LastThursday

It's worth contemplating what this means. Perhaps if every woman was (nearly) equally beautiful you'd still want the most beautiful ones. And maybe that is already the case?

Every cause is unique, every outcome unique. It's never the same dog yelp, it's never the same step on the dog. Causes are categories of things, which needs you to connect things into "sameness". Causation also needs separation, the process of stepping needs to be separated from the process of the dog yelping. Without sameness and without separation what do you have?

I've tried a few of them. Speed dating's fun if you're comfortable talking to lots of different types and you don't take it too seriously. It's good because you're all in the same situation which takes away the hard bit of working out if someone is "receptive". On the other hand five minutes per person is only really going to tell you if there's an attraction there not much else.

a. Forget IQ. b. You can't be someone else yet, accept it and love yourself. c. Given enough time and/or effort you will become someone else. d. Worry less about things you can't change. Put energy into the things you can change. e. You have a lot more power than you currently think. f. Creativity can be learned through practice, forget genes. g. Just keep doing your art, push through the frustration, never give up.

Maybe the insight is that complexity is not absolute, but depends on how you think about the object? You're right in saying that the arrangement of materials matters in terms of complexity. That's spatial complexity. In a machine the arrangement can change over time, so that's temporal complexity. For any machine what matters is its degrees of freedom or if it's a discrete system then the number of different states it can be in. A clockwork has effectively two degrees of freedom: the position of its minute hand, and its hour hand. You could argue that it has more degrees of freedom, because it can be moved and rotated in space: but that isn't inherent to its function, we "throw away" the complexity of its position and orientation in space, and "narrow down" to just two parameters, hours and minutes. Hours and minutes are artificial constructions and so don't necessarily have anything to do with day and night. But a clockwork does encapsulate the idea of "time", and that is quite an abstract, conscious idea. Does a pebble have more complexity than a clockwork? It will have spatial complexity of its elements, due to its formation history. It has no temporal complexity, because it pretty much doesn't change over time. Likewise, it has degrees of freedom of movement, so it makes for a more complex projectile than a tree. In some sense a clockwork is less complex than a pebble, because you don't use it as a projectile, and it has fewer degrees of freedom in its function. As I say it's all a matter of perspective.

Being on here is no different from a moth being attracted to a light bulb. I don't mean it as a put down, but rather that the nature of people is to be attracted to other people. Once you accept that, then any elaboration or over analysis becomes moot. The paradox is clear: And yet, here you are. The deeper point is that the mind and body are naturally attracted to a lot of things, human things. Notice them, accept them, and let them take their natural course.

I see you're going to be a tough nut to crack. Let me see now... Did you know a coconut is not a nut?

8.5749 milli-furlongs. Don't @ me I'm British.

I'll bite. Did you know scorpions are related to spiders?

Interesting question. I'm struck by the idea of self-assembly and copying. A shell, leaf and a brain assemble themselves from matter over time, they grow. A pebble or stone is ground down from bigger lumps. All leaves, shells and brains of a particular type are similar, stones are randomly sized and shaped. A clockwork doesn't assemble itself and is more like a stone. But it does get assembled by something that is self-assembled (a person), so you could call it an epiphenomenon of nature. Its complexity is way less than even a shell, although, you could also call a shell an epiphenomenon. But, there could potentially be many identical copies of a clockwork. A stone could have a complex mix of constituents, but the arrangement is not orderly. I'm guessing a clockwork is mostly brass or steel, possibly ruby for bearings, maybe gold for trim, and quartz for glass; maybe that's fewer ingredients than a stone or pebble?

What is reality? Imagine a block of cheese. Imagine something carves that cheese into different shapes. Reality is the cheese, the shapes, the carving strokes, the tool that carves, and the intelligence that decides where to carve.

You are, and I'm saying that your idea is too simplistic. You have intelligencies not intelligence, and everyone has a different mix. Forget IQ, it's wrong.

The thing is, intelligence is not just one thing on a sliding scale. It is multiple things. I could be intelligent at Chess but stupid at cooking. It's not even clear if skill equals intelligence, I could be skilful at tic-tac-toe but is that really intelligence? Is just having knowledge equal to intelligence, am I intelligent if I know all the capital cities? You are right though that most people probably overestimate their own abilities. But even saying that is problematic. I can measure my skill in Chess fairly easily, but how do I measure my skill in cooking: how do I know how much ability I have in something? You can only know by comparison and measurement, but life's too short to be measuring everything all the time. Most people don't know their own level in anything, you can't blame them.

No... sameness and difference are different. Great video BTW.

A "person" is just a label, as such you will always be more than any label can describe. Said differently, what you "are" is a bunch of labels: but that's just language. Names drift on water Reflecting the full moon