A Glorious Accident (7 of 7) Coming together: We wonder, ever wonder why we found us here 

This how TV should be, an instrument of enlightement instead of manipulation.

Toulmin: 🧐 Sheldrake: 🤔 Dennett: 🤨 Sacks: 😄 Dyson: 🙂 Gould: 👨🏻

This is the best discussion of philosophy of Science in English, so far.

What an absolute pleasure to listen to this, and the individual interviews. I initially decided to listen because of Dyson, Gould and Dennet but I discovered Oliver Sacks and I’m so glad I did. Not only a brilliant scientist but seems like a genuinely lovely person and I love his way of speaking

I tip my hat to whoever put this group together in one place on the planet at one time AND got this on film. You are truly all gifts. Thank you for your time and effort. This might have been the most important talk of the 20th Century. I truly believe this. The fact that this has now been unleashed to the public will have a butterfly type effect that one can not even conceive. Sacks/Gould opened up so much. This was so enlightening. So glad I found it. Too bad I can not find out how to support more of this type of programming. It was not available on the link. When I saw this was a Dutch TV production I shook my head and said to myself 'only an open minded Dutch group of people would put this together in 1993'.

Rest In Peace Daniel Dennett (March 28, 1942 - April 19, 2024)

In terms of profundity of thought I personally felt that Oliver and Stephen Gould were in a league of their own in this discussion

An intellectual Knights of the Round Table discussion! Wonderful!

2:20:39 Genuine moment of happiness there from Mr. Sacks. I can't help but smile.

@1:00 Sharing memories from childhood @5:55 What is passion to philosophers @7:15 Moderator suggests starting from pre-universe @13:00 Laws vs habits @16:50 One guy really not liking another guy's idea @23:48 Same guy does not like the course of the discussion @28:00 Really they've just been debating the nature of the question; they disagree on the question's parameter. LOL. Only philosophers. @29:00 One guy's prediction to "how radically revolutionary is reality?" @29:50 talking about common evolutionary theory @30:18 One guy dissing the intellect of the general educated public, but also explaining why Darwinism is misapprehended @31:48 Darwin's theory simplified @33:18 Same guy challenging another guy @35:30 Western folk embody Pythagorean notions @36:25 Consciousness @44:35 Perfect example of how a scientist can harmoniously exist among religious ideas (such as God infusing souls into the evolutionary sequence) @47:04 New question: Do humans exist "just because," i.e., without the hand of cosmos or the divine? @54:08 One guy answers what a human being IS @54:30 They start talking about the role of nature in studying humans and one guy brings up Darwin's commentary on how god is not benevolent (brings up how animals are cruel to each other) and so nature is not adequate for measuring morality. @57:00 One guy says we CAN learn from nature, but then doesn't really explain "how" @58:45 Is nature non-moral? (question is re-asked) @1:00:45 why it's dangerous to view consciousness as either "on" or "off" @1:01:25 The division between the plant and the animal world (this guy really likes to take in the beauty of whatever landscape he finds himself in) @1:02:44 Aesthetics @1:05:20 One day we might know what it's like to be a bat @1:05:55 One guy tries to expand the conversation from consciousness of animals to consciousness of inanimate objects, like the sun @1:08:55 One guy explains why it's silly to think of the sun as having consciousness @1:11:20 discusses how A.I. has given new perspectives on animal motions @1:15:40 Consciousness in robots @1:19:15 better to figure out emotions before figuring out consciousness @1:20:39 sifting through the terms of "mechanism" and "mechanical" @1:25:00 One guy does not answer the moderator's question and instead answers another guy's comment about the term "machine" being anthropocentric. @1:25:50 same guy believes organisms are machines, or at least is open to that thought @1:27:05 one guys explains why the human brain is not similar to a machine @1:29:19 why people might be uncomfortable discussing robots with emotions @1:29:50 What would it take to create a robot who cares about its survival @1:30:20 One guy discusses his thought-experiment of a homeostatic emotional word processer (This idea reminds me of one of my old Tamagotchis) @1:34:55 One guy changes the subject from robots and machines to dogs, which he had been thinking about during the robot talk. The discussion went off track after the "sun having consciousness" comment. @1:35:28 Do dogs have feelings? @1:36:18 An example of how philosophers have differing definitions of words @1:36:47 What is it like to be a herring? (They had been served herring, so naturally one philosopher considered the herring's emotions) @1:37:30 How can one have a relationship with a Giant African Snail. Also, homology and consciousness @1:38:55 Cognitive rules among birds @1:41:28 Moderator asks about the little men in our heads reduced to ants reduced to a machine @1:43:39 The importance of words! A linguist will like this part @1:45:00 "wonder tissue" @1:50:00 anecdote about "consciousness" @1:51:00 Moderator asks a guy about his comment on immortality and belief that we exist in our brains, rather than having a soul. (interesting part) @1:55:46 Guy who has barely contributed brings back "wonder tissue" and brings in quantum mechanics @1:58:40 One guy reshaping what should be discussed by bringing in "criticality" and his "awakenings patient" @2:02:30 The new "artificial life" movement (bridging engineering and A.I.) @2:04:43 the need for variation and multiple functionalities of organisms @2:06:40 "neuro-robustus" @2:07:20 This guy never answers the moderator's question @2:07:54 Grammar joke! @2:08:05 Persons still maintain a sense "self" even in the face of mental diseases such as Alzheimer's @2:09:20 What is "fun"? also, pandas are the most boring animals in the world. @2:12:57 Otters have "fun" @2:13:59 Moderator calls out some members of the table for NOT sharing (the guy who I had previously mentioned wasn't contributing to the conversation) @2:14:35 Conversation goes back to consciousness, machine metaphors, and what was left out @2:15:58 The homing of pigeons to show how math and other philosophical theories do not explain peculiar human and animal behavior @2:25:15 moderator moves on from the fascinating pigeon monologue and asks "how has consciousness altered the world" (brings up human atrocities such as the holocaust) @2:27:43 one guy says human beings are rather peaceful @2:29:29 It's good that we even 'notice' violence @2:32:00 Beastly people @2:33:02 "The Origin of Totalitarianism" by Hannah Arendt being the most frightening book to one guy @2:34:15 Yes! Parents are SO important! @2:34:34 Moderator addresses one guy's belief that the present order is DOOMED PS I had taken some screenshots of a very lengthy and detailed comment that had this table of contents. I don't remember the name of that person who had written this highly valuable information as a comment on the original video which was removed. I don't claim to be the author of this comment. However, I converted those screenshots into the text that I have reproduced above. So credit is due to that person. Thanks to him or her.

How on earth can such an iconic discussion with such brilliant minds have such low views?

Freeman Dyson sums it all up.... ' were not even close to understanding whats going on ' and ' we can't be sure of anything '.

any more discussion like this one?very interesting....and entertaining...

Awesome. These guys went deep. Courageous. Thanks for sharing.

Rest in peace: Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) Stephen Toulmin (1922-2009) Oliver Sacks (1933-2015) Freeman Dyson (1923-2020) Daniel Dennett (1942-2024) Only Rupert Sheldrake is still kicking out of this wonderful group of minds

The OG podcast.

What Oliver Sacks is talking about at 48:30 is what Robert Sapolsky would later go on to talk about in his 'Emergent Complexity' lecture - Oliver was scratching at something that would have offered answers about a good chunk of their earlier questions about contingencies and they all ignored him lol

This is the definition of « The Boys ». Listen, chill and enjoy a ride that you only get to discover once.

Just finishing with this final part of the whole series, and what a fantastic idea it was to interview each individually and then in the round. Why does content like this only have (at lwast in the case of this final part) a mere 203 likes? Mindboggling!

I love Rupert Sheldrake. He makes them all so nervous, but he's the only one moving the conversation into interesting spaces, while they all would have been there content to scoff at Kayzer for asking them questions.

Stephen Jay Gould is always so captivating . Such a well spoken intellectual .

oliver sacks is delightful

Philosophers are just something else. They’re consistent a step ahead of the scientists. Very underrated field.

[2:51:21] Dennet says that we can hopefully "capture it all without any residue". This reminds me of the difference between lossless compression vs. jpg or mp3 and mp4.

A most wonderful debate, props Holland for hosting.

By far the best outro music. Bizarre yet captivating choice.

When my teacher asks what we're doing in the back of the classroom...

2:15:40 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetoreception _Further experiments with magnets attached to the backs of homing pigeons demonstrated that disruption of the bird's ability to sense the Earth's magnetic field leads to a loss of proper orientation behavior under overcast conditions._ Sheldrake manages to cover my entire list of wu-positive escape hatches. This is is inference from ignorance (alternative: inference from stuck). But "stuck" is just a fat tail, and I don't think we really are stuck on most issues. In other cases, the problems are very, very hard for reasons you can apprehend well enough in the first hour. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backpropagation _In 1993, Wan was the first to win an international pattern recognition contest through backpropagation._ Right while this talk was taking place. But this would mostly languish for another twenty years, as other parts of the puzzle came together (mostly a vastly larger scale of data and data processing). And then one day, Go has fallen, fifteen years earlier than most experts predicted. Progress is a funny business, and even hindsight takes a long time to converge on 20-20.

From Gayling’s “History of Philosophy”: “Something that anyone reading these pages might cherish in Xenophanes is his account of a dinner of philosophers, in which he writes, ‘The floor is clean, so are our hands, and so are the cups . . . a mixing bowl stands by, and another bowl of gentle flower-scented whine . . . there is cold sweet pure water, golden loaves of bread, and a magnificent table laden with cheese and rich honey . . .’ The ‘cheerful men’ (always only men, alas) pour a libation pledging alway to ‘do acts of justice’; the drinking is continent, just enough to allow everyone to get home afterwards unaided; and the talk is not of myths and wars, but of ‘excellence’ (arete).”

This is absolutely beautiful to hear . Im starting to think I need new friends

24:30 intellectual tennis without a net 🤣👌

Terrific upload! I wish there were more long discussions like this. I tend to agree with Gould on these issues, but there's a lot of interesting discussion, especially from Sacks and Toulmin. Dennett...sigh. A clenched mind -- mostly agree, but a clenched mind.

@1.06.10 *_Sheldrake, ''I'm finding this discussion rather provincial. What about the consciousness of the sun for example?_* Internal cringing, groaning and facepalming for all the other participants, who then firmly tell him to come back when he's got the tiniest hint of a hypothesis.

My IQ increased by at least 40 points in the first 10 mins....

The point of other animals having "fun", birds seem to have fun by my observations, and recently, i watched a video about bumblebees having play time with little balls that the researchers add in the path to their nest. I personally think that all mammals share the consciousness of the spectrum of consciousness with all living things, we are all mearley avatars of consciousness. If consciousness was electricity, it would fit an interesting analogy that the same electricity can power many unique devices all at the same time, though, we have not yet, to my knowledge, found a way to measure "consciousness", perhaps ne day we will, or maybe, it isn't possible at all, except only, by a living being - if they are self-aware!

A very sharp barb to ask if Sheldrake observes constants. But do we observe them?

1:28:15 I love how Freeman Dyson is getting a kick out of this discussion.

Thanks for this.

Especially in the beginning, when Rupert tries to lead the pack, I thought this was mostly unnecessarily heady and forced. It didn't seem sincere, in the way that everyone seemed to act mostly on trying to defend their intellectual authority rather than focusing on having a human, passionate discussion. An ego is a funny thing, isn't it? It can really separate us from one another. Of course the tension went away after a while and I love this video in general.

Ive watched this video 6 times now

Don't delete the other version though guys!!! (They have cool comments)

The pretense of knowledge!

Although certain interlocutors were clearly reductive, mechanistic, closed-minded blockheads, this was nonetheless a fascinating dialogue thanks to the intellectual fortitude displayed by Rupert Sheldrake.

4:32 That moment when someone looks just a _tiny_ bit like Robin Williams _(Awakenings_ awakens).

Much better ! More enjoyable then the scientific and philosophical dance battles of the modern era ! So nice not to here boo's and cheers from spectators.

1:20:00 Sachs on the octopus as an "exploratory computer" is brilliant. And it really holds up well with the modern theory of emotion.

Hahahaha - Wonderful. Rupert Sheldrake meets Freeman Dyson meets Stephen J Gould and more. Lovely just lovely.

Dank U , really enjoyed watching this series.

Girls lunch table: OMG John looked so hot today Boys lunch table:

While I love this concept, I fear the group was just too large for it to be a real conversation, especially with topics so complex. I would say about four people would be ideal, maybe five.

19:27 It's probably both: 1.) Us discovering it 2.) Us constructing it to our reality.

I'm here after seeing the post on my facebook

Podcast before podcasts :)

40:07 Sheldrake finally making some sense, but still with heavy Freudian drapes.

This was my friends and I back in high school drinking coffee at a diner at 1 am

It was Alfred Wallace who surpassed Lamarck, on paper… he wrote it in Indonesia, and sent it to Darwin. Darwin never evaded Lamarck… Wallace’s essay was bolted to Darwin’s work and published without his permission… Wallace’s was first to construct the crane of thought in writing, see his ‘the ternate paper’…

EXCELLENT

Sheldrake: _But what if..._ SJG: _No._

Almost 30 years ago, wow, so Dan Den has always looked like Darwin... I assume he came out of the womb bald with a luscious beard.

This is the philosophers version of a Bruce Lee taking on a dozen opponents scene

I go back and forth on who im going to (hypothetically) marry at the table. Right now its Toulman ❤️

i wonder if Stephen Gould would be "entirely comfortable" without a soul when on his death bed and facing the destruction of all the memories and personal intelligence he has worked so hard to amass in this lifetime. some believe that soul is the same as spirit when they are two different concepts. Soul is having enough other-selves to maintain memory after physical destruction. Thinking of it as a point of origin is interesting.

Sacks died last year and I believe two out of the group are still living.

Clearly, Dennett misunderstood Nietzsche since, contra Dennett, the idea of the 'eternal recurrence' was put forward by Nietzsche in order to affirm life despite its horrors!

Wow, all the evidence today supporting all that Sheldrake says, it’s no wonder he was right-it looks as if he was in touch with the future or guided toward a goal and it turns out to be the case.

If one used the magic of AI and CGI to remove their heads so that only their spinal cords and brains were visible, I think the six in this video would look very much like a group of identical aliens having a discussion. If one replaced the audio with a track of the voice of just one person lip syncing the words of all of them through a synth giving a slightly synthetic sound to the speech then the alien effect couldn't help but be even more dramatic. In fact I'll bet despite the visual prominence of the individual and separate bodies, it would seem to we viewers that only one mind was present and that that mind was mulling thoughts we could hear with our ears. My confidence that language is essential to the coming into being of the conscious process is growing stronger the more I watch this.

What i feel is its like all is connected

Wim has the accent and looks of a Bond-villain.

Also, don't get bogged down by the illusory material of metaphysical paradigms; they hold fertile fallacies you all cite.

Who else is, at the same time, relating strongly to, and being annoyed strongly, by Rupert Sheldrake, like me? : ) Respect for the man, of course

Except Sheldrake, everyone on this table now dead.

Me and the boys on our lunch break:

25:43 That's what Freeman and Rupert are there for 😉

Sheldrake is fundamentally completely at odds with people like Gould and Dennett. The others are more equivocal

why this has only 54.000 views?

excuse me while i laugh 🤣🤣🤣

Wait where's 1 of 7?

They look like they’re about to discuss the whereabouts of agent 007

You need to surmise to know nothing about nothing in the grand scale of the verse we live in. Not only are senses limited in this reality, the organization (lack therof) of man created fragmented research & principles due to the acting parties having an incomplete scope of human knowledge available, let alone cosmic understanding. With that, you can not surmount the galaxies(yet) with any actionable intelligence aside from everything accessible to us here. Before you go populating the galaxy, you're going to need to prove yourselves here. You haven't yet.

a guy which said that he is not certain dogs have feelings then with moved own feeling says he had two dogs charlie and duffy lol. would have had his dogs charlie and duffy agree they dont have any feelings? :D

I haven't watched this yet, only skipped through. BUT, Sheldrake talks circles around Dennet in that bit about right triangles.

Time’s is up good morning gentleman

But where was Terence McKenna though..

all these guys are going to gang up on Sheldrake... and Rupert is the only man at the table that had to fight for his ideas against the favorable tide of intellectualism. all these other men are well known, fawned over darlings. i'm not saying they didn't have their own challenges, they just didn't have to fight all of academia to earn a spot at the table.

At one time I was building a respect for the academics in our country. Now I just believe they are organizing around saturnian belief systems. Living comfortable padded lives at the expense of everyone else. They have made no major discoveries in the last 50 years.

31:58 42:06. 44:58. 45:12. 45:56->. 47:43. (52:07) 1:09:38

Co-workers and I in the break-room.

I remember being sent home from school to see the moon landing on tv in 1969.

U call me a model !

Me and boys during lunchbreak

Me and the boys at 2am looking for (っ◔◡◔)っ ♥ love ♥

haha Stephen Jay Gould has no time for Sheldrake and his pigeons (2:17:00 ..)

Indubitably.

31:33 He's onto it ya'know; why we're here.

Bring pigeon and go somewhere. But Dont let it fly just walk do u think the pigeon get it home?

The sun does not rise, the earth rotates toward the sun.

Even u change the meaning i am fully aware

they need to read Hegel

30:20 "Evolution has no purpose" Note to self

a discord now exists for those that were recommended and have watched the video discord.gg/TXXvw92