See Randomness
paulgraham.com
paulgraham.com
"You see this goblet?" asks Achaan Chaa, the Thai meditation master.
"For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it.
It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in
beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it.
But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over
or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and
shatters, I say, ‘Of course.’
When I understand that the glass is already broken,
every moment with it is precious."Thank you very much for posting.
One of the reasons I gave up blogging is that it caused me to use up topics that deserved more work on little, quickly written blog posts. That's why I wasn't in a hurry to republish this.
Yes, you can choose what your mind does, but this is simply playing make-believe. No self-respecting mind is going to eat this for more then 10 minutes. Changing your thinking works, but it has to be a bit more subtle (and complicated) then this.
I really liked this: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/minsky07/minsky07_index.html
Back in school I was diagnosed as exceptionally gifted / learning disabled. So I am probably an extreme outlier, but I don't think of myself as the voice in my head. The voice is stuck with language which is this huge, unwieldy instrument, that's far too slow to be interesting. If feels like there are separate machines that can preplan how to move my body, solve math problems, play a video game, etc. Still composing this sentence feels more like remembering the words that best fit the idea, while scrabbling to find the next word to fill out the logical sequence.
Anyway, the best analogy for who I am might be the entity that decides which ideas are terrible and which ones are reasonable enough to keep. But, I don’t hear other people talking about themselves like this, so I wonder if there is all that much commonality. When there are so many ways solve a programming problem why assume that everyone is wired up the same way. Considering all the crazy people out there and how people can function with significant brain damage, there is probably a wide range of internal landscapes even among normal seeming people.
PS: Consider how many different ways people you know react to alcohol a simple drug and then consider love as a huge cascade of chemical responses. Do you really think all of humanity reacts the same way internally?
And then he killed himself. The world is such a strange place.
1. The great many people who live "unexamined lives" tend to be much happier: conservatives are happier than liberals, people in the Midwest are happier than people on the coasts, etc.
2. The default settings are really, really good. You should be extremely skeptical whenever anybody tries to sell you that everyone is born "wrong" and needs to be "fixed" (circumcision, original sin, chiropractic adjustments for all children, etc.). (Vaccination and water fluoridation are the only exceptions I know of, and those are supported by actual science.)
3. Same with anyone saying, "If you don't do this one thing, your whole life is going to be HORRRRRRIBLE!!!"
4. Standard religions most certainly do eat people alive: the people who desperately obsess about them the way his (mostly imaginary) targets obsess about money, power, etc.
5. The real message of the article is the style, and what it says, sentence after sentence, is: "The older, wiser fish knows that life is crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap, crap. And BTW, you know I'm the older, wiser fish, because I'm such a soul-sapping drag. Oh, and BTW, I'm the older, wiser fish, and you're not, and if you can't see that, that only proves what a naïve little twit you are. One day, all you goddamned self-centered little successful optimistic goddamned twits will all be sorry!!!"
BTW, I think the last line might be better phrased as "See indifference." The ubiquity of causation requires that much/most of the word isn't random. It just doesn't give a damn about us. "Seeing indifference", and how to get past it, is probably also a good starting point for new businesses pondering their marketing plan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediocrity_principle
and "See yourself"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle
I love the tension between these two ideas. The universe must be organized in a way that supports your existence, because, well, you exist. But your existence is just a fluke, made possible by the fact that the universe is what it is. The universe wasn't created for your convenience.
Anyway, the juxtaposition of "Everyone ... At least I do" seems to peg it as a joke, given the subject.
Try not to examine it too closely without proper guidance, though: it's a little more than just fuzzy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two_truths_doctrine
It's a very nuanced and often misunderstood concept. Leaning too far to either side (hyper-reification of and attachment to the material world on one side, and Śūnyatā ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Śūnyatā ) -- the emptiness or lack of "thingness" of all concepts -- on the other, lead each to their own problems. Of course, you can get so wrapped up in the observance of walking that line that it becomes a problem, too, which is sort of where Zen steps in with the simple and the absurd.
It all adds up to normality, like you said. I like that.
"Those who believe in the objective reality of experience are stupid, like cows. Those who believe there is no reality at all are even stupider."But life demands, and I stopped my practice and dove back into it with little thought, and that's when things got bad. I had no drive, no motivations, and didn't have a clue who I was anymore. But I also wasn't meditating, which can serve as preventative medicine against the effects of these things in the "real world". I felt kind of clueless and naked, like an amnesiac dumped in the middle of a big city.
Well, anyway, long story short, you'd be surprised how powerful these ancient techniques can be, and you'd be wise to seek guidance from someone experienced before you go dismantling yourself all willy-nilly :). I'm doing wonderfully now, though. And I'm not currently practicing.
You have a world view that you have acquired/formed based on certain assumptions that you may have never questioned. Once you start questioning them, you won't stop at any assumption, and you go into a sort of mental abyss, especially, if you have never believed in God.
One consolation is that however hopeless it may feel when you go there, you'll probably come out and get back to your usual self.
How do I know who I am? When I try a new food, what are my criteria for deciding whether or not I like it? If I wish to be a better person, why am I not already that better person?
How many of the tags you use to idendify yourself are actually group membership tags... e.g. pythonista, founder, etc.?
How many of the activities you do only make sense in the context of people (productive member of society stuff)? Even more, how many of the things you do are because of the consequences for or from others (feed your family, help your friends, do something recognized as really cool)?
Where "me" stops and society begins is always a bit fuzzy.
It is said to be Napoléon Bonaparte.
> ...but it is a powerful idea.
Yes anyway, this is what matters and this is "true".
In any case, I would like to know about tech examples of this:
So if you want to discover things that have been overlooked till now, one really good place to look is in our blind spot: in our natural, naive belief that it's all about us. And expect to encounter ferocious opposition if you do.
PG: Did you write this on etherpad? Can you share that link? I wanted to get a look at how this essay was shaped, specifically the above mentioned sentence. Thanks!
What I did get snapped into was understanding 2 things about evolution by natural selection:
1) It is an abstract principle. It exists very comfortably outside of genetics or even biology in a very similar way to numbers existing outside of apples and oranges.
2) It is creation. That is, it has abilities so similar to what we call creativity that it can very plausibly be called creativity.
Just defining and demonstrating memes along with his description of some classroom experiment drawing boats brought those two things home. After that, I got why biologists are so in love with evolution.
Biology happens to utilise this powerful principle. Happens to. There may be many such powerful principles out there without a flagship product. Undiscovered.
In the tradition of Darwin and Dawkins, I heartily recommend Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Pinker's always worth reading, and for me this is his best. Broader and deeper than his more linguistic work.
( http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/4363 )
That book truly changed the way I lived and the way I thought.
I'm not convinced.
To me, the most convincing atheist argument has always been some variation of Russell's teapot.
Accepting Russell's argument (which I think is very hard not to without challenging knowledge generally) you cease to ask that question. Just because religion happens to usually come before atheism doesn't mean that atheism needs to prove itself. The burden of proof is on the theist because of the nature of the claim.
There is no need to prove that gods do not exist to be an atheist.
No, it turns out, humans are not created by God in his own image; they're just one species among many, descended not merely from apes, but from microorganisms.
I'm not really trying to convince anyone, just showing how for many people the process of changing their mind about God involved the principle outlined in the essay and demonstrated in these comments.
According to Russell (with whom I agree) The fallacy lies in the question, a common place for blind spots to hide.
Counterpoint: God could be described as the "master programmer". A supreme being would be capable of designing an evolutionary system which would evolve beings who are capable of contemplating the existence of God himself.
That deity probably has a handle on chaos theory.
A better question -- because it gives some opportunity for applying actual information about the world -- is "If a supreme being were making a world, would we expect it to look like this one, or very different?". The answer to that depends on what sort of supreme being you have in mind, of course.
Now that we're not burning or crushing people for disavowing the state church we don't need to define the belief system solely on that criteria anymore.
Suppose you firmly believed the answer to the simulation argument was that we are indeed living in a simulation. Who runs the code? By any reasonable definition of god you have some; they may be petty, or foreign, or unknowable but you've got gods all the same. Yes they are not Christian gods, so in that sense the person is still a-Christian-theist but does that still have meaning.
Or suppose the earth was seeded with amino acids by a traveling and functionally immortal alien race who monitor earth by ansible and adjust things for the better every now and again when people ask them too. Athiest? Well sort of.
The claim that there are no simulation masters, no alien races, no omniscient AI spy satellites, no ... is certainly possible, but it seems like we're back to thinking that we humans are special and the center of the universe.
This is partly just a matter of verbal semantics but I think just deciding to be not Christian/Muslim/Jewish/etc. often leads to theological laziness about other possibilities, and as atheism becomes more commonplace (it's hard to imagine that it won't) maybe it won't be enough to just join the camp and call it good.
Huh?!
If what we do doesn't have any meaning (i.e. if no one is watching) then we might as well do anything we want. By discarding the idea of god, its true that we do tend to place ourselves as the highest beings in existence, but that doesn't mean we put ourselves at the center, we just discard the idea that there is a center.
That's insulting, and (more importantly) it doesn't seem to have any factual backing. Got evidence? Because I don't know a single formerly-religious-person for whom that sort of thing was even a consideration.
And come on, everybody makes up their moral rules or inherits them from their community, or usually some combination of both. Some of them attribute the results to God, but the difference is minimal.
Humans are the vehicles of anti-randomness, we make patterns.
Yay:
Conversely, if you have to choose between two theories, prefer the one that doesn't center on you.
This is exactly my primary article of faith in life. (By faith I mean the stuff I fill the missing gaps in my knowledge with in order to make actionable decisions.)
Nay:
See randomness.
1. I'm not sure what this even means. How does one learn to see randomness and just what are they seeing when they see it?
2. It's not the positive version of "stop inserting yourself in the chain of causality". (Is there even a positive way to say "stop doing that thing you're doing"?)
I say pick b.
b is not random. It's just not about you.
I meant you should actively seek out ways in which you're seeing patterns where there aren't any.
"Bias: your pattern recognition is overzealous" would be a great companion essay, which I would love to read. Especially ideas for countering it.
A line from that essay showing up at the end of the "Bias: you think it's about you/your species, but it isn't" essay seems quite.. random.
Sorry.
Self-centrism, while no doubt obstructive in the search for a cure to cancer can be quite useful when say, asking for a raise or deciding whether to ask that girl out.
I find it quite useful, when unsure about something, to assume the option that is most beneficial to you.
This positive self-centrism could also come in quite handy when starting a startup.
This leads to the most famous and one of the most controversial elements of the [a] play. Adam cannot understand what the purpose of his existence is if mankind's future is so bleak. The last line is spoken by God: "Mondottam, ember, küzdj és bízva bízzál!" ("I have told you, Man: fight on, and trust!") Depending on the interpretation, this can either be seen cynically as the words of a capricious deity, or else pointing to a "hope beyond all hope," that God has a purpose for all things which man may not necessarily comprehend. This is markedly different from Paradise Lost, where the Christian hope is explicitly spelled out.
listen to the talk: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2009/2641555....