Christmas Lecture 05: Virtual Reality: Can You Believe What You See?

[@77zztop]

This is the kind of science classes I would have loooved to attend as a child - glad I got to catch up. Thank you

[@meridianheights6255]

Richard Dawkins is one of my all-time favorite humans. This series should be shown in all classrooms, in every city, state, country, in the world, for the sake of the progress of mankind. It's time for the human race to grow up, and leave behind it's many superstitions. Thank you for this important contribution to science, rationality, and reason.

[@terrymckenzie8786]

I agree with you so much, but there is a slew of angry religious evangelicals in America that are a far way from leaving their superstitions.

[@fionagregory9147]

Yanks ​have God and the gun.

[@gemmajackson5446]

💯

[@ericdenton9663]

These lectures are a true gift.

[@shawnosborn8887]

I love your views Dr. Dawkins. Thank you for your logic and reason.

[@auroravanessa221]

Thank you, Professor. I extend my heartfelt gratitude to you for your unwavering dedication to truth and science. Your passion has been a guiding light, inspiring countless individuals, myself included, to delve into the depths of knowledge and embrace the pursuit of understanding. Your eloquence in communicating scientific principles has made complex concepts accessible to a broad audience, fostering a love for inquiry and rational thinking. Your contributions have left an indelible mark on the scientific community and have played a pivotal role in shaping the intellectual landscape. Thank you for your tireless commitment to the pursuit of knowledge and the advancement of science 🙏🏻🤍

[@louisehaley5105]

A delicious combination of intelligence and good looks. Like Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins made science sexy. I was blown away by these wonderful lectures when I first saw them back in ‘91. Years later when watching them on KZbin I was delighted to see they were presented by the same Richard Dawkins who wrote “The God Delusion”, a book that changed my life, A superb communicator of science and morality.

[@jlankford]

It’s amazing to me that in the early 90s Richard could encourage young people to question their religious views but in 2024, in the US, a science instructor can be fired for showing young people the differences of myth (religion) and reality.

[@bouzoukiman5000]

We have to shun people like that and make them want to crawl back into their caves

[@gps9715]

This isn't true at all. Religious dogma was much stronger in the US in the 90s than now. Much, much stronger.

[@bronze2956]

@@gps9715 Teachers are being fired for knowing that men can't magically change into women, no matter how delusional they are and don't deserve to be in teenage girls spaces.

[@gemmajackson5446]

If i had richard dawkins as a teacher, i'd have listened and done well!! So interesting and eloquent

[@louisehaley5105]

49:23 - I love how even then, RD was having a go at religion.

[@carld9451]

Have learnt more of this remarkable man in a couple of watches than what I learnt rite rite throo school ha ha brilliant

[@dancemachine497]

captivating lecture, learnt so much.

[@louisehaley5105]

30:47- ironically, unlike the human brain which gets bigger the smarter we become, computers become smaller the smarter they become.

[@kennypowers1945]

In some sense yes, but our most intelligent computers are huge

[@tonylipsmire5918]

I may be a dummy but I’m 28 and still enjoy these

[@kennypowers1945]

Crazy to think they had working virtual reality in the 90s

[@tommyvictorbuch6960]

"Science doesn't know everything, religion doesn't know anything" - Aron Ra -

[@Namtucket]

Ty Richard ❤

[@milanmasat8248]

Thank you, nice lectures.

[@Namtucket]

Love u Dawkins

[@mattkennedy667]

Wrong about baseball caps and those bloomin turtles! 😂

[@ebptube]

Lovely lectures and a 30 year old VR headset! Must be one of the first ones...

[@DeconvertedMan]

wow that VR tech XD

[@NICE-NG163]

We must never forget when they coerced the children into being used as shields to temporarily and marginally "protect" adults.

[@wonder_platypus8337]

What the fuck are you talking about?

[@ALavin-en1kr]

A further note it is now in question in a quantum world if life began with the cell and also the latest information about the complexities of DNA where exactly life started, so it is in no way resolved at the physical level.

[@DeconvertedMan]

so cool :)

[@MS-od7je]

Understand why the brain is a Mandelbrot set complex morphology.

[@fionagregory9147]

He was nice looking when younger.

[@DHead5150]

Is this the regular meeting of NAMBLA?

[@yoshtg]

8:32 here is a human brain in a rather unfortunate state, its in a pickle WHAT A PUN why did nobody laugh

[@Permadose]

Because he says it’s “in pickle” or like Americans might say pickled. So it wasn’t a joke to laugh at that’s why no one laughed.

[@kennypowers1945]

@@Permadoseexactly lol. It wasn’t a joke

[@ALavin-en1kr]

The definition of religion is that to which we are bound, so religion and what is perceived as reality are not oppositional states but synonymous. This is something that materialists do not comprehend. If ‘the hard problem of consciousness’ is understood; if it is fundamental and is all there is, predating quantum events, (with mind emerging in consciousness through vibration at the quantum level), is known and understood, it would solve a lot. However, materialists are no where there yet, and as we are living in a material age it is harder to comprehend for many, especially those without a religious background. There is consciousness, mind, elements, force, and the elements adhering according to law, enabled by force, this makes a world, a universe(s) whose origin is consciousness, mind, force, elements. The opposing view is elements, force, mind, consciousness. What in Revelation was referred to ‘as the four beasts of the apocalypse: motion, time, space, and the atom. (The meaning of apocalypse is not end times, but life as it is lived). The absence of all these would the Unity that existed before the Fall. Of the three forces it was the weak force (personified as Satan, or the light that fell from heaven) whose fall created a universe; a world in which we have to evolve our way back to unity in consciousness; to cosmic consciousness. Now we are just aware of our internal and external environments. We need instruments as a crutch to know more. Mr Dawkins is clueless, as are all materialists, and with consciousness a mystery, mind not understood; does it emerge with quantum events, are there other forms of electricity, do we know all that is to be known about electromagnetism and what exactly is magnetism? With all this unanswered Mr. Dawkins dogmatic atheism has little ground to stand on, and it answers none of the questions that materialists need to answer if they are to make their case, which as of now they have not made, based on anything that is fundamental. Physical life started with the cell, life itself did not start with the cell. So what is the origin of life if it is not monocular based, what exactly is it based on. Answer that materialists and we will be all ears.

[@louisehaley5105]

47:33 - unfortunately the reverse baseball hat meme is still with us thirty years on ….. (and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles too)

[@saliksayyar9793]

He is getting old. Soon, like everyone. he will face the ultimate reckoning, wonder what emotion will seize him? Fear? Regret?

[@johnnycombs6570]

Blazin a phat one to this...👊😎✌️

[@mikebellamy]

My response to a confused materialist: I was not quoting Claude Shannon! I was revealing what he should have said based on his equation for H which he correctly called UNCERTAINTY! He did not define information in his paper _"roughly"_ or any otherwise but he later said in 'The Bitplayer' _"gibberish contains more information than great literature"_ based on the naturalistic assumption that the BIT is the basic unit of information and gibberish contains the highest count of BIT's.. So your IGNORANCE is showing. James Gleick in his excellent book 'The Information' concluded _"information is uncertainty!"_ It was only Paul Davies who said _"Information is a reduction in uncertainty"_ in his book 'The Matter Myth' which challenges materialism so by repeating that you are in direct contradiction of your own materialistic philosophy! The fact is the p(i)'s in Shannon's equation are the probabilities of the ith symbol *IN A LANGUAGE!* And only a communication of meaning in a language uniquely produces the minimum BIT count. There is no unit of measure of meaning but every instance of what we call information carries it otherwise it is not information. So just counting BIT's has nothing to do with information. Shannon's H function which he called _"uncertainty"_ is similar to Boltzmann's entropy formula for disorder which loosely conforms to uncertainty but they are not equal. However the Second Law is the basis of Shannon's Law which states "noise degrades information." Which falsifies evolution as incapable of creating information from noise (random mutation) which is why materialists like you are so confused. Language is not confined to human beings! Bird calls have meaning which is encoded in sound patterns which are a LANGUAGE known to both sender and receiver. You said _"a mindless proton can be the source of communication that carries a materialistic message to the interpreting scientist"_ Mindless matter is never the _"source"_ of information! It is the observer (scientist) who creates information in a language when he chooses to *interpret* an observation and it always comes from a *mind!*

[@brian-jv9bt]

Can you too pack it in please

[@mikebellamy]

@@brian-jv9bt Well Brian the last thing I want to do is just piss everyone off so thank you for being civil about it. Science is unfortunately a very bloody battleground from which neither side will retreat except I will if I am proved wrong! I hope however some will see that i am actually countering false *assumptions* which are by any measure of the comments here deceiving many people and that is inexcusable. Someone said _"Hell is truth realized too late"_ which was the case with Anthony Flew. Please just think about what I have said.

[@pmfg875]

We have the same eye colour 😊

[@Muonium1]

When people tell me how "amazing" things like Oculus / Meta / whatever the latest VR thing is, this 15:00 is still the intense level of lameness I picture. lol What the heck is that huge chest freezer of a thing running it?? A VAX server?

[@wonder_platypus8337]

Have you tried modern VR? Trust me if you have this as the picture in your head you're way behind the curve.

[@MS-od7je]

Epicycles

[@333Cherubim._.]

Aliens are coming😂😂

[@ETfromEuropa]

Simulation as real as reality 👽☀️🌎

[@reubenyoung70]

Why does he call them chess men

[@reubenyoung70]

Has he never played chess

[@shamanicrevolution2204]

Meta quest 000.1

[@johntumpkin3924]

Hopefully, eyelids would not be anaesthethized open, which would be more than discomforting. However, the eyelids can be closed with a sweep of the hands, although that may invoke images of death.

[@robertmcclintock8701]

(・・;) the demon in sunshine movie is Jesus. It's not reality but people's perceptions. The churches have failed Jesus. Fighting over the star makes more sense than the horrible prophecy Fighting over who knows what.

[@ArlindoPhilosophicalArtist]

I am glad that Dawkins acknowledges the mystery surrounding consciousness, but I wish he had abandoned the materialist doctrine early on as he still betrays the notion that the brain generates consciousness. On my channel I explain why idealism is more compelling than physicalism.

[@Philitron128]

Show me something that can't be explained within a materialistic worldview.

[@ArlindoPhilosophicalArtist]

@@Philitron128 Consciousness. If everything is mental, the mind doesn't go anywhere. You only have these options: 1. Physicalist monism 2. Dualism 3. Idealistic monism 1 and 2 have problems so you are only left with 3 which is the most parsimonious one and the one with least problems. I am only telling you here that I find idealism more compelling than materialism. So, if you ask me, my opinion is that once we shuffle off our mortal coil, we wake up from the 'dream' of life. Presumably, you will no longer identify with your anthropic form just like you no longer identify with your dream body, identity and events when you wake up to realise it was all an illusion. Unfortunately, I cannot tell you what happens as certainty will only come when we experience death directly. Because intrinsically we are a pristine awareness, it could be that our minds are wiped clean to become a tabula rasa (emptier than a baby's mind) becoming awareness of awareness (metacognition) but with a potential to perceive an infinitude of forms. This is speculative, of course. Perhaps we become omniscient as we transcend time and space (forget how crazy this may sound because what we know now would sound crazy to someone in the Middle Ages). The only thing I can infer from everything I have gathered is that experience is perennially continuous because consciousness, as the irreducible ground of existence, cannot be destroyed. Now, I've had a few experiences myself with psychedelics but the people who may provide us with more insight about what's to come (and it may be different for all of us) are those who have had NDEs due to the extreme physical trauma they endured and the fact that medical science can now bring back people well past the former threshold or 'point of no return'. Of course, I don't recommend suicide just to find out directly because, in time, we will eventually know and focus should be placed in this life, in the here and now.

[@ArlindoPhilosophicalArtist]

@@Philitron128 I can tell you why idealism should be the default position: 1. Your mind exists 2. Other minds apart from your own also exist 3. Things independently exist outside minds 4. Things outside minds can generate minds A true sceptic realises that materialism violates Occam's razor and concludes that idealism provides the simplest and most effective, metaphysical explanation of reality. Materialism, or physicalism, requires all these four statements to be true. Idealism only requires the first two to be true. As you can see, materialism requires more leaps of faith than idealism. The only statement that one can be sure of is number one, but in order to avoid the problem of solipsism and pragmatically uphold the theory of mind, both metaphysics must consider that statement number two must be true: other minds exist apart from one's own. This is the only leap of faith required of idealism-and it is a small one since we already know, from personal experience, that a mind can and does exist. It's easy to extrapolate from what is already known and posit the existence of a plurality of the same kind of phenomenon, namely, the conscious perception of other sentient beings. Materialism requires statements three and four in addition, and both are bigger leaps of faith, since we can never truly confirm that a world exists outside of consciousness without being aware of it in the first place, and we have no evidence nor the slightest idea of how anything unconscious could ever give rise to consciousness. As the scientist Bernardo Kastrup pointed out, '...everything you can ever know comes into consciousness the moment you know it, so the belief that there are things outside consciousness is an abstraction beyond knowledge.' So now consider how bad the last statement is as it postulates that things whose existence you cannot verify are responsible for the only thing you can be absolutely sure to exist: your own consciousness. Statement number four runs counter to the natural direction of inference, which is, the unknown is inferred from the known, not the other way around. Materialism isn't empirically deduced from the scientific process, it is a belief born out of medieval propaganda to politically subvert the power and influence that ancient religious dogma had over people. It began with the heretical rebellion of the Middle Ages as religion stood in the way of freedom and progress. Materialism isn't just false, it's untenable. The only reason we have come to believe in the last two statements with the advent of the age of reason is that we seem to share a common world. After all, two different individuals can describe the same surroundings and come to a mutual agreement based on what they observe simultaneously. But idealism is congruous with this observation without requiring huge leaps of faith like materialism. Metaphysical idealism doesn't require solipsism to be true as we have already established. Different conscious observers can agree on a shared mental construct that makes up an ostensibly external reality apart from their egoic minds. One can have one's private dreams as well as share a collective dream, as it were. At the moment, as human beings, we experience a narrow and limited perspective of reality, but without our anthropic avatars, we are, in theory, unbounded consciousness. We are both the part and the whole as access to other states of awareness, including a primordial and pristine cognition, is available to us through certain types of meditation. The interactive holarchy described in the alumnus Cosmin Visan's idealist theory of consciousness-which was brought to my attention recently-aligns well with subjective as well as ostensibly objective, verified facts about reality.

[@ArlindoPhilosophicalArtist]

​@@Philitron128 Consciousness. We are the eternal witness. Reality is a mental construct shared by many conscious observers. On my channel, I explain why metaphysical idealism should be the default position-not materialism, as such a view suffers from the hard problem of consciousness, which is an impasse, and physicalist metaphysics itself violates Occam's razor.

[@ArlindoPhilosophicalArtist]

​@@Philitron128 Materialism fails to explain consciousness. Trust me, I'm not a religious person and I used to be a materialist up until two years ago until some things began to happen in the scientific community in multiple fields-in particular physics and neuroscience. My channel explains that journey. There is some philosophy in my thinking but it was science that caused my latest paradigm shift. I understand if it seems to go against our intuitions, but reality isn't what we take it to be. All we have is conscious experience. Consciousness exists and is irreducible. It is the ground of existence. It sounds religious or mystical because we've been led to believe that reality is made of matter devoid of mind (this is false). Under materialism, people will always struggle with the hard problem of consciousness. But there is no such problem. Ontologically speaking, the base of reality isn't 'nothingness' as this one can't exist by definition; the next existential level up is consciousness, which we know to exist and begets the world. There is a great place to start which is the analytic idealism of Bernardo Kastrup and also the conscious realism of Donald Hoffman. Kastrup is a former physicist who worked on superdeterminism at the large hadron collider years ago when he was a materialist. Now, his metaphysics explains how it all works and gets rid of the hard problem. We are like whirlpools in an ocean. In the end, there is only water (consciousness). We are spatiotemporally localised consciousness. His model also explains, dreams, memory and how it all works. And the brain is only a partial image of a mental process. The brain does not generate consciousness any more than the radio synthesises the voices that we hear coming out of it. I have quite a few videos on my channel explaining all of that. If you really want to go deep into the brain science, read Kastrup's 'Why Materialism Is Baloney'. Brain function is more commensurate with filtration theory than what you are led to believe under materialism. In fact, if you watch the video I posted above, you will see that to assume that a physical reality exists outside minds violates Occam's razor. Correlation isn't necessarily causation. To assume so is a materialist fallacy. It's known as the cum hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy (you can look this up). Here's a radio analogy: the voice on the radio might correlate with the electromagnetic oscillations in the radio's circuitry but the circuitry does not synthesise the voice. In the same manner, consciousness is not generated by the brain as you would have to assume that unconscious elements generate consciousness and here you hit an impasse. Materialism cannot explain why psychedelics, which reduce brain activity, actually can lead to mind-expanding transpersonal experiences. This is congruous with the view that the brain filters out much of what can be perceived and constricts your experience to a narrow focus. Even when people say that they don't have dreams is erroneous because everybody dreams. And here's another thing about the notion of unconsciousness: just because you don't remember something doesn't mean that you were unconscious at the time. You can only be in consciousness because that is exactly what you are. So your stream of experience is continuous. Another fallacy materialists make is the argumentum ad lapidem (appeal to the stone), which began 300 years ago when Samuel Johnson tried to refute George Berkeley's Immaterialism by kicking a large stone. It was noted that the same actions and the same sensations that come with kicking a stone can occur in vivid dreams, therefore, kicking a large stone does not prove, in any way, that objects have material existence. I've been exactly where you are and I have had the same questions. Answering them, surprisingly, led me away from physicalism, which is untenable, and into idealism. It all began when John Clauser, Anton Zeilinger and Alain Aspect proved local realism to be false and won the Nobel Prize for it in 2022. Trust me, my friend. I understand what you are saying about brain damage and mental deficits, but as I have found out, it's more akin to a damaged oculus not allowing one to perceive a 3D game. Once you remove the oculus, your experience expands, it does not end. Note that, even though I am practically claiming that consciousness NATURALLY survives death, I am not claiming that God exists or that any of the religions are true.

[@robertmcclintock8701]

(^^;))) the sun is dire. It makes some people feel dread. They are the fallen ones.

[@robertmcclintock8701]

f(^_^) With a television you don't have to be supernatural. God prefer that because it's more social but we have to use it correctly. Right now we have anarchy blindness. Despite the anarchy blindness I figured it out. That proves we can be God like. Only a person getting crucified would suspect something greater. They crucified me with exact same disease that in pink Floyd the wall. Victor said it's all good. It should be possible to make everything all good.

[@robertmcclintock8701]

σ(^_^;)? If someone makes the Bible your disability you become the most interesting person in the world.

[@robertmcclintock8701]

(^-^; natural selection is the character flaw in evil that is integrity is more important than life otherwise evolution is tragic circumstances with nothing intelligent happening. Almost everyone survive until they reproduce. Nothing is getting selected except for the character flaw in evil. I found a replacement for the character flaw in evil that I liked but God makes me forget things that will cause me trouble

[@mikebellamy]

MATERIALISM contradicts itself and proves God 1. Materialism assumes reality is composed of only MATTER and ENERGY 2. INFORMATION is always instantiated in or on matter or energy 3. So materialists assume information originates from mass + energy 4. But from Claude Shannon information is a COMMUNICATION of MEANING ENCODED in a LANGUAGE 5. But language only comes from a MIND 6. So matter + energy cannot be the source of information 7. Therefore the origin of information can only be a mind 8. Therefore if nature includes information we know it originated from a mind 9. DNA's only function is to store, transmit and copy information 10. Therefore that mind must be outside of our reality ie *GOD!*

[@wicekwickowski3798]

👍👍👍

[@zachariahjohn5833]

What is mind ?

[@mikebellamy]

@@zachariahjohn5833 Properties of MIND: 1) *Consciousness* (awareness) 2) *Creativity* (write new information) 3) *Communication* (in a language) All life forms exhibit all of the above including plants. The really interesting thing is that we can make robots which can do the same. i.e. artificial minds.

[@Oscarman746]

No. Shannon used "mind" in the general sense and said that communication is the act of one mind influencing another. Language is one form of communication. Shannon defined information, roughly!, as the reduction of uncertainty within communication. Premised exactly on the law of entropy, using energy systems, therefore using matter as the basis of it's formula. Your philosophy makes at least three erroneous assumptions. 1 that information comes from communication in a language (this is false, obviously - look out at two birds in the tree). 2 that matter and energy cannot be the source of information (Shannon uses "source" in a technical sense, as the thing which communicates a message, i.e. a mindless proton can be the source of communication that carries a materialistic message to the interpreting scientist) 3 that information originated from a mind ... I cannot be bothered to go on and am now questioning what type of information it is that gets me so frustrated by internet trolls with faulty religious "logic"... Probably some sort of injustice to science and claud Shannon ! 😁

[@Durzo1259]

You seem to have it backwards. Mind is an emergent property of the organization of matter and energy (the brain), as evidenced by the fact that you can damage the matter in someone's brain and change or destroy the mind within.

[@wicekwickowski3798]

The example of Professor Dawkins is a perfect example of the justice of Eternal Hell. This man has constructed in his mind a construct of Christianity that he believes to be true. He is a very persistent and determined preacher of this lie. -He is a very deserving employee of the devil Satan! Perhaps he has even reached the rank of general? So if he fights so fiercely but dishonestly, why should he not share the fate of his boss? After all, he, like few others, has done his job very solidly! And she should be left without pay? ? ? -that would be absolutely dishonest and immoral.

[@RomanGavrilov-rq8sd]

What sin did atheists commit that they do not want to believe that after death comes judgment?

[@wicekwickowski3798]

A lecture by an atheist evolutionist scientist about Christmas makes a similar sense as a lecture by a farmer and cattle rancher about the stars. Mr. Prof. Dawkins and the rest of his fellow atheists like Prof. Sam Harris have created in their minds an imitation of God, one twisted according to their imaginations and conjectures. And since most people are not interested in spiritual matters more deeply and more often than twice a year, they sell them this mystification as truth on their videos. For a better understanding of the nonsense sent out into the world by Dawkins&Harris&Dennett& I hint that science cannot investigate or falsify God, just as it cannot investigate and know the laws governing OTHER worlds, even though it theoretically allows for their existence!!! -See the many worlds theory. This is for one simple reason: lack of proper tools and instruments. Also, the interpretation of the descriptions in the Old Testament and the conclusions drawn given to the public as if they were true have absolutely nothing to do with it. This is nonsense and gibberish of ignorant people who would like to know God, but only with their limited minds. Since this is absolutely impossible, so they created an imitation of God and mercilessly kick and box it, thinking that they are killing God himself. And God as He was, is, and always will be.

[@meridianheights6255]

Please grow up. Science has mountains of evidence. You have a 2,000 year old book which has been proven to be wrong about every single claim it has EVER made about reality. There is NOT even ONE tiny shred of evidence for anything supernatural. You're "thinking" is like a child's. Stop poisoning human progress with your silly fairy-tales.

[@Durzo1259]

It's not a lecture about Christmas, it's a lecture about science given _on_ Christmas. Of course science cannot investigate God, just as it cannot investigate leprechauns because it's not designed to investigate things that have no evidence for their existence. Science does not say God or leprechauns don't exist, only that there is thus far no evidence that they do.

[@terrymckenzie8786]

Go away

[@wicekwickowski3798]

@terrymckenzie8786 -Why?

[@puddle_puddle]

Sorry, where was the "lecture about Christmas"? It's called the Christmas lectures because they have been presented around Christmas time and have been going every year for nearly 200 years to educate mostly children about science. I guess you're American, where it's a shame you never had such things as simpletons like you would do well to get a real education.