"You can only get some French out of me with a gun pointed at my head" a few seconds later "It actually happened to me when I was taken prisoner in Africa …"
There's something to be said for Herzog's intuition that his words may outlast his films.
If you haven't read it yet, read A Guide For the Perplexed, which is basically him talking about stuff (mostly films) in his own words. But the films become catalysts for his random musings, he can't help but dish out great throwaway lines about the wonders and meaning of existence no matter what he talks about.
It's one of my favorite books on this side of the century.
What frightens me the most is that chicken and birds in general are literal dinosaurs, with millions of years of evolutions compared to sauropods. Imagine what life on Earth might have been with massive predators with claws and teeth, with the intelligence of a prehistoric, unintelligent chicken.
Somehow I doubt T-Rexes had the intelligence of a crow.
> Somehow I doubt T-Rexes had the intelligence of a crow.
What would lead you to a conclusion one way or another? The Tyrannosaurus seems to be well evolved to a similar hunt/scavenge lifestyle to crows. They likely had a large set of sensory input to process.
It's likely that not all dinosaurs were chicken level intelligence and were quite a bit smarter, why couldn't they have become (or been) as intelligent as modern corvids?
“ And secondly, what is not really much in the debate is that there seems to be evidence that we will disappear as a species. Probably fairly soon. And we should look into that as well.”
> If you had a question you could ask God, what would it be?
> I wouldn’t ask God, but in general: why is there existence, rather than nothingness? It’s the biggest of all questions and it’s not my question. It was posed 2,500 years ago by Greek philosophers. It’s the question of questions and, of course, there’s no answer.
I'm just an intern running simulations for my professor. I have seventeen other simulations with minor tweaks running concurrently. I am also living in a simulator, ironically created by myself in the parent universe. We are testing whether it's simulations all the way down and up.
The reason the universe was made, as I understand it, was to answer Man's last question: Can entropy ever be reversed? and God answered by demonstration.
as a progammer, I gotta believe we can do better! I'll start.
What is a method to permanently relieve mass human suffering, that has practical step-by-step instructions, achievable with modern technology, would be widely believable and easily fundable.
The definition of suffering is unique and relative to each person. Some might consider boredom suffering while some consider it a necessary path towards creativity.
Your idealistic question gets into philosophical territory when you consider what it means to be human without suffering, or wether some forms of suffering can be good.
In other words, your question starts from a premise that might not be shared by others. Whereas, “why is there something instead of nothing” is a widely shared curiosity.
So then, what is a method to permanently relieve mass human suffering relative to each human, that has practical step-by-step instructions, achievable with modern technology, would be widely believable and easily fundable?
> For Herzog, the problem is that there are always more ideas than time to accomplish them. “I name at least 10 projects, there are 20 more behind that,”
The universe is our playground, and "God is against all".
Nobody ever talked about beginnings. The question is, even if the universe always was,
why does it exist? It wouldn't be impossible for there to be nothing and never have been anything.
It's an abstraction. If there was no beginning there was never the possibility of nothing. Just because you can conceive of a question doesn't mean it is valid.
That God necessarily has responsibility ("his failures").
It is extremely easy to make errors when one uses English to represent logic, or to use binary logic where it is not sufficient. Reduce the frequency of these two simple and extremely common errors and you can change the world.
In truth a being like that would probably be beyond ego.
It’s just a human projection onto them to make it easy for us to talk about that we think in those terms.
so in a sense it’s us being egotistical by projecting our perspective onto God to talk about It, and by assuming that God has ego.
I think in a sense, God is beyond all our concepts of morality and everything, so They are unknowable unfathomable. The great mystery.
Man In Sky could be read as the ultimate human ego trip, and we keep repeating it with anthropocentric distortions about UFOs and so on.
This is just one perspective. The concept in reality it’s probably so big that it’s going to be impossible for us humans to agree, natural for there to be disagreements and, even when there’s apparent disagreements, still contained within the totality of whatever it is that God is.
In fact, I think it's even egotistical of us to believe that we can think our way through the concept of God, that we can even talk about it.
In a sense, I think there's validity to the approach of some traditions that say that God can't even be talked about, can't even be named. A stance that reflects the required humility.
Again, this is just another perspective of an infinite concept. I'm not saying I'm right about this. I'm just theorizing and speaking from my experience and ideas. Of course, there will be disagreements. And I think it's natural for there to be.
What's unnatural and stupid, I think, is to persecute each other over any disagreements that we have of a concept that is seemingly so large as it could contain all these things without contradiction.
So, please be kind to each other in your talks about God.
Yep; We are God. It says so in the bible: he's made in our image. (some dumb copy editor just mixed up the order a couple thousand years ago and they've been misprinting since)
The question seems a bit confused as posed. On the one hand, asking God "why is there something rather than nothing?" is odd if one is looking for the cause, rather than the reason or motive. If you're asking God, then you're addressing the Cause! But why does God create the universe? If God is perfect, then He has no need to create, thus it must be a free act. It must have been for the sake of those created.
If you're asking why there is existence, first, existence does exist, as existence "is" existence, and second, God is Existence Itself (Ipsum Esse Substitens) by which everything is, so again, if you're addressing God, you are already addressing the Act of Existence Himself!
For various values of God, perfect, He, and need, which are debatable ad astra/ad nauseum.
if you're addressing God
What are the chances someone is not literally addressing the literal God, but is rather posing the question using that language poetically, with zero belief in an actual God? I'd say that’s clearly nonzero.
> 1) In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. 2) The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. 3) Then God said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. 4) God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness. 5) God called the light day, and the darkness He called night. And there was evening and there was morning, one day.
He felt like it, and saw that the light was good.
Something, light, is better than nothing, darkness. 'It was good,' I believe is the answer to that question.
The question of “Why is there something rather than nothing” encompasses a curiosity about the existence of God. Your answer starts after the existence of God, so it doesn’t answer the original question.
The question was 'why is there something rather than nothing.'
I believe: '...it was good...' is the answer. Why was it good? Because, at first there was nothing. Then, there was something, light, and _that_ was good, not the nothing.
The question I believe you wish to ask, without asking, is: "God, why do you exist?"
“It was good”, addresses the post-creation impact of the something vs. nothing (decision, instance, etc.), but it doesn’t answer the question of why there is something vs. nothing, which is asking about the origins of existence and isn’t concerned with the impact.
I don’t mean to ask "God, why do you exist?" because “Why is there something instead of nothing?” encompasses that possibility without necessitating it.
"So, as we struggle to resolve our IT issues, it’s a little stressful, but I’m also struggling to suppress a laugh. Eventually, Herzog decides it’s a problem with the Teams video-call platform we are using: he delivers this information like he’s been prophesising this disaster for years but no one’s heeded him. “I’ve had it a dozen times before, it’s very, very frustrating,” he says. “And I keep predicting that if we do not do Zoom, we will lose the conversation. I hang up now.
Five minutes later – turns out he’s right! – we catch up again on the Herzog-endorsed Zoom."
Herzog is easily one of the greatest filmmakers alive today. He was at the forefront of the German New Wave of the 1970s, and has continued to produce great films throughout the following decades.
Many of his best films are documentaries, but he frequently blurs the lines between fiction and nonfiction, such as by giving his documentary subjects scripted lines or by using non-actors in his movies; he calls his approach to art the pursuit of "ecstatic truths". Among the general public, his most well-known film is undoubtedly Grizzly Man, which is a very good film, but he has made many that are just as good. My favorite of his is Lessons of Darkness, which is a kind of audiovisual poem showing the destructiveness of humankind through images. The film opens with a quote from Blaise Pascal, which was in fact invented by Herzog himself [1].
Herzog is also a very, very good writer (and he somewhat paradoxically prefers, according to this interview, to be remembered as a writer rather than as a filmmaker). His non-fiction books Conquest of the Useless is great, and Of Walking on Ice is supposed to be wonderful. He just came out with his first novel, The Twilight World, as well as the autobiography mentioned in the article. For a taste, one chapter of the autobiography was published in The New Yorker [2] recently.
If I may ask, for someone who heard but never actually had pleasure to touch his masterpieces except Grizzly Man, what would be 3 films (or 5) you would recommend to start, or rather continue, with?
The aforementioned Lessons of Darkness is obligatory, but as I said, it is less a documentary than a kind of audiovisual poem. The footage is incredible [1].
Of his "straight" documentaries, Encounters at the End of the World is great. It's a film about the people who live at McMurdo Station in Antarctica. Like his other biographical documentaries, it mixes quirky people and humour with brutally realist view of the world, all to great photography and music.
The Fire Within [3], his 2022 documentary on the popular volcanologists Katia and Maurice Krafft, is wonderful. It's a superior companion piece to his earlier films about volcanos (Herzog really likes volcanoes), Into the Inferno and La Soufriere.
Of his fiction films, you can't avoid Aguirre, Wrath of God or Fitzcarraldo. But a personal favourite of mine among his 1970s films is Heart of Glass [4], a quirky and beautiful retelling of a Bavarian folk tale, set in the 1700s.
He's been world-famous since the '70s. He's just a much-appreciated German film auteur. Although he's gotten pretty big in Hollywood, too, since the 2000s.
