A LUCILIUS PARABLE: ENTROPY SHARPENING

March 31st, 2019

One of the very faintest memories that Lucilius often wondered about -as perhaps a dream- was an image of his two hands, each with a rock, ramming one into the other at careful angles, cracking off flakes.  The finished piece was a crude edge, slowly inspected while a small scatter of rocky shards littered the forest ground.

He thought of this hazy image as he carefully ran a blade along a wet stone block.  He flipped the blade and brought it back towards him.  Slowly, the thin layer of water grew murky as he swept the water back and forth with the blade.  The whole knife used to be much bigger, but over the many years it has dulled and sharpened, by the stone and by the task it lost and found it’s edge, always by losing more and more of itself.

Lucilius could also remember a crude copper knife, and later on, iron.  Every blade he’d made and honed through the centuries had slowly ground down to nothing or snapped.  Each time he honed his skills at the forge, bending bright metal onto itself under great heat, pounding the softened metals, then grinding down edges.

As he sharpened the small blade he now had, he wondered: how many such tools had grown by the hands of man and withered under the same hand to stay sharp.

He flipped the blade and dragged it slowly against the smooth stone. 

His phone rang, but he did not hear it.

He flipped the blade once more.

The TV’s talking head droned on with new alarm, but Lucilius did not hear it.

He only concentrated, keeping the blade at the right angle.

Even the thoughts of past tools he had built and used, melted away as he concentrated more deeply.

He brought the blade to pass once more.

And once more.

And there was nothing in his mind save for the task at hand.

Soon this knife would be used up and gone too, but Lucilius did not think of it.

Both the past and all that might still happen were sheared from his mind.

He only moved the blade across the stone,

merely holding it at the perfect angle.

IN OTHER WORDS

March 30th, 2019

We love sound-bites, quotes, jokes, maxims, axioms and all manner of adage, for they simplify the world for us.  Beyond this, the brief, but thought-provoking phenomenon of such mimetic morsels is a pleasure.  Literally a pleasure.  Such statements do not evoke wise behavior in those who hear such Yoda-like statements.

Even a kid can pick out which of Yoda’s sentences are probably the wisest and most profound.

If this disconnect between recognizing a wise statement and being a wise person weren’t so profound, then there would be far wiser people walking and talking.  Alas, our ubiquitous balking, squawking and bad-faith finger-pointing indicates that we’re far from a more enlightened state as a species.

In other words, recognizing wisdom does not make a  person wise.

This is much like beauty.  We can recognize beauty, something that has been crafted with thoughtfulness and deft skill, but this does not mean that we can immediately do the same thing.

In the case of an artist, aesthetics of this sense is not just a matter of recognition, but a matter of practice.  The artist practices a skill and seeks to recognize beauty in the result.  A beauty that can uniformly be recognized by those who do not practice in the same way.

What practice of a skill does in this case is build a context.  Like the wide life that we experience, an artist’s cannon of work is a generative work that the artist not only creates but also experiences in much the same way a spectator would.  The artist functions in two ways whereas the spectator only functions in one.

With regards to wisdom, it does not take much observation of life to recognize a wise action or statement. Merely living in the world is the only prerequisite for gaining the context for statements that can be phrased more simply in other words.  But to evoke wise behavior within one’s self requires a practice much like the artist who develops a skill.

In other words, it’s not enough to recognize wisdom, one must experience it, and this takes practice.

HARD BOUNCE

March 29th, 2019

For anyone who has ever figured out the basic workings of a yo-yo, it’s clear that getting the yo-yo to come back up has everything to do with how it went down.

Masters of this simple toy will launch their yo-yo as hard as possible in order to create as much rotational motion as possible, motion which will eventually be recaptured and harvested on the way back up.  Youtube any of these masters of the toy and you’ll be met by yo-yos moving through all manner of acrobatics with the string fully unraveled.  The entire time this is happening the yo-yo is still spinning, but that motion hasn’t been tripped into coiling the string and thus making it climb back up to the hand.

We have the same phenomenon with a bouncy ball.  The harder we throw it at the ground, the higher it will go.  Beyond the equal lengths that a yo-yo falls and rises, however, a bouncy ball can be launched at the ground with such force that the resulting height is many times the height it initially started at.

We can mine these images for an allegory about how to pivot hard and in a difficult direction. 

How we start or maintain a diet might benefit from such images.  Of course there is yo-yo dieting, the act of losing weight and then binging it all back on.  This fits out image somewhat, at least with the yo-yo, but how might it translate into a ball hurled at the ground with such force that it goes high into the sky?

For the yo-yo dieter, we can look at the equal and opposite motivations that propel such behavior.  The diet is undertaken for health, or reasons of body image.  There’s some sort of well-intentioned reasoning going on here that understands that something must be given up in order to gain something of a different category.  Tasty food for a more pleasant experience while looking in the mirror, or at pictures, or that subtle feeling of increased well-being during the day.  The corresponding opposite motivation is that evolutionarily programmed desire to consume as many rich foods as possible.

These two forces compete with on another, and in the yo-yo dieter they might achieve something close to equal influence, ensuring that neither really win, and all that’s happening is one variety of unpleasantness followed by another, ad nauseam.

Here we might try to switch out our allegorical images and interpret what this would look like in practice.  Instead of a yo-yo, what would the diet look in terms of a bouncy ball hurled at the ground as hard as possible? 

What this might look like in practice is someone who is finally fed up (pun intended) with the yo-yo dieting and wants to take more drastic actions, but instead of just going on a longer, harsher diet, such a person predicates doing such with a gluttonous binge of epic proportions.  Such a person might set a date a week away for an extended diet to begin, and then, spend the ensuing week eating all manner of pleasurable and gluttonous food, and not simply enjoying, but force-feeding, in order to make one’s self somewhat sick.  This might sound somewhat unpleasant and masochistic, and it is, but for potentially good reason.  We could say that the person throwing the ball at the ground harder is crueler than a person who merely drops it, but if the ball can handle the force of transition that happens when hitting the ground, then the payoff is that much more.  For the dieter, this might be akin to an internal monologue that is finally sick and tired of the nagging little voice that always wants the donut or the coffee cake or the mac’n cheese, and responding with: you want it?  You got it, and feeding that little monster past it’s limits of enjoyment.  For those who have not been in a healthy state for quite a long time, this might actually be dangerous, but for someone younger and more robust, this kind of experiment might be well worth the memories it creates.  The gorging here is solely for the memory, of disgust it will create, so that when a healthier, difficult diet is undertaken, such feelings of sickness and disgust can be paired with temptations and thereby ameliorate their effect.

If such a categorical change in behavior can be maintained long enough for that behavior to form a structure of habit within the brain, then we can perhaps succeed in levelling-up our health and our life.

But such allegorical images might be useful in other realms.  The real fruit of such images is to realize that success can sometimes be achieved by going in counter-intuitive directions.

This episode references Episode 150: Pivot Harder and Episode 42: Level-Up

PREDICTING THOUGHTS

March 28th, 2019

We have all had the eerie experience of struggling with a problem and by chance noticing some new aspect of the problem which ushers in a Eureka moment.  In such a case, our attention has happened upon some stray and key detail. 

Ideally we are directing this attention into unexplored territory in an efficient and systematic way.  Unfortunately, our attention seems to bounce around more by the whims and wills of chance rather than by the design of some overtly conscious system.  Our own consciousness seems to tile over this disturbing fact with feelings of identity and  the ownership of one’s own experience.    But the fact is, we cannot really predict the next thought that we will have. 

Notice how the very word ‘prediction’ separates into pre- and –diction, meaning simply ‘before spoken’.  Prediction, in this etymological sense means thought, as in, we can predict what we will say because we have a thought about it immediately preceding the event.

But can we actually predict what is before our diction?  This is a redundant regression.  Our definition and use of the word prediction has conveniently expanded beyond this more narrow etymology, but the functional problem of predicting a thought remains.  To try and predict a thought is to actually have the thought, there is no ‘pre-thought’ that we can access.  We can certainly plan on doing some type of work, or theorize about the kinds of thoughts we will have in a certain place and time and in a certain context, but the nuances and details do not arise until we are actually experiencing such a future moment.

We can rewind back to the introductory image of struggling to solve a problem and see that while we can’t predict actual thoughts, we can actually map out their negative space.  What does this mean exactly?  In visual art, negative space is the space around an object.  We can easily imagine someone selecting an object in Photoshop with a function that detects it’s borders and then deleting that object.  This would turn the object into a negative space.  The areas of a jigsaw puzzle that appear as though they’ve been cut out of the piece can qualify as a negative space in this context.  The useful aspect of negative space in this instance is that we have the capacity to slowly map out the negative space of a solution as we investigate a problem.  This is somewhat like predicting a thought. 

Eureka, after all is greek for “I have found it.”  What exactly did Archimedes find when he exclaimed this?  More important than finding a method for measuring the purity of gold, he found a thought.  A system of thoughts that his mind predicted might exist.  And like shuffling through a bucket of keys and trying different keys for a specific lock, his imagination kept generating more keys until one finally fit.

We inevitably have only one tool for this entire process: the question.

At the root of all thought and progress, the question is humanity’s single superpower.

Not only is it an open ended concept that propels us into a new adventure,

it is a mechanism for mapping, outlining, and in some sense predicting the future of our own thoughts.

For a different discussion of this tool, check out Episode 30 of Tinkered Thinking, entitled The Only Tool.

WHERE'S WALDO?

March 27th, 2019

The most difficult question and task of daily life is to ask: what should one pay attention to?

A young student of driving is on alert, paying attention to every little detail on the road for the main reason that such inexperience doesn’t know what to ignore.  As we develop proficiency in a task like driving, we figure out what to ignore and what is important to pay attention to.  Experienced drivers do not pay attention to a stray movement of a coffee cup behind the window of a Starbucks, but a similarly small object like a child’s ball bouncing on the sidewalk towards the road will – hopefully – evoke a sense of alert for the fact that there might be a child chasing it out into the street.  This intuitive filter of attention is something that fine-tunes over time, and in such cases it seems reasonable to think that such a filter is attempting to pay attention less and less in order to ease the cognitive load.  Of course, if this filter ends up filtering out too much information, important details might be lost.

Such a concept of important details overlooked or zeroed in on applies to any and all aspects of our life, especially those to which comprise the path of our goals.

Figuring out what is important may be the simplest and most basic question that confronts anyone with an aim and a goal.  So often goals are thwarted by attention and effort paid to the wrong thing.  Like barking up the wrong tree, we waste time and resources trying to make our aims happen with a concentration on the wrong details of our goal.  Spending oodles of money on promoted Instagram ads for a product that doesn’t really translate well to the domain of photos might be a good example of this misdirected attention and effort.  This is somewhat like searching one small section of a ‘Where’s Waldo’ picture where he doesn’t exist and failing to search the rest of the picture.

Knowing what to pay attention to is somewhat like playing where’s Waldo, but without having any idea what Waldo looks like.  In fact, it’s even worse than this: on top of not knowing what Waldo looks like, he’s also a shape-shifter who turns into anything and everything else.

Phrased with this image, what exactly one should pay attention to in any given moment may in fact seem like an impossibly tall task.  The enormity of options is why we constantly filter, though our filters can grow in dangerous directions that begin to filter out important details.  This is where mechanisms usually decried as negative, such as self-doubt, hesitation and a lack of confidence can be incredibly useful tools.  If we entertain no doubt about the way we filter the world.  If we have supreme confidence in such a filter, and if we never hesitate with our interpretation, we are no better than a charging buffalo in the middle of a herd headed for a cliff.

The unfortunate and thrilling part of life is that time hauls us forward against any counter-wish, like a buffalo in the middle of the herd, unable to stop.

But even while moving forward inexorably, we can Zoom out on our own situation, as though taking a bird’s-eye view of the situation and ask: are we moving in the right direction?  We might spot some new detail, a Waldo trailing off from the herd in a better direction, away from danger, and towards some better future.

While we cannot pause time, such an effort still requires that we pause our activities and rest our mind of the business.  If we don’t exercise this ever-present opportunity often, our ability to zoom in and zoom out gums up and gets stuck, making it less likely that we’ll be able to shift perspectives, locking ourselves into some track of undecided end.

This episode references Episode 340: Discovering Details, Episode 54: Well-Oiled Zoom, and Episode 23: Pause