In one sentence, what exactly is the topic of debate?
Sure, easy: are you wrong about everything you ever knew?
But every single word in that sentence must be recursively defined to be a general as possible, given every other word in the sentence. So starting with a metaphor is easier.
Anyway, I’m basically trying to convince people not to judge anyone or anything else prematurely. And I suspect that no one has any clue what prematurely means yet (not even me).
How do you live life like that? I dunno, maybe be a Zen Buddhist laughing at the universe. Or maybe a devout Christian with faith in God. I think these are probably approximately linear solutions, though not orthogonal ones.
No, I’m not. That would required a perfectness on the scale of a god-like creature.
You, on the other hand, are wrong.
Sure, probably enough to discuss mathematical ideas. I like measure theory a lot, for example. Don’t ask me about L2 convergence though, because I’m too lazy to look it up and relearn it.
Also, I know enough to know that every object is a mathematical object. (Try very hard to name a counterexample!) Hint: ZFC is just a convenience for a certain subset of math.
have you considered starting a blog on this subject?
Nope. NEXT ISSUE!!
I used to think I was wrong, but then it turned out I wasn’t, so I changed my mind. Either way, I was right at some point.
About that part??? you sure??? oh my god, look, I don’t even know why I bother but here’s a hint:
I say recursively because you’re not capable of learning absolute concepts on within linear time on a probabilistic neural network. You’re just not, ok? You don’t know anything absolutely. It’s possible even that everything you know is absolutely everywhere false but somehow true at the same time. (Ask a mathematician about measure theory if you’re confused about that one). So that’s why every word must be recursively made more general based on the recursion of teaching other people how to think of English words more generally so they can in the reverse collectively teach you to think of English words more generally etc. That’s recursion and it’s the key to life as we know it. (Did you read Wolfram’s A New Kind of Science? keywords: self-reproducing patterns).
So anyway, all I’m trying to tell you is that anything is (almost, mathematically almost, probably…just a guess at this point) possible. Seriously. All objects are mathematical objects in some measure space (for some definition of math–seriously don’t limit yourself to ZFC for no reason here) and it’s possible that the recursively defined universal measure function over that measure space converges. Or maybe it doesn’t converge. Or maybe it’s zero almost everywhere except one place. Who knows?.
All I’m telling you is that things are possible that you might not suspect without really questioning some patterns you’ve built up over time in that neural network of yours. That’s fine too, since I’m sure that neural network has served you fine until now, OK? And probably it’ll serve you well pretty well, if you’re playing the right game of life right now. It’s probably better for playing the game you’re playing now than for me to be playing the game I’m playing now, because I have no idea what to do next in life at this particular juncture (hint: it’s probably going to be CS research, but it might be disappearing to Fiji instead) So don’t take anything as an insult or offensive, even in a logic-based way
It would probably just be endless questions and equivocations. So maybe?
There, I just made a recursive joke! :o
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt, based on what I wrote, and your username, that you’re joking. I’ll also give you the benefit of the doubt that you’re not joking. But really that would just mean you’re making and even bigger joke and I don’t care. But I don’t really care either way, because I’m amused. 
This is a lecture, isn’t it? You’re here to guide and enlighten us! That would explain all the different questions and topics meandering off in a million myriad ways.
No thank you.
Can you ask yourself why you’re still responding then and hide the answer from yourself? I suspect you might already be doing that. I’ve been doing the same thing, about responding to you still, I’m pretty sure. Well, who knows. It’s a bit too recursive to understand without help.
This thread is recursive. But I could be wrong about that. Who knows?
See y’all in Fiji. I hear the food is excellent. But what do we really know about food anyway? Maybe it’s just a mathematical function, recursive to zero except in Fiji.
Think about it.
Oh my God. Please don’t confuse me like that. It’s really not nice. Yes, yes, pot calling the kettle black and all. But how black is your black and relative to which black did you define it? Oh my God, please stop this now. :smack:
By the way, did you really mean that being wrong about everything requires the perfectness on the scale of a god-like creature? Did you really mean to say that? I mean, I think you might be right about that part so I’m slightly confused, but who knows.
Actually even better. Did you just make a mistake implicitly on purpose? How sure are you about that?
What you have to do is ask yourself if the evidence of your senses is consistent with your understanding of how the universe works. Truman Burbank was right to question his environment. But he didn’t just decide that he was living in a TV set - he set out to obtain evidence to confirm it.
Complacency is never questioning your beliefs. Insanity is adopting a set of beliefs without any evidence to support them.
Right right, but you’re not supposed to be insane. You’re supposed to be simultaneously OK with two extremes and act in perfect accordance with both. You have to be ok with facts that are objectively false but subjectively true.
Mentally-ill people generally are those that are too frustrated that subjectively true facts are not acknowledged by others, so they feel that they must force them to be acknowledged (i.e. they feel like they’re anti-Truman). The trick is just not giving a damn anymore and letting the universe sort it out for you.
By the way, did we see what happened after Truman Burbank left his bubble? What if it ended up really really sucking, just like Christof implicitly warned? What if that he and that girl weren’t really all that compatible, except as young lovers bucking a system keeping them apart? What if he could have had the perfect marriage, if only he weren’t so distracted by his supposed one true love?
This is pedantic and late but I meant almost everywhere false, but somehow true at the same time. Then again, I don’t know enough math and it might have been better the first time. I hope a mathematician shows up. Does anyone want to page Indistinguishable?
I think if I were a blind man in the kingdom of the sighted, I would be able to tell by the way everyone kept saying things like, “Look at that pretty sunset!” and I’d have no idea what they were talking about. Conversely, if I were a sighted man in the kingdom of the blind, I suspect all the white canes carried by everyone else would be a bit of a giveaway.
Yeah right, right, because sight is not orthogonal to hearing or touch or smell or taste given the capacity for language and metaphor. Very insightful (about the lack of orthogonality)
But what if you had no capacity for either? How would you figure out you were sighted or blind? Or better yet, what if you did have the capacity but there were rules in place to prevent you from figuring it out, and they were put there in place for your own good (either maternally or paternally or linearly independently from both, to taste…)
Remember Christof’s paternalistic speech to Truman trying to convince him to stay. Was he really the “bad” guy?