RULE OF THUMB - FRESH START

December 24th, 2019

There’s a simple rule of thumb about whether you should call it quits for the day, when the frustration is too great, the problem too convoluted, the work simply not moving.

Is the problem mental or physical?

Or rather, are we failing to make progress because of our emotions?  Because we feel defeated or stupid or aimless?

Or is it because we keep trying to rub the headache from our temples, keep yawning, and squirming, and reaching for the coffee?

If the problem is a mental and emotional one, then keep pushing.  Don’t give in to the fresh start.

If the problem is legitimate physical exhaustion, then just go to bed.

When you’re truly in the flow, you’ll stay up without realizing it.

When the body needs rest, it’s most likely the brain that needs the rest.

Sweet dreams.

MEDITATION: COMPOUND PRACTICE

December 23rd, 2019

This episode is dedicated to Sam McRoberts.  You can connect with Sam on Twitter at @Sam_Antics

This episode begins with a description of pyramids that at first may seem off topic and perhaps even convoluted.  There are a couple rudimentary drawings accompanying this episode on tinkeredthinking.com that might help if the physical descriptions begin to feel as though they are describing la-la land.  Do remember though, this is ultimately about the long-term effects of consistent meditation.  If a few minutes of description feels a bit much, then perhaps the episode might be best taken to heart.

There are two ways to build a pyramid.

To be clear, let’s put aside the veritable monument of human argument about what might have happened in Egypt a few thousand years ago.

Rather let’s examine the feat in a far more simplistic way, the way a child might when a toybox full of blocks is at hand.

One way is to plan out the whole thing.  Determine the height you want and from that determine how wide the base needs to be and then start from the bottom by laying a huge flat base and then slowly working up one level at a time until the entire thing is finished.

The other way is to realize that a pyramid is somewhat fractal in nature regarding the way you can build it.  Without diving too deeply into a strict definition of fractals, we can look at a large pyramid and see that there are potentially many much smaller pyramids inside of it.  We can even see this as a concentric phenomenon, like an onion.  Peel back a layer of an onion and it still looks like an onion.

The second way to build a pyramid is to build the smallest most basic pyramid.  A child with some blocks would use maybe 5 to accomplish this.  4 placed in a square as the base and a second level consisting of just one placed on top in the center of this 2 X 2 square.

We might term this the minimum viable success when it comes to building pyramids.

What’s interesting about this, and how it relates to something like meditation is how the size of the jump changes when we go to the next complete pyramid that we can build on top of this first basic one.

If a child were to add to this tiny pyramid in order to make it bigger, the jump is far bigger than we might at first think.  First the child would add a row of blocks around the base, creating a new perimeter, which would be an additional 12 blocks.  And then blocks would need to be added to the next layer which currently only has 1.  This would be an additional 8 blocks.  This creates a foundation that can then support an additional layer of 4 on top of it and then a final pinnacle once again of one block to make it a complete pyramid.

Think of this for a moment.  The most basic pyramid is 5 blocks.  4 on the first layer and 1 block on the top.  The next legitimate pyramid we can build on top of this basic structure is a pyramid that is suddenly double the height, 4 layers tall and it requires and additional 37 blocks on top of the original 5 for a total of 42 blocks.  This is a massive jump.

If we were to go through this process again, the pyramid would rise two levels but this would require 51 additional blocks! more than doubling the total amount to 93.

We could have started with a base level of 36 and then added a second layer of 25, but if we think of each block as a unit of time, then putting these all into place means it’s going to be a long time until we see something that looks like a complete pyramid.  Whereas by making the smallest pyramid possible first, it only takes 5 blocks and we see a pyramid very quickly.

As with the practice of any skill where we can become better, its possible to recognize a similar trend with the results that we get based on the time and energy we put in.  The first ten hours of practice can get you something like that first basic pyramid in terms of ability.  And then practice can often feel like it’s plateaued.  As though no real improvement is happening, and then all of sudden it feels like a breakthrough has occurred and our ability has matured.  It’s as though our constant pyramid building has suddenly resulted momentarily in the shape of a bigger complete pyramid.  But we continue to practice and more time and effort passes before we see the same thing happen again on a new scale.

With meditation, particularly with mindfulness practices, it’s generally accepted that 3 to 4 months are required before results start to show up.  Many certainly report a honeymoon period during the first few weeks, though it’s quite possible this is more excitement about embarking on a new endeavor than it is any real tangible result from meditation.  FMRI scans also seem to indicate some truth regarding this 3 month trend.  Changes in brain structure remain unnoticeable until at least 3 months of daily continuous practice.  We might think of this milestone in a practice of meditation as that first basic pyramid.

Let the imagination follow this analogy further and we might wonder what that second pyramid would look like in terms of “results” regarding meditation.  As we saw with our child building the pyramid, it’s quite a jump between that first one and the second, and this might make the analogy quite apt for meditation. 

Well regarded figures in the field of meditation like Sam Harris and Joseph Goldstein, have reported that things like anxiety and depression decrease significantly over time, or that one’s relationship to these emotional experiences changes so drastically that any practical description might as well report their disappearance. 

While this result is anecdotal, and doesn’t seem to have any hard science to back it up, it does seem to be widespread and nearly uniform among those who maintain a practice for many years.  This writer, for one, can add to such anecdotal evidence by saying that something fundamental regarding negative emotions starts to undergo a profound shift after a period of 2 or 3 years of consistent daily practice.

After enough practice and time, something like ambient anxiety, or the likelihood of anxiety to suddenly spike simply begins to fade and eventually they dissolve entirely.  The emotions that do crop up seem as though they have higher resolution, with more specificity, and something like anxiety in retrospect takes the character of an unresolved cloud that had more to do with a confusion as to what was really occurring rather than a genuine reaction to our experience of reality.

Meditation, in this sense, really is an example of results that only come with consistency and patience.  Just as the scenic route is fundamentally at odds with the concept of the shortcut, we have to put in the time to reap the benefits here.

Pushing beyond these practical benefits allows the mind to enter an entirely new definition of progress.  As opposed to the anticipation that comes with the pleasure of seeing a full pyramid finally materialize again after so long, progress begins to take on a fractal nature.  With enough of a pyramid built, the placement of each block looks as though it completes an entirely new small pyramid embedded in the larger one.

Tangible goals like those initial markers of progress like increasing focus and attention or decreasing anxiety and panic attacks - these dissolve as the moment gains a higher and higher resolution.

Consistent effort eventually pays off, but if continued, the consistent effort eventually resolves into it’s own reward until there is no difference between practice and the reason why we sit down to practice in the first place.

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: MAD MYTH

December 22nd, 2019

For a few brief moments Lucilius wondered if he were hallucinating.  Beyond the orange sandy dune a monolith of steel, like a low flat building hovered above the desolate land.  He thumbed a knob on his goggles adjusting the apertures and zooming in on the structure.  Three of the corners were supported by giant metal columns, that looked at though they telescoped down into the ground like giant hydraulic supports.  The forth leg was buried in sand as decades of shifting desert had finally piled up high enough to reach the structure. 

The hot blue sky was clear, so he removed his goggles to squint at the site with his bare eyes.  He studied it a few more minutes and then began to slide down the crumbling dune to climb up the next, and at the top of each he paused just a moment as the giant building grew larger.

The dune piled up high against the forth column crumbled as Lucilius slowly climbed.  He paused with each step, allowing the sands to resettle, trying to sense whether the whole of it would fall from beneath him.  Finally he touched the hot gleaming metal, feeling the slumped pyramid of soft sand loosen beneath him.  His fingers grasped an edge just as the weight beneath his feet lightened and he was left hanging.  The sand below him resettled again for a moment until an edge of the hollow created by the shaft’s shadow gave way and the mound of sand that brought him so high began to sift out, draining the height below him until the fall tensed his nerves.

“Ok,” Lucilius muttered to himself, hanging by the slight grip against the hot metal building.  He looked up at the next corrugation in the wall.  This new world was filled with moments when the future collapsed to a pinch and there was no telling whether it’d restart.  Lucilius eyed the distance, and then slowly pulled himself up and then quickly let a hand go and slapped the arm above him, just barely grasping the next edge.  He hoisted himself until he was again hanging and slowly brought the smooth soles of his boots to the first edge.  He could barely feel the indent through the off-road tire rubber he’d stitched on, but it was enough to feel some relief.  After a moment he looked up again to see the next edge, and the next.

“You don’t even know if there’s a way in up there,” he muttered.  There was nothing in this wasteland, and the wasteland only grew.

The sun sank as he rose.  He watched his hand against the sky disappear above the metal wall and he searched for something to grasp.  There was a lip to the structure.  His fingers hoarded the strong comfortable shape and then the muscles in his arms bristled as they worked on such little energy, his whole body quivering as he struggled.  He slid an elbow over and then reached with his other hand, his feet now dangling from that high edge of the gleaming edifice.   He hauled himself up, rolled onto the flat surface and laid there gasping, his hands aching.   He looked at his hands, his fingers like clumped up claws.  Years before they would have blistered from the heat and the effort, but now they just hurt.

As the buzzing in his hands and arms calmed, he got up, and looked around.  The roof was outlined in a thick black band.  Lucilius looked closely at it.  It was composed of solar panels, and at their inner edge a grate-covered gutter.  Beyond it towards the center lay glass panels.  Lucilius walked to the edge and then looked down into the monolith.

There he saw green.  Endless green.  The entire monolith seemed filled with a hydroponic system.  He walked onto the glass above the huge well kept garden.  Drones buzzed up and down the lattice work of plants, pruning and cutting, collecting tomatoes and grapes, spinach and an endless variety of foods Lucilius had not seen in years.

He frantically looked around.  There had to be some sort of service hatch.  Anything.  Lucilius knew he’d never be able to break glass this thick, so solidly mounted to the steel construction that made up the glass roof.  He turned back to the corner where he’d climbed, remembering what he’d first grabbed hold of.  The corner panel was raised slightly, creating a gap. He got on his hands and knees searching to understand how it might work, feeling where he could beneath the lip of the panel.  His hands raced along and bumped.  His fingers fumbled at the shape, gripping, twisting, pulling until there was a click.  The thin high sound of pressed air fled from the panel and it lifted. 

Lucilius pulled the panel shut as he descended the ladder and within minutes he was gorging on strawberries, bell peppers and stuffing handfuls of wet crisp lettuce into his mouth, tilting the pod to drink deeply of the fresh cold water.  He ate until he was nearly sick.  He lay slumped against the wall, watching in awe the magnificent heights of green, the drones going about their mindless work, and on the ground level rows of fruit trees and lines of vegetables growing in soil so fresh and dark, Lucilius felt as though it were an alien of his memory.

“The hell is this place?” he wondered aloud biting into another strawberry, the sharp sweet tang making him shudder.  It was the first time he could remember feeling full in a long time.  It didn’t matter if it was a dream, it was surely better than anywhere he knew he might wake up.  But he didn’t wake up, he got up and began to explore more. 

He found the drones were systematically depositing the food into a grinder system that liquefied the fruits and vegetables in a corner of the edifice.  A huge vat of the liquid food was being filled.  Lucilius sat against the wall, munching from a handful of green beans he’d taken from a drone, watching the whole system.  It was only moments later when the system lights attached to the vat began to flicker and the drones stopped their toil to grind the food.  Then quickly and smoothly, the vat emptied completely.  A wash cycle started in order to clean the vat and Lucilius wandered further, exploring. 

It was in the forth corner that he found a door with no handle, only a button.  He pressed it and it opened onto a small room.  Tentatively he stepped inside, looking around.

“Reminds me of an elevator,” he mumbled as the door slid shut and the floor jolted as it clearly descended.  He leapt at the door thinking the elevator might lead him back out into that desert wasteland, but remembered the thick column.  He was in a corner of the building, he knew.  The elevator was descending through the column.

The doors opened onto a giant circular room, dimly lit, save for the light that radiated up through another glass floor in the center.  Lucilius walked to it and looked down.

There were rows and rows lining a deep circular hole down into the earth.  Rows of pods where Lucilius could see people, motionless, as though frozen in each one.  Hundreds of them.

“Jesus Christ..” Lucilius mumbled, wondering how this place could exist, with everything that had happened.  The light in the vast chamber seemed to be dimming, and Lucilius figured it was probably in accordance to the setting of the sun, remembering how dark the sky had grown above the hydroponics before he’d discovered the elevator.

He looked around and found what he figured might be the brain of the operation.  A large computer screen and a some sort of control station.  Lucilius rolled back the chair to sit, but stopped.  Embedded in the desk, as though incased in glass was a book.  He leaned in closer, disbelieving his eyes.  He read the words again.  It was the Holy Bible.  He sat down and stared at the book.

The strange novelty of it all was still awash in his mind, so fresh that questions could not even yet form, when the giant screen lit up, startling Lucilius.

The huge screen was filled with the hardened face of an old man, his eyes clear, his beard flush with deep grey.  It did not speak but merely stared at Lucilius, as though studying him.

Unsure if the face could actually see him, Lucilius looked around.

“Well?,” the face said, the sound booming throughout the cavernous room.  “How did you get in?”

“The roof.”

“How’d you get on top then?  The sands aren’t high enough.”

“They were against one of the columns.”

The face looked away from Lucilius, nodding.  “I turned off the security system years ago.  Many died trying to get in during those early days, but after decades with no one trying to break in, it seemed a waste of energy.  And to be honest after the last satellites went dark, I haven’t paid much attention to this side of things?”

“This side of things?”  Lucilius prodded.

The face looked at him.  “The real world, as you’d probably think of it.”

“As opposed to what?”  Lucilius asked further.

“The one below you, in the mainframes.  I created a matrix for these people.”

“A simulation?”

“Yes, perhaps.  One that I create and control.  One where the word of God is fact, not some fiction in a book.”

Lucilius slowly let this expand in his mind before asking.  “Are you human, or computer based?”

“Oh, I’m human, I am down there with them.  You see, I used to be a titan of industry, before things began to fall.” The head shook a little looking off.  “I tried to turn things around.  We all did, but we were too late, so my last efforts went into this place.  For these people – my chosen ones.  After the world began to turn into the desert it is now, they were losing hope, so I gave them this place, where their beliefs make sense.”

“Are you their God?” 

The head nodded.  “I play the role.  And I control it.  I’ve made my mistakes through the years, but I’m getting the hang of it.”

“I get the sense you probably knew when I got in.”

The head nodded.

“Why didn’t you turn the security system back on then?”

The head breathed deeply and sighed.  “Enough people have died.  You looked hungry.”

“Do they remember the real world?”

“No no, it wouldn’t work as well if they did.  Perhaps not at all.”

“So what now?” Lucilius asked, putting his worry aloud.

“Well, I can’t plug you in.  And even if I could, I get the sense that you wouldn’t want to join us.  But you can stay if you’d like.  There’s more than enough food.  I suppose it might have been different if there’d been someone with you, but that’s not the case.  And now I have to go.”

“Why do you do it?  Live in that other world when you know this one is still here?  How can you do it?”

The face smiled, and just before it snapped to black, it said

“They love me.”

UNIFYING REALMS OF DATA

December 21st, 2019

All creatures have some kind of input.  Humans have a few.  We can taste, we can touch, we can hear and we can see a certain sliver of the electromagnetic spectrum that we call visible light. 

Bees can see ultraviolet light and humans generally can’t, but beyond these small slivers in the electromagnetic spectrum, there is a huge range of activity that bees are oblivious too and humans for the majority of our existence have also been oblivious too.

The important difference is that we have figured out how to access that spectrum without having any sense organs that are designed to interface with these other regions of the electromagnetic spectrum.

We have been able to notice everything from Ionizing radiation to microwaves and beyond.  This hasn’t just given us new capabilities like transmitting massive amounts of information through your average wifi network which utilizes radiowaves, it’s also allowed us to study the fabric of the cosmos.  When we simply look up at the night sky with the un-aided eye, we only see specks of light, but with our ability to access a larger portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, we see an outpouring of information raining down from the heavens.  This information gives us a more nuanced and detailed perspective of what is potentially going on when we look up at the night sky.

Just as our use of radio waves via wifi or cellular networks provides us with access to an endless stream of information about what’s happening around the world, with our family, our friends, or even if we wish to access the vast treasure trove of human knowledge.  Because of our awareness and manipulation of this part of the spectrum that we cannot see nor taste nor hear nor touch, we no longer have to make a trip to the library or write a letter or make the arduous journey to visit someone.

Perhaps most important, however is our ability to unify these realms of information.  Not just in a manipulative sense in that we can convert something like sound or a picture into a form that can utilize radiowaves, but that our juxtaposition of these different realms allows us to make assertions about the nature of physical reality that is simply unavailable to your average bumble bee or octopus.

This is an assumption that Octopi and Bees don’t have some hidden access to the whole electromagnetic spectrum, but chances are they would express this access in some sort of use. 

Natural selection has little use for the useless.

Humans, on the other hand are quite quick to put a new discovery to use.  Curious findings rarely remain just curious findings.  We find some way to use it, manipulate it, and bend it to our benefit.

Just as we had no knowledge of Gamma rays for most of human history despite their presence nearly everywhere, we must wonder, what else is right in front of us, just waiting for our minds to create some portal so it can be seen?

What keys might such unknowns hold to the questions we see in other places?

RIVALNYM CASE STUDY: NATURAL SOCIETY

December 20th, 2019

If you are unfamiliar with the concept of a Rivalnym, it is something developed by Tinkered Thinking to address a certain class of words and concepts that fall in a strange place between Synonyms and Antonyms.  A rivalnym is a word, or rather, a pair of words that are somewhat synonymous in literal meaning, but opposite in terms of the emotional valence we ascribe to the thing being described.

An easy example is the pair of words cooperation/conspiracy.  Both describe a group of people who are working together to bring about a commonly desired goal.

But cooperation is generally positive and conspiracy is generally negative.

This episode seeks to explore a pair of concepts that are a bit more complicated than the usual rivalnyms that have popped up on Tinkered Thinking before.

First, enter one of the most ambiguous and difficult to define words in the entire English language:

Natural.

Ask 10 different people what Natural means and you’ll get 10 different answers with a vague trend of similarity.  You’ll also get a few perplexed pauses.

One inevitable answer is that natural is whatever occurs in nature.  This seems reasonable enough, but the construction ‘in nature’ contains a fair amount of problem.

For example, can we say that human society is natural?  The aim here isn’t to answer it outright but simply to point out that ‘in nature’ implies somewhere else: the woods, where wild animals outnumber humans, and the ocean which might as well be totally unavailable to the average human – aside from what we haul out of it to eat.

Human society seems to be somewhat separate from nature given the way that we use these words.  And of course there are countless people who believe that we should ‘return’ to more natural ways.  The existence of this perspective is perhaps the best evidence to underscore the separateness that we’ve managed to squeeze between society and nature.

The problem with this dichotomy is easy to unravel and it requires only a simple question:

Where did human society come from?

Some might simply say ‘humans’, but where did humans come from?  Well if Darwin has anything to say about it, we arose from the “natural” world.

The fact that human society ultimately arose from the natural world is unavoidable.  In fact, without human society and culture, the concept of ‘nature’ and ‘natural’ wouldn’t even exist.  They are things we created.

The interesting thing about this dichotomy which makes it begin to look like a Rivalnym is that we can say the exact same thing about the word ‘society’.  Without human culture and society the concept of ‘society’ wouldn’t exist.  We can take it to one more level of paradox and point out that ‘society' as a concept and as a real functioning thing, wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for…. ‘nature’.

Both ‘society’ and what is ‘natural’ are describing a process that we see on earth.

The most functional definition of what is ‘natural’ is simply what is physically possible.

This means that it’s natural for animals to eat each other alive, which happens everyday.

It also means plastic is natural and space travel, and of course, society.

But of course some of these things we feel good about and others we don’t feel good about and it’s because of this deep human trend to categorize things in such ways that we split things into different words.

Is it a conspiracy?

Or cooperation between people?

All depends on if you approve of their goal.

Nature is a sort of master category which subsumes all other categories.  To claim that we are separate from it, or straying from it is to completely miss the larger picture.

Mother nature curiously created humans, and she’s clearly interested about where we are going to go and what we are going to do.