Being and Nothingness
and and and i want to thank everyone for
being here because i’m excited
in these trying times where everything
seems to be contentious
i think there are two fundamental truths
to which we can agree upon
uh you are living the person watching
and i am living
and and these are things we can all
agree upon right and
and i actually think maybe not and so in
the next
20 minutes i’m going to talk about being
in nothingness what it means to be
and what it means to be nothing at all
and um
the people at ted unionville have told
me to stay away from anything divisive
and i’ve given them my word
but i want to warn you in advance that
some of the topics we’re going to be
talking about aren’t easy
uh they’re not simple and they are in my
opinion the most important questions we
can ask ourselves as humans
and the most important questions that
have and ever will exist and uh with
this
um there’s several sides in which you
can see this so i’m really looking
forward to this discussion and debate
so for the philosophically astute you
may have realized that i’ve just stolen
something
now these words being in nothingness
they they aren’t mine
they belong to this guy french
philosopher and writer john paul
and in his book being in nothingness he
talks about existentialism
now fortunately for all of you we won’t
be talking about that i just like
the the choice this this binary decision
to exist or not to exist
to live or not to live and to be or not
to be
and i want you to keep this question in
your mind throughout the next 20 minutes
what does it mean to be alive i think
it’s pretty evident uh when if you’re
watching this that
you know you are living but why
and in order to answer this question and
evaluate the ramifications it has
and in order to answer the question of
how we know that humans are living right
now
i actually think we have to ask another
question first
why were viruses not living 100 years
ago and
so obviously we’re in the middle of a
pandemic which is why i’m not in
unionville right now and the last time
we had a pandemic of this magnitude
it was in 1918. and actually if you
think it’s confusing right now and we
don’t know a lot about
uh diseases you have no idea how poor
the knowledge of infectious diseases was
back then
for years it was hypothesized that the
so-called spanish flu was actually a
bacteria
and with the discovery of viruses
another monumental question came up
what are these things and are they
living and this is actually a debate
that’s been roaring on for decades in
the scientific community so in trying to
define
what exactly life is i reckoned i had to
ask myself this question too
so i picked up this book off my desk
vulcan wheeler’s basic microbiology’s
fourth edition of 1973
and i flipped a section about viruses
and fair warning
um i’ll actually admit that i’m in a
select minority people
who believe that viruses are living and
it’s not because they
define the criteria of livelihood it’s
because
other organisms including ourselves do
not
now please allow me to explain one of
the first criteria that vulcan wheeler
site and a lot of people cite is that
viruses aren’t self-sustaining without a
host they simply can’t survive and
replicate
so here we have a virus the coronavirus
and without a host of viruses just
nothing it needs us now please get
acquainted with this picture of me at
yellowstone because i’ll be using it a
lot
but i ask you this i mean really think
about it right now
could you live without a host i mean
take everything
every single thing you know away from
you and ask yourself
could you live and this might seem sort
of a silly question of course not
but we sort of trick ourselves and
here’s how i view it there’s sort of two
relationships here
first there’s humans and viruses viruses
need humans to survive and reproduce
we know this and in return what does the
human get
well nothing really and then the second
dynamic is of humans in our hosts the
planet
and we need the planet in order to
survive and reproduce and in return
we don’t really provide much i mean
entire states are burning right now
the result of subterraneous uh
bombardment and superterraneous
emissions
so this self-sustenance argument it’s
sort of malarkey to me because if
viruses are not self-sustaining
then neither are we and the second line
of defense for vulcan wheeler and a ton
of other people is energy and
temperature
well they can’t regulate how they use
their energy or even if they make energy
and they can’t regulate their
temperature
and my answer to that is what about
these guys
who spend entire months not using their
energy
or these guys cyclophilic bacteria that
can live under permafrost
for millennia and then just activate in
any given second
and as for temperature they don’t
regulate their temperature well
neither does this lizard or this fish in
lake tanganyika which has to live in
certain currents
in order to regulate its internal ac and
then the final line of defense and the
one i’m most vehemently opposed to
is of waste and stimuli viruses don’t
produce waste and they don’t respond to
stimuli
viruses produce a lot of waste in every
single cell they destroy and
not to be morbid in the victims that
they take
and as for stimuli viruses can stay in
genomes
for millennia or generations and
while this isn’t like swerving the car
at the last second i think it’s much
much cooler
they’re actually able to sense when a
bacteria undergoes something called an
sos or save our ship response
that’s when the bacteria freaks out
because it’s not really living in a
suitable place
and then immediately the virus can just
emerge and say well i’m out of here
that’s some stimulus and you’ll actually
notice a trend going on here every time
we’re bringing up
a reason for something to be living it’s
immediately shot down
and that’s because living is a human
concept now this might seem obvious to
you but every single way in which we
define life
is based on humans we’re self-sustained
because as
of now we have the blessing of being on
a habitable host
we consume energy by eating
cheeseburgers we regulate our
temperature internally but also
outwardly through our innervations
we emit waste through removing of those
cheeseburgers
and we respond to stimuli by say putting
up an umbrella
and quite frankly i could care less if
we define cheeseburgers or
umbrellas or viruses as living i don’t
care i’m here to talk about us
but here’s my problem essentially what
we’re doing is we’re standing in front
of a mirror
and we’re only seeing ourselves and
instead of saying oh so this is what it
means to be human we’re saying
so this is what it means to be living
and that is something that i care about
because i think by promoting ourselves
to this position of decision we actually
exclude ourselves from the fundamental
laws of existence
and what are these fundamental laws well
here’s a way to think about it
i’ve made here a venn diagram of life
and on the left we have the living and
on the right we have the non-living
and you’ll notice that i’ve actually put
humans on the outside
because if you’ll remember we’re the
ones making the rules and so
as for living we’ll put this fish from
lake tanganyika
and non-living this cheeseburger that is
no longer living
and you know what just for vulcan
wheeler and if you’re still not
convinced
we’ll put viruses in the middle because
it’s sort of an a so we’ve
we’ve solved existence right we’ve
solved livelihood we know it’s living we
know it’s not living we know
where we stand in all of this except not
really
because there’s something missing here
there’s a bigger ring
and it’s existence and we can’t see it
because we are inside it
it’s bigger than our arbitrary notions
of life and non-life it’s bigger than us
actually
it’s everything we know every thought
every every discovery because it’s
existence and we cannot see beyond it
now you might say something well like
unicorns don’t exist but strictly
speaking they do
though they’re fictive they belong to a
realm of existence
just as you can’t imagine a new color
you can’t imagine something that doesn’t
exist
now you might be saying well alex you’ve
changed the definitions of what it means
to be living or existing
what are the definitions and i actually
think we can define
existence and we can define livelihood
and i’m calling the rules by which we do
so the undeniable lemmas
now i want to warn you that i’m going to
use some terms in the next slide which
we typically don’t assign to non-living
things
and some people might be uh very opposed
to this
or i’m sort of personifying things that
i can’t really personify
and that’s intentional all right here we
go we’re about to define life
number one existing things want to be
stable
and number two living things will go out
of their way
to do so in other words they’re selfish
and the descent to chaos and loss of
entropy that we call the universe i
proclaim that every single existing
thing
is just trying to return to stability
now at this point you’re probably not
even listening what i’m saying
that’s the automatic response right you
want to think of a counter example to
this well what about what about
hurricanes or earthquakes those don’t
seem very stable to me
and i want to make the point here that i
didn’t say that existing things are
stable
existing things want to be stable and
life
what i think is living is just the
endless pursuit to those means
so if i put this pin down it’s just
going to stay there
because this is the most stable it can
be in its given environment
this might not be the most stable it can
be anywhere but this is where it’s at
right now as for me i’m constantly
readjusting myself wanting to maximize
my stability at
any given state but i can do so actively
because i’m living
now i’m not just going to suggest these
rules without any logical grounding in
order for these rules to be true
a universal constant must exist and
luckily i think you’ve already heard of
it
you’ve probably heard of this constant
in a high school chemistry class
it’s the atom now i know we have string
theory and i know it gets smaller
but never mind that string corks atoms
onion rings mix mix and match whatever
you want it’s all the same for our
purposes
atoms will bind twist exist in multiple
states fuse
fizz do basically anything to ensure
stability
and it shouldn’t be a revelation to you
this is actually pretty easy for most
people to understand these bundles of
chargers are forever wanting to remain
intact and in the most stable state
and when these things assemble and do
all sorts of wacky things which makes
even more wacky things and even more
wacky things until we get
until we get what we can eventually
consider the boundary of life and
non-life
the cell we’ve done something remarkable
we have made
something living out of entirely
non-living things
that is absolutely insane but really
that living breathing cell is
nothing more than an unfathomable amount
of atoms
and since we know how atoms behave we
know how cells behave
and this just continues onwards because
beyond cells we have tissues
and organs and organ systems and
organisms
and the issue is still the same and
above organisms we have ecosystems and
planets and solar systems and galaxies
and eventually the universe
but still the story is the same
everything is made up of these little
guys and so in principle everything
behaves like these little guys
wanting to be stable and if you’re still
unsure
consider these delicious looking baked
goods a sponge cake and a baguette
now if you’ve only ever had one of these
in your life shame on you but
if you’ve had one of these you can
probably predict what the other one
tastes like
that’s because they’re essentially made
up of the same things you might not get
it perfectly
but you definitely know what it doesn’t
taste like you’re right you’re not going
to buy into that sponge cake into taste
prime rib
and this is because the universe
operates in the same way these two baked
goods do
the behavior of entities is predictable
because these entities are composed in a
similar fashion
you know just because i’m made up of the
same atoms as this computer
doesn’t mean i’m going to be exactly
like it but there are some fundamental
rules which we seem to neglect because
we
think we are defined by certain criteria
and so everything i’ve been saying so
far sort of abstract and i get that you
might be wondering what exactly are the
applications of all of this
if you haven’t been paying closely now’s
the time because if things
are predictable if what i’m saying is
true if every entity just abides by
these rules of maximum stability
then this is also true that when i have
a thought any thought
that when i say i want a bad debt that
in everything i do
that decision isn’t in the conventional
sense mine
and this is what we call determinism
that every decision is made of the
coordination of an infinite amount of
proceeding decisions
each out of our control and this usually
offends a lot of people because we want
to
think we are in control i want to make a
distinction here
this isn’t the same as fatalism fatalism
is the notion that something is going to
happen and what happens in the middle
doesn’t matter
and i’m really opposed to that what
happens in the middle does matter
because it’s delicious
it’s life and we can’t just put our
hands in there and say well it doesn’t
matter if it’s destined there are too
many variables
because that’s precisely the point there
are too many variables
so i want to dive just a little bit
deeper in order to emphasize this point
whether or not you’re a determinist
which is unlikely you’re probably not
what i am
which is an absolute determinist now
conventional determinism is based on the
principle that voluntary actions
particularly monumental ones are
scripted bound to the conglomeration of
antecedent occurrence
so what that means is when you think
you’re making a decision
there really was no alternative so say i
make the decision to move my knee here
it’s just the confluence of past
decisions
past things that have made me do this
but nonetheless
i’m moving my knee i was always going to
pick move right
what if this happens what if i’m just
standing there and my knee twitches
now this is entirely different right
that or i didn’t make that decision for
my knee to twitch
and so if i didn’t make a decision how
can it be scripted
well i actually argue that they’re the
exact same that the cause and the effect
are the same so the phenomenon is the
same
a perturbation in balance resulting in
an action
so whether you’re thinking about it or
not the choice isn’t
yours and you might be realizing that
there’s a problem here
because if every choice or every
decision
was based on previous decisions where
does it end
if everything was done in the
jurisdiction of the previous thing what
was the first
thing right we can keep going back but
there’s a certain point it’s a sort of
mental big bang there’s this event
horizon
can’t trace all the way up to the origin
this is a problem
i call it the originator problem but it
doesn’t have to be a problem
and here’s why it doesn’t actually
matter if we need to know the originator
for some it’s god for some it’s a big
bang maybe it’s a combination of both
no matter what your revolution is it
really doesn’t matter
because the what follows is the exact
same
this quote from philosopher daniel
didn’t i think sums it up perfectly a
process with no intelligent designer
in this case it means it doesn’t matter
who it is or what you believe in
can create intelligent designers who can
then design
things that permit us to understand
how a process with no intelligent
designers can create intelligent
designers
who can design things what does this
mean
it means the origin does not have to
control what happens
afterwards we don’t need know something
at the onset
to know its final result and for me this
means one last thing
everything simple or complex is made up
of the same self-interested stable
craving things and if that’s the case is
there such thing as altruism
that is is there such thing as not being
selfish now for the one person still
holding onto my case and believing what
i’m saying
i might turn you off here because i say
no instead
i think existence has triple
egocentricism and i’m going to show you
with a colony of ants
so the first selfishness i call
pronounced and this is when people do
things for their own benefit
so in this case the ant is saying i want
this food the motivation is the self and
the recipient is the self
this isn’t hard for us to understand
because this is what we conventionally
call
selfishness the second kind which i’m
calling mast
is what we typically think of when we
think of altruism of helping others
and this is how this works basically an
ant says i want to work for someone else
and get them food
and that’s great they’re working for
others but the motivation here whether
consciously or not is societal return
because biologically these organisms and
all entities
are programmed to work for themselves
the recipient of course is others but
they’re still the self
and usually when i have these
conversations with people and they’re
really against this notion of their only
being ecocentricism
they push it to the extreme and that’s
led me to make a third group of
egocentricism
what i call rebuke egocentricism and the
idea here is basically people say well
what about the most extreme case
sacrifice how can that be
not selfish
and i actually think that it’s no
different than mass
of course sacrifice is an immeasurable
action i and many others will never
understand
but there’s still an inherent
evolutionary societal obligation the
pressure
of resolve is at once beneficial to the
self and the other
and this is sort of depressing right if
we think we don’t decide our outcomes
and we act in our own interests
i mean this ted talk is about together
we stand what are you doing alex
you know if we don’t decide our outcome
and we act in our own interest are we
not what the french flawless for rene
descartes
suggested animal or human machines
and i say no and i say no because of
this guy
because of daniel didn’t it because all
of the brilliance and comprehension in
the world arises ultimately out of the
uncomprehending competences compounded
over time into ever more competent
and hence comprehending systems what
does that mean
it means it’s okay to not be in control
to be an assemblage of self-interested
particle physics miracles
we are humans we are the product of an
infinitely unlikely process that has
yielded agents capable of
introspectively analyzing our origins
that is so cool and obviously there are
implications to what i’m saying
if we really only act in our own
interests and we can’t decide how we act
what does that mean for things like
liability if someone commits a crime
was there any alternative or heroism
what does it mean to be a hero
or faith or love and what i find most
interesting
death how do we define death if life is
simply a pursuit
of stability and these are scary issues
but i think it’s okay for them to be
scary because as sartre told us in being
in nothingness
it is therefore senseless to think of
complaining since nothing foreign has
decided what we feel what we live
or what we are you should not be
offended by the fact
that our outcomes aren’t really our own
or that any of them are intended to
serve our own
you know whether or not you agree with
me these are not things that should
offend you
and here’s why because no matter how or
why
or when you’re listening to this as you
look into your screen of nothingness
knowing that you are made up of the
exact same things at the core
and you know that you are being that
alone
should be more than enough thank you