John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future' | Hacker News Reader

John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'

theguardian.com

127 pointsagronaut145 comments

Live life for its own sake. The gift of life is life itself. What's the alternative?

Twice in my life I've grasped the concept of death, and it made my heart race with an exhilarating feeling of suffocating claustrophobic for two reasons:

1. It's coming for me one day

2. Not just the lack of agency in the universe, but the lack of even the realisation of the lack of agency. All of this (wide sweeping hand gesture acknowledging "everything") is not just out of my hands but out of my awareness. Because I no longer exist. I no longer exist.

Life is preferable to the alternative because it's at least something. A chance to experience.

Reminds me of an experience where, my brain fully convinced itself for around 4 hours (felt much longer ofc) that I was an outdated Azure "SmartCodeCreator"[1] instance being deallocated for upgrades... it's a strange experience to embrace death. I haven't been the same since.

[1] I had no name for it at the time, but that's the gist of it

Beautiful

This is bitterly true but also profoundly, maddeningly, horrifically sad.

Death is monstrous. We can do better. We have to do better. And it's tragic that we probably will but everyone alive today will probably miss that chance by a sliver. We happened to be born 99% of the way from the beginning of humankind to the end of death, but we just barely missed it.

How did you come alive. Did it really happen, and how come it never will happen?

One of the things that has helped me get into and maintain the state of 'grasping the concept of death' is the idea of the universe existing (for billions of years) prior to my awakening to conscious existence, and returning to that state of dis-being; non-existing.

I also figure: you have only known existence. You will never know non-existence. You can sleep deeply for hours and it feels like a mere moment. For all you know, there is only existence. This is my backdoor way of getting to reincarnation.

Infinite time and universes might pass, but if you were ever conscious, why would it be impossible? Thinking people lack proper logic and perspective, but it's not even about belief systems, or even identity.

We may be close to being able to extend human life. Ending death entirely seems a bit less plausible; even a person who doesn't age can still die by accident, and I'm not sure how the probability of any person experiencing such a random accident can ever drop to zero.

My optimistic view is to look at self-awareness as a very surprising thing that doesn't make any sense. As far as we know from biology, I should be basically a biological robot that can use its brain to solve problems but without any real sensation, just reaction to stimuli. If self-awareness isn't an emergent property of complex biological machinery, maybe it isn't entirely dependent on it either. I can't imagine how self-awareness would work without a body or a brain to connect to it as an interface, but perhaps there's more to souls than is apparent and maybe those do last forever in some form.

This notion that we could be the last generation to not beat death, was the subject of a Mitchell and Webb comedy sketch that I find quite funny.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wt6nwvGJiN8

I think death is at the heart of what makes life worth it and enjoyable. Imagine, at the extreme, we find a cure for death. What happens then? Overpopulation at the simplest. I can see how this can quickly lead to life being worse than death if played out to the extreme.

I believe that the cure for death would not be distributed evenly at first, and by the time everyone has access to it, there are two options:

1.- We haven't solved the problems caused by overpopulation, and in that case standards of living will drop and people will either have less children or choose to end their lives voluntarily.

2.- We have solved them and there is no longer any issue.

What about 3) standard of living will drop and people will have their lives ended involuntarily (ie war)?

We can't even imagine the new ethics and rituals of a human world where immortality was on offer, but it's hard to imagine something as boring as overpopulation snuffing them out.

It's kinda like who could've predicted that we'd be arguing about gender/queer theory when the first nukes fell on us.

Why do you think that an end to death is close but not close enough for the average aged HN reader

“Close” in a relative sense. They implied we’ll have the cure for death in the next 2000 years or so, with the 99% and humans having existed for roughly 200K years. Sounds plausible to me.

Lifespans many be dramatically extended, but it’s going to take a monumental change in our understanding of physics to actually end death. Second law of thermodynamics directly means the universe will eventually be completely devoid of life.

Billions of additional years is quite some time to find a solution though.

You can’t find a solution to the actual laws of physics. Our understanding may be wrong, but that’s different.

Unfortunately what humanity always found out is that physics always progress. That means that we are always at mercy of uknown physics laws or put it simply: Till now humanity had a lot of luck and everyone luck at some point ends.

There's a big difference between dying because the negentropy finally ran out, after billions of years in the height of life's power in thr universe, and being snuffed out by something as banal as biological malfunction after the blink of an eye.

If nothing else, if I got bored after x number of centuries, I'd want any useful/meaningful memories of mine to be indexed and saved on hyper-wikipedia rather than just be burned because a piece of meat rotted.

Ending death would require us to be perfect beings. We are not. Death is part of the solution to the problem of evolutionary adaptability. We are born, we mate, we die, the cycle continues with our children. If circumstances change, our genes can too but we cannot. As much as we want to stick around forever, I don't think our biology does...

Why should we care what our genes want?

Also, as tech advances, the need for slow recombination goes away, as people can alter their genes and body on the fly. Supersede natural evolution, rather than bowing to it.

> Death is monstrous.

The one thing that softens the blow for me is knowing how many other people have been through it. It's an absolutely illogical attempt at rationalisation, but, you know, Einstein died, Beethoven died, my childhood cat died. Everything that has once ever lived but is not living right at this moment in time, has died. Death just IS.

My stupid quip is: "Well, they survived it, so I guess I will too".

Just a year ago, my cat stopped eating/drinking and just perched stoically on her favorite chair outside waiting for time to pass and do her in. She would purr if you pet her, but that's where she wanted to be. After a biopsy, I found out she had advanced tumors in her stomach and I soon put her down.

Sometimes I think about how my cat accepted and stared down death.

Sorry about your loss, but that is very much like cats ! Bad-ass and sweet till the end :)

My reasoning is something like: I didn't really mind not existing for 14 billion years, why should I worry about not existing after I die.

>>Death is monstrous.

I'll be a contrarian and post this:

>>No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life<<

Steve Jobs

Also put much longer in the form of the Tolkien books. Elves have non-bound lives but Men got the gift of a bounded lifespan by the creater. The Elves think that is a strange gift, but some come to realise just that, we have a chance to live not someone elses, but our own lives, made precious by its scarcity.

>>It clears out the old to make way for the new.

Just imagine working for a boss who had been climbing the company ladder 200 years. Or trying to buy a house in a market where people had been accumulating capital for centuries. And lest we think it's just the the economic system, look at the average age of politicians. Or science, the researchers who hold the most prestige are likely past the point of embracing new ideas. Any advantage which can be accumulated over time would be held almost exclusively by the oldest, and the world would stagnate.

Death is the natural law which requires every generation to pass the torch. Without it, there'd be no life for the young.

Same thing can be said for money, that money spent moving from the baker to the record store operator in days, is people money.

Money sitting in vault is rotting food and weekends not going to a rock show.

Inflation is a way to decay the power of money and make way for the new.

I love ice cream. But if I had to eat a billion gallons of it, it would lose its appeal. Life is like that too: if we had it in infinite supply, it wouldn't have much value.

If I could extend my life by 50 years of good health I might take that offer. If I had to extend it by 500 years, I'm pretty sure I'd decline. If I had to extend it 5000 years I'd certainly say no. 5M years of existence would be torture.

When people express the desire to live forever, either here on earth or in an imagined afterlife, I wonder if they have really thought through the consequences.

You say you’d decline 5m years of life. But have you been in love? How would your answer change if he/she was ready to live 5m years with you?

given the option of spending 5m years with another human I'd pass. A lot of other variables would need to change (ability to retain long term memories, fertility, time it takes to raise a child, how we raise our kids if at all ...) But even changing one of these variables would change things in ways we can't fully imagine (complex system so there would be lot of emergence/chaos)

While the first years of such a "long term relationship" are probably great, (I am high on my hormones imagining that I potentially will spend some millions of years with my partner) they might also be a nightmare for the same reasons.

The more successful relationship I had were all about managing each others long-term expectations, and not risk breaking promises. How would I do this over that horizon idk (more importantly I trust potential partners even less to know)

What would reality look like if we only lived twice as long and were able to retain memories along the way. Holocaust survivors, Spanish flu survivors are dead now and I wonder what they could teach us about 2020. I wonder how such a Malthusean society would feel about Tech, the environment, urbanization, wars, politics, ... Our inability to live long enough and remember things keeps coming back to bite us in the ass I think so doubling our life expectancy would be cool but 5m years is an unthinkable dystopian horror show.

Considering most people are unable to have a great relationship with themselves. Many consider their love / partner a person that "completes" them. In other words they don't love themselves enough to think they need another person that makes them whole. That's a lot of pressure in 40 years but 5m it would be hell. But maybe this would solve the actual problem and it would force people to love themselves first? 5m years isn't just a lot of time to make it a nightmare but also to get many things right we currently don't. I'm not convinced we can accurately imagine/paint this picture tho.

No offense, but long term relationships are a fuck-load of work. You don’t just stay in love with someone indefinitely. People change significantly over 10 years, let alone 100 or 1000.

Being stuck with one person for 5m years is worse than living for 5m years without a guarantee of being with someone the whole time.

Half of marriages end in divorce and only a subset of people who are “in love” get married. HARD PASS

Yes, multiple times. I'm 25 years married and we still have a great relationship. You have a very romantic notion of love if you think it could last even 5000 years.

I'am always intrigue by these "range problems / statements" I guess there are no great insight other than most timelines(ranges) are subjective.

My S.O is always complaining that we are spending too little time together( I really don't think so).

I asked her once, so if we had to spend 23.5 hours together that will be obviously too much, and spending 0.1 hour together will be too little (we could both agree on the extremes), yet somewhere between those extremes are a number we both are comfortable with and feel is correct. It's just not the same number.

On the face of it, it sounds like you have a great bargaining chip here. For the extra hours you think are "too much", come up with an activity which involves you both, but you immensely enjoy. You might both grow!

Good tip :)

In my experience, it's almost never actually about how much time but how you spend that time. TV doesn't count, doing dishes doesn't count... Walks, talking, mutual hobbies do.

> If I could extend my life by 50 years of good health I might take that offer. If I had to extend it by 500 years, I'm pretty sure I'd decline. If I had to extend it 5000 years I'd certainly say no. 5M years of existence would be torture.

is this a thing you worry might happen? like, if life extension is developed, you're concerned it will come in the form of a 5 million year increment, take it or leave it, no possibility of suicide in the middle?

> When people express the desire to live forever, either here on earth or in an imagined afterlife, I wonder if they have really thought through the consequences.

i wonder why you interpret the desire to live forever as some enforced, not only eternal, but literally unendable existence.

i expect we'll manage to simply end aging first. that won't prevent you from walking out into rural alaska in your underwear.

The Christian idea of an afterlife that I was raised with and apparently most people in the US follow is an eternal afterlife and there is no opting out of it once you get there.

As for the hypothetical, no, I don't worry about for a microsecond because it won't become reality anytime soon.

> I love ice cream. But if I had to eat a billion gallons of it, it would lose its appeal.

How do you know? Besides, if you had to eat a billion gallons of it, but over a billion years, I'm pretty sure it would've not lost its appeal at all. It's not "too much" but "too frequent" that takes the joy away.

To counter your example: I watch more TV series than I probably should. What I've learned is that while there's no fun in rewatching the same show just after you finished your first run, rewatching after ~5 years feels almost as if you were watching it for the first time.

I think life is the same. Brains are physical objects with limited capacity for memories and experiences. A million years of life won't be a million years of memories. But it will be a million years' worth of refining your person.

> if we had it in infinite supply, it wouldn't have much value.

Maybe "economic value" under capitalism. But emotional value to the person living.

> I wonder if they have really thought through the consequences.

I know I did. I fail to see a problem with everyone extending their lives indefinitely, past the initial hurdle of rebuilding our economic system to not structurally depend on people dying on schedule, and actually getting space exploration started.

And remember, if you get bored living forever, you could always check out. Right now, we don't even have an option to live long enough to get bored.

> Besides, if you had to eat a billion gallons of it, but over a billion years

That is changing the analogy. The billion years of life would be experienced every waking minute of every day.

Why? You won't be experiencing a billion years a minute, you'll be experiencing a minute a minute.

Here is the difference. If I eat one gallon of ice cream per year, that is 0.1% of my life eating ice cream, whereas I spend 67% of my time experience my life (assuming 8 hrs sleep per day).

> If I had to extend it by 500 years, I'm pretty sure I'd decline.

500 years sounds like just enough time to become an expert in dozen interesting things.

> We happened to be born 99% of the way from the beginning of humankind to the end of death, but we just barely missed it.

Ekhm, citation needed?

Perhaps, something like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

It's just someone's prediction. Could be true, could be false. Maybe the singularity will happen in 10 years, maybe in 10000 years, or maybe it's actually impossible for us humans to accomplish.

Even if technology allows the extension of life, death is still inevitable for us all.

There is no future in which we will overcome death because we can’t overcome the second law of thermodynamics.

That’s a hell of a thing to know and so many people either ignore it or are crushed by it.

Whole religions are based around dealing with it.

My only advice is don’t live in a dream that technology will save us. Do everything now while you can. Pass on what you can while you can.

While the second law of thermodynamics might be a problem, I think that it would be a rather low priority. Perhaps we can stop or reverse cell aging but then might face a wave of suicides because people don't want to live with their worsening arthritis anymore.

We should strive for finding eternal life perhaps, but certainly shouldn't expect it. Few want to die, but even fewer want to die in disappointment.

I have never been overly afraid of death but after deep diving into meditation, math and philosophy, i have come to the conclusion that a form of "idealism" or consciousness-first is much more likely than a materialist universe. This makes a lot of "scientism"(not scientists) people very angry , but personally my best guess is that "spacetime" will be seen as an evolutionary adaptation, or much more of a morphable cultural construct that is no more real than any other human narrative received through narrow sensegates and molded by fitness filters.

This is not an escapism from death, because that prospect can be as absurd or as frightening as death itself. But i am personally leaning more to the side of "the seer keeps seeing" at the moment.

The dennet'esque "lets just explain consciousness away", western perspective and ultra reductionism has always seemed extremely silly and banal to me - there simply can be no dualism, and the arrogance and narrow mindedness is a huge blindspot. They got everything upside down, - great and useful in one context but useless in another.

My own journey started with a deep dive into mediation, then Dzogzhen meditation, lucid dreaming exploration (Dream Yoga), the realization that you can be aware even in deep sleep "like in death", very absurd, then i became intrigued at Gödels theorems (via Godel, Escher, Bach ), and lately i have found scientists like Donald D. Hoffman and Bernardo Kastrup much more sane than many of their contemporaries.

That Hoffman associates (as in disagrees very much but have debated) with charlatans like Chopra is a bit annoying but looking back i think the western divide between "spirit" and science is fundamentally wrong, most, and i really mean all most all the the biggest thinkers we canonize today were into the weird and ungraspable, it has just been scrubbed from the reductionist retrospective. Also Hoffman really is doing all of the math if you go look at it and ignore the pop cultural shredding machine and even though his radical ideas might be gimmicks as Julian Janes or Hofstadter i think they point to a coming revolution where everything is going to get extremely "weird" in both math and physics.

Real insight exists in the liminal, i think.

Everything is more cyclical, warpable, field like, emergent, tantra-timelike, archetypal, perspective dependent, interpolated constantly and upside down in any paradigmatic sense.

Great insight. Thanks for posting your thoughts.

Great points, thanks.

Counterpoint: Hayflick limit [1]. Of course, the humble lobster, jellyfish and hydra [2] (along with other animals) don't seem to undergo senescence but IMO the jury is still out on whether hominids are biologically amenable to such feats of genetic engineering.

The other question besides whether such a thing is possible is whether it is desirable. Depending on one's viewpoint, one could look at immortal humans as a cosmic cancer. At least the cycle of death and birth limits the harm a bad actor can do. What would you do if your least favorite fascist were also immortal and invulnerable? And I do mean that somewhat rhetorically. It's a messy ethical subject to think about, personally. I kinda prefer life and death.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayflick_limit

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_immortality#Organis...

Yikes! What if you die, but the fascist lives forever? That seems like the worst of both worlds.

Why does it matter if everyone else is immortal and invulnerable?

Great question. IMO, it's because it doesn't prevent the counterparty from torturing everyone else in perpetuity. The world risks turning into a Dantean inferno.

Are you talking about the counterparty taking 'physical' people hostage and torturing them? Because that sort of runs counter to 'everyone is invulnerable and immortal'.

Or about them running sentient hell-simulations for fun because they're a sadist? In which case, yes, that is a concern. If you knew it was going on, you could presumably try countermeasures (up to and including threatening to run simulations that decrease the sadist's utility function, if you know it). Otherwise, maybe engage in trades with other people where you refuse to cooperate with someone unless you both audit each other's hardware?

Death is relief from observing the continual descent into madness for the human race. Ever wonder why smart but unacclaimed elders are so bitter? We've spent our lives watching the stupid evil win over the smart evil, and the good never having a chance. I'll be glad when I'm dead, if I could be glad. To not watch the human race destroy itself is all the heaven I expect.

Why are you sticking around, then?

I help others.

Trump/Putin/Jong Un/... forever? Really? I think that would be monstrous.

No matter how unfair things are in life, in the end we are all food for the worms. Already better educated people live longer lives, but once science really 'cures' aging, who do you think will be the first to benefit. And probably the only ones as well?

Why the only ones? That hasn't been the general arc of tech-advancement. You think the rich and powerful are going to prevent companies from making money by selling life-extension to the poor by figuring out how to do it more cheaply?

There's always cryo.

I like this quote by a Greek philosopher Epicurus “Why should I fear death? If I am, then death is not. If Death is, then I am not."

Besides, we all already have died in one way or another. I'm 24 year old, is my 15 year old self still alive, is my 5 year old self still alive? Nope. Even if I make it to my 40s, I will become a different person by then - the person that is me will die in some form.

Now imagine if you lived 500 - 1000 years. There are few this could go:

1.You will be fairly active your entire life, thus experience many of these "personality deaths" - so what difference does it make if you finally die for real

2.You will grow old mentally and stagnate. Chances are you will want to die anyway because you can't take it anymore.

3.You will achieve some degree of "enlightment" - and the forementioned quote will probably make even more sense than we can intellectually imagine

Where is there to go from non-existence but back into Life?

How about just going to more non-existence?

In buddhism there is the four noble truths, a teaching about living life and facing death.

In short, what many people afraid in death (or in life generally) is the fear of losing, either losing their possession, losing their loved ones or how those loved ones will feel when losing you, losing your ability to do your job, etc.

In the teaching, if someone is able to overcome that fear (suffering / dissatisfaction), he / she can accept death as a cycle of living and live more relaxed life.

In a more general sense, these are all various attachments people and society drives people to have. This isn’t to say that indifference to our world is the path that makes sense - this would be a fast way toward suicide. Rather, a life of intent and choosing our attachments with wisdom and understanding finds a good balance between being enslaved by our attachments and a belief that living is itself an attachment.

Doesn't Buddhism say you can never day and you'll re-emerge in somebody else's body?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebirth_(Buddhism)

The purpose of enlightenment is to eventually not re-emerge.

Exactly. They say the Buddha was a very pragmatic man and the whole purpose of his practice was to find a way out of Samsara, the cycle of existence and suffering.

I always wonder if he would have advocated for suicide if only he didn't believe in rebirth.

It always struck me as very weird that Buddhists want to escape suffering. That's just saying you want to escape life. Suffering is beautiful and one of the best parts of life (the only thing better is momentarily overcoming it). But having neither is just sitting around waiting to die.

Well, it depends on what you mean by suffering (and some say suffering isn't the right translation for what they really mean). For buddhists, pain, sadness and grief are not suffering, they are indeed an inescapable part of life and are to be fully embraced with awareness and compassion. Suffering is an unnecessary, clingy, ego-centric (hyphenated to emphasize the buddhist concept) reaction to them.

Doesn't that also imply that life is a sort of punishment? Once you get the lesson, you are no longer forced to play the game?

I'm not a good Buddhist, so this is what AFAIK. Chance to be reincarnated as human is low, it's rare so we are lucky to be born as one. As human we have a chance to gather good karma and attain enlightenment, thus ending the cycle.

I think rather than punishment, it's more like a lesson. And dukkha is often mistranslated as "suffering", but in reality it's closer to dissatisfaction or unhappiness (sadness) rather than suffering.

I disagree that it must be seen as a punishment; once you've attained your degree you no longer need to go to school, but going to school probably wasn't a punishment in the first place.

I guess it depends on your personal outlook.

c.f. notions of transcending for other possible interpretations.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Oddly, I don't see death as something coming for me. Rather, I am heading towards it. No different than heading towards next month, in many ways. Just a time and an event that hasn't happened, yet. From today's point of view.

> Life is preferable to the alternative

Because you are alive.

If you didn't exist you wouldn't have preferences.

> If you didn't exist you wouldn't have preferences.

So if my living self prefers to live and my dead self has no preference, on average I prefer living over dying

Dying is not the opposite of living, it's its consequence and requirement (so far). If you prefer living, you also prefer dying.

It's also the inverse to being born.

Its opposite would be not living (and not being born, and not dying).

I'd say it's more that death is a price people would be willing to pay in return for getting to live for some number of years in the absence of any better options (like not dying).

There are as many ways to live, as many meanings to life, as many philosophies of the nature of things as there are beings in the universe. There's really nothing much to learn, because there are endless things to learn.

One of my favorite comments on Hacker News was posted a few days ago. To quote:

"On and on you will go, making sense of the world, forming notions of order, and being surprised in ways large and small by their failure, forever." — Albert Burneko on Wile E. Coyote: https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/how-wile-e-coyote-explains...

Depends how detailed you want to get. All of us have a need to be social and creative, IMO, and Gray would say each sex has its own traits which do not necessarily hold all the time but can be instructive. I gathered this from his "Men are from Mars..." book.

You’re thinking of the other John Gray

Haha you're right! I did not know there were two. Pretty sure the Mars author is the better known of the two.

Possibly, though I only know the Mars/Venus guy because Amazon used to recommend those books based on the fact that is bought ‘Straw Dogs’

All beings so far have created something beyond themselves. Do you want to be the ebb of that great tide, and revert back to the beast rather than overcome mankind? What is the ape to a man? A laughing-stock, a thing of shame. And just so shall a man be to the Overman: a laughing-stock, a thing of shame. You have evolved from worm to man, but much within you is still worm. Once you were apes, yet even now man is more of an ape than any of the apes.

- Nietzche

The issue with this "only the present matters" shallow take is that the imagined future does matter in terms of the present. In other words, your imagined future influences your actions in the present, often to such a degree that it actually forms the future. If you discard these imagined futures, you end up with a "Eh, I have no agency anyway, why bother with difficult things?" and slide into an apathetic, presentist hedonism.

The game is about constructing imagined futures which are productive and optimistic, not simply checking out entirely.

Also, man is a laughing stock to the ape. "What are you doing without hair? Why so weak? Ugh, what is that you're eating?!" I can scarcely imagine what kind of unsustainable sacrifices the Übermensch will make in service to "progress".

> If you discard these imagined futures, you end up with a "Eh, I have no agency anyway, why bother with difficult things?"

That's one take on the situation, the unreasonable other which all society depends (the inventor), sees a stupid, nihilistic future and gets to work to improve it, simply because there is nothing more interesting to spend one's time than elevating others in need, regardless of it having any meaning.

But your definition of improve and elevating others is inherently based on your worldview and projection of imagined futures. You can’t escape the metaphysical horizon.

I'm ending immediate pain and hunger, how is that operating in an imagined future?

nietzsche was an idiot ...

spotted the intellectual

you don't think his aphorism collection is pretty ridiculous considering that he barely interacted with other people and based his "insights" entirely on reading books and theorizing?

Indeed the long term incentives underpinning the whole of human technological civilization so far requires belief in a better tomorrow. To remove such incentives would have consequences far beyond the first order.

“The grandeur of man is measured according to what he seeks and according to the urgency by which he remains a seeker.” - Heidegger

>and it takes a long time, because they’re slow to trust, slow to really enter into communication with you – then you can probably imagine how they might philosophise.”

>Gray believes that humans turned to philosophy principally out of anxiety, looking for some tranquillity in a chaotic and frightening world, telling themselves stories that might provide the illusion of calm. Cats, he suggests, wouldn’t recognise that need because they naturally revert to equilibrium whenever they’re not hungry or threatened. If cats were to give advice, it would be for their own amusement.

Reminds me of

https://youtu.be/AjFItQPBF3E

I was 1:50 into that before I figured out how the British accents fit into the joke on this Key and Peele skit.

I don't follow. That was a clip of the Cat from Red Dwarf. A British sitcom from the 80's and 90's set in space in the far future.

That's the joke. :) Key and Peele could totally play Cat and Lister. But I'm surprised they never did a red dwarf tribute sketch now that I think about it, that would have been... something for sure. I loved that show!

I gotta admit, sometimes I take things a bit too literally on HN. But yeah, that would be pretty awesome. Never really thought about that before.

Bollocks.

My cats regularly imagine a future in which I'm going towards the fridge to provide them with food......

...when the reality is I'm going elsewhere and just going to trip over them.

Different take : the cat is trying to coerce you into an early feeding, because it recognizes that you as an entity have the power to make such things happen for it.

I think my cat can count to two.

He only goes outside a leash, and we walk together 2-4 times a day.

The harness has two plastic clips, and he will sit still until the second clip is secured. After that second sound, he will stand and walk to wait near the door.

Cats can count to much more than two. If there are treats on a shelf and our older cat knocks them down, she'll remember how many hit the floor (from the sound) and then not stop looking for them until she's found that many. I suspect being able to keep track of distinct objects is useful when hunting if multiple small prey animals disperse in order to confuse the predator.

I had a mother cat who failed to move one kitten from one nook to another. Is counting a common behaviour?

It might be food/hunting related. I only have a sample size of two cats.

This raises the question what counts as counting (sorry). It could be that the cat interprets two actions not as the multiple of one (thus counting 1 → 2), but as a single event with that exact pattern of sounds (thus interpreting "no event" → "event").

This had me curious. From a brief look it seems counting is not so clearly defined as mathematic skills expected by various milestones. [1]

For example,

> Pre-school - Kindergarten

During this stage, children should begin to:

- count aloud

- compute the number of objects in a group

- understand that a particular number of objects has a fixed value despite the size or nature of those objects

- understand relative size and be able to sort objects by size and shape

- follow a sequence of two- and three-step commands

- be able to perform simple addition and subtraction computations

I believe my cat Pip only can only do the “follow a sequence” ability of these mathematical skills, so even if he can “count” he has a ways to go in developing his math skills.

Fortunately, lack of mathematical skill does not get in the way of my adoration for the animal.

[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/misunderstoodminds/mathbasics.html

I think this is a great interview and I will definitely pick up the book. I think the answer to "What can we learn from cats?" can be to live more like a cat. But to force disinterest in an effort to emulate a cat's apparent disinterest would be a mistake. To live more like a cat cannot mean to simply imitate the cat, that would be another ideology. Instead, it must mean that we have to follow our human nature, just as the cat follows its cat nature.

I agree with John Gray's distrust of all ideology because ultimately ideology is what gives us the illusion that we can ignore our human nature. A cat must follow its cat nature, it has no choice. We as humans have a choice to follow our human nature or to try to bend nature to our will. The problem is that nature will always bend back, efforts to bend it will always be futile. So the ideal solution is to abandon ideology and choose to follow our human nature, to be the humans we are meant to be.

I think the central idea is that we need to be humble (like cats) and that hubris is dangerous.

CTRL+F "domestication" then "rats"

Felines are only partially domesticated. From my research into the subject, including the article about the first cat skeleton found with no teeth, indicating humans had fed it, is that they only associate with us because of our habit of debris and sloppiness that attracts their prey. Otherwise, feral felines are still unrepentant killing machines that will try and trip you while walking up the stairs just to feed them so they'll stop yowling.

Source: Personal experience with a feral kitten I have "domesticated" and would probably feed on my corpse for a few days if I trip and fall and die even though she's ~11 human years now.

It is a macabre topic, but cats and dogs don't need to be feral to eat your corpse if you die. Google around, it is not uncommon.

For that matter, imagine you being trapped somewhere you can't care for yourself, with a corpse. What do you do? People have chosen both paths.

All other disgusting factors aside, human meat must have some ridiculous concentration of all kinds of harmful things like mercury and all kinds of bizarre things.

YC 2021 - Soylent Human Hummus - Do vegans taste better than omnivores? - ArsTechnica

Don't even joke.

shutupandtakemymoney.gif

Grain-fed free-range vegans, ethically bow-hunted, marbled meat

Just imagine a human with the "modern hobbies" like "health supplements", micro dosing xyz, grass-fed whateva !

Oh I get it, but my Corgi-Pug rescue mutt doesn't ever seem to intentionally try to trip me. My lovely kitty on the other hand, I wonder sometimes. I guess what I'm trying to say is that domesticated dogs ain't the same as feral cats that enjoy a symbiotic relationship.

A dog is a great source of oxytocin when it looks at you and wags its tail. A cat decides whether or not they want anything to do with you, and in my case, that desire is to sit on my chest and lick my chin with a tongue that feels like sandpaper. They both love attention and enjoy affection, they just express it in different ways.

I'm totally open to Gray's arguments. Wide open. But I do find a some of his writing quite mediocre. I'm surprised by how highly he is regarded. I read Soul of The Marionette recently.and I thought it was a somewhat aimless and poorly written meander through other people's ideas. Had a bit of a Gell-Mann moment as well when he discussed Philip K Dick and I found his summation of Dick's ideas flat and lacking in insight: that was one of the writers on the book whose work I knew well.

I'm with you about Soul of the Marionette - aimless. But perhaps this article gives some hints as to his intention, to light a spark in our subconscious? Im not sure any lights flickered in my head reading that book though!

I think he got very famous with the Straw Dogs and Black Dawn books (I've not read those). Recently he seems to be a columnist mostly ranting about SJWs and brexit - effectively a small c conservative pundit, but sometimes these contain a gem of a paragraph especially when talking about history or literature.

I do like his ideas about the myth of progress and found it chimed with recent discussions about the hinge of history https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200923-the-hinge-of-his...

If the positive changes we have made are not inevitable and this moment in time is not the most important ever, how best should we act to make the best impact on the future?

We have learned a lot from cats. The foundations of deep learning were inspired by the research of cat brains.

https://web.archive.org/web/20150709140148/http://www.nobelp...

we will always opt to view and live through our imagined future, it's how we issue priority in the plans and contingencies of our lives, the best we can agree is to spend more time living in the moment and not otherwise in a loop we call regret where the decisions(past) is being redo in our minds to better imagined outcomes(future)

Right? It seems strange to call wisdom from a creature living in a simplified rule set. Throwing out imagined future necessarily throws out all of society and human knowledge.

gray is not saying that at all.

>What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future

For sure, however we can live in a created future, isn't that what DIY and maker culture all about?

> In the last election he voted Conservative, persuaded in part, he says, by that need to get Brexit done, and laughing now at the delusional hypocrisy of “democrats”, who wanted a second referendum “without the option that people had voted for the first time even on the paper!”

And there he loses all credibility. Very nearly everything that makes Brexit such a fiasco stems from the fact that "the option that people had voted for the first time" was not concrete and well-defined.

I recently watched a video where three cats waited half a day by the door, waiting for their owner's return.

Isn't this article "cat owner entertainment" and not serious? Well, not really.

Also learned from cats: Should be read like a metaphor

- Always land with your feet down when falling.

> Don't live in an imagined future.

Congratulations, dear philosopher. "Living in imagined future" is called motivation. You just told people that they shouldn't have any motivation beyond primitive impulses (hunger, fear, lust) such as those found in a cat. I'm not sure this is good advice for humans, however.

You certainly seem to have a good understanding of how provocative his philosophy is.

He doesn't believe that history is leading anywhere, that there's moral progress. He believes that in the future slavery might return because history is cyclical and a result of a corrupt human nature that has not changed for thousands of years. That means genocides, racism, etc are here to stay and whatever progress we've made is a coincidence.

I believe the Long Peace and technological progress put us at the dawn of the Golden Age, and we're living it right now, setbacks like COVID notwithstanding. Steven Pinker puts forward a powerful argument to that effect in "Enlightenment Now", and it's hard to disagree when you look at the data. Literally none of that would be even possible under this philosophical framework.

Yeah John Gray and Steven Pinker exist at opposite ends of the spectrum on this one (eg https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-stev... ).

I think both perspectives are valuable

Except Pinker's perspective is supported by data.

Gray's view is not that there is no progress but that the idea of natural progression, unstoppable, inevitable progress is wrong and dangerous.

In the article it gives the example (a minor setback, I'm sure) of the return of torture in western democracies.

Data: In terms of lives ruined via proxy wars you can make the data show that more people are in misery now compared to less actual deaths. But we can discard this (personally I think its a weak argument and is a distraction). The main point is not "are we better than we were 50 years ago?" but rather "will we continue this short term trend and reach star trek society?".

The warning from Gray is that if you believe that the world is going automatically on the right path then you don't need to fight for it. You dont see the return of torture as something to be fought against, but just a minor setback. You dont see the rise of proxy wars as something to be criticised, its just a setback to progress. The rise of fascism in Eastern europe and the removal of rights is just a setback in the inexorable rise of progress. We toppled Saddam after all. China will naturally move to democracy. Its neo liberal science fiction.

The warning is that any progress we make is not a natural law. "Progression" is created by and can be destroyed by humans. Indeed when you see history through this lens one often stops calling change "progress".

The warning by Gray is that "believe the Long Peace and technological progress put us at the dawn of the Golden Age" is dangerous hubris and is a belief that can destroy the very things that have been achieved.

Gray does not try to prove that no change has been made, he tries to point out that the good changes need to be continually fought for and defended.

Cats are humble.

You misunderstand Gray and somehow believe him to hold the exact specific position that he's arguing against, namely, the humanism of Dawkins/Pinker/Chomsky. You can't get this from the article above, but read other books he's written, or listen to any of his talks on youtube. He's not a humanist and he's anti-enlightenment. His entire claim to fame is that he rejects the humanist idea of progress despite "minor setbacks".

sounds like the same thing I wrote!

Rejection of the idea of progress.

Gray does not reject that things have happened in the past. He rejects the notion that the reason these things happened is natural and part of "Progress".

> Gray's view is not that there is no progress but that the idea of natural progression, unstoppable, inevitable progress is wrong and dangerous.

What I mean to say is that his view is that there really is no progress. Scientifically, sure, but morally we've been the same for thousands of years. He has quite a nihilistic view that leads to political indifference. Here's a talk of his that explains his position in more detail: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jmRBHCclzZk

In short, however:

e.g. "Gray does not deny the reality of scientific, technological, and material improvements. He only insists that the things we mean when we call such improvements “progress”—that gains, once made, are not lost but built upon, that setbacks are rare and temporary—has no analogy in morality or human affairs: “Knowledge increases at an accelerating rate, but human beings are no more reasonable than they have ever been.” - https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2019/02/21/john-gray-atheis...

I guess another way to put it is that, not only is there not necessarily any progress. But that as a result of a fixed human nature, the mistakes of the past will almost certainly be repeated. As John Gray states “politics is a succession of temporary and partial remedies for permanent and recurring human evil.”

In other words, the political traditions we have currently should not be torn down in the name of progress. Further, we shouldn't try to overthrow dictators like Saddam or the authoritarian rule in China (the opinion on Saddam is that of John Gray). This is because, as is apparent in Iraq, anarchy may rule. And when it does, it's very difficult to reach some level of civilisation and peace.

TL DR: It is easy to tear down a spider web, and very hard to rebuild it.

Gray is not saying motivation is wrong...quite the opposite! Gray is saying that if you believe humanity is headed naturally in the right direction, that this is a dangerous imagination. And that humanity needs motivation to ensure that any progress we make is recognised as special and fragile. Its not automatic and permanent, humanity needs motivation, they can't just believe in an imagined future and sit back and let the imagined invisible powers of progress happen to them.

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