Tinkered Thinking

But think about the opposite. About a person who has no urge to wander. We might label such a person with a euphemistic platitude about being content and knowing what they want, but does such a person have any chance of discovery?

To be sure we do not actually have to get up and physically wander around. We can be at home, reading a book, or researching a topic that’s spawned 73 tabs in our internet browser.

To wander is to pay heed to curiosity.

Unlike the rigid tests of school, curiosity gently allows us to wonder, and suspect that there’s… something.. something out there that we don’t really know about yet.

This sensing of the unknown is also captured by any great question.

Questions, which are defined on tinkered Thinking as open-ended concepts that create forward momentum, thrust the mind on a quest.

And a quest, like any good adventure cannot be planned. We take it a step at a time and figure it out as we go.

In essence, we wander our way towards a realization.

All those who wander are not lost because they have a sense of something to find, but such people simply seem lost because no one yet knows the way.

THE VIRTUE OF NEGATIVITY

September 12th, 2019

Most people just complain, and that’s a good start.

The unfortunate part is that all effort often ends with the complaint.

In order to improve anything, it’s first necessary to have a perspective that is oriented negatively enough to find fault.

By this metric alone, nearly everyone qualifies to be a genius.

But of course we laud little the talent of finding fault. Everyone can do it because it’s easy. But this does not mean it should be under valued or shunned. The capacity to find fault simultaneously evokes the possibility of a reality that could be better.

The is the virtue of negativity, the fact that it elicits a vision of life improved.

But this is only one piece of the puzzle and the first step towards improvement. How our thoughts and actions develop as a further response determines whether the negativity of a perspective remains negative or if it undergoes the metamorphosis required to bring about a better circumstance.

A simple and often asked question strikes at the heart of this metamorphosis. When we listen to a complaint, or hear one from our own self, we can ask:

What are you going to do about it?

This flips the negative perspective inside out and asks directly what the world would look like if this negative thing ceased to exist.

In this way, the negative and the possible positive are inextricably linked.

For instance, without any idea, inkling or feeling about how bad something is, how could we ever improve?

FALSIFY

September 11th, 2019

The best way to find out if you’re right about something is to try and prove yourself wrong.

The hesitating assumption here is that if you prove yourself wrong, then you’ll be left with nothing.

But this is not the case:

If you can falsify your idea, then it paves the way for a better idea.

We are often reluctant to do this though. We get attached to our ideas, our theories, our own personal story of how the world works. There’s some kind of emotional attachment present that breeds a fondness, the likes of which we are timid to betray. We can see this same sort of thing play out similarly in human relationships: we often continue to love someone despite being a victim of their lies.

Bad or incorrect ideas play us for the same fool.

Does this have more to do with some kind of intrinsic manipulation on the part of the idea or the liar, or does it have more to do with our own reluctance to update our view of the world?

And to be sure, a thorough and honest update of the world demands that we behave differently in response and take different actions that take into account the inaccuracy of previously cherished ideas, beliefs and theories.

We would benefit greatly from creating a practice of celebrating falsification.

Every time an idea is thoroughly falsified, we no longer risk wasting time exploring an unproductive avenue.

While the capacity of the imagination is an infinite blessing, it is also the source of this curse of attachment to the unrealistic.

Modern society is protective and cushy to a degree that we can harbor wildly unrealistic and unproductive ideas without incurring damage nor injury.

Compare this with a hypothetical that incorporates the animal world:

Let’s say we have a deer that cherishes a belief that all other animals are kind and loving and only want to be friends.

Many people have imaginative aspirations that this is how things should be, and some probably believe that this actually is how things are. But people are generally so far removed from the animal world that the full consequences of such a belief are never witnessed.

When a hungry wolf comes across our overly-idealistic deer, our deer would either have to compromise it’s ideals quickly, or it would have it’s cherished belief forcibly falsified by the jaws of that hungry wolf.

The protective aura of our modern environment has an upside and a downside in this instance. The upside is that we don’t need threat of death to weed out bad ideas – we are capable of updating our beliefs without dying. The downside is that death is very efficient at weeding out bad ideas and bad ideas are slower to leave our minds and lives of practice. Natural selection has engineered skittish and suspicious deer that assume something looking like a wolf is never in the mood to be friendly. Modern society has removed the wolf and in so doing allows us to imagine –falsely- things like wolves being friendly to deer.

As with many other things in our modern environment, our progress depends on the creation of an artificial hardship. In this case, we must go against the intuitive grain and use the intellect to challenge that warm fuzzy feeling we have when we think of our cherished idea, theory or belief.

Ruthlessly attempting to falsify our beliefs is the only way we merge the substance of our imagination and the brick and mortar consequences of reality.

Pause, and meditate for a moment on what this means in terms of what it means to be alive. Are we really living with our head in the clouds? Preoccupied with some sort of imaginary idea of how the world works? Are we not missing out on the real stuff of life in this situation?

The difficult and perhaps painful act of aggressively trying to falsify our beliefs inevitably brings us closer to reality, and ultimately enables us to live a more authentic life.

Unfortunately, for many people, one touch of this falsification process swings the pendulum too far, and dreamy optimists become unrealistically pessimistic and simultaneously claim to be cold-hard realists.

But the cynical pessimist is not much different than the dreamy optimist. Both are governed by an emotional attachment to some idea of the world.

Only the one who can continue tinkering and testing reality with new and updated ideas has that emotional pendulum properly calibrated – that is: vibrating in the center.

For such an individual, optimism exists on a much longer timeline, and the setbacks that could cause emotional upset in the daily grind are of little matter. Such setbacks, and falsifications – inevitably, are rungs on a ladder towards a better understanding. And such setback can even become positive emotional fuel. The instance of falsification is proof that updating is occurring, that the imagination’s overlap with reality is increasing, even if it feels as though the absolute bounds of what is possible are shrinking.

It’s not the absolute size of the imagination that matters, but its range of flexibility while acting within the physical laws of reality.

Finally, note that updating our idea of the world only occurs through falsification. If our idea succeeds, then no updating has really occurred. What we thought was possible turned out to be possible. In such a case, our idea of reality hasn’t actually improved. It’s simply been used to make something happen.

This episode references Episode 498: Artificial Hardship

THE SELF-ASSEMBLING NATURE OF SUCCESS

September 10th, 2019

When you start speaking a sentence, do you know exactly how it will end? Are your words all pre-decided, pre-arranged?

No, not at all.

We begin to speak due to some kind of emotional urge. That emotional urge has a kind of conceptual shape, and the words that we assemble seek to trace that shape, but it’s like tracing the lane lines while driving in the fog.

And just as we take a winding road one turn at a time, we place each word after the last in accordance to the emerging shape of that conceptual emotion.

Notice how no one is afraid to start a sentence, even though almost no one has any clue exactly where and how the sentence will unfold. Of course we have an ‘idea’.

But what exactly does that mean?

When we say we have an idea of what we’ll say?

That idea is certainly nothing like a script. It’s that conceptual emotion.

It’s more accurate to say: I have a feeling that I will speak.

That’s about all we can grant the situation. The moment we actually start describing the idea, or the feeling, we are building in real-time and that conceptual emotion is being converted into words. And we continue to build by speaking until the feeling is resolved, and we feel a sense of relief.

But examine how elusive this experience is: it cannot be planned. It simply happens and in some respect we simply listen to what we say.

The same exact thing happens while writing. Each piece of writing assembles itself as it moves forward. The great difference, however, is that while speech vanishes as fast as it is spoken, the written word is stamped onto reality in a way that permits editing. We can go back, and change, delete or start over. But on the whole, the same core elusiveness exists as it does with speech. We only ever have a feeling as to what we will write, just as we speak.

In the process, of course, we often end up stumbling across things we never dreamed of.

This experience can be scaled-up to larger efforts that we might undertake, and this is where we run into a strange disconnect.

Fear of failure often stops us in our tracks before we even begin work on some dream or goal. But why does this same fear fail to over come us at the beginning of each and every sentence that we speak?

Surely none of us would claim that each and every sentence we have uttered was a total success. The history of speech for every individual is undeniably riddled with tons of failure. Things that weren’t worded well, things we regret saying, things that just didn’t make sense.

But when it comes to that business we think about starting, or that book we want to write, or that adventure that fills our dreams, we hesitate.

Now, question:

Does this hesitation come from fear or from lack of practice trying?

Young children who are developing the ability to speak are constantly confronting false starts and inaccurately constructed sentences.

For example, let’s compare a child pointing at a ball and saying ‘ball’

and a slightly older version of the same child saying ‘I want ball’

and then a fully grown adult saying “Would you mind passing me the ball?’

All three of these utterances can reasonably describe the same conceptual emotion. But they represent possible iterations that are successively effective.

Fact is, we are so practiced with trying to speak that the possibility of failing to put together a complete sentence does not even phase us, even though it happens from time to time.

Everyone who speaks or writes has ultimately already taught themselves one of the most important lessons that we can import to all other parts of our life: keep trying and steamroll your own failure until you’ve built that thing you imagine, that business, that app, that movement, that book, that verbal description…

As we trudge into the unknown, we can take heed in the fact that things have a way of emerging and assembling themselves as we make progress. Just like the sentences we speak.

The key is to start and to keep moving.

This episode references Episode 63: The Etymology of Fear

FAITH

September 9th, 2019

Faith has a hazy cloud of meaning.

“I have faith in that person.”

“I have faith in this belief.”

But what is this word? And what is really meant when it is used?

“I have no faith in myself. . .”

It clearly has something to do with trust and belief. Perhaps faith is where belief and trust overlap?

But trust and belief are not the same thing. As it is often said, trust is earned. Reliability must be proved. Or at the very least, when it proves otherwise trust becomes broken.

What about belief?

Is belief earned? Does a belief earn our credulity or does it gain it’s footing in our minds via some other conduit?

Credibility, is the quality that indicates that something can be trusted. .

Credit, to have good credit, to be credible, means that we can be trusted and believed.

A credible source provides information we can trust and therefore believe.

Credit itself is also how we refer to money.

And money is perhaps the best example of fungible trust. If someone has ‘good credit’ we have reassurance that they will pay their debts.

But money is just a concept. There is nothing inherently valuable about a piece of paper with a number on it.

(unless you’re really cold and you have a lighter and desire about 5 seconds of fire. So as kindling, money might have some inherent value.)

All the value that money realistically has is due to a commonly held belief in this money, which is built on a common trust that has been earned by continuous exercise of this system of money. We sit down at a restaurant with full confidence – faith - that the money in our wallet will be accepted because we have tested this hypothesis many many many times. We have tested this belief so often and for so long that we do not even think to question it.

Much like gravity.

We still don’t know exactly how gravity works. But all of us have supreme confidence that while we are close to the surface of the earth, things that we let go of will fall. Gravity is something we trust because it has proved very reliable and credible through constant experimentation. We do not even question gravity because of how consistently reliable it’s effects are.

If trust is earned through proven reliability. Where does this leave belief? Belief merely means ‘held dearly’. So a belief is primarily and at it’s base, just an idea that we like to hold on to and feel warmly towards.

Is faith reserved for ideas we like that we can’t prove?

Is faith perhaps also reserved for ideas that we don’t want to test because we are frightened of the results we might find?

Could it be that we manufacture a false sense of trust in untested ideas and call it faith? Merely because the idea is comforting. This can easily create a false sense of comfort because our ideas are not in line with reality.

“I don’t have any faith in myself. . .”

Really?

Well you were able to put that sentence together. Do you have faith in your ability to transmit that idea?

Faith is unneeded, there’s proof.

And that tiny success, even if it’s negative, is proof of agency. Build on that. Expand on it. Perhaps it’ll turn into an award-winning tragedy.

it’s important to remember while writing, reading, speaking or listening, that:

The meaning of words change over time.

S.I. Hayakawa goes so far as to make the argument that words mean something different every single time they are used.

Is the word ‘faith’ useful today, or is it more likely to confuse and obfuscate? Does it really address issues or does the bloated haziness of faith simply end the conversation by blotting out the question altogether?

Would it be better ascribed to things that we do not understand but have high reliability? Like gravity? Like money? Things that are ‘provable’ in a reliably consistent way but not necessarily understood? Ideas that we simply can’t help but to believe because they are so reliable?

I don’t know what step I must take next, but I have faith in myself because I’ve figured things out from an uncertain position before. I’ve tested that situation.

We all have. Because once we were all screaming, squabbling, confused babies.

Faith is probably a good starting point.

But making the continuous effort to move from faith to trusted and reliable, durable ideas is far better.

Unfortunately, this is not the common choice of process for most people.

It seems that for many, faith is a label that we retreat to when we have an emotional connection…

to bad ideas.

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THE END OF NOWHERE

September 13th, 2019