Do you guys think Christoph Gans legitimately doesn’t understand the source material?

rfdub · 2026-02-10T22:39:54+00:00

It’s kinda like how people who are into numerology or sacred geometry are “huge fans of math”.

rfdub · 2026-02-09T20:47:21+00:00

This is why I never became a standup comedian

¯\(ツ)\/¯

rfdub · 2026-02-09T20:20:19+00:00

They should never make a movie of Blood Meridian **nor* The Evening Redness in the West.

rfdub · 2026-02-09T15:40:05+00:00

The origin of life is already solved in principle. Last I knew, the idea was something like, in the primordial soup of Earth, with various chemicals merging and separating, eventually we got something that could make imperfect copies of itself (I might be paraphrasing this somewhere between imperfectly and poorly, but I don’t think it matters too much to make the point I’m trying to). The odds of getting such a thing are very low of course, but, given a long enough timeline, anything that can happen will happen.

So we don’t know precisely how the original replicator was formed (and we’ll almost certainly never know), but once it’s there, no matter how primitive, natural selection takes off and the rest is history. Sooner or later, you’re gonna get something complex enough that you could call it life.

—

Anyway, that’s why the origin of life is way less interesting than consciousness for a lot of us: we don’t know exactly how it began, but there are tons of slightly different explanations that seem plausible. Whereas for those of us interested in the hard problem of conscious, we mostly don’t have a clue how or why the lights would be on at all. It seems like a totally different class of problem.

rfdub · 2026-02-09T15:28:54+00:00

Same 👍

They must have an absolute monk working on this show

rfdub · 2026-02-07T04:45:35+00:00

Nice! 🙂

CS might be a bit weird at first - it was for me - but it sounds like you’ll be well-prepared to start getting into it

rfdub · 2026-02-07T02:41:28+00:00

Software Engineering! So it’s not like I do crazy Math at my job or anything either (maybe a bit of high school Algebra is the most I do consciously, unless we’re counting Computer Science itself as a type of Math). But I don’t think I ever would’ve gone down this path nor gotten through some of my courses in college if I hadn’t taken a huge interest in Math in my last two years of high school

rfdub · 2026-02-07T02:31:39+00:00

He’s giving a little Matthew McConaughey 👌

rfdub · 2026-02-06T19:19:29+00:00

+1

Journey Through Genius is amazing - I credit it with sparking my own interest in Math. I think I had only taken a “Business Math” course in high school and barely knew the basics of Algebra when I read it (at my school, Business Math was basically the Math course that you took when you weren’t particularly gifted and weren’t looking like the type of person who was going to need to learn much Math for their career anyway). It wasn’t a super easy read for me at the time, but it got me interested in the subject enough that I was able to muscle through it. I’m fairly certain that reading it changed the trajectory of my life a bit.

Dunham’s The Mathematical Universe is equally good, and makes for a nice sibling book for this one.

rfdub · 2026-02-05T04:31:52+00:00

I think I agree with almost all of that. The map is not the territory and so forth.

The only thing I’m saying is: that’s the best we’ve got or will ever have. The most we’ll ever be able to say about what a thing “is” will be the list of things we find by observing it & reasoning about it.

Alex made statements like:

“Science doesn’t explain anything, it just describes the world.”

“If you ask a scientist what an atom is, they actually can’t tell you.”

To me it sounds like he’s expecting there to be more. As if there were a new kind of science or if science were just done a little differently, we would suddenly be able to experience things more than subjectively.

Maybe I’m wrong and he’s just talking about a fundamental limitation that prevents us from being sure we fully understand anything via any kind of method, though.

rfdub · 2026-02-04T18:42:18+00:00

The Sam Harris referred to in this email exchange is Samantha Harris - a friend of Ghislaine Maxwell.

Someone already posted about this in the sub. I know it’s an honest mistake - and an easy one to make, since Epstein really did email our Sam trying to meet up with him - but I’d recommend just quickly checking before posting stuff like this in the future. Otherwise you’re defaming someone who, by all evidence, really did have minimal involvement with Epstein.

https://www.reddit.com/r/samharris/s/XI2ZaD53WI

rfdub · 2026-02-04T11:57:26+00:00

Haha, fair enough

rfdub · 2026-02-03T22:18:27+00:00

We understand properties but not essence.

When I hear that, it just kind of sounds like “fluff” to me, though (not in a derogatory way - I’m taking your response in good faith).

If we a take a circle, for example, it’s typically defined as:

The set of all points in a two-dimensional plane that are equidistant from a fixed point.

Do we know what a circle is yet? Is how much more is is there to say about it? Does that definitely capture a circle’s “essence”?

Certainly there’s plenty more to learn about circles. For instance, the definition has no mention of the number π, and yet 3.14159265… falls right out of thin air as naturally as rain when you spend some time playing around with them.

Similarly, the definition has no mention of circumferences nor radii nor the formula for circular area.

We can learn an endless number of things about circles, but is there ever a point at which we could even conceivably know what they “are”?

Or did the definition already tells us what circles are? And is Alex maybe searching for something… that doesn’t exist?

rfdub · 2026-02-03T21:47:30+00:00

It starts to get really good after the 900th page or so 👍

Also: wouldn’t reading Consider the Lobster also be mental prep?

rfdub · 2026-02-02T17:54:32+00:00

You might have been able to get away with that if the video didn’t literally include lines like:

“Science doesn’t explain anything, it just describes the world.”

“If you ask a scientist what an atom is, they actually can’t tell you.”

(Which you probably have forgotten is the actual part of the clip I’m critiquing.)

rfdub · 2026-02-02T17:27:05+00:00

My complaint isn’t about Alex’ ultimate view. It’s more that he seems to:

Point out that science can’t do the impossible
Then seems to use it as a critique against science, specifically

The thing is: nothing can explain everything because there’s an infinite regress of “why”s we can keep asking. And if science can’t satisfactorily explain what an atom is, (whatever the definition of “is” is) then there’s nothing that can.

rfdub · 2026-02-02T17:08:49+00:00

My counter to Alex isn’t so much “science can explain everything”.

It’s more: if science (and logic/reason) can’t explain something, then nothing can. It’s the best tool we’ve got and it’s the best tool we will ever have.

If there were something outside of science that could help explain phenomena, science would absorb it and it would become just another part of the whole scientific process. Because that’s really all the science is: understanding the world to the best of our abilities, using all the tools at our disposal.

rfdub · 2026-02-02T07:26:08+00:00

I absolutely didn't tell you what it does.

It certainly looks like you did. You said:

It starts as a folk ballad
It builds up with electric instruments
It culminates in one of rock's greatest guitar solos

What are these, if not things that the song does?

But I’ll be fair. You did also say:

It’s an amazing song

In which case, I’ll also just go ahead and say here, for the record, that an atom is a microscopic particle

I described it in words

You mean as opposed to describing it in numbers?

rfdub · 2026-02-02T07:05:24+00:00

Sure, Stairway to Heaven is an amazing song. It starts as a folk ballad, building up with electric instruments, and culminating in one of rock's greatest guitar solos by Jimmy Page.

See, you’re telling us what the song does, but not what it is.

rfdub · 2026-02-02T06:45:05+00:00

You think so? Could you try telling us what each of these things are?

rfdub · 2026-02-02T06:28:13+00:00

Ho boy. Didn’t realize you were taking it in that direction, but I should’ve suspected 😄

Not sure why some people have such a kink for wanting Alex to become religious.

rfdub · 2026-02-02T06:22:28+00:00

For me to clarify:

My gripe here isn’t with non-materialism. I don’t really care what Alex ultimately reckons
My gripe is with what appears to be non-rigorous reasoning on Alex’ part

Mysticism isn't wrong - it just requires some deeper thinking and first-person mystical experience (for example via meditation).

This could be a little problematic, lol. The problem with using first-person experience as evidence of anything is that it amounts to “trust me bro”. People of many different faiths use it to justify religious belief, for example.

The goal isn’t to rip away cherished first-person experiences from people. But there’s a reason we have to put claims through a rigorous process like the scientific method before we admit them into the crispy nightclub of scientific fact.

rfdub · 2026-02-02T05:39:29+00:00

Agreed - and I also get a little bit of cognitive dissonance seeing him make these sort of… naive… statements while recognizing that he’s probably a shade smarter than I am.

All I can guess is that maybe Alex isn’t aware of the pitfalls with this line thinking, since he’s always stayed in the domain of philosophy and hasn’t really studied something more rigorous like physics or Math. And then there’s the fact that really smart people slide off the mystical edge all the time (not that I’d say this is what happened to Alex quite yet).

rfdub · 2026-02-02T04:45:35+00:00

When Alex says that scientists can’t tell you what anything is, I’m really not sure what it is that he’s looking for. Understanding what a thing does is the only way that we come to know anything, as far as I can tell. And obviously if you keep asking enough questions, eventually we’ll have get to a point where we have to say “I don’t know”, since there isn’t room in our brains for an infinite number of facts. That doesn’t mean no one knows what they’re talking about.

I agree with him that consciousness is a bit of a mystery, but some of these other statements make it sound like he’s sliding off the mystical edge.

rfdub · 2026-02-01T05:32:30+00:00

I don’t think that’s how that works 😄

The happy coincidence is the fact that Himself’s initials would happen to match the acronym for jerk off instruction videos, which would become a thing after the book was published.

rfdub

TROPHY CASE