h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

And I still have this problem with question marks (you see).

Forgive me for not giving an abstract of Jung's idea he termed "Synchronicity". You're in a library, right? Look him up: he wrote the book on "meaningful coincidence".

Gotta run. Real life interrupts (coincidentally?)

No. Not important to me. I know what synchronicity means in current usage. I just was unaware of Jung's coining. Are you going to hire me to do something or some such if I now go read Jung? Why don't you stop responding to me like you can insult what I have said or your version of it without direct quotes? Give me orders; give me job then. I may be in Canada soon; it is quite likely what I will have to do if I am denied a passport and Guam and a boat seems less palatable.

You state, “I have in the past said that there is no such thing, strictly speaking, as the supernatural, to my mind.”, this is your belief and you then go on to say “I use 'supernatural' as a stand-in for the longer phrase 'things (or actions) that would ordinarily be perceived as supernatural”.
How can you dismiss a words meaning in prefers to your own belief then go on to apply this word “supernatural”, stating it is “ordinarily perceived” to unqualified items, such as ,“things”.
Then unscientifically state that” my suspicion/guess”, are these good enough grounds to dismiss or over turn none fact.
You then conclude, “That is my perspective. Supernatural for real, really supernatural, does not exist, but why can't I use the word as shorthand in a clearly expressed context for something else.” , so you don’t recognise the word “Supernatural” but still insist on using it but only as a means of, capturing and relaying your belief
Sorry, the word supernatural is commonly applied as, that which is not subject to the laws of nature, or more figuratively, that which is said to exist above and beyond nature.

"No. Not important to me."

well, your mathematical stuff doesn't seem too important to me, but I did ask, and, frankly, I was more polite than you're being right now.

"Are you going to hire me to do something or some such if I now go read Jung?"

No. Are you going to hire me if I go back to university for a Mathematics degree? (not that I need or want a job)

"Why don't you stop responding to me like you can insult what I have said or your version of it without direct quotes?"

Okay, I'll stop responding to you, but I wasn't meaning to insult. I was asking politely for you to try to simplify your exposition enough that I (and the rest of us here) might have some chance of actually discussing your ideas with you. Is that not what you want, discussion? If not, why are you posting here at all?


"I may be in Canada soon; it is quite likely what I will have to do if I am denied a passport and Guam and a boat seems less palatable."

If you come here, welcome, but I won't have a job for you. Sorry.

I'm also sorry that you're finding it necessary to leave.

Science's primary concern is ultimately with the question of whether coincidences rise to a high enough level to be regarded as not merely accidental coincidences (or if they exist at all). The existence of a coincidence of high enough magnitude has to be assumed to be non-accidental or there is nothing we can call knowledge at all. Setting the standard 'high enough', however, is an art within science by-and-large. The rule of thumb is Carl Sagan's "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence," but then how do we define the 'extraordinary'? Things happen that seem to have meaning to certain observers and not to others, and there are general senses of who might and might not be deluded, but the bottom line for my 'work' is it does in fact meet a standard of astronomical unlikelihood of accidental in parts and in entirety, and this would be concomitant with the birthday coincidence being of the order of a fraction of the reciprocal of the Earth's population in a reasonable framing of the coincidence, as I have discussed. Now, you may not like this, but your importance as a human being, anhaga, a million years from now will be determined by just one thing: You knew me when. SORRY!

"your importance as a human being, anhaga, a million years from now will be determined by just one thing: You knew me when."

Well, I don't care about my "importance as a human being", tomorrow or in a million years.

Good luck with that ambition of yours, though.

I mean, unless we are BOTH still alive then (which is what I am aiming for). If not, then we are both important dead people or one is an important dead person to the other.

Ambition schmambition. I just want what is best.

Whatever.


Honestly, all I was trying to do was to ask for a bit more clarity in your communication. Until you've got that abstract ready, I'm not at all interested in whatever it is you're trying so hard to not communicate.

Importance has a meaning other than as related to ambition, anhaga. You don't have to be ambitious to believe with good reason you are important. I do not mean to say that I lack personal ambition; it just is not my primary concern to be important to more than a few people I meet on a personal level I don't happen to have any choice on the matter, however. If I were not a discoverer of my own family birth-date coincidence and it were unearthed from records and explored in a million years, I would be important for that reason alone entirely independently of what my life in its specifics had been like (although that is an impossible hypothetical).

I am reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity , but reading the works of an old Nazi sympathizer directly holds no real interest for me at present, and I am busy with plenty of things without putting everything but the kitchen sink into my work (which I suppose I will end up doing anyway, but only if I am right about living forever).

I'm not clear on why anyone would want to live forever.

But, good luck with that non-ambition.

And the passport.


Excuse me, I've got to go save the world.

It does seem Jung was attmpting to create a pseudoreligious approach to me. It does not mean anything to me. Accidental coincidences, non-accidental coincidences, and non-coincidences are all there are, and the question is which is which.

I'm not clear on why anybody who actually has a choice would prefer to die if there is nothing after life and suffering is not interminably extreme. I am not sure that I appreciate the glib attitude toward the intellectual efforts I have made (and given my expressed circumstances). You already have your abstract, more or less. Unless you have some reason to not regard what I have said as worthy of review or reconsideration, we have nothing to talk about on what must naturally be very important. That does not mean we cannot talk about other important things (like how I can make money from mixing social networking and the need for commuters to stop wasting fossile fuels (and their own time)).

winternights: come again more clearly, please.

Why don't we try this: One definition of 'God' is 'That entity responsible for causing the supernatural', and it ends up being a little circular. However, a 1-shot sentence on my first try at creating a sentence of any length and doing as follows is (I have told this once before, that this sentence was provoked in me by Taff relating a quote by the Pope that God, using 'He', pretends not to exist) "GOD IS NOT A HE, SHE, THEY OR AN IT, BUT IS AN IS." translates to the prime 71549191415201851985208525151811492022120919114919 by stringing together alphabetical positions of letters. If it is assumed that I am being honest (You need not, but if...), then this 1-shot along with the details concerning factorization when YHWH and ALLAH are substituted for GOD constitute evidence [if] that I was mediating mathematical results generally (as a single datum, more or less, among a wide variety of others). Now, if I say, winternights, that it is okay for some people to call this mediation 'natural but very strange' and for others to call it 'supernatural', and I decide I prefer just 'supernatural' with the understood caveat that it can hypothetically be explained naturalistically without the hugest stretch of imagination given the state of today's scientific knowledge on the expected likely ubiquity of life and certain plausible conmsequences of this likely ubiquity, why is there a problem? You say that if it is natural but weird enough that it would seem like a normal thing to call it supernatural, with a caveat, then there is a problem? Okay, fine. I don't have a word for it then; just a concept.

Please just regard the little mistakes in the preceding to be typos (close enough).

On my shorter recent post (__-concidences), obviously all three classes have larger meanings than the question of categorizing, but I do not see anything deeply relevant to what I am saying in Jung's perspective other than that his has intellectual heft historically and we both talk about coincidences. Really, it could be I am too tired or busy to see it. Bottom line: Somebody helping me discover strange surprising math stuff that is not of human origin. Maybe that cat parasite is it, but my guess is it is not. You choose not to understand (or proclaim that position) if you have been arguing with me from the beginning here.

Since I already have quite a sequence of posts, I might as well say that I would have reasonably soon expected to read Jung (years rather than decades) in detail, but I am not going to do so sooner or later because somebody says so with so vague a reason. I suppose that my categorization having some kind of highlighted split between meaningful and non-meaningful accidental coincidences might be something a little on point, but it is only relevant to what I have been doing as context on the subject of coincidences generally except to those without mathematical curiosity or capacity. My coincidences have to be regarded as meaningful to anybody exposed to them who cares and is capable of looking at them, and my main concern is why they are meaningful rather than that they are (because they really are so clearly so).

I will leave at least the next page to others even if directly addressed.