MEMORY'S BETRAYAL

March 8th, 2022

Realism, pessimism and everything in between robs a person of quite a lot. Even a philosophical optimist who tries to armor themselves against downside with a cautious entertainment of pessimism is robbed. Perhaps this is speaking too much from experience, or perhaps this phenomenon is pervasive among realistic optimists: but it seems very positive memories are very often shuffled out of sight.

Recently I was talking with someone from my past who described a certain day that I had engineered. It was a spectacular day, and I had completely forgotten almost every single detail, despite the fact that I’d dreamed up the entire program. I only remembered the single dark event that punctured the day unexpectedly. This is despite the fact that I rallied against this dark event for fear that it would detract from the day I’d planned - it didn’t really matter anyhow, so why not enjoy the moment? And yet, my memory doesn’t appear to abide by the same good logic. Despite enjoying that day, and doing everything in my power to make it excellent, my only lasting memory was the one thing that went wrong with it.

The recollection has made me wonder anew: what else in my past has my memory swept aside in order to highlight all the negative that can be learned from?

Frankly, none of us get out of this game alive, so what really is the utility of such a negatively-focused algorithm? Naturally, this could easily be a personal development, but I’m tempted to think it’s a more pervasive issue. Humans are incredibly susceptible to concentrating on the negative at the expense of ignoring the positive. The average person takes a lot longer to pick out the one smilie face in a sea of frown faces than it takes to pick out the one frown face in a sea of smilies. This is exactly the propensity that my mind is playing when it comes to memory selection and importance.

From an evolutionary perspective this makes sense: preparing for the worst is easier if you can remember the worst of what’s happened. Remember the best of yesterday doesn’t do much good for preparing for the worst. And the point of this difference is that the worst to come has a much higher chance of wiping our your genetics when compared to the best of what’s to come - as backwards as that sounds. Backwards because the continuation of our genetics usually entails some great moments -subjectively speaking. In terms of evolutionary biology, the brain has no interest in remembering good times because that has no bearing in surviving bad times in order to have more good times.

This feels like an enormous betrayal of memory. In the modern civilized world, what should memory be like? Some wonderful amalgam of a museum and a music festival comes to mind: Closing my eyes should be a phantasmagoria of the most wonderful moments that stand as touchstones in the arc of a person that I have become. Memory should be the best place to retreat - no matter how bad things get, I should be able to instantly form a chrysalis of the best that is behind me. Why isn’t a selection of the best nights, the best mornings, the best days and afternoons on constant offer when we close our eyes? Such memories represent incredible achievements. No matter how hard or easy life has been, the fact that these experiences could come into existence is itself an achievement worth.. everything. For why are we here if not to gather up some small patch of treasured memory?

No matter how rich someone is, all we crave is more of this treasured memory.. which is so hard to hold on to. When our mind is hardwired to remember the worst, do we remember less and less the better life gets?

A LUCILIUS PARABLE: A DREAM REFINED

March 6th, 2022

The clacking stopped. Lucilius’ fingers rested easy on the stout keys, the metal crescent of hammers resting easy after their frenzied assault on the white page, now bending in an arc out away from the typewriter. Lucilius pulled the page and reread the last few lines. It was the first decent story Lucilius had written, and he smiled at it, knowing now, for sure, that it was good. After so much rewriting, after so many dozens of stories tossed away, finally, he’d arrived at the place he’d yearned for and dreamt of for so many years. 

It was a starting line, of sorts, he thought. Which lead him to wonder. It would probably take another ten years of consistent, dedicated work to gain the kind of skill he needed to produce the novel he had in mind. A new thought accompanied the dream: what would the world look like in ten years? It didn’t really matter for good fiction. Literature is timeless, and that was his aim, making it irrelevant what the world would look like after another decade of work.

But still, the idea kept at him over the next few days of rewriting and refining. When finally he felt the story was ready to send off, he pushed away his typewriter, and opened his laptop. Obviously, the typewriter was a purposeful anachronism. All of his favorite writers of the past had used typewriters, and the singular purpose of a typewriter helped him focus. A computer has so many uses beyond just a word processor, and they all linger as potential distractions.

So he started to research: did anyone have a good idea about what the world would look like in another ten years? It wasn’t long before Lucilius was in the bowels of a rabbit hole, obsessively reading about the world painted by futurists and technologists.

After several days, Lucilius found himself, thoroughly depressed. The dream he’d spent so much time chasing suddenly felt… quaint. Unnecessary. The aim itself now an anachronism. He suddenly felt like an artisan of spears in the age of gunpowder. So much passion and love now painted in his mind’s eye a vision of himself playing dress-up, like a kid, or an actor for some historical reenactment. He’d always had a notion of what amazing developments there’d be in the future, but what he hadn’t anticipated was that such advancements would get here so soon. In fact it seemed like their progress of arrival was itself speeding up.

For weeks, Lucilius was aimless - paralyzed by a feeling of complete inability. He’d prepared for a different future, for a different life, and now he felt drastically behind everyone else. The technological world he’d been so suspicious of, and had even hated was winning, and it was swarming around Lucilius at a pace he’d never even dreamed possible.

His mind had ruptured. He could do nothing. He could not write, he could not read, he could only obsess over this new and terrible vision of the future, one of accelerating disruption. HIs typewriter began to collect dust while Lucilius spent more and more time on his computer.

After months in this state of horrific limbo, Lucilius finally admitted what he’d known for some many weeks. He sat down at his computer and searched: how to code. If Lucilius was anything, he was a builder, and perhaps - he thought - he could build something else, instead of his stories, and his characters.  

There was a kind of poetry in the act of beginning again. Like starting a new story, and having no idea how it would turn out, what would be required and what his characters would do, it was now him, Lucilius, tasked with learning something new, having no idea how it would go, nor what would come next. And as with anything, the going was slow.

Within a few weeks, he could do the most elemental of tasks with the little code he’d learned. He was spending nearly his whole day trying to learn more, and as much as he tried to ignore it, he really missed writing, like a loved one now gone and mourned. But of course, it was still available, he realized.

One morning, before he set to the grind of learning more, he took his computer with him to the little coffee shop where he spent a bit of his morning everyday, and he opened up the word processor. He wondered what to write about. He didn’t have too much time, he realized, and decided what he could manage in just twenty minutes. Something he could complete then and there. 

Quickly, this became a habit. Before his long days trudging through the task of learning code, he would quickly write a small piece over coffee. What seemed to be materializing were short, whimsical pieces of non-fiction. He seemed to be actively thinking about his own process of thought during these sessions - as if deconstructing how he came about to have the thoughts and beliefs he did. They were satisfying, and quick.

And slowly, he made progress with code. For one of his first projects, as dictated by a program he was following, he built a blog. Lucilius absolutely hated the word, blog, and it was the full reason why he’d never bothered to try and start one himself. But when it came to the step where he had to populate the blog with nonsense Latin, Lucilius realized he had quite a bit of his own writing that would work beautifully as some placeholder text. Lucilius followed through with the project, and got it working online. He was pleased with the look, and the sight of so much of his own writing was nice, especially after such a sad time it had been to ‘give up’ that dream. He’d even mixed in some fictional stories, which he’d dubbed Parables. Stories that were no longer constrained like his serious fiction, but whimsical, like his non-fiction, dipping into all manner of science fiction and thoughtful realism. Writing had become a pure joy, unencumbered by the strict seriousness of his old dream.

Without thinking about it, Lucilius showed the little practice blog to a friend, and then some days later, that friend messaged Lucilius: I keep going back to your blog to read more. When are you going to update it?

Lucilius hadn’t actually considered the project, nor the writing with any kind of seriousness. It was all whimsical - just a selfish excuse to dip into that guilty pleasure of words each morning. But now, perhaps, there was more here than he realized.

Years later, after the blog had grown far beyond anything he expected, he got a package in the mail. He opened it, and smiled, looking down at a book. After years of writing, the number of Parables on the blog had stacked up, and Lucilius realized he might have a book, which he then compiled, and built an online store to sell it with. He now held the forth volume of Parables, and opened it at random. There on the page was a drawing of his old typewriter, and below it, the title of a parable: A Dream Refined.

AN UNRULY COUPLE

March 5th, 2022

The fickle pair of power and influence has always been quite close. Those with the power have the influence. And to a large degree, this is and probably always will be the case, in some form or another. But is influence and power always perfectly correlated? Is it always the case that those with power have influence, and those with influence have the power?

Looking at the advent of recent social technologies, it’s arguable that influence and power have decoupled, somewhat. Those formerly without power or influence have gained some influence, which changes the way power operates. This can easily lead to a quagmire of semantics. Let’s define power as the practical elements: having control of money and force. And let’s define influence as an ability to guide, or alter mass opinion. Traditionally those with power had the money to shepard mass opinion by controlling the vehicles of information distribution. But free social platforms subvert that old structure, allowing those without power to gain influence, hence the horrible new term: influencer. What is an influencer? Someone with a lot of eyes and ears, but perhaps nothing else. The Kardashians, perhaps more than any other human entity, has demonstrated that it’s possible to bootstrap a flywheel, where generating influence can generate power (money) which can then be used to generate more influence. Tik tok stars who were known by no one but a few short months or years ago demonstrate that this bootstrap process is accelerating with the advent of social media.

Recent events show that quite a larger portion of the world can now listen to itself, unconfined by the gatekeeping of prior media, like television and print journalism. And when eyes and ears have new sources to stumble upon and ingest, influence becomes less centralized. But does power follow influence?

Perhaps in some places, but not in others. Power, unlike influence, is more grounded in physical systems, such as who actually has this and that money, and who dives orders to this and that set of professional armed people, such as militaries and police. The nature of these physical structures are far more rigid, and less susceptible to the wander and whim of influence. But while the two may not be fused twins, they certainly share an umbilical cord, and when one marches off in a direction with enough force, the other is likely to get yanked along. Unless of course it yanks back.

What’s important is to remember that the relationship between the two is never one to one. Those who think they have all the influence can be deluded into thinking they therefore have all the power. The compliment is also true. Those with all the power would be unwise to think they also have all the influence.

The important questions examine how these two act upon each other. Can either conclusively force the other? Authoritarian regimes go all-in on the answer being yes - for at least one direction: With all the power, influence can be forced. Is this always true? Hard to say, regime leaders eventually die, and then the details of the question become hazy: if a predecessor is not chosen, does it then fall to the one with the most influence? Even in regime’s that glorify power over influence, ignoring the latter can lead to an unravelling.

What’s also good to note is that the structure of influence is also rooted in certain physical structures.  The two most obvious examples of this are work and social media. These are the two places where attention is pooled most. Work dictates that attention should be spent in a certain way for a reward. Social media plugs attention into a novel phantasmagoria of current events, seemingly unburdened by the curating opinion of an editor or a news station producer.

It was an extremely lightweight set of software innovations that created this massive shift in attentional options. It’s impossible not to wonder: what other software innovations might create different organizations of attention, and ultimately, different avenues of influence? And even more important: when the avenues of influence change, does this create a different relationship between influence and power? Could there ever be an organization of influence that fundamentally changes the relationship between power and influence? These are all quite lofty questions, but it begs to wonder: we are gaining the ability to toggle with the genetic make up of our own culture, and fast track it’s evolution. And remember, evolution, no matter how fast or slow doesn’t mean it’s headed in a useful direction. Plenty of species evolved themselves out of existence.

Issues of both influence and power, ultimately boil down to a cultural question: is our global culture becoming more or less mindful of the long term situation?

TIME'S ASYMMETRY

March 4th, 2022

A child has almost no past. The abundance of the present is far bigger than feeble memory, and curiosity for details of now is all engrossing. But as we age, time stacks up behind us. The present grows smaller, compared to the train tail of memory we begin to lug around, growing ever longer as we go. And where is the future in all this? The future is an unknown, and nearly a non-entity. We interact with the future through our plans an expectations, which both grow smaller with age as milestones are passed and the room for a wide ranging set of plans narrow.

Imagine if, upon waking today, there was no memory of the past. Say you still knew all the normal things, like language, and human culture - but only generally. Image what would happen to your attention, and by extension, the experience of time? Attention modulates our experience of time. Perhaps time seems to move quicker as we grow older because it’s so easy to miss so much of the moment by being preoccupied with thoughts of past moments? Anyone waking up without a past would almost certainly have a long day with attention so tightly bound to each detail, trying to figure out what is going on.

Strangely people are apt to say life is short as they grow older, but with each and every second, life is longer than we’ve ever known. Children, who have so far had much shorter lives never comment on the fact, and it’s the oldest among us who comment on life’s brevity. Are the days actually shorter? Or do they simply seem different because they are compared to past days, that had a wholly different composition, packed with more events and changes, realizations and highs and lows?

It’s worth it to wonder how a child would experience this very moment. Not because a sense of wonder is enjoyable, but to ask why wonder occurs for a child in the first place? Adults gaze upon the moment with assumptions piled up from years of experience, and these assumptions not only blind us from new ways of looking at and experiencing the current moment but often prevent us from experiencing it at all as we simply repeat a phantasmagoria of thoughts, feelings and impressions composed during many yesterdays. A child’s wonder is quickly accomplishing it’s own undoing: wonder fuels inquisitive investigation, and once we come to our quick conclusions about this and that, they loose their mysterious gleam. The toy is quickly discarded and something new is sought out.

Boredom arises from a confidence that all of these assumptions are correct. Innovation arises when there’s plausible deniability - when there’s skepticism about current knowledge and an anti-assumption that perhaps there’s more to things than meets the eye: perhaps things can be different, but where do I find the overlooked detail, what does it mean, and how do I understand it?

Realizations are these abrupt shifts when all the world suddenly snaps to a new focus. It’s a pity they are so brief and take up such tiny slivers of time, allowing for the experience to be somewhat forgotten. Rarely do people anticipate future realizations. How many people are walking around with the thought that probably next week, they’ll think differently about things? Few seem to hold such a fluid view of their own selves - especially as we get older.

If there’s one principle about the future that we should glean from past perspectives, it’s that the future is likely to bring unexpected things - which should make unexpected things unsurprising. A surprise expected is not a surprise, even if you’re not sure what it’ll be, and yet everyone is continually surprised and shocked as events unfold. If anything, this perpetual failure to habituate to the unexpected is perhaps proof that our assumptions are chronically wrong to some very real degree. 

Perhaps there’s still a very real cause to invoke and practice a sense of wonder - not because it’s fun or childlike - but simply because the only thing we can be certain about is that our grasp of the world is wrong.

PRACTICING PARADISE

February 28th, 2022

Many religions and traditions have a vision of an idyllic afterlife. Calmness, relaxation, an end to suffering, a sense of true wellness - these are things to wait for and experience after life is over. It’s incentive for many people to grin and bear the toil and suffering and behave while here on earth. All the faith in the world can’t supply even the tiniest shred of evidence that such a paradisal afterlife actually exists, and so what’s to keep one from doubting that all the effort and work might be for nothing? There’s some clever arguments against this - that it’s a test of one’s faith, or that someone is somehow supposed to find the pain as the reward itself. But, to be honest, it’s just a shit deal, particularly because there’s a very sensible and practical alternative view that isn’t really at odds with the majority of belief systems.

It’s particularly odd because some religions advertise that such “divine” fruits can be experienced here on earth while we’re still alive. Jesus, for example, said that the kingdom of heaven is within you. Seems a bit strange to have to wait for the afterlife to experience it if we lug paradise around wherever we go, does it not?

Then of course there’s the offer from Buddhism that a lot of our suffering during the here and now is actually completely unnecessary and there’s a way to slough off this pesky aspect of existence.

So many people dream of floating in tropical waters, sitting on hot beaches, and yet, it’s perfectly possible to book that long-lusted-for vacation, go to that tropical beach, get in an unpleasant argument with a spouse and end up miserable on that beautiful beach.

Or simply move to that beach and slowly become inured to how lovely things are, and the same old anxieties and miseries will glide back into consciousness. The pleasantness of the tropical vacation is really in the novelty - just switching things up. So we fake paradise in the short term by using a different mechanism.

But there are mechanisms we can develop to unlock that paradise within each of us. It’s possible to be happy, calm and content for no reason at all, and every reason, be it good weather, or bad weather. It just requires practice. Paradise isn’t a place, or a time, it’s a state of mind, a shaping and maintenance of our very own consciousness that we can achieve here and now. Like all good things, it’s not achieved over night, and the flower for its fruit is slow to bloom - like physical fitness. A week at the gym will not create huge changes. But visiting the gym constantly, and consistently will yield results. Part of the practice of paradise is to cultivate a patience for its arrival.

Milton once wrote: The mind is its own place and, in itself can make a heaven of hell or a hell of heaven. The practice of paradise is a mental training, and strangely we don’t talk about mental training all that much. We talk about training for a job, or physical training, but explicitly mental training is a rather esoteric topic, despite the fact that virtually everything we think and do is a mental training for the mind we will have tomorrow. Considering it’s absolute ubiquity for our very experience of life, you’d imagine a bit more.. discussion.

Unfortunately, few of the ancient religions and traditions talk about it either. Buddhism is really the only religion where a practical regimen of mental training can be divorced from the actual religion, and implemented to great effect on its own, independent of supernatural beliefs. This allows meditation to lend itself to the adherents of other religions inoffensively and it also fits in very well with the scientific and secular culture.

Through mental training, paradise is on offer to absolutely everyone, even those without the slightest shred of faith.