Thoughts for the Day: Monday 21 June 2021

Mastermind

Maria Konnikova

“That process starts upon the supposition that when you have eliminated all which is impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” [Quoting "Sherlock Holmes"]

Mastermind

Maria Konnikova

I raise this . . . to point out one somewhat obvious and yet absolutely central element of the human mind: we never stop learning. The Holmes that took the case of a mysterious lodger and ended up embroiled in a saga of secret societies and international crime rings (for that is the meaning of Red Circle: a secret Italian crime syndicate with many evil deeds to its name) is no longer the same Holmes who made such seemingly careless errors in “The Yellow Face.” Holmes may have his Norburys. But he has chosen to learn from them and make himself a better thinker in the process, ever perfecting a mind that already seems sharp beyond anything else. We, too, never stop learning, whether we know it or not.

Metabolical

Robert H. Lustig

In a population where 88 percent have some level of metabolic dysfunction, the entire concept of healthy has been obfuscated.

The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness

Reinhold Niebuhr

Marxist social theory betrays striking similarities to Rousseau's conceptions. It fails to anticipate the rise of a ruling group in a socialist society.

Ultrasociety

Peter Turchin

A successful upstart who wants to become king needs something extra. His authority cannot be maintained by force alone; he needs to persuade others that he has legitimate authority.

Strangely enough, it is easier to become a god-king than merely a king.

To become god-king the successful upstart needs several things. Obviously, he must be at the top of the military chain of command. But he also needs to become the ritual leader, so that he controls the religious hierarchy—large-scale ritual cults that evolved to cement tribal alliances. Finally, the king-in-the-making needs a fanatically loyal retinue that will follow his orders without question and compel others to do the same. The king needs loyal warriors to protect him from assassination, and to put to death any commoner who shows insufficient respect and obedience. Basically, the king and his retinue are a coalition of upstarts, with the king as the alpha male and his followers as lesser upstarts, but who also do quite well out of the deal.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

In Heraclitus’s statement that the restraining of impulse is difficult but necessary to the soul’s health lies the source of the Stoic emphasis on intervening in the mental process that leads from sensation to action. And in Democritean athambia is found the root of Epicurus’s ataraxia. Most Greek philosophies, like most Indian philosophies, were, in their ethics anyway, philosophies of retreat.

The Principles of Art

R. G. Collingwood

One paints a thing in order to see it People who don’t paint, naturally, won’t believe that; it would be too humiliating to themselves. They like to fancy that everybody, or at least everybody of refinement and taste like themselves, sees just as much as an artist sees, and that the artist only differs in having the technical accomplishment of painting what he sees. But that is nonsense. You see something in your subject, of course, before you begin to paint it (though how much, even of that, you would see if you weren’t already a painter is a difficult question); and that, no doubt, is what induces you to begin painting; but only a person with experience of painting, and of painting well, can realize how little that is, compared with what you come to see in it as your painting progresses.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 25 May 2021

 

Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution.

– Albert Einstein

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

Taxes are interesting. They are one way governments guide a society and fund governmental activities, more the former than the latter. They are as old as civilization. An ancient manifestation of the power of the state. It’s possible that both debt and money were invented in the earliest cities, specifically in order to enable and regularize taxation. Both of them being forms of IOU.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt 

The metaphor achieves the “carrying over”—metapherein—of a genuine and seemingly impossible metabasis eis alio genos, the transition from one existential state, that of thinking, to another, that of being an appearance among appearances, and this can be done only by analogies. (Kant gives as an example of a successful metaphor the description of the despotic state as a “mere machine (like a hand mill)” because it is “governed by an individual absolute will. . . . For between a despotic state and a hand mill there is, to be sure, no similarity; but there is a similarity in the rules according to which we reflect upon these two things and their causality.”

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

Fear, moreover, becomes pointless when the selection of victims is completely free from all reference to an individual’s actions or thoughts. Fear, though certainly the all-pervasive mood in totalitarian countries, is no longer a principle of action and can no longer serve as a guide to specific deeds. Totalitarian tyranny is unprecedented in that it melds people together in the desert of isolation and atomization and then introduces a gigantic motion into the tranquillity of the cemetery. No guiding principle of action taken from the realm of human action—such as virtue, honor, fear—is needed or could be used to set into motion a body politic whose essence is motion implemented by terror.

The Force of Character

James Hillman

As Heraclitus said: “Underworld souls perceive by smelling.” Twenty-five hundred years later, we say that the person who can get down has a quick apprehension—“street smarts”—and senses reality behind the front. Ancient descriptions of the underworld maintain that in this realm nothing solid exists, only images, phantoms, ghosts, smoke, mist, shades, dreams.

An Essay on Metaphysics

R. G. Collingwood

Metaphysics is for us the name of a science, and has been for many centuries, because for many centuries it has been found necessary, and still is found necessary, to think in a systematic or orderly fashion about the subjects that Aristotle discussed in the group of treatises collectively known by that name.

The Confidence Game

Maria Konnikova

Their [confidence mens'] genius lies in figuring out what, precisely, it is we want, and how they can present themselves as the perfect vehicle for delivering on that desire.

Thoughts for the Day: Thursday 4 February 2021

 

How vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes... 

— Hannah Arendt

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

Essences cannot be localized. Human thought that gets hold of them leaves the world of the particular and goes out in search of something generally meaningful, though not necessarily universally valid. Thinking always “generalizes,” squeezes out of many particulars—which, thanks to the de-sensing process, it can pack together for swift manipulation—whatever meaning may inhere. Generalization is inherent in every thought, even though that thought is insisting on the universal primacy of the particular. In other words, the “essential” is what is applicable everywhere, and this “everywhere” that bestows on thought its specific weight is spatially speaking a “nowhere.”

Time of the Magicians

Wolfram Eilenberger

Particularly so in light of the seemingly reactionary alternative origin to the age of modern philosophy Benjamin proposes. Ultimately, for him, only God—an event as divine as the phenomenon of speech itself—can supply true salvation. Just as language—as the foundation of all meaningful access to the world—cannot in Benjamin’s view be of human origin, the healing shock of the perception of truth (in “pure language”) cannot be, either. Like Wittgenstein, Benjamin insists time and again that the miracle of language cannot be explained in language. At most, its essence can be shown through particular linguistic modes of representation.

Between Past and Future

Hannah Arendt

The underlying theme of every essay in Between Past and Future is that the great Western philosophic-political tradition has been ruptured, and so definitively ruptured that its authority can never be restored.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Fareed Zakaria

It’s strange that in America we have not learned the lesson that hasty, unplanned development can provoke a backlash. After all, the country has experienced several, most notably the 1930s Dust Bowl, the greatest ecological disaster in North American history. The event is seared in the American imagination, depicted in novels and captured in movies. The bitter tale of desperate Dust Bowl migrants inspired John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath—describing the plight of people who could be called AFarmerica’s first climate refugees. And it is a story of human action causing a natural reaction.

We just read (aloud) Grapes of Wrath this fall: a great book.

Collingwood's the Idea of History

Peter Johnson

First, in human understanding, facts do not come alive until the ideas internal to them are grasped. Second, the appropriate question to ask of human activities is not whether they are true or false, but what they mean.

The Ministry for the Future

Kim Stanley Robinson

“The rentier class.” Keynes meant by this the people who made money simply by owning something that others needed, and charging for the use of it: this is rent in its economic meaning. Rent goes to people who are not creators of value, but predators on the creation and exchange of value. So “the euthanasia of the rentier class” was Keynes’s way of trying to describe a revolution without revolution, a reform of capitalism in his time, toward whatever subsequent post-capitalist system might follow.

The Machiavellians

James Burnham

If, in the selection of members of the élite, there existed a condition of perfectly free competition, so that each individual could, without any obstacle, rise just as high in the social scale as his talents and ambition permitted, the élite could be presumed to include, at every moment and in the right order, just those persons best fitted for membership in it. Under such circumstances—which [Alfredo] Pareto seems to imagine after the analogy of the theoretical free market of classical economics, or the biological arena of the struggle for survival—society would remain dynamic and strong, automatically correcting its own weaknesses. However, a condition of this sort is never found in reality. There are always obstacles, or “ties” as Pareto calls them, that interfere with the free circulation of individuals up and down the social scale.

Cf. Collingwood on "the ruling class" in his "The Three Laws of Politics."

The Confidence Game

Maria Konnikova

Psychopathy is part of the so-called dark triad of traits. And as it turns out, the other two, narcissism and Machiavellianism, also seem to describe many of the traits we associate with the grifter.

Thoughts for the Day: Sunday 24 January 2021

Commanding Hope

Thomas Homer-Dixon

And if we’re going to reimagine and reinvigorate hope in ways that help us, we must think carefully about the relationships between time, imagination, possibility, and prediction.

A Secret History of Consciousness

Gary Lachman

We may indeed be passing through what the historian Arnold Toynbee called a “time of troubles,” the period of challenge and difficulty that precedes the disintegration of a civilization. Toynbee argues that a civilization in peril reacts in specific, recognizable patterns. One is to seek safety by a “return to the past,” by reviving a “primitive,” “archaic” way of life. The various “back to nature” and fundamentalist philosophies that have emerged in the last fifty or so years suggest something of this sort.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

We face a stark choice. We can expend our waning stocks of fossil fuels, our scarce capital, and our limited political will in a vain attempt to maintain industrial civilization as it exists, or we can use those same resources to effect a necessary transition to a radically different type of civilization. But we cannot do both, and we must choose reasonably soon.

Apologies to the Grandchildren

William Ophuls

Niccolò Machiavelli: "Wise men say, and not without reason, that whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times. This arises from the fact that they are produced by men who have ever been, and ever will be, animated by the same passions…."

Mastermind

Maria Konnikova

[F]or [Sherlock] Holmes, education means something more. Education in the Holmesian sense is a way to keep challenging yourself and questioning your habits, of never allowing System Watson to take over altogether—even though he may have learned a great deal from System Holmes along the way. It’s a way of constantly shaking up our habitual behaviors, and of never forgetting that, no matter how expert we think we are at something, we must remain mindful and motivated in everything we do.

Meditations of a Buddhist Skeptic

B. Alan Wallace

Nothing inherently exists, with its own parts and attributes, independently of our conceptual designation.

The Soul's Code

James Hillman

[T]here is no escape from necessity. It will not yield, cannot submit: ne + cedere. Kant defined necessity’s German equivalent, Notwendigkeit, to mean that which “could not be otherwise.” This makes the understanding of our lives remarkably easy: whatever we are we could not have been otherwise. There is no regret, no wrong path, no true mistake. The eye of necessity reveals what we do to be only what could have been. “What might have been is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in a world of speculation. / What might have been and what has been / Point to one end, which is always present” (T. S. Eliot) [Burnt Norton]

As we perform an act, make a choice, we believe there are options. Options, Personal Agency, Choices, Decisions—these are the catchwords Ego thrives on. But if we look up from the engagement for a moment and speculate, Necessity’s implacable smile says that whatever choice you make is exactly the one required by Necessity. It could not be otherwise. At the moment the decision falls, it is necessary. Before it is decided, all lies open. For this strange reason, Necessity guarantees only risk. All is at risk in each decision, even though what is finally decided upon at once becomes necessary.

Thoughts of the Day: Monday 21 September 2020

 

Beyond the Robot

Gary Lachman

“The job of the adult is protection and care,” he felt, and “the job of all responsible human beings is the same protection and care towards the universe.”

Mastermind

Maria Konnikova

Attention is a limited resource. Paying attention to one thing necessarily comes at the expense of another.

The Fifth Discipline

Peter M. Senge

Personal mastery is the discipline of continually clarifying and deepening our personal vision, of focusing our energies, of developing patience, and of seeing reality objectively. As such, it is an essential cornerstone of the learning organization—the learning organization’s spiritual foundation.

Speculum Mentis

R. G. Collingwood

...an observer studying a certain form of experience often finds it impossible to give an account of it without stating certain principles and distinctions which are not actually recognized by the persons whose experience he is studying. Thus an artist constructs his work on principles which are really operative in the construction, but are not explicitly recognized by himself, in art they are implicit, to become explicit only in the criticism of art.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

Everything that is perceived by the senses or apprehended by the mind is relative, since sense objects “exist” in relation to the perceiving sense, and mind-objects in relation to the mind.

Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954

Hannah Arendt

If, on the other hand, the scholar wants to transcend his own knowledge—and there is no other way to make knowledge meaningful except by transcending it—he must become very humble again and listen closely to the popular language, in which words like “totalitarianism” are daily used as political clichés and misused as catchwords, in order to re-establish contact between knowledge and understanding.

A Few Lessons from Sherlock Holmes by Peter Bevelin

Small book, big ideas

Peter Bevelin’s short book is a compendium of quotes from the stories of Sherlock Holmes, other writings by Arthur Conan Doyle, and some writings of Doyle’s contemporaries. Before each set of quotes, Bevelin identifies a theme, such as “Practice is a good instructor and teaches us to where to look and what to look for”. (Bevelin, Peter (2013-06-24). A Few Lessons from Sherlock Holmes (Kindle Locations 156-157). MX Publishing. Kindle Edition.) The quotes, primarily from stories of Holmes, then illustrate or elucidate the theme. Perhaps that second most commonly cited source comes from Thomas McCrae, who published a work in a Canadian medical journal in 1914  titled “The Method of Zadig in the Practice of Medicine”, which discusses many of the themes common to Holmes’ methods. 

This short (65-page) book is a compendium of wisdom that one can dip into at random to reinforce an inquiring and questioning mind. Its single sentence themes and brief quotes make it like a commonplace book. In its themes and conclusions (and often in its selections of quotes from the Holmes treasury), it’s very similar to Maria Konnikova’s Mastermind:How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes. But where Bevelin limits his quotes to Holmes and his contemporaries, Konnikova riffs into contemporary research and thought. Both are valuable and fun—how could they not be when led by the great detective?