Forum Moderators: phranque
Hey, what's a mind for if not to waste it musing about the possibile interpretations of life and the myriad outcomes possible given certain assumptions.
Okay, now . . stop avoiding doing your homework (or whatever you're avoiding) and get back to work.
Signed,
Dad :0)
The problem is we search for answers before even knowing the questions.
Just remember that as you travel down the roads of life to stop once in a while and eat the roses. (cow philosophy).
Besides, people are nothing like coding. We are really all automobiles with the same type of circulatory, fuel, ambulatory and electric sytems.
What Deep Think actually said?
"Ford, y tu?"
The study of quantum reality has revealed that the inevitable outcome of an imponderable question seeking an impossible answer is to ask the interrogator to answer their own question . . . in Spanish. Therefore, "Ford, y tu?" or "And you, Ford?"
An artifact of the same forces that give us the improbability drive.
Damn, I think I'm having a flashback . . :)
Pretty close to MSN Search, you might be on to something with this.
I couldn't help but think of some more cow philosophy from "The Longest Journey" (E.M. Forster)...
"One might do worse than follow [Tilliard], and suppose the cow not to be there unless oneself was there to see her. A cowless world, then, stretched round him on every side. Yet he had only to peep into a field, and, click! it would at once become radiant with bovine life."
Humans will only percieve things they already believe it. Unless they are half human half ADD. Those were the filters you spoke of.
If some piece of data definitely looks like something they don't/shouldn't believe in, we are back to Douglas Adams again - its an SEP (Somebody Else's Problem) and thus invisible. People will get quite obnoxious defending their non-belief in something thats right in front of them. They have to get offensive with you, because if its right in front of them, they can't explain it away with logic!
This is quite amusing if its a Slow News Day and you have fast reflexes. :)
People will try to fit new information into the belief structure they already have. Most people anyway. The rejected data ("damned" in Charles Fort's terminology) is cast adrift.
I've watched people do this. Within 20 minutes all memory of the rejected information seems to be gone.
It seems people flag data as 'true' or 'false'. A very few people can also use 'indeterminate' without major psychological trauma. I wish there were more of them.
Ford, y tu?
I love it! But it made me think of another (im)possibility, French instead of Spanish!
"Ford est tu"
Which means "Ford is you" in English.
I.e. that we are all Ford Prefect, insignifigant hitchikers lost in an immense universe that we cannot understand. Which reminded me of one of my favorite (long) quotes:
I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything, and many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean. I might think about it a little bit, but if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else. But I don't have to know an answer... I don't feel frightened by not knowing things, by being lost in the mysterious universe without having any purpose, which is the way it really is, as far as I can tell, possibly. It doesn't frighten me.-Richard P. Feynman
And that's from a guy who won the Nobel prize for figuring out some stuff about Quantum Electrodynamics ;)
I'll save the Bistromatics for Pubcon dinners.
The simple form of the circle is the one true unsolvable equation. The movie is of course fictional, but it goes on the concept that if you can solve PI, you know the true name of God. It's an adventure of one character that supposely can solve PI but does it by some supernatural ability. :-) Full of holes, not the greatest cinema, but a concept most of us can relate to.