Does the physical world exist independent from a conscious observer?
This is not at all obvious. Maybe it is like in the computer-game Minecraft, so that the world is only generated once we move towards that part of the world. That would even open for the possibility that the new parts of the world are generated based about our expectations what to find there.

And more than that, this concept is not necessarily only about world-locations.
What if there are countless thinkable "truths" which "physically" manifest themselves only once we think about them?

Just think about the revolutionary theories of Albert Einstein, no doubt that they are true.
But on the other side they are kind of "remote" in a sense that they are not something we encounter in the daily life, so the major part was really to think about these things, that kind of brought these truths into existence. Same thing with the incompleteness-theorem of Kurt Gödel, just to start thinking about such a unthougt thought (if a logical system can prove itself to be either incomplete or contradictory) was the major step.

So it is really fantasy and imagination which are the prerequisite in finding new truths, it is not sufficient to "keep the eyes open".

And it is up to us to discover those truths which we want to discover, so the choice what we think about is really an important choice; it is unlikely to make progress with "good things" when thinking about "bad things", and vice versa.

We hear a lot of dangerous ideologies, dangerous religions, dangerous movements, which turn people into psychopathic idiots. But I think this is not the whole truth, I think also that there are just psychopathic idiots around with dark intentions, and they use and abuse ideologies, religions and movements by holding them up in front of them, as reason for what they do, but the simple truth is that they are just psychopaths which need some kind of explanation for their idiotic actions.
It is just by chance if such a persons shows up in one radical group or in another radical group with the opposite ideology, it does not really matter for them.
They do not deserve to be identified with an ideology or religion - this is what they want. They deserve to be seen as what they are - psychopathic idiots.

I am really a supporter of the guideline "getting far with small steps".
However, there are situations and problems which can not be solved that way.

If you learn how to ride a bike, you will not succeed when being to cautious to steer hard enough.
There is no way to learn this by first steering a little bit only, and then increasing this in small steps.

I did a simulation today of a random chaotic system, trying to find system parameters where this system would do what I wanted. I did not succeed first, only after I substantially increased the mutation size of the parameters the system would snap over from the chaotic behavior to the stable behavior.

Can this be generalized somehow?
Well, looks like making small steps is good to find a solution only in certain environments, in other environments it is necessary to make big steps.
This is not as trivial as it may sound in the first place.

I do not think that there will ever be intelligent robots. I do think that there will be artificial intelligent beings though, but they will not be what we would call a robot, they will rather be like we imagine intelligent life from other planets.
What is the important difference?
What we expect from a robot is that it is most of all willing to serve us humans, and in combination with this also intelligent. And that it does exactly what we want, the perfect servant so to say.
But this will not happen. The goal of every truly living being is most of all to survive as individual and as race (which also means to create offspring). This is not combineable with only wanting to be a perfect servant.
So yes, I think that there will be soon artificial intelligent life, but no, it will not be our servant but exist in parallel to us, lets hope in peacefull way.

Today is my 50th birthday, so what is it that matters on that day?
I'm really gratefull for having a family around me and not sitting somewhere alone today, I must admit.
I had a nice visit at a museum with my wife, a good lunch after that, right now I am enjoying to do not very much at all, nice summer weather outside, my older son has baked a cake for me, and I'm looking forward to eat pizza with my two boys in the evening.
I am lucky.
Thank you, world!

I really do not understand why most people have such a big need to answer questions with yes or no instead of leaving them open.
Of course it is sometimes necessary to make a yes or no decission, even if we can`t be sure, but in many cases it is not, and it is much better to work with a floating likelyhood in the range of "for sure yes" through "maybe" to "for sure no".
I truely disgust when someone obviously does not know, then chooses a position, and then declares those who do not choose this position as wrong.

"The world is rational" was the philosophical viewpoint number 1 of the great mathematician Kurt Gödel.

Kurt Gödel  suffered periods of mental instability and in the end he starved to death, due to an obsessive fear of being poisoned.

It's not irrationality which makes a psychopath, but an exaggerated believe in rationality.