It's not very often that I try to wax philosophical with you. It's not that I don't think you're worthy of the discussion, I just think we both like to spend our time on other things. But every now and again, a topic comes up, and maybe the mood is just right. Not like I've lit candles for you or anything, I'm talking more like me showing up for $5 pizzas tonight, and being told that they're sold out.
You see, depending on if, and how you know me, you might fancy me an optimist, or a pessimist, but in fact I am neither. I am a very, very strict realist. I am a scientist, and believe that the universe works, at some level, in a logical way. I do not have the luxury of 'luck' or 'hope'. I simply try to analyze the situation, and see the outcome logically, based on the information available.
And the information available is vast, and it's varied! No two situations include exactly the same data, and the possible amount of available data is so vast that no individual or collection of individuals could ever completely calculate it. And even if you could calculate all of the knowns of a situation, the unknowns are, by definition, uncountable.
But, this is how I operate. I take a situation which is unmanageable, and try to approximate it into something meaningful, and that is how I see the world. So when I walk up to the counter at the gas station, and they're selling lottery tickets, I think about how the lottery works, they have federal oversight to make sure they are operating legitimately, they have to make money for their employees, for taxes, for contributions that they make to education, to pay for advertising and supplies, and I can do the calculations, as to what the odds are of me winning.
I was once told not to start paragraphs with 'and' or 'but', but I did it just there. Fuck you I write how I want!
Some would argue that the odds are against me, and that there is a (making shit up) 65 billion to one chance of winning, but it's more than that! And I'm not talking about fate, I'm talking about the way the world works. Events have one outcome, not two, not three, not an infinite amount. When you approach an event, the roll of the dice, the action that you take, and the events which have led up to that action, determine the roll of the die, not fate, and not luck.
The story of Schrodinger's cat, famous lately because every gob with two ears thinks he's an expert on quantum theory, would be used as an argument against me. A random event occurs, the cat either dies or not, and it is not revealed. But this is not counter to my proposal! It is true we can not know if the cat in schrodinger's box is alive or not, but that does not mean that it is both alive and dead! In reality, the cat has died, or it is alive, and Schrodinger does not postulate otherwise! Schrodinger was discussing Magic, but demonstrating the linkages between things!
Now since there is only one outcome of an event which will occur, there is also only one best way to handle the event: the method which is optimal based on what the result of the event will be.
If we combine these two ideas: That it is not possible to determine the outcome of an event previous to it's occurrence, and that every event does have an optimal route of behavior, it does not mean we can not approximate an event, and even do so very well!
For example, getting out of bed in the morning. Will I get out of bed tomorrow morning? One might say that the odds are very good, but if a man says 'Yes', and I get out of bed tomorrow morning, that man was correct. Could he have known with complete certainty that that was the outcome of the event before it had happened?! No! But that does not change the fact that he was correct! His reason for him being correct is irrelivant, only that he was! He could be guessing, bluffing, he could have made the observation that I usually get out of bed and made his determination thusly, but the fact remains that this individual has navigated the event successfully!
That is an obvious example, but consider flipping a coin. One might say that the amount of information available is insufficient to make a decision, but this is NOT the truth. There is an overwhelming amount of information available! We simply are not able to process it! From the aerodynamic aspects of the environment and the coin, and the mannerisms which will determine how the tosser places the coin in their hand, how they will throw it, these things are real!
An optimist will believe that good things are likely to happen. A pessimist will believe that bad things are likely to happen. And a realist will attempt to derive an answer from what data they ARE able to gather and process, and make a decision based on that.
This is how I know that dishwasher-makers, and dish-soap companies are in league to try to get me to waste dish-soap.
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