you know?
Where is knowledge biologically in the brain?
What are memories made out of? We are a long way from being able to
answer that question completely but research has shown that memories
don't exist in the brain in single locations.
Instead, what we call a memory is likely made up of many different complex relationships all over
the brain between lots of brain cells, neurones. A major cellular mechanism
thought to underlie the formation of memories is long-term potentiation or LTP.
When one neurone stimulates another neurone repeatedly that signal can be enhanced overtime LTP, wiring them more strongly together and that connection can last a long time, even an entire lifetime.
A collection of different brain cells, neurones that fire together in a particular order over and over again frequently and repeatedly can achieve long-term potentiation, becoming more sensitive to each other and more
ready to fire in the exact same way later on in the future.
They're a physical thing in your brain, firing together more easily because you strengthen that pattern of firing. You memorized.
This branching forest of firing friends looks messy, but look closer.
It could be the memory of your first kiss.
A living souvenir of the event.
If I were to go into your brain and cut out those cells, could I make you forget your first kiss or could I make you forget where your fingers are? Only if I cut out a lot of your brain. Because memories aren't just stored in one
relationship, they're stored all over the brain. The events leading up
to your first kiss are stored in one network, the way it felt to the way it smelled in
different networks, all added up together making what you call the memory of your first kiss. How many memories can you fit inside your head?
What is the storage capacity of the human brain?
The best we can do is a rough estimate, but given the number of
neurons in the brain involved with memory and the number of different connections
a single neurone can make Paul Reber at Northwestern University estimated that we can store the digital equivalent of about 2.5 petabytes of information.
That's the equivalent of recording a TV channel continuously for 300 years. That's a lot of information.
That is a lot of information about skills you can do and facts and people you've met, things in the real world. The world is real, right? How do you know?
It's a difficult question, but it's not rocket science.
Instead, it is asking whether or not rocket scientists
even exist in the first place. The theory that the Sun moved around the earth worked great. It predicted that the Sun
would rise every morning and it did. It wasn't until later that we
realized what we thought was true might not be.
So, do we or will we ever know true reality or are we stuck in a world where the
best we can do is be approximately true? Discovering more and
more useful theories every day but never actually reaching true objective actual reality. Can science or reason ever prove convincingly that your friends and YouTube videos and your fingers actually exist beyond your mind?
That you don't just live in the matrix? No.
Your mind is all that you have, even if you use instruments, like a telescope or particle accelerators.
The final stop for all of that information is ultimately you.
You are alone in your own brain, which technically makes it impossible to prove that anything else exists.
It's called the egocentric predicament.
Everything you know about the world out there depends on and is created inside your brain. This mattered so much to Charles Sanders Peirce
that he drew a line between reality, the way the universe truly is, and what he called the phaneron,
the world as filtered through our senses and bodies, the only information we can get. If you want to speak with certainty you live in, that is you react to and remember and experience your phaneron, not reality. The belief that only you exist and everything else, food, the universe,
your friends are all figments of your mind is called
solipsism. There is no way to convince a solipsist that the outside world is real.
And there is no way to convince someone who doubts that the universe wasn't created
just three seconds ago along with all of our memories.
It's a frightening realization that we don't always know how to deal with.
There's even The Matrix defense.
In 2002 Tonda Lynn Ansley shot and killed her landlady. She argued that she believed she was in
the matrix, that her crimes weren't real.
By using the matrix defense she was found not guilty by reason of insanity, because the
opposite view is just way more healthy and common. It's called realism.
Realism is the belief that the outside world exists independently of your own phaneron.
Rocks and stars and Thora Birch would continue to exist even if you weren't around to experience them.
But you cannot know realism is true.
All you can do is believe.
Martin Gardner, a great source for math magic tricks, explained that he is not a solipsist
because realism is just way more convenient and healthy and it works. As to whether it bothered him that he
could never know realism was true, he wrote "if you ask me to tell you
anything about the nature of what lies beyond the phaneron, my answer is how should I know?
I'm not dismayed by ultimate mysteries, I can no more grasp what is behind such questions as my cat can understand what is
behind the clatter i make while I type this paragraph."
Humble stuff. What strikes me is the cat.
Cats do not understand keyboards, but they know the keyboards are a fun place to be. It's a great way to get the attention
of a human, they're warm and exciting, surrounded by noises and
flashing lights plus cats love to get their scent
on whatever they can, a mark of their existence. We aren't that much different,
except instead of keyboards we have the mysteries of the universe. We will never be able to understand all
of them. We won't be able to ever answer every single question, but walking around in those questions, exploring them, is fun.
It feels good. And as always, thanks for watching. Do you want more unanswered questions?
Well, you're in luck. Today, nine other amazing channels on
YouTube have made videos about questions we still haven't fully answered. Alltime10s has organized them and to watch them all click the annotation at the end of this video or the link at the top of the description.
Enjoy.
deleted What is this?
I have never been more disappointed that I can't turn my tongue upside down.
Edit: Speel Gud now
woah watching this video did not help my derealisation,
These are questions that I have asked myself since I was too young to even understand what I was asking. Great video!
I've always had fun with these questions. I gave a presentation in psychology on a variation of this.
The basic premiss was about how we perceive things. I focused on colors. I would hold up a blue piece of paper, ask the class what color it was. Then I asked them to describe the color to me. As you can guess, the descriptions were mostly about other things that are blue. Then I proposed that it was possible that we all see a different version of blue. We have all been taught that the sky is blue, police men wear blue, and that Daniel Craig has gorgeous blue eyes. So blue has been defined for all of us. But we can't know that my blue looks the same as your blue. The same things still have that color, so we all call it blue, but there's no way to prove it.
I wonder how different the world would be if I had the brain of one of my friends or families. In a sense their brain looks at every object different than mine does. Weird
I think the most interesting part about this where he says that ultimately it ends up in your brain, filtered by you.....that means if you're sad or upset or angry or whatever the case might be, it's because you are choosing to be so. You have ultimate authority on your outward look in life.
What if our mysteries of the Universe are just like the cat and the keyboard? There could be even bigger mysteries that are so mysterious that we can't even understand the base or concept of said mystery.
I seriously love this guys videos. Just felt like I had to tell somebody lol