Given that all we have is subjective awareness, and that we came up with logic and reason, that is self-evidently false? I don't understand your line of thinking here. Logic and reason is a subset of subjective awareness, as you say. So how can logic and reason describe subjective awareness in its totality? It can't - it can only ever point to it or hint at it in some way. That's the point I'm making. Furthermore, logic and reason aren't good mechanisms to explain this totality, as they are extremely rigid and limited subsets of it.

> I do think the screenwriters began with the premise: "What kind of conflicts would characters encounter when facing a multiverse somewhat related to that of quantum mechanics?"

Why would you think that? It's very obviously a story about potential and familial expectation dressed up with pretty dope kung fu and silly men-in-black tropes to provide visual analogies to regular human interaction and emotions.

Would disagree with your last point only because we don't know how the brain works. What if our brains can implicitly understand and mediate quantum states? If that's the case, every iteration of "you" might be vastly different because every iteration has completely different quantum states of mind to deal with from birth to death. Our lives and our thoughts compound from birth, I find it hard to believe that in all the probable universes, the same me is doing the same thing. But then again, based on many worlds, there would be an infinite number that supposedly do the exact same things. There'd also be an infinite number where because of the countless changes in others and histories, you are not you, or you are the you that does everything but the things you do.

I like the write up- have some thoughts of my own on it. So the movie is a personal one for Director Daniel Kwan- so I’ll frame my thoughts around his personal story. Philosophically, the movie is about a character losing their sense of meaning (Kwan losing his Christian faith) and experiencing a crisis of uncertainty- followed by the all so common journey from Nihilism into Existential Absurdism. That’s basically it, though I don’t think it’s simplistic at all. Unless we want to call Camus simplistic (I recall Kwan stated he prefers the writings of Vonnegut to Camus- I haven’t read Vonnegut so I don’t really know his takes on absurdism and how they diverge from Camus.) I agree the film builds around MWI, and I think the absurd scenarios are consistent with the absurd implications of MWI.

What doesn’t quite work for me is the idea of a characters consciousness being tied only to their consciousness of other worlds- because this demands the existence of some sort of metaphysical reality like a soul to form these boundaries. The existence of a metaphysical soul breaks down the crisis of nihilism and removes the need for an absurdist philosophy. Now, perhaps one might say that the mumbo jumbo sci fi trick Evelyn discovered to link herself to other worlds only links her to worlds where some particular physical aspect of her consciousness exists, then you could argue that Evelyn has access to infinite universes with an Evelyn while not having access to infinite universes without an Evelyn. Removes the need for a metaphysical, but I personally don’t think it works. Personally, I think the flaw in the philosophy is that Jobu Tupaki with complete knowledge of the universe would not come to the logical conclusion that life has no meaning- rather I think she would come to the logical conclusion that life may or may not have meaning but the human capacity for reason is incapable of comprehending it. In other words, Jobu should really spend the movie preaching the categorical imperative and sleeping in self made swaddles.

As a side note: I think because this is such a personal film for Kwan I suspect this is why so many people I have seen struggle with the density of themes and try, unconvincingly, to boil it down to one thing. Familial bonds. Goofy feel good action movie. Marvel wannabe. The power of positive thinking. Etc. Kwan is trying to put his entire worldview into a film, so it’s a lot of things. Kung fu action film. juvenile absurdist comedy. sentimental family drama. Exploration of adult undiagnosed ADHD and the neurodivergent experience. Asian American experience, both first generation and second generation. The intellectual philosophical journey from Faith to Nihilism to Absurdism. Reflection on contemporarily relevant themes of identity. Philosophical implications of modern scientific theory. The movie is all of these things because all of these things are objects of Kwan’s life experience and personal musings to this point. Additionally, you see the same density of formal qualities in this movie with numerous techniques and styles conglomerated from other films and works of art I suspect the directors found influential- such as Kung Fu cinema, Adult Swim comedy shows, Wong Kar Wai films, Terrence Malick films, Stanley Kubrick films, etc. Thats a somewhat tangential point though and probably better served for a different audience than the r/philosophy sub.

This post is better suited for our weekly Open Discussion Thread, which you can find stickied at the top of the subreddit.

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That said there are still different levels of infinity. The reals have a Lebesgue measure strictly greater than the rationals.

Also the "sum of 1..inf == -1/12" is not the case at all, the whole point of that example is to show how different contexts and definitions can have conflicting answers, similar to 0^0 or 1^(inf)

> You can have “most” of infinity. For example, most whole numbers are not prime, and both of those sets are (the same size of) infinite. Still, the ratio of the number of primes to the number of non-primes below a certain value is small (and tends to zero as that value tends to infinity).

The difference between asymptotic density vs proportions of infinity is relevant here. Most numbers are non-primes only in the first sense, not the latter. Problem is, the asymptotic density depends on the ordering of the set, and not all infinite sets have natural orderings like the number line does.

For example, you can’t simply take the asymptotic density of an infinite set of coin flips to get frequencies of 0.5 for both heads and tails, because that depends on the ordering of the set being {H,T,H,T,H,T…} or {H,H,T,T,H,H,T,T,…}, or similar. But there’s no reason to privilege that ordering over {H,H,T,H,H,T,H,H,T,…}, which will give an asymptotic density of 0.67 for heads and 0.33 for tails. It might seem like something’s wrong with that last ordering, like we’d eventually run out of H’s or something, but in an infinite set we won’t ever run out.

The lesson is just that you can’t define frequencies or proportions in infinite sets that lack natural orderings. The number line is the exception, not the rule.

I thought the philosophical crux of the movie had more to do with existentialism and nihilism than theory of mind.

Also, all things considered, for an eccentric movie they handled the science and philosophy relatively well imho.

It's a silly and overly chaotic movie masquerading as some deep philosophical movie. It's style over substance with a very simple premise. Nothing to deconstruct here, just move on in my opinion.

Secondly, trying to touch on metaphysics in a movie is very hard and can quickly become pretentious. I would instead recommend Donnie Darko which tries do to it with more subtly.

Can always tell who has taken calc 2 and who hasn't in these conversations

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I mean… kind of, but I would say the movie more throws out the idea of an “ordinary” life. In my interpretation the movie showed how incredible life is, and can be, no matter who you are. The husband (I watched it months ago in theaters, don’t remember names) saying he would be really happy with a life of doing laundry with his wife shows how there is value in any existence. Every life has immense value/depth and is worth living and loving.

> subjective awareness can never be described in logical, rational terms, or

Well, given that all we have is our subjective awareness of things, and that we came up with logic and reason, that is sort of self-evidently false. What subjective awareness can't be described in is scientific terms, which is different. Science requires empirical observation, but we can't observe someone else's subjective awareness by directly. It also requires repeatability, but subjective awareness is too malleable for that.

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Time is change, things always change, we can't stop it. The key is to control change, change things for the better. You shouldn't obsess over time or money, try to find things of value in your life. Time will keep marching on whatever you do, but you can use rationality and wise decisions to improve your life.

The point of training is to refine our intuitions.

>You can have "most" of infinity. For example, most whole numbers are not prime, and both of those sets are (the same size of) infinite. Still, the ratio of the number of primes to the number of non-primes below a certain value is small (and tends to zero as that value tends to infinity).

You chose an interesting example, because the ratio gets smaller as the limit gets larger, but when the limit is infinity, then the ratio becomes 1:1. The number of primes is the same as the number of non-primes. They correlate on a one-to-one correspondence (bijection).

Similar to the sum of 1+2+3+4+5+6+7..... gets bigger as n increases, but when n is infinity, the sum is -1/12.

Infinity breaks a lot of our expectations.

You may still have a point about it still is possible to have the "most of infinity," whatever that means, but your example doesn't work out. Just because something holds at really big values of n doesn't mean it holds for infinity.

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I wish money didn’t exist, I try SO hard to ignore it, but it’s all around us, governing our daily life. I tell myself I don’t care, but I still crave the cushion of having money. I tell myself that I would defy the statistics of rich people being unhappy, because I, unlike everyone else, will spend it well. Haha

I didn't say the number of universes changes, so I don't know what you're commenting about

Thanks, u/LucianoMrlli and u/AnUntimelyGuy for your replies. u/LucianoMrlli I have an addition to your point that we have to contribute to society; otherwise, we would be deemed criminals. After giving it proper thought, this is what I came up with :

As a person, we want to do things for ourselves, like a job or a business, to earn; by doing so, we provide some service (Labor or Intellect) to society, which is our contribution to society. In essence, even the job we have is for it is not for us but for the community, and we are incentivized by money to contribute to society.

People who just take from society without giving back are deemed criminals, i.e., thieves and scammers, because they do not provide anything. They are just taking from the people.

On the other hand, some people contribute to society but have different incentives, like they might want to feel good about their work or themselves.

And there would be an extreme minority of people who know they would suffer if they help others but still do it. And that is what I feel, like the people who are contributing selflessly or without taking anything from the society.

After writing this, I realize that my answer is dealing more thing the idea of the word help as help to me feels selfless.

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Was it? Will it expand on itself 3 times and get worse each time as well?

>My thinking was that we all exist in an uncollapsed superposition, but conscious observation is always with respect to a collapsed state. E.g. Each universe is a manifestation of a possible state in the overall multiverse superposition. You're saying though that the superpositions are never reduced, so would that mean no universe can be observed individually, only as a collective multiverse?

None of that is correct. In many worlds theory there have always been and will always be the same number of universes. It's just that many of them look identical until they diverge.

Yes, look up the prime number theorem, and write out the limits