LastThursday

Funny you should say that, I have vivid dreams and good recall. I used to maintain a dream diary for a while. I stopped because I was waking in the middle of the night and making quick notes of my dreams, but that was making me tired in the day. I need a better system. What do you think can be realised from dreams?

It sounds potentially exciting. What would that entail from your point of view?

@CARDOZZO it's an interesting question for sure. Living day to day is totally ordinary. I think and behave as if I'm in a physical material world, and I treat and respect others as I would like to be treated myself: respectfully, as a sovereign, intelligent person. I will never know what it is to be someone else inside their body and mind, it's probably quite alien, but from the outside there are a lot of similarities. I generally yield as much of myself as people are able to bear, I know that I can be a lot more open and openminded than a lot of people I come across, and sometimes they're surprised at this when they bother to ask. I often feel like an iceberg with only the tip showing, underneath is a churning sea of ideas, knowledge and creativity, even spirituality. I often have "wtf is this?" moments, and have a clear intuition about things, which I will talk about if people are interested. I think spirituality has affected me deeply, I'm very "Zen" and "Existential" in my approach to life and people and to myself. It's mostly as a counterbalance to my ADHD mind, and I think that's why spirituality attracted me in the first place. Cool enigmatic on the outside, frothy on the inside. People often comment about how calm I am. If only they knew!

I suppose I was just poking at cause and effect there. Depression isn't a conventional illness whereby the body (and mind) need to be damped down so that it can recover and/or not injure itself further. The body could be energetic, and the mind still ruminate about the lack of control, and feel hopeless, and indeed you could do that with a sharp and active mind to even greater effect. I wonder if the negative rumination actually comes from the body reacting as if it were ill (physically), and not the other way round? Of course being lethargic in body in and mind, is a very good indicator to others that "I need help", and maybe that is part of the equation?

Thanks for the sparring @zurew, I haven't got much else to add, I'll call it there.

@zurew I understand where you're coming from. Propositional logic is supposed to be this mathematically precise system with only definite answers, and that anything outside of that is not logic. You could argue that the definition of a proposition is that it only has one interpretation and only a true/false validity, and if those conditions are not met, it is not a proposition. Maybe the idea of a hypothesis takes over here instead. The law in your example tries to be mathematical about what it defines, and so yes, rape has a list of predefined conditions which have to be met (i.e. there is a fixed interpretation), and if all conditions are met then it is unequivocally true otherwise it is most definitely false. "Rape" is a proposition in its purest sense in law. This being the case, then why are agents needed at all, if there is no free will in either intepretation or assessment? Why have a jury, if it is clear that rape occurred under the list of conditions in law? What I'm pointing out in my roundabout way is that a pure propositional logic does not generally hold in the real world. There is no pure fixed interpretation and there is no pure fixed assessment of that interpretation. What I'm also pointing out is that propositional logic is a product of messy human minds in the first place. It is a product of the thing the propositions seek to describe. As such it can suffer from self-referencing or circularity.

Reading the above, the thing that springs to mind is "control of what?". There are things we absolutely have to control, such as where and how to get food, finding a place to sleep, the base things of survival. Then from there each form of control gets more and more removed from base survival. I suppose control here means all forms of it, whether self-control, control of others, control of environment or circumstances? Where control is a forcing of things to be beneficial to oneself. Letting go then, would be either deliberately relinquishing control over certain things, or re-framing things so that the sense of needing to control it evaporates. I think some people are more prone to needing to control than others, because the sense of control gives them comfort or security, they over control. I always found it intruiguing that these symptoms of depression are nearly exactly those of being ill in general, such as with a cold. Maybe the body's reaction to depression is one of "I must be ill" and acts accordingly? Just a thought.

No, because information requires interpretation by pulling in a load of personal context. Each member of a jury will give a different value of truthiness for the proposition. Indeed, even if A raped B (the proposition), A and B themselves could disagree about whether it was rape, because each has their own context and interpretation of the "facts". In short you can't evade interpretation when assigning a value to a proposition. To compound that, there isn't necessarily a binary true/false value to a proposition, in reality there will always be uncertainty however small. The only sense in which a proposition can uniquivocally be true then, is if the proposition uses the definition of a thing, i.e. "a triangle has three sides" is true because a triangle is by definition a three-sided thing. Nearly all propositions are more like "it's always sunny on Tuesday", with no definite truth value: what do we mean by always, what do we mean by sunny, where is the sunny day happening? and on and on.

That's a fair and a common sense way of understanding it, the observer and the observed. Or you could say we're in Plato's cave looking at shadows, and inferring that there's an actuality beyond. It's construction, models and interpretation all the way down. The structures in reality are in fact shadows, they are the "things we notice" about reality.

Believing you can fly doesn’t make you able to fly. But understanding the structure of reality well enough that we can build aeroplanes, does make human flight possible. My point is that physical laws are descriptions of structures in reality, not things created by belief. What's the difference? Both are interpretations of "things we notice" in nature. The two are exactly the same. Scientific laws are just a more formal system of modelling. Interpretation is constrained by cognition and what we're wired to perceive. A proposition is simply a verbal statement in thought, to put it in a simple way. As such, as soon as it arises in thought, then it exists. That's it. Before it arises, it doesn't exist. I mean nothing more than that.

@zurew as I said we're arguing from different paradigms, so you're not going to agree with me, and that's fine by me. For example: I say the laws of physics are a construction of human thought. We observe nature, make up hypotheses (propositions) about our observations, and then validate those hypotheses to get at their truth value. The very concept of "law" is a construct. There's nothing instrinsic at all about "the laws of physics". The laws of physics don't hold if you have no notion of laws or physics. In any case the laws are constantly revised and added to, a Victorian's laws of physics is not a 21st century person's laws of physics. Equally, propositions are constructions of human thought, not separate from them. A proposition only "exists" as human thought, nothing else. And, as such propositions must be shared into other minds, and so suffer from relativity. Epistemology is not prior to human thought. Because you paradigm doesn't allow it.

@zurew you're just seeing it from a different paradigm than me, maybe I hold an unusual position. From my paradigm the content of the proposition is less important than its existence (location) in the first place. I say this because you can have any content you like. Think of a proposition machine that churns these things out one every second. You contend that if any of these arbitrary propositions are true (or false), then they are forever true, even if no one reads them. But were the propositions true before the machine generated them? No, because the truthfulness depends on the proposition existing in the first place. From my point of view the proposition needs to be "instanced" by both coming into existence and being understood in someone's mind (i.e. it's relative). The proposition itself contains information, and that information must be "held" somewhere. Apart from the content, the proposition itself must be validated in some way. It doesn't hold that a proposition is immediately true or false, other states may be, "unknown" or "uncertain". Validation takes "effort" and "time" however small. I agree that once the state of a proposition is known, then you can extend its truthfulness both backwards and forwards in time, but that's only after the fact. The flipside way of looking at it is that a proposition always had a definite truthfulness value, but you had to uncover it by some sort of process. Either way discovering the truthfulness of a proposition is a process, exactly as a jury does in court.

That is exactly my stance. It's all about information and relativity. Truth and falsity is just the answer to a proposition. To use a toy example, consider the proposition "all triangles have three sides". Either that is true or that is false. And that answer is unchanging, whether someone is aware of the proposition or not. But unless you think that propositions themselves are divorced from reality (as some sort of Platonic form), then you have to step it back and ask: where does the proposition live? It has to appear (exist) in the mind of a person. The order of importance is then first Existence, then Proposition, then Truthiness. Each thing needs the previous one to make any sense. Truth is the state of a proposition, but has no life of its own, and equally a proposition is a state of existence, it has no life of its own without it. By relativity then, a proposition can exist in one mind, but not another, and so truthiness exists in one mind but not another. How does a proposition get relayed to another mind? Information transfer. Once transferred it then "exists" in another mind, and so does its truth or falsity. The information transfer can be extremly subtle though. Information "leaks" in many different ways through cause and effect chains. There is also the problem of uncertainty, it may not be known if a proposition is true or false, until more information comes to light: the process of science, or the questioning and evidence in a court case. Your example is just a case of relativity. There may be a truth to the proposition: person A raped person B, and that truth can be known by person A and B. But the jury does not know the truth of the proposition, because not enough information has been transferred to be able to answer the proposition. A proposition can both be true and uncertain simultaneously depending on who holds it.

This is the sort of thing I get up to. I've been pissing about with generating QR codes. It all started a year or two ago when I was asked at work to embed QR codes into the PDF documents used for window displays for property listings for an estate agent (and breathe). We were using PHP for the coding, since it was all web pages hosted on an internal intranet. I could have taken an off-the-shelf libary for the task, but I thought "how hard can it be?" to write my own. One of my friends takes the mick saying that I'll have that saying printed on my gravestone. It is indicative of my general do-it-yourself attitude to most things in life. Why!? most people ask, I just say "because it's fun, why not?". At the same time I also had the bright idea that it would be amazingly useful (for work purposes) to be able to have a desktop app that would dump the contents of the clipboard as a QR code, so that I could easily transfer URLs from desktop to mobile phone - streamlining testing of various web pages on different devices. So, I rolled my own QR generator in both a PHP (web) and Visual Basic (desktop) simultaneously. I found a good website that went through all the gory details of Reed-Solomon error encoding and the specifics of the visual layout of QR codes. I got things working quickly enough, and after about a week of wrangling I got good enough results to use as a solution for the estate agent. As a bonus the company would own the code and could modify it to their heart's content. And I got a neat little app that made life easier: always build your own tools. However, some time later, on a completely different project, they needed a QR generator to embed on web pages, and I piped up and said "use mine!". They did, but for some reason the QR codes did not scan consistently on different devices, and I never got to the bottom of it: they used a third party library. That sort of thing always bugs me, and I couldn't let it go (the fact that it didn't always work), so since I quit my job I've been trying to fix the problems. It turns out I'd got a few things wrong, such as one of the masks used, and the order of placement for some larger QR codes. One of the areas of QR codes is optimisation, i.e. getting the smallest QR code for the message you want to encode. QR codes allow you to change "modes" throughout a message, essentially changing the encoding half way through a message. This allows you to get more message into the same space. There are four modes and you can chop and change as you see fit. Each mode has a different range of allowable characters, such as just numbers, or numbers and upper case letters, or even one for Japanese characters etc. Three of those modes are subsets of each other, like an onion. So numbers appear in three modes, letters in two of them, and the rest (punctuation/special characters), in just one mode. When optimising a QR text then, you have a free choice as to which set of modes you can use for a particular part of a message, sometimes you have three different modes to choose from for a particular stretch of message. How to choose the right ones to make the encoding as short as possible? In short: Dynamic Programming. One choice is to try every single valid combination of modes you could have and brute force it an answer. This good and you will find the correct optimisation, but it could take a very long time to find the answer. Dynamic Programming solves the "long time" problem. Dynamic Programming is about breaking down a big problem into smaller sub-problems. This is exactly the same as Divide and Conquer algorithms, such as Quicksort, but the difference is that with DP the sub-problems often repeat themselves many times. The strength of DP then comes from not recalculating the same sub-problems over and over again, but just calculating once and recording the result for future use. As a quick example of what this means, try counting up to 999. You'll notice that if you look at the last two digits the sequence 56 appears ten times. A DP algorithm would see that 56, and replace it with a recorded result of a calculation call it R, instead of recalculating 56 again every time. So R, 1R, 2R etc. instead of 56, 156, 256 and so on. There are two forms of Dynamic Programming: top-down and bottom-up. With top-down you look at the big problem and break it down repeatedly into smaller but similar chunks until you hit small enough chunks that are easy to compute. Any chunks that re-appear you record their result to speed up future calculation. With bottom-up you start with all the smaller chunks and build up larger and larger chunks, all of the small chunks are already calculated and their results recorded as you go. Bottom-up is the opposite of top-down. How to apply DP to the QR message optimisation problem? This is where I've come unstuck. I've gone round and round with ChatGPT and Deepseek trying to understand the solution they gave me: a bottom-up Dynamic Programming solution. Every time I think I understand it, I realise I don't. It's super frustrating. I think it's it's rubbing up against my style of learning, which is to think->understand->try, and go around that loop until I get the result/understanding I want. I'd call myself an intuitive coder, if there is such a thing. I don't deal well with abstract mathematical notation and nitty gritty explanation, I'm more of a big picture visualiser, I see the algorithm working like a little machine in my mind's eye. With the QR DP problem I just don't have enough traction to even start coding a solution, or to completely understand the solution given to me. Most coders would just take the solution from some source, and not question it too deeply. I want to know goddammit. Maybe that should be on my gravestone instead. TLDR: coding is fucking hard.

I don't track my my calories. I eat similar food every week, so I know what's going in. Then again I don't generally snack or eat junk food. Could I clean up my diet? Absolutely: more veg and less processed food. But I know I'm neither gaining or losing weight over time, so the balance is correct in that respect. I have calorie counted when I was doing a 5/2 fasting diet because you have to for that. I started that because I'd put on a lot of weight (for me) and that was mostly because of having a sedentary job, and not exercising at all. But even on that diet, I just ate similar things on my fast days, so I didn't have to think too hard about calorie counting. The diet was brutal especially in the afternoons, but was effective for me. I'd do it again if necessary.