Uplifting and Helpful Quotes

I'm sure what you say is Real, but per my skepticism over my cynicism, I'm divided by this.

-Will

 

You must be beside yourself.

 

Such division.

 

"Division" is such a divisive term. I prefer gazentas.

 

I could multiply that by a number of times between zero and one.

-Will

 

Merry Christmas!

 

Merry Christmas to you.

-Will

 

"No one grows great by making others feel small. Great is he who succeeds in magnifying those around him."
TANSL

 

The ending to INFERNO By Dante Alighieri

The Guide and I into that hidden road
Now entered, to return to the bright world;
And without care of having any rest

We mounted up, he first and I the second,
Till I beheld through a round aperture
Some of the beauteous things that Heaven doth bear;

Thence we came forth to rebehold the stars.

 

Nice!

 

“A lot of us first aspired to far-ranging travel and exotic adventure early in our teens; these ambitions are, in fact, adolescent in nature, which I find an inspiring idea... Thus, when we allow ourselves to imagine as we once did, we know, with a sudden jarring clarity, that if we don’t go right now, we’re never going to do it. And we’ll be haunted by our unrealized dreams and know that we have sinned against ourselves gravely.”
— Tim Cahill

 

LESSWRONG
The Stamp Collector

Once upon a time, a group of naïve philosophers found a robot that collected trinkets. Well, more specifically, the robot seemed to collect stamps: if you presented this robot with a choice between various trinkets, it would always choose the option that led towards it having as many stamps as possible in its inventory. It ignored dice, bottle caps, aluminum cans, sticks, twigs, and so on, except insofar as it predicted they could be traded for stamps in the next turn or two. So, of course, the philosophers started calling it the "stamp collector."

Then, one day, the philosophers discovered computers, and deduced out that the robot was merely a software program running on a processor inside the robot's head. The program was too complicated for them to understand, but they did manage to deduce that the robot only had a few sensors (on its eyes and inside its inventory) that it was using to model the world.
Continue at:
The Stamp Collector - LessWrong https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/AxTJuFSPdfhACJCea/the-stamp-collector

 

I like it Howland.

The whole 'mind in a vat' scenario vs concrete reality and Plato's Alegory of the Cave addressing the question of what part of 'Reality' do we actually live in.

Descartes started with, "I think, therefore I am." As a fundamental truth from which he hoped to prove all Reality. He was unable to go any further, in absolute terms. The biggest problem was, he couldn't even reasonably say, "I think", because thinking requires a changing state that can't be followed in anything but the abstract. We don't know we think. We have only this moment in which we have a sense, a feeling, of moments before, of states of mind that led to this moment. We have the idea of future moments, an impression of direction leading to the next moment, to a future of unexperienced moments; but only this simple state of existence in this one timeless, dimensionless moment can we accurately say we experience. Once this moment passes into the next new moment, then, again, we only have its memory as a sense of passing and we exist only in the timelessness of our one, impression filled, moment.

Is there a phenomenonal Reality to experience, or are we simply receiving sensory input fed into a 'brain in a vat' by some "evil" wizard of a "false" Reality? To take, as was mentioned in the above article, a position that favors simplicity (Occam's Razor), which Reality is simplest? Timeless, dimensionless impression of Reality, or a phenomenal Reality with vast distances of Space, trillions of trillions of objects and each made of complexity a trillion times more numerous that has led to our incredibly tiny, yet powerful self-aware minds?

Just the musings of a naïve philosopher.

-Will

 

When the waitress asked Descartes if he would like another drink, he replied, "I think not." and immediately disappeared.

 

Will,
I like the way you think.
"Philosophers can seldom put their knowledge to practical use, but if you're a sailor, you can."
Daniel Dennett
May we all keep thinking.