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

I enjoyed reading your posts tremendously, and admired your patience and effort in arguing about science.

Cheers.
I think today I've finally run out of patience with those couple of threads, since if I try and expand on a point, it seems I'm 'missing the real point', and if (as usually happens) I cover multiple points in a post, the most pertinent ones seem to end up generally ignored.

Bingo. "Here's an example. Based on this example, X, Y and Z." Then you say wait, the example is wrong! "Ahh, you're missing the *real* point".

Very frustrating. But I think your discussion was nonetheless useful up to this point, reading the posts was great.

Looking elsewhere onsite this evening I came upon something that might at least explain the problems I was having communicating - it seems possible that P-C may have a personal philosophical view of reality as being something less certain than that of most people.
However, even if that is the case, I still don't see how that view would require P-C to consider that other people must share that view even if they claim that they don't.

If someone is happy to take a pragmatic philosophical view, and considers that their everyday view of reality doesn't require philosophical underpinnings at all to be adequate, it seems a bit much if someone else not only has a different view but seems to seek to imply there *aren't* any other views, and then gets worked up if people challenge them.

It's not quite at the level of "How dare you disgree with me, especially when you must actually think the same way as I do", but sometimes it feels like it's getting close.

Not having any philosophical background, and trying to work things out as I go along does maybe make things more confusing at times than they need be, but possibly it does also help free me from certain baggage and allow me to think about how *I* think, rather than about how other people think I think.

It is nice to know I'm not entirely confusing everyone, but I'm generally not particularly skilled at accepting positive feedback, even for an Englishman, so I'm not sure what more to say.

I wasn't sure if you were working things out, or already had some philosophical training. I was going to say if it was then second, then well done. And regardless of others response, you definitely got something out of the argument.