Re: OT: totally off-topic

On Sat, 29 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:

I see a lot of neighbors here that don't get along.  I am probably a

>
Ahh... sounds more normal! ;) In my current apartment, the community
is either non-existent or nuts. I don't like them, and therefore I am
selling the apartment.

>
Not an unwise decision.  But the wises decision is to buy a house.  An

True. But a house means higher cost, more maintenance, more time lost doing
things I do not enjoy. So there is no perfect solution. But I have actually
thought about getting a house. So let's see what the future holds! =)

apartment is like living together with strange people, except that you
have a very nice room (that comes with a kitchen inside) that gives you
a good sense of privacy.  (But you have none.)

True. It is a little bit better in northern europe where people do not want to
socialize. Most of the time you meet no one. Another solution could be to buy a
nice pent house apartment, making sure you share the floor with no one, and
ideally, a private elevator! =D

In the other 2 places I have apartments, I do like the community! 66%
goodness!  ;)

>
Dude, 66% is no good. :)

It's better than 0%! ;)

admit it.  I had never eaten a Cheddar McMelt 'til then.  I never
thought I would like it.  Many years later I tried it out.  It's all I
eat now when I go there---once every 5 years?

Interesting, I have never seen this burger in europe! How does it differ from
regular cheese burgers?

No worries... it is very interesting to note these differences between
cultures.  =)

>
It was more like a joke---I'm apologizing on behalf of my countrymen.
Surely it's not my responsibility that my countrymen are not very
polite. :) (Except that it is because they're all humans.)

Ah, got it! =)

Above all, I identify myself with people with vigor, passion and energy.

Sounds like a nice group of people to identify with if you can find them. =)
I've always been a loner from that point of view, so I tend to not identify with
others much at all.

I think our increasingly sedentary lifestyles are to blame as well as
the mindset of instant gratification which makes people want to
achieve things with the minimum amount of energy necessary.
>
I also think this ties in with the fertility crisis we spoke of
before.

>
Yeah---the experts always include nutrition in their hypotheses.

The question is... how can we, you and me, change the trend? ;)

I am lucky! I do not like to exercise, but my wife forces me to. ;)

>
Doesn't sound like fun.  If you take a half hour walk each day, you
should probably be good.

I do walk, voluntarily, but the wife judges that not to be enough. I am thankful
that she makes me train, since it is healthy. Without her, I would be a lot less
healthy and eating a lot more junk food. So yes, it is one of those things that
are annoying in the short term, but good in the long term! =)

I've reached a routine I've been looking for for a long time.  I wanted
to bike to the beach, walk and swim.  I was swimming in a gym pool.
It's not very good for me: the chlorine water doesn't feel right at all.
Sea water, on the other hand, is ideal.  I live in a part of the town
that's elevated.  When I bike to the beach, I must go down.  Coming back
is not easy.

Why not try an electric bike? ;)

I think proofs are just constructions.  In math, for example, their role
is quite clear.  I don't even know what it would mean to prove that
there is reason.  I think there's reason because we seem to be doing
some stuff here that we decide to call reason and then, evidently, it
exists in the sense that we conclude it does and move on.

>
You do sound like a philosopher to me! ;)

>
Lol.  I should probably take that as a compliment.  On a more serious
tone, I'd ask what is a philosopher to you.

This could definitely be the start of an eternal conversation. 2500 years has
not been able to pin down the definition. ;)
A wise man, someone who is full of wonder, someone who likes to ask questions?
Many ways to define a philosopher.

Based on a recent conversation, there can be proof, as in math, and
evidence, as in empirical science. Since philosophy is not about
empiricism, I'd say proof is probably it. There is of course a new
branch of philosophy called practical philosophy, but to me, it seems
more like a closet branch of sociology or psychology.

>
I had never heard of practical philosophy.

It is a fairly new branch of philosophy, about 100 years old or so, depending on
how you define it.

If someone /rejects/ an axiom I came up with or a definition I wrote,
then there's likely little friendship there.  Friendship exists when
people go along with you without judgment.  Rejecting /or accepting/
anything is judgment, which is not friendship.  When someone proposes me
anything, I look at it without accepting it or rejecting it.  (Unless
I'm a really bad mood!)

>
There is a theory of truth called the consensus theory of
truth. Sounds as if that might be what you are thinking about?

>
No.  Certainly not.  I have nothing to do with consensus.  Truth should
have nothing to do with consensus.  We can easily imagine an outrageous
group denying obvious facts.

There are facts, and then there are "facts". Is it true that blue is the best
color? Good luck answering that objectively. ;)
Is it true that there is a coffee mug on my right on a table, yes! And if you
were here with me, I am 100% certain that we would agree.

I'm quite okay with the keeping ``truth'' undefined.  I may have some

Even if your life depends on it?

idea in my mind that I think it's totally true.  Perhaps I can't get you
to assert the same.  So what?  Does that keep in doubt?  So?  I can't
see any problem with living life with a little doubt.  Every now and
then it's a good idea to hang a question mark on those things we've
taken for granted.  (Have you located where Russell said this?  I can't
even be sure it was him.)

Excessive refinement in thinking?  They want a kind of super assured
certainty?  I think that's a waste of time.  It's not a waste of time to

>
So do I. In 2500 years no such thing has been found, so I am quite
happy and content to accept what my senses tell me. ;)

>
Our senses also do make mistakes.  And some things can't come directly
from the senses---what we see in a microscope, for example.

True, but just because we sometimes make mistakes I do not think is enough of an
argument to refute completely the idea that what we can confirm with our senses
is not the truth.
When it comes to the microscope, it is true, but at the end of the day, we do
use our senses to look into the microscope.

Even ``senses'' is a complicated word.  I met someone at the beach last
Saturday.  It's a person who lives very far from the beach---another
town.  For about a year and half, I've been thinking about (as I walk on
the beach as I always do) that I could someday meet that person by
chance on that beach.  But, of course, this is just fantasy because it
nearly makes no sense.  So, after my Saturday surprise, I was thinking
to myself---omg, how weird!  Do the things I imagine come true or is
this imagination a kind of premonition?  (Or just coincidence?)

My theory, conincidence, selective memory, and priming your psychological
filter.
1. Yes, sometimes it is just conincidence.
2. You think a lot of things, and forget a lot as well. If you think about an
event x, and x never happens, you would have forgotten about it. If you
envounter event x, after first thinking about x, you'll say to yourself, Oh, I
did think about x, how strange that I know encountered x.
3. When thinking about a thing deeply, you are in a way telling your
subconscious mind to be on the lookout for that. So when you filter your 1000s
of daily sense impressions, your usbconscious mind has been programmed to
"trigger" based on what you thought about.
Those are my 3 theories around why that happens.

This is not the first time this happens.  But many of the other past
coincidences (such as this one), I have been able to explain in a
special way, which I have been calling long-range planning.  I can spend
years imagining a certain situation (a little bit every now and then)
and then I end up putting myself in a position where I can live that
imagined situation.  I could then claim to have materialized that
situation or that somehow my imagination was having a glimpse of the
future.  But I actually call that long-range planning.

True! No hocus pocus at all! =)

But the beach event of last Saturday seems very much outside of my
control.  The most I could do is to always go to beach, which in fact I
have been doing lately...  Still...  It still feels totally outside my
control.

care for your math proofs, say, or removing bugs from your programs and
so on.  But rejecting the senses as in I don't know if really exist or
I'm being fooled by an evil genius?  I think that's excessive thinking.
That's when thought escapes from the leash.

>
Agreed! That is why I do not care much for interpretations of quantum
theory as well. Plenty of thoughts escaping from the leash there, and
plenty of useless (in my opinion) speculation.

>
The case of quantum mechanics is a necessary one, though.  Yeah, surely
there's a lot of imagination there, but I think that's part of science.

Oh yes... I am not against imagination and speculation, if that serves to
motivate a person, or inspire him, or help him advance theories. My main beef is
when people confuse speculation and theorizing, with what we can or cannot
prove. Mistaking the map for the real world so to say.

Quantum mechanics is giving us great philosophical problems.  It's a

Yes!

very hard read, but to see them all you could skim a quantum theory book
by descant.  Interpretation of quantum mechanics force us to make up
our minds about how we want to see the world.  The fun thing is no

I think we are never forced to make up our minds. I am happily agnostic about
the interpretations of QM and I live my life just fine. I am just content to
note that some interpretations are absurd, some impossible (in my opinion) some
meaningless, and some I do not understand.
So I wait for more evidence, and for science to march along, and that is about
it.

matter which perspective we take, they're all problematic.
>

Most psychologist are so full of nonsense that being one wouldn't help
you here. :) I haven't read The Interpretation of Dreams, but I really
would like to do it.  The book could be wildly wrong, but notice that
nobody seems to have made any advances since then anyhow.

>
I find the Dodo effect quite facsinating. It says that it is not the
school of psychology that makes a difference in therapy, but only the
person.

>
I had never heard of it and I can't look up anything right now, but it
makes perfect sense to me.  The inner is the outer.  What a person lives
in the outside is a reflection of you'd find on the inside.  A
therapist, like any intelligent person, can be of help, but you can't
put your life in order if you are not able to find order where you
should be looking.

Like the buddha said somewhere... he cannot do the work for you. You have to do
the work (meditate, live a good life) yourself if you want peace. Buddha can
facilitate, point in the right direction, but you have to do the work to
experience the result.

Not quite. Counterfactuals are questions such as... "imagine you ate
an apple this morning, would that mean that later in the day you
would have a stomach ache". So when those types of thought
experiments are not made with the intention of high lighting
something tangible or empirically provable, I find them to be
useless idle speculation. That's what I was trying to get at.

>
Oh, I see.  We're in total agreement.  I think counterfactual
propositions are useless distractions.

>
Excellent! There has been a meeting of minds! ;)

>
This is the USENET.  We could be yelling at each other for an entire
year.  Instead, we do something completely different.  We're weird.  And
we don't even use our real names.  Our friendship can't leave the
USENET.

Haha... true. I find that usenet has great power, due to its simplicity!