EGON FORUMS

I'm sorry, I must have been confused by this bit: (emphasis mine)

;)
[/smartass]

There you go again, using your "logic" and "reason". Honestly, I though we gave those up? And Mathematics is a creation of the evil god Loki, meant to lead us astray from the true path of Eternal Kaos. I thought everyone knew that.

Y'know, you're coming dangerously close to recreating a fictional universe I came up with a while ago. Stop it. I plan on using it in my eventual webcomic. (It also involves the Godelian paradox at the heart of the concept of God, and other fun stuff. Just as background, you understand…)

Lemme guess… Invalid_session? Annoying as all hell, that. Does anyone know what causes it, or if Khym would be able to do some sort of maintainer-fu to get rid of them?

But hey, we're talking about philosophy here, we've long since left the realm of sane, normal human thought. :D

I've always thought that if you can't think of a theory as being true while you're taking a piss, then perhaps you should question whether you really believe it.

End of my response here. I consider WI sane. At least he can understand that sometimes, whether or not something is true isn't as much a matter as whether it affects you or not.

Reality doesn't exist? Fine. So how can you take a piss? Explain, please, master Icy. If neither existence nor reality exists, how can we even sit here and contemplate whether it exists or not? I don't buy it. I prefer to trust my senses. Oh, right; they're flawed, I can't trust them! So what, dear Brian, do you suppose I should trust? Oh, that's right! There's nothing TO trust! It doesn't even EXIST!

Then why do you still go on 'living,' then? If you don't exist, then what the fuck would it matter if you went out, bought a gun, and shot yourself? Certainly the universe wouldn't change any bit--if it doesn't exist, something losing its existence isn't going to hurt it! Nothing from nothing still equals nothing!

So, Icy, pray tell, why do you still go on living, when obviously, if you are nothing and the universe is also nothing, you're not contributing anything to it?

Hmm?

Oh. So the entire time you've been arguing from a stance you knew had problems anyway . . .

Never mind, then. Slap the cards down and call me a Pragmatist, then.

So you don't believe in reality (in the metaphysical sense) either?

My job here is done. :)

[EDIT: BTW, a very short introduction to pragmatism can be found in the book "Pragmatism" by William James (the same guy that wrote "The Varieties of Religious Experience").]

End of my response here. I consider WI sane.

The idea of language, mathematics, and logic as a game is actually quite popular among many major thinkers of the 20th century. I'm thinking particularly of people like Ferdinand de Saussure (linguistics), Ludwig Wittgenstein (philosophy), and Jacques Derrida (literary criticism).

So you don't believe in reality (in the metaphysical sense) either?

My job here is done

(Hey, when you admit you screwed up, that's gotta count for something . . .)

And so the universe, noticing that things were getting a bit entropic lately (the last few 10e^2000 years or so) decided to activate an anti-entropic repair system. Gathering a few bits of its waning anti-entropy, it managed to plant the seeds of a repair system on one of its smaller planets, carefully selected. Letting a system grow on its own is, of course, far more efficient than trying to make one full-grown. The small system grew and flourished, and so Man came to be. Filled with the seeds of anti-entropy, yet not fully understanding just what the !#@% he was doing, he built, fought, learned, and nearly killed off the other inhabitants of the planet (the “animals”, who, though not as anti-entropic as Man, were still a part of the same system). Eventually, Man got a bit tired with all the swinging of clubs and bashing of heads, and collectively sat down for a moment to think. And so we had fishing, hunting, gardening, and the first inklings of philosophy. So, feeling the anti-entropic seeds within, Man (when he wasn’t busy bashing in heads, which remained a very popular pastime), grew and built all sorts of snazzy stuff. Airplanes, cars, wristwatches, houses, etc. Along with this, Mankind also discovered a few ways to make itself most entropic, meaning, Mankind’s collective atoms would be scattered so far that not even all the King’s men, with the help of God and the universe, would be able to find them all. Luckily, the universe had forseen this, and had figured that Man’s essentially anti-entropic nature would keep them from indulging too much in nuclear weapons, zero-state vacuum acceleration machines, and so on. If not, there were still **unrepresentable using current math** years left until entropy completely took hold, which was plenty of time to start all over again. Besides, with the near-infinite number of quantum universes involving Man, one was bound to work, and one was all that was needed. And so, with much sniffling and obstinate dragging of feet on the part of Womankind, and much grumbling about “good old days when head-bashing was All We Did” on the part of OldMankind, and much “aren’t we there yet?” on the part of Youngkind, Mankind prepared to leave its cozy home planet and go out to see what could be done about the rest of the universe, which was already showing bad signs of entropic decay. And so, everything went along happily. Until…

Mankind, realizing the universe considered them as nothing more than a pair of needle-nosed pliers, and furthermore, realizing that the universe had gotten hopelessly senile from entropic decay, committed mass suicide, throughout all planes and dimensions (they, or their descendants, had gotten up to the 56th dimension, and the nteenth plane) taking a good chunk of space-time with them. No trace of man remained, except for a small tea-cake which had somehow gotten stuck in an old interdimensional corridor between planes that nobody really cared about. Feeling the slight tap of Man’s destruction, the universe, by now even more hopelessly insane, gave a slight sigh and decided to start over again, this time using the tea-cake as a catalyst for a new race of anti-entropic builders. A tea-cake, even under the best of circumstances, is not something it is wise to build a race upon, but the by this time howlingly-insane universe decided to try it anyway. All this, of course, took place in an alternate uber-universe, so when Cakekind made the same realizations as Man, they escaped to our current universe instead of killing themselves. Bitter and angry at their origins, then turned on their anti-entropic past and began handing out large king-sized buckets of entropy to any being or dimension that dared cross their path. This is the origin of the hideous, mutated, twisted, evil, yet delicately frosted, DEMON-PASTRIES FROM UNIVERSE Z!!!!! I personally regard the nickname given to these beings as totally inappropriate and childish. In my opinion, the threat to our universe represented by these rampaging confections, and by their universe of origin, which is now so senile it goes bumping into other universes at random, is being seriously underrated in both houses of Congress. But then, what better can you expect from a race of second-rate repairmen?


(Note: The above race and their story, will, so help me, be in one of the WW’s. Perhaps in WW4, as a lesson taught to young Haveners about the dangers of careless system design. Also, a few of Cakedom’s spies may still be around, posing as ordinary consumables)

(Second Note: I just realized that some people, on reading the above, might take offense to my portrayal of “Womankind”. Like I care. “He who makes fun of the human race can’t afford to be politically correct.” There now, there’s a new quote for ya. That and a nickel’ get ya a sense of humor. Go pick one up- they’re cheap. Ooh, ooh… see if you can pick one up from a politician- they only use theirs for hideously bad jokes to constituents, so it should be in fairly good condition.)

(Third & later Note: I’m sure I was going somewhere with the “sniffling and dragging of feet”, I just can’t remember where, now. Maybe it will come to me. Ah, yes, now I remember. I was imagining a typical family trip, only it was a family of cave-people, and they were on their way to the next valley or something (hence the “are we there yet?” of Youngkind). Womankind was berating Mankind about leaving their nice warm cave, etc.)

(Quick, Robin- to the Batmoobile!)

The theory of moo propagation-

The moo grows stronger with each passing day...
All is moo, and moo is one. But why is this? For the simple reason that moo encompasses all- it is inescapable. Some might say- "but what about that which is not moo and does not contain moo"? They are deluding themselves, for that which is not-moo contains within itself moo. For something to be not-moo implies the idea of moo, therefore moo is inescapable. All attempts to speak of not-moo only strengthen moo. Moo contains within it all the universe, for in all the universe there is only moo and not-moo; and as I have said, not-moo implies moo. "But it is just a joke!", they say. "So is the universe", say I...


Moo...
(to be continued...)


E-Z multiple choice response!

a) This is a bunch of moo!
b) What a load of moo!
c) It mooves me in ways which I cannot explain.
d) 23 (It doesn't rhyme with "moo", but what can you do?)
7) I refuse to pick one of these options...


Personally, I'm going for b...




(moo; moo; lesson two)

Let us consider a simple object; say, a flower. This is not moo, but by being not-moo, it contains the idea of moo.

Let us take the universe. In all the universe, however mind-bogglingly big it may be, there is only one thing which *is* moo, and that is moo itself. All else is not-moo. Therefore, moo is unique, and is to be cherished. "But what of my thumb?", some might ask. "Does it not divide the universe into 'my-thumb' and 'not -my-thumb'?" Show me your thumb, I say. What do you mean by "your thumb?" Where does your thumb end and your hand begin? Look closely enough at your thumb, and its solidity will be shown for the **falsehood** it is, for your thumb is but frail matter. Moo is not. Moo has no meaning, and is therefore the most meaningful of all things. "Meaning" can count for little, coming from we who know so little of the universe. Better to leave something unfettered from the restrictive meanings we would give it. That something is moo. It is meaningless, and therefore is able to contain all of the universe, whereas those things which are meaningful contain only themselves, if that. Therefore, the more meaningful a thing is, the less meaning it truly has. The above may seem, to some, to make little sense- that is because words are very meaningful, and thus mean little. Moo.

I haven't had the time to fully look through all the arguments, but it looks like the previous argument about reality is over, so I will go ahead and try to stir up the shit again...

(As for the reality of reality issue, all I have to say is that the moment someone opens his mouth to deny reality, he already refutes himself. Reality is the sum total of all existents, and all that which exists is that which is.

What you take for granted is the fact that you gauge what is true and what is not true by whether or not it corresponds to reality. If I were to say Miao Ming was in Texas, but she was in fact in California, what I said was false. What I said about her location did not correspond to her real location.

Whenever someone points to an example of the worthlessness of your senses, such as an error of observation, how were they able to determine your observation to be false? Through observing the error occur, of course. A bit of a contradiction, don't you think?

If our senses aren't valid; if they can't give us the information we need to determine the true and the false, how is it that we know even this? If I observe a person making an error, how do I know that it is actually happening, if my senses aren't valid? Those who deny the validity of the senses undercut their own arguments in this way.

It would be silly to deny the existence of reality, but the actual nature of that reality cannot be proven through our senses alone, although we can tacitly assume that they are more-or-less correct for the sake of convenince. You really should read the thread, we pretty much went through this.

And thus, the Philosophical brawl ends, as they are wont to do, in a big gooey puddle of Solipsism. ;)

Oh yeah, since this thread is pretty much dead anyway, as promised here's my old (very) short story that's similar to Yevaud's bit about the Universal Combustion Engine, completely unchanged from when I originally wrote it. Save any accusations of misogyny until the end, and forgive any scientific inaccuracies- I was young :) (Although it's somewhat mitigated by the fact that I was using the non-standard definition of a "universe" that I use in all my fiction, in which the "known universe" is but a tiny portion of the whole thing, and what we think of as laws of physics may be different in other sections. And one of the notes at the end refers to a videogame I was designing on paper, back when I thought I might do that for a living)

And now, here's a extra-special-bonus-unsolictied piece of writing, a post (2, actually) explaining the true nature of moo that I made to the Bad Boys of Computer Science board a while ago, when either by random chance, the actions of a MOOist agent, or interference from alien mind-control satellites, there was a thread that came very close to recreating the beginning of MOOism:

Basically I agree with everything Icy said.

...

:o

*Icy checks to see if Hell has frozen over or if pigs have gained the ability to fly.*

Hmmm, that little piece sounded somewhat Taoist to me. You've read the Tao Te Ching, right? If not, then go, read it, now. It's eighty one-page chapters, and if you don't reflect upon it too much, you should be able to finish it in under a half hour.

All in the world recognize the beautiful as beautiful.
Herein lies ugliness.
All recognize the good as good.
Herein lies evil.

All the people enjoy extra
While I have left everything behind.
I am ignorant of the minds of others.
So dull!
While average people are clear and bright, I alone am obscure.
Average people know everything.
To me alone all seems covered.
So flat!
Like the ocean.
Blowing around!
It seems there is no place to rest.
Everybody has a goal in mind.
I alone am as ignorant as a bumpkin.
I alone differ from people.

When the government is laid back
The people are relaxed.
When the government is nitpicking
The people have anxiety.

1. faith is all about belief in the possibility of an object which may or may not exist, yet has great emotional or spiritual significance to you. The moment it is proved or disproven that the said object exists, you no longer are required to believe in it, and therefore faith ceases to have any meaning.