[ExI] You know what?

[spike]

> [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of BillK
...
> The expression 'I could not care less' originally meant 'it 
> would be impossible for me to care less than I do because I 
> do not care at all'...

and

> ...The Yiddish 'I should 
> be so lucky!', in which the real sense is often 'I have no 
> hope of being so lucky'... BillK

BillK you have stumbled upon the key.  Clearly luck can have a positive or
negative value, or zero value (leaving the poker table with the same amount
with which one came for instance.)  Thus the saying "if not for bad luck I
would have no luck at all."

We could apply the same scale to caring, assigning any real number, so one
need not assume that zero caring is the minimum possible.  One could care
negatively, so that if one began to care more she wouldn't care at all.
Under these assumptions, the phrase "I could care less" is always true of
all people under all circumstances.

But since we are on this tangent, why must we assume luck and caring must be
only real numbers?  Why not imginary luck?  The imaginary luck is where one
thinks one is lucky, such as thinking you won at the poker table when
someone folded with a full house on the last hand just to make you think you
won.  Then like complex numbers, one can have positive or negative real luck
along with positive or negative imaginary luck.  Perhaps if you score with a
pulchritudinous avatar in second life, that might be imaginary luck, but
then if she morphs into some big ugly galoot while you are doing it, then
that would be negative imaginary luck.

Perhaps we could express it thus:

e^I(luck) = cos(luck) + I sin(luck)

Likewise with caring.  We can imagine we care or imagine we don't care, or
some combination, along with our real component which is how much we really
care.  The whole concept extends nicely, even to humor.  Imaginary humor
would be some yahoo who thinks he is funny, for instance.

spike