Random thoughts

The comments competed for attention, like Daniel Dennett's memes, and one now reads: 'whether it is wise to explore what is given or to start anew'.

When in Xia do as the Xians do.

The Xians inherit an uncomfortable chair from their elders which is the only chair they are allowed to sit in by law until a certain age. After a period of seven sitting revolutions the chair is abandoned and put in a glass case, to be gifted to the closest of kin who haven't yet been inducted into the sitting period of PainOhw. Older Xians pride themselves on keeping very comfortable chairs for their age appropriate guests. From an outsider's point of view, Xian chairs have become an cultural obsession. Those who have not completed the ritual of PainOh age are discouraged from sitting at all in the houses of their elder peers, unless an uncomfortable chair is present.

Young Xians are known to proclaim outloud, as they sit in their uncomfortable chairs, 'this chair is surprisingly comfortable'.

I noticed the cage of course, but not explicitly. Now seeing what it's made of and what it surrounds, I'm uncomfortable.

It is a waste of time trying to comfort the uncomfortable, but those who are merely discomforted can readily be comforted. Uncomfortable chairs in particular should be put out of their misery.

Guns should be upholstered for everyone's comfort.

“When I came home I expected a surprise and there was no surprise for me, so of course, I was surprised.” -- Ludwig Wittgenstein

Chance:Randomness::Probability:Frequency

Damn, that was a good one. I'll have to remember that.

Note: good luck trying to guess who I answered to.

Note 2: neither of these notes are part of the thought, do NOT interpret them! :-}

"Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" -- Confucius (or maybe Buddha or Groucho Marx)

Reply to Pierre-Normand Is the colour of the fruit relevant? I wouldn't like being thrown around to confirm the claim :D

Like a stream. Here it is. I'm sharing it. But is it the same?

The whole time I was picking, I was getting ready to defend myself.

I was sifting through this trash heap with CasKev and all I could find that I liked was a sparkly sequin.

Also, there is something (an agent) hunting us on the trash heap (I hear it over the ridge), so get ready to defend yourself.

Someone post directions to a trash heap worth sifting through so we can get outta here.

Sapientia was peeing into the wind (always here to lighten the mood with his antics, or is he trying to lure the thing over the ridge by scent marking).

Reply to Pierre-Normand Surely it's Groucho. And fruit flies would like a banana.

You can never land in the same pile of shit twice.

"The critic's symbol should be the tumble-bug: he deposits his egg in somebody else's dung, otherwise he could not hatch it." ~ Mark Twain

A tumble bug often lands in a pile of shit twice, unless it is the shit of Heraclitus (diarrhea).

Gold is cold and hard. Yet people say ''She had a heart of gold''

Reply to TheMadFool Gold is pretty soft, as metals go.

(Y)

Reply to jamalrobWhen people say ''I love you'' do they actually mean ''do you love me?''

Reply to TheMadFool Sometimes, and mostly partly.

Take the second left. Give it to the time flies to gain entry.

Clumsy sheep, confidential feat, farmers wish, wools a method, madness, floundering artists, flying carpets, around the wheels, secrets kept, lessons talk, chalked, blue bananna, nurse that goat, float disguised, robbery of youth, bong before song, long before small, intro after, laughter as casper.

"I've got a monocle of the greater space and time. Some would like to get my monocle, try and use it for a crime. No success in that category, you see, it derives naturally, from the sublime, and that's where I broadcast me."
-Telekinetic Walrus

This is how life began. Memes replicating in a thread over many millions of years blindly corroborating to swim against the flow of entropy.

There are some features of this replication you can't break, unless you are a hacker of sorts.

"What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind."
(Attributed to George Berkeley)

Materialism is simply and only the mistaking of methodological naturalism for philosophy. But once inside that perspective, any real philosophy becomes unintelligible, for reasons that are impossible to articulate, as they have been forgotten. It is like being locked in a room due to forgetting the key in your pocket. And because everyone you know is in the same place, then you even forget that it's a problem. All of which is exactly what was predicted in the Allegory of the Cave.

Buddhist analysis here

Neo-thomist analysis analysis here

Find the thread out of the labyrinth. There's nothing else worth doing.

What about the Allegory of the Ship, what with the steering wheel and the way finding and the division of labor.

Whether you sail for God or the nation, or a nation under God, for the captain chasing the white whale on the Sophia, or with your humble friend the Victorian Naturalist, Arwin, it doesn't change the science and adventure of way finding and the body of organization it requires.

No amount of wishful thinking is going to change the ending to Moby Dick...

Everything else is worth doing.

Just when I thought the bullshit would never end, she's getting replaced, and I might have a way out.

One leg sure. But a hundred virtually identical legs at the same time? Unlikely.

Regarding the question, the definite and extremely conclusive answer is absolutely and positively NO. It is matter-of-factly impossible and inconceivable. All scientific evidence ever studied and demonstrated by every brilliant mind ever proves this indisputable and undeniable fact! Unquestionably and in all circumstances. The answer can only ever be NO. NO,NO,NO. End of story and discussion. A lead-pipe cinch. Rarely is the answer so clear and universally agreed upon!

Unless... Except however though but maybe in the only unlikeliest outside impossibility it is very very extremely far-fetched that the answer might somehow under miraculous and incredible situations be in fact... possibly perhaps could be... MAYBE. Extremely unlikely, but at least theoretically possible. And since there is at least a millionth of a billionth of a chance of it possibly one day occurring, that then makes its eventual likelyhood practically guaranteed, so therefore it is overwhelmingly obvious that the only possible and logical answer is an unqualified YES! Everyone has known this since the beginning of time.

Point for pondering.

What did Johnny Cash's Cadillac really look like?

A right is a justified claim.

But that does not necessarily mean that it is always a good idea to make that claim.

How do we know whether any of these thoughts are random?

Reply to Sir2u

If you can hear the bell it's probably not tolling for you.

How did those two get their heads out of their arses for long enough to find the site?

Reply to Mongrel Refutation of idealism?

Reply to Cavacava Well, or just statistically speaking.

Reply to Sapientia What did you say your address was again?

Reply to Hanover If seemingly random replies are expected, and if our thoughts are predetermined, then shoebill.

Even if things were predetermined, no one would know what events were to come, and the future would be just as exciting! Aardvark! (At least the last part was random. Or was it...?)

Except I didn't bring a gallery, so it's doubtful I'll ever find her lapel.

Quoting CasKev

Or was it...?

No, because my mention of a shoebill triggered it, and now there's a pattern, and fandango.

Quoting Hanover

Except I didn't bring a gallery, so it's doubtful I'll ever find her lapel.

My address is 32 Archers Lane. What did?

Quoting Sapientia

If seemingly random replies are expected, and if our thoughts are predetermined, then shoebill.

It's about random thoughts, not random words.

I have been wondering about this for some time.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/science-journalist-retires-98-warns-104600883.html

Sir2u's avatar looks like a dude sitting on a toilet.

That's where we do our best thinking!

Ultra-pensiveness as a way towards supplication... It's not that I would trade anything for it, it's just that she's steadily been draining the IV bag over the past few quarters, which supplies me with a steady ration of bullets to feed on. Decades-old weather forecasts have been helping. I'm waiting on a Chinese Zodiac animal change; it's black market, but it works.

Quoting CasKev

That's where we do our best thinking!

See, I knew that I could not be the only smart one around here. Well done.

Quoting Mongrel

Sir2u's avatar looks like a dude sitting on a toilet.

I will fix it when I get a chance so that the whole glory of it can be appreciated.

Reply to Sir2u Oh that's ok. The glory is implied.

"To live is to suffer. To survive is to find the meaning in suffering."
--Friedrich Nietzsche

But I think to live is to suffer. To suffer even more is to find the meaning in suffering.

"Particles tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force, or move in the direction it is pushing them, and they are more likely to move in that direction than any other at any given moment." ~ By Natalie Wolchover, Quanta Magazine on January 28, 2014 (A New Physics Theory of Life)

Now bear witness to a moment of reckless, idiotic, energy-dissipating, nihilistic substitution:

People tend to dissipate more energy when they resonate with a driving force...

Daniel Dennett's carbon footprint is huge compared to mine because he dissipates more energy. Other organisms resonate with him to dissipate more energy. What luck!

I have decided that I must be a really fantastic person.

When people see me they bow their heads and whisper "Oh my god"

Searching for a better telling of the parable of the two-colored hat.

It resembles the Blind Men and the Elephant.

The end of John Godfrey Saxe's poem:

"So, oft in theologic wars
The disputants, I ween,
Rail on in utter ignorance
Of what each other mean;
And prate about an Elephant
Not one of them has seen!"

Novalis (Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg )

"The world must be romanticized"

I look at my stained hands, and wonder if I've done enough...

Novalis (latin for "new land") started the blue flower meme.

Is the Sawstika (Nazism) a kind of dark flower that grew out of the soil of German Romanticism?

I've been washed clean, and wonder if I should start again.

Reply to Nils Loc

"The world must be romanticized"

Interesting, I didn't know about that. I was reading a book review and the author pointed to this quote. I am interested in the imagination, which seems to me to be a sort of 'work-space' where we flex (romanticize) the images of perception and memory into our flow of thought. Thinking about it in regard to another thread.

I think he was trying to say that we must imagine (romanticize) answers to questions that may have no answer.

[quote=James Hillman Essay, Pothos: The Nostalgia for Puer Eternus] When pothos is presented on a vase painting (fifth century, British Museum) as drawing Aphrodite's chariot, we see that pothos is the motive force that drives desire ever onward, as the portion of love that is never satisfied by actual loving and actual possession of the object. It is the fantasy factor that pulls the chariot beyond immediacy, like the seizures that took Alexander and like Ulysse's desire for “home.”
Pothos here is the blue romantic flower of love that idealizes and drives our wandering; or as the romantics put it: we are defined not by what we are or what we do, but by our Sehnsucht: Tell me for what you yearn and I shall tell you who you are. [/quote]

I think I first encountered the blue flower in this James Hillman essay.

In a botanical domain, Pothos refers to a ubiquitous house plant Epipremnum that wanders (is a vine).

There is an unknown epiphytic species (likely a true member of the genus Pothos) at my local botanical park that is quite unusual. The modified leaves are giant blue scales that hug the side of the palm it is wandering on.

So when I think of the blue flower there is also this epiphytic vine that reminds me of the scales of a dragon. It's an otherworldly psychedelic kind of plant.

All of the ideas amalgamate in my head in a beautiful (or romantic) way.

Maybe negation is spacial

'a' doesn't seem to entail anything except itself,
but '-a' seems to entail 'a'
Does '-a' suggest a logical space.

This thread seems pretentious.

"attempting to impress by affecting greater importance, talent, culture, etc., than is actually possessed"

Thorongil is not impressed. Who is impressed that he is not impressed?

The quality of this rug (a quilt of rags) does not justify its price.

The quality of this person does not justify his/her existence (here).

Bench # 52.

Quoting Thorongil

This thread seems pretentious.

Wait till the real thread starts, it will be a little more mature. [s]Pre[/s] tentious :-*

Maybe this is a slam poetry contest in disguise.

Those tripe tacos you like are coming back in style, but it just depends on what sort of horses they rode in on when the war ended. It's clear in my mind, but I also smoke cigarettes while asleep. So, as Reply to Thorongil said, no one waits for the dharmic wheel to role down the hill all the way; usually you make sure it stops before it hits the barn at the bottom. More info on his philosophy here.

Reply to Nils Loc

Connected to The Blue Rose in Twin Peaks?