Attain fulfilment by becoming famous?

To attain happiness? Fulfilment? No, it certainly won't be the answer.

  

The answer is to attain a tranquil state of mind and accept the vicissitudes of life for what they are, to elevate oneself above all the pettiness and trivialities that consume so much of our lives. To become one with all things. To glimpse the broader picture. To recognise there is so much beyond this world, even though unfathomable to our very much finite minds.

Yes, I have much to learn! 😂

Is it virtuous never to use social media?

 Someone said in a comment under a Guardian article:

My solution to this problem is somewhat simplistic. I don't do social  media. As in not at all. None. Nadda. Never been on Facebook. Never  will. Everything I have read about it causes me to view it as quite  sinister. I don't do Twitter, Linkedin or any other form of social  media.

I'm not sure why people think it's so virtuous and positive to shun social media.  And many appear to think people simply exclusively use it to send strangers pictures of their kids, or of their latest meal, or to boast about their lives, or to announce they're going to the shop etc.

A lot of people do, but one can post about other issues too. People can post something thoughtful or thought-provoking on a whole range of topics. Or they can post something interesting, amusing, or even something profound, e.g. see all my Facebook posts  😉

Or, put it another way, if people just post dreary stuff, trite stuff, nonsensical stuff and nothing that you ever find engaging, interesting, or amusing, then how much are you going to be able to connect with them in real life anyway?

Trouble with real life conversations is that people just talk about dreary, boring stuff. On social media I can say what I think, which I could never do in real life since everything gravitates to small talk.

Outer Space is only an hour away.

 

Scary when you think about it. We live on this ball suspended in the midst of an eternal black inhospitable nothingness with only a very thin sliver of air surrounding the globe enabling us to breathe and live. It is a highly peculiar alien reality we find ourselves in.  Inimical to the yearning soul.

And I love her.

 An excellent cover of "And I love her" by the Beatles. 

Much better than I can sing it.  But I'll give it a shot below.

A chimp typing the complete works of William Shakespeare

 

Someone on twitter/X asked the following question:

A mathematician emerges from a cave, hands you the photo below, and asks "Will a chimp type the complete works of William Shakespeare if the chimp hits keys at random on a typewriter for an infinite amount of time?" What is your answer?

I have no idea why this is so controversial with people arguing with each other. Someone banging on about infinite number of infinite sets and all sorts of baloney. And then answering no! Eh?? The answer is obviously yes.

People seem to think the chimp could avoid certain letters forever. That it would be possible for the chimp to, say, type out an infinite number of "A"s. It isn't. Nor any other specific infinite series. Any such specific infinite series (e.g. an infinite number of A's), would have a probability of 1/infinity of occurring. Which is 0.

All finite strings will not only eventually occur, each and every one of them also occurs an infinite number of times!

Incidentally, I haven't read anything up about this. It's just me thinking about it for 5 mins.

The Bizarre beliefs of Philosophers and Scientists

Many philosophers and scientists have some truly bizarre beliefs. The denial of consciousness (as we understand this term) is the most bizarre. Indeed, I don't really understand what the consciousness deniers are really saying. That they literally never have any conscious experiences? No visual experiences, no thoughts, no pains, no yearnings etc? And if they don't mean this, what do they mean? It's worse than saying an experience is literally identical to a series of neurons firing... although that is utterly bizarre enough.

And I think stuff like the denial of mental causation; that there is no persisting self (not even from one minute to the next); that colours, sounds and smells don't exist out there; that there are ultimately only subatomic particles and their interactions that make up absolutely everything... I think all that is utterly bizarre too, although not quite reaching the absurdity of denying one's own conscious experiences.

But suppose I'm wrong about everything, that reality is really like what some of these people believe. Well.. I don't think I can possibly be wrong about my own consciousness, but what if I am wrong about everything else? Well . .if I am, then I am. I have tried to understand and grasp things, it's the best I can do.

But I do try to understand where people are coming from. Why on earth do they believe the bizarre things they do? It seems clear to me that it is our modern western culture that is the source of all these bizarre beliefs. There seems to be this infatuation with physics and a misinterpretation of what it's telling us.

To be honest, I think it's all largely groupthink. I think to a large extent they are just repeating each other, maybe they're concerned about their reputations and careers to want to rock the boat too much. And when others are continually expressing a certain view of the world, that surely has a powerful effect on one's own beliefs?

I don't think any of us knows anything really ...well, apart from the fact we are conscious! We are just cast adrift into this world. We do not know what we are, where we come from, where we are going, what the world is, and why it has the nature it has, and whether our existence has any type of meaning or purpose. We are lost in a huge chasm of unfathomable mystery, and so we just soldier on.

More on the Free Will issue

 I read the following article today.

Yes, We Have Free Will. No, We Absolutely Do Not

Sapolsky tells readers that the “biology over which you had no control, interacting with the environment over which you had no control, made you you.”

I disagree entirely. Neither genes nor an environment, nor both makes us what we are. We have an intrinsic essence.

[N]o matter how much you try, you can’t intend to intend something. You can’t will yourself to have willpower. You can’t think of what you’re going to think of next. It’s simply not possible.”

True, but irrelevant. As usual the free will deniers demand too much of free will. (BTW, this is a universal tendency in all topics, namely attacking a position that few if any people actually believe in).

Although I can’t intend to intend, I can intend. Where does that come from? It comes from my essence. An illustrative example is I can’t choose to be interested in celebrities rather than philosophical issues. Does this entail I don’t have free will? No, because my essence is of such a nature that I am more interested in philosophy. But where does my essence come from? I suggest that we determine our own natures. We self-define ourselves, as it were.

And, incidentally, this is all far removed from the idea we have no more free will than a boulder has as it rolls down a hill, or the moon has as it orbits the Earth. We are, in the most immediate sense, implicitly aware of our own causal agency. It requires an effort on our parts to get out of bed in the morning, the laws of nature by themselves do not suffice.

The way Sapolsky sees it, you can’t escape the biological and cultural forces and environmental factors that preceded you and shaped you. “There’s not a crack anywhere in there to shoehorn in free will,” he said. “When you look at every contemporary argument for free will that’s not invoking God or fairy dust or something, at some point, one must assume a step that bypasses the antecedent causes. But that violates the laws of how neurons work, atoms work, and universes work. Your life is nothing but that: everything that came before.”

This reference to God or fairy dust is another way of saying that he thinks that naturalism or materialism is true and there are only physical forces. The same typical pattern where materialists accuse their opponent of appealing to magic or the supernatural. It’s a technique to try and convince the reader not by arguments, but by utilizing people's aversion to supernatural or magical explanations, even though it is an incorrect employment of those words.

Essentially, here he's appealing to the notion that the world is physical closed, e.g. that physical causes account for absolutely all change in the world. But appealing to such physical causal closure is transparent question begging.

My first ever computer

It's just about exactly 25 years that I got my first ever computer. From a place called "Time" (it no longer exists). 10Gb hard drive and had Windows 98 2nd edition on it.  I didn't have a scooby how to do anything on it.  But I managed to work out how to play Tomb Raider 2 (I'd already played Tomb Raider 1 on a PlayStation 1 that I had borrowed). Never went on the internet till about 3 months later in 1999. 

The tragicomedy of Trussonomics

I just read this article:

Going for broke: the tragicomedy of Trussonomics 

 She was not a numbers person, she knew what the country needed.

The whole problem was that she was stupid. But why did Tory party members vote for her? Why did the Tory supporting newspapers hail the "mini" budget as outstanding and just what Britain needed?  I think it's endemic stupidity. The problem is that the mechanism whereby people get into positions of influence and power doesn't appear to pay much heed to people's actually ability or intelligence.  Influence and power is won by people being firm, being unwavering, in their convictions. Contrariwise, having a head for figures, having a nuanced stance on issues, doesn't win any favours with the masses, and it is the approval of the masses that precipitates a person's popularity and hence influence.

Astonishing Physics Facts

 

People keep currently posting above in Facebook saying essentially, wow, isn't physics amazing.

1. And apparently we never ever see anything "now". Even when talking to someone just in front of you, they're appearing as they were an incredibly small fraction of a second ago. So, in a sense, everything we ever see is non-existent if the past doesn't exist. But I think people always take the scientific story too seriously. Perhaps we should re-consider what is meant by "now"? Perhaps "now" should be defined by what the speed of light conveys. So we're not seeing a star 100 light years away as it was 100 years ago, but rather "now".

2. So at the singularity (the centre) of a black hole, in a split second the whole of eternity flashes by in the rest of the Universe. Or perhaps Einstein's equations break down in such extreme conditions! 

3. Refers to dark matter. Translation -- the galaxies exhibit motions not currently accommodated by our current understanding of gravity. Or, in other words, our theories in physics don't currently describe everything. But putting it this way is less likely to exhibit the wow! from people...

4 & 5. Takes our theories in physics as depicting a literal state of affairs. Ignores underdetermination of theories that suggest physics is merely engaged in describing the world via mathematical equations, not saying what its ultimate nature is.

6. What is amazing is that reality exhibits patterns that we can mathematically describe. But 6 seems to suggest that gravity is a real thing with causal powers, which like 4 and 5, is a metaphysical interpretation.

7. Meaningless blather, but sounds cool to say it. 

8. Or observation (as in a perceptual experience) defines reality.