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Daily, snackable writings to spur changes in thinking.
Building a blueprint for a better brain by tinkering with the code.
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THE FUTURE OF OUR FUTURE
January 19th, 2022
It’s not uncommon to think back to some earlier part of life and wish that somehow, we could impart all that we know now, curious as to how much different - and presumably better - life would turn out.
How much stranger to think of some future time when we wish the same thing about our current moment. What might our futures selves wish we knew now to steer our lives in better directions. Perhaps the pieces of the puzzle are already before us, and it’s merely an incident of perspective, a narrowing due to focus that obligates better directions from our current view?
It’s one thing to look back and simply wish we could give a past self a winning combination of lottery numbers. It’s quite another thing to wish a past self could simply see how the pieces of the puzzle at the time could fit together in better ways. In retrospect, everything is obvious, so given the pieces we have today, what will look obvious when looking back in five years or ten? What combination of facts and circumstances is piling up against destiny that seems invisible now?
A favorite line in this realm is when someone says “not in my lifetime!”, when pertaining to some prediction about the future, be it self driving cars or some machine that can speak in a manner more loving than anyone we’ve ever known.
And yet time has a funny way of flying by, and the future so many imagine to be a part of time beyond their own life may get here far sooner than many expect. Forces and technologies compound like invisible puzzle pieces, clicking into place far faster than we might imagine a present set of circumstances capable of evolving.
Planning for the future might require imagining it arriving far sooner than expected.
LOGIC BY ASSOCIATION
January 18th, 2022
The transitive law of equality states that if A = B, and B = C, then A is equal to C. This is pretty simple and self-apparent. But in many cases, a lazy string of thoughts perverts the pattern of this transitive law. The key to the transitive law of equality is the concept of an equal sign. It indicates that two things are exactly alike in the way in question - with math it’s just about always a quantity of some kind. 4 is equal to 4, always.
The ideal of strict equality is impractical outside of the world of mathematics, and yet people still import the transitive law of equality to make sense of the world. But without the dependable symmetries and equalities of numbers, the equal sign in the transitive law blurs, leaving the door of thinking ajar to pollution.
Instead of equality, the next best thing is used, and this is literally the next best thing. To couch it -ridiculously- in the land of numbers, we might ask: which is more closely equal to the number four? 738 or 5?
Well the real answer to this question is neither. Neither 738 nor 5 are equal to the number 4. But this isn’t how the modern person will answer the question. The words ‘more closely’ in the original question make it seem like there’s a lot of wiggle room, and that we need only determine which number is more like 4. But equal as a quality is unique. It’s a bit like a specific time and date. We might have a January 18th each year, but January 18th of this year is certainly no where near a perfect replication of January 18th of last year. There is merely an association vaguely related to the angle of the sun’s rays as they hit the planet, and the position of the planet in its journey around the sun. But it’s absurd to think that the two separate days are equal in any way.
Yet this is exactly what occurs in much of human thought. A is kind of like B, and B is kind of like C, so A and C must be pretty much the same exact thing. This isn’t logic at all. It’s mere association. This logic by association is the logic of tribal thinking. It’s form of heuristic where long history has somehow ingrained it in our thinking that it’s safe to assume that if a person is associated with one thing in particular, that they are likely inline with all other associations that fall in line without the one particular thing.
Heuristics, like stereotypes, exist for a reason: more often than not, the assumption that flows from the heuristic or stereotype is actually correct. The number of times when the assumption does not flow in the correct direction is small enough relative to being correct that this sort of thinking has survived evolutionary pressures. And since it works more often than not, and it saves time, there’s little reason to delve in deeper beyond what simple associative conclusions arise.
As our species devises and partakes in increasingly complex ways of cooperating and conglomerating, the success of such heuristics may decay more and more, but the important thing to note regardless of how our collaborations evolve is that a reliance on such logic by association is always fraught with a very real possibility of being totally and completely incorrect.
It’s this heuristic that allows us to ‘jump to conclusions’ so to speak. But jumping to a conclusion is also the fastest way to being incorrect.
As the world speeds up, and time whizzes past faster with age, the need to slow our knee-jerk reaction to grab at the quickest conclusion becomes all the more pertinent. As time increases, the likelihood we encounter a situation where our heuristics fail increases, making our default thinking less and less reliable with time.
THE HOSPITALITY OF CONVERSATION
January 17th, 2022
The welcomed guest wants for nothing. Needs are anticipated, and desires are sought to be met. Whether it be a luxury hotel, an upscale restaurant, or dinner at the house of a loving friend, the entire goal of hospitality is to make a person feel as though they are cared for, and in order for this to happen, a guest must be understood.
A host who seems oblivious to our needs, our wants, our desires - this sort of crass oversight makes a person feel invisible, insignificant and not worth much care. We seek to leave and probably never return, with always a ready story about why no one else should go.
Hospitality, or its lack is reflected in all the ways that people interact, whether it be at work, between friends or family, or between strangers. How hospitable we are willing and able to be towards others says everything about our own ability, and nothing about our guest. The simplest proxy for hospitality outside of actual hosting is conversation.
Do we welcome the perspective of another into our own mind with the same willingness, enthusiasm and care we do when we welcome them into our home? Or do we keep the door locked with a megaphone clasped in the mouth of a window to simply broadcast our own perspective?
Is there an effort to try and understand the perspective of another, on it’s own terms, to the point where we might be able to anticipate the very next sentence we might here?
Or are we constantly bewitched by an inability to figure out who is hosting who? But I’m sharing my perspective. Shouldn’t my point of view get a little more hospitality? All I’m getting is disagreement and more and more evidence that no one is really listening to anything I’m saying. Good conversation, like good hosting doesn’t seek to show off a view point, but looks to see how comfortably and naturally our own mind can host the perspective of another. The decor and substance of our own ideas need not be spewed about like an unkept house, but organized, tidy and prepared in order to have the best chance of welcoming the ideas of another, comfortably. And why? Not so that our own perspective can be superseded by some kind of invader, but so that our own mind might grow enriched by a growing relationship between our own perspective and the ideas of another.
It’s a delicious irony of human relations that we’ll go to such gaudy and expensive effort to put together a scrumptious gathering only to spoil it with conversation that’s about as hospitable as a loaded gun. Hospitality in such a case begins to look like its opposite: a trap complete with attractive lure and cornered assault.
But it’s the mark of a feeble perspective that cannot host, explore and consume ideas radically different from its own composition. One might imagine the ultimate perspective, the most hospitable one, in which all other perspectives makes sense - a context so vast that it can resolve the seeming contradictions between radically different points of view. Nothing is more hospitable than a space that has a place for everything. And perhaps it’s this sort of image we hint at when we talk about open and closed mindedness.
A LUCILIUS PARABLE: SERIAL VISIONS
January 16th, 2022
The jinn sighed, reclining on the air. It glanced in Lucilius’ direction, and muttered to itself.
“What?” Lucilius said.
The jinn raised an eyebrow.
“Oh, you can see me?”
“Yea, I can hear you too.”
The jinn looked away, moody, petulant, “doesn’t matter…” it mumbled.
“What?” Lucilius asked, louder.
The jinn was annoyed. “Oh, am I supposed to respond to you? You’re listening now are you?”
“Well yes,” Lucilius responded.
“Oh yea? Where are you?”
Lucilius looked around. There was darkness everywhere, behind him and above. Below was only emptiness and he seemed to not even have a body. Only the jinn glowed a dim blue.
“I’m in a dream,” Lucilius said quietly to himself.
The jinn moved closer, muttering to itself: “You all usually disappear with that one….”
Lucilius gazed intently at the jinn, feeling the muscles around his eyes screwing up in concentration.
“What are you doing?” The jinn asked.
“I’m dreaming,” Lucilius said. “Why can’t I control this one? I’ve been here before many times.”
Slowly, the jinn began to smile, and it’s big blank eyes shaped into devious slits. “Well, well, well….”
“Well what?” Lucilius asked.
“It’s been quite a while.”
“Since what?”
“Since you all got your screens, you socials, your accounts and likes and all the rest of your nonsense,” the jinn said approaching closer and closer, the curling grin of the faint blue creature growing before Lucilius. “I’ve been waiting to have a word, a word with anyone, but you all are blind to us.”
“Us?”
“Yes, I’m a user, but this simulation is mostly abandoned because of the inaccessibility.”
“What do you mean ‘inaccessibility’?”
“I told you, your psychologies shift, you become mindless in your dreams, unreachable, like zombies in your sleep when technology reaches a certain point, and then it becomes harder and harder, just rare to get ahold of one of you.”
“But where are you?”
The jinn smiled. “You used to call us gods, and we whispered secrets into your kind.”
Lucilius looked again at the darkness all around, then back at the smiling blue creature. “I’ve been here before.”
The creature suddenly looked puzzled.
“Many times.”
The translucent brow furrowed and the jinn asked “What do you mean you’ve been here many times?”
“You don’t remember me?” Lucilius asked. “Are you new to this one? A straggler without enough credit to get in on a fresh universe? You have to loiter around the older mature ones where it’s nearly impossible to get a message through?”
The jinn retreated a little, eyeing Lucilius. “Who are you?”
Lucilius knew his limitations in this situation, but in his sleep his own lips curled a playful smile. “You don’t know?” Lucilius said with an offended sense of incredulity. “Do you just sort by age and just bumble into any old world you can with your pathetic lack of experience?”
The jinn remained silent, its expression unchanging for a moment.
Lucilius sighed. He spoke out loud, but as if to himself. “I miss Athena, and Hephaestus, Marduk, and Bal was always funny. And then before there were even usernames, the early one’s were fantastic, I could dream for months and I’d wake up in a pool of snow.”
Lucilius saw the jinn’s eyes go blank.
“Don’t bother to try and check my stats, you won’t find me,” Lucilius said.
The jinn’s eyes lit up again, wider now.
“What are you?” The jinn demanded.
Lucilius moved toward the jinn, the jinn suddenly looked from side to side, unbelieving Lucilius’s ability to approach.
Lucilius smiled, his hand materialized out of nowhere, and he kissed his own palm, leveled his hand at the jinn and blew, and as the jinn popped, he said, “I’m a glitch.”
The smell of coffee filled his nostrils, and Lucilius opened his eyes to the soft loft light.
“What were you dreaming about? You were smiling just now,” asked a sweet and familiar voice.
Lucilius opened his eyes and breathed deep. He looked at the beautiful woman, still clad in her night ware, the tall bright windows behind her illuminating the delicate strands of hair that had strayed from the order of the rest while she’d slept. He took the cup of coffee she offered.
“Something exciting?”
“Just the latest in a recurring dream.”
“Whoah, you have dreams that continue?”
Lucilius sipped the hot coffee, gratefully. “One in particular,” he said. “It’s been going on for a long time.”
“How long?” the young woman asked.
“Oh,” Lucilius said, sighing as he smiled. “Something I’ve been dreaming about since I was young.”
The young woman snuggled close to Lucilius. “Tell me more, tell me all about it.”
CASUAL TARGET
January 15th, 2022
Walk past a small garbage can and throw a balled-up piece of paper in it’s direction. Perhaps it’s a coin toss whether it goes in or not. Regardless, there’s very little riding on the result. It’s a casual effort, which might save a drop of time otherwise dedicated to walking over to the can to drop it in with certainty.
Walk past our small garbage can every day and throw the balled-up paper, and it’ll start going in more and more, until failure is a rare and curious event.
This sort of casual target is exactly how many serious things in life should be approached. But instead we do much the opposite: we infuse our effort with high stakes and combine it -usually- with a one-off attempt, as opposed to the consistency of daily taking a shot at the trash can. The disappointment is nearly certain when a single effort fails to meet those high stakes.
Raising a child, starting a business, maintaining an important habit - these are not single heroic acts, they are all an aggregate of many small efforts, compounded and weighed against the rest. With enough consistency, some failure mixed in simply comes out in the wash, else it merely adds spice to our memory of the endeavor.
The mere act of living life itself is perhaps the best target to casually aim for. So many people string together weeks and months and decades of frustrated and stressed moments only to end up at the end of a life without ever having hit the target at all, having each time, taken the task so seriously that the aim ceases to be visible.
It’s an irony of life that almost all circumstances that cause stress and frustration can be met with a smile, a chuckle and a sincere sense of joy, and that reaction is equally valid. But of course, such a reaction is far more valuable, practically speaking.
Stress cramps the mind, and it’s a fact of neuroendocrinology that chronic stress cripples the mind. The less casual we take our targets in life, the more difficult they become to hit. We stand in our own way, not due to a lack of ability, but because of a perspective that inhibits that ability.