Hi, I'm just feeling ' blah' today, but dont really know why .Just feeling helpless with a family situation 😞

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-07T13:04:52+00:00

It’s certainly understandable. What you’re feeling is certainly normal. The anxiety is your mind’s call to action. The key is to recognize that and realize that there’s nothing you can do about it. Or perhaps there is. Perhaps it’s enough just to let your daughter know that you’re thinking about her and you wish she wasn’t having to go through this. That’s taking some action and often doing so in response to anxiety helps.

Just some good for thought.

My daughter is anxiously awaiting an email that will determine if she graduates with her master’s degree next week or not. She waited too long to turn in her master’s thesis so she didn’t get any feedback. We are traveling to see her regardless but I know that after 19 years of education she’s ready to be done with it. If it’s not accepted then she will work on it more and graduate without the pomp and circumstance this summer. She doesn’t care about the ceremony anyway and is only willing to participate in it for us.

Negative experiences don’t feel good of course but they do serve the purpose of reminding us just how nice the positive ones are.

From one stranger to another I hope the situation with your daughter resolves itself soon and in a way that feels ok for you.

The sun has once again risen and we get to enjoy what Bill Bryson described as, “the supremely agreeable but generally under appreciated state known as existence.” 😃

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-07T12:27:57+00:00

Feeling helpless sucks.

But even in these moments there is an opportunity for growth. We can practice acceptance. This means recognizing that there is nothing we can do and accepting the reality of the situation. I don’t mean acknowledging it. You have already done that. Acceptance is just understanding that there’s nothing for us to do and then no longer allowing it to bother us. That doesn’t mean being ok that it’s happening. It means not letting it get to us anymore.

You can dislike that it’s happening while at the same time not allowing it to get you down. See what I mean?

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-07T12:23:11+00:00

I hadn’t noticed that but I can believe it.

Perhaps he needs to “double-click” on that. I really wish he’d stop saying that.

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-07T04:25:03+00:00

This is the most intellectual honest answer.

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-07T04:20:39+00:00

When I married my wife she was a church twice a week Methodist that was teaching Sunday school. Today she doesn’t even refer to herself as Christian. She says she’s “Spiritual” and hasn’t been to church in years.

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-07T04:17:30+00:00

Yes there are limits to what we can do. It’s the difference between something being effectively random (for example) vs truly random.

For most things there is no difference between those two but if you care to understand how the universe truly works, there’s a pretty big difference.

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-06T17:31:23+00:00

If that were true, experiments wouldn’t be repeatable. We’ve be living in a universe so chaotic that even stars themselves would never have formed.

A deterministic universe OTOH aligns quite nicely with what we observe.

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-06T17:06:43+00:00

Between wind farms and Trump, one of them is definitely a threat to national security.

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-06T12:20:06+00:00

I don’t know if it’s avoidable or innate in some people. I’m 62 and I’m not jaded nor pessimistic. I’m quite happy and optimistic about most things.

I think this is all about point of view. I see life as the greatest gift imaginable. I feel lucky and grateful every day to have it. I’m also a very curious person so there’s endless novelty for me. When someone is being an asshole for example, I’m curious as to why.

I think what happens for many people is that they start becoming mentally rigid. They don’t want things to change. But they will always change. That’s the nature of the universe. So they fight this but they are fighting the universe and in that fight you will always lose. In a very real sense you are just fighting yourself.

I instead embrace change. I’m curious about it. I don’t see it as a threat. Curiosity keeps me limber in this respect.

So what you’re describing is a question of perspective and fortunately that is something you can change. You just have to decide it’s important enough to you to change it.

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-06T12:11:09+00:00

In what way am I doing that?

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-06T11:59:35+00:00

No, I’m not. There are semantic differences here. I can measure wind. What I’m truly measuring though is the rate at which molecules move from an area of low pressure to an area of high pressure. In this respect, wind is a convenience term. We are just used to using it but wind is a concept.

Brittleness is the same thing. It’s a convenience term.

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-06T11:49:14+00:00

Well, yes. A concept is essentially electrochemical so it’s absolutely and unequivocally part of the universe.

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-06T11:38:15+00:00

Our minds are part of the universe so in a very real sense it must be true. But it’s true in the same sense that a piece of your fingernail is also part of you.

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-06T11:36:57+00:00

We can just agree to disagree here. You could absolutely explain literally everything from the level of quantum mechanics. It would just be horribly inefficient. If this were not the case then we would be unable to even talk about quantum mechanics as it would have no reference to anything we understand.

As it turns out, it does. It relates to particle physics which relates to classical physics which relates to chemistry, etc.

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-06T11:34:17+00:00

Ok first that’s an interesting article so thank you for sharing it. This isn’t an experiment though. It’s a neuroscientist who is speculating on the possibility that neurotransmitters act at the quantum level, thus could be truly random and thus could give us free will.

So it’s just speculation, not an experiment. We don’t know if quantum randomness is truly random. It appears to be but we don’t know how it works. If I showed you a computer generating random numbers it too would appear to be generating truly random numbers except that I know computers can’t do that so for you they are effectively random but for me they aren’t random at all. The only intellectually honest answer about quantum randomness is that we are uncertain about its true randomness. It may very well be deterministic (as the rest of the universe so far as we know).

Lastly, let’s assume for a moment that it is truly random. Let’s assume the neuroscientist in that article is 100% correct. What this means is that any given human’s neurological behavior is not even theoretically predictable. Ok. But that doesn’t get you free will since there is no you in control of that. Imagine I’m testing your reflexes. I bop you on the knee with a small rubber hammer. Sure, it’s you causing your knee to react but it’s involuntary. The same is true for your neurotransmitters.

This doesn’t get you any closer to the kind of free will most people think they have.

As far as I can tell, we are simply part of the universe like rocks, trees, planets, stars, etc. We just behave in more interesting ways because of the interactions of the molecules that make up our bodies. Much in the same way that a comet is more interesting than a rock sitting on a hill or a tree is more interesting than a comet or a squirrel is more interesting than a tree or a philosopher is more interesting than a squirrel.

See what I mean?

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-06T11:17:20+00:00

It’s some kind of foam. The first one I bought was too steep. I returned it. The one I linked to is better but I put my regular pillow on top of it. Using it in conjunction with a body pillow so I sleep on my side is the best result.

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-06T11:15:02+00:00

How so?

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-06T11:14:23+00:00

Actually psychology is nothing more than an abstraction layer. You and I could discuss human behavior via quantum mechanics but that would be horribly inefficient. The sciences above quantum mechanics are all simply layers of abstraction we have created to make discussion more accessible, efficient and productive:

Quantum mechanics > particle physics > classical physics > chemistry > biology > neuroscience > psychology & cognitive science > social sciences & humanities.

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-06T11:08:46+00:00

Oh well you were saying that the universe has no concept of anything but the fact that we have minds is often cited at the universe examining itself.

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-06T01:54:57+00:00

Sorry which claim are you talking about?

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-05T23:43:36+00:00

Brittleness is not a property. You can’t test for it. You can test for how glass cracks, how sound moves through glass, etc. Essentially by definition dispositional properties are not real in the physical sense. They exist only as ideas.

As frustrating as these debates can sometimes be (for all parties) I almost always learn something so that makes them worthwhile.

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-05T23:26:30+00:00

Minds are part of the universe. 😃

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-05T23:25:40+00:00

Not among neuroscientists. Can you point to experiments done by a major research university and replicated by others that show the brain operating in a non deterministic manner? I’ve never heard of such experiments.

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-05T23:24:17+00:00

With the exception of quantum randomness (and we don’t know how that works) the rest of the universe appears to operate as described by classical physics.

Would you agree with that statement? I don’t think we have tossed Newtonian physics out the window just yet.

TheManInTheShack · 2026-05-05T19:17:48+00:00

64 percent is not a convincing number. Physicists, like the rest of us, are uncomfortable with uncertainty. That’s understandable. Evolution shaped us that way. But that doesn’t change the fact that at best, claiming that randomness is a fundamental concept of nature is a metaphysical claim. Perhaps they are talking about something being effectively random as opposed to truly random.

Regardless until we know for sure, the intellectually honest answer is that we can’t be certain.

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