mindfulness

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Man doth not yield himself unto the angles save through the weakness of his feeble vectors

It’s Friday.  It must be, because yesterday was Thursday, and by the conventions of the modern English-speaking world, the day after Thursday is Friday.

We could have named the days differently, and if we had, then different days would follow other different days, but they would still proceed in a consistent order.  A day naming system that changes its order from day to day and week to week would not be useful at all.

Similarly, we could name the numerals and numbers differently‒the names we use are fairly arbitrary‒but that would not change the deep nature of arithmetic.  Whatever the equivalent of 2 + 2 might be, it would still equal the equivalent of 4.

That which we call arroz, by any other name, would still be rice.

I am not using the lapcom today.  I felt a bit lazy yesterday afternoon, so I didn’t bring it with me (there was already cat food in my bag, so it was somewhat heavy).  Also, I am still sick, strictly speaking; in fact, I feel slightly worse this morning than I did yesterday morning.

But I do have some regret over not bringing the computer with me, because my thumbs are rather sore.  You might think that would be enough to motivate me to bring the lapcom with me every evening, but the person I am in the evening does not necessarily appreciate what things will be like for the person I am in the morning.

Intellectually, of course, I can know what the situation will be, and I do know it, at least implicitly.  But I cannot feel it in the moment; all I can feel is the resistance to bringing it at that moment, because the immediate extra weight feels much more salient than the discomfort I might feel the following morning.

This is natural, of course.  I suspect that you experience similar disparate and antithetical drives and resistances at different times, despite what you know in your “higher” brain.

This is one of the annoying things about the fact that there is no single, stable, consistent “self”, with a single terminal goal (to use some AI-related jargon), in the minds of humans and humanoids.  There is, instead, a fluid of vectors adding together in a high-dimensional phase space, with lengths and directions that change from moment to moment* in response to changing external facts and to feedback from its own internal states.

Willpower is a function of the brain.  It varies from person to person and from moment to moment.  It is also subject to fatigue.  This has been studied with a fair degree of rigor.  People who have recently been engaged in taxing mental tasks, like solving relatively challenging math problems or similar, are less able to resist (for instance) eating an offered cookie despite being on a diet or even being diabetic.

This stuff may be fairly obvious, but in any given moment, most of us are not mindful enough of our own internal states even to be aware of what might be our current relatively depleted will.

It’s analogous to a person who does strength training with free weights in a gym.  Imagine this person comes to the gym after a hard day that involved physical labor, perhaps more than they usually do.  Or perhaps the person is ill but feels they can tough things out.  In the worst situation, this can lead to catastrophic accidents with weights that are‒at that moment‒too heavy for the person to lift, even though at other times the person may have lifted them with relative ease.  At the very least, such a person is at risk of strain and injury that could impair their ability to exercise for some time.

The mind works much like this.  The brain is an organ, a physical, biological thing, and it is prone to illness and injury and fatigue, in addition to all the software-related weirdness it can instantiate (like having conflicting and/or illogical points of view about empirical facts, and various other forms of irrationality).

This is one reason it can be useful to engender strong habits, even ones that border on the dogmatic.  Because the brain works on habit‒it being simply unworkable to try to evaluate each and every situation de novo‒if one can set up good habits, they can protect one from some catastrophes.

For instance, one of the “dogmas” of gun safety is that one should treat every firearm as if it is loaded, even if one has literally just removed all of its bullets oneself, and one should therefore never point the gun at anything (or anyone) one is not prepared to shoot.  This can feel unreasonable, and in the short term, thinking only of that instance where one has just thoroughly unloaded and checked the weapon, it may seem strictly unnecessary.

But humans are not perfect reasoners‒I suspect that nothing is, and that perfect reasoning is impossible for any finite mind‒and when fatigued, they fall into more automatic behaviors rather than thinking everything through.  This is why it is good to train such automatic behavior to be what one wants it to be when one is able to think clearly.

So, treat every gun as if it is loaded.  Buckle your seat belt for even very short trips**.  Don’t keep sweets in your house if you’re diabetic.  If you’re trying to quit smoking, don’t hang out with people who are smoking and don’t go places where cigarettes are easy to get.  Ditto for other drugs of abuse.

Speaking of which, alcohol tends to screw all those things up.  One of the key effects of alcohol on human (and other animals’) nervous systems is to decrease or diminish what can reasonably be called willpower.  This is not its only deleterious effect.

Okay, well, my thumbs are a bit sore, so I’m going to bring this to a close for the day.  It probably goes without saying‒somewhat ironically‒that there is much more that I could write on this topic.  Perhaps I’ll return to it, and to other related subject matter, tomorrow.

There really should be a blog post tomorrow, given that the previous two Saturdays were surprisingly non-working days.  But, as with a coin flip (or nearly so), previous results don’t have any impact on where the outcome will land this time.

Either way, please try to have a good weekend.

*Lawfully, but in such a complex fashion that it is effectively almost a chaotic system.

**Unless you literally don’t mind the increased risk of injury or death.  It’s possible to be in such a self-destructive state***, but if you are going to accept that risk, try to make sure you really don’t care.  It’s easy enough to imagine one doesn’t mind getting injured or killed in a traffic accident, but when one is injured‒or killed‒it is too late to change one’s preferences, and the version of you who suffers injury may be quite put out with their previous self.  See above about the lapcom.

***e.g., Florida.

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Dreams of a rational culture

I’m writing this on my mini laptop computer again today, because I got tired of the frustrating process of doing stuff on the smartphone.  Really, writing and texting and everything else via the smartphone is more often than not terribly annoying.  I know Steve Jobs got inspired by Star Trek: The Next Generation and wanted to make some version of a tablet with their touch-screen controls and all, but that was fiction.  If he wanted to make something more useful based on Star Trek, why couldn’t he have put some money into warp drive or something?

Of course, he was mainly a software guy, not actually any kind of physicist or true engineer or something, any more than Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or Peter Thiel or any of these other successful billionaires and so on are.  Don’t get me wrong; I’m sure they’re all reasonably clever, and they’re decent at business, especially at business that doesn’t require them to manufacture things that require serious production and safety and stress testing and all that.

Well, okay, Musk does make cars that are often quite decent (from what I have seen) and rockets that are sometimes quite impressive (and often not).  But mostly what these really successful business people seem to be good at is marketing, AKA self-aggrandizement.  Likewise for successful politicians.

They don’t actually have to be exceptionally good relative to their competitors, they just have to convince enough people that they’re cool and clever, and that if those people want other people to think that they are cool and clever, they should buy their products or use their services or whatnot.  It’s all rather pathetic on their part, and even more pathetic on the part of the people who faddishly embrace them.

Again, don’t get me wrong; I like things about Amazon, for instance, especially the ability to get books that I never was able to find even in Barnes & Noble or Borders (RIP) or Books-A-Million.  And I publish through Amazon when I publish my own books (or, rather, when I used to do so) because of their reach, not that it did me any particular good—I, unlike the humans to whom I referred earlier, am not a natural self-promoter.

I wish humans were less enamored of having obnoxious, “flashy”, egotistical (often male) tribal leader types and instead focused on competence and level-headedness.  Just imagine if most of our politicians were not interested in bombast and attention and rhetoric and recognition and “importance” and were just mainly interested in doing a good job on behalf of the people who elected (i.e., hired) them.

I don’t know what point I’m trying to make here.  I never plan these posts out ahead of time, so they are very much just whatever pops out of my mind on any given day.  In a way, all of you reading are only slightly more surprised by what you read here than I am by writing it.

Still, I don’t think I’m alone in wishing people would be less flash and more substance.  Then we wouldn’t have brain-worm-dead people like RFK Jr. in charge of the nation’s healthcare and medicine organizations when he is not merely unqualified but is anti-qualified.  Ditto for the one who appointed him (and for the abysmally cowardly congresspeople who approved the appointment and the poor misled people who elected them all).

If people in general were less interested in seeing who “owns” or “destroys” someone else in mere “debate”, but instead were interested in seeking reliable information and solutions together, things would likely be better.  If we want to try to model things in our society after Star Trek, I wish we could try to instantiate some version of Vulcan philosophy and practice.  Mr. Spock is so much more admirable as a character than nearly every other person on the original Enterprise, and Captain Picard in TNG is almost Vulcan in his own character.

We shouldn’t, of course, seek to eliminate emotion; that’s hardly possible.  Emotion is what gives us impetus, and indeed, that may be its entire biological “purpose”.  But we can try to govern our passions (to quote Spock) to make them our faithful servants rather than our capricious and chaotic masters.  This is not impossible by any means.

Not that I am a master of my own emotions, especially my negative ones.  But I do not consider them to be anyone else’s major concern, and certainly no other person is responsible for them or to blame for them.  I try not to let them destroy me, though I am so inclined.  But if we could all put more emphasis on, for instance, Stoic philosophy, on Vipassana and Metta and similar meditation practices and some of the ideas from, for instance, the Tao te Ching, I think all the world would be better.

I guess for now, at least, it’s a pipe dream—whatever it is I’m “dreaming” about, that is.  Frankly, I’m not sure what I’ve written here today, so far, or if there’s any coherence to it at all.  If there is not, I can only apologize at this point, because I have no intention of starting this post over.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get through this day less down and discouraged than I was yesterday*.

The world is terribly annoying and disappointing and, yes. discouraging, and my own personal life is in some ways even more so of all three of those things.  I try not to let it defeat me, but perhaps that very determination to keep playing the stupid game of the stupid human race and the stupid universe is the very thing that should count as being defeated—being fooled into taking part in the pantomime that is “civilization” instead of making my quietus, or perhaps finding some other path.

I guess I have to figure that out for myself, as with most things for most people.  Please try to have a good day if you can.  It would be nice if someone could do so.

*Apparently, I was so plainly depressed that someone (or perhaps “the algorithm” itself) on Threads thought that I might need help, and I got another one of those “someone thinks you’re having trouble and might need someone to talk to” or whatever that message is, along with a link to the mental health/suicide hotline.  Frankly, I’m amazed that I don’t get such suggestions every day, since I spend at least part of each day thinking about dying—and not thinking about it as a passive thing.