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?

CHARGED BATTERY PART II

January 30th, 2020

I personally finished a 10 day fast this week.  It breaks my previous record of 9 days which was accidentally set while very ill and somewhat stranded in the Himalayas.  That experience showed me that it was possible to go without food for a very long time, and having an experience like that in the back or your mind is incredibly powerful when you eventually come across fasting and all the purported benefits.  It’s much easier to think: I can do that.

Short fasts of 1-2 days are simply the worst.  What most people don’t realize is that after these two days, the body calms down.  Mental acuity goes way way up, and even strength improves significantly.

This makes sense from an evolutionary point of view.  No food is a sign to the body that the environment is sparse and it might be a while before the next meal.  So the body sort of reorganizes what it’s doing and makes sure the brain is working as well as possible so that it can figure out what it needs to in order to get food, and it likewise makes sure that physical abilities are as tip top as possible so that the brain can use that body in whatever way it needs to manipulate the environment in order to get food.  Whether that mean tracking an animal for several days, or coming up with an ingenious way to trap one.

It’s these benefits, the mental ones in particular that I personally have come to value the most.

That being said, there are untold health benefits.  The genome starts functioning in a new way, and after a couple days of fasting, it starts a process called autophagy. 

This word literally means “self” “eating”.  But perhaps not in the way you think.  The body starts combing itself for poorly made proteins and dysfunctional cells and rips them down to basic parts in order to rebuild things correctly, making things more efficient.

The best analogy is to think of owning a business.  Let’s say you’ve got 100 employees, and suddenly there is a huge drop in revenue because of external market forces.  You are forced to lay off 10% of your workforce in order to stay profitable.  Now here’s the question: 

Are you going to lay off your best 10%?  Or are you going to think about who you could do without and lay off your worst 10%?

The answer is obvious and this is exactly how the body goes about it’s process of autophagy.  Organs shrink and become more efficient as a result.  Things quite literally start running better, because they have to.

Dr. David Sinclair has written an interesting book entitled “Lifespan: Why We Age and Why We Don’t Have To.”  It details a fascinating information theory of aging, but poignantly, at the very end, the one thing he singles out as the greatest predictor of a long and healthy lifespan is calorie restriction. 

Fasting simply makes our bodies go longer and in better more able fashion.

Intermittent Fasting is quite the craze these days, but truth be told everyone who sleeps does some form of intermittent fasting because they’re simply unconscious for a good part of the day.  This is why it’s called breakfast, you’re literally breaking the fast that you slept through.

Stop eating for a couple days, and after that initial period when the body is expecting it’s usual hit of food and whines when it doesn’t get it, you start to look at everyone else and bizarrely the whole world looks as though it’s addicted to food.

We are, frankly.  As mentioned before, we’re programmed to eat as much as possible because our species has clearly experienced some bleak times.  We have an addiction programmed into us for it.

One of the nice things about a long fast is that the near constant thought and desire for food melts off.

Normally while working, there’s always that thought of what am I going to have?  And then of course it’s often a distraction.  I’ll get something to eat before I start this project.  It can be a constant distraction.  But commit to a few days and after that initial day or two of hunger, the mind clears, the desire melts off and there’s honestly a great deal of freedom in that mental space.

One thing that is very important to have dialed in during any kind of multi-day fast is the regimen of water-soluble supplements, like potassium, calcium, salt and a few others.  Without these things can become quite painful, and I speak from dumb experience.  But with this dialed in, it’s far easier than most would imagine.  All the fat soluble vitamins are actually stored in the liver and in a person’s fat. 

The benefits at the end of the day are just too numerous to ignore.  You save money, you get back a lot of time, your focus and strength improves, so combined with the extra time you get way more done than you normally would, oh and your essentially activating all of these latent super powers in the body that make it healthier and ultimately you live longer and better as a result.  Is there anything else we can do that packs this many diverse benefits?

After fasting a few times and truly internalizing all of these benefits and how they all interact with one another, you begin to see that most eating is simply..

mindless entertainment. 

CHARGED BATTERY PART I

January 29th, 2020

Tell someone you haven’t eaten anything for the past week and they look at you like you’re legit insane.

In the culture climate of the last few decades it goes against everything we’re told and elicits thoughts about eating disorders.

However, this might be the one area where grandmother’s wisdom doesn’t hold.  If you think about it, most grandparents in the western world, specifically north America, got their eating advice from parents who went through the Great Depression… an era when people had so little to eat they actually did starve to death. 

Make sure you eat enough, is perhaps more reminiscent of a passed down trauma.

Truth is, we’re  very well built for going without food for long periods of time.  If you close your eyes and imagine yourself as a hunter – gatherer from 100,000 years ago, do you think you’d be getting 3 square meals a day?

Not at all.  You might have something that amounts to a very dry salad.  But the good stuff only came along every once in a while.  After a big successful hunt, or when the tribe comes across bushes of berries.  We learned to eat everything edible because there was such a likelihood that we wouldn’t have anything to eat at all.

Frankly, the fact that we are so well built to go without food is the reason why so many people have weight problem.  Our body is permanently programmed to save as many extra calories as possible.

Why?  Because the times our ancestral bodies had to go without food were so numerous and frequent that putting on fat became a permanent feature. 

Notice that our bodies haven’t adapted to do the same with other necessities, like sleep and oxygen.  We can’t go a couple minutes without taking a breath and go a night or two without sleep and your performance regarding anything starts to go down the drain.  Keep sleep depriving yourself and you run the risk of significant brain damage and death. 

But Skip a meal? 

Sure you might proclaim to the world that you’re starving! but in reality, you’ll be fine.

If you can grab a good hold of your side, then your battery is still charged up.

And just to put it in perspective, it’s worth mentioning the case of a man named Angus Barbieri.

In 1965 he weighed 456lbs.  Then he fasted for 382 days.  Think about that for a second.  The guy didn’t eat for over a year.  When he finished he was 180lbs.  And he kept it off for the rest of his life.

One way to think about obesity, is to think people have fully charged batteries.  If there was a famine tomorrow, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out who would last the longest.