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Thinking Way Too Hard About Jelle’s Marble Runs
Human imagination transforms motion into action
One of the most wholesome and fun YouTube channels I’ve ever come across is Jelle’s Marble Runs. (No, I’m not sponsored.) I discovered Jelle’s Marble Runs about four months ago, and the lovingly crafted marble sports events got me thinking.
Thinking way too hard, probably.
Even though my one philosophy course in college was a disaster, I still like learning about philosophy on my own. In philosophy terms, I could describe Jelle’s Marble Runs as turning motion into action using the human imagination.
Why would I bother doing this analysis? Because the more I think too much about it, the more interesting Jelle’s Marble Runs gets.
Motion is just that: something moving because a force has been applied to it. But action is the word for living beings moving on purpose. Jelle’s Marble Runs turns marbles into athletes. No one making the programming failed to identify the marbles as marbles. What they’re doing is imagining the marbles as athletes.
When I was a kid, I turned Hot Wheels cars and paper airplanes into characters and made up stories about them based on the way they raced and flew. My brothers and I saved those paper airplanes for years, until they got too…
