The narcissism of wedding photographers
The problem is that photographs don’t just record reality — they change it. Quantum physicists talk of the observer effect: the very act of observing reality causes a disturbance within it, and thus changes it. Something similar is true of wedding photography. We pose for photographs. We behave differently when we are being captured on film. We may feel awkward or self-conscious; we may pout or posture. In extreme cases, reality is bent around the presence of the photographic: lighting is enhanced, people are asked to stand in different places and look in different ways. Reality becomes a stage set.
The Art of Solitude
To be able to die at peace, a philosopher needs to die to his attachments to the world. This, for Montaigne, is “true solitude,” where one’s thoughts and emotions are reined in and brought under control. “To prepare oneself for death is to prepare oneself for freedom. The one who has learned to die has unlearned to be a slave.”
To die to the world is far from straightforward. “People do not recognize the natural sickness of their mind,” says Montaigne, which does nothing but “ferret about in search of something, ceaselessly twisting, elaborating, and entangling itself in its own activity like a silkworm, until it suffocates there like ‘a mouse in pitch.’ ” We rush around in a compulsive flight from death. “Every moment,” he remarks, “it seems I am fleeing from myself.” No matter how many laws or precepts we use to fence the mind in, we still find it “garrulous and dissolute, escaping all constraints.” This flight is chaotic and aimless. There is “no madness or lunacy that cannot be produced in this turmoil. When the soul has no definite goal, it gets lost.”
What Is Property? by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
In this treatise, Proudhon contrasts the legitimate right to possession, in which individuals own the products of their labor and the necessary means of production, and the illegitimate right to property, the absolute right granted to proprietors by civil laws to “use and abuse.”
Determinism vs. free will: A scientific showdown
However, the (often quite unpopular) truths revealed by the scientific method—heliocentrism, evolution, quantum mechanics—have often upended “the clear existence of” what came before. Determinism may be no different.
My favorite debate.
Death Is a Part of Life
When we know that our time in this body and in this life is finite—when we fully embrace finitude—we don’t waste time. When the scarcity of our time comes into the forefront of our consciousness, we tend not to do the unskillful actions that cause harm. When we “greet and hold death as an advisor on our shoulder all the time,” as Carlos Castaneda said, the way we live our life changes.
We live with more freedom, peace, ease, love, and care because we know there is nothing to hang on to. We are a traveler on this earth. This body is not mine. It’s for rent. This life is for rent.
When we realize this, we live differently, we live more freely. We let go of our clinging, our sense of attachment to me, me, me, mine, mine, mine. It shifts our perspective. We can live with more freedom, generosity, kindness, and forgiveness. There is nothing to take with us. There’s nothing to hang on to. So this practice is liberating, just as the Buddha says, and it has the deathless as its fruit.
Think in analog, capture in digital
To be a frustrating centrist I would say, “why not both?”. Analog is the better choice for thinking and note-taking 90% of the time. But its usefulness ends when all those insights are trapped in notebooks. Gathering dust and requiring overly obtuse ways of organisation like BuJo.
This is where we can supplement with digital methods of storage. We can review what we’ve written and decide if it’s worth capturing. What we’re left with is a digital archive of our pursuits. Whether they’re intellectual, creative or personal. They are kept safe for generations to come to discover. Especially if they’re captured in a universal format like TXT or Markdown. Even more so if they are stored publicly.
We may not know now whether our insights and thoughts are useful. But they may be useful for those that come after us. By leaving them in an easy to access, long lasting, public format we can ensure our contributions to society last longer than us.
I write on a typewriter, then scan the pages with my iPhone camera or portable scanner. They are then keyword-searchable, copy-and-paste-able just like a document created on a computer.
I write on typewriters because they physically slow me down. My thoughts cannot fly out of my mind at the speed of a computer keyboard or dictated voice memo.
This slowness creates space for introspection.
In Defense of Hypocrisy
When people attack a teaching by criticizing the behavior of the messenger, they fail to distinguish between truth and authority. Truth does not depend on the person preaching it because truth is objective. If objective truths did not exist, then any discussion on moral codes is meaningless because two persons could have opposing views on the acceptability of murder and both would be correct from their subjective standpoint. Murder being right and wrong at the same time is absurd. Thus, though humans may err in interpreting truth, truth itself is objective and outside of humans.
I’ve always been a touch uneasy with the charge of hypocrisy — both leveling it and having it leveled at me. It’s a bit too…easy. Online, it’s a get-out-of-jail-free deflection, a charge you can throw at someone to put them back on their heel and thus distract from your own inevitable failings.
I found this article particularly interesting given it’s a Catholic publication and, well, need I say any more? But in our cultural slide toward relativism, I find myself with strange bedfellows yet again.
Opportunity Econophysics: Opportunity Cones, Conscious Agents, and Mechanical Traces of the Conscious Dimension
The quest to capture mechanical traces of
consciousness within spatiomatter presents a
compelling challenge. By leveraging advanced technologies, such as mobile devices equipped with sensors, we have the potential to gather immense volumes of data from billions of participants. Through data analysis, we aim to uncover patterns, correlations, and anomalies that may reveal the influence of consciousness on the physical realm. The development of novel workflows and data processing techniques enables us to navigate this vast ocean of information, inching closer to capturing the elusive traces of consciousness within spatiomatter.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, cribbing liberally from my favorite comedian: free will is a cognitive distortion made to compartmentalize chaos.
As we traverse this fascinating territory, we inch closer to unraveling the fundamental nature of consciousness, empowering us to forge new paths in resource management, decision-making, and the pursuit of a more harmonious and prosperous future.
“Harmonious” and “prosperous” are doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Overall? Fascinating.
Headed Into the Abyss by Brian T. Watson 📚
I just finished, laying here in my bed, the dogs and cat asleep beside me. Crickets chirp out my window. In the distance a train’s whistle breaks and rolls over the valley.
More than anything, I prize seeing things clearly. Nothing fills me with that particular and precious joie de vivre — that electric sizzle — quite like close proximity to the truth. But most people don’t like the truth. We’ll do anything to avoid it, if we know it at all. So it’s a rare thrill to read something so transgressive in its honesty, so clear-eyed.
Credit to Brian T. Watson for his courage to accept the inevitable, and then to write it. May his acceptance be an inspiration.
The Dark Mountain Manifesto
Around the world, discontent can be heard. The extremists are grinding their knives and moving in as the machine’s coughing and stuttering exposes the inadequacies of the political oligarchies who claimed to have everything in hand. Old gods are rearing their heads, and old answers: revolution, war, ethnic strife. Politics as we have known it totters, like the machine it was built to sustain. In its place could easily arise something more elemental, with a dark heart.
A lot has changed since I first read this almost 15 years ago, but it has only become more prescient.
‘The Machines We Have Now Are Not Conscious’
What we have with these LLMs isn’t low-level intelligence but rather high-level applied statistics that creates the powerful illusion of low-level intelligence.
I predict that in short order, our collective consciousnesses might become indistinguishable from “high-level applied statistics.”
Maybe we are just meat machines with anxiety.
AI plus MRI yields the ability to recognize what the mind is hearing.
Today, researchers announced a new bit of mind reading that’s impressive in its scope. By combining fMRI brain imaging with a system that’s somewhat like the predictive text of cell phones, they’ve worked out the gist of the sentences a person is hearing in near real time. While the system doesn’t get the exact words right and makes a fair number of mistakes, it’s also flexible enough that it can reconstruct an imaginary monologue that goes on entirely within someone’s head.
The hardest part of the AI revolution will be the discovery of empirical evidence that free will is a myth.
“I have ambition to have no ambition."
Years ago, I read this article in the New York Times. His throwaway line about ambition has stayed with me ever since.