“Zen pretty much comes down to three things– everything changes; everything is connected; pay attention.”
Category Archives: Philosophy
Magic
As business —and the public at large— struggle to understand artificial intelligence and what it might become, I am free from any such anxiety. Arther C. Clark explained it back in 1962:
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
For now, you might say. Like all magic through the ages, we’ll figure out how the trick was done. And there are computer scientists today who write the AI code and understand how it works.
But if AI keeps “improving” at an exponential rate perhaps full understanding will remain just out of our grasp. And, yes, somebody wrote the code for today’s AI and understands how the trick is done. But who will know when AI is writing its own code?
For my part, I don’t really care how the trick is done (until it’s a bad trick, of course). For now I think about it the same way I think about “the hard problem” of consciousness. Nobody really understands what it is and how it comes to be. If some future AI achieves consciousness, and can explain it, I hope it doesn’t.
Thinking about thoughts
I prompted Perplexity to tell me if scientists had determined how many thoughts we think every day. Obviously nobody knows for certain but 6,200 is the number she came up with. As I prepared to include a link to her findings in this post, I discovered I could create a “page” and publish that (somewhere) on Perplexity. While I didn’t write a single word of that page, I guess I get credit for the prompt? (“Curated by smays”)
Looking at the tag cloud on my blog I learned I have posted on the topic of “thoughts” 39 times going back fourteen years. A blog rabbit hole I couldn’t resist. Didn’t read them all but plan to read one each morning for the next month. I did, however, scrape some bits to give you a taste. (Each of these from a different source)
“I’m imagining a technology that doesn’t exist. Yet. A lightweight set of electrodes that monitors my brainwaves and transcribes (transmitted via Bluetooth to my mobile device, let’s say) my thoughts. An advanced version of today’s voice-to-text apps. We get to read that “stream of consciousness” at long last.”
“Thoughts think themselves.” […] “Feelings are, among other things, your brain’s way of labeling the importance of thoughts, and importance determines which thoughts enter consciousness.”
“If I re-google my own email (stored in a cloud) to find out what I said (which I do) or rely on the cloud for my memory, where does my “I” end and the cloud start? If all the images of my life, and all the snippets of my interests, and all of my notes and all my chitchat with friends, and all my choices, and all my recommendations, and all my thoughts, and all my wishes — if all this is sitting somewhere, but nowhere in particular, it changes how I think of myself. […] The cloud is our extended soul. Or, if you prefer, our extended self.”
“The problem is not thoughts themselves but the state of thinking without knowing we are thinking.”
“Even if your life depended on it, you could not spend a full minute free of thought. […] We spend our lives lost in thought. […] Taking oneself to be the thinking of one’s thoughts is a delusion.”
“Look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them or just your thoughts about them. Sometimes our thoughts act like “dream glasses.”
“We often see our thoughts, or someone else’s, instead of seeing what is right in front of us or inside of us.”
“Our minds are just one perception or thought after another, one piled on another. You, the person, is not separate from these thoughts, the thing having them. Rather you just are the collection of these thoughts.”
“awareness by the mind of itself and the world”
I don’t recall precisely when or how I became interested in consciousness. I’ve read a few (26) books on the topic and gave it some space here (104 posts). The reading has been a mix of scientific and spiritual (for lack of a better term). The concept showed up in a lot of my science fiction reading as well. And we’ll be hearing the term –however one defines it– more often in the next few years.
I like the idea that nobody really knows what the fuck it is or where it comes from. Thankfully, that won’t change.
I forgot to meditate today
Thus ending a streak of 2,288 consecutive days on the cushion. More than 6 years without a miss. My best guess of when I started meditating would be May of 2008 so I’ve been at it for about 16 years and started tracking my practice (in a spreadsheet) in 2014. Back in 2015 I missed a day because I was sick with pneumonia and the following year I missed because I was attending my 50th high school class reunion.
How did I forget to meditate today? Not sure. Just got busy. Woke up in the middle of the night with the realization that my string was broken. How do I feel about this lapse? Sad wouldn’t be the right word. Maybe a little disappointed? I’m going with nostalgic. And a little relief that whatever pressure came with such a streak is gone. Perhaps I was sitting every day so I could make that spreadsheet entry rather than simply practicing awareness.
Like the man said, the only day that counts is today.
PS: Going forward I will not be tracking consecutive days of meditation practice. Rather, the total number of days practiced since I began tracking in 2014. [3,683]
PPS: This seems like a good time to retire the spreadsheet as well. I’m now logging my daily sessions in Calendar on my MacBook.
What if everything is conscious?
That’s the headline of a pretty long article by Sigal Samuel at Vox. I’ve done some reading about consciousness and posted here with some frequency. The idea that everything is conscious has been around a long time. It’s called panpsychism.
Panpsychism, the view that consciousness or mind is a fundamental and ubiquitous feature of reality, has a long and rich history in philosophy. From the musings of the ancient Greeks to contemporary debates in philosophy of mind, panpsychism has captured the imagination of a diverse range of thinkers. Luminaries such as Plato, Spinoza, Leibniz, William James, and Alfred North Whitehead have all explored panpsychist ideas, and in recent years the theory has seen a resurgence of interest among philosophers like David Chalmers, Galen Strawson, and Philip Goff. (Perplexity)
Consciousness shows up in most of my reading on quantum theory. (My incomplete reading list) I, for one, hope “the hard problem of consciousness” is never solved.
The Death Business
“Religions are in the death business: preparing people for death, pretending to send them off after they’ve died, making believe they know what happens afterward, and explaining to the dead person’s relatives where they think their loved one might be now. Without death most religions don’t have a whole lot to live for.”
— Sit Down and Shut Up (Brad Warner)
Rust Cohle talks about religion
Ricky Gervais on Religion
One good habit
habit (noun) – a settled or regular tendency or practice, especially one that is hard to give up
I don’t have a lot of bad habits these days. Don’t smoke or do drugs, drink (beer) in moderation… but when the idea for this post occurred to me, I was thinking of good habits. Things I do with some consistency without having to give them a lot of thought. Consistency being the operative word. If you don’t count brushing my teeth, I really only have one good habit: meditation.
There are almost as many forms of mediation as there are meditators. For me it’s the time I spend each day practicing paying attention. (I’ll skip the long riff on how continuously lost we are in thought we all are.)
2024 will be the 10th consecutive year of tracking my daily meditation. I think I was practicing for five years or so before I began logging my time on the cushion on November 30, 2014. I ran up a string of 371 days before missing a day (pneumonia). I managed 271 consecutive days before missing again (out of town attending the 50th anniversary of my high school graduation.) I have not missed a day since. 2,101 consecutive days (5.7 years). Total days since I started logging my sessions, 3,317 days.
I usually sit for 30 minutes. If it’s almost bedtime I might do a 15 minute session and every once in while I set for 45 minutes or an hour. In terms of perceived time, the longer sessions do not seem much longer. But 30 minutes is the sweet spot for me. My one good habit.