LastThursday

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 think it'll be good to get out things that arise and put them down in written form. I have so many lost thoughts and ideas, and some of them were very good.

I've been feeling a lot of stress lately and I'm concerned about its effects on my health and sleep. Anyone here now how to clear stress hormones quickly from the body, and how to reverse the bad effects of stress hormones?

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.

@Natasha Tori Maru yeah I did a some intensive NLP courses back in the day, sort of got into it by proxy via my Dad, who's even worked with John Grinder. I understand the power of rewriting memories first hand because of it. @Leo Gura there's no denying that some people have more accurate or fuller recall. Marilu Henner is an actor (look her up) who has nearly perfect autobiographical memory or hyperthymesia. She can recall what happened on any particular day just by giving her a date - which is astounding. But memory is quite a broad category. I'd say it includes autobiographical, visual, sound, touch, taste and so on. Also procedural memory, and memories "held" in the body, such as emotions and trauma. I myself have very good visual recall, and very good recall for abstract stuff. I vividly remember stuff from being a very young kid. But is it accurate? I'm not so sure and I have nothing to back up my memories other than asking immediate family and some old photographs. When it comes down to it, to know if your memories are accurate you have to compare them something else. Memories are a kind of abstract reconstruction put together from many different sources. To use a computer analogy they're stored in a very compressed lossy format, and during decompression you get artifacts and hallucination.

Being concerned about health is very valid even at 22. You should work on moving as much as possible if you have a sit down job. Go to the gym, or walk or run when you're not working, even half an hour of movement every day helps your health a lot. But also do the other obvious things: don't smoke, don't eat junk food, don't drink alcohol excessively, get proper sleep. Saying that, until you're about 40, I wouldn't worry too much about health, being worried all the time is also not good for health.

Memory is a lot more fluid than people think. The overwriting mechanism explains how to heal memories of trauma, and how bad situations can seem a lot less bad as time passes, or how two people can disagree on the same events. It's even possible to implant false memories by hypnosis, or even by just by exposure to photographs for example. It also explains how some of the therapy techniques in Neuro Linguistic Programming works, such as anchoring.

I'd say it's in the same category of question as do computer games cause violence? The answer to that one is is that most people can sensibly tell the difference between fiction and reality, and don't go around stealing cars and running over pedestrians in a big city. In the same vein I think most people can tell the difference between porn and reality. If you have or have had a sex life, then there's no comparison. In that case you only continue watching porn like you continue eating fast food, because it gives you an instant pleasure hit. Like fast food, that pleasure hit is addictive, and addiction is bad (so says society). There's a lot of moralising about porn, but if you strip that away, then porn could give you a disorted view of sex and how and why it's performed, especially if you're young and uninformed. The question really is then, does repeated exposure to porn cause a long lasting negative effect on libido, expectation, attraction and fashion in how sex is performed? Is faux strangulation and shaved genitals the norm now because of it?

@Ramanujan I'm sorry man being lonely sucks bad, loneliness is anti-human. Sort of what @Cred says, go find people to be with, that interact in a way that feels comfortable to you. There's so many different ways now to do that online, if face-to-face doesn't appeal. Think about your interests and go find groups online to express that interest. Probably even being on here helps to an extent I daresay.

In terms of attire there is a large element of tribal belonging. There is always a current fashion, just look at how people presented themselves in the 1970's to now. Even though there is always a wide range of styles, even in the 70's, there is a kind of zeitgeist that people lock in to. Looking good is in large part being part of the in group and conformity. But this also applies to the way you speak and carry yourself. In terms of genetics then it's parts sexual selection and evolutionary selection. We are unconsciously positively biased towards people who look healthy and strong, and we could breed with successfully or could provide good protection - and status as a side effect. Mostly, indicators of good genetics, that can be passed to offspring.

I'm not so convinced. There is also a lot of mathematics that doesn't correspond to anything in nature. So there is mathematics invented to model nature and existing mathematics that can be co-opted to model nature, and a lot maths that's nothing to do with nature. Although, it is cool that we can come up with equations that encapsulate nearly the whole of a phenomenon like Maxwell's equations. But even there those equations don't describe the photoelectric effect for example. In other words nearly never is a mathematical abstraction the complete picture.

There is a possibility that mathematics is so flexible that it bends itself to the patterns in nature. Anything with some sort of pattern, can be modelled by maths. Indeed maths has been invented just for specific physical theories such as quantum mechanics. There's also lots of approximations in mathematical modelling going on, take the Ideal Gas laws for example, which are statistical, there's plenty of that sort of thing. Mathematics isn't always about precision. There's also the question of calculation. Even if you get equations for something in nature, they can be intractably hard to either solve or plug real numbers into. How spacetime behaves around most types of black hole, has differential equations that are unsolvable. The three-body problem is unsolvable. But nature doesn't care about mathematics and just gets on with it. But, one link is that both idealism and mathematics are in a sense both about non-material Platonic forms - so they share that in common. @Lazarus93 do you have any ideas or thoughts about it?

Indeed. And the normals will call you insane or at least keep well away from you. Most can't bear the idea of that sort of separation from the flock. So they don't even start.

that was my point. Nice, making a point by stating it's opposite. Must be rhetorical or something...

These people are trained for their job, which is to be on TV. There is also bias because TV people are cherry picked to appear on there, so you only get the most articulate, most intellectual, most attractive, most funny etc.

You're born into a society and culture and indoctrinated from a young age. It's super hard to break out of that programming - even if you wanted to - everything is against you. Philosophy, epistemology and all that stuff is very hard to learn and understand, and most people don't see the utility of it, it doesn't help them survive. I wouldn't underestimate how indoctrinated you yourself are either, work on that, let others worry about themselves.

Romance and Truth are totally separate, you can chase both if you like. Romance isn't all consuming, you can have hobbies.

God(s) isn't rational, we are. Plurality or singularity are the same to God. Fundamentally what is being experienced is both irrational and arbitrary. There are patterns in that irrationality and order in the arbitrariness, so you could argue about why this and why not this for ever; there is no ultimate answer.

@Hojo maybe language has been directly altering my perception all the time, but I just haven't noticed before? My experience would seem to go against the idea that language is just "pointing", and more that language is strongly intertwined with perception.

It all happened a few years ago when I was listening to some hypnosis stuff on YouTube. Specifically one video that programmed my mind to "love the colour pink" - don't ask. But I probably listened to that quite a few times over months. Suddenly, one day when walking down the street I noticed that anyone wearing pink or anything with pink seemed to "pop out" in my vision. It's hard to describe but was something like turning up the saturation in Photoshop. The colour wasn't brighter, but somehow thicker and the effect was quite jarring. Over the next few days I noticed that purple (dark pink?) was also affected in a similar way. Eventually, the effect went away. However, being me, I tried to consciously mess about with this. I would pretend to have various "saturation dials" in my mind and turn up various different colours. Trying this over an extended time of months, eventually I was able to affect other colours in a similar way to pink. Again the effect went away again eventually, after I stopped messing about with it. I tried again recently, and for a week now my colour perception has been messed up. It mainly affects strong bold primary colours, and especially blues this time, more mute colours don't seem to be affected at all. Thing is, I seemingly have no way to "turn down" the effect, other than to just wait it out. My question: what's going on here? How does language affect perception directly?

That sure is a big vision. To do that you'd have to understand all the systems that make up Western culture. All systems have leverage points: places where a small change can tip the system into a new state. Think things like Covid stopping normal working practices, or the blocking the Strait of Hormuz stopping oil movement. The main problems are finding leverage points you can affect with a small number of people, and the other is the uncertainty of tipping the system into a new state, it's not deterministic. Every other revolution will take sustained effort and is most likely futile because you're working against billions of people's entrenched habits and world views.