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aCosmicWave @lemm.ee

What is a beautiful concept or idea that continues to blow your mind?

For me it is Cellular Automata, and more precisely the Game of Life.

Imagine a giant Excel spreadsheet where the cells are randomly chosen to be either "alive" or "dead". Each cell then follows a handful of simple rules.

For example, if a cell is "alive" but has less than 2 "alive" neighbors it "dies" by under-population. If the cell is "alive" and has more than three "alive" neighbors it "dies" from over-population, etc.

Then you sit back and just watch things play out. It turns out that these basic rules at the individual level lead to incredibly complex behaviors at the community level when you zoom out.

It kinda, sorta, maybe resembles... life.

There is colonization, reproduction, evolution, and sometimes even space flight!

158 comments

  • Evolution as a concept; not just biological. The fact that you can explain the rise of complex systems with just three things - inheritance, mutation, selection. It's so simple, yet so powerful.

    Perhaps not surprisingly it's directly tied to what OP is talking about cellular automata.

    • DNA still blows my mind. Some weird simple molecules that just happen to like to link together have become the encoding of how complex biological systems are constructed. Then mash two separate sets of DNA together, add a little happenstance, and you have another new being from those three things you mentioned.

    • There's something interesting in here about the persistence of legacy systems that I can't quite put my finger on. Rest assured I will be consumed by the thought for the remainder of the day.

      • There are plenty things that we could talk about legacy systems from an evolutionary approach. It's specially fun when you notice similarities between software and other (yup!) evolutionary systems.

        For example. In Biology you'll often see messy biological genetic pools, full of clearly sub-optimal alleles for a given environment, decreasing in frequency over time but never fully disappearing. They're a lot like machines running Windows XP in 2023, it's just that the selective pressure towards more modern Windows versions was never harsh enough to get rid of them completely.

        Or leftovers in languages that work, but they don't make synchronic sense when you look at other features of the language. Stuff like gender/case in English pronouns, Portuguese proclisis (SOV leftover from Latin in a SVO language), or Italian irregular plurals (leftovers of Latin defunct neuter gender). It's like modern sites that still need animated .GIF support, even if .WEBM would be more consistent with the modern internet.

  • Part of the beauty and awe I get whenever I reread that famous excerpt from Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot is the sense of how ephemeral and delicate our existence, and even the very human concept of "existence", is. We are infinitesimally small and yet, through no fault of our own, our days, how we fill them, and the people we know hold some measure of importance to us. And it will all be gone - eventually. It's a very somber note yet it makes me feel a certain sense of peace.

    "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam."

  • The butterfly effect. The phenomeon that tiny seemingly insignificant changes can result in massively different outcomes. Someone out there could read this post and get distracted and leave home for work/school/shopping a bit later than they would've and avoid a major accident. But conversely, someone could also get distracted by this post while crossing the road and... you know... die...

    Fascinating, yet terrifying at the same time.

  • I am focusing on the "blow my mind" part, rather than the "beautiful" part of your question, but I am certain many philosophically-minded people would consider the following "beautiful".

    Peter Singer's argument in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality (1972)" that you and most everyone you know are probably immoral or evil and you don't even realize it. It really affected my ideas of how to strive to live.

    Here is a good video explaining the idea in detail, worth 30m of your time.

    Peter Singer - ordinary people are evil

    • That's an incredibly pessimistic way to view the world... I think it's more accurate to say that people have the capacity for both good and evil. I'm not sure that you can say that "most everyone you know" are immoral or evil. That's quite the claim.

      Though we would also have to explore what "immoral," and "evil" actually mean. Am I immoral for purchasing and using a cell phone made with materials that were obtained through means that destroy lives and damage ecosystems?

      The modern world is far too complex and interconnected for people to avoid doing things that could be considered immoral or unethical.

    • Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/KVl5kMXz1vA

      Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.

      I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.

    • I didn't actually watch the video, but I have read the original essay and I thought I'd offer a few thoughts (and criticisms) of it.

      An interesting consequence of his strict utilitarianism is that it follows from it that it's actually immoral to do anything to help issues close to home in pretty much any way if you live in the West, and maybe even in other countries as well, regardless of whether that may be by donating, volunteering, or anything else of the sort.

      if it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.

      Because of wealth disparities between countries, your money will almost always go further somewhere else. If you live in the West, this difference can be extreme, and as a result any money sent there will be able to accomplish far more than it will for people in your own area. Since your donation to help out nearby is a donation not being made elsewhere where it can do more good, it is then to be considered immoral. A similar logic can be applied to volunteering. If when you're volunteering you are not working to make money which you could donate to much poorer countries, it's immoral, because your personal work to do good will never be able to equal what your money could do. In fact, your life should essentially be, to the greatest extent that doesn't reduce the amount you can make by the harm it does to you, you constantly working. He even admits as much:

      Given the present conditions in many parts of the world, however, it does follow from my argument that we ought, morally, to be working full time to relieve great suffering of the sort that occurs as a result of famine or other disasters.

      He even goes as far as to say the following:

      we ought to give until we reach the level of marginal utility ---that is, the level at which, by giving more, I would cause as much suffering to myself or my dependents as I would relieve by my gift. This would mean, of course, that one would reduce oneself to very near the material circumstances of a Bengali refugee.

      If this is the case, it has important implications for political action in its many manifestations as well. Should I be campaigning for the government to adopt policies which reduce suffering as much as possible? If implemented their effect could be massively beneficial, but I don't think this works with the arguments he makes. My individual contribution to a political movement will never be the difference between its success and its failure, so it would seem the moral decision is for me to remain effectively apolitical.

      This however strikes me as being in contradiction with this later statements:

      I agree, too, that giving privately is not enough, and that we ought to be campaigning actively for entirely new standards for both public and private contributions to famine relief.

      I would sympathize with someone who thought that campaigning was more important than giving oneself

      Ultimately, I am led to the conclusion that following his arguments, the only moral thing to do is in fact to relentlessly pursue financial gain, as donating the money one earns is far and away the most effective use of one's time and effort to do moral good. The engineer who could have worked for Lockheed Martin designing weapons for the US military is in fact more moral than the one who turns down the job for one that pays substantially less, since it is practically certain that whoever would take the job otherwise would not donate as generously as they do. Applied to capitalists (the class of people, not the supporters of capitalism), it seems that since giving money is the moral thing to do, and giving more money does more good, making more money is the moral thing to do, as it increases one's capacity to do good. This seems to be borne out by his statements concerning foreign aid, which indicate that it's not just about giving what you can in the present moment, but also considering how your actions impact your future ability to continue to do so:

      Yet looking at the matter purely from the point of view of overseas aid, there must be a limit to the extent to which we should deliberately slow down our economy; for it might be the case that if we gave away, say, 40 percent of our Gross National Product, we would slow down the economy so much that in absolute terms we would be giving less than if we gave 25 percent of the much larger GNP that we would have if we limited our contribution to this smaller percentage.

      I find that this ends up being quite problematic, because the ability to grow one's own wealth is functionally unlimited. It might seem that that's not a problem if you're giving away all your wealth, but for it to grow so you can give more, that can't be the case, because you need to be reinvesting it. As a result you end up with this contradiction, where your are morally obligated to increase your wealth so you can do more good, but at the same time this obligation prevents you from actually putting that wealth into doing good. You could say that the not doing good with the money means that it's no longer moral so you have to give at some point, but the problem with that is that it's impossible to define that point. It still remains that at any given point in time the moral thing to do is to reinvest it so that if you give it next time, more will be given. Ironically, this endless pursuit of ever greater wealth is the very same thing that creates so much suffering in the world, even if its justification is usually different, so this argumentation seems to just end up reinforcing the same ills that it hopes to address.

      I do like his conclusion though, directed towards other philosophers, reminiscent of a Marx quote that I've always been quite fond of: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it."

    • I've watched like 10 minutes and I hate it. Peter Singer is a very controversial figure as it is, on top of that the guy in the video comes off as super condescending to me and I can't stand watching him for longer. Me personally, I don't think it's "immoral" to not give money to charity. And terms like immoral or evil are usually defined by the society you live in and not some random philosopher. And I bet there are good reasons his radical ideas in "Famine, Affluence, and Morality" did not get embedded in our society yet.

    • The presenter focuses on argument 1 because he says the other points are "obviously correct" and therefore moral. Imo that's flawed.

      1. Hunger disease etc are part of a natural cycle which controls population and ecosystem balance.
      2. Luxuries are of no significance is not obviously true. Our economic system means that purchasing items of "no moral significance" feeds into a system which supports livelihoods and, in a functional government, provides welfare and health care to populations.
      3. There are multiple areas where money could be focused instead of Oxfam etc which could be seen as moral- R&D, luxuries as per 3

      (It might just be that I don't like philosophy)

      • I'm also no philosopher, but I've a penchant for ethics.

        I feel like the message is diluted a bit given how much he talks about charity in our capitalist society. The question is larger, and it takes some effort to step back and view a collectivist society as it could be.

      • Focusing on your points:

        1. Controlling population - this is flawed completely, the lowest birth rates in the world are in the most affluent countries. In a lot of places it is below the replacement level of 2.1 births/woman. I think it is fine to accept the premise that hunger, disease etc are very bad things.
        2. This is think is much more open to attack than point 2. Luxuries are of no moral significance, in my opinion is a flawed premise because it is both a "Straw Man" and a "Rhetorical Definition".
        • It is a Straw Man argument because: it is weakening any counter point by hand waving away any possible refutation by using "Luxuries" in a pejorative way (in my opinion).
        • It is a Rhetorical Definition because it is using Luxuries in an emotionally charged way (again in my opinion); it is equating that you as a person, indulging in "Luxuries" are taking a moral stand. Luxuries are not required for life and thus are immoral, when those same resources could be used to save others lives.
        • My refutation: Happy people are generally more productive, having access to some luxuries increases happiness, therefore having access to luxuries increases productivity.
        • This leads to: a more productive society generates more tax revenue that can be used to help others. Thus paying your fair share of tax is a moral good.
        • Counterpoints: Some people will become hedonistic and focus too much on luxuries. Some people will hoard wealth and forgo their moral obligation to pay their fair share of tax.
        • Supporting case: We could look for a real word example....ignoring the situation that lead to it, lets examine the productivity of North vs South Korea, the amount that each country gives to international aid etc...SK gives approx $37USD/citizen, I could not find any data on how much NK gives, we can probably assume it is very low.
        1. What you say here is basically a "rising tide lifts all boats" argument. This is a very valid argument, again using the North/South Korea example, SK has invested heavily in R&D and as an indirect consequence, their ability to help has vastly outstripped that of the North.
        • There is another point here, it seems to me that Singer is providing a "False Dilemma"; essentially saying that there are only two choices here, we either help or don't help. One choice is good the other evil.
        • I posit that there is a middle ground, we can strive for the ability to enjoy some luxuries without devolving into hedonism, whilst still helping those in need.

        In conclusion. You were correct to take issue with the presenter blindly accepting premises 2, 3 & 4. The way you tried to refute point 2 however was not great. Especially since point 2 is the only premise that we can say "is self evident".

        My points are more temporally distant then those of Singer, he is stating that helping now is better than building the ability to help much much more in the future.

  • Symbiosis in nature….it always brings up feelings of awe and wonder for me. Especially in forests. The "wood-wide web" or "mycorrhizal network" being my latest obsession . The fact that the fungi joins the trees together through the roots to allow for exchange of nutrients, water, and chemical signals between plants. And then there’s the forest canopy, and the role it plays in keeping the forest healthy.

    Trees are awesome.

  • Alright, thanks to this comment section, I now need years of free times because it's all so fascinating I need to learn about all this!

  • Bergsons theory of mind. I wish i understood it enough to put a tldr, but its complex and has been misunderstood.

    Heres another one. Michael behe's mousetrap. He likens cellular structure as a mousetrap, with every piece forming a necesesary part, and without any one part it ceases to function.

    Back when i was a creationist christian and didnt accept evolution as fact, he was a hero. Endogenous retroviral dna put that all to rest. Except maybe not.

    The counter arguments were that other structures could form over time to create the minimalist structures we see today, like using scaffolding to construct a self sustaining roman bridge or replacing the wooden base of the mousetrap with the floor. Obviously behe is mistaken.

    But he claims not, that he doesnt argue that variants of mousetraps can't exist. He argues that all exist without scaffolding. We dont see cellular structures with unnecessary parts that can be acted upon by evolution. Everything already is the end product after evolution has selected away the unnecessary parts. So how can evolution be happening the way its described? We just go between different end products. Theres no structures still with scaffolding.

    This keeps me up at night. Maybe theres more to evolution that we dont know yet.

  • Several things are regularly in my "ponder and wonder" list, the most recent being:

    • Chaos theory
    • Higher dimensions (>4)
    • The actual scale of space versus our normal human scale
    • The idea of social/societal evolution (how can we be better together as a species)

    I can get lost for a while in any of these topics.

158 comments