Endril's Journal

1:05 pm
Estimated score on today's test: 55
Needed to pull a B in the class: 100% on all remaining homework, 80% on next test, 83% on final.

LOOKS LIKE I UNLOCKED HARD MODE

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24th Jun 09 (Wednesday)

11:38 pm
We'll spread our thoughts with nanobots that know how to self-replicate
through Solar system, Milky Way, or anywhere we designate.

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4:33 am
'geddon-'geddon-'geddon-'geddon-'geddon

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23rd Jun 09 (Tuesday)

6:51 pm
( Read more... )

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19th Jun 09 (Friday)

7:15 pm
Why don't non-theists just go ahead and say that their atheism/agnosticism/deism/humanism is a religion? It would afford them quite a bit of debate leverage. Religionists seem to think you've got to justify and scrutinize every little quirky thing in a secular belief, but if you just said "Well, I just believe it. It just seems like it's right to me," what are they supposed to say in response?
And, what would the difference be between a secular-versus-religious argument and a religion-versus-religion argument? Presumably Buddhists and Christians have different standards of evidence, different conceptions of what constitutes a problem, different domains of thought they are willing to entertain, the same way materialists and Christians do.

As a more-or-less materialist myself, of course I think that materialism has the higher ground, and the supernatural claims people typically make aren't on good footing. But, I'm very willing to admit that there are certain assumptions behind materialism, and certain phenomena that have a "godlike" nature. The basest and most difficult to reduce components of our metaphysics. Here's a tentative list of our natural gods:

Brahma. The timeless laws of consistency. Logic, mathematics, and the field humbly titled "computer science" (as if all it described was computers) describe a sort of entity beyond the scope of normal observation. Its components, such as numbers and functions, lie in some platonic heaven where rules are never broken. There's been a bit of controversy about the very existence of this entity, as if humans have simply decided by polite convention the truths of mathematics, for the sake of convenience. It might be fine to talk that way, but these myriad abstracta have surprising properties that we cannot toss out with a little handwaving. They kick back like rocks; we "discover" new things about them all the time, the same way that we might discover new facts in chemistry. Consistent in its invisible domain, free from the chains of this world of time and energy, this component of reality can be difficult to reason about. Perhaps its features are all "necessary truths," or perhaps they are just one of many possible configurations.
Yog-Sothoth. The enormous wrinkled manifold of all the space, time, probability, and energy that is our universe. We're still trying to figure out the details of how it works, but we have at least a faint idea. We're often told that this beast is "weird," but actually, it is perfectly normal, and not once has it behaved in a strange way. It is we humans and our intuitions that are weird. This world we call home exists without any especially good explanation, particularly considering that it could not have been 'caused' in the normal 'time-like' way.
She Who Lives in Her Name. The property of symmetry in the components of reality. Patterns, communication, and information are able to exist, because there can be a defined relationship between non-identical elements of the world. The reach of this principle is profound; meaningful interaction of any description depends upon it. All information processes of any kind, including evolution, are made possible. Smears of graphite or chalk on a smooth surface might accurately represent an exploding star or the world population growth. It does not matter how very disparate the phenomena seem to be in physical instantiation; there is a kind of deep "sameness" that is possible amongst the things in the world. It's difficult to imagine how things could be otherwise, and it's easy to take it for granted. But it is a physical fact like any other, a property of things in our universe.

You may wish to argue about the words I used, but I don't think you can outright deny that those things are fundamental to our world and still call yourself a materialist. Do we have good reason to think that they are real, that they are not just clever and complicated fictions, the evolutions of Thor and Apollo?
I'm actually not sure.
I would like to hear your thoughts on this, if you have any.

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14th Jun 09 (Sunday)

4:58 am
The mark of the subtle mind is not only its ability to grasp the idea of spontaneous orders but also to understand that conscious attempts to improve or to mimic these orders are doomed to fail. "Why so?" asks the simplistic thinker. "How can happenstance generate complex order superior to what a conscious mind can conceive and implement?" In responding to this question, a subtle thinker points out that spontaneous orders do not arise from happenstance: the continual adjustments by each individual within spontaneous orders follow a very strict logic—the logic of mutual accommodation. Because no central planner can possibly know all of the details of each individual's unique situation, no central planner can know how best to arrange each and every action of each and every individual with that of the multitudes of other individuals.

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10th Jun 09 (Wednesday)

4:16 pm
KAGAMI, THE CITY OF MIRRORS
DEMON OF THE THIRD CIRCLE
FETICH SOUL OF THE SILVER FOREST

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1:27 am
I was going to make an uncharacteristic-for-me post about relationships

BUT INSTEAD

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9th Jun 09 (Tuesday)

6:24 pm
The Nash equilibrium of this game, where all players choose the number 0, is thus associated with an infinite level of reasoning.

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6th Jun 09 (Saturday)

12:50 pm
What a familiar dream. I think I've had almost he same dream before, but there's not really any way to tell if that's true. But it all seems so very familiar. Hiding information in the books. The strange codes we used. The wooden airship. The sacred place with the red eyes. The pact with the girl that had to be broken. It's a beautiful story, even though I only half-remember it.

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3rd Jun 09 (Wednesday)

12:59 pm
They need to make a Vocaloid out of Norio Wakamoto.

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2nd Jun 09 (Tuesday)

4:38 pm
"A ghost's inability to respire the Essence of Malfeas presents severe (but not insurmountable hardships) to a ghost."

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31st May 09 (Sunday)

12:01 pm
ξ（^ω^）ξ

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26th May 09 (Tuesday)

2:14 am - It was only half-finished before
媧如妖姬

Translation: "Courtesan whose Fascinating Beauty that Evokes of the Nature of the Goddess"