So a little of my personal PoV cuz my philosophy seems to be ignored. The overall pod is How Good Can it Get, with the sub-vine of illusion of choice.

My girlfriend chose a better life for herself. Her life got better. I came into her life, and she ended up being contagious. My life got better once I chose to agree with her. Before then, I had no empirical evidence that it, whatever it is, could be good.

There was no last minute rising up from my processing subconscious that I gave no subsequent thought to. A tempest raged in my skull for a while regarding whether or not I could accept what she had to teach me.

That by chosing to change your life for the better, you can. I chose to, and all I can say is my life is better because I made a choice.

I chose the possibility of love as something more than ionized molecules or the reproductive urge writ deep in our genes or the driving need of a brain depleted by tumescence elsewhere.

Since then, I have chosen to strive to speak as kindly as possible when my daughter enfuriates me. I have chosen to look forward to the future. And, most importantly in any discussion regarding choice versus psychochemistry, I stopped sucking at the nicotine nipple. I chose to overcome the most insidious of addictions, and have been successful for six months now (well, next week).

Am I merely reacting to signals from my body that the future is shiny? Is my brain feeding me information from media telling me things are good and all is well and the world is fine? Is the Universe a happy place that wants the best for me?

No. The world is rife with suffering and the Universe doesn't care and we are far more alone than we fear. What right to I have to be happy? What nerve, walking with a spring in my step and a hum in my mind. Can't I see the obese families and the crack whores and the man pissing in the bushes because no store will let him in? Of course I can.

If I let the world wear me down, entropy wins, and if entropy wins there is nothing to look forward to but the heat death of the universe as all matter deteriorates into a vast nothingness.

How Good can it Get? It can get so good that just because the world is stricken with angst, misery and dispair, being happy makes you a rebel, and being a rebel is cool.

'Large'has an interesting connotation.  Neither infinite nor even huge (although ithe universe is huge, or larger than you think, anyway).

    It is what I call effectively infinite.  It's like the largest known prime number.  Eavh one is not the last--there is always one at least 2p-1 away, but the one that you know is finite.

    Nothing is infinite.  The idea of infinity is a useful shortcut in calculus and simple philosophies.  In physics, if infinities end up in your conclusions, there's something wrong with your assumptions.  The men who investigated the mathematical depths of infinity tend to end up mad.

    None of this is proof of the lack of infinity in the universe, is is why I've assumed Infinity is an Illusion (because there is no proof).

    The above was taken from a notebook I had written in over a year ago.  I still hold to this, and this is the best way (so far) that I have to describe it.  It needs work, but I wanted to add that R. Buckminster Fuller seems to agree.  At least, if one is to think globally, then the finite nature is an urgent notion to integrate into our psyches.  Sure we get some additional matter through meteors and additional energy through solar flares and the occassional poorly timed neutrino, but over all, we have to consider the fact that we may run out of an easy way to do things, but we still have the means to support us all.  Mind you, Bucky was presenting these ideas 40 years ago, but they seem to hold true.

This is rather turning into K's blog, as transcribed by me.  Not that that's a bad thing.  I have pods to vent in.  Anyway, I was blathering on to K about something I read in R. Buckminster Fuller's (hereby known as Bucky) book "Utopia or Oblivion" (or vice versa).  Columbus determining the Earth is actually a globe with a whole lot more world than the most scholarly KNEW existed shattered the worldview of everyone.  Suddenly, the world was not a plate floating in God's infinity.  It was a finite globe.  It would end.  

K lit up.  "That's exactly it," she declared (I'm paraphrasing, with heavy on the gist), "2 has power because it comes at the end after the equals and the one and the plus and the one."  At the time, it resonated in a way I cannot portray, but I hope it makes sense to someone, somewhere.

K is always very good at listening to me for a while, wandering paranthetically along the tangents, then summing the thought up in 25 words or less.  She constantly astonishes me.  I told her that, as well read as I am, I've realized she's probably more intelligent than I am.  I still have a little trouble dismissing the qualifiers, but I'm coming to terms with the fact that I'm knowlegeable and clever and mighty with wit, but I'm not nearly so smart as the woman I love.  How blissful am I?  I'm spilling happy all over the place.

My girlfriend, K, and I were cuddle-talking this past week.  We're in a medium distance relationship and only get to see each other five times a month, or so, and she was commenting on how good physical contact felt.  She then wrote a T-shirt:

Mean people don't get hugs.

Hugs, as many zaadsters know, are just plain good for you.  Hugs improve your immune system.  Hugs ease stress.  Hugs draw a deeper sense of community and subsequently a sense of security.

Obviously, a lack of hugs is bad for you, so mean people are selected against.  Because of hugging, we are evolving into a nicer species. 

So, grumbling and griping, my thoughts kept surging.  Given two ways to do something, one would obviously be more intuitive than the other.  The two ways could be equal in all other regards, but if one requires a moment of conscious thought every time (the turning fob is vertical, which means the lock is in place) and the other only requires an intuitive glance (the turning fob is pointed at the door, which means the door is obstructed) then the intuitive way is obviously better.  For a few weeks, every time I checked my door, this train of thought would leave the station.

Then I realized I was wasting a whole lot of conscious thought on this.  Either I should take apart the lock and reassemble it in the intuitive way or I should just get over it.  I did one better.  I am now in the process of reprogramming myself to think that when the fob is vertical, it means the door is like a wall, and when the fob is horizontal, it means the door is like the floor.  Hopefully, this will reduce the waste of conscious thought in both regards and I can go on to a more productive life.

In other words, it does no good to gripe about that which you are unwilling to change, whether it be something in your environment or the way you think.  Life lessons can come from any source. 

Six weeks ago, I moved into a new apartment.  The deadbolt on the door struck me, immediately, as counter-intuitive.  To lock the door, I have to turn a thin rectangle so that it is parallel to the door frame, like an eleven, or equals sign.  To me, the intuitive way would be perpendicular to the door frame ( T) means the door is locked.  This inspired a few hours of thought (who knows where inspiration can come from) regarding efficiency. 

There are two ways to install the deadbolt: = means locked and T means open (the way my door is) or:  = means open and T means locked (the way that made sense to me).  I griped and grumbled that no thought had gone into the installation

 But life gets in the way of blogs and I'll have to type out my resolution later.

 

There is something about happiness that makes it desirable.  Those who feel happy usually wish to feel happy again.  As far as physical states go, happiness is one that its medium (us) strives to repeat.

 I am not the first to experience happiness.  Is my species the first to be able to?

Is the first human the one who first did grin?  Homo smiliens?

Happiness is a physical state its medium strives to repeat.  For now, the only known medium is the meat in our skulls (and I'm giving anyone other than myself the benefit of the doubt here).  There is a social trait that is equally relevant in that if someone makes me happy, I like to make them happy, too.  If I'm happy, I'm more likely to make other people happy.  Happiness is, to some perspectives, a contagion.

Is there a non-human medium in which a physical state occurs that causes the medium to repeat the physical state?  What about the Anyverse? 

Sometime after the Big Bang, when the syntax of physics stabilized and certain aspects of the Universe became constant, there existed an isolated state that urged the fledgling superduperhypermegacluster of superduperhypermegagalaxies to make that state again.  How this state happened, or why, comes down to sheer contingency.  It just happened.  It had happiness.

I can't prove this, but it seems right. 

For reasons I will explore, these are the three assumptions I make when dealing with my philosophy:

1.  Infinity is an Illusion
2. Entropy Exists
3. As Above, So Below

Perhaps only the first seems unusual, since the second is the Second Law of Thermonuclear Dynamics and the third is attributed to Hermes Trimegistus.  Infinity has proven to be a useful tool in exploring higher mathematics and defining simplified cosmogenesis, but the only infinite sets  I'll admit to are natural numbers and possible futures, and neither of those actually manifest in the tangible world.  As such, infinity only (possibly) manifests in the intangible world, which is impossible to study and has no effect on tangible me and might as well be illusary.

 Just because the universe is really, really big and the cosmos is really, really complex doesn't mean any state of infinity exists.  As the physicists say, "if any infinities show up in your conclusions, something is wrong with your assumptions."

Greetings and Salutations.  My name's Rich, and I'm the Etceterist.   Just what sort of person is an Etceterist?  It's hard to describe in less than a few thousand words, which is onerous in an introductory blog.  An Etceterist falls between pigeonholes, is a jack of all trades, knows a lot (especially the range of his own ignorance) and craves understanding of so much more.  I have recently determined that my desire to repeat the state called happiness is an instance of the driving syntax of the cosmos.  I hope I'm right.  

 I mean for this blog to delve into my thesis.