I was surprised by Buntaro's slight redemption, in the book and the 80s series man he was reallllllllly horrible but here he was nuanced, not redeemed but nuanced.
Your predictions have to be unpredictable. Because if your predictions are predictable, then I can predict them, then contradict them by my actions and thus making them failed predictions.
Dang. That was very well presented. The "algorithm" brought me here, thankfully. I have no idea how this does not have tens of thousands of views. Kudos.
The new Shogun is not good because it subverts samurai stereotypes. It is good because it is true to the Japanese culture and historical past. We live in an age where being subversive is far more important than being honest. It's not about contemporary politics and doesn't try to be. Some progressive and woke activists have tried to claim otherwise, but that's just being subversive and dishonest.
I agree that being subversive has certainly been weaponized politically and across media, but with regards to Shogun, I felt that the historical accuracy of the production and the subversion of Hollywood samurai stereotypes, happened to align rather well, and were symbiotic in their positive effect on the show. Subversion though, in and of itself, can be used rather cheaply to virtue signal, or appear contemporary or deconstructive, but I hope my video didn't infer that the show's only or MAIN value was solely in its subversive qualities
@@BrandoCastro215 The problem with that thesis being that Shogun was simply more historically authentic. Hollywood stereotypes were not so much subverted as ignored. This was more of a production in a Japanese style with Western influence being appropriately muted. Nothing whatsoever "subversive" happened, especially given that "subversion" itself is a sad Hollywood and modern Western Leftist trope inappropriate to the period in question.
Great job again 🤙🏽 I was fortunate to experience both shogun series as a kid in the 70s and now. I am proud of this depiction and proud I survive anti Asian hate i am a retired veteran at peace
There are many commentaries on RU-vid about Shogun. Some are appalling showing little understanding of what was portrayed while whining that the battle of Sekigahara was not shown, while others contain some meaningful insights, yours, however, is one of the best I have watched with some truely gifted commentary. Well done.
For the pure spectacle, I would never say no to a high budget rendering of Sekigahara 😂 but maybe those folks will get their wish in this s2 that's loading now 🤞 Jokes aside, I'm glad you enjoyed the video, and thank you for the extremely kind compliment 🙏
I think the issue of prescience is that even after Paul consumes the water of life and actually gets a full view of all possible futures, he is still human even if a very intelligent and perceptive one. Just because one can see all possible futures does not mean one has time, energy or incentive to see all those paths but might choose the one that fits their agenda. For Paul this is the vengeance for his father, for his mentors and friends, for house Atreides. Later in the series we learn Paul explicitly chose not to walk down the Golden Path, to me that already excludes full determinism. Frank Herbert explicitly warned about following charismatic leaders blindly, yet most readers take Paul and Leto II, the god emperor, for their word without question. My take is that Frank tried to make us see the processes, political, ecological.. whatever in their nature that are going on all around us, interacting with each other.. When it comes to these processes they often carry a heavy weight of their own, and when it came down to Paul it was a perfect storm of these processes creating the circumstances for him to climb up to power. Could Paul have stopped the Jihad is the question we see time and time again. The answer in the Dune universe just like reality is, "it's complicated". Paul could have stopped the Jihad from happening right there and then, with him as it's leader but the building blocks were in place. The decadence of imperium and the Sardaukar, Fremen hardened by the sands of Arrakis to be the best fighters in the universe and the Bene Gesserit Missionaria Protectiva planting the religious levers to pull, these along with many other processes and factors were already in place and someone would have risen to be their leader eventually. Paul was on a mission and so was Leto II and we take their words that all the billions needed to die for greater good.. Our history is full of people who say the same, people like Hitler, like Stalin, like Mao and Putin.. It is for the people taking them and their vision as the ultimate truth why millions follow them to death and destruction. Maybe this was the ultimate warning by Frank Herbert, that we shouldn't try to rationalize men like these. Paul had prescience but he was out for revenge and went down the path fitting that quest, Leto II seeing greater enemies could have just been the fears, preconceptions and eventually paranoia of someone who rules with absolute power way longer than they should..
Kingdom Of Kingdom was pilloried for not having a sympathetic view of the Crusades. It simply shows the Crusaders as the villains (with some characters as exceptions). The usual suspects didn't like it.
Interesting video, I had a lot of thoughts about The Sight and determinism that was echoed in this video, but I just can't make myself accept randomness, so the "invisible gene" always bugged me. And when I learned about quantum mechanics I quickly rebelled against randomness there too. If you haven't, check out the youtuber you mentioned, lookingglass, she made some videos about Pilot Wave Theory, which explains things like the double slit experiment within a deterministic framework.
Title is pretty clickbaity and misinformative. In the video you explain how Dune is inherently deterministic, but the title sounds like it is criticizing determinism, by "destroying" it
We have free will. I think so therefore I am. From nitzche to Karl junge to Mr. Rodgers and Einstein. All men try to find ways to satiate our base desires. Once you've fought, fked, and are the apex of trying to find meaningful things you will fall flat in philosophy. The men who pull back on the gnawing feeling of bordem and try to enjoy what's real, friends and family. I'm selfish and selfless as everyone is. Free will? It's real if you have the comprehending and breaking down drama in life skill. To read a room or a voice on a phone and read between the lines...like news channels weaponized advertising is all media is to sell ads. They will try to elictic an emotional impact so you can keep watching. Like an addict.
as odd as this sounds, i dropped my phone after watching a video to remove water from my speaker and then this video turned on with you immediately asking me if i picked this which was odd. Now im sitting here watching this video that i never intended on watching yet im being told i wanted to watch this, but im hooked. The path has began and i must fulfill this prophecy
Prescient beings in the Dune universe cannot “see” other prescient beings in their visions. That, by your own definition, means there definitely is free will before any changes happen.
@BrandoCastro215 It's not that Dune's universe is deterministic; it's that humans are stupid, limited, repetitive, dependent, interdependent, weak, timid things. And besides, quantum indeterminacy has nothing to do with macroscopic events. Even if somehow it enables "randomness" and doesn't run into the quantum-macroscopic scaling problem, it still doesn't mean your choices are "Free", it means there's some random choice function. "God Emperor Of Dune" Leto II's plan, the Golden Path, was two-fold. 1) the Atreides genes, spread far enough and with spice enabling it, confuses prescience. Fenring was close to being a Kwisatz Haderach, but was flawed; it's the reason Paul never saw whether he lived or died at Fenring's hands. With spice and Atreides genes in enough people, prescience is jammed far and hard enough that people don't see the future anymore. That safety-barrier of prescience is gone. 2) Leto II wasn't just a tyrant because he was turning into a worm, it was the part of the Path that Paul couldn't bring himself to do, it was why he instead chose to walk into the desert and accept dying when he came back. Leto II had to utterly and brutally repress humanity, keep it compressed down, until eventually it was prepared to rise up, rebel, take power, lose its timidity and prepare to be something more. And on the point of determinism being destroyed, we have to consider that prescience DOESN'T destroy determinism. The spice prescience - when Paul's eyes are burned out, he's blind and he uses his prescience to look one instant into the future and see as if he weren't blind, whose free will is he suppressing then? What decisions is he making that undo free will? Nothing. The prescience is not a matter of total knowledge and people choices being biological brain determinism - it is the ability to PERCEIVE EVENTS disconnected from his current place in time and space. Remember that when he tells Jessica she's pregnant, he has looked ahead to a point in time when he's reading Bene Gesserit files explaining that Jessica is the Baron's daughter. And we know the spice prescience works the same way, it's literally how the Guild Navigators navigate. They can perceive paths with destinations outside their light-cone, they know the path to a location that requires FTL to get there. That kind of time-travelling prescience has nothing to do with knowing how somebody thinks down to the neurological (or quantum, if that weren't such a ridiculous mis-step of biology). That's like saying if you had no idea somebody was spying on you with an x-ray telescope, them seeing you without your knowledge somehow affects your decision-making. It doesn't. All Paul did was see the future and nobody knew it. The thing that really restricted humanity, as had to be broken by Leto suppressing them for 4000 years isn't them being psychic-spied-on. It's the fact that humanity is EXTREMELY PREDICTABLE; and it so happens Paul could spot that in the future with his time-travelling psychic x-ray-telescope. The Guild restrained humanity. The Mentats were powerful but limited and rare. The Emperor really had very little influence. The spice was far too critical and the galaxy was way too dependent on it. The Houses all fought each other and limited each other. Even if there were an alliance, other houses would ally to fight those down. They all desperately depended on the Guild. And the Bene Gesserit were trying to control and infiltrate them only in as far as they tried to leverage everything and everyone to their benefit. As Kynes knew with ecological systems of a planet, as the Guild knew the dependence of them on the spice and everybody's dependence on the Guild, EVERYTHING is connected and restrained in way too many ways. Nobody controlled everything. Even the Emperor was just another bit player and couldn't control the Guild, the Guild pushed him around, but they could be pushed around because Paul would destroy the spice. But Paul couldn't even stop the Jihad, even though he wanted to. In the end, Paul realised he controlled nothing EITHER. NOBODY had significant control. The Fremen were oppressed by their planet desert and the Harkonnen. After long enough, they made their planet a paradise and beat back the Harkonnen and spread out to be one of the most powerful forces in existence. And that's key. To suppress, oppress and control EVERYTHING to make humanity want to rebel breaks them free of these patterns of dependence, THAT was the Golden Path; that's what Leto II did for 4000 years. Plus, reducing the Guild's power to control everything, breaking the structure of the Houses under Leto II, having to return to calculated Ixian computations for navigation, the spice no longer being made only on Arrakis but being dirt cheap made in Tleilaxu tanks, plus spreading Atreides and similar genes, breaking the ability of prescience to plan/read events in the future; bringing power back to individual ships to travel FTL... Determinacy, in the sense you describe it, especially tapping on "quantum indeterminacy", has nothing to do with it. To free the whole of humanity and push and drive them beyond an ancient, dead, useless, repeating pattern of human-driven history without "hydraulic dependence" is the Golden Path.
I love how people look at fictional books, the OPINIONS of philosophers who are just as likely to be sociopathic lunatics as wise men, or statements by politicians and religious leaders and say “look, the death of determinism” or insert your favorite absolute statement here. None of these things prove anything besides the malleability or confirmation bias of the listener. Granted, I am not saying the author of dune is wrong in some of his underlying ideas but what I am saying is that no fallible human can claim to be the authority on anything save his own self interests.
Quantum indeterminacy is simply a result of our inability to know the state of a particle due to causality speed limitations. The problem is those light speed limitations are partially the result of quantum properties like Planck's constant. The end result is this circular reasoning that next to no modern physicist seem to realize let alone understand. If we instead view the properties of super position as a wavefunction operating at any speed above light speed by even a fraction the result is all we could ever see is a wave that appears to be in a super position with the peak and trough in the same place at the same time with all in-between, despite it having an actual cycle. Standing waves are a classical physics example of a super position. Their current state is determined by all matter and energy around them. Their behaviors perfectly model those of the quantum world best we can tell however since the speed of sound is so low compared to light, we can observe what is actually taking place and that is deterministic processes that result in standing "bumps" of matter which move slower than the speed of sound in the material. If we view light in the terms of a sound wave in a medium, we can't observe due to our limitations what we realize is ALL of the goofiness of Quantum mechanics goes away with the stroke of a pen. It can be demonstrated, and has, however most don't realize our modern physicist are not exactly the brightest minds we have to offer but instead are the most determined and persistent meaning the stick with it and can solve the math of minds like Einstein, but are not seemingly capable of creating their own, better models. Those who have like Bohm are instead pushed out by the majority of average due to their inability to see the benefits such a system would have down the line.
Paul was not unable to avoid them, but he _refused_ to do it, as it would have required a big sacrifice. One that Leto took later in his place. (And another reason why Paul is actually an anti-hero.) Quote (Paul and Leto discussing the alternate choice that Paul refused): "I spit on your lesson!" Paul said. "You think I've not seen a thing similar to what you choose?" "You saw it," Leto agreed. [...] "You never told them, did you, father?" Leto asked. "I never told them." "But I told them," Leto said. "I told Muriz. Kralizec, the Typhoon Struggle." [...] "You think me coward for refusing that path," Paul said, his voice husky and trembling. "Oh, I understand you well, son. Augury and haruspication have always been their own torments. But I was never lost in the possible futures because this one is unspeakable!" In a deterministic universe, a prescient being would only see a single path. The fact that Paul sees an infinite number of possible futures means that it was non-deterministic from the beginning. Leto's plan has nothing to do with that. The problem Leto wants to solve is that a prescient being will also start narrowing down the options by looking at them. A little like when in quantum mechanics, a measurement collapses the wave function. Other prescient being could prevent that, but that had other inherent issues, like seizing power. What he worked on was to breed a genetic trait that had the same disruptive effect on the prescient visions without themselves being prescient. Then make sure to spread those genes far and wide, 'covering the galaxy', and thus making it impossible for another being like himself to ever emerge. He did not make any change to determinism. The accuracy of Leto's vision was not due to determinism, but choices and himself "snapping" those paths in place. Hence, the torture of living for almost four millennia, and enduring his "holy boredom". Quantum randomness is nor related to determinism. Something can be unpredictable, and have statistical properties, yet be deterministic. Side notes: - Originally, women could only see the memories passed along from other Reverend Mothers. This later changed to female genetic line memories. It's one of the inconsistencies in the story, where Herbert changed a concept between books. - The Butler/pregnancy bit is not part of Frank Herbert's books. - Mentats don't have prescience at all. - The approaching machines are also not part of the Frank Herbert canon.
Frank Herbert refused to use magic in the Dune Novels... until the end of God Emperor. Until he realized that prescience implies determinism and determinism means none of these characters could've done anything but what they did, at which point... why am I writing this again? What's the point of being critical of charismatic leaders when they have no real choice in the matter? So, Herbert turns to the rise of "no ships" and somehow breeding "randomness" into humanity. I don't know, sounds like a pretty magical dues ex machina to me!
