The World Is Not as You See It
0:03 The world as it really is is not the world as we see it. Everything we see is more or less a perception of what is actually there. And while we'd be inclined to say our perception matches reality without any faults, that isn't completely correct.
Take a look at my handwriting. Clearly, this is the English language. You can see the "D" and the "A" and the "F" and the "G". But what if I wrote more like this? This script, which you may not recognize, is the Palmer Method of business handwriting. And if you don't know it, then this isn't handwriting at all. To a person who can't see that the Palmer script is written in English, the script isn't a script, but a bunch of messy lines. I mean, look at the letter "F". These two look absolutely nothing alike! Nor do the letters for "Z" and "Q" and "S" and "G". I mean, how can both of these characters both represent an uppercase "F"? The answer is... well, because we say they do. And the moment we stop, they cease to. If you can't read the Palmer script, it's not an "F"; it's more like a backwards "6". But even if you know modern cursive, there's a good chance you can't read any handwriting from as little as 300 years ago!
1:07 People that can read cursive know that this definitely says "been", that says "the", and that's "patient". But what the hell is this! In order to read that, you have to know that that character is not an "F", but a long "S", which is used throughout the document. And if you don't know that, the following, "and such is now the necessity", becomes "and fuch is now the necefsity".
And if you think that's bad, another 200 years ago, you can't read anything! But even though this is Shakespear's handwriting, to us most of these characters might as well be squiggles! We can't make out what letters are here because what's on the page isn't a letter—nor in the Declaration of Independence, nor in my handwriting. What's on the page here isn't a word or a combination of letters, either. A word doesn't truly exist on that paper... but in the mind. And because of that, even if you can read cursive, you're still not reading a word; you're just looking at a character that represents a tone, and when you string those tones together, you then get a tonal representation of a concept which itself can only represent what we can perceive. I mean, say I have seven banabanas!
2:07 What exactly is seven? It's definitely a number--BUT WHAT'S A NUMBER? Surely there's seven banabanas here, but there's one BUNCH of banabanas. Does that mean that seven equals one? I would contend that seven and one aren't even real! The tone of two short "E"s with a dental fricative "S", a "VVVV", and an "NN" sound... it's just a tone we've given to the abstract quality of there being this many of a particular thing.
So what does it mean to say that three plus four equals seven? I'd say it's getting at the abstract quality of how much of something there actually is. But when you see this equation, you don't think of any of that. It's just--you see this character, you know it's a 'three', you see this, you know it means 'add', if you see this, you know it means 'four', that's 'equals' and that's 'seven'. But if I wanted THIS to be 'three', and I call it 'chair', I wanted THIS to be 'plus' and called it 'opus', wanted this to be 'four' and called it 'anime', wanted THIS to be 'equals' and called it 'Donald', and wanted THIS to be 'seven' and called it 'trump'... then chair opus anime donalds trump! And that sounds ridiculous, but if I started a commune in Antartica, and the people in the commune use that system,
3:08 chair opus anime would definitely donald trump! Believe it or not-- I mean, this is something we do all the time in math! π is the ratio of a circumference of a circle to its diameter. But as far as we're concerned, it's 3.14 or this little Greek symbol. We just plug it into the formula aaand BOOM! You're still failing math!
Music, too, works exactly the same way! When you play a chord on the piano, you LIKE to think that you're being artistically expressive and laying your emotions out before you, but all you're playing is a frequency ratio, which is why progressions and harmonies work so well for us. They're built on real principles! When you play a major interval, you're playing two frequencies that happen to coincide nicely. Whereas you play a minor interval, you're playing two frequencies that DON'T coincide quite as much because they're closer together. There's nothing that makes an A minor chord 'sad' or a C major chord 'happy'. It's just the latter is not as dissonant as the former. So we think that it sounds kind of sad when we hear the minor chord.. And when you play that on an electric piano like I have, you don't even get a natural frequency anymore, but an electronically synthesized tone that sounds like a piano string being struck.
4:11 And this isn't even my voice either, but a synthesized transposition of frequency of my vocal chords into data that is then played back for you. This isn't even my hand! This is just an interpretation of light information recorded by a sensor in my camera into its own data and played back for you in this video! And this--THIS ISN'T A HAND EITHER! It's not even a DRAWING of a hand! But a VIDEO of a drawing of what looks like a hand! But because of pareidolia, this looks like a hand to you.. and it should! Because it is a piece-by-piece recreation of the original light. But if you zoom in, it's definitely NOT a hand! Just as this is just a bunch of lines.. our minds put those little constituent pieces together.. making them as if the real thing.
But it's odd! Because our minds sometimes do the opposite, putting constituent pieces together to make a whole brand new thing! When I see a thing enough times, the little parts that make it up don't really have any meaning. If you look at 'New York', you're thinking, "Oh, the city in Manhattan in the North-Eastern United States!" Not the new version of the city of York in Britain. The sense of 'New' in 'New York' at one point was to say that it was a /New/ York.
5:13 But now it's its own thing; it's its own meaning. 'New York', as if it were one word. The exact same thing allowed us to use the ampersand. Now it kind of looks like a reverse cursive 'S', but only a few hundred years ago and it was the Latin word 'et', which means 'and'. We don't see 'et' in the ampersand--I mean.. if you look at certain variations of it, you will, but most often times we don't! It's its own thing; it's its own representation of the word! And we have made it so.
To take this just another step further--take a look at human burials! They are now wonderfully beautiful ceremonies that are carried out as a means of respect for the dead, but what are we doing?? We're burying an a thousand dollar box, putting a dead man in a suit, and surrounding the corpse with vegetation! We put the box in the ground with a stone that has the man's name on it and visit the stone to pay respects; some people will even talk to it and put candies and flowers next to it! I don't know about you.. but none of that really says "respect" to me! And what's more, we're respecting a guy that's not even alive anymore! He can't discern our respects, so why are we even doing this? As we say this character means 'and', we say these things yield respect.
6:14 And so to us, the living, not the dead, they do. Burial arose from a very utilitarian need that ancient man had to get rid of decaying corpses. But now that meaning is lost, and that process has become its own thing. Materially, nothing changed. We're putting people in a box and putting that box in the ground. But because we've said it's different, it is.
Driving a car, going to work, having a marriage, having children.. being patriotic or philanthropic.. All of these are things that we percieve. Things that we've said should be. And so, that they must be. But all marriage is, is just putting a piece of bent metal around someone's finger to signify that you put scribbles on a piece of paper that represent the abstract nature of yourself, as in embodied in your name. So your personhood is committed to that document. It's the mistake of the Nihilist to say that we can break everything down like that, make it all sound so meaningless, that our world is a lie. Sure! What we know isn't the real world, but it is definitely NOT completely false
7:15 that the cross is a little more than a tool of torture! And that those who follow it are misguided for doing so is a fallacy! Every symbol we take part in has its basis in what we ourselves can truly know. And while, from some perspective, all this symbolism may seem silly, the fullness of all things is only as we have perceive it. Because we as ourselves have decided so.
These letters are OUR letters. These numbers are OUR numbers. This music is OUR music. This picture is OUR picture. These symbols are OUR symbols. And this world is OUR world. And we have made it. This is MisterAmazing. Thanks for watching.
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