DISTANCE FROM NEUTRAL

December 31st, 2018

For anyone who is out of shape and finds it cold in the winter, it’s an interesting discovery to reflect on just how hot it gets when you go for a challenging hike.  Especially for those out of shape, such a trek becomes an ordeal and the problem of temperature flips.  Instead of too cold, now it’s too hot.  The focus is on the discomfort, the emotional distance from neutral that we find ourselves.

Instead of the fact that the body alone is capable of generating a huge amount of heat.  Our emotional state blinds us from this convenient and useful fact.  No fancy gym or equipment is necessary.  If we want to warm up, it’s only a few dozen squats or pushups or jumping jacks away.

Strangely, the more fit a person is, the less emotional distance they travel from neutral.  Certainly their body still warms up, but the situation is not uncomfortable, it’s welcomed.

This distance from neutral is simultaneously something we seek to increase and something we purport not to want.  This quaint little contradiction of human nature is easily elicited by fact that much more free time is squandered on social media getting revved up about this or that issue instead of sitting quietly in order to develop a meditation practice.  How many minutes, hours, days and probably weeks are spent during a given year seeking out this emotional disturbance instead of cultivating a closeness to neutral?  We watch action movies and dramas because they jerk around our emotions.  And all of this movement is away from a sense of neutral.

Our own mind seems geared against us in this way, constantly reminding us of embarrassing or worrisome things that have happened in the past and conjuring up all sorts of terrible forks by which the future might turn.  All of these anxiety-provoking thoughts simply lead us away from the moment, which is often far more neutral.

Whether it be the fitness of the body or mind, it’s a paradox that in order to actually get closer to neutral and remain close to neutral, it requires a constant effort, a constant drama with our own emotions of laziness and lethargy to work out, and a likewise drama with the mind to let go of this thought and stop chasing that one in order to focus on the simple experience of what is happening in the moment.

While at first glance it might seem like a life as far away from neutral would be more exciting – and indeed it probably is when we stop for a moment to ask what exactly is being excited -  the gift that is absent from such excitement and resides in the calmer, more peaceful states of the brain is the ability to make better decisions for ourselves and those around us.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: BETWEEN QUESTIONS

December 30th, 2018

“Do you think animals ask questions?”

Lucilius looked up from his meal and looked at his good friend who had asked the question.

“I don’t know,” Lucilius said, “I’d never really thought about it.”

“I know that you can teach an ape sign language but the ape’ll never use the language to ask a question.”

“Strange,” Lucilius said, “I wonder if trainers have to instruct all the words, or if the ape can even ask how to sign something like a banana?”

“I don’t know,” Lucilius’ friend responded.  “Curious.”

That night Lucilius had a dream where he spent an eternity compiling all of the questions into a single place.  In the dream Lucilius was writing in it right up until the very end of time, streaming every nuanced forking ponderance of advanced AI’s as they cracked open black holes, searching for every last little piece of knowledge about the universe. 

Lucilius woke up and laid in bed a moment pondering this catalogue of questions.  He wondered about all the questions he had asked during his time alive and for the first time wondered about the quality of questions he had been asking.

Certainly there were countless ways to ask the same question and poke at the same unknown sentiment, but were there perhaps better quality questions?

As has always been said, no question is a bad question, but that had never ruled out the fact that some questions are certainly better than others. 

Without getting out of bed Lucilius picked up a small notebook on his bedside table and opened it to the first blank page.  He wrote at the top ‘Catalogue Q’, and resolved to try and live the next year of his life through a search for better questions, by cataloging them, analyzing them, and honing them.

In the beginning Lucilius thought he was making much headway with his life: breaking down problems into finer and finer questions that were answered more easily and for a number of months he saw an immense improvement in his productivity and progress.

But after a while, as he began to curiously look back on his pages of questions through a sense of pride for carrying out the small experiment, he started looking at his answered questions differently.  Time and space from the older questions gave him a new perspective and he started to see the answers he had found to these questions as stale, but also itching in a strange way.  Naturally, a question popped into his mind as a way of testing and ultimately splitting the answers he had found.  He flipped back to a blank page and began to write more questions based on the older ones he thought he had laid to rest.  He wrote feverishly until he had reworded most all the questions he had come up with during the experiment, and then he settled down upon the core problem.  He sat back from his catalogue and mused aloud:

“To wonder is a kind of question.  Or to imagine, or dream.  It’s all a kind of question about reality.  But to take any kind of next step on what we might wonder or imagine or dream requires honing down that vague question into something more specific, something concrete with which we can test reality with.”

He paused, wondering more.

“But any kind of answer we might find to any question we ask really just improves what we know about reality, and so it changes the sort of mental environment in which we can imagine and dream up possibilities.  It goes back and forth.”

Years later when Lucilius’ Godson was an adolescent, he sought advice from his godfather.  He called him up and complained about a lack of motivation, a feeling of aimlessness and purposelessness.

“How,” he asked his godfather, “can I get moving?”

“Answers exist between questions,” Lucilius told the boy.

“That’s your answer to my question?”

“Yes, but what does it tell you is next after this answer?”

“Another question?” the boy queried.

“You got it,” Lucilius said, “time to ask yourself a better question.”

FLOWERS & FRUIT

December 29th, 2018

Visitors never comment on the seeds in the ground.  A gardener knows what work goes into the flower and the fruit, but the early onlooker judges on appearance, not an understanding of the slow process at work.

Even when something finally pierces the surface, there is still no flower nor fruit.  The well versed gardener takes it as a a good sign, a chance to nurture, a chance to start the real work.

Shipping our project is just the start, like planting a seed.  Think for a moment of how much laborious design went into the instructions curled up in that seed.  Generations of flowers and fruits interacting with the world at larger were slowly edited to give that seed a tweak, a nudge in a direction that might better, more useful, more fruitful. 

Seeds are no flash in the pan, though some weeds may sprout early and fast to take advantage where they find, the oak, though tentative and weak at the start, endures long beyond those petty weeds.

Our projects need not wait for the seasons of the world, but may lie in wait for the season of drive and determination.  Some people go through all of life without a single season of courage, without a single season where their efforts flourish and blossom with flowering fruits of labor long in the making.  Just as the good gardener labors for goods that require patience, any goal or project we undertake must be afforded the generosity of that same patience.   Seeds just planted do not sprout overnight but require time and warmth and water.  So too with our projects for we know not when that first searching limb will take root in the larger imagination of our fellow friend and foe, and produce a chance to change things for the better.

Evolution has done the same to you, and invested millions of years in the design of you.  Just as millions of seasons have shaped the curled instructions of seeds, we too have been honed as best as the past could fashion for an unknown tomorrow.   Are you going to pierce the ground and suck in the sun’s energy?  Whether that be the power wrought from a successful business or a high platform affording you the ears of thousands, maybe millions.  What flower and fruit will you proffer for the world at large to take and find nourishment, in order to move forward into a new and unknown tomorrow?

This episode references Episode 65: The Brain Garden

CHECK YOUR MIRRORS

December 28th, 2018

As the year comes to a close, many eagerly or anxiously await the day when a potentially grueling list of new years resolutions comes into effect and we are obligated by plan to try a whole bunch of novel behaviors.

Perhaps such lists have not yet even been written.  Regardless of where in the perennial process we might find ourselves, and regardless if we even take practice in a ritual that often peters out in silently discarded failure, there’s an important preparatory ritual we can perform that has no risk of failure and can in fact bolster the thoughtfulness of preparing for a new year and the changes we’d like to enact.  We can spend a little time looking back on the year that’s coming to an end.

Just as we are instructed as drivers to check our mirrors before changing lanes, we can take a quick glance at what is behind us before heading in a new direction.

One tint of this metaphorical mirror is to view the year through a list of successes and difficulties.

A refreshing result of this sort of practice may for many be the strange realization that successes outnumber difficulties even though we probably anticipated by raw feeling that the opposite would be true.   For those who find this pattern, we might pause for a moment and ponder that perhaps we spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about those difficulties and so they feel bigger and more numerous than they actually are.

Such a rear-view perspective can also help us frame goals for the future: which difficulties are still giving us a hard time and need to be remedied?  Perhaps annoyances that have metastasized need to float higher on the priority list.  And perhaps the successes we’ve accrued imply that we need to aim higher and with more ambition.  Perhaps there is a pattern or trend that links our difficulties or successes, a pattern that can help solve our difficulties or capitalize on our successes.

At the very least, this exercise gives us an awareness, just as checking mirrors while driving gives us an idea of what is behind us, spending time thinking about the year past gives us a better idea of how we behave as a person and ultimately who we are. 

We might realize that some things that we hold as top priorities have not gotten any attention or effort whatsoever.  And this difficult possibility highlights something important: namely, the difference between what we think and say, and what we actually do.  Being honest about what we see looking back might be exactly what we need to look forward once more and change direction so that we live more in accordance with who we thought we were.

This episode references Episode 32: Rear-View.

MENTAL TEETH

December 27th, 2018

The animal kingdom is replete with an incredible diversity of tools for munching on dinner.

Lions have their fangs for taking down prey, cows have epic molars for grinding down grasses, and blue whales have a screen of baleen to sift food from the ocean.

Each is equipped for processing a different part of the environment, and we humans are equipped as omnivores to chow down on just about everything.

We might for a moment think of the Koala Bear that only eats eucalyptus leaves and wonder what happens to the Koala if some disease comes along and wipes out all the eucalyptus trees?  The koala would be in a tough spot.

Whereas we human can lose a huge portion of our diet’s diversity and still find something to make do with.

In all arenas of life, the mental model we use to interpret what is going on is hugely important.  Like having the right teeth or the right food, we likewise need the right mental model to best integrate the knowledge of our environment in order to use that information effectively.

Unlike our biological teeth, the mental teeth we can design and redesign and switch out in order to effectively chew on a situation are endless.  We can study mental models developed by others, whether this be Bayesian Updating, Pareto’s Principle, or a religious text and use these models as a way to filter and interpret the world.

One important thing about these mental teeth to remember is that there is no end to the design and kind we can create.  While many mental models have been developed, this does not mean that all possible useful models have been imagined or discovered. 

Often, naive ignorance is the most important factor for discovering something new.  If our mind is constantly trying to fit everything we encounter into models we have already learned, then we are less likely to notice natural patterns that may exist in the complexity we seek to understand.

One thing to further keep in mind is the innate violence that teeth perform.  Whether a carnivore or herbivore or omnivore, the teeth of all animals (and their subsequent digestive systems) tear apart their food into smaller and smaller pieces in order to extract what is useful.  The same is true of our mental models.  As mental teeth they simplify the complexity of information we look at, tearing off irrelevant parts and straining for the relevant information.

Imagine for a moment a new problem, and instead of having access to all sorts of mental models that have been used in the past.. imagine having no mental teeth.  What sort of mental teeth would we construct in order to rip into the problem most productively?  Like the thin edge of a wedge we might perhaps develop one kind of tooth to see how it works with the problem, perhaps to tear the big pieces apart like canines, and then use another tooth to really grind smaller pieces up, like molars.  Or for a moment we might imagine a totally different kind of food that needs to be ‘eaten’ from the inside out.  In fact we deal with and solve this kind of problem every single day.

We need only think of the teeth of a key used to open a lock.  Such teeth interact and process the environment inside of a lock and in doing so highlight the relevant information by moving that internal environment around and open the door or lock.

The teeth of keys is a perfect analogy here for the infinite varieties of mental models that we might imagine could exist for all sorts of different problems, since all keys are effectively different.  It’s as though a new mental model is developed uniquely for each problem or in this case, each lock.

Our mind can become like a keymaker that designs new mental models, or new mental teeth for each and every new problem we face.  Like some kind of epic swiss army knife, we can compound our collection of keys in order to become more efficient at making these mental teeth and perhaps even come up with a mental model for building mental models.  This is, in essence what raw learning achieves.

This is the ultimate skill, to learn how to learn.  So that when all the traditional problems dry up, we won’t be like the Koala in a world without Eucalyptus.  We can refashion our own mind’s maw and start gnawing on whatever reality throws our way.