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ELI5 What is stoicism?

Stoicism is a way of approaching living with the aim of having a positive and tranquil life. It originated in ancient Rome with a philosopher named Seneca, who started a school to teach his approach to life, called Stoicism. The basic idea in stoicism is to seek out a tranquil and positive way of living by training oneself to appreciate the things one has. This training takes several forms, when people think of stoicism they often think of putting up with misfortune without complaint, or deliberately seeking out hardship. A simple example: Imagine your favourite toy, let's say it's a ball. Now imagine that your brother borrows your ball and loses it. This might make you sad and angry but if you think about it, there are plenty of ways for you to play without having a ball; you could run around in the park, or learn how to do cartwheels! The ball isn't really so important after all! Now because we were imagining this, you still actually have your ball - this is great because you haven't actually lost anything but hopefully have a new appreciation for your ball and how great it is to play with, but you also know that, should worst come to worst, you'll be ok without your ball and you'll still be able to have fun. So a stoic is calm and ok when bad things happen to her, she knows that she'll be fine because she's learned how well she can cope in rough situations as she has imagined (and sometimes put herself) in bad situations as practice so she really appreciates all the important things she does have. Hopefully, if the practice is successful, a stoic enjoys all moments fully: genuinely appreciating all good fortunes, and weathering bad fortunes with a calm joy and lack of regret.

Why are most random number generators said to be "pseudo-random" rather than truly random? What is the difference between true randomness and pseudo-randomness?

Reading a book on programming they mentioned that the Random function for C# didn't actually produce random numbers, it produced pseudo-random numbers, but that this is acceptable for almost all situations. I'm a bit confused as to what they actually mean. My understanding is as follows: My random number generator is designed to output either a 1, 2, 3 or 4. The random number generator will "designate" an equal probability for all possible outcomes (in this case it would be .25 for each number), but somehow the designation of the probably means that it is not truly random. But if this is not truly random, how can a number generator actually produce a truly random number? Wouldn't it always have to assign a probability for each number, thus always making it's decision pseudo-random? EDIT: Does this mean that randomness can only happen in an environment that we cannot completely control? So flipping a coin, since we can not actually *force* the coin to has a 50-50 chance of being heads or tails (in the same sense that a program can) mean that a coin flip is truly random. EDIT #2: So I looked up a bit more about this because I'm really curious about this and got the following situation If you had a program that "generated a random number" by creating a predetermined sequence of numbers in which each number had a 25% chance to occur and the only reason they have this probability is because the program put an equal number of occurrences for each number (So if it created a sequence of 100 numbers it would make sure that the number 1 occurs 25 times, the number 2 occurs 25 times etc...). If this random number generator was to be truly random then it **can not** create a table that has more than 1 number in the sequence. It would have to create a new table every time.

Let's start with the definition of deterministic. A deterministic process or system has one future for each state. In phase-space, the trajectories don't cross. So you can usually predict the future state of a particle given the particles current state. Random processes/functions/systems (whatever) can have multiple futures for one state. On computers, random numbers typically are deterministically generated, but by a process so complex that each future state is not easily predictable (you can have determinism without predictability: see chaos for instance) and also such that their distribution obeys the statistics of the desired random process.

CMV: Saying that we are in a computer simulation is a meaningless, nonsensical statement

From time to time I come across a theory claiming that our universe is a computer simulation. [Here](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulation_hypothesis)'s a Wikipedia article about it. I think it's a completely meaningless proposition. It's similar to claiming that there is a parallel universe, completely separated from ours, where Earth is populated by lizard-like creatures. Or that the universe is full of invisible dwarfs that can't interact in any way with the rest of the universe. They are nothing more than ideas in our heads – if we added them to our model of the world it wouldn't change its predictive power. Our model of the world (physics) is basically a tool to summarize past and predict future observations of the world. Adding a statement that the universe is a simulation wouldn't improve that tool in any way, just make it more complicated. If the simulation theory claimed something tangible about the universe, for example that the universe is discrete, it wouldn't be meaningless. But why not simply claim "the universe is discrete"? Adding some bullshit about outer universe and computer simulations is completely unnecesary. It's like explaining the gravitation force with invisible dwarfs pushing elementary particles. Hope it makes sense, I'll edit or comment if it doesn't :) _____ > *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!*

Bostrom's argument that I've previously read suggests the following: Let's say we are in a computer simulation (which can be argued is actually quite likely). What is the purpose of this simulation? Is it to simulate a particular point in past history, or to determine certain particular outcomes to certain particular actions? If there is a purpose, then *certain parts of the simulation might be more important than others*. This is important. Let's say the simulators want to see how various actions affect the outcome of American History (just a random example). Let's say they care particularly about Obama's term in office, and it's effects. Then it could be suggested that Obama and his government, and his staff, and his staff's staff are quite relevant to the simulation. Some groundhog in Asia is probably not that relevant. Due to potential limits of the simulation, some aspects may have "shortcuts". Like the groundhog in Asia. Maybe it's not fully simulated. Only the most relevant parts of the simulation are simulated in great detail. Maybe the groundhog is just running very basic code. Maybe it's brain isn't even simulated. What about *people*? Perhaps only relevant and important people are simulated fully. The other people are basically empty shells that superficially *appear human*, but aren't really. What does this mean? It means that if you want to continue living as a real person, and not be replaced by some superficial shell program, you might wanna be involved in important things, near important people. This is just one single example... but the idea would hold for all sorts of different considerations. The fact that we are probably in a simulation means that certain things might be more or less well-simulated. We haven't found any such cases yet - but that doesn't mean we won't in the future.