Space is Fundamental

In this post I will address some nonsensical attempts at denying space, proposed by real physicists and philosophers.

1.The Mathematical Universe Hypothesis: space is actually made of numbers. Cosmologist Max Tegmark is responsible for this trainwreck of an idea.

•But numbers don't take up space, you can't observe numbers, and numbers don't do anything. It also makes no sense to talk of numbers having charge, mass, etc.
•Physics is empirical, but math is a priori.
•If the universe is reducible to mathematical descriptions, then everything that is mathematically possible should exist. In other words, everything should exist, and exist necessarily. There is no way for the MUH to distinguish between hypothetical math and actual math.
•It is also impossible to identify what math any physical object is reducible to.

2. Ontic Structural Realism: Entities don't exist, only relations or abstract "structures" do. Ex. The table is five feet away from the door. The table, door, and space do not exist. What exists is the relation, "five (nonspatial) feet away from."

For another example, let's apply OSR to light: The entity posited as an elementary component of light has changed, but the theoretical structure describing its behavior has remained the same. Therefore, light doesn't exist, but the structure describing its behavior does. In the diagram below you can see how "light"; i.e., nothing, behaves.

•This denial of objects is refuted by the very obvious fact that we’re constantly observing objects. I'm not surrounded by theoretical descriptions. When I flick a light switch I'm not suddenly hit with a diagram about the behavior of light, I just see the fucking light. If the theoretical structure describing light is all that exists, then wtf did we study in order to come up with that theoretical structure?

•If everything is just "relations" then we are left with a list of phrases comparing nothing to nothing. I can't drink a glass of "sweeter than" or even comprehend what "sweeter than" alone is supposed to be, and neither can you. It's just an incomplete thought. If we were to translate our statements about the world into the language of OSR then all of our scientific theories would become gibberish.

Relations require entities by definition:
•Relation: the way in which two or more concepts, objects, or people are connected; a thing's effect on or relevance to another.

This is what the definition becomes when we remove all references to entities:
•Relation: the way in which are connected; an effect on or relevance to.
Pure gibberish.

•If Ontic Structural Realism was true, it would be impossible to explain how the view itself came about, since there would be nothing to think of it in the first place, unless you believe some combination of phrases like "smarter than, happier than, lighter than, etc." can think, which has yet to be explained. It hasn't been explained how relations alone could account for anything.

•This is clearly a meaningless view that reduces reality to abstract objects just like the MUH, and falls apart for the same reasons.

3. Pop-cosmology: Space emerges from vague things that sound like they’d require space to exist but don’t for some reason.

•See if you can decipher this word salad from a quack string theorist: "However, the effects in string theory do not say simply that "space is made of atoms of space". Instead, there are many new objects, fields, concepts appearing in this regime and all of them are "fuzzy" and mixed up in some way. This fuzziness also allows topology of space to change smoothly once a topologically nontrivial submanifold shrinks to very short, substringy distances."

And here's some hilariously vague nonsense from some idiot named Preskill:
“If you probe geometry at scales comparable to the Planck scale — the shortest possible distance — it looks less and less like space-time. It’s not really geometry anymore. It’s something else, an emergent thing [that arises] from something more fundamental.”
It's an "emergent thing"? Really? That's your theory?

Sean Carroll, using multiple intricate and horribly written articles to express his self-defeating view, claims that spacetime arises from quantum entanglement. But quantum entanglement requires particles. And particles require space.

Sean Carroll has made another self-defeating argument against space. He says, instead of describing particles as being in space, we can "completely describe the particles by how fast they're moving".

But of course, movement requires space. This man is a clown.

Years of study in a field don’t make up for a childlike grasp of language and a lack of basic reasoning skills.
No one needs bite-size descriptions of theoretical physics. Scientists should stop trying to articulate their ideas in this way unless they become better at it.

4. Subjective idealism: space doesn’t exist, all that exists are perceptions.

•Then what does the thinking and seeing? Do perceptions have intelligence? Do perceptions see things? What does "the taste of peanut butter" think about? What organizes perceptions?

5. Transcendental idealism: space doesn't exist, the world outside of perception is the realm of noumena, of which nothing can be said.

•If noumena are outside of spacetime, then what could they possibly be? The problem isn’t that we don’t know which answer to this is true, it’s that we know all of them are false. How does noumena have any effect on our experience? How does noumena account for things going on outside of perception? How does my brain work if it's really made of nonspatiotemporal stuff? This view doesn't make sense of anything.

What This Scientist Discovers About A Simple Mathematical Problem Will Blow Your Mind

EXPOSED: Proof that Donald Trump is the Reincarnation of Hitler

Dowsing rod spectrography and crystal ball electromagnetic field detection has confirmed that Donald Trump is in fact the Hundred Eyed Demon Lord from Chinese mythology, reports the Federation of the Department of the Commission of the National Organization. Donald Trump himself confirmed this, stating yesterday, "Yes, I am a demon lord."

HTC Desire 816 Review

Nope

Animating Rebel Brutally Pwned

This is a complete refutation of Animating Retard's abysmal word fuckery regarding free will. 

Animating Retard "addresses" the standard argument against free will by saying our choices are random, which is entirely consistent with what the standard argument says. The standard argument doesn't say randomness is incoherent, it says you will have to posit randomness if you want alternative possibilities. 

Animating Retard is supposed to show how we're responsible for our choices in any significant way if they are just based on luck. He doesn't do this, he just asserts that we're responsible since we wouldn't be responsible if we were doing something for a reason. But even if you aren't responsible while doing something for a reason, that doesn't mean you are responsible while acting for no reason. 

Animating Retard also redefines three crucial terms:
1. Control - He has yet to show me an already existing definition of control that does not require causality, so he uses a made-up, nonsensical definition that bears no resemblance to the word's original meaning: "control is the feeling you have while making a choice."
In other words, control has nothing to do with which outcome happens, yet it somehow makes you blameable for the outcome. You don't "control" A to happen over B. You just feel a certain way while one happens for no reason.
2. Randomness - Ordinarily, randomness means happening for no reason, but that would entail that Animating Retard's model is one of randomness, so he has redefined it to mean "happening for no reason and without a certain experience AR labels control." 
3. Responsibility - To Animating Retard you are responsible for something if you did it while experiencing his "control".

AR's model of free will is like saying you're responsible while being determined by prior causes because you're wearing an orange shirt. He just concedes the dilemma presented in the standard argument, and comes up with totally arbitrary and unheard of criteria for being responsible. Nothing about wearing an orange shirt implies that one ought to be punished/rewarded or seen as a good/bad person. Likewise, nothing about having certain qualia implies one ought to be punished/rewarded or seen as a good/bad person. (Perhaps one could say that feeling strong delight while watching an innocent person suffer makes you a bad person, but that isn't the sort of feeling he's talking about, and this still wouldn't even matter because it is an example of blaming someone for who they are. You don't get to choose your qualia.)

AR's model entails that everyone has the same 50/50 ratio when making moral choices (except for the occasional choices like choosing between 2 good options and 1 evil option, etc. Of course, everyone would still have the same ratio in such circumstances, but it wouldn't be 50/50). This is obviously empirically false, as some people overwhelmingly choose good over evil and vice versa. Pointing this out clearly shows how ridiculous his model is. He's saying that no matter who you are, you have the same chance as picking the good option as anyone else would given your options. 

Now I'm going to get rid of all AR's redefined words and show you what his position actually boils down to: All of our "free choices" are purely luck-based and we happen to have a certain feeling during them for some reason. 

Some problems: 

An experience couldn't even inform you that you have the power to do otherwise. AR just mistakenly infers that from the fact that he can think about other things and isn't aware of anything causally determining him. But this sort of experience is consistent with determinism. 

He also fails to realize that his own experience cannot be persuasive evidence for anyone but himself. 

Refuting the rest of Animating Rebel's bullshit

This post is a response to the rest of Animating Retard's video titled "Ander Smith: Incompetent AND Dishonest", as well as his latest debacle.
I'll go over the recent stuff first. Lately I've been bludgeoning Animating Retard in the comments section of one of my videos, and he's gotten nowhere with his Chichoney-style word games. It's as clear as ever that he isn't trying to make his position understandable. That would be against his strategy as an obscurantist.
Time and time again, he has failed to answer simple questions like:
If control isn't just qualia, then what else is it?
What do you mean by responsibility?
Why does your model provide us with a stronger sense of responsibility than compatibilism?
What is the difference between non-causally making things happen and not making things happen?
What dictionary definition of control are you using? (He did eventually provide one, but he won't let me quote him on it, so I'm still waiting.)
As I said in one of my comments, what he's describing is really just a coin toss + qualia. He's talking about holding people morally accountable for good or bad luck just because they had a certain experience.

Response to "Ander Smith: Incompetent AND Dishonest":
1:18 [Animating Retard complains that he clearly explained his position and I didn't address.]
Here is why he needs to shut up:
1. He supposedly explained his position in a comment, which he deleted. But my video was written before he wrote these comments.
2. Why the fuck did he delete the thread? And no, he didn't explain his position. I know that because he still hasn't explained it. See the comments on my video "Idealists Fail Again". He tried and failed to explain his gibberish there.
3. Why did I need to add his shit to my video? It wasn't intended to be a response to him. I'm not obligated to do that.

3:35 [Animating Retard asks, "where did I literally say, 'therefore matter does not exist?'"]
He said it's incoherent and indistinguishable from nothing. That's just another way of saying it doesn't exist.

3:48 [Animating Retard says: "Matter can still exist even if our conception (or description) of it is incoherent."]
Ok, he just doesn't know what his own words mean, so I have to explain them to him.
Incoherent things cannot exist. Things that are indistinguishable from nothing cannot exist (they'd be nothing).
I didn't misinterpret him, he just misunderstood himself.

4:19 [Animating Rebel claims I don't understand the difference between inductive and deductive arguments, but doesn't show where I misunderstood this. He then shows a Facebook thread which he claims shows that his argument is inductive.]
On that thread and in many other places, he was trying to make a stupider version of Berkeley's master argument, which is a deductive argument from a tautology (it also happens to be the worst argument in the world, google it). And he doesn't seem to realize that saying matter is "pragmatically useless" is not the same as saying it is "incoherent and indistinguishable from nothing", which is another thing he actually said. So at best he contradicted himself.
And let's have a look at that Facebook thread:
He says:
"Take a ball. It can be red, round, bouncy, soft, and gives a peculiar smell. How would you define the ball as anything other than those properties I just mentioned and the experience it gives?"
Well, we can talk about properties that aren't sensations, like the ball's mass, spatial properties, chemistry, etc.
He then says:
"Since each of those properties are contingent on your perception and experience, it makes no sense to say anything objectively exists outside of our experience."
But he thinks information exists outside of experience.
Sam says: "I don't think you understand information theory. It doesn't entail the absence of the physical. It is just a model cast upon the physical in order to discern signals from noise. I've published in the area of bioinformatics which is the application of information systems and theory to understand biological phenomena."
Animating Retard says, "that's not the kind of information I was referring to."
That's right, because he's referring to the kind that doesn't mean anything. He just uses information as a computery-sounding filler word because his position is vacuous. He belongs to a group of people who think that you can describe the world by saying "being" and "isness" over and over again.
There is no version of his argument that makes sense. Yeah, we don't experience phenomenal properties when we don't experience phenomenal properties. To give a specific example, I don't have the sensation of tasting coffee when I'm not having the sensation of tasting coffee. How the fuck do you get from that to the claim that the coffee must be converted to some nonspatial information stuff when no one is experiencing it? Either way we're going to have to posit something that exists apart from observation. He posits information which is just a more mysterious version of matter.

5:40 [Animating Retard claims he has already proven in comments that matter cannot objectively have spatial extension.]
I already replied to those dumbass comments. And those comments appear to contradict his current position. In the quote I was just replying to, he seem to think its ok to define matter as having spatial extension. And his argument against matter having spatial extension is just pure shit. He says it is only meaningful based on perceptions and experience. I guess he means that it is impossible to understand the concept of space without experiencing it, but it doesn't follow from that that space doesn't exist when it's not being experienced.
His other arguments are also catastrophically bad. He says that matter cannot seen, heard, touched, smelled or tasted, because those require perceptions from a mind. Ok, they require a mind, but we fucking have minds, so where's the problem?

6:55 [Animating Rebel denies saying that my arguments have no consequences for free will, and says that they obviously show that we're limited to choosing between a set of thoughts and desires that occur to us.]
He previously said that libertarians already accept my arguments because they don't undermine libertarian free will. That's what I meant by saying that they have no consequences according to him. I don't see how he failed to understand this.
And the arguments absolutely do not show we are able to choose between a set of thoughts and desires. We're talking about arguments AGAINST being able to choose your thoughts and desires.
So what he's saying is that: "Showing you can't choose thoughts and desires shows that you can choose thoughts and desires!"
Contradictory fuck.

7:35 [Animating Rebel claims that free will doesn't require choosing thoughts or desires]
I already pointed out that on many definitions free will DOES entail that. If you think your choices are based on your thoughts and desires (as many people do for obvious reasons), then you would need to have control over your thoughts and desires, otherwise you are being determined by things you don't choose. This is basically Strawson's argument, I have just narrowed it down to thoughts and desires since those are the attributes people usually claim affect their choices.
Just because some retard wants to make up some horseshit and call it free will to escape the arguments doesn't mean those arguments don't work for the types of free will they were meant to address.

8:40 [Animating Rebel plays a clip from one of my videos and claims I am saying something similar to what he is saying.]
The clip he plays is totally irrelevant. In it I say that being coerced at one point doesn't take away your free will during future decisions in which you're not being coerced.
Animating Rebel is talking about ending up in a situation in which you have to choose between a limited number of desires. Explain to me how the fuck that has anything to do with what I just said.
And again, if we're granting an argument that says you cannot choose your desires, then you aren't going to be able to choose between a limited number of desires you mentally impaired child.

9:11 [Animating Rebel says that his model is not a coin toss, and says I didn't explain why I think it is.]
He got me this time. He's right, his model is not a coin toss in that it doesn't actually involve real coins. But it's still fucking random. It's random by my definition, it's random by what philosophers in this field mean by random, it's even random by the definition he gave me of random (he said, "random means happened for no reason"). According to him, it is possible for you to act on either desire, and you act on one for no reason. It cannot get anymore random than that. Animating Rebel's only attempt to avoid this problem is to redefine randomness. He simply builds an inconsistency with "control" into the meaning of randomness for the sole purpose of making his model nonrandom.
But this word game doesn't do anything to solve the problem. His model is still like a coin toss in the relevant and damaging way: your choice just comes down to a 50/50 chance. So he's actually just accepting randomness while asserting that it gives you more control and accountability for no reason.
I already responded to his model and explained why it is a coin toss in my previous video. His distinction isn't even a real distinction, and has nothing to do with you having responsibility. He says that his model is not random because there is some sort of experience he has. Of course, whether or not he has such an experience, it is still random by the ordinary definition of "happening for no reason." It's not clear why on earth we should define randomness to exclude this experience he's talking about, except for to save his model.
Imagine that there is some perfectly random quantum event that could either result in X or Y. If X is the result, the agent will choose A. If Y is the result, the agent will choose B. There is no significant difference between this and Animating Rebel's model. There is no reason why you couldn't also have the same sort of experience under these circumstances.

10:31 [Animating Retard says he is not shifting the burden of proof, and says again that not all arguments are deductive.]
He cannot connect the claim that "all arguments are deductive" to anything I said. Shifting the burden of proof IS making a claim and saying that you're correct by default, which is exactly what he did.

10:50 [Animating Rebel claims that his burden of proof was already met because he asserted that free will is intuitive and that his experience confirms it.]
That's just a load of shit. It's intuitive TO HIM. His experiences are not acceptable evidence for someone else. I don't have experiences that confirm free will, so does that mean my burden is met? And what experience would confirm that it is metaphysically possible for you to do otherwise, and that your doing otherwise would not depend on randomness? Please tell me.
So no, he didn't meet his burden of proof. He's just claiming he's experienced something and saying everyone else ought to take his word for it.

11:24 [Animating Retard says that evidence for indeterminism is evidence for free will.]
He has to show why free will is more plausible than randomness ("because he feels like it" is not a convincing reason). He hasn't done that. Ignoring the fact that it's incoherent, sure, you could say that it's now more probable than before we knew determinism was false, but it wouldn't make for a convincing argument for free will because it's still equal footing with randomness (perhaps not quite because Ockham's razor favors randomness).

12:03 [Animating Rebel says he addressed the argument against free will.]
He "addressed" it by conceding it and then redefining everything so that he can still say he has control, it isn't random, and he's responsible. But the actual content of his model is still just a fucking coin toss, so he didn't do anything to escape the argument.

12:23 [Animating Rebel says his model "CLEARLY" isn't a randomness model.]
This is just ridiculous. He said our choices happen for no reason, but it "clearly" isn't random? I fail to see how it could be more obvious that it's random. Again, he has just changed the meaning of random so that it excludes his redefined "control".

12:34 [Animating Retard displays one of his horrific models of free will and claims he was just trolling.]
This is obviously a lie. And it's not like it was any worse than what he's currently doing. Everything he does is completely retarded. Just look at one of his previous arguments for free will:

Who's to say his "troll" post was any worse than this? This argument is an abomination. He sets out to merely prove the possibility of free will, but assumes that free will is true in the second premise.

13:33 [Animating Rebel claims I didn't argue against the paper IP cited, and I didn't show that it failed to support IP's position.]
What I did was point out that the paper mistakenly conflated free will with indeterminism. That is obviously a problem with that paper. The paper fails to support IP's position because it is consistent with randomness. Animating Rebel and IP both fail to provide a reason why free will is preferable to randomness. And again, Animating Rebel's experience does not count as a reason for anyone but himself.

15:18 [Animating Rebel says he wasn't asserting anything, he was just asking, "but wouldn't choice be a lot more reasonable a conclusion?"]
Yes, technically he was asking that, but obviously he thinks that is the case and apparently didn't care to offer reasons to think it is.
Animating Rebel once again asserts that his experience should be considered compelling evidence to everyone else. And again, I see no reason to think that experience could even possibly provide evidence for free will.

I already addressed the part of his video about Brembs. While it's true that Brembs was not saying that evolution is inconsistent with universal determinism, he's still an idiot for conflating determinism with predictability, and he still failed to provide evidence for free will because what he said is consistent with determinism and randomness.

InspiringPhilosophy's Position is Still Confusing

It seems that InspiringPhilosophy's position is either incoherent or incomplete. The trouble with his view is that he has devoted so much effort to arguing that the mental cannot be reducible to the physical, and that the mental can influence the physical, but he has yet to offer an intelligible explanation of how the physical is supposed to be emergent from the mental. So far his only explanation of how the physical emerges from the mental is that the physical is contingent on God's thoughts (which are not mental images, but words) about it.
There are at least two problems with this:
1. There doesn't seem to be any reason why physical objects must be contingent on God's thoughts.
2. The fact that God is holding descriptive statements in consciousness doesn't explain why there are physical objects.
The best I can understand IP's position is as follows:
There are objectively real minds, which are nonspatial entities that have awareness, and physical objects, whose properties exist due to the fact that God is thinking of propositions about them. Our minds can influence our brains, which is to say that we are changing (through "focusing" or some kind of mental effort) the propositions in God's mind. Changing the structure of our brains also affects our mental attributes somehow. Presumably brain structure can store memory and personality, and influence conscious experience. Brains aren't illusory or a separate substance, they are fundamentally mental because they are reducible to God's thoughts.
That's what I've gathered anyway. I will leave it to IP to attempt to explain the relationship between God, our minds, and our brains in a future video.
My main question is, why is any of this necessary? What in the world suggests this is what reality is like?
Even conceding IP's arguments that the brain is not sufficient to explain all of the mental, it is clear that he's made some strange moves in an effort to avoid dualism. But his main argument against dualism is ineffective. He incorrectly claims that substances cannot share properties because if they did, one would be reducible to the other. But there is no justification for this. Why would sharing a property make one reducible to the other? He needs to provide an answer.
There is another thing about IP's view that deserves mention. For some reason he admitted that all of the properties of an unobserved object would remain, but he said a "unified perception" of it would not be there. Well of course not, that is tautological and in agreement with everyone's view on the matter.