[pantulis]

He was five years my senior. I never expected to be immortal but at my age one starts becoming aware that you have more weeks behind your back than in front of you. I like to think that living is just untangling a web that somehow fate has already set for you. So in the end what counts is living each and every moment as if it was the most important one, and loving and caring about the people that love and care about you.

[xpe]

While I like the sound of a mentality that suggests paying attention to every moment, it does raise the question: pay attention at what level? Count the leaves on every tree?

This question motivates a different follow-up question: how should we pay attention? Our senses can be deceived, so we should also use reason and conceptual understandings to literally enrich (de-noise perhaps) our raw senses?

But some philosophies (e.g. Buddhism, or at least some variants of it) emphasizes that ‘conceptual’ understandings can distract us from reality, which is always changing.

Almost every philosophy has paradoxes — some of which have convincing resolutions. I’m hoping to hear more points of view…

[vintermann]

Good question, and good point. I read a definition of information a while ago (actually it was Judea Pearl's), which defined it in the usual log-negative way, but in terms of the probability of states that you care to distinguish.

I mean it's obviously sensible. In the context of binary information in a computer, for instance, we (generally) don't care about exact voltages, we group it all together as 0 or 1. And talking about genetic information, we don't (usually) care about, say, if a slightly unusual isotope has snuck in in one of the usual nucleic acids, since that "information" isn't copied in the usual way.

It's very obvious, but it's also more profound than it looks. Even for something as seemingly purely mathematical as information, there's actually teleology, assumptions about what matters, baked in every time we apply it.

[pantulis]

This is a great question, but I'd answer that paying _some_ attention is better than paying _no_ attention at all. Some people study and train for years and reportedly they achieve full happiness, but certainly that is not my case and, to be honest, it's hard. ymmv.

[mulmen]

Interesting philosophy, I like it. It seems to reconcile self-determinism with fate. Do you believe that life ends when you successfully untangle this web?

[pantulis]

Yes. I will be back to where I was before I was born: not being.

Edit: You captured the idea, I am able to determine what will be my next steps in life, but once my life has ended it will be written in stone. So what's time, what is the future and what is the past? I do not care if it's some quantum many-worlds interpretation, or a spacetime slice of bread that moves with the arrow of time! In this way I am already dead, and I am still newborn.