I'm a Rambler (part N of M)

quick thought on the philosophical front -

What questions are worth asking? One of the biggest problems when looking for information is in knowing how to frame your question properly - when I talk about it being likely (IMO) that the answer to most philosophical deep / base-level questions is found and forgotten frequently, I'm talking about exactly the same type of issue you find when you go to Google looking for the answer to something you know very little about: you have to spend *some* time searching ineffeciently just casting a wide net, learning the terms of the trade, so you can narrow your search down to the stuff you're really interested in. until you've narrowed your search, you probably see the exact answer you need several times without being aware of it, because it's significance isn't apparent until you see what's noise and what contains that nugget of useful information you're looking for. and "useful" exactly equals "what you're looking for" - information isn't intrinsically useful or not useful without a purpose to be evaluated against. IMO.

example: my wife cut her finger and got raw pork in it one day. the search trail first started with generic terms like "raw pork infection", and ended up with searches for "septicemia" and "yersinosis", to get very targeted articles on the medical implications of this cut. in my analogy, philosophical questions about human nature and the nature of the world are like searches on a database of immense size, and the volume of search results is so huge that getting to the really choice keywords is not feasible. in google searching, it's obvious what keywords are relatively rare and targeted, just by looking at the first 10-50 results. in human thought and observation of the world around us, factoids and plausible theories are so plentiful that even the statistical tail end of the uniqueness curve is actually a huge number, so with our scarce amount of time available, we can't absorb enough information to clearly say "yeah, that train of thought is static, and that other trail has the good stuff". I know this isn't exactly clear, but i guess i'm trying to elucidate one of those scalability issues that enters the picture when inspecting thought and existence.

to be continued.