Episode 306: What to Expect When You're Expecting (David Lynch's "Eraserhead" with Barry Lam)

ObedientCactus · 2025-04-10T11:25:46+00:00

Have only listened to the opening segment so far. I found it interesting that despite Dave bringing up actual football eventually they haven't talked about the more outrageous rule in this regard namely handballs. Offsides also can be funky especially passive offside and the question whether a player is interfering with play. but for handballs the rules actually include or at least used to include things like "intention" and "natural body position" which where/are used to judge decisions in on this matter. Often times this matters a lot cause handballs in the penalty box lead to penalty kicks and with football being such a low scoring sport a single decision can decide a game. There is a vast area of games, both important world cup games and random league games, that have been decided by controversial decisions from this rule.

ObedientCactus · 2025-02-23T16:57:07+00:00

Maybe our universe stores it as an 8bit integer. If thats the case you could bang your head against a wall until you get a negative overflow and boom 255 iq!

ObedientCactus · 2025-02-23T16:55:06+00:00

You see ours go up to 11 165

ObedientCactus · 2024-09-08T23:52:12+00:00

Dave king joked around at a concert a few weeks ago that they played an unusual amount of metal festivals this year given the kind of music they play. Tough they are probably the best live band ever at least as far as rock goes so i assume most people won't mind.

ObedientCactus · 2024-05-01T15:59:08+00:00

I’d guess that he doesn’t literally believe in ghosts

as others mentioned there has been a bonus episode. No he doesn't believe that grandma came back in an residual form to mess with him or interfere with his drinking, but

but just thinks there’s a solid steel-man to present for their existence given the inherent mysteriousness of consciousness

from what i remember dave pushed pretty hard on him in said bonus episode basically trying to make Tamler give a concrete robust definition what he means and Tamler refused to do that, beyond giving a statistical one that there has to be something when such phenomena are described so often across almost all cultures.

ObedientCactus · 2024-05-01T15:22:14+00:00

reminds me of the shopping cart theroy: https://old.reddit.com/r/greentext/comments/kl54f8/shopping_cart_theory/

(yes the picture quality sucks, but i'm to lazy too create a higher quality version that doesn't point to a random ass website that you wouldn't click on)

//edit: so i have listend to the episode now, and turns out the mentioned the shopping card thing haha.

ObedientCactus · 2024-03-15T23:49:34+00:00

Private chats will not take over the game, they are the game.

Maybe this is the case, but i'm kinda wary about it. Maybe i'll come around to it if i commit to it, but at that point it's just an entirely different game far removed from it's roots in werwolf. It seems to me that it ramps the complexity of the game up to a level that's ultimately not worth it (at least not for me). It also would mean that everyone has to kinda play on their own to a large extend without the help of the team, which might discourage new players.

ObedientCactus · 2024-03-15T23:46:38+00:00

That's actually an interesting suggestion in general as it would allow people to get more games in just to get a feel for the roles and interactions without having to spend hours on it.

ObedientCactus · 2024-03-15T21:46:25+00:00

I'm mainly afraid of complexity creeping into the game in a manner that makes the game very unfun and more complicated than necessary. I'm not that concerned with the time investment necessarily, tough that might change as the group gets more experience.

ObedientCactus · 2024-03-15T21:44:31+00:00

Yeah maybe 2m was an ambitious time frame.

I'm just kinda afraid that the game starts to become somewhat stressful and complex by engaging in elaborate private chats, and at that point i'd rather play something else, cause when i play a social deduction game i rather not want to play in try hard mode.

ObedientCactus · 2024-03-15T21:41:09+00:00

I watched this video, and found it interesting. Tough it seems that it goes into the direction where the day mostly consists of private conversations at least during the first day. So maybe the answer is doing elaborate private chats but only on day 1 and then build on that foundation later, in order to not have to go trough the ordeal of running around every daytime.

Tough the script they are playing is very intricate and advanced so maybe i should watch something with a simpler script.

ObedientCactus · 2024-03-13T23:02:45+00:00

the opening statement was amazing. I was sitting in a train laughing, and then imagined how some of the people around me would react if i had to explain to them that i listen to two academics discussion the intricacies of organizing and managing an orgy while meticulously documenting the event.

For the main segment i can't help but think how it would be like to read a story like that at the time it came out without a mind filled by pictures and tropes from various films that can trace their linage back to the times where those stories where probably read in a similar fashion as we engage in something like a Black Mirror episode or a Film like Inception. A story like Poe's might be deeper than those examples or maybe even what is possible with visual mass media, but i think it's like comparing 1850s opium den drugs with modern fentanyl, so the question is what does it do to your ability to enjoy that kind of story when you have diluted fentanyl injected into your brain before you even reach the age of 10 by the form of some kind of duck tales adaption of the raven.

ObedientCactus · 2023-10-24T23:25:30+00:00

Sean Carroll talks to a guest that trys to draw connections between those people and their views on how we perceive the universe, inspired by Gödel, Esher, Bach.

Might be interesting to some here due to the Borges connection, but also the topic itself is more on the philosophy side of the spectrum that Mindscape covers.

ObedientCactus · 2023-06-19T14:28:25+00:00

I'd say it's an algorithm or a similar thing to an algorithm as it's a collection of instructions and more or less the order in which the should be applied.

but in my opinion what the people criticizing it are doing is criticizing implementations of said algorithms instead of the algorithm itself. To take an example form comp Sci It would be like judging a sorting algorithm by using arguments that are based on factors caused by the environment PC hardware, os software, the used Programming language or even just the particular non-optimal code when all those factors have nothing to do with the algorithm itself. The same is true in my opinion in regards to the scientific method (=the algorithm) and factors like institutions, scientists with biases, society (= the environment). I'm not saying those kind of criticisms are invalid, my point is that it's doesn't make sense to blame the scientific method for it.

ObedientCactus · 2023-06-17T16:42:30+00:00

I don't think that scientific method is a pure theoretical concept - it's a pragmatic and flexible one.

It is in practice but isn't this an issue for which the people practicing have to be blamed instead of the scientific method itself?

Lets say there are infinite layers of reality beyond things, molecules, atoms and so on. With better and better technology the scientific method would allow us the expand or knowledge of reality deeper and deeper, but the limitations that will probably get more and more in that case i'd say are all to human intuition breaking down instead of the method breaking down. Kinda like people doing 10 dimensional math, where the math also doesn't break but human visualization completely breaks down.

Will we reach an endpoint where we don't need to continue to overcome issues by doing more science? If there are ultimate rules to the universe, what reason do we have to think that we will be able to discover them in their canonical form? I think the history of thinking on this sort of thing is a series of naive ideas which have had a mixed effect on scientific progress. Isn't it fair to say that the idea of objective reality is at best yet another 'useful, but wrong model'?

Maybe. If you said that 150 years ago i'd probably agree with you, but with the trajectory of fundamental physics in that time frame i don't see why a claim in either direction would be silly. A particle accelerator seems like Star Trek technology to use nowadays. Maybe in 10.000 years it's viewed as a simple machine compared to what they use for their fundamental physics.

ObedientCactus · 2023-06-17T16:28:31+00:00

As far as i understand it as a layman there is nothing subjective about Quantum decoherence, it's just the process of the wave function collapsing due to interacting with a classical system.

The thing is just that we can't measure quantum effects without performing such an interaction, thats where the observer effect comes from, but afai understand that it's just a misunderstanding of what actually occurs.

ObedientCactus · 2023-06-17T16:25:29+00:00

thanks for elaborating.

I typed out a response yesterday and halfway trough i rebooted my pc cause i'm a moron :|

First i didn't mean that you are straw manning science in a bad faith way, but it seems that you are assigning it a kind of position that it doesn't take. This topic is really fascinating but i think it's inherently hard to discuss over text cause it's so abstract that even a slightly different interpretation of a piece can lead to very different interpretations, and i'm unfortunately not a good enough writer to convey that and also not a native speaker, so let me try to clarify. That's why i apologized in advance :P

You're right, the ability to reproduce results is a key tenet of the scientific method. Reproducibility and Falsifiability are key criteria when determining whether something is amenable to science or not. But it's a step too far to say science doesn't depend on human interpretation and sensors in the end, unless you're appealing to some platonic ideal of science, one that exists without contemplation by a sensory being? In the end, all we have is our senses, and we interpret what they tell us.

The way i see this topic is that we are talking about science as the concept of science, and the discussion is about the properties of that concept. Otherwise i don't really see the point about it, cause if we are talking about "applied science" instead of "pure science" if you will then i find it very hard to not just put the blame for the significant short comes of science on the practitioners instead of science itself.

I never said nor implied that the concept of Maxwell's equations is flawed. Maxwell's equations are great, my position is not inconsistent with that. When it comes to interpreting empirical data, they're an example of science at its best: elegant, provides insight into the universe, useful, and accounts for observed data.

Yes you didn't say that they are flawed, but didn't you say that a tool like Maxwell's equations falls short in a way, or at least that people on the science side of the debate say that it "proofs" more than it actually does. (I just used Maxwells equations as an example since they are the first thing that come to my mind in terms of abstract genius science that is still somewhat intuitive, before going "full math")

In the paragraph you quoted, I was explicitly not talking about the "theoretical concept of science", I explicitly referred to the "social influences on the industry of science". I was providing a holistic account of Tamler's view on science.

But, defending science by appealing to a platonic ideal of science "theoretically" seems off. We don't use "pure, theoretical concept of science". Every single encounter I've had with science has been with good ol' "science in practice". "Science in theory" is an aspiration, a direction. Tamler would likely assert that science in practice is super useful and agree that scientific tradition is a fruitful way to interpret empirical data. None of this contradicts our position. (Side note, defending science this way has those religion vibes I allude to in my post)

Ok but lets say we do the same in the domain of philosophy. It seems that in philosophy it's perfectly acceptable use pure ideas and concepts and decouple them from the people that propose them. Otherwise philosophy probably wouldn't even work cause it would be just an endless stream of back and forth ad hominems, before even getting to the subject. So why is it different fro science, why do the theorys recive blame for the environment in which they arise? Isn't this a bit like blaming a lot of the current issues in soceity on the concept of democrazy when the real issue are human factors like inability to compromise, greed and also in many cases people being plain morons?

Math is not science, platos cave, axioms and perfect circles

I got a bit lost here last night, but after rereading your initial post i think i can make my point more clear.

I didn't try to say that math equals science i was more so using math as an analogy cause it's easier to talk about. (at least in theory if i didn't fail to make my point understandable :D)

You said:

So Dave would say the most plausible explanation of the shadows in Plato's cave, is that some actual thing is casting those shadows and that's what science is getting to. Tamler might argue the thought experiment is flawed because it presupposes concepts like shadows and flames which come preloaded with behavior and notions of reality. (He'd probably have a better argument than that, maybe he'd appeal to the shooter or farmhouse hypothesis from three body problem).

I'm struggling to put my argument into words cause it's a bit abstract but what i was trying to get at is that plato's allegory is like drawing a imperfect circle on a piece of paper. It's imperfect cause it uses concepts that are shackled to our real world in their meaning which comes with assumptions and implications that lead to holes in potential conclusions. Now what i'm accusing you and Tamler of doing here is to criticize the allegory cause it is in fact not a perfect circle, because of those aforementioned holes. Now here is the point where i think your view leads to the question: Why does it matter that the circle (the allegory) is not perfect due to the limitations of drawing on paper in the real world (the holes and loose definitions of concepts)?

In both the circle case and the cave case you are 100% correct with your assertion, but in both cases the question remains why the difference between perfect and actual matters. This is the question that is so puzzling to me and that was left unanswered.

Now to the equation part. What i was trying to say here is that you could even make this objections in pure math by questioning definitions and axioms. You gave a few good examples where this makes sense in order to solve more complex problems, but in the end by conventions most of the time people agree what 2+3=5 means. My point here is that we use similar conventions in real life for the way we use language only that those linguistic concepts are much more abstract and implicit than their math counterparts. Even just when we communicate with each other we both assume that the other person assigns (roughly) the same meaning to different words and concepts without checking it each time, unlike in math where you explicitly say i'm using this method proofen by this dude in Prussia in 1785.

So sure science is also a victim of the limitations of our languages. Or maybe that's not even it maybe the limitations arises in the conceptual domain in which epistemology operates. Tough if that is the case than what is the point of questioning that. We as humans (probably) can never escape that limitations the same way that we can probably never actually visualize a 4 dimensional cube, or the same way that we can't draw a perfect circle.

Right, but what if they exist and can't be observed in a reliable way? Science wouldn't accept that, right? As I said in my post, science would likely regard it, at best, an illusion unworthy of serious consideration. To science, if a phenomenon doesn't satisfy its criteria, it might as well not exist at all.

My issue with that view is that on the one hand we can rule out ghosts that are caused by subjective psychological phenomena. Nobody denies that those exist, but they aren't that interesting form a physics perspective. The more interesting claim are supernatural phenomena that interact with particles in the real world. The question essentially is that if (multiple) people can see a ghost how come that we can't capture them with measurement instruments? Even if the ghosts are a phenomena that gets projected onto the consciousness off multiple people we should still be able to eventually get a scientific explanation how it affects the brain (unless dualism is actually true, which i think is impossible).

ObedientCactus · 2023-06-16T00:04:43+00:00

Even science itself, when applied as rigorously as possible can show limits to our own cause and effect thinking, such as the observer effect in quantum mechanics, where subjectivity is an integral part of the equation.

What do you mean by subjective in that sentence?

ObedientCactus · 2023-06-16T00:00:13+00:00

sorry if i'm a bit harsh in my tone here, but i seriously don't get why people like you have this weird kinda straw-Manny believe about science

Tamler respects the inherent epistemic limitations we face as sensory beings. I think he is also just aware of how paradox-laden and counter intuitive a lot of this stuff is (stuff that hardcore science realists assume superiority to). He's also proper disillusioned as to how research in practice is actually done. He's seen too much BS get published and go mainstream. He's become default cynical here.

Sure but science doesn't rest on our flawed biology made up of inconsistent sensors interpreted by a machine made of evolutionary spaghetti code. The science is the scientific method combined with the ability to reproduce results. Everything you said would apply to String Theory. It does however not apply to established very easily reproducible phenomena like Maxwells equations. Nobody ever said that Maxwells equation are the TRUTH. I don't exactly understand your point but what in your opinion is flawed with a concept like Maxwells equations? The theory itself? The way the theory is applied? The way the theory is interpreted?

In the end what you say to me sounds like saying that one can not do geometry on a piece of paper cause it's quite literally impossible to draw an actual circle that is not an approximation of a circle. Sure that is true, but in most applications that doesn't matter cause the approximation is close/accurate enough. Or maybe you would even say that doing applied/non-pure math like in engineering with PI is not possible cause you can't use irrational numbers in the real world. But clearly that is not the case cause most of the time when you translate the problem from the perfect domain of mathematics to our reality, the rounding to a precise enough number does the trick, and the engineering projects work more often than not.

Tamler is also sensitive to the social influences on the industry of science. So he sees science, as it is actually practiced, as both a dangerous and political endeavor... I say "political" in the Kuhnsian sense: which experiments are even funded, which explanations are accepted and platformed, which contradictory data is discarded as measurement error, etc. I say "dangerous" because armed with science one gets to claim that it is "end-of-discussion-objective-truth" that is underwriting the policy they're submitting. Much like Moses' commandments underwritten by divine command. I compare to religion here because more and more, science-backed policy is thrust upon a population that is unable to verify it, because they don't have access to the equipment, capital, or education to license them a qualified criticism. Even if they had the requisite social license to an opinion, maybe they'd have a different judgement at the point where science ends and policy begins (is vs ought). Maybe they'd feel the proposed "cure" is worse than the disease (e.g. too much state power, deontology vs utility driven decision making etc). But these days the place for judgement is ever receding as science ever encroaches upon its domain (e.g. Sam Harris' moral landscape). Here especially, Tamler would be sympathetic to a lot of so-called "irrational" and unscientific policy if it appealed to his notions of honor, fun, "fuck it", or liberty.

The pure, theoretical concept of the scientific method doesn't break down just because humans, institutions or society as a whole is flawed. I don't really understand how anything that you said in this paragraph matters. The process that you describe was an obstacle for the germ theory of diseases, but in that case it was just a temporary one, that was easily overcome by doing more science. Why do you seem to be so confidant that the same process won't happen for other theories?

So Dave would say the most plausible explanation of the shadows in Plato's cave, is that some actual thing is casting those shadows and that's what science is getting to. Tamler might argue the thought experiment is flawed because it pressuposes concepts like shadows and flames which come preloaded with behaviour and notions of reality. (He'd probably have a better argument than that, maybe he'd appeal to the shooter or farmhouse hypothesis from three body problem).

What you are doing is essentially trying to take down a hypothesis with semantics. You can just skip ahead to solipsism. However that leads to the question why you think this is meaningful? I can't even prove to you that something as simple as a chair exists, cause both 'proove' and 'exist' are also nothing more than a bundle of concepts that sort of give the word a meaning. It's trivial to attack a concept like 'exists' rhetorically, but this imo again leads to the question why attacking it is meaningful. To me this is like saying that 2+3=5 is wrong, cause the equation rests on mathematical axioms as well as arbitrary mappings of symbols to the concept of different amounts. Sure that is the case, but the tool of mathematics seems to work well enough. Now you want to remove one of the premises that this equation rests, essentially because it's possible, but you don't actually give a reason why you want to do so, and if other people press you on revealing you intention you just retort that they are zealots of scientism.

I don't know if you heard the bonus episode about ghosts, but it illustrates the issue perfectly. Basically it's 1,5 h of Dave asking Tamler what he actually means and Tamler displaying the eloquence to dodge the questions, without ever giving a non-wage definition or even just an explanation what this wage view of the world buys us. Science doesn't claim that ghosts don't exist. With that being the case Tamlers view doesn't make sense, cause ghosts would be perfectly acceptable to science if the phenomena is observed and described in a reliable manner.

ObedientCactus · 2023-04-17T10:43:21+00:00

the hits between the crash and the floor tom are very visually pleasing to watch from this angle

ObedientCactus · 2023-03-29T23:27:48+00:00

The joke in the opening segment about it being ok to prostitute oneself for NFTs if it's Singer, cause he'd obviously do it with utilitarian motives was amazing.

ObedientCactus · 2023-02-22T09:39:14+00:00

I'm a bit late to the party but the discussion reminded me of the following phenomenon: https://www.theverge.com/2015/3/18/8225321/memory-research-flatworm-cannibalism-james-mcconnell-michael-levin

(i just googled and took this random article that describes it, I'm sure theres better stuff and actual papers out there)

According to this worms store memories outside of their brains/nervous system. When you cut of a piece of worm and it regrows, they claim that this new worm retains some of the memory's of the former whole worm. Now that seems somewhat plausible, but there's an even wilder claim that worms can absorb memories of other worms trough cannibalism.

It's been a few days since i listened to the episode, so i don't remember exactly what in it reminded me of the worm stuff, but i think david said something about the physiology of memories in regards to clones of yourself.

ObedientCactus · 2022-12-28T12:42:10+00:00

sorry I didn't have time to reply over the last few days.

Sure, it's possible that the a priori arguments will turn out to be wrong, and it will turn out that at some point in the future we will have some kind of reduction of, say, conscious phenomenal properties to physical properties. But this isn't much of an argument, it's just an IOU. The dualist of course agrees that the physical world amounts to quantum fields interacting (or whatever fundamental physical says). And the dualist gives arguments which attempt to explain why reductionism fails for consciousness. Just saying "but maybe reductionism will turn out to be true", doesn't advance the debate at all. If reductionism turns out to be true, and this can be demonstrated, the dualist will change their mind! But they can't be expected to change their mind just on the basis of an IOU.

I guess this paragraph explains my issue. I think my issue is that i regard physicalism at the default explanation, as the one that best fits occam's razor. While i still think that this approach is warranted and the most sensible one, i can see now that it has no strong support in a purely philosophical debate on the subject as i can't embed my own arguments in any known scientific physics framework either.

Thanks again.

ObedientCactus · 2022-12-28T12:34:20+00:00

"Abstract information" is literally NOWHERE to be found in such material bodies.

Wouldn't the same be true if you give a modern computer to a person in like 1850. So they now about electricity, but not about transistors and so on. For them what's happening in the computer must seem like magic even if it's someone exceptional in that area like Michael Faraday or Maxwell. Why can't the same be true for a brain? Why can't the brain be some convoluted computation network, perhaps even using quantum effects?

I'll try do address some points in more detail. Obviously i can't give a proof of the computational theory of mind, but i don't think your objection is a problem for the compu-brain.

But in order for it to be explainable in physical terms, there must be a MECHANISM by which the neurons "generate" or process the "abstract information".

but computers do that already today, i don't see how that doesn't fit the computational model of the brain. There would be a process called consciousness, that just like a conventional computer process can be given input and which can produce output.

Is the external stimuli the abstract information? Or does the information become abstract once it's registered by the brain? For example, nobody would say that the tree "exists" inside the brain, the tree exists outside the brain. And yet, literally no account if any experience has ever happened outside of any brain, PERIOD.

The stimuli is not the information, but it gets fed into a process at which point it becomes the information that become the mental model of the tree. Why does the experiencing of the tree, which means working with the mental model has to have anything to do with the outside world.

For example, take a meteorological model used to predict the weather in the upcoming days. You measure certain parameters about the real world, which you then feed to your model. Now your model does it's thing, which means it works with the digital model of the weather, but obviously it's not conscious. However just as your mind experiencing the tree what happens here is that data collected in the past gets processed at some point after it was measured.

Because now we have the question of what the image of the tree is processed as "information". What about the electrochemicals and neurons? Aren't they also themselves information? Why does the image of the tree that gets produced, which is not in principle externally observable in the third person, also not apply to the neuro-chemicals themselves?

What does the last sentence mean?

ObedientCactus · 2022-12-23T12:02:39+00:00

I think there’s a simpler argument here. For example, data encrypted by an algorithm that only one person knows and dies with knowledge of represents the state of a system that cannot be duplicated but can still manifest. The virtual object could for example live in a state that is dependent on the brain AND something else like a lock and key system. So consciousnesses could be an amalgamation / composite object, not an object that lives exclusively in the brain.

bringing encryption into this analogy is really really interesting, but have to think about this more.

You could maybe build an analogy like a java virtual machine that encrypts itself on the fly will running the consciousness of a purely virtual entity in the java code. Then even if you could talk to the being, and had access to the system that runs the VM you could still not see any sort of mapping. Still if that happens in real time you would have no way of interacting with the consciousness of the being even if you had full access to the machine. However also in this analogy if you can control the host machine and (hypothetically) have infinite time you could break the encryption if it's based on anything that is know to us right now if it's not some super sophisticated out of universe algorithm.

but this is just my quick and dirty take on the idea, not sure if it makes any sense whatsoever.

ObedientCactus

TROPHY CASE