LastThursday

Again I'm in that funny zone with work, where I have much stuff to do, but no interest in doing it. It's just a game a play with myself really. So instead I'm propping up my journal. What's the gossip? Well, I went on a blind date on the weekend. It went well. Except, that I can get on with most people, and the entire experience was more like speaking to a friend than a potential lover. She wasn't quite attractive enough, not quite exciting enough. I'm going to have to let it slide, but it's going to have to be me that does it. You'd think it'd be easy with my verbal skills - lol. But I have to do it today or it goes into awkward zone. It was all arranged through/by friends and I just kind of agreed to it! Unfortunately, that creates an expectation and excitement. So I'll be letting many people off the hook so to speak. Ah well. I've been away on holiday for a week. I always love going away with these particular friends, we just know each other well and are easy around each other. This is how real relationships should work, neuroticism be gone! I don't have any more room for neurotic relationships in my life. My mum's style was mostly this and it's something I've always abhorred in people, I don't deal with it well. The converted barn we stayed in had its own indoor swimming pool, which I used daily. I'm no great swimmer, but the novelty was fun and it beats a shower for waking me up. Strangely the swimmer in the group used it less than me. But I guess for her its less of a novelty. We stayed in the same place about seven years ago. It was a good mental exercise to compare how things had changed from then to now. Mostly, it went by a lot more quickly this time. One of our group, I'll call her A, seemed a bit distant. She set up her art stuff in the kitchen and painted most of the time. She was with us, but not. The last time we had stayed up talking together into the wee hours. Being older perhaps we can't take it any more. The rest of us played card games (a lot of Big Two) and drank. I took no photos this time. Despite bringing my fancy camera and promising some competition - just a few snaps on my phone - I just wasn't feeling it. I enjoyed this country house walled garden. A secret garden if you will: The roads of Devon (county) are narrow car-widthed affairs and I managed to prang my rear bumper reversing back down one of these lanes. Life throws crap at us and we have to deal with it. Philosophically speaking, I've never been one for having to deal with crap I don't want to deal with. I'll procrastinate and then do it begrudgingly. I sort of admire people who just get on with it. I'll fix the bumper eventually. Just in the same way I'll fix all the broken things eventually... Right then. That's out of my system. Now to work and rejection.

Philosophy in general seems to be this way. Each philosophy has its axioms or ground truths and you build everything up from there. Mathematics also has this. It's no coincidence I think, mathematics is a form of philosophy, albeit very abstracted away. Also science itself is a branch of philosophy (originally natural philosophy) and has a similar way of working from axioms (called laws there). I think psychology is sort of a hybrid between hard science and philosophy. There have also been attempts at creating artificial languages that reduce ambiguity. Edward De Bono I think attempted this - see his The De Bono Code Book.

Some throwaway thoughts that come to mind: Maybe hedonism is more prevalent in affluent societies. In some way, hedonism seems to be disconnected from the everyday process of survival. If you have to constantly think about survival, that crowds out any non-survival related activities. I think there's a strong human need to "be outside yourself" or "get out of your head". Parties, drugs, music, clubs, immersive games and so on all provide an alternate to normality. If everyday reality is harsh or difficult, then maybe the only break from that is to have periods of hedonism as an escape. Maybe there is some survival component in it, if it allows someone to maintain good mental health. I think that many religious societies or at least those were the culture has a religious history or undertone, shun hedonism. If strongly religious then the only hedonism allowed is to connect with God. Any other sort of hedonism is a corruption and possibly related to the Devil or other such negative things. Even nowadays non-organised dancing in the streets - as an example - would be seen as odd or even provocative. The late 80's rave culture in the UK springs to mind. Hedonism could lead to addiction if the pleasure reward is high enough. Some drugs: nicotene, cocaine, heroine are super addictive precisely because of the high pleasure reward from them. A large majority of people are not hedonistic in any way and they will view hedonism with distaste or suspicion. They will see it as some form of threat to their way of being. I think there's an age component too. As you get older and you've tried many different hedonistic activities, the need to do them so much falls away. You kind of burn through the desire to engage with some hedonistic activities. Hedonism is cultural mostly, large numbers engage in the same hedonistic activities (alcohol, clubs etc). There's nearly always some sort of negative side-effect from hedonism, such as addiction, high cost, come down, violence, loss of control.

I've never laughed so hard. I feel as though I ought to tell you that you should touch grass occasionally. To put the cat amongst the pigeons: specifically here he talks about how numbers are not the thing itself.

I guess you would call Carton Wolf state C and normal human state N. Then you'd have an transformation function called H (for high) and apply it C=H(N). This sort of shenanigans is why the universe is not "made of maths". It only ever maps patterns, it's never the thing itself.

You can have an infinity without all possibilities. So this statement doesn't follow necessarily. As an example, imagine the infinitude of numbers starting from 1. Now take one random number out of it, say 3. How many are left? Maybe reality doesn't have type a purple dog. It's interesting to think about an infinity where all possibilities do exist. You'll come to the conclusion that there can only be one of them - because the infinity must include itself! And. if there is only one of them, then you must be in it - because if you weren't then it wouldn't be "accessible" to you. That's because if you can access that sort of infinity, then you must necessarily be part of it. You can of course comprehend infinity with intellect - we're doing it here.

I'd always have some sort of ventilation with incense, no sort of smoke is good for your health. Saying that I use it to to relax and to meditate. The scent is good for giving yourself a slightly different sensory experience than normal.

@Vibes sigh. I'll go interact with some grown ups. Moving on...

I was pretty young when I became interested. I think at that time it was just a fascination with symbols in general. Playing with a calculator was more like a process of discovery and deciphering what it all meant. But there was an overlap with reading, as I had also recently learned to read (Spanish) too - so I had an unconscious inkling that it was just like another language. It's only much more recently that the penny dropped about maths being mostly about describing transformations between different patterns.

There is Truth. Truth is simply the illusion spoiled and reality seen for what it is. If you're not into that kind of thing - then walk your dog and go on with your day. But here we are about uncovering Truth. The illusion and Truth are one and the same thing - it is just that one makes many out of one - and the other is pulling the many back into the one. Honestly, we're singing from the same hymn sheet. It's just that applying the veneer of solipsism to truth is unnecessary. For Truth itself I simply observe - no words, descriptions or explanations are necessary - they're all distractions from Truth.

Whether external or internal or whatever, believing it to be an illusion would presuppose that there was something "outside" of the illusion - i.e. something that wasn't the illusion. Again, solipism would fail because there's supposed to be nothing outside of it. Maybe you can destroy some imagined illusion, but it's not going to be solipsism.

Fuck your attitude I'd say. However, it's your prerogative if you want to throw away its usefulness. And, it's not my science, it belongs to all of us.

I agreed that there is nothing outside of (my) direct experience - mostly because "outside" is meaningless in this context. However, that isn't solipsism. Is my experience one monolithic thing or many different things? Actually, it's not so easy to answer that. And what does "my" mean anyway? Do I own this experience, or am I somehow responsible for it? The word "my" presuposes that there is an entity separate from the experience itself. Taking on solipsism means believing that experience is monolithic, and that a separate entity is experiencing it. But without those two things, solipsism fails.

I'd say maths is a language like any other. The difference is that its purpose is to reduce ambiguity and to be self-consistent. It is also largely about transformation. One "sentence" in the language of maths gets transformed into other "sentences", using a precise and self-consistent number of steps. That way you can "prove" things. It's also about the essence of capturing patterns in the world, by mapping symbols and operations onto those patterns and also their relationships. English language is about conveying information in generality, so has much wider scope.

I agree wholeheartedly. But calling it a dream makes no difference to me, in the same way as calling it solipsism makes no difference - I've entertained both and nothing broke. Neither label will "enlighten" me any further. The only shocking thing about the dream of solipsism is falling for its allure.

Solipsism is a phase, you'll get over it eventually. Whatever "you" is, can just be without attaching a story to it.

I'm bilingual, so you could say I have two overlapping characters that I occupy. People have mentioned that I have a different timbre to my voice when I speak Spanish. And in my experience there are kind of two different hooks that a lot of things hang off of, my Spanish identity and my British one. I think what happens when expressing different identities is that certain traits are amplified and others diminished. So if you identify strongly with the voice in your head and were to change it, you would express different parts of yourself more strongly and others less so. It's like playing dress up and digging into a box full of different outfits, and then embodying the character that suits the clothing. Changing the voice in your head is like putting on a different outfit. The main point, is that everyone's character is in fact very fluid - and we have a large reservoir of characters we could be. It's just that we chose to express certain traits more than others, out of habit, practice and social pressure.

Except electrons. And the universe, apparently.

Masses (a.k.a energy) distort spacetime. The distortion tells mass how to move. Naturally, that explanation leaves a lot to be desired, like: why does mass distort spacetime? No-one knows. I'd say it's because mass and spacetime are part of the same thing. It should be called massenergyspacetime. But my maths skills are not good enough to come up with a theory. But if massenergyspacetime "exists" then the structure of spacetime should be as complex as the mass in the middle of it. Essentially, the closer you look the more unified things look. Things fall towards each other, not up or down or anything else. But momentum can make objects orbit each other.

Consciouness and infinity and beyond are just words, it's not any of those. Is it possible to understand it all? Yes it's here, right now, just look, feel, listen, taste. Unfortunately, all those are just words too.

@nuwu you seem to be referring to a fractal structure. In terms of life I would say that a fractal accurately captures its essence. It's self-similar in that every generation is similar to the last. But it's also self-similar in that different forms proliferate, i.e. there are many bacteria that are similar, many people that are similar. So life is fractal both temporally and spatially. Each generation is like zooming into the Mandelbrot set, and the entire biome is part of the same fractal. In terms of reality itself, then that is a bit more difficult to apply. I agree that reality is self-similar in that there are aspects of it that are unchanging (i.e. similar). Reality doesn't generally change its nature radically from moment to moment. There is also a sense in which reality "unfolds" from moment to moment, each moment similar in nature to the previous moment. There are also structures and forms and laws that proliferate in reality, repeatedly. The idea of random chance is that of an un-pattern. So it represents a type of chaos which seems to go against the patterning of a fractal. I suppose a fractal can be chaotic in nature and could be said to be (pseudo-)random. I don't know, randomness is a very slippery concept to pin down.

@nuwu I would like to reply to you, but I didn't understand a single thing you wrote. Or is that your point?

1.6km is twenty minutes of walking. So not long at all. If you see someone you don't like, or a dog, cross the road. Kidnapping is exceptionally rare anywhere. You're more likely to be hit by a car.

There are two teachers in a village (somewhere, somewhen). One of the teachers attracts a great number of villagers every day, who gather around him on a hill and answers questions. One villager pipes up and asks "I have heard the next village along eats fish every day. We have never eaten fish. How do we get fish?" The teacher thinks for a minute and then explains that fish live in water, and you would need to build a boat and nets and have a lot of patience. The villager then asks further "What is a boat and a net? And where do we find water?". The teacher goes on to explain all these things at great length. Day after day the villagers gather and ask more questions about fishing. Sometimes there is great debate about which is the best way to find fish. Some villagers even try to convince themselves that they have eaten fish, and others tell them how silly they are because it's not fish they're eating. The other teacher goes out early in the morning before all the villagers are up and wanders widely around the area every day. One day one of the villagers is also up early and notices her walking about and asks her what she is doing. She says "I'm going fishing, would you like to come?". The villager responds "I already know all about fishing.", he pauses, "but I've still never tasted a fish". "Come!" the teacher says, "but you must stay silent and just copy what I do.". Together they walk for what seems a very long time in the darkness. Eventually they reach a great lake. The villager's eyes nearly pop out of his head when he sees a small boat on the shore. The teacher gives him a sharp look and indicates not to say a word! She motions him to get into the boat and inside he can see a net. He runs his fingers over it and laughs with joy. Again the teacher signs for him to be quiet. She pushes the boat out into the lake with the oar and when they are out far enough, she motions him to throw the net into the water. The new fisherman keeps up the practice early every morning. He tells the other villagers all about his fishing and how tasty fish are when cooked over a fire. However, when they ask how he found the fish, he just says "you must come silently with me early in the morning and I will show you". But they don't believe him, and getting up so early every day seems like effort and staying silent is difficult. All they can say is "but we already know about fishing".