Category Archives: Philosophy
One less decision
For the past two weeks, breakfast has been cereal with fruit, OJ and (sometimes) toast. This didn’t seem like an important decision until I read David Cain’s post: Why the minimalists do what they do.
“After years of being confronted with a decision shortly after waking, I decided to be done with deciding what was for breakfast. My usual is now the only thing on the menu, and since I stopped deciding what’s for breakfast, mornings have had a significantly different feel. They are clearer and more spacious.”
And it’s about more than what we have for breakfast.
“When we’re faced with a number of options, we’re always going to assume that one of them is better than all the rest. This means the more options there are, the more likely we are to choose one that isn’t the best one. […] Our satisfaction with what we have shrinks as the number of things we don’t have — or could have — grows.”
This notion resonates with me. Even to having fewer shirts or pants to select from each morning.
Your head would explode
I’ve never met David Cain but when I think of “enlightenment,” he comes to mind. If I could pick one person to give me tips on how to live, I think it might be him. From a recent post:
“I now see all instances of minor physical discomfort as a chance to get better at being relaxed. I relax into the discomfort, I let it hang out with me. When you first try it it’s an exhilarating experiment — to voluntarily open up to minor pain when that’s what the moment brings you, to refrain from listening to the impulse to cringe or harden. It feels like you’re walking freely in an area you thought you weren’t allowed to go.”
“The present moment is the only concrete reality you will ever have to deal with. Sometimes it contains pain. We prefer that our realities don’t contain pain. But that can only ever be a preference, because ultimately we don’t have control over the present once it becomes the present. If you truly needed reality to be something other than reality, your head would explode that instant. But it doesn’t. You prefer it to be one way, but don’t need it to be.”
Who are your heros?
“If you tell me who your heroes are, I’ll tell you how you’ll turn out.”
I’m not as smart as Warren Buffett but I might be as lucky.
“When you work with people who are already rich, they’ll work because they choose to do so, ‘rather than being on a yacht somewhere.’ But you don’t have to be rich. Buffett says that while it make take a job or two to get there, you should do the work you love.”
“Just imagine you could be given 10 percent of the future earnings of one person you know,” Buffett says. Would you pick the smartest person? The fastest runner? No, Buffett says: “You’re going to pick the person that has the right habits.”
In the can
While watching the new Tom Cruise movie last week, I found myself feeling anxious about some situation his character was in. A little worried about how it was going to come out. It was clearly a moment of suspended disbelief. And then, sitting in that dark, nearly empty theater, I had a moment of insight. The movie I was watching was already “in the can.” The story I was watching had ended, long ago.
Things might work out for Tom’s character (they usually do), or they might not. But that had already been decided. Nothing happening in my head, in that theater, would change how the movie ended. As that dawned on me, I had a very strong feeling the same is true for my story as well. I’m saying the lines and doing the stunts but the story was written long ago and the movie is in the can. I can’t change the story or how it ends. Like Mr. Cruise, I can say my lines a little differently in each take, but the plot is done.
I know this is a very disturbing notion for many people. A ridiculous idea for some. But the more I think about it, the more convinced I become. No, “convinced” is not right. It’s more of a feeling. A recognition. ‘Ah, yes. This is how it is.’
I choose not to try to ‘understand’ this.
The God Argument
Reply
The God Argument (The Case Against Religion and for Humanism) by A. C. Grayling was a bit of a slow read for me, compared to a few other books I’ve read on this topic. This was, I believe, my first brush with secular humanism and it’s nice to have a basic definition of the concepts.
“Secularism is the principle of maintaining a separation between religious interests and bodies, on the one hand, and the state, on the other hand, on the premise that religion has no greater claim than any other self-interest outlook in debates about matters of government and public policy.”
“The basis of humanism is that we are to answer the most fundamental of all questions, the question of how to live, by reflection on the facts of human experience in the real world, and not on the basis of religion. […] As a broad ethical outlook, humanism involves no sectarian divisions or strife, no supernaturalism, no taboos, no food and dress codes, no restrictive sexual morality other than what is implicit in the demand to treat others with respect, consideration and kindness.”
Humanism’s two fundamental premises: 1) “there are no supernatural agencies in the universe,” 2) “our ethics must be drawn from, and responsive to, the nature and circumstances of human experience.”
“A key requirement (of humanism) is that individuals should think for themselves about what they are and how they should live. […] It imposes no obligations on people other than to think for themselves.”
Same for stoicism which, at first glances, seems to share some ideas with Buddhism.
“Stoicism’s main doctrine was that one should cultivate two capacities: ‘indifference’, and self-control. They used the term ‘indifference’ in the strict sense of this term to men neutrality, detachment, as in not taking sides on a question, or being disengaged from a quarrel.”
A few more ideas that got some highlighter »
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How much of your life are you selling off?
This post below by David Cain is probably the best thing I’ve ever read about retirement. More accurately, it’s about people who are retiring much earlier than “normal” (45, or 40 or even 30) It’s long (for a blog post) but worth a read. A few excerpts:
“Those of us with jobs have arranged to sell off large parts of our lives (8 hours a day, 5 days a week, for decades) to employers, in exchange for money that we can use to build a life that makes us happy.”
“When you compare the amount of happiness we actually derive from our unnecessary spending habits to the amount of happiness that can be derived from years of paid-for freedom (not to mention a clear and secure financial position the whole way there), most of those consumer habits come to appear glaringly absurd.”
“Would you rather have five all-expenses-paid years off to spend with your family, learn a language or build a business — or drive a big car instead of a small car?”
“Common Western fallacy: that for you to be as happy as you currently are, you need to spend as much as you currently do.”
Scott Adams: Universe as computer simulation
Three of my favorite Smart People (Kevin Kelly, Ray Kurzweil and Scott Adams) have convinced me there will be a post-human stage in our evolution. And Scott Adams makes a compelling (to me) case for the computer simulation theory.
“The theory basically goes that any civilisation which could evolve to a ‘post-human’ stage would almost certainly learn to run simulations on the scale of a universe. And that given the size of reality – billions of worlds, around billions of suns – it is fairly likely that if this is possible, it has already happened. And if it has? Well, then the statistical likelihood is that we’re located somewhere in that chain of simulations within simulations. The alternative – that we’re the first civilisation, in the first universe – is virtually absurd.”
Before you dismiss this theory, compare it to this popular creation narrative:
“It is made up of two parts, roughly equivalent to the first two chapters of the Book of Genesis. In the first part, Genesis 1:1 through Genesis 2:3, Elohim, the generic Hebrew word for God, creates the world in six days, then rests on, blesses and sanctifies the seventh day. God creates by spoken command (“Let there be…”), suggesting a comparison with a king, who has only to speak for things to happen, and names the elements of the cosmos as he creates them, in keeping with the common ancient concept that things did not really exist until they had been named. In the second, Genesis 2:4–24, Yahweh, the personal name of God, shapes the first man from dust, places him in the Garden of Eden, and breathes his own breath into the man who thus becomes נֶפֶש nephesh, a living being; man shares nephesh with all creatures, but only of man is this life-giving act of God described. The man names the animals, signifying his authority within God’s creation, and God creates the first woman, Eve, from the man’s body.”
Virtual reality environments for the elderly
Is anyone creating virtual reality games/environments for the elderly? I’m not a gamer but each time I happen on some video a new game, I’m stunned by how good the graphics have gotten. I assume all other aspects are improving as well.
Today I can outside and romp and play with the other kids but someday that might not be the case. And I might be in an assisted living facility or whatever they have in the far, distant future for people who can’t care for themselves.
Could a clever person create a custom virtual environment for me. I have thousands of photos, hundreds of videos and many thousands of blog posts and tweets and such. A person could know a lot about my past and interests and use that data to create something amazing.
Instead of playing grab-ass with Mrs. Henson down in the day room, I could jack in to Steve World. Hell, in 20 years, the hardware and software will know things about my cognitive state and compensate where needed.
There’s a pond at the bottom of the hill on which we live. On nice days I enjoy sitting at the edge and watching the geese. I’ll bet you that could be created with amazing accuracy. Even “get up and take a walk” around the pond (after I can no long walk anywhere). I’ll hear the geese and the wind in the trees and maybe smell the grass.
This might sound sad and creepy to some, it does to me a little. But aske me again in 20 years.
Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
“We tend to exist in a distracted present, where forces on the periphery are magnified and those immediately before us are ignored.”
“The minute the ‘now’ is apprehended it has already passed. […] The more forcefully we attempt to stop the passage of time the less available we are to the very moment we seek to preserve.”
“Which ‘now’ is important: the now I just lived or the now I’m in right now?”
“Digiphrenia – the way our media and technologies encourage us to be in more than one place at the same time.”
“Not only have our devices outpaced us, they don’t even reflect a here and now that may constitute any legitimate sort of present tense. They are reports from the periphery, of things that happened moments ago. […] By dividing our attention between our digital extensions, we sacrifice our connection to the truer present in which we are living.”
“Humans once lived without any concept of time at all. In this early, hunter-gatherer existence, information was exchanged physically, either orally or with gestures, in person. People lived in an eternal present, without any notion of before or after, much less history or progress. Things just were. […] While they had to worry about where their next meal was coming from, they felt no pressure to succeed or to progress, to achieve or to improve. They had nowhere to go, since the very notion of a future hadn’t yet been invented. This stasis lasted several thousand years.”
“Like a digital file, a spelled word is the same everywhere it goes and does not decay.”
“Where calendars led people to think in terms of history, clocks led people to think in terms of productivity. Only after the proliferation of the clock did the word ‘speed’ (spelled spede) enter the English vocabulary.”
“Digital technology is more like a still-life picture. A sample. It is frozen in time. Sound, on the other hand, is audible only over time. We hear sound as it decays. […] The digital universe is a visual one: people staring silently at screens, where the only sounds in the room are the keys and mouse clicks.”
“While there is tremendous value in group thinking, shared platforms, and networked collaboration, there is also value in a single mind contemplating a problem.”
“We must retrain ourselves to see the reward in the amount of time we get to spend in the reverie of solo contemplation or live engagement with another human being. Whatever is vibrating on the iPhone just isn’t as valuable as the eye contact you are making right now.”
“In the space of one childhood, we can learn what it took humanity many centuries to figure out.”
“Catching up with Twitter is like staying up all night to catch up on live streaming stock quotes from yesterday. The value was in the now — which at this point is really just a then.”
“When everything is rendered instantly accessible via Google and iTunes, the entirety of culture becomes a single layer deep. The journey disappears, and all knowledge is brought into the present tense.”
“Our recorded past competes with our experienced present for dominance over the moment. […] What isn’t coming at us from the past is crashing in at us from the future.”
“Big data companies collect seemingly innocuous data on everyone, such as the frequency of our text messages, the books we’ve bought, the number of rings it takes us co pick up the phone, the number of doors on our cars, the terms we use in our Web searches, in order to create a giant profile. They then compare this profile against those of everyone else. For reasons no one understands, the data may show that people who have two-door cars, answer the phone in three or more rings, and own cats are extremely likely to respond favorably to ads for soup. So these people will Ье shown lots of soup advertisements. The market researchers don’t care about the data points themselves or the logic connecting one behavior to another. They only care care about predicting what a person is statistically likely to do.”
“For the first time, people engaged with products completely divorced from the people who actually made them. Technologies masked not just the labor, but also the time that went into an item’s production. […] This new way of interacting with things defined a new human identity for the very first time — that of the consumer.”
“Consumption makes up about half of all economic activity in America.”
“In a digitally enhanced consumer reality, we not only work to keep up with the latest products and service options, we purchase products and services that serve no purpose other than to help us better keep up. Our iPads and Adroids are nothing like the productivity-computing tools on which they may once have been based but are instead purchasing platforms designed to increase the ease and speed with which we consume.”
“We are so good at making stuff and providing services that we no longer require all of us to do it.”
“It is now usually cheaper to just try something than to sit around and try to figure out whether to try something.” — Joichi Ito
“The individual is flow, and the community is storage. Only the individual can take actions. Only the community can absorb their impact over time.”
“Fractalnoia – Relating one thing to another, even when the relationship is forced or imagined.”
“Ideas don’t generally emerge from individuals, but from groups (liquid networks).” – Social critic Steven Johnson
“In a networked ideascape, the ownership of an idea becomes as quaint and indefensible a notion as copyright or patents. Since ideas are built on the logic of others, there is no way to trace their independent origins. It’s all just access to shared consciousness. Everything is everything.”
“Consumers don’t want to speak with companies through social media; we want to speak with one another. We don’t even think of ourselves as consumers anymore, but as people.”
“As long as people didn’t engage with one another and were instead kept happily competing with one another, their actions, votes, and emotions remained fairly predictable.”
“The human body is a space suit for something that could be stored quite differently.”
“I find myself unable to let go of the sense that human beings are somehow special, and that moment-to-moment human experience contains a certain unquantifiable essence. I still suspect there is something to quirky, too paradoxical, or too interpersonal to be imitated or re-created by machine life.”