JennaW

He's not a photographer -- that's me. He's a musician, a programmer, a climber, a paraglider, a snowboarder, and a mountain-guide. And he "gets" me, even from so many miles away! But I'll write more when I meet him. Thanks for your well wishes! :-) --Jenna

Thanks everyone! Angie, actually Priceline is the way that I got my first airline ticket to Thailand in 2001, and I used it again to go buy a ticket to Vienna (for $475) for April 2007. I emailed him this info (also orbitz.com is good) and since he's sick, he's probably not near a computer so I'll have to wait to see what he thinks when he's better. He's not a photographer :-) But he certainly does have well-defined passions, and he does them all excellently-- which is why I like him so much. We shall see about January. If not, then it's a definite for April! :-) --Jenna

Nevermind the naysayers, they aren't the ones living your life. You go out and live your dreams, that's what counts.

Well, I learned a lot about the boy I like from a crisis, and it was done through electronic medium. So it is possible to see how someone handles something (although not the whole of it) via email and photos. He's strong, he's stable, he knows himself, he knows what he needs for himself, and he's still able to be happy a month later while recognizing grief and sadness-- I learned all that. And that totally rocks my world, as I've met other boys who have gone into histrionics with much, much lesser "crises".

Hey, I'm in the same boat. 6000 miles, sheesh!

thanks! I'm pretty good about ignoring naysayers. If I can ignore my (very loud, shrill) mom naysaying me for 16 years, I can pretty much ignore anyone! :-)

Thank you very much! Also I've been in school and just living my life... sitting less in front of the computer and doing more school. He has nothing to do with objectivism at all. :-) --j

If it's not love, it's something. You can safely say we "like" each other, but we've told each other more that than. In different languages. Like your relationship, we met online. I was posting photography online off and on, and in late August he started to comment on my photos, when he started an account. I looked at his photos and started to comment back. And then when a discussion went really long, I just mailed him through that site's mail. I realized that I was the only woman whose photos he commented on and that he marked as what he likes. Then I got annoyed with the interface, so I just told him to email me at my normal address. Anyway, in ~4 months, it's ramped up, and we've sent each other CDs through snail mail, and video thru email. He is trying to find a good priced ticket to meet me in Bangkok, and I bought a ticket to Vienna. And now I know he likes me. So we haven't met, but we miss each other. In a lot of ways, he's closer to me than a lot of random people I meet right here in my own city! But we don't talk about dating or labelling whatever it is... it's just not important. It's something that I think we'll know, if not now, then when we meet. Right now, we're each other's dreams. :-) Hey Jenna, that's wonderful! Is it love? are you dating? Do tell us more! How did you meet? Where and how did you meet? Cyberspace or in person? [by the way, that's a very cool posting pix you have there].

Taken!

On the trail of Angie & Victor... I have met someone online but they are halfway around the world. I think gary williams knows about this... but in a nutshell: I hope to meet him in Thailand in January, if not, I'm going to Austria in April. Me and him, me and him. What's good is that I'm planning on trying to move to Italy in 2 years or so. This thing, it just sneaks up on you. Talk about being blindsided.

Angie & Victor: I'm happy for you. Whatever the love, it should be celebrated, as there is (I think) not enough of it in the world. And I know somewhat of how your situation is like. All I can say is that distance is really a drag.

I'm forty-nine come January. The earlier vanity shot was from the 'old days' when I was a singer for a band called Los Popularos . . . WSS-- your picture makes you look kinda like a young Christopher Walken! He's a good-looking guy.

Words like "always" and "never" in terms of future conduct-- no matter the best effort-- is just going to be frustrating and exhausting. By following the first line-- "never" accepting any irrational virtues that's impossible to do, the person reading this would have to wonder about the impossibility of "never" doing the rest of the paragraph, and wonder about how rational it is to set up all these "never"'s in the first place. There's too much contradiction with human nature from one line to the next in the original format; I like the re-write better.

That kinda reminded me of this: Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny

These are beautiful pictures! I'm in the market for a camera that gives good colors and is excellent at macro shots-- what camera do you use?

I don't see what that has to do with Darwin's quote. He doesn't wish to impose his rule on anyone, he just tells us what he found to be a good method to avoid confirmation bias. And if we can learn something from such great minds, we shouldn't dismiss it on the grounds of the fact that we didn't think of it ourselves. Oh, I wasn't responding to Darwin, I was responding to the question of the difference between following rules and using principles. For me, one follows from the other, and back again. But I do understand what Darwin was doing when he wrote "golden rule". I see Darwin as having learned a lot of value from his golden rule, and through life experience and my own principles is how I establish my golden rules. And, what I learn through these "rules" (I prefer to call them 'guidelines') can influence my principles.

I am not much of a rule follower of other people's rules that they wish to impose on me (barring professional and legal settings). I'm a better rule follower if I make my own rules, which arise from my own chosen principles.

I've read about 3 scientists in the pre-WWII era, and I'm now interested in why people would want to pick up communism. Well, the pattern is this: people did it as a reaction against the Nazis. In response to the totalitarian regime of one individual dictating life or death over all, one reaction was to support equality among the people. Originally, for most people, it is a naive move-- because most people don't think through ideas on their own and tend to follow. I call these people pseudo-communists, those who were dazzled by its positives and naive about its dangers because they weren't thinking of communism per se, but its seeming opposite: Nazism, fascism, etc. and just trying not to "be like that". That is, until people started to know how dangerous communism can be later on via a dangerous application of it when they saw USSR, Vietnam, and China. Thinking of history in terms of action-reaction really lays bare how extremists are so similar, & how people can act when they're uninformed, naive, innocent, thoughtless, yet extreme in their reactions. Hence, reactionaries. I don't think ideas are dangerous until they are applied dangerously-- either via psychopathy, naivete, ignorance, or irresponsibility. An idea doesn't apply itself-- it needs people to apply it. One can dangerously apply an idea in an ignorant manner and cause distress and destruction. One can also apply an idea with full knowledge of intentions, like Hitler. An idea may not have much power if it's ignored, but if you don't know about it, how can you be sure you're not applying it accidentally? Also, to know the ins and outs of an idea, and to consciously not apply it because you can see the dangers, causes it to have no power.

Paul, we should sit down sometime and have a cup of joe! I'm having lots of fun engaging with you on this. As for the questions... 1. Well, it depends on what the orthodox view of existence is. How is it defined? If you give me a definition, I can work off it. I didn't know there was an "orthodox view" versus all other views. 2 & 3: Refer to #1. 4. So far in my science journey, whatever we know of consciousness is important. If we lacked memory, it would put a huge dent in the concept of self. But I'm not sure what you mean by "capacities", though-- for me, capacities of consciousness include volition, emotion, cognition, memory, etc. Or, they could mean what we are capable of. I'm not sure how you're using the word "capacities"... 5. I'm thinking absolute here means objective, that which exists independently of me. Scientifically, to assume a connection with reality, the difference has been scientific progress over the years to the extent that I opened a Gateway (computer) catalog and they were selling laptops with touch-sensitive screens, on which you could directly take notes on using a stylus, and save the notes into the computer. And I, personally, don't "assume" this connection, I've learned about it in biology and via life experience: I connect with reality via sound waves going into my ears, chemicals diffusing into my nose and mouth, and photons into my eyes-- that's the connection. I can't ever get all the photons, chemicals, or sound waves in all of reality (to the far reaches of the universe) into my sense organs-- that's unrealistic-- and in the realm of "the gods"--, so this connection must be contextual to my life; contextual to the photons, chemicals, and waves that I've interacted with and interact with throughout the course of my life. With this knowledge, reality is all around me; I am part of it, I move around in it. I interact with it in the context of my life, and that is as real as the next person's life. There is always context. Context of a generation, of being in a different country, of one's own biology, etc. Context is a tool to understand reality. I think people tend to just drop context everywhere and not even realize it, especially dropping the context of someone else's life. Acting as though a single individual's special connection to the absolute (objective reality) is the One True Thing For Everyone Else drops A TON of context, and to me, floats away into dictatorship, omniscience, and all that jazz. This single individual must know everything about every human on planet earth in order to know who/how everyone should be. The worst of these individuals, in history, tried to become omnipotent, too, and I'm sure we can all think of examples. Likewise, a group of people as dictators reminds me of the pantheon of gods in ancient Greece. To me, it's enough to know that a person talks about and applies their life to reality, consciousness, and existence as real things in their lives. After that, it's up to them to figure it out from there, because that's what their minds are for-- to figure this stuff out, on their own. What better way to practice one's thinking than to actually think on one's own? This is why I can understand relative perspectives on an objective reality... it's like having a set of numbers (reality), and you can draw from it different types of information (perspectives) such as mean, median, mode, standard deviation, etc. To me, not having different perspectives means not having people with their own minds. (Like in Star Trek, with the Borg). That's alright, I don't mind tangents. Tangents tell you where the curve is going... ;)

Me too. Guess no one's gonna know my birthday

Does it? A = A to me just means that whatever thing A is, that's what it is. Whether it's an electron, or an elephant. Where did A = A ever mean that everything is fixed? Aristotle was wiser than that. I read Plato more than a decade ago, and I don't have time to reread right now. Because different people touching the elephant have different perspectives on the same thing, doesn't mean they 1) have no connection to what they're touching (they're touching the elephant, so why wouldn't they have a connection to it?!), or 2) that they're all relativists (when in actuality, each of them have a direct connection to objective reality), or 3) that if the elephant changes, it stops being an elephant; or if the people touching changes, they stop being people. Change doesn't necessarily mean magical change. Change, in the sense that I meant, means that when you were 5 years old, you were different than you are now. Yet, you remained you throughout these years. This is the kind of change I'm talking about-- the dymanics of stability. It meant that you changed in certain ways--- physically, mentally, intellectually, emotionally, etc., but you're still you. It doesn't mean you went and changed into a television set-- that's not the change I'm talking about. A=A still works for me here, even if A changes, it's still A. "A" is just a variable for me, a mental container. It can include all the changes an entity can go through that I know of. For me, saying "absolute reality" means the same thing as "objective reality".

Some quotes from favorite scientists: It seems to me that he might not be talking just about Darwinism, but any kind of intellectual entity. I very much enjoy his integrated approach to a lot of things, and through reading his stuff, I've begun to see the complexities in reality not as opposing forces, but more as sides of a coin, or facets of a diamond: Here's one of my favorite Feynman quotes: The Statue Within by Francois Jacob is a beautiful book. This guy (a molecular biologist, who studied genetic mechanisms) is such a poetic and deep writer: Before my post becomes a quote compendium (examples are better than descriptions, I think), I'll just leave it at that for now. There are so many good books out there, but Gould, Feynman, & Jacob are really awesome.

Nick: In my mental visualization, the orange and the figures are all part of objective reality-- that which still exists when I die. I'm not sure what you mean by "absolute reality".

I'm a really obvious type 8 according to the "eclectic energies" site. It also says SX for sexual instinct and I have a "7 wing". I have no idea what that means.

This might be interesting: The beginning of the book Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, by Antonio Damasio, introduced a patient who was neurophysiologically damaged in the emotive aspects, described by S.S. Ackerly and A.L. Benton: From wikipedia: Between the two excerpts here, autism sounds like an emotionally abnormal condition-- where the emotive aspects of the human being are absent, unbalanced, or inactivated. I think there are also gradations of autism, different kinds of autism, and people who are bordering on it. In any case, it has a tie to emotional intelligence.