Something
Emporium

Them...

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If you thought "What the Bleep Do We Know?" was bad, I'd recommend the comments to this clip from Waking Life.

The view of physics presented in first part of the vid have long passed. The more modern view now, can be summed up in the phrase, 'Consciousness is the only true reality.' Einstein said it in a different way, "Matter is the optical illusion of consciousness." The power of your awareness, consciousness, determines your reality and defines 'who you really are.' The phrase 'free will' is misleading because it implies that you are only human but we are more, we are 'human beings.' The word being implies consciousness - the true reality. The phrase I Am sums up 'being' well. Eckhart Tolle talks about the ego (the false self). I suggest you read his books or listen to the audiobook verions. The ego has no free will. You do, however. You are much more than your mind. Your mind is a tool, only one of the many tools you have. Your reality is not predetermined exactly. If you bring awareness, consciousness, into what you are doing now, your consciousness changes reality outside of free will.

Yay! There's also the usual factoids and argument about quantum indeterminacy - nobody seems to catch on that how it might work (percolates up, consciousness causes collapse, blah blah blah, wank wank wank) is quite irrelevant to the argument in the clip.

Dominic

Comments

What the Bleep Do We Know? is probably the worst film I've ever seen, and I've seen FART: the movie.

It was stupid.

And what's worse is that some people thought it was great.

Fools.
Sam
I like how at least in the comment Einstein got the mighty double quote marks rather than measly inverted commas
t r a v
I used to do this. Not give Einstein better quote marks, but use them to distinguish between a direct, identified speaker and an abstract, unidentified speaker. I'm not sure if I believe in the distinction any more.
Dominic
I'd just dodge the whole thing and avoid the "...the phrase 'X'" construction altogether. It's crap. Scare quotes are crap in general; irritating, in the words (roughly) of the Chicago MoS.
This is the one that really got me: "The word being implies consciousness - the true reality." Surely most physical things _are_, yet many are not conscious. Being implies existence, not consciousness. Also, how does "the phrase 'free will'" imply that I am only human? The pen isn't that mighty. I'm also digging the _variatio_ on the scare quote thing with, "the phrase I Am"; clearly quotes and caps are Equivalents.
t r a v
I'd love to dodge the whole thing, but sometimes I need to use a phrase, sometimes I need to mention it, and sometimes I need to mention someone else using it (without using it myself).

On another note, Meinong would hate your leap from being to existence. But I guess he'd join you in bashing the being [hook] consciousness implication too. Being implies nothing (but existence implies being), he'd say, parentheses notwithstanding.