Category Archives: Philosophy

Reason to believe

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Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it.
Do not believe in anything because it is spoken and rumored by many.
Do not believe in anything simply because it is found written in your religious books.
Do not believe in anything merely on the authority of your teachers and elders.
Do not believe in traditions because they have been handed down for many generations.
But after observation and analysis, when you find that anything agrees with reason and is conducive to the good and benefit of one and all, then accept it and live up to it.
This bit of wisdom is attributed to the Buddha. I wonder why this never came up in school (public or Sunday).

The next thing

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David Cain has soared to the top of my must-read list. His latest post has made my day richer and I hope it does the same for you. Here’s a taste:

“As I very slowly get a little better at managing the “stuff” in life, I am getting markedly better at being okay with everything’s eternally-half-done status. I’m getting better at coexisting peacefully with stuff that needs fixing, problems I don’t know how to handle, opportunities I am mismanaging, and even my anxious moods. Peace with anxiety. Anxiety, with peace. Somehow.

Now and then I can sit right in the middle of all of my uncertain and unfinished business and relax in the knowledge that everything really is in its right place. Strangely, the more I’m okay with everything being not quite okay, the better I am at moving the little things along to a place where they do feel okay. Make sense? Not really? That’s okay.”

I’m reminded of a trip from Des Moines to Jefferson City. Greg Brown (now our CEO) was at the wheel and working hard to pass slower cars on the two-lane highway. It dawned me that he was trying get to the “front of the line.” His face confirmed this when I mentioned it. Greg and I are older and wiser now.

Kevin Kelly loves technology

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The full quote (by MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle) is: “We think with the objects we love, and we love the objects we think with.” I came across it near the end of Kevin Kelly’s new book, What Technology Wants. (More on that in a later post.) Mr. Kelly beautifully captures my own feelings about technology:

“I am no longer embarrassed to admit that I love the internet. Or maybe it’s the  web. Whatever you want to call the place we go to while we are online, I think it is beautiful. People love places and will die to defend a place they love, as our sad history of wars proves. Our first encounters with the internet/web portrayed it as a very widely distributed electronic dynamo –a thing one plugs into– and that it is. But the internet as it has matured is closer to the technological equivalent of a place. An uncharted, almost feral territory where you can genuinely get lost. At times I’ve entered the web just to get lost. In that lovely surrender, the web swallows my certitude and delivers the unknown. Despite the purposeful design of hits human creators, the web is a wilderness. Its boundaries are unknown, unknowable, its mysteries uncountable. The bramble of intertwined ideas, links, documents, and images creates an otherness as thick as a jungle. The web smell like life. It knows so much. It has insinuated its tendrils of connection into everything, everywhere. The net is now vastly wider than I am, wider than I can imagine; in this way, while I am in it, it makes me bigger, too. I feel amputated when I am away from it.”

“In that lovely surrender, the web swallows my certitude and delivers the unknown.” Who can ask for more.

Scott Adams: “Shape Shifters”

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“One idea we all share is the narrow view that ideas are not alive in any way we like to define such things. We believe ideas are our tools, not our masters. That is exactly what the Shape Shifters have programmed us to believe. While we know that the ideas in our head control our behavior, we have an idea that we can choose any path we like, so we are blind to the fact we are little more than milk cows for our non-corporeal overlords. Everything we humans do is in the service of creating a better environment for ideas to reproduce. We create more babies so there are more brains to fill with ideas. We write books, make movies, build schools, and expand the Internet, all to help the reproduction of ideas.”

Scott Adams: Immortality

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“…we’re a simulated (programmed) world left behind by advanced humanoids that shed their bodies billions of years ago. Our simulated world is the closest they could come to immortality. They were romantics, much like ourselves, and couldn’t stand the thought of being separated from their loved ones for eternity. So in our programmed little world, when we feel a special connection to another, it’s because we knew that person when we were real, and the program allows us to feel it again as if new. Thus, when you meet your soul mate, it is a reunion of sorts. And it will happen over and over, in each subsequent life the program provides for you.”

Scott Adams concludes an interesting post on stress with this lovely take on reality.

God for a Day

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For most of us (well, actually, for all of us) God is a mystery. Whatever God is, I’m confident she has a fine sense of humor and might be doing something like this.

Once she knocked out the Heaven and Earth stuff and had a few people running around it occurred to her to put them in charge of the Universe. But she knew a committee was the wrong way to go. They’d come up with those soon enough.

So she decided to rotate the job. Every day, someone new becomes God, with full powers. They can create sunsets or erupting volcanoes or whatever pops into their temporarily divine heads.

And to keep things interesting, there would be no rhyme or reason to selection. Totally random.

Even if the world’s great religions figured this out, they kept it to themselves. You can’t build a functioning religion when there’s a new deity every day. Just keeping up with the artwork would be a nightmare.

Each new god could tell his friends the exciting news if they chose but, being omniscient they could see that could turn out badly. Some couldn’t resist, however.

You’d think after all this time (and all those god’s) the world would be in pretty good shape. But each new god could –and often did– fuck up the good work of previous gods.

So. If today is your day, what will you do?

TED Talk: “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”

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In a recently-released TED video, author Simon Sinek explains what he sees as the secret to Apple’s success and makes a case for the real reason the company is so innovative–even though it has “the same access to the same talent, the same agencies, the same consultants, the same media.”

Nothing on my mind

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I’ve been reading about and practicing meditation for a couple of years with the goal of a quiet mind, free from thoughts, for half an hour.

(If you’re an experienced practitioner of meditation, please don’t write to tell me what I’m doing wrong. I will stipulate that.)

I don’t know at what age we have our first thoughts. But once they start, they don’t stop, except when we’re asleep. (Do we think when we’re asleep? Are dreams thoughts?)

Most of us believe we “choose” our thoughts. I can think about a banana… and then switch to a porcupine. If that’s true, it would seem to follow we can choose NOT to think. I have no idea if that is, in fact, possible. But maybe we can reduce the number and “volume” of our thoughts. Sort of like the relative quiet that comes after turning off a blaring television.

Why bother, one might ask. Well, it is restful and pleasant and might have health benefits (But let’s not go there.) I’m also curious about what I might “hear” if I can tune out all of the static.

Back in my radio days, one of the “sign-on” procedures involved warming up the station transmitter. Once it was ready, you punched a button that turned on the carrier (wave). Then I’d walk back into the control room, open the mic, and read the sign-on announcment.

If a listener had their radio tuned to our frequency (830), they would hear a low hum for those few seconds before I began talking.

That’s the “almost silence” I’m shooting for. Who know what signal might be hidden by the noise of our daily thoughts?

The One True Faith. Mine.

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I’ve always wondered how deeply religious people could be so certain their “faith” was the real deal and everyone else’s was bogus. Brian Hines wonders, too:

“People will reject unsubstantiated claims in holy books… except the book they believe in. People will reject miracle stories… except miracles related by their own faith. People will reject the divinity of living prophets or messengers of God… except the person they accept as a genuine spiritual teacher.

Every religious believer, aside from the few who are genuinely open-minded, considers that he or she has found the One True Faith among the 4,199 or so false faiths. Yet how is this possible, logically or realistically?

It’s like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Woebegon, where all the children are above average.

There are good reasons for belonging to a religious, spiritual, or mystical group. But having a lock on cosmic truth isn’t one of them. Nobody knows what lies at the heart of reality, or even if there is such a thing: a heart, a core, a central truth.

So the only honest attitude is “I don’t know.” Along with, “You don’t know either.” This leaves us all on the same unknowing level.”