What he is saying is subtle but useful in getting us to think about what we mean by terms we don’t think about much. I enjoyed it and has made me think.
He gives a profound talk for thinking people, without using all the philosophical terminology. My take on his point is the universe is irreducibly complex, and so we all create models of the universe to help make sense of it. This way we can obscure the parts that don't make sense, and call the rest of it (the tiny subset of the stuff that goes on in the universe which fits conveniently within our model and our context)---we call that truth or fact. But it's such a small incomplete part, that it can't possibly be the universe. Unless we posit an omniscient being, then there's no context that contains the entirety.
Maple Graves Among other things I believe that there are planets, numbers, governments, elections, and unicorns.. I think all these thing exist but there’s exactly one thing which really does not exist namely the world 😏🤙🏼😎
I gather from the comments below that most of us people are not philosophers :) I thought it was quite good and I particularly appreciated his conclusion / interpretation given at the end
EXTREME..as this talk unfolds, the topics and deductions were fascinating. If you really concentrated, the words were unfolding into a life-changing theory of reality. I honestly was hooked. The last few minutes Marcus finally unveils the meaning of his ideas, and it was like your favorite sports team losing at the buzzer. His big theoretical conclusion..."We can really become the free, autonomous human beings that we think we are". WHAT?.. when did that become part of the talk? The beginning did provide some deep thinking though, which I applaud.
I agree. I thought he baled out, either from a loss of nerve or a failure of imagination. The first two-thirds of the talk presented ideas that are really worth thinking about, but then suddenly he's saying that everything isn't connected and we are truly individual. However, regardless of whether or not these propositions are true, they don't necessarily follow from the key ideas.
You both missed the point. Watch again and listen carefully. There is no "reality" as such - no absolute within which everything is "connected". His positive claim is that there are "contexts" within which we, for example, use concepts to give meaning to certain things, such as chairs or dreams. Regarding freedom and autonomy, if there is no absolute or "world", in my understanding of what he is saying, there can be no theory or God that can determine how everything, including human existence, is. If humans are not determined by anything absolute, we are, in that sense, free and autonomous beings who intersect with eachother in meaningful contexts.
When did this become part of the talk? When he said, that all easy concepts of the world, like religions or believe in science don't grasp the whole world, because the world is infinite. Therefor humans are free and can explore an infinite space of ideas.
i like his idea of existence as a thing being in context, that makes perfect sense. he finishes with a very contentious issue of non-connectedness and although i don't think of grand connectedness like some people do, i do think that throwing it out it is premature at best
Im re-watching this for the 37th time and I think I finally get it, okay?... Legend has it that hes walking around in circles in the non existent world saying okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, oka....
LOL this was psuedo science conceived subjective theory on existing I'd like to think of existing as a process and the world is collective subjective/objective perception with present time being base fundamental well not really present time cause conscious is pastime the rest is cheesy mumbo jumbo
I think the real problem with this whole talk is very straightforward: a confusion of the inability of language, a construct produced by humans ( and possibly other critters..) to explain the totality of "the world". Although it is perfectly obvious that something ( including us ) seems to exist, our difficulties in expressing clearly the nature of said existence might suggest that perhaps it does not, if you suppose that we humans are even capable of ever of ever fully understanding the whole shebang. This of course might lead to the fatuous claptrap that I just listened to. I would point out that philosophy was a construct of a prescientific era, when even intelligent humans had an extremely limited access to much data concerning, for example, what those sparkling things in the night sky were, how simple physics operated, and so forth. Not surprisingly, this can create the linguistic quicksand that typified this lecture.
very true. The constraints of language are FAR greater than we give attention to. In fact our language is so deeply indiscriptive that you're right, we have no hope of describing or understating the infinite universe.
@@hughbarton775 He's also very wrong about his idea. It's very clear that humans and consciousness are a product of "the world" and not the other way around. When you die the world the your experienced is still there. We can be sure of that. Hard determinism is currently the most logical philosophy. It's difficult to accept, but we are in fact not in control at all. We don't know why we think the thoughts that lead to action. We think we are making decisions in "real time" that affect the outcome of the universe, but it's a false perception. There is infinite scale to our "world", but there are not an infinite number of possibilities, there is only one. Everything that happens in the past determines every single present moment. Destiny and fate are real, only the most objective thinkers who can let go of the illusion of free will can realize it.
That's because humans and their thoughts are constantly creating and expanding reality. Markus gave it away when he talked about the list of things and then needing another list to put the list on it. "The world" will always expand and be infinite as long as there is thought and context. The physical/corporeal and the thought. Thought expands itself and everything it creates.
Through the comments, people tend to think and mock people just because they fear. They are afraid of not understanding something spoken by the wise people out there. Markus Gabriel breaks the record of becoming the youngest professor of Philosophy in Germany (the record was hold by the roommate of Hegel if I recall correctly). There must be something special about his thought. If you think the professors in universities are dumb and they put another stupid guy as a professor then you are just too arrogant. The 2nd order theory is something interesting to play with. If you understood or if u saw some of his work, you may start to find some tracks of his thinking process. So don't limit yourselves from your "world" guys. Life is much more than going to work, eat food and sleep. Philosophy is one of the reasons why we should love humanity. So try to understand it please.
The entirety of this theory is just an attempt to justify philosophy in the world (pun intended) where there's a big "risk" of theory of everything being discovered. He totally ignores that information is just how our brain perceives a certain pattern of electric charges in its structure, and that "blue" is just a word we made for our language to describe a certain wawelenght, not anything with its own independent existence...
my way of thinking exactly, and the funny thing is that i came to his way of describing our personal reality only yesterday so that makes things a bit spooky. he is so easy to understand and fluent, Wunderbar , sehr schon.
Like numerous philosophers have done, he takes a few pages from Ch’an (Zen) teachers, stands on their shoulders and then re-engages in conceptual frameworks to try to describe everything. Whereas the Ch’an teachers of old could eloquently and perfectly elucidate the entirety of everything (suchness) with even a few words or the motion of a fly swatter. My conclusion is that when someone is attached to thinking, they will pursue thought. When someone instead wants to see the substance of everything-of which one is a part-it can be seen, but not known.
His point is that the „world/universe/reality” was infinite, and therefore it does not exist in its wholeness, as like there does not exist a highest number. He says that physics cannot describe everything that exists, as it is limited to space-time, but things like concepts would exist too. He uses the unicorn as an example: Unicorns do not exist in space-time, yet unicorns exist as a concept (like in movies), therefore there would be things, that exist, but cannot be described by physics. He then explains, that concepts would be ambiguous and by that he concludes, that there cannot be an overall concept of The „world/universe/reality”.
I think therefore I am. Or my existence derives from my consciousness. I can make up anything. Intangibles are intangible. Wow. Etc, etc. Halfway through this and I’ll never know how it ends. And that’s a fact.
I feel like I need to watch it at least twice more to fully get it, but yeah, it's good stuff. Trying to think about it without reference to language, which is really a consensus of fixed abstractions, not the thing itself.
not at the very end. He's wrong that were fully autonomous humans. We're practically completely instant driven. we don't think of our thoughts, they just appear in our brains. He is totally right in saying we need to find a way to incorporate infinity into our theory. Because everything is infinite
Ive been telling people that concepts and numbers and power structures and abstractions and meaning and value are not inherent in the universe, but are constructed in our brains. When you scratch a car's paint, it is not a flaw, but merely the result of physical forces at work. Your reaction is where meaning comes in. I have never considered that facts are not part of the universe, but it seems so obvious now. After all, what we think of as facts are subject to updates. But now I see: it is a fact that one apple is bigger than another. But if you eat one, what happens to the fact? One apple was bigger, and the fact remains even though one apple is gone. The fact is not in the apples, it is in our brains. That does not mean that facts are baseless or untrue: it means that facts are not nature. The map is not the territory. The time on a clock is not actually time. There is no calendar in nature, only seasons. Remember, don't eat the menu!
No, it means that facts can be dependent on time. From July though November last year, it was true to say that apple A was bigger than apple B. Not before then, and not after then, when someone ate apple A. Time has to be stated somewhere. It will always be a fact that in October of 2017, Apple A was larger, and it will always be false to say that Apple A was bigger in December, 2017. Now let's say a bear ate the apple. How did that bear choose which apple to eat? It ate the bigger one because it was hungry. The bear observed the apples and compared them. Do you think the bear was unaware of the fact that one was bigger than the other? I think that's a natural fact. So the fact was in the bear's brain? We could go down the list of less and less "sentient" animals, but at what point will you see the fact of one being larger (or sweeter, or redder...) as being part of nature? Without such facts, organisms cannot survive. They need (and have) the ability to discriminate quality food sources based on their observations (in the broad sense) of such facts. They abstract meaning from their observations as well. "Red means yum. Bigger red means more yum." I agree that the fact is not intrinsic to the apple, but it is a natural fact. (Like sweet sweet Connie :D ) I also disagree with your take on numbers. Pi is pi. And look at quantum physics. There are all kinds of unnecessarily specific (my judgement) numbers involved. Why should the first electron orbital have room for exactly 2 electrons? Why should the next accommodate exactly 8? Why do photon waves follow such precisely definable patterns? We humans are just trying out our best mathematical models to describe what's already out there. We're not imposing numbers on anything, just seeing what numbers are there and how we might use them. That's my take :)
There are no facts. What is considered a fact is only an atom on the tip of the iceberg or perhaps a quantum particle on the tip of the Universe. I think he is wrong when he says that our choices are not affected by the Universe. Cosmic radiation is flowing through us every second.
Allan Watts, Eckhart Tolle, Juddi & UG Krishnamurti, Moojii, Osho, Papaji, Rupert Spira, Sadhguru, Samadhi Movies. All on RU-vid, all FREE. These are resources, that POINT at truth!
@@beenaplumber8379 bear ate an apple because it appeared viually bigger and you can reduce that to neurons firing in bears brains without involving any concepts
@@t.h.4960 German academia is rigid and status oriented. G. got tenured at 29, which is in itself infuriating for many established academics. Furthermore, he is very fast, very logical and incredibly precise in his arguments, and has a good, very witty sense of humor. His arguments are hard to defeat. And yes, insofar it is hard to not get angry at him, because one is constantly confronted with one's own inferiority.
@@otisobl No, in fact, that is not why Gabriel is ridiculed in serious philosophy. There are many other examples of unsympathetic philosophers and philosophers who have been publicly present and popular; and which are nevertheless very recognized and received in the professional world. With Gabriel, the reason is simply that he constantly speaks out on topics in which he is not an expert: corona pandemic, philosophy of mind, artificial intelligence and, more recently, moral philosophy. However, I can well understand why a philosophical layman can be impressed by his eloquent and profound verbosity.
Ask two questions from yourself after waking from a dream. Q.1 Who was conscious of my dream when it was observable? A: I, who was living in my dream. B: I, who was sleeping in the universe. C: Neither A nor B. Q.2 Who is conscious of the absence of my dream when it is not observable. C: Neither A nor B. Answers of these questions will enable us to understand why world doesn't exist.
Because its necessary for the establishment of domestic tranquility to replace the behaviors of hunting and gathering and survival we have with a paradigm that cultivates as close as possible the individuals will to live by stimulating the still present necessity of our survival instincts
TED is a fantastic organization. It gives everyone a chance to share their ideas and learn of new ideas in the world of design, engineering & technology....bravo!
ironically, he is deconstructing reality, , but then he confuses divine intuition/intelligence for for his limited human mind. This guy obviously has not mastered silencing his own thoughtflow at will. (Though i would call his attempt at it admirable). That would leave him with the one single word he did not mention, the elephant in the room:CONSCIOUSNESS. Pure consciousness in a silent mind reveals everything you need to know. Imagined or real, it works, flawlessly...
The world does exist, although our perception of it may not match the reality. The fact that much of it is beyond our (current) understanding does not make it any less real.
Unlike other commentators, I think that he is not saying that the world as all the existing things and its properties does not exist, neither he is saying that the world existance is mind dependent. What he is staying is that any humman idea of totality must be wrong or missleading; what we grasp of the reality are facts, and it is impossible to even thing of a list of all facts. I'm going to read his book, I really hope his realism keep the doors closed to constructivism or ontological relativism.
From the fact that you cannot come up with a list containing all facts it doesn't follow that the world doesn't exist, it just follows that the number of facts is infinite. For example, from the fact that there is always a bigger natural number it doesn't follow that the set of natural numbers doesn't exist, but just that the set of natural numbers is infinite. Mr Markus assumes that infinite sets don't exist. Why?
Gugiu Teodor Arguments from infinity are a usefool tool against "the world". However, Gabriel does reject the world on an ontological argument, this "list" may be understood metaphorically.
Everyone here who complains about his use of language; this is obviously his second, or even third language; I'd love to hear some of you do a talk on anything approaching the complexity of this talk, in German.. And at least it's "okay" not the uniform word of stupidity in the US: "like"
The correct interpretation: there are no unicorns in the movie The last unicorn - but there are animations, drawings and artistic interpretations of what the artist thinks a unicorn might look like.
You are missing the point of realism, and for if there’s no human to makes up conceptions , we have a reality “no human is making up any conception”, this reality is objective, it is not in space time. His framework still holds.
Imagine you bought some rather complicated flat-packed furniture from IKEA, got it home, opened the assembly instructions and found a transcript of what Gabriel has delivered in his TED speech (vide supra). Obviously you couldn’t use it to assist in putting your furniture together. I’m not entirely sure what else you could do with it (?).
you don't need a bigger list, just a self reference within the same list. Similarly there-s no need to enumerate every natural number in order to mathematically describe or define what natural numbers are.
Wonderful! Thank you so much for sharing this Excellent Open-Minded All-Encompassing Perspective! WOW. I Love It & I'm listening again, perhaps now that it's 2018, other minds will be able to Comprehend your Prophetic Wisdom! Rock On fellow Me!
Such a great topic and very nice start, you lost me in the second half unfortunately. seemed a bit rushed, but its hard to reprogram thousands of years of generational conditioning in 20 bloody minutes, but its nice that someone is trying.
He is forgetting that every concept we perceive is made from electrical connections in our brain, this means all concepts are physically present in the universe. We just do not yet have a way to decode all the information contained in our brain to directly point out where these concepts are located.
this entire theory is blown out of the water when you factor in the scientific method for being able to "reproduce those facts" for anyone else at any other time during their experiments.
This is not a good talk, and I feel sorry for him, because his book is phenomenal. Go read it if you have time, it's interesting, it's fun, it's coherent and short too. You have no real ground to be dismissive if you've only heard this, honestly, weak summary.
I too noticed, the shorter the talk = less time for context, complexity & nuance, the worse the impression. Forum talks or interviews tend to ruin his message the most. In forum rounds, everyone just defend their little bubble and don't even try to understand the new ideas and concepts Gabriel is submitting.
The concept of truth inevitably leads to an infinite regress, yes, but that is true about truth itself, not about "the universe", we can´t extrapolate the properties of one thing to the properties of the other. The universe, or the totality of all that is, may be finite, and in this case it would make sense to talk about it without merely trying to escape the concept of infinity. Very thought provoking though, I´ll want to read his book.
Dawn Amato no, I don’t think that’s true. Instead, he uses it to make sure the audience is with him, or as reference to the fact that what he is said is to be taken as fact to allow or make way for his theory.
Interesting concepts. I'm not sure I agree that we're not connected but I agree that the limitations of our processing equipment prevents us from seeing or experiencing the meta connections which places severe limits on what we can understand, influence, manage and engage with.
These are ideas similar to these of one of the biggest geniuses of all time - Immanuel Kant, so if i was a metaphysical layman with 0 knowledge on the subject i wouldnt dismiss them
@@jawarkok4777 Why do I need to study his work to point out his fallacious arguments in his talk? Again, he is using a really bad language mode, which open the doors his magical ideas. Do you want examples? Are you unable to spot his tricks?
@@nickolasgaspar9660 Tricks? You are talking about "fallacious arguments". I am asking you to formulate your objections. Nobody is interested in unsubstantial claims of you.
If a tree falls in the forest and there is no one to see it, do it make a crashing sound ? QM says if no one is there to see it ...there is no tree at all. No tree fall. that spot is in all possible states until someone go and check it out. Did I understand QM correctly ? Or is this what it is - the real reality.
This is why we have a brain: to express our understanding,----whatever that might be, or wherever that might lead us to. We can look at this "existence"--phenomena in countless ways. But on the end of the day, we always tend to end up with physical reality itself, that surrounds us. However it is very fascinating to ponder upon the - whatever.
imagine this guy in the room with the ted talk dudes.. "I've got this great idea for a ted talk" its about yule brinner look alike contest.. Ted talk dudes... "Sold! "