21 Lessons by Yuval Harari – Some thoughts

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Book review - 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Homo Deus, Meditation, Personal survival strategy, Sapiens, Yuval Harari

 

Like Harari’s other books, Sapiens and Homo Deus, this book 21 Lessons has the feeling of easy first draft writing, but the ideas are turtles all the way down into his depths. He claims he writes from his experiences developed from his two hours per day of meditation and that none of these three books would exist without his meditations.

The science of brain exploration is progressing well, that is, an understanding of chemistry, electricity, synapses and such, but that isn’t the mind; it is just mechanistic functioning of the brain. It is like examining the mechanical operation of a car and thinking you understand cars. Whereas, for a human, the mind is more like using the car and having living experiences that are created by that car and in combination with the car’s unique qualities. The mind is not chemistry, it is the felt emotion in response to something internal to the body. There may be an external input of some kind that goes through the mechanism of the body and into the brain, but it is the mind that is experiencing the emotions and mediating what is to be learned from the experience. Probably there is another level within the mind that should have a separately defined state within this hierarchy. That is, the mind performs its functions, but it isn’t until the individual attends to these available ideas as a conscious interaction with other things that they become available for useful action. There may be reflexive reactions that occur as brain responses instantly to a threat stimulus, and mental responses that are slower emotionally driven actions, but when there is an interplay of a few ideas that are conscious they can become new and useful ideas never before encountered by humanity.

21 Lessons is ultimately about self-observation and Harari’s form of it is called Vipassana meditation, which may go back to the Buddha. I’ve been meditating for twenty minutes per day, but my mind is still a wild thing. It’s like watching squirrels chasing one another in the spring mating season. Harari says there are many forms of meditation and he has explored many of them in an attempt to understand his mind.

Following that idea into deeper meditations seems like a good idea to me.

 

 

Finally an approximate return to my normal life.

Tags

Bend Bulletin, Diet and BMI, Inguinal hernia, My normal life returns, Prostate cancer, Returning to Seneca, Snow and ice removal, Snowpocalypse

A year ago I had just reached my year-long diet goal for attaining my perfect Body Mass Index (BMI) and was feeling really healthy. I could climb the four levels of our local parking structure to the rooftop two steps at a time and then walk across the top level to my parked car in comfort. Breathing hard of course, but comfortable. Then came a diagnosis of prostate cancer and I participated in forty-four radiation treatments. Here is an article in the Bend Bulletin, with photos, about the very device I laid in and the nurse that controlled my treatments. It was actually a pleasant experience and while in the waiting room I had many wonderful conversations with people experiencing similar life-threatening situations. I survived very well, some didn’t!

In my follow-up visit with my radiation doctor a month later I mentioned a new lump in my lower right abdomen. He checked it and declared I had an advanced inguinal hernia. I then visited my VA personal doctor within the week, and he began the paperwork for me to get the appropriate operation. That was completed eight days ago, and I am on the mend and feeling good and doing heavy-duty things like shoveling a lot of snow off my house roof, and chopping with a pick-ax through six-inch thick ice to clear things like street drains with huge water puddles around them.

I make a point of doing those things in such a way that there isn’t the slightest strain on my hernia stitches. With the forty degrees weather, the snow is melting and the main streets are dry, and our residential street is clearing up nicely, but there are many eight-foot high piles of snow about the city, and lots of puddles. My house has five-foot piles of snow continuously around all four sides. That snow is mixed with slabs of inch-thick ice that I pried off the roof. That is necessary to prevent ice dams that force water through the roof into the house. There are many cases of that problem with people I know. I wouldn’t be surprised if as many as ten percent of homes here in Bend had water intrusions and roof collapses. But who’s counting? The insurance companies I suspect are being hit hard.

I have never missed any of my daily social meetings during these months of “trials and tribulations,” and if I hadn’t mentioned them I suspect that no one would have guessed I had the slightest problem. Hopefully, these potentially horrible things are in abeyance for a while and I can spend more time with my philosophers.

My problems are trivial compared to Seneca‘s and the more carefully I read his writings the more orderly and quiet my life becomes.

Fourth post-op day and my medical ducks are bored.

It is now the fourth day since I had inguinal hernia surgery. Since then I’ve talked to a couple of guys about my surgery and compared to theirs it was duck soup; that is, there was only a little pain and that was when I did something I could control and not do again. Except for when coughing or sneezing I had no pain events that were serious enough that I considered taking the Oxycodone-Acetaminophen that was prescribed to me. I would rather observe my pain and avoid doing what caused it than suppress it and be dulled to my world of experience.

I don’t like having these drugs around and will dispose of them tomorrow morning if I sleep well tonight. I am doing some experiments with making an anti-sneeze/anti-cough spray. My current experiment is to dissolve a cough drop in whiskey and then spray that into my mouth when there is a tickle in my throat. There is nothing to report yet. As previously reported, if I could get a cough drop chewed and dissolved in my mouth in fifteen seconds, it would suppress the cough. By making the spray I can get that solution into my throat in a second or two but like I said, I have nothing to report yet.

I attended my usual conversations with my friends and they were as exciting as ever, perhaps a little too exciting because I overstated my opinion on something and offended a dear friend. Sorry. Later, in the afternoon I attended a scheduled group discussion, where I showed off a photo of my recovering incision. I held it life-sized over the site. Several of the guys mentioned what appeared to me as nostalgic memories of similar experiences.

On to more serious things. Because of this assault on my life, a modest assault, I have been thinking about my eventual death and what I wish that I had done, but haven’t done yet.

I don’t have much ambition to make money; actually I’ve never had much of that, and I do have enough to get by. Thanks to my medical bills being covered by the Veterans Administration because of my two years of military service as a pilot in the USAF, I haven’t been driven into desperation by this hernia operation.

I have some personal friends who treat me well, and I attend the UU church every Sunday and do a few routine good works there, so there is a mild feeling of satisfaction from that. I have several other small social groups that I attend regularly, and even though I miss the exhilaration of living in Berkeley for fifty-one years, what I am doing is meaningful enough.

I have Debbie as a multi-decades-long life companion and we get along so well that people often mention that in passing by. We rarely argue about money, or politics, or religion, or anything else except for the meaning and pronunciation of words. Even though I have been crankier than usual because of my medical problems the last few months, she has been a constant and reliable companion.

In my discussion group with about eighteen guys this afternoon I said something that was a bit much for them. I said that I didn’t mind dying or being dead, and didn’t expect to have any personal afterlife to look forward to; that instead, I felt comfortable returning to the nonliving matter of the Universe. That the Universe is such a spectacular thing that I feel good about becoming once again an unthinking part of its grandeur. That little speech didn’t get any hurrahs from those people, most of whom said they were praying for an afterlife where they would be reunited with their loved ones, but I felt that it might give them a feeling that everything would be okay even if that afterlife is what not happens to them personally.

Clearing one’s own mind from unnecessary stresses and helping other people to live more abundantly is enough.

How America Went Haywire

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Falsehoods are unchallengable, Haywire thinking, Trustworthiness of information, Truth is open to challenge, TST~

I’ve been reading Fantasyland by Kurt Andersen for a couple of weeks and it is disturbing to my intellectual and emotional equanimity. It is an interesting book to read but generates annoyance sometimes because he refers to interesting research papers from some people at some university somewhere. There are frequent footnotes but even so there are serious gaps in his arguments caused by lacunae in the links going back to his information sources. See page 262-3 for some examples.

I very much like the book and it gives a good effort at answering questions that have bothered me for years. Such as, why are so many Americans living their lives based on assumptions that are not only untestable but unrealistic, insane and destructive to the health and wellbeing of their true believers?

On the next page, 264, there is a plausible answer given by Thomas Jefferson, one of the key creators of our nation. “Thomas Jefferson said he’d ‘rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than those attending too small a degree of it’—and it would all be okay because in the new United States ‘reason is left free to combat’ every sort of ‘error of opinion.'”

All of that made sense back in the 1700s, when a hand-driven printing press was high tech and a thousand copies of an article would be a good print run. Also, only a few had access to those presses. Nowadays, everyone has access to the internet and can publish anything they can think up. Unfortunately, the most exciting things get read and redistributed, and easily mentally accessed flagrant lies get vastly more readership than carefully thought out, and carefully researched and linked analysis and opinion. What the internet public thrives on is the basest sort of undocumented, even undocumentable, scary stuff. Below is the chart of Trustworthiness of Information that I created in 2007, which lays out standards for various levels of believability of information. Click here for a big and printable view, and drag to the side for easy reference.

Trustworthiness of Information

The materials that are having the most influence at present on the internet are at the top of the chart: TST~0, A glorious Hoax with an ultimate authority seeking your abject belief, Unverifiable source of data with clear problems in the historical record and with probable translation spins. Unfortunately, expert frauds carefully done are impossible to identify, and there is no way of verifying them.

A bit of information that is at the highest level of trustworthiness requires (at TST~14) Cross Accountability by Known and accountable people with the goal of clarifying reality; they have a keen desire for irrefutable proofs. The best information comes from groups of cross-purposed accountable viewers observing the same ongoing events and agreeing. This involves presently viewable processes which can be easily challenged at every moment by the accountable and well informed outside people. Complete clarity always leaves material open to questioning.

TST~0 is the stuff of excitement usually found on the internet, and TST~14 is usually challenged by TST~0 believers because it is designed in such a way as to be falsifiable. Because TST~0 is unchallengeable it isn’t challenged and therefore is accepted as true. Unfortunately, Andersen’s book Fantasyland, while exposing a lot of TST~0 thoughts in others, commits some of them himself.

Thus the greatest falsehoods are easily defended and believed and the greatest truths are constantly challenged and therefore disbelieved. 

Do it right!!!” Emptying your brain and refilling it with the right stuff

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Buddha, Ego is the Enemy, Jesus, Lao Tzu, Ryan Holiday, Seneca, Socrates Cafe discussion

In the post last week, “Do it right!!!” Overfilling your brain with the right stuff, I complained about the author of Ego is the Enemy, Ryan Holiday, falling into a simplistic reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act I, Scene 3, 564-567, where Polonius, the king’s chief counselor, gives these concluding lines of advice to his son Laertes who is sailing away to University:

This above all – to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man.
Farewell. My blessing season this in thee!

The problem is that these words sound great, and they may be good advice most of the time when dealing with honest people, but at critical times like when someone is trying to murder you, it is a better policy for your own self-survival to be infinitely subtle and false to the planners of your demise.

The title of the book, Ego is the Enemy, and the cover of the book, with a beautiful Roman-style portrait bust statue with its head knocked off, perfectly state Holiday’s developmental problem. He is like an amalgamation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Polonius and Ophelia trapped in shortsightedness of the real problems of survival. 

Some of the greatest heroes of history looked ahead, saw their own demise at the hands of treacherous intellectual opponents, and chose to pursue their cause and in some bizarre way enjoy their own well-staged deaths. Seneca, Jesus, Buddha, Lao Tzu, and Socrates seem to have realized that their method of departure from public life would bring immortality to their words. They wouldn’t live forever, but their actions as described in the form of word images are immortal and alive today. Shakespeare stated this well in

Sonnet 74

But be contented when that fell arrest
Without all bail shall carry me away;
My life hath in this line some interest,
Which for memorial still with thee shall stay.

When thou reviewest this, thou dost review
The very part was consecrate to thee;
The earth can have but earth, which is his due,
My spirit is thine, the better part of me;

So then thou hast but lost the dregs of life,
The prey of worms, my body being dead,
The coward conquest of a wretch’s knife,
Too base of thee to be remembered;

The worth of that, is that which it contains,
And that is this, and this with thee remains.

Every moment I must choose what is the most important thing I can do NOW.

 

 

What do you want? Truth or truth? Beauty or beauty?

Tags

Anavysos Kouros, Church ceilings of the world., Living a life of little b beauty., What is beauty?, What is big B Beauty?, What is little b beauty?

A couple of posts ago I came down firmly on the side of little t for scientific truth rather than big T revealed Truth. The reason is simple for me, in that I can go and bring little t truth into my reality with personal experience. Whereas revealed big T Truth is always and forever hidden from me and I am compelled if I am to accept its Truths, to swallow the whole Kool-Aid. I much prefer untainted lemonade, which if I don’t like it, I can spit it out.

Can I apply this same style of judgment to the concepts for beauty? Is there such a thing as big B Beauty and little b beauty? What would be the qualities of big B Beauty? Applying the method above, big B Beauty would be fixed and I would be forced to accept it whole or not at all, and furthermore, there would be some form of punishment for not accepting it exactly as it is presented.

A couple of months ago I Googled beautiful church interiors and (click images and also go to) beautiful church ceilings – and I spent an hour marveling at the beauty and variety of this art form. And yet, as I see it now, it is a “take it or leave it” kind of beauty. It was created as a big B Beauty. In our modern world, we can go visit these Beautiful places without the threat of punishment but it was probably not always so. In their original formal settings, we would be compelled to enter these sacred places with our personal traditions in their proper place and inspected, or we were asked forcefully to leave and be forbidden from participating in the rituals.

What would little b beauty be? The beauties provided by “Mother Nature” come to mind. Sunsets, blue sky transitions, clouds, forest walks, waterfalls, still ponds, and quiet swamps. These we can all view freely without any form of punishment, if there aren’t any mosquitoes. Having been a lifetime people watcher, I would consider the most beautiful things on this planet to be people. The great variety of them and every one of them beautiful when you view them in the environment they have chosen to adapt themselves to.

Is that the core of beauty? Is any being located in an environment where it can thrive – just as it is – the key to its beauty? An hour ago I was looking at “The Anavyssos Kouros” on page 31 of “The Art Book” (which we got on a New Year’s deal for $10). What struck me first about this 530 BCE Greek sculpture was its obvious derivative qualities from classic Egyptian art forms, but when reading the caption it became apparent that this was a grave goods icon sculpture that accompanied a young soldier who died in battle. Is this sculpture’s perfect place for its existence accompanying a dead body of a beautiful young man?

I am presently living in a world of little b beauty and enjoying it very much.

The Origins of Creativity by Edward O. Wilson – review

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Edward O. Wilson, Eveish Selection, John Shelby Spong, Science combining with Religion, Science versus religion, The measure of man, Women choosing mates

The measure of man and everything else.

As always, a book by E. O. Wilson is a pleasant experience because he has a deep kindly wisdom of his subjects based upon a lifetime of being in the center of his scientifically inclined intellectual world. The goal of his creative instinct is to “translate the previously unperceived into the limited audiovisual world of human consciousness. … the advance will come with understanding the evolutionary forge in which culture was shaped, slowly and often painfully, from animal instinct.” … “The study of religion is an essential part of the humanities. It should nonetheless be studied as an element of human nature, and the evolution thereof, and not, in the manner of Christian bible colleges and Islamic madrassas, a manual for the promotion of a faith defined by a particular creation story.” (p. 194-95) This way of approaching religion is similar to 1st Presbyterian Bishop John Shelby Spong‘s approach which I discussed in several posts. Both of these scholars have had a life-long pursuit of truth from very different perspectives but have come close to a common worldview.

In Wilson’s concluding pages, he writes, “The real limitation of present-day philosophy is not clashes of authorial logic but incoherence, due chiefly to inattention to science. This is curious, since we are in what can reasonably be called the Age of Science, and science is positioned to combine with the humanities to rekindle the spirit of the earlier Enlightenments. I believe that the two, meeting in common inquiry, can at last solve the great questions of philosophy. … At the base, we need to explore ever more deeply the meaning of humanity, why we exist as opposed to having never existed. And further, why nothing even remotely like us existed on Earth before. The grail to be sought is the nature of consciousness, and how it originated. Equally fundamental is the origin and proliferation of life as a whole.” (p. 196-97) These two longish quotes illustrate the coming together of Bishop Spong and Harvard Professor Wilson.

What caught my eye was the sentence bolded by me but emphasized by Wilson with the words “The grail to be sought, … and how it originated.” That is precisely what was discussed in Selection – Natural, Sexual, Artificial and Eveish. Below is a quote from that post.

“Eveish selection is a new term delineating what we humans have been doing to other humans for over 50,000 years. It is a form of sexual selection but with a human difference. The older sexual selection tends to choose a single quality as a marker for genetic health and thus environmental adaptedness but Eveish selection chooses a composite of many, many qualities. Human women make their selection of mates based not only on animal vigor but on all of the qualities in a mate including those which distinguish humans from other animals. It is a very complex decision process because the environment is very complex and the qualities being valued are difficult to assess, even for humans. Women converse at great length with each other about humans the various human qualities and it is generally given the derogatory name of gossip. But, it is this measuring of humans against some infinitely variable complex of qualities which is what gossip is about and it is what ultimately improves the quality of the human species from one generation to the next.

Eve chooses Adam with a little help from her friends.

I made this composite picture, derived from Michelangelo’s “God creating Adam” and Goya’s “Naked Maja” to illustrate my theory of human-style selection in action. The picture shows Adam having ascended some difficulty, showing his prowess over another man and Eve choosing him as her mate but with the advice and counsel of a group of angelic friends whispering in her ear.

Males are still choosing females based on their physical attractiveness, health and vigor but females have been choosing males since the beginning of modern humans and of speech for all of those qualities which make us human. It is reasonable in this view to replace Michelangelo’s God as the creator of the human species with Eve and her talkative companions.”

It is women who are measuring man and breeding with the best available one.

The big problems for Wilson and Spong are answered by observing human women and who they choose to mate with.

 

DESIGNA followed by SCIENCIA and QUADRIVIUM

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Archimedes, DESIGNA, Evolution of thought, QUADRIVIUM, SCIENCIA, Volume of a sphere

Here is a pleasant way for an artistically inclined person who has also had a strong scientific streak to spend a month or more. It is to purchase and read  DESIGNA: Technical Secrets of the Traditional Visual Arts. Be warned that this isn’t reading a book in the usual way but requires considerable effort and endurance to weave your brain into and through the complex windings of Celtic artists and Muslim graphic designers’ images and minds. For me it was worth it, because I now appreciate much more what other people have created. With that experience in mind I purchased another of the Bloomsbury Wooden Books series – SCIENCIA: Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Astronomy for All.

This is really dropping into an infinitely bottomless rabbit hole of mind-challenging reality. This book, as far as I have comprehended it, demonstrates our reality as it is rather than as some people wish it to be. On page 22-23 we encounter what made the Classic Greek Archimedes so happy he had it carved into his gravestone. It is a proof that the volume of a hemisphere equals the volume of a cylinder wrapping the hemisphere minus the volume of a cone that just fits inside the hemisphere: Πr³ − 1/3Πr³ = 2/3Πr³ (pi times radius cubed). This is only half of a sphere so if we multiply by two we get the volume of a sphere. Thus the volume of a sphere is 4/3 Πr³. That is the result of a few little problems that Archimedes figured out and are illustrated with a few drawings found in this book. It’s easy, so they say, but it does require following a tight argument. I have known that formula since high school but didn’t know how it was derived.

Apparently, I am a glutton for mental anguish because I ordered another book from the Wooden Book publishers – QUADRIVIUM: The Four Classical Liberal Arts of Number, Geometry, Music, and Cosmology. This is an approximation of a complete Classic Medieval European education under one cover, and it took an intelligent person several years to complete a classical education.

I did do a passable job of reading DESIGNA and have made an acceptable beginning on SCIENCIA but it seems unlikely that I can squeeze QUADRIVIUM into my brain.

Why You Eat What You Eat – Rachel Herz

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Book review Rachel Herz, Rachel Herz, Why You Eat What You Eat

Why You Eat What You Eat by Rachel Herz

This book is a wonderful source of facts about what people eat, and why. It is well researched, sourced, and written. Food is more than a substance we eat with our mouths, it is also an emotional connection to our family, our culture and our whole world. It is also a spiritual connection to those things and our own soul too. In short – food is life. It’s my life. It’s your life. Without food we don’t exist for very long. Food is important!

One of the important things about food for restaurant owners is that it is about the feelings the customers have while they are in their restaurant. This book has a multitude of thoughts on the feelings associated with the infinity of variations of what food can be and become. Many of these go back to Charles Spence, a gastronomic guru whom I blogged about a year ago in Gastrophysics – The New Science of Eating. That book influenced the way I eat because it made more aware of the fact that I am a dabbler, a little of this, a little of that, with quite a few different items on the plate at one time. I like to have lots of variation in the flavors, the odors, the smoothness, the crunchiness, the weird patterns, and colors of my food. Once I became aware of my natural inclinations I was able to exploit them and help to enrich my particular lust for life.

One curious “scientific” discovery that I have felt but don’t remember ever verbalizing is that people who are involved with something that requires their emotional and moral effort become short-tempered with other people who fail to make those same efforts. That concept is discussed on page 278-81 under the sub-title “Green and Mean.” In that section, we discover that people who get active in a special kind of moral cleansing and moral superiority are ultimately bad for humanity. There forms a strange reaction from these people who pursue a moral high ground of ethical foods and ethical behavior. You must toe their line of rectitude or suffer their judgments, or those righteous people will project feelings of moral transgressions upon you.

There is a moral undertone to this book that is covered beautifully with what feels like underpopulated small scientific studies.

What is the best behavior?

Tags

John Shelby Spong, Love frugally., What is best?, What is the best behavior?

One of the basic ideas of the Wallace/Darwin theory of evolution is that the members of a species that fit the environment best are the ones that survive best and reproduce the most successfully. Before that selection can be made means the species has survived, or it wouldn’t have individuals available to reproduce. Because the environment constantly changes means no members are ideally adapted. Species that have survived have thus developed behaviors and genetic actions that include adaptability as a component of their being. 

That general statement applies to humans as a species, as social subgroups, and as individuals. With humans, it is the individuals who can perceive the facts of their environment and arrange those mental perceptions accurately as comprehensible ideas that fit the situation. Those who can do that best survive best. That ability requires having ideas but not having overly fixed ideas about the realities that come before them. They have the ability, either genetic or learned to remain flexible at the opening stages of a new problem. Other members of their group who are inclined to lock on to a fixed idea too early in a situation will obscure their exposure to facts of new realities with their preexisting ideas. The problem, for these individuals, becomes a misapplication of their personal resources because their preexisting ideas of what the reality actually is and what needs to be done don’t fit the situation well.

With that in mind, this next statement is a follow-on to my ongoing series of critiques of John Shelby Spong’s book Unbelievable: … Ultimately those individuals survive best who apply their available resources most responsibly and frugally. They give exactly what is needed for the optimal outcome. One characteristic that is observable from afar is that they never squander resources. But that is exactly what Spong recommends in the concluding sentence of his final book, Unbelievable. In this sentence, he states unequivocally – to love wastefully.

I would insist that love is one of a human being’s most precious attributes and it is to be given freely, but it is to be given frugally even to those who are deserving of our love.