Thoughts 8 Feb. 2022

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Understanding the structure of the brain and how it functions can help us see the constraints on consciousness, much as, to use another metaphor, the banks of a river constrain its flow and are integral to its being a river at all, without themselves being sufficient to cause the river, or being themselves the river, or explaining it away. All experience in this life as we know it (and this applies whether we conceive the brain as the originator, or as a transducer, of consciousness) comes to us through the brain, and is therefore inevitably constrained, and shaped, by it.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

It is not the changes in the brain itself that matter, but the way in which we use it. An analogy might be with a radio set: to begin with you try different channels, but after a while you begin to tune into only one. The other channels are still there – it’s just that you are no longer listening to them.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Even if we avoid oblivion, the result would be a dark age whose darkness would be roughly proportional to the extent of the overshoot. To avoid such a fate, humanity must either achieve a total technological mastery over nature via the perfection of artificial intelligence and robotics, an outcome that has been dubbed the Singularity, or make a relatively fast transition to a high-level agrarian civilization, precisely the options posited many years ago by Harrison Brown.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

[A] state of total technological mastery is probably not achievable owing to basic physical and biological laws, such as the Entropy Law and the Law of the Minimum. Technology cannot sustain a “machine civilization” or even a “digital civilization” out of thin air.9 In addition, as noted by Brown, the Singularity would be a regimented, collectivized dystopia. (The digital panopticon of today is but the merest harbinger of such a future.)

Developmental Politics

Steve McIntosh

According to John Rawls, for example, pursuing our own interests may be necessary, but only those acts that are motivated purely for the interests of others can be recognized as intrinsically moral.

The Art of Learning

Josh Waitzkin

Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible,  unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential.

The Way of Zen

Alan W. Watts

This is not a philosophy of not looking where one is going; it is a philosophy of not making where one is going so much more important than where one is that there will be no point in going.

The Case for Keto

Gary Taubes

As informed physical trainers will tell their clients, you cannot outrun a bad diet.

Thoughts 3 Feb. 2022

 

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

[W]hat allowed the Industrial Revolution to be such a success? The answer is sixfold. First, most obvious, it began with an abundance of high-grade resources. Second, the original bads, such as industrial waste, were relatively small compared to the atmosphere or the rivers into which they were discharged. The harm did not go unnoticed, but the damage seemed minor compared to the benefits. Third, the benefits and costs of industrialization were not distributed equally. The industrialists and their allies profited greatly, the natural world and the poor, disadvantaged, or colonized paid the price. Fourth, due to inertia in the system, a major portion of the costs of industrialization were shoved into the future. As with the climate regime, the effect of current industrial activity does not always become apparent until decades later. Hence grandchildren pay for the ecological sins of grandparents. Fifth, even the slowest rate of growth is exponential. Thus the absolute amount of both goods and bads grows steadily over time, doubling and doubling again until the burden of bads becomes impossible to sustain. Finally, sixth, economic growth involves an inescapable increase in complexity whose management requires ever more time, energy, resources, and money—a burden that, again, grows larger over time, forcing the society to run harder and harder just to stay in the same place.

That industrial civilization is being strangled by a slowly tightening noose of ecological scarcity has been apparent to anyone who cares to examine the evidence without prejudice. Sadly, this patent reality continues to be mostly denied in societies made up largely of the passively uninformed and the passionately misinformed.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

Regrettably we would rather speak falsely, if doing so means we do not seem to contradict ourselves: we realise that it is much simpler for our point of view to be dismissed as self-contradictory than untrue.

The Matter With Things

Iain McGilchrist

[W]e are under almost irresistible pressure to adopt a view consistent with one hemisphere’s take or the other: it is too risky to draw, as we should, on both. And second, one of these takes, namely that of the left hemisphere, is very much simpler – indeed it is simplistic; and therefore far easier to articulate. It sees matters as black and white, ‘either/or’. The right hemisphere sees the nuances, as well as that we often must embrace two superficially incompatible truths in a ‘both/and’ – one, moreover, that includes embracing both its own take and that of the left hemisphere: altogether a far harder, and more complex, view to articulate.

Last Best Hope

George Packer

This activism [left progressivism] shifted the scene from blighted urban neighborhoods and prisons to human resources departments, anti-bias training sessions, and BIPOC reading lists. It was less interested in social reform than a revolution in consciousness. The pandemic almost disappeared from mind as millions of white people experienced the kind of collective moral awakening that comes over Americans in different periods of our history. These awakenings can take on the contours of religious experience, a particularly American one—sin, denunciation, confession, atonement, redemption, heresy hunting, book burning, and the dream of paradise. Moral awakenings leap backward over the worldly philosophers of the eighteenth century, the secular and rationalist Founding Fathers, to our origins in the Puritan ancestors.

The Art of Learning

Josh Waitzkin

In my opinion, intuition is our most valuable compass in this world. It is the bridge between the unconscious and the conscious mind, and it is hugely important to keep in touch with what makes it tick.

59 Seconds

Richard Wiseman

Time and again, the same pattern emerged. Those who spent a higher percentage of their income on others were far happier than those who spent it on themselves.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 26 April 2021

 

A book grounded in the classics but seasoned by plenty of contemporary insights, too. 

Plato's Revenge

William Ophuls

Rather than joust with contemporary specialists in environmental affairs, I therefore decided from the outset to rely on the time-tested classical authors who have eloquently and cogently grappled with the core issues of politics. I found Plato, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the rest more illuminating and pertinent than other writers to achieving my aim—namely, encouraging readers to question our most basic social, economic, political, and even moral assumptions as the first step toward imagining a truly ecological future.

"The greats" do provide unparalleled insights.

The Best and the Brightest

David Halberstam

He [LBJ] would say to friends, talking about his dilemma, “If we get into this war [Vietnam] I know what’s going to happen. Those damn conservatives are going to sit in Congress and they’re going to use this war as a way of opposing my Great Society legislation. People like Stennis and Gross. They hate this stuff, they don’t want to help the poor and the Negroes but they’re afraid to be against it at a time like this when there’s been all this prosperity. But the war, oh, they’ll like the war. They’ll take the war as their weapon. They’ll be against my programs because of the war. I know what they’ll say, they’ll say they’re not against it, not against the poor, but we have this job to do, beating the Communists. We beat the Communists first, then we can look around and maybe give something to the poor.”

There is a sense of the tragic in LBJ's story.

The Wedge

Scott Carney

Evolution has gifted humans (and vertebrates in general) two immune systems: the innate immune system and the adaptive one. The innate immune system is the front line of defense and has a standard set of responses—fevers, inflammation, mucus generation, attack cells—to biological threats that are quick and easy to deploy. The innate immune system is a blunt instrument that has a pretty dramatic effect on how you feel. It alters your internal environment to make it hostile to invaders. The adaptive immune system is more selective (this is the Special Forces rather than the regular Army); it identifies the specific threat to the body, learns its weaknesses, then deploys a very targeted response.

We should all have learned this now in the time of COVID, but it bears repeating.

Prometheus Rising

Robert Anton Wilson

The “soul” or Circuit VII is constant, because it is, as the Chinese say, void or no-form. It plays all the roles you play — oral dependent, emotional tyrant, cool rationalist, romantic seducer, neurosomatic healer, neurogenetic Evolutionary Visionary — but it is none of them. It is plastic. It is no-form, because it is all forms. It is the “creative Void” of the Taoists.

Read Robert Anton Wilson & this book in particular for a wild (but nonetheless) convincing ride.

When to Rob a Bank

Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner

Humans tend to overestimate small probabilities, so the fear generated by an act of terrorism is greatly disproportionate to the actual risk.

And we could add vaccine risks.

Breath

James Nestor

The problem was that this smaller, vertically positioned nose [that homo sapiens developed] was less efficient at filtering air, and it exposed us to more airborne pathogens and bacteria. The smaller sinuses and mouth also reduced space in our throats. The more we cooked, the more soft, calorie-rich food we consumed, the larger our brains grew and the tighter our airways became.

Moral: everything involves a trade-off.

The Art of Learning

Josh Waitzkin

Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible,  unconscious , creative components of our hidden potential.

Waitzkin is talking chess here; but in life as a whole, I posit that a wide breadth of knowledge & skill is most desirable. Don't be a one-trick pony.

Thoughts for the Day: Monday 9 November 2020

 

What if Thomas Homer-Dixon is correct about his assertion here? 

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

So by 2068, warming of at least 2 degrees is virtually assured— indeed, we’re likely to pass that threshold by 2050— and we could easily be on course for 3 or 4 degrees Celsius by the end of the century without a radical shift in our sources of energy and ways of life.

My review of Commanding Hope.

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

Distance produces a something that is neither in the subject nor the object, but in what arises between them, and it is intrinsically melancholic.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Such an escape from reality is also, of course, an escape from responsibility. In this the Germans are not alone; all the peoples of Western Europe have developed the habit of blaming their misfortunes on some force out of their reach: it may be America and the Atlantic Pact today, the legacy of Nazi occupation tomorrow, and history in general every day of the week.

The Art of Learning

Josh Waitzkin

In my opinion, intuition is our most valuable compass in this world. It is the bridge between the unconscious and the conscious mind, and it is hugely important to keep in touch with what makes it tick.

My comment on the book from the best of 2007 list at no. 25.

Thoughts for the Day: 1 November 2020

 

The Wedge

Scott Carney

When an ecosystem functions well, it’s homeostasis; if it’s in decline or in the midst of unsustainable growth (as with cancer), then it’s heading into trouble. The system could end up in a state of constant vigilance and, to use Feinstein’s term, become allostatic and never return to normal.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

It may be that Hegel was not entirely wrong in seeing human history as a story of progress—not toward a merely rational reason, but rather toward a greater and more expansive awareness, a consciousness in which Pascal’s “reasons of the heart” predominate and act as a container for instrumental rationality.

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

Basically, when we approach life with our habitually passive attitude (James's “inferiority to our true selves”) we are saying to our robot, “Go ahead and take care of this, it isn't important enough for me to attend to,” and the result is that sense of separation from life, of never really touching it, that plagues so many of us in the modern world.

The Art of Learning

Josh Waitzkin

Depth beats breadth any day of the week, because it opens a channel for the intangible,  unconscious, creative components of our hidden potential.