BACKTRACK BUILDING

February 4th, 2020

It can be so exciting to acquire a new skill that we start using it before planning what to do.  As aggravating as this is, it’s simply part of the learning process for acquiring that new skill.

As with the difference between merely thinking about something and talking about it out loud, there is a fundamental difference between what we want to do, and what we realize we can do once we start making that first vision a reality.

Learning and experimentation is a compounding process.  Each new step builds off all previous progress.

This creates the tension between planning and doing. 

On the one hand we want to plan as well as possible in order to save the need to backtrack in the future, but on the other hand we cannot predict what we will learn and what we will come to realize is possible as we progress.  This tension is a bit of a paradox.

It either paralyzes us with perpetual planning.

Or,

We barrel ahead and just do whatever.

Or,

We squeeze between the constraints and we keep the larger goal in mind and make small plans that we hold on to loosely.

The process of achieving the goal is not one big thing we do.  It is an iterative process.  We can take smaller steps, and while this might hark of slower process as opposed to taking big leaps, it requires less effort to backtrack when we come across some sort of new information.

The faster we can take smaller steps, the less we have to rely on big leaps.

Big leaps that we might regret.

HOW'S IT LOOK?

February 3rd, 2020

There’s the adage: Monkey see, Monkey do.

But how do we go from seeing something to doing it?  Take dancers for instance.  Their learning, practice and training happens in front of a mirror.  They get instant feedback about what their body orientation looks like.  But once they’re on stage, performing in front of an audience, where is the mirror?

There is no mirror, of course.  So how does the dancer know they are doing the dance in a way that looks correct?

The process of learning and tweaking in front of a mirror is a process of translation.  What the dancer changes by way of self-reflection manifests within a person as a different feel.  With any sort of body orientation, it simply feels different, and with enough practice we can bookmark these orientations in order to snap to that orientation.

Dancers perhaps have it easy in this respect.  The translation from what something looks like to what something feels like has a tight feedback loop and only has . . . two steps: moving the body and referencing the mirror visually.

Before we abandon the mirror completely and wonder about things that we quite literally can’t see ourselves do, what about something like getting in shape?

The walls of gyms are plastered with mirror.  Again for good reason, it’s important to have proper form while working out and referencing one’s own body orientation is vital.  But more important is the different way it feels to workout on the first day of a committed exercise regimen versus the way it feels on the 1,000^th day of a committed workout regimen. 

We start such exercise commitments with a hope of looking better.  But it’s feeling better that keeps us at it, and this, unfortunately takes time.

It’s for this sort of reason that we should be wary about how seriously we take our own feelings.  It’s possible to realize from an intellectual standpoint that “hey, if I keep doing this, my emotions surrounding it are going to change as a result of doing it.”

Often we look at it the other way around, we wait around for the emotion to do it.  But often we have to do it in order to arouse the emotion.

This goes for any endeavor, whether it be learning to dance or starting a business.  The beginning is confusing and uncomfortable, and it’s easy on the basis of these emotions to convince ourselves that we aren’t good at it or that it’s not worth the effort.  What we forget about is how these emotions change as we make progress.

When starting something new and discouraged by the sorts of emotions that crop up, it’s best to ask:

Will it always feel like this?

The answer is obvious of course, despite the fact that we so easily fail to remember it.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: HOLDFAST

February 2nd, 2020

The day was long dark, cast with an early night as snow began to fall and freshen the layer of white that covered the path and the surrounding woods.  Lucilius slowed his horse a moment to flip his collar and button it and then urged the horse on.  The darkness collapsed the small light around them but the hooves of the horse found their way until dimly a glow began to edge into the darkness up ahead in the woods.  The few lights of the town blossomed into view as the trees gave way, and Lucilius reflected on the shape of his mind as it expanded with the lights.

He slowed the horse before the tavern of town and dismounted.  He patted the horse, and removed a wide blanket from the belted back and covered the horse.  Then he smashed the layer of ice in the water trough and the horse took in laps of water.

Lucilius climbed up the wooden steps, the planks of the porch creaking, reminding him of the ships he used to work, the way they whined in the waves, and groaned with advances of wind.  Those ships, like old gods, always up to the challenge but still always about it like men, complaining as proof that they could take more.

The heavy door had a snug fit but swung open swiftly, and with it, the cold he brought.  He turned the door closed, feeling the heat of the room cozy up around him. 

The room was sparsely full, and quiet, and Lucilius took to the bar.

“Ale, a whisky and a room. A plate too if you’ve got anything.”

He fished a thick coin from his pocket and letting it land heavy and quick on the bar, felt the few stares from around the room. Lucilius was a man of industry now, and though he wasn’t one to show it, there were good boots he’d just purchased, the style unavoidable.  Even in a time when things were made to last there were still some that were made to last longer, and only an idiot failed to realize that the thing built custom, with it’s whole life in mind, lasted longest.

Lucilius took his beer, his whisky and sat at lone table.  He drank long from his beer and then stared into the golden amber spirit.  The beer was cold, but the whisky would be hot, and no matter how hot the hearth was in this tavern room, he knew that old familiar heat of whisky pouring down into his body.  He held off, and glanced around the room, figuring the stares would have subsided, tending back to their own private worlds now.

But there was one man across the room, near crossed with liquor, still staring at Lucilius.  He saw that it was Lucilius and started to stand, struggling.  The man took a moment to steady himself, remembering the old machinery of balance, before lumbering across the room.

“You’re Lucilius,” the man said.

Over the years Lucilius had become less and less impressed with his own memory, and this was not exception.  Even through a thick haze of liquor, the man could see Lucilius struggle to place him.  The man took a seat opposite Lucilius.

“The Ariadne,” he said.  “After bowheads, western coast of Greenland.”

It all came back to Lucilius then.  The grey skies that swirled to a torrent.  That crazed Bluenose blood boat captain screaming to lower the boats to go after spouts.  They barely made it away from the ship before struggling to return in the cold boil of sea as it began to battle that howling sky.  The few left struggling to keep the ship watched in horror as the boats were, lost, dashed to pieces by an insane sea.  The helmsman that day was superior, a friend of Lucilius but the captain was crazed for more kills.  It was that struggle between that captain’s greed and that helmsman’s wisdom of the sea that sank the ship.  The captain bludgeoned the man off the wheel and turned the ship back towards those long-since-seen spouts, hurling the ship into dangerous angles with the sea.  The mizzen was the first to be torn from it’s stalk, snapping backstays of the main before diving into the sea to grab and drag the stern out of any control.  The captain was lost and so too soon would be the Ariadne.

Lucilius had gone down below and began hacking at the roped barrels, hacking open the hold as the freezing water cuffed his ankles and began to climb in torrents, the barrels now becoming restless, and dangerous in their bobbing movement.

“What are you doing? We’re never to touch the barrels!” Lucilius could remember someone yelled as he worked his sheepshank.

The ship went down in the tumult, some few barrels spewing from it’s hold.  In the chaos of that freezing landscape, between those walls of water, never ceasing, Lucilius made out one other man clinging to a barrel, far away, just as he was, holding on for all of life.

Hours, or days later when the sea was finally calm, Lucilius could see nothing else among the grey expanse.  He was lost in that memory, thinking of that icy shore that found him and his long trek across the frozen land, when he remembered this drunk man before him.

The man had tears in his eyes. 

“You were the other, on that barrel.”

The man nodded.

Lucilius smiled.  He clapped the man’s shoulder.

“What a day that was,” Lucilius said, smiling.  But the man looked on in horror, and Lucilius was confused. 

“Ever get back out there?” Lucilius asked, thinking about the years afterwards he’d spent at sea before then building his industry, his place now in the world, now more as a decision after all those years of action.

“Been here ever since,” the man said, shaking his head. “Can’t go back.  Can’t look at that watery hell.”

“The sea you mean?” Lucilius asked.  The man only nodded, and Lucilius took in a great breath and slowly sighed, knowing the many years since this man had spent lost in his own liquored stupor. 

Lucilius took back his whisky, feeling that heat pour into him, and now feeling it he almost missed the cold, out there in the woods before he saw that glow of town.  He felt a meanness towards this warm tavern suddenly, and he looked at this broken man.

“We were smart to hold to those barrels that day.  But why do you still holdfast to yours when there’s no wind and water here and now to try and take our lives from us?”

USER INTERFACE

February 1st, 2020

The Simulation Hypothesis holds that given all possibilities, it’s likely we are in some sort of simulation, like The Matrix.

This is about as far as our conclusions can go given our current information and evidence on the subject.  However, there is a simulation that we can be certain about.

As a matter of neurology, everything that we see, hear, taste, touch and otherwise sense is the result of a simulation that our brain is running for, what amount to our conscious experience.

This isn’t too difficult to deduce on one’s own.  Take vision for example.  Light somehow enters your immediate environment either from a lamp, a fire or after it’s 8 minute trip from the sun.  Then it bounces off of everything and the receptors in your eyes get hit by all that bouncing light and cause chemical reactions which then activate neuronal pathways that send the specific signal of those chemical reactions all the way to the back of your brain where they are processed by your visual cortex, and the results of that processing are then shuttled up to the neocortex where you can make some thoughtful deductions about what you are seeing.

That’s a lot of stuff to happen between something happening in front of us and our register of that change.  Of course all of these processes happen so quickly that we don’t notice any lag, but the fact that we’re certain these processes do take place requires that it must take some time. 

This means our experience of the world is on a delay.

More specifically a processing delay.  In some sense we only have access to the world as it just occurred.

Now what does that mean?  In some sense it’s like a memory. We are experiencing something that has already happened.  And what exactly are we doing when we try really hard to remember something that happened yesterday? or a week ago?  or many years ago?

We are trying to use a mental space to simulate the events of that past time.  Memories, for all their flaws, are merely poor simulations of what our sensory experience was at some past time.

But our experience of the present moment isn’t terribly different, even if it has a much higher resolution.  It’s still a separate creation, not a recreation of what’s going on, but a creation.  Our brains have figured out a useful way to make sense of all the information that’s incoming from all ur sense organs and it generates this constant dream with constant input from our environment.

Another way to approach this is to think about senses that we know exist but that we don’t have.  Electroreception, for example, is an interesting one.  It’s used mainly by aquatic animals like sharks, and they use this as their primary source of vision, but it has nothing to do with light.  Electroreception gives the animal an understanding of what is around them by generating an electromagnetic field and then noting disturbances to this field.

Imagine closing your eyes and still having a completely intuitive understanding of where everything in the room is and an accurate idea of how far away everything is.

We do this effortlessly with vision, and it’s a fun, albeit potentially dangerous exercise to try and make your way around well known spaces like your bedroom with your eyes closed.  It’s amazing how poor our conception of our environment is the moment we turn off the datastream.

All of these alternative senses are simply ways for brains to gather data from the environment and process it in a way that allows us, or an animal to have an effective interaction with that environment.

Think about this a second.  Our whole sense of reality is something our brain has generated simply so that we might have an effective interaction with our environment.

This begins to be reminiscent of something like User Interface.

When we use a piece of software, or an app, there is almost always some sort of database behind the scenes.  But we don’t see it.  We see some sort of fancy (or terribly ugly and frustrating) User Interface which is designed so that we can interact with this database.  We either need information from that database or we need to see what the information looks like when combined or processed in a certain way, and it’s through the User Interface that we do this.

That User Interface, is in some sense, a simulated version of the database.  It’s one way of looking at it.

We might think of different senses as different features of an interface that allow us access to the database in some way.

Whatever reality is, we only have our senses to get an idea of it.  We can think of base reality as the database, and our conception of the world that our minds have created through vision, sound, touch and taste comprises our personal interface about how we interact with that database.

Now here’s the truly wild thing about all this.  We have the ability to change our User Interface.  We cannot yet add senses, but we can change the way we’ve simulated the world in our mind. 

The most basic and fundamental way of inducing changes in this simulation is to crack it with questions, and then ping reality with actions that give us more information from the database that can then be used to update our simulation.

The key here is to think of the simulation we have of the world in our mind as the User Interface, and to think of our senses as some of the features on offer automatically by this User Interface.  The other, incredibly important aspect of this User Interface that might be easy to overlook is our ability to create stories and fictions that can then be tested, rejected, iterated and honed into theories that become extremely effective models for further interacting with our environment.

As mentioned before, the mind sort of hallucinates a world based on what we get from our senses.  It’s given us this base experience, but the conjectures that we can make about how it works is a completely new layer of simulation that we have far more control to grow with flexibility.

Regardless of whether the world at large is running on a giant simulation, we are already doing it on a solitary, individual level.

RIVALNYM CASE STUDY: FANATICAL FAN

January 31st, 2020

As Winston Churchill once said, A fanatic is someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject.

The diminutive form, that of just being a fan, speaks of the same phenomenon but to a lesser degree.  And more importantly, we think of a fan as someone who has a positive and healthy interest, whereas fanatic is far more negative and conjures up notions that are generally dangerous to our sense of how we think things should be.

These two words are rivalnyms.  They essentially describe the same thing, but from two completely opposite emotional standpoints. Rivalnyms are pairs of words, like synonyms and antonyms.  Rivalnyms share much the same definition, in that both words refer to the same phenomenon, like synonyms, but they have opposing emotional signatures attached to them, somewhat like antonyms.

This pair, that of Fan & Fanatic

form one of the best rivalnym pairs because they can convey opposite feelings when in fact they are pretty much the same word, since the word fan is simply a diminutive form of fanatic that’s been merely shortened; nothing could be more emblematic of the strange fact that our perspective is mostly determined by our emotional response as opposed to our thoughtful treatment of any given subject. 

Our language is laced with rivalnyms that allow us to describe events in opposing ways.  Language appears to be built in this way because people have different emotional responses to the same things.

An event that makes one person nervous makes another person excited.  Nervous and excited form rivalnyms in this case, eye-rollingly appropriate too, considering each refers to the other.

This split in language that we can identify with rivalnyms seems to indicate something perhaps fundamental about the way our emotional composure can be geared towards receiving the experiences of life.  While that’s a larger subject to be unpacked at another time, Rivalnyms do, in the meantime provide a clue about our own composure and how to change it if we so want.  Being aware of rivalnyms in your own language can become a sort of mindful practice, akin to that of a detective, but when the subject is one’s own self. 

For example, when we hear ourselves say that we are lonely.  This is a negatively tinted description of the state of being alone.  As opposed to focusing on the state of being lonely, we can re-describe the situation with a positive tint.  We can ask:

How can I enjoy this gift of solitude?