You may not like what you hear, but these are working solutions:
Volunteer. Find an organization that does something useful. Warning: true loony causes attract loony people, so I'd stick to the mainstream. Saving baby turtles, planting trees, recycling, etc. help.
Take classes. Yoga is great for meeting ladies, but there's a dozen billion things you can learn. Join an orchestra and you'll meet a ton of people.
Church. Add the religious or sacramental activity of your choice, even an atheistic one, as long as it is organized and draws in people.
Join activity groups. A bike riding group, a poker playing club, an informal party every Thursday night, all good.
Network. If you meet someone at work who has a brain, spend time with them. They know other good people.
Finally, and I guess this goes without saying, but try finding places where people you think are interesting show up. Ask people you know what they do with their time. They'll probably be glad to tell you.
Humans are no more a mystery than Linux, but there's a similar amount of learning. Luckily, you don't need to learn how to rebuild human kernels, just how to set up the network. Be brave. You have nothing to lose but your solitude.
The average user wants their computer to "just work" and be what their friends use.
This person would be happy with Windows 95 or probably even Mac OS 9 (if they remember not to hold down the mouse button, which freezes the system).
The average person uses Microsoft Word, IE or Firefox, Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird, a chat client, maybe Photoshop, and plays video games.
If something goes really wrong, they want Microsoft or the Geek squad to fix it, and don't seem to mind being sheared of a few hundred bucks a year.
They don't care about much else.
Linux desktops are doing the right thing in targeting the power users: these are the people who want cutting edge features. They are also willing to spend more time configuring their systems.
If you target the power users, the others will imitate them, but it will take some time.
In my experience, the best Linux promotion you can do is what HAL-PC used to do here in Houston, which is to invite people to bring in their computers and have an expert help install the Linux operating system.
I don't know where these guys fit on the political scale, but I think it's interesting that people are seeing through the free/not-free facade that, amazingly, both the "oppressive" government and the "progressive" protesters seem to agree exists.
For writing purposes, I'm considering the AlphaSmart Dana. It's a PDA-like portable word processor that gets 25 hours of battery life without a backlit screen, which wouldn't be an issue for me since my favorite haunts (Bookstop cafe at Shepherd and W. Alabama, Agoura coffee house at Dunlavy and Westheimer, Borders cafe at Kirby and W. Alabama) are all well-lighted. The other option is a netbook. I'd really like someone to design a low-power laptop that allowed word processing and ssh access, because that's about all I need or want. (The web is great for leisure time, not work!)
I mean, come on -- if the guy actually believes what he wrote in F. 451, then how does this NOT make sense for him to believe?
The point of Fahrenheit 451, like the point of Brave New World before it, is that people choose an easy lie over complicated truth. They prefer their entertainment and their illusions.
When I look at the internet, I see a lot of illusions, but very little that approaches the factual power of a good book. And I am a content publisher who has made the choice to put future writings into books, because I see how the internet has been progressively turning into television since 1996.
I will still love those resources, including Slashdot, which are useful. But I'll pick a real encyclopedia over Wikipedia, ignore those forums and blogs, and pick up a quality textbook for factual information.
When we find someone obstructing our interests, we round of millions of useful idiots to begin clamoring for "freedom," and use that to passive-aggressively unseat the regime.
All while we are increasingly banning our own freedoms here in the West, and might be better off with a goal of "an organized, thoughtful society" instead of the nebulous "freedom."
The teacher has found favorite assignments to give, for reasons of his own. The students now have access to those between years. Teachers don't like that. Many of my best teachers recycled most assignments because those assignments were designed very carefully and deliberately to be best at extracting certain knowledge.
However, in the internet age... there will soon be very similar projects that people can google, or other teachers will lift those assignments, or students will pass them between grade-years as was common when I was an undergrad.
My solution is simple:
In-class testing. Get students into a room without their personal machines and force them to create from scratch, or even... dear God no... use pen and paper.
This is equally important in the humanities as the sciences. Tests exist for a reason, because a student who does well on homework but poorly on tests is probably either (a) having extreme test anxiety or (b) cheating, being helped by parents or friends, etc.
The problem is mostly legal: if nothing is documented, the other guy's story wins, and one large lawsuit could take down the hospital. If you cannot organize your records, you're going to lose one, and if you lose one for the guy who claims he slipped, broke his back, and now can't work for life, your hospital goes bye-bye.
Our society has adapted to computers. We require them to move things along at the usual speed. Going back to paper isn't an option. Remote backup and redundant power supplies are a good idea, as that hospital found, but they did the right thing in shutting down instead of taking a huge legal risk.
If he really wanted to make a political statement, he would have licensed the music or sued to get it licensed, and then released the CD with a statement revealing how much of the cost was license fees to the Beatles and Jay-Z.
What we see instead is a protest statement, which smacks of impotence. Don't abandon your legal system to dickheads pretending to be lawyers; use the system and gain what you want legitimately, instead of trying to sidestep it like a teenager.
Full x86-64 architecture support; Rewritten PowerPC JIT compiler, with ppc64 support; new SPARC JIT compiler, with support for both sparc32 and sparc64; improved console command auto-completion; persistent console command history; improved QVM (Quake Virtual Machine) tools; colored terminal output on POSIX operating systems;
At this rate, we should just expand it to take over those trivial remaining functions entitled to the operating system, and give it to Apple.
Google's strategy was brilliant: fund Mozilla in order to hurt Microsoft. Then, once the damage was done, launch their own competitor to gain market share.
Their next step: Google products will work with any browser, but there will be special features only Chrome can support.
Sound familiar? Apple's doing it with Safari, and it's how Microsoft marketed IE initially. History repeats itself.
I am going to continue to use Firefox. Opera is the best solution but like a BMW it's high-maintenance with frequent crashes. Safari is a neurotic product by a neurotic company, so even if it's ahead this round, in the long term I don't want to be a user. Chrome is out because I don't want to be part of someone's marketing strategy until it's clear what the end goal is. But Firefox is stable, does 90% of what I want 90% correctly 90% of the time, so for a browser it's awesome.
"Should" is a moral question. Moral questions are a luxury afforded by rich societies with no pressing needs (in other words, no cause for survival except continued convenience). The real question is "Do we need to?" and my answer is that if you have enemies, you always need to keep track of them.
I may be channeling Niccolo Machiavelli here... stupid cheap acid I bought back in my sophomore year.
In the next Twitter, there's no typing. You signal emoticons. If you are too fat to use the mouse, they will develop a device that interprets your emotions from the configurations of your fat cells, and you don't ever have to get off the couch.
:| - at work
}< - taking a dump (not sure how this works with the couch)
Family friendly means your kids wait until they are mature to make decisions about their sexual futures.
Family friendly means you don't want someone else's values rammed down your throat.
I think Amazon picked sensibly. People say all sorts of stuff about diversity and justice, but when it comes time to buying homes or buying products for their families, they are conservative -- even if liberal in outlook.
One academic at Rice University studied how people vote with their feet, in contrast to what they identify as their political beliefs, in a study about how education breeds segregation because whites with higher education, even very liberal whites, avoid diverse neighborhoods.
If we are going to be scientists about this issue, we should look at the practicalities of pluralism. Pluralism means every group gets their own space; it doesn't mean we find one standard for all people, because that removes their right to have their own opinions.
Alcohol probably does not cause crime; however, alcohol is an idiot magnet. If I could, I'd live in a dry county. It drives away the people who need to have intoxicants to survive. (I'm "high on life," yes, please call me a fag in email so as not to waste valuable discussion space.)
Think about the magnets for idiots that exists near your neighborhood. The same people who cannot plan ahead more than 24 hours in their lives are the people who, when presented with an opportunity where crime is profitable, impulsively do it. Wal-marts, liquor stores, pawn shops, convenience stores, tattoo parlors, etc. draw these people like moths to light, and that's why many communities have chosen to ban these businesses.
In chaos theory, instant gratification businesses are a "chaotic attractor" that draw in chaotic people;)
Process does not replace having good people paying attention to the situation and working to correct it.
Democracy today is a form of advertising. You send out some pleasant image to the drones through television sets and comedy shows, and convince them they're smart to vote for it. It passes, and then you can abuse power as you choose.
France is no different. When the majority of the people are non-involved in politics except to pick the choice the TV likes, how could you expect results to turn out differently?
You cannot, using process, take low quality thinking and make it into high quality leadership. You need high quality leaders, and a politically active and morally alert portion of the population to support them, especially when they do unpopular but necessary things.
Self-identified underdog psychology is the worst of in-group/out-group behaviors.
When a group forms and identifies itself as an underdog, it closes ranks and will not criticize the prevailing dogma because it perceives itself as too weak already.
This is in dramatic contrast to psychological compensation, or cognitive dissonance, wherein people who paid too much for an art deco Macintosh need to invent some moral superiority to what they do as no evidence suggests technical superiority.
Linux advocates can escape underdog psychology by looking at the positive data first: Linux has a firmly entrenched market share doing what it does best. It will always have this base and it has a growing hobbyist base, which is where all the interesting stuff (IMO) occurs in computing anyway.
Anti-Microsoft rants, etc. conceal the fact that Windows still rules the desktop and Linux may never be ready to take on the software base of win32 applications developed over the past thirty years. When Linux users rant at Microsoft, they reinforce the sense of inferiority that fuels the underdog complex.
Create the excel spreadsheet that keeps track of what you own, what its serial numbers are, and for how long the license runs, how many licenses you have, and projected cost. Claim it's for budgeting. That way, no one will fuck with you; they'll be forced to recognize it as legitimate and in doing so, be urged toward software legitimacy.
Yeah, I know: we're all tired of idiots saying "I blame society."
However, for smart children, this society is a mess. It has no goals. It suffocates us in platitudes (equality, generosity, compassion) while forcing us into a life of conformity to very basic aims, like money and popularity. While all this public bloviation goes on, commerce destroys everything good by turning it into a lowest common denominator product. The smart kids see this; everyone else is oblivious.
From my reading of the documents that school shooters like Jeff Weise, Eric Harris/Dylan Klebold, and Pekka-Eric Auvinen leave behind, this more than anything else is their motivation: our society is a monstrous hypocrite that has lost direction, and because it cannot face that, we all serve in boredom and frustration.
It seems like he said that they all are except for politics and philosophy.
Which for the most part I've agreed, I've just disliked Art and Ligature majors. But it seems to me that modern Philosophy isn't done in the same way. Today it seems like you come up with a solution that you like and use the tools of philosophy to justify it.
The problem with humanities is that because they are based on symbolic communication between humans, it's easy to fool people. For that reason, they attract many people who are good at manipulating symbols but bad at understanding structure (Plato's cave metaphor specifically addresses this problem).
However, I do not think they are all worthless. A good teacher, good examples and classmates who are not oblivious fools all help. In that environment, it's easier to sift the truthful from the solipsistic garbage.
If you're in a Lit course reading Moby-Dick with someone who understands it, that beats a trendy professor teaching you Barbara Kingsolver or Toni Morrison. The goofball versions of humanities classes attract the mentally unstable, holier-than-thou types that made class painful for me.
It helps to read literature as a communication from artist to reader that hopes to express structured thought in the form of experience. When you get into the "the book means whatever you interpret it to me" territory, beware! Unrealistic behavior is not far behind;)
If you have good teachers, they will recognize when this is occurring. It is well-documented by professionals as a risk.
If a correspondence theory of truth is correct, and if thus for a sentence to be truth it has to correspond to the world in a way that mirrors the structure and matches parts of the sentence properly with parts of the world, then the structure of a true sentence would have to be mirrored in the world. But if, on the other extreme, a coherence theory of truth is correct then the truth of a sentence does not require a structural correspondence to the world, but merely a coherence with other sentences.
One way to understand logic is as the study of the most general forms of thought or judgment, what we called [a type of logic]. One way to understand ontology is as the study of the most general features of what there is, our [a type of ontology]. Now, there is a striking similarity between the most general forms of thought and the most general features of what there is. Take one example. Many thoughts have a subject of which they predicate something. What there is contains individuals that have properties. It seems that there is the same structure in thought as well as in reality. And similarly for other structural features.
If there is an explanation of this similarity to be given it seems it could go in one of two ways: either the structure of thought explains the structure of reality, or the other way round. An explanation of the latter kind, where the structure of reality explains that of thought, could go as follows: the world has a certain basic structure, being constituted by objects which have properties, which other objects can have as well. To properly represent a world like this the creatures from which we evolved had to develop minds that mirror this structure. Those who developed a different kind of mind died out. Therefore we have a mind whose thoughts have a structure which mirrors the structure of the world.
Slashdot Mirror
You may not like what you hear, but these are working solutions:
Finally, and I guess this goes without saying, but try finding places where people you think are interesting show up. Ask people you know what they do with their time. They'll probably be glad to tell you.
Humans are no more a mystery than Linux, but there's a similar amount of learning. Luckily, you don't need to learn how to rebuild human kernels, just how to set up the network. Be brave. You have nothing to lose but your solitude.
The average user wants their computer to "just work" and be what their friends use.
This person would be happy with Windows 95 or probably even Mac OS 9 (if they remember not to hold down the mouse button, which freezes the system).
The average person uses Microsoft Word, IE or Firefox, Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird, a chat client, maybe Photoshop, and plays video games.
If something goes really wrong, they want Microsoft or the Geek squad to fix it, and don't seem to mind being sheared of a few hundred bucks a year.
They don't care about much else.
Linux desktops are doing the right thing in targeting the power users: these are the people who want cutting edge features. They are also willing to spend more time configuring their systems.
If you target the power users, the others will imitate them, but it will take some time.
In my experience, the best Linux promotion you can do is what HAL-PC used to do here in Houston, which is to invite people to bring in their computers and have an expert help install the Linux operating system.
I'm sorry to see this post modded as "0, Troll." There was zero troll intent about it.
A couple others see it my way:
I don't know where these guys fit on the political scale, but I think it's interesting that people are seeing through the free/not-free facade that, amazingly, both the "oppressive" government and the "progressive" protesters seem to agree exists.
For writing purposes, I'm considering the AlphaSmart Dana. It's a PDA-like portable word processor that gets 25 hours of battery life without a backlit screen, which wouldn't be an issue for me since my favorite haunts (Bookstop cafe at Shepherd and W. Alabama, Agoura coffee house at Dunlavy and Westheimer, Borders cafe at Kirby and W. Alabama) are all well-lighted. The other option is a netbook. I'd really like someone to design a low-power laptop that allowed word processing and ssh access, because that's about all I need or want. (The web is great for leisure time, not work!)
I mean, come on -- if the guy actually believes what he wrote in F. 451, then how does this NOT make sense for him to believe?
The point of Fahrenheit 451, like the point of Brave New World before it, is that people choose an easy lie over complicated truth. They prefer their entertainment and their illusions.
When I look at the internet, I see a lot of illusions, but very little that approaches the factual power of a good book. And I am a content publisher who has made the choice to put future writings into books, because I see how the internet has been progressively turning into television since 1996.
I will still love those resources, including Slashdot, which are useful. But I'll pick a real encyclopedia over Wikipedia, ignore those forums and blogs, and pick up a quality textbook for factual information.
The West thinks in binary terms: free/not-free.
Life is more complicated than that.
When we find someone obstructing our interests, we round of millions of useful idiots to begin clamoring for "freedom," and use that to passive-aggressively unseat the regime.
All while we are increasingly banning our own freedoms here in the West, and might be better off with a goal of "an organized, thoughtful society" instead of the nebulous "freedom."
This will not be popular.
The teacher has found favorite assignments to give, for reasons of his own. The students now have access to those between years. Teachers don't like that. Many of my best teachers recycled most assignments because those assignments were designed very carefully and deliberately to be best at extracting certain knowledge.
However, in the internet age... there will soon be very similar projects that people can google, or other teachers will lift those assignments, or students will pass them between grade-years as was common when I was an undergrad.
My solution is simple:
In-class testing. Get students into a room without their personal machines and force them to create from scratch, or even... dear God no... use pen and paper.
This is equally important in the humanities as the sciences. Tests exist for a reason, because a student who does well on homework but poorly on tests is probably either (a) having extreme test anxiety or (b) cheating, being helped by parents or friends, etc.
Wait until they make their first mistake and crush the first innocent person.
Wait until you see this being used to hound, ostracize and impoverish political dissidents.
If a lynch mob is a bad idea, a cyber lynch-mob is a bad idea.
And even more poignant: for every one cat killed by a Chinese psycho, probably 100,000 are euthanized in animal shelters across America.
Dying in pain or not, dead is still dead, and those cats are dead.
The Crowd wants to deny its real problems, which are systematic and institutional cruelty to animals and people, by beating up on a few scapegoats.
"I don't consider myself a genius because there are 6.5 billion people in this world and each one is smart in his or her own way."
The guys driving around me on the freeway today are not geniuses. Not everyone is smart. Deal with it and stop flattering the crowd.
The problem is mostly legal: if nothing is documented, the other guy's story wins, and one large lawsuit could take down the hospital. If you cannot organize your records, you're going to lose one, and if you lose one for the guy who claims he slipped, broke his back, and now can't work for life, your hospital goes bye-bye.
Our society has adapted to computers. We require them to move things along at the usual speed. Going back to paper isn't an option. Remote backup and redundant power supplies are a good idea, as that hospital found, but they did the right thing in shutting down instead of taking a huge legal risk.
If he really wanted to make a political statement, he would have licensed the music or sued to get it licensed, and then released the CD with a statement revealing how much of the cost was license fees to the Beatles and Jay-Z.
What we see instead is a protest statement, which smacks of impotence. Don't abandon your legal system to dickheads pretending to be lawyers; use the system and gain what you want legitimately, instead of trying to sidestep it like a teenager.
Only goatse is eternal. The rest is being used to seed a randomness generator somewhere.
I was hoping this was about the Finnish death metal band, but I guess I'm in the wrong aisle.
Full x86-64 architecture support; Rewritten PowerPC JIT compiler, with ppc64 support; new SPARC JIT compiler, with support for both sparc32 and sparc64; improved console command auto-completion; persistent console command history; improved QVM (Quake Virtual Machine) tools; colored terminal output on POSIX operating systems;
At this rate, we should just expand it to take over those trivial remaining functions entitled to the operating system, and give it to Apple.
Google's strategy was brilliant: fund Mozilla in order to hurt Microsoft. Then, once the damage was done, launch their own competitor to gain market share.
Their next step: Google products will work with any browser, but there will be special features only Chrome can support.
Sound familiar? Apple's doing it with Safari, and it's how Microsoft marketed IE initially. History repeats itself.
I am going to continue to use Firefox. Opera is the best solution but like a BMW it's high-maintenance with frequent crashes. Safari is a neurotic product by a neurotic company, so even if it's ahead this round, in the long term I don't want to be a user. Chrome is out because I don't want to be part of someone's marketing strategy until it's clear what the end goal is. But Firefox is stable, does 90% of what I want 90% correctly 90% of the time, so for a browser it's awesome.
"Should" is a moral question. Moral questions are a luxury afforded by rich societies with no pressing needs (in other words, no cause for survival except continued convenience). The real question is "Do we need to?" and my answer is that if you have enemies, you always need to keep track of them.
I may be channeling Niccolo Machiavelli here... stupid cheap acid I bought back in my sophomore year.
In the next Twitter, there's no typing. You signal emoticons. If you are too fat to use the mouse, they will develop a device that interprets your emotions from the configurations of your fat cells, and you don't ever have to get off the couch.
etc
Family friendly means your kids wait until they are mature to make decisions about their sexual futures.
Family friendly means you don't want someone else's values rammed down your throat.
I think Amazon picked sensibly. People say all sorts of stuff about diversity and justice, but when it comes time to buying homes or buying products for their families, they are conservative -- even if liberal in outlook.
One academic at Rice University studied how people vote with their feet, in contrast to what they identify as their political beliefs, in a study about how education breeds segregation because whites with higher education, even very liberal whites, avoid diverse neighborhoods.
If we are going to be scientists about this issue, we should look at the practicalities of pluralism. Pluralism means every group gets their own space; it doesn't mean we find one standard for all people, because that removes their right to have their own opinions.
Alcohol probably does not cause crime; however, alcohol is an idiot magnet. If I could, I'd live in a dry county. It drives away the people who need to have intoxicants to survive. (I'm "high on life," yes, please call me a fag in email so as not to waste valuable discussion space.)
Think about the magnets for idiots that exists near your neighborhood. The same people who cannot plan ahead more than 24 hours in their lives are the people who, when presented with an opportunity where crime is profitable, impulsively do it. Wal-marts, liquor stores, pawn shops, convenience stores, tattoo parlors, etc. draw these people like moths to light, and that's why many communities have chosen to ban these businesses.
In chaos theory, instant gratification businesses are a "chaotic attractor" that draw in chaotic people ;)
Process does not replace having good people paying attention to the situation and working to correct it.
Democracy today is a form of advertising. You send out some pleasant image to the drones through television sets and comedy shows, and convince them they're smart to vote for it. It passes, and then you can abuse power as you choose.
France is no different. When the majority of the people are non-involved in politics except to pick the choice the TV likes, how could you expect results to turn out differently?
You cannot, using process, take low quality thinking and make it into high quality leadership. You need high quality leaders, and a politically active and morally alert portion of the population to support them, especially when they do unpopular but necessary things.
Self-identified underdog psychology is the worst of in-group/out-group behaviors.
When a group forms and identifies itself as an underdog, it closes ranks and will not criticize the prevailing dogma because it perceives itself as too weak already.
This is in dramatic contrast to psychological compensation, or cognitive dissonance, wherein people who paid too much for an art deco Macintosh need to invent some moral superiority to what they do as no evidence suggests technical superiority.
Linux advocates can escape underdog psychology by looking at the positive data first: Linux has a firmly entrenched market share doing what it does best. It will always have this base and it has a growing hobbyist base, which is where all the interesting stuff (IMO) occurs in computing anyway.
Anti-Microsoft rants, etc. conceal the fact that Windows still rules the desktop and Linux may never be ready to take on the software base of win32 applications developed over the past thirty years. When Linux users rant at Microsoft, they reinforce the sense of inferiority that fuels the underdog complex.
Create the excel spreadsheet that keeps track of what you own, what its serial numbers are, and for how long the license runs, how many licenses you have, and projected cost. Claim it's for budgeting. That way, no one will fuck with you; they'll be forced to recognize it as legitimate and in doing so, be urged toward software legitimacy.
It's like ISO 9002 in fragmentary form.
Yeah, I know: we're all tired of idiots saying "I blame society."
However, for smart children, this society is a mess. It has no goals. It suffocates us in platitudes (equality, generosity, compassion) while forcing us into a life of conformity to very basic aims, like money and popularity. While all this public bloviation goes on, commerce destroys everything good by turning it into a lowest common denominator product. The smart kids see this; everyone else is oblivious.
From my reading of the documents that school shooters like Jeff Weise, Eric Harris/Dylan Klebold, and Pekka-Eric Auvinen leave behind, this more than anything else is their motivation: our society is a monstrous hypocrite that has lost direction, and because it cannot face that, we all serve in boredom and frustration.
It seems like he said that they all are except for politics and philosophy.
Which for the most part I've agreed, I've just disliked Art and Ligature majors.
But it seems to me that modern Philosophy isn't done in the same way. Today it seems like you come up with a solution that you like and use the tools of philosophy to justify it.
The problem with humanities is that because they are based on symbolic communication between humans, it's easy to fool people. For that reason, they attract many people who are good at manipulating symbols but bad at understanding structure (Plato's cave metaphor specifically addresses this problem).
However, I do not think they are all worthless. A good teacher, good examples and classmates who are not oblivious fools all help. In that environment, it's easier to sift the truthful from the solipsistic garbage.
If you're in a Lit course reading Moby-Dick with someone who understands it, that beats a trendy professor teaching you Barbara Kingsolver or Toni Morrison. The goofball versions of humanities classes attract the mentally unstable, holier-than-thou types that made class painful for me.
It helps to read literature as a communication from artist to reader that hopes to express structured thought in the form of experience. When you get into the "the book means whatever you interpret it to me" territory, beware! Unrealistic behavior is not far behind ;)
If you have good teachers, they will recognize when this is occurring. It is well-documented by professionals as a risk.
If a correspondence theory of truth is correct, and if thus for a sentence to be truth it has to correspond to the world in a way that mirrors the structure and matches parts of the sentence properly with parts of the world, then the structure of a true sentence would have to be mirrored in the world. But if, on the other extreme, a coherence theory of truth is correct then the truth of a sentence does not require a structural correspondence to the world, but merely a coherence with other sentences.
One way to understand logic is as the study of the most general forms of thought or judgment, what we called [a type of logic]. One way to understand ontology is as the study of the most general features of what there is, our [a type of ontology]. Now, there is a striking similarity between the most general forms of thought and the most general features of what there is. Take one example. Many thoughts have a subject of which they predicate something. What there is contains individuals that have properties. It seems that there is the same structure in thought as well as in reality. And similarly for other structural features.
If there is an explanation of this similarity to be given it seems it could go in one of two ways: either the structure of thought explains the structure of reality, or the other way round. An explanation of the latter kind, where the structure of reality explains that of thought, could go as follows: the world has a certain basic structure, being constituted by objects which have properties, which other objects can have as well. To properly represent a world like this the creatures from which we evolved had to develop minds that mirror this structure. Those who developed a different kind of mind died out. Therefore we have a mind whose thoughts have a structure which mirrors the structure of the world.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-ontology/#4.5
I don't think they call it solipsism... yet. The source above is a good place to read about philosophy.