(evolution) chance seems to be a significant factor

Richard Dawkins: Every organism that lives is the "elite of the elite of the elite" (end of 2nd paragraph under "Take a giraffe" chapter)--> seems to ignore the fact that people would not be around if they wouldn't have gotten lucky at some critical points (@ the population bottlenecks)

there *may* be something BIG to lose

by trying cryo preservation or similar -- if there IS something beyond this existence, something better then this you wouldn't want to be stuck to a body indefinitely, but we just don't know...

should we just count our blessings?

there is no real guarantee that our life would be anywhere this good a some significant time into the future; you'd *hope* things would just get better but how realistic is that? we may have gotten to live (naturally, without the life extension) during the best of times; is there a point where life is just not worth is anymore? does every individual have a 'suicide point' --> a point where death is truly a better alternative d.

getting back to science...

STILL MORE: favorite quote from this book it's actually a re quote of Oscar Wild: "we are all in the gutter, but some of us are gazing at the stars..." D.

EVEN MORE:

some things I always had a problem with:

the analogy used to explain basic relativity: is the train moving or is the platform moving? what a silly question... you must burn energy to have that behemoth of a train move! there is no energy spent for just... standing on the platform... (if you have any doubt as to what is ultimately moving in that situation, just have somebody in the train pull the emergency break...or better still, have the train run out of fuel)

quantum mechanics: the idea that you have a measuring instrument interacting with what it's supposed to measure and thus the measurement turns-out wrong and that's a problem we just have to live with... you should be able to at least estimate the error, take it into account and move on... it's an *error of the measuring process* -- has nothing to do with the underlying reality...

a lot of things that are currently main stream appear beyond ridiculous and I think Einstein was correct (although deemed wrong according to current ideas) to question the foundation of quantum mechanics.... D.

MORE: well... I just have to give up on trying to get G. to read it (he's read a couple of paragraphs I pointed-out and said "cool!" -- not exactly the heated discussion I was hoping for... D.
...
Einstein's mistakes

Delia

P.S. science and the like may not be a perfect way to figure out what's going on but it seems to be the best we've got... D.

I took a look at fractals, a way back...

... doesn't seem to be very promising, although I wonder if we "see" fractal-like images before falling asleep and somehow end-up hallucinating as a result; I seem to be able to lucidly dream to some extent (are some people lucid all the way through? seems hard to tell -- how do you know you are not dreaming that you are lucidly dreaming?)

Delia

P.S. this Claude guy was a trip... (did confirm some thing I noticed and seems odd to me: having a dream that uses information from a prior dream, sometimes a very old dream)

P.P.S. I also read a bit about hallucinations in schizophrenia (interesting that one school of thought holds that there is nothing "wrong" with these people... in a medical sense... (just a different kind of "normal") D.

I need to get out of the funk with this...

... but I just don't know which way to go; G.'s been asking me to "dump Archy McNally" (and his ilk) and read some Dostoevsky instead (I didn't quite like his writing in the past, seemed like a boring guy that rambled on and on... and never quite got to the point, I just I never really stuck around for the ending...)

Delia

P.S. So I guess I'm going to give the guy chance , G. says it all comes together at the end -- we'll see... D.

are we in a self created bubble?

do we have any idea of what's really going on?

Delia

P.S. are things like truth and reality -- human concepts -- really "real"?