LastThursday

My shortlist: VirtualBox - computer in a computer VirtualDub - quick and simple video editing, conversion and effects FontForge - design new or manipulate existing fonts Upscayl - AI image enhancement ChatGPT/Deepseek - (free version obviously) mostly for coding or philosphising Google Maps on mobile - probably the most mindblowing

I don't know what you mean 😉

Flat images show you exactly why everything in experience is a construction. The irony is, is that the image is a bobcat, because a bobcat is just a construction in your mind. I bet most of us have never seen a bobcat in the wild. Here's an animal, give your new construct a name:

Correlation is not causation as they say. Never trust anything on video in any case. The wizard with his cutlery is most likely using induction heating to melt the metal. Notice how its the thinnest parts that melt first.

@Oppositionless I reckon he's got some gizmo up his sleeve.

Rationality is done by minds. It's coherence, cause and effect, B because of A, explanation, narrative, science. Rationality is a subset of reality though, everything else is irrational until proven otherwise. Existence itself is irrational, qualia are irrational, consciousness is irrational, whether others are conscious or not is irrational, electrons are irrational.

Why is it always metal cutlery? It's almost certainly a trick. I want to see pencils snapping, biros bent into pretzels, paperclips straightened out, matches catching alight, something with more imagination! And, I want to see all that without the thing being touched. I want the guy to wear a T-shirt, none of your wizardy long sleeves.

When I play Chess online I have two separate accounts. Originally I had just the one account with my name on it, clearly a male. I've played many thousands of games on each account. Out of curiosity and because I'm sometimes a devilish imp, I decided to create a female version of myself (CharlotteHarper if you want to play me on chess.com!). It's probably against their rules, oops, go me. Typically as these things happen I started to get the higher rating on the female account, and so I ended up playing mostly with that account. What did I notice between the two accounts? The difference was like night and day. To keep up with the charade and for testing purposes I always accept all friend requests on both accounts. Currently Charlotte me has 1488 "friends", Guillermo me has 7 - and of those, three of them I actually know. The female account gets plenty of private messages daily, some of them hilarious and eye opening. The male account has hardly any messages. The female account often gets chat requests in the middle of a game, I very rarely answer, but if I do and if things get too flirty I have to bat them off and say "I have a boyfriend" or "I'm married" or I talk about what their country is like to visit or some such shit to put them off. Now don't get me wrong, I know that what I'm doing is deception, and that's why I mostly ignore 99% of messages, but the imp sometimes wins. Don't trust anyone on the internet kids. Here are some of the amusing messages Charlotte has had on there, bearing in mind that I've had no previous contact with these people, and the only thing they've got to go on is a picture of Charlotte Harper (AI generated). The shit women have to put up with! "Hello, could I send you money just to please you? Thank you" "are you a girl or an angel 💕" "its Daniel from India .. but living in canada" "Let’s play. I want to lower my competition" "Sorry, you need to play more accurately." "Hello, for more information and friendship, you can send me a message. Here is my email address: xxxx. See you soon!" "My name is Kenneth I know this might sound a bit bold since we’re just meeting, but I wanted to be honest from the start. You caught my attention not just because you're beautiful, but because there’s something calm and confident about you. I didn’t want to let the chance pass without saying something. I’d like to get to know you better, not just from a distance but in a more intentional way. If you're open to it, I'd love the opportunity to take you out sometime and see where things could go. No pressure just genuine interest and respect." "May I get to know you better?" "You beautiful girl in world" "You are the most beautiful girl I have seen" "I need to ask u something important" "I watch your game not bad, bit I noticed some few things maybe I can assist" "I want to be friends. Can we talk on WhatsApp?" "You seem like someone I’d love to get to know better" "🌹🌹🌹" "I love you" "I didn't mean to disturb you. But your smile is amazing" "Hello sweetie 😘" "hi dear lets play" "hello pretty girl!" "Wow, your smile is radiant!" "Hello dear , how you doing pls i need your help" "Good Evening Dear Sweet Friend" "My Queen!😍" "Hi beauty" "are you single" "Your smile is as bright as the sun" "Are you a model? You're very pretty!" "Do you have insta?" "UR NUDES PRICE" "Hey Charlotte. How old are you and where are you from?" "wow how beauti,, you.." "Pass me your instagram" "By the way, your beauty is impressive" "If I could disappear and be transferred from one place to another, I would definitely come to you." "Longing, you know how my penis is right" "I want to be your husband"

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.

Enlightenment is a dripping tap, not Niagra falls.

Yes yes, but by telling us "think about what you're doing" you're encouraging the very thing you're arguing against. Your advice is just self-help in disguise.

@CARDOZZO you asked us a sensible question, we open up and give you genuine answers, you castigate us for those answers. We've got to start from somewhere, as normies, and go from there, there will be people at many different stages here. And, the work isn't done on this forum, which is an informal chaotic place, it's done IRL. Anyone looking in here will get a very distorted shallow picture of what's really going on. A stage turqoise saint isn't going to announce their presence at all, they will look and sound normal.

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.