For me it is the fact that our blood contains iron. I earlier used to believe the word stood for some ‘organic element’ since I couldn’t accept we had metal flowing through our supposed carbon-based bodies, till I realized that is where the taste and smell of blood comes from.
Yo OP. We’re carbon based, which you accept. Diamond is stronger than almost all metal, and it’s pure carbon. Why wouldn’t we have metal in our veins? We atomically won that round before inflation was even over.
I’m just playin, carbon under high enough pressure is metal too.
Twice over, my favorite fact is that humanity has only existed during the time frames that the moon and the sun have been the same size in our sky, this allowing total eclipse - which is so obviously ridiculously rare I don’t see the point in quantifying with maths.
I think it’s bizarre to think we have free will. Everywhere around us, in all our tech, tools, toys we see the realities of determinism. Cause and effect. To think that our minds are somehow not governed by this in a universe that unequivocally is is beyond Babel levels of arrogance.
Beyond that, the idea that’s gaining ground about shared consciousness I find really intriguing. Rather fascinating stuff.
Consciousness is the biggest mystery of the all, after all.
I think it’s bizarre to think we have free will. Everywhere around us, in all our tech, tools, toys we see the realities of determinism. Cause and effect. To think that our minds are somehow not governed by this in a universe that unequivocally is is beyond Babel levels of arrogance.
Huh, I always thought of us having free will in response to cause and efect, not in place of it. But maybe I’m understanding free will differently?
sometimes your brain will decide something independently of conscious thought, and then invent a compelling narrative for why you are about to do what your brain already decided you were going to do
This kind of effect can be seen when a split brain person reacts to textual commands, like “stand up” seen on a computer screen in front of them only one eye can see by standing up, but when asked verbally why they stood up they just make up some shit on the fly like “I was tired of sitting and wanted to stretch my legs”
We’re just narrative machines (no, not like ChatGPT)
It could be asserted that none of our decisions are ever actually real, and its all just a series of these ‘decisions’ that are just invented by your brain to explain why you’re doing what you were always going to do, and thus you don’t have free will you just tell yourself that you do as a nice story.
I don’t believe that, I think that assertion is a bit like last tuesdayism and I dislike the unfalsifiablity of it, but yeah I get the argument
I think Camus might have summed it up best when he said the only real choice (therefore, freedom to exercise will) humanity has is whether or not to commit suicide.
Whether or not free will is “real” in some rigidly technical measurable way, we have never known anything different than what we now experience as living beings. To me, telling people “free will doesn’t exist!” is like telling them “you don’t meet arbitrary standards of self-actualization that don’t really exist anywhere else either!” and it has roughly the same effect on me: none, except that the speaker (in my experience, including offline conversations) often comes across as talking down to other people and maybe making them feel less good about their lived experiences.
I’m not religious, but I feel the same way about the kind of person that’d feel compelled to sneer “god’s not real” at a religious funeral to feel superior.
I had a conversation with my neighbor along those lines. He reads his Bible everyday. I asked him if he knew that God were real, 100%, something/someone he could reach out and touch, if that would change how he lives his life.
I answered before he had a chance and said in no way would it change mine. I live my values. He said it wouldn’t effect him either, and I believe, he is a genuinely great guy. But the fact that that would change soooo many people is either terrifying or makes me super grateful that they have their reasons to not indulge their worst instincts.
Both are unsettling, really.
There’s quite a few versions of God that have hard determinism built right in, too. It’s God’s will that everything has a linear course, nothing can be changed, no choices are made, which means people are predestined to be punished for things they literally have no choice in.
In my opinion that’s crushingly bleak and believing in and outright praising any sort of divine creator that’d punish their own creations for doing exactly what was planned for them is fucked up on so many levels.
I suppose such an entity would be an interesting premise for very dark horror literature.
If the universe is deterministic, it means that every particle has an infinitely predictable path. And our body and brain are full of particles which could only ever move in the predetermined way. And because our thoughts are only movements of neurone, which in turn, as everything, are made of particles, every action of ours would be predetermined and we could never decide otherwise than we did.
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How would our minds not being governed by this universe imply free will?
If anything, I’d assume the you don’t have free will if your actions weren’t chosen from experience, but were controlled by a supernatural ghost.
We do have metal in our veins. Blood has metallic taste precisely because of iron, which carries oxygen through our body.
Metal has no taste tho. What yr tasting is you. VSauce or Nilered did a video about it.
You can test it yourself, just degrease and wash a coin. Once clean, no taste.
Of course it is not free metal. Probably oxide. And no, I am not going to taste rust.
Years upon years of being told this cannot make me not taste metal from stainless steel cups/canteens and forks, even brand new and/or freshly scrubbed to hell and back. I can’t use stainless steel tumblers because of this - even if I keep my tongue well away from it, and it’s the cleanest dish in the world, it makes the drink taste metallic. No amount of youtubers just insisting I don’t/can’t taste a thing can actually compete with a lifetime of experiencing this problem. And I have, multiple times, tried all the things they say to do to fix the “real” problem - but no. Steel tastes like steel, always.
Hypothesis: this is one of those things some people can taste and others can’t, like how there’s a whole group of “cilantro tastes like soap” people and everyone else is like ???
Except the universe is full of non-determinism that we work hard to keep quiet in our toys.
I’m mostly with you except for the determinism. Not only do we KNOW that the universe is fundamentally probabilistic and not deterministic, all our technology works extremely hard to combat random errors because small electronics are absolutely not deterministic, they are just engineered to have a low enough randomness so we can counteract it.
Did something change? Last time I checked we didn’t know whether in the grand scale the universe is or isn’t deterministic.
That we know that the universe isn’t (seemingly) deterministic locally doesn’t change anything about that.
I’m pretty sure it is essentially that any propensity the macro-scale universe has for the appearance of determinism is an illusion since the fundamental scales of the universe and everything it is built on are probabilistic. Nothing built on probabilistic foundations can be deterministic. It can appear to be. In large enough samples the law of large numbers smooths all the chaos out, but that is all our world is. Mathematically smoothed chaos. We as a species have known that for a very long time, but it has only begun to permeate the social zeitgeist in recent years and there is still a lot of pushback from certain sections of society.
The best theories are non-deterministic, but of course we don’t know if they are the last word about reality. To put it another way, we don’t know why the math is non-deterministic in our best equations.
The old equations were deterministic, but they turned out to be wrong. Something similar may happen here.
Allowing for quantum randomness does not help the free will argument. Randomness might be “free”, but it is certainly not but “will”.
But it does. If the universe was deterministic, choice would be impossible because all outcomes would be predetermined.
Quantum randomness may not directly provide free will but it does exclude determinism, which would make free will impossible.
This “choice” is just the manifestation what you are at that moment, the sum of everything that has influenced you up until this point. Whether that complex tangle of cause and effect was “determined” a million years ago or affected by random fluctuations the whole way, including a moment ago, doesn’t change anything. “Free will” just doesn’t make any sense, regardless of whether one considers predeterminism to be the alternative.
We don’t know whether the universe is deterministic, though. That’s the only slimmer of hope for free will we can have.
The fun thing is, even if we assume our consciousness isn’t entirely deterministic, the most reasonable alternative would be pure randomness.
Which, in the end, makes absolutely no difference in the free will argument.
Let’s stick with the iron in your hemoglobin for some more weirdness. The body knows iron is hard to uptake, so when you bleed a lot under your skin and get a bruise, the body re-uptakes everything it can. Those color changes as the bruise goes away is part of the synthesis of compounds to get the good stuff back into the body, and send the rest away as waste.
In the other direction, coronaviruses can denature the iron from your hemoglobin. So some covid patients end up with terrible oxygen levels because the virus is dumping iron product in the blood, no longer able to take in oxygen. I am a paramedic and didn’t believe this second one either, but on researching it explained to me why these patients were having so much trouble breathing on low concentration oxygen… the oxygen was there, but the transport system had lost the ability to carry it.
Everything is illegal in the DPRK except if you are the current Supreme Leader, in which case everything is legal.
Queuing theory can have some fun surprises.
Suppose a small bank has only one teller. Customers take an average of 10 minutes to serve and they arrive at the rate of 5.8 per hour. With only one teller, customers will have to wait nearly five hours on average before they are served. If you add a second teller the average wait becomes 3 minutes.
We can’t touch objects, ever. Most of the space “occupied” by an atom is emptiness (which is another rabbit hole I’m not willing to go down), and when we “touch” an object, it’s just a force field pushing the atoms apart. It’s the same reason why we don’t fall apart into atoms - some invisible force just really wants our atoms to stay together.
Your asswhole can stretch up to 8 inches without permanent deformation.
Also an adult raccoon can fit into a 4.5 inch hole.
Do with that info as you wish
There’s no such thing as tides. Gravity holds the water as the earth rotates
Calcium is a metal. We have metal bones.
They sure don’t feel metal.
By the sound mine make I would have thought free jazz.
From Wikipedia on bones:
Bone matrix is 90 to 95% composed of elastic collagen fibers, also known as ossein,[5] and the remainder is ground substance.[6] The elasticity of collagen improves fracture resistance.[7] The matrix is hardened by the binding of inorganic mineral salt, calcium phosphate, in a chemical arrangement known as bone mineral, a form of calcium apatite.[9]
So the statement is a bit faulty, not only because of the relative low amount of calcium in our bones, but also because it appears as a mineral. We distinguish between salts and metals because of their chemical properties being quite different (solubility, reflectiveness, electrical conductivity, maleability and so on).
Edit: I do realize the point of the comment was not to be entirely factual, so if I am allowed as well I would say science is pretty metal.
We also distinguish between metals and non-metals by field of study. Ask an astronomer which elements are metals sometime.
How so? I thought they were mostly determined by their positions in the table of periodic elements.
Lol, they are. In astronomy anything heavier than Helium. is considered a metal.
Well TIL. It makes sense that from an astronomical perspective the use of metal as a qualitative distinction of material properties makes less sense than as a distinction of mass.
Thanks for the reality injection!
The statement was glib but even the partial truth of it made me wonder when I first learned it.
Nigel?
Oh my… I refuse to accept this as reality
We’re all organically powered metal meat machines? 😭
The meat is suffused with more metal throughout it
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In the same sense that we contain a massive volume of gas, because there is a lot of hydrogen in our bodies. Yes, hydrogen is a gas, and yes, there is a lot of it on our body. But it’s bound, so it doesn’t count.
It would be more accurate to call it stone than metal, because the calcium in our bones is also bound to other elements, which means it does not exhibit its usual metal characteristics.
That stuff about metal is really counterintuitive, because normally when we talk about iron, gold, copper, nickel, zinc, magnesium, aluminium etc it’s usually about the element in its metallic form. However, when you study chemistry a bit more, you’ll come to realize metals can be dissolved in water and they can be a part of a completely different compound too.
Calcium, sodium and potassium are basically the exact opposite in this regard. Normally when people talk about these metals, they are referring to various compounds that obviously aren’t metallic at all. This leads to people thinking of these elements as non-metallic, but it is possible to purify them to such an extent that you are left with nothing but the metal.
In the case of Ca, Na and K, the resulting metal is highly reactive in our aggressive atmosphere, so that’s why we rarely see these elements in a metallic form. Our atmosphere contains water and oxygen, which makes it an incredibly hostile environment for metals like this. Imagine, we’re breathing this stuff that attacks so many elements mercilessly.
There’s a giant ball of extremely hot plasma in the sky and we aren’t supposed to look at it. What is it hiding? Surely if someone managed to look at it long enough, they would see the truth!
I’ve seen some of its secrets during the eclipse. It’s an angry, writhing tentacled thing. Be thankful it’s so far away.
Don’t look up!
Scientists look at it. That’s where they get all their sciencing from. The forbidden knowledges comes from the sun.
I often used to look at it as a child, however the adults wouldn’t let me. I knew there was some ulterior motive behind it.
“You look unhealthy! You should go stand in that really large room and absorb the radiation from that gigantic space-based fusion reactor more!”
You’re right, that sounds like a great idea.
I had the same thought so I looked directly at it everyday during an hour at sunset for a year, it was intense and an interesting feeling, it is called sungazing.
Planets and stars and galaxies are there. You can see them because they’re right over there. Like, the moon is a big fucking rock flying around the earth. Jupiter is even bigger. I see it through a telescope and think “wow that’s pretty,” but every once in a while I let it hit me that I’m looking at an unimaginably large ball of gas, and it’s, like, over there. Same as the building across the street, just a bit farther.
The stars, too. Bit farther than Jupiter, even, but they’re right there. I can point at one and say “look at that pretty star” and right now, a long distance away, it’s just a giant ball of plasma and our sun is just another point of light in its sky. And then I think about if there’s life around those stars, and if our star captivates Albireoans the same way their star captivates me.
And then I think about those distant galaxies, the ones we send multi-billion dollar telescopes up to space to take pictures of. It’s over there too, just a bit farther than any of the balls of plasma visible to our eyes. Do the people living in those galaxies point their telescopes at us and marvel at how distant we are? Do they point their telescopes in the opposite direction and see galaxies another universe away from us? Are there infinite distant galaxies?
Anyway I should get back to work so I can make rent this month
If I point my finger at one of those galaxies, there’s more gas and shit between us within a hundred miles of me than there is in the rest of the space between us combined
You should try Space Engine. It’s a program to explore the universe, based on real telescope data. It also has the ability to procedurally generate galaxies, planets, and stars in unobserved parts of the universe.
I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.
People don’t realize how crazy it is to have a moon orbiting earth
A moon isn’t that strange, our moon is.
First, it is massive compared to Earth. The mass of the Moon is so large that it messed with definitions of planets and plutinos.
Second, the Moon’s size and distance from Earth is a near match for the Sun’s, which is really rare.
And for a strange fact, the Moon is about as reflective as worn asphalt. The Moon looks white in photos of just itself, but it is a dark grey when in photos with Earth.
First time I saw Jupiter through a telescope I got hit hard by the feeling: “Oh shit, that giant monster is real”.
Samesies. You aren’t alone. We have a support group.
In the same vein, I like to remind myself that every field in physics is literally happening all around me, right now, and it always has been, in fact, I’ve never seen anything without these invisible fields in it and for some reason, that really makes me super aware of our place in the order of magnitudes.
It’s wild we can see so much further down than up.
“Just a bit farther” is quite the understatement!
“I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
What’s even more fascinating is that most of the stars we see in the sky are afterimages of primitive stars that died out long ago yet they shine as bright as the stars alive today
That doesn’t seem right. The galaxy is only 100,000 light years across (give or take) and the life span of stars is measured in billions of years.
Most of the stars we see are in our galaxy, so at most, we are seeing them as they were 100,000 years ago, which means that the vast majority of them will still be around, and looking much the same as they did 100,000 years ago.
I seem to have made a mistake then. Thank you for correcting it.
Thinking about it further, if we’re talking about stars that we can see with telescopes, Hubble, James Webb etc, then you’re on the money. Stars in remote galaxies far outnumber the ones in our galaxy and show us glimpses of the early stages of the universe. And many of those stars are long gone
Not too sure where you got that number from. From what I can find, the radius of the observable universe is estimated to be about 46.5 billion light-years.
Edit: I see now that you are talking Galaxy. That’s different.
The original comment was about stars we can see in the sky, so I was assuming naked eye
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I can really relate to this. I remember a weird night in my teens where I must’ve spent at least an hour staring out of my bedroom window at the moon, because really for the first time I’d had the exact same thought. It’s right there. It’s so easy to get desensitised to that and to just think of it all as an image projected on the sky. The thought has never really left me and even now I still linger on the moon every time I see it and try to acknowledge that it is a 3 dimensional object lol.
The fact that the moon is tidally locked probably doesn’t help, if it rotated it would be easier to see it as a sphere instead of an image
Women have orgasms
Jesus Christ people it’s a joke
It would be less funny if there were no downvotes
reported for misinfo
Humans can smell rain better than a shark can smell blood.
The speed of advancement from the industrial revolution to present.
The relatively short time humanity has been around
The universe is finite but expanding
The Monty Hall problem
The absolute scale of devastation created by humanity
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