“How to Write a Thesis,” then, isn’t just about fulfilling a degree requirement. It’s also about engaging difference and attempting a project that is seemingly impossible, humbly reckoning with “the knowledge that anyone can teach us something.” It models a kind of self-actualization, a belief in the integrity of one’s own voice.

But the book’s enduring appeal—the reason it might interest someone whose life no longer demands the writing of anything longer than an e-mail—has little to do with the rigors of undergraduate honors requirements. Instead, it’s about what, in Eco’s rhapsodic and often funny book, the thesis represents: a magical process of self-realization, a kind of careful, curious engagement with the world that need not end in one’s early twenties.

Principle (Observables). States for which the value of an observable can becharacterized by a well-defined number are the states that are eigenvectors forthe corresponding self-adjoint operator. The value of the observable in such astate will be a real number, the eigenvalue of the operator.

If you aren’t visibly producing, you aren’t worthy. In this context, taking time to lie dormant feels greedy, even wasteful.

Confidence is the middle way between self-deprecation (deficiency) and arrogance (excess).

Beware the person, party, or project that claims to be the incarnation of the common good. The common good is imminent within the polis in all its possibility, but it is never the embodiment of any one version of the polis. That way of thinking, always tempting, often deployed, never ends well. The common good is not something extra added on to what other practices of right recognition provide for a society. Instead, the common good shifts the frame and changes the subject of political life from the declarative as is to the subjunctive as if—the corrected fullness of equality, justice, and interdependent mutuality that are already but not yet.

Friedrich Schiller had already argued in 1795 that it was precisely in play that we find the origins of self-consciousness, and hence freedom, and hence morality. “Man plays only when he is in the full sense of the word a man,” Schiller wrote in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, “and he is only wholly a Man when he is playing.”

what are the things you've done or you're doing now that your 10 year old 00:10:51 self will be so happy for but if he was in front of you right now he'd just be hugging you and high fiving you nonstop the things you're doing that he will appreciate in ten years and then what are a few things that he's 00:11:04 gonna say man i really wish you wouldn't do that right now

you have to 00:07:05 make that decision for yourself right and yet somehow we also have to transform society well i i think that that's it that's maybe the most 00:07:18 important the single most important thing that buddhi buddhism has to offer which is the ecosatur path frankly or sorry not not just regards ecology but let's call it the the bodhisattva path 00:07:31 or the new bodhisattva path that that what's what's so wonderful about that path is one has a double or dual practice you know we we continue to work on our own transformation but we know that 00:07:44 that's in itself insufficient it's still at a certain point that can actually reinforce the the root delusion of separation that my well-being is separate from yours and other people 00:07:56 so you know we also are engaged out in the world and and what i think one of the really important things about that i think is the way those two reinforce each other that um 00:08:10 it's not simply that they go well together but that if you are working and transforming yourself by being engaged in the world it's helping to overcome our kind of deeply rooted self-preoccupied habits so 00:08:23 i think that that's really important in fact given the kind of very critical situation we face right now may be the most important thing of all that buddhism has to offer

i'll be talking to you for four weeks 00:06:02 um about what i call losing yourself that is really understanding the idea of no self of selflessness not in the moral sense specifically though that will get there but not having a self 00:06:14 and of what it is to exist as a person uh without a self and i'll be doing this um from a variety of perspectives and one of the things that might make this 00:06:27 set of talks different from a lot of the talks that the barry center supports is that it won't be specifically or uniquely buddhist doctrine i will be relying on a lot of 00:06:40 buddhist arguments because i do that but also addressing a lot of western arguments in western literature and i won't be interested in doing a lot of textual work in fact i won't do any textual work at all even though i love doing that this will be really about the 00:06:53 idea about really how to understand the idea of not having a self and the idea and how to understand what it is to be a person so i'll draw on buddhist ideas and non-buddhist ideas on western ideas 00:07:07 but i won't be specifically giving a course in the history of buddhist thought about no-self nor will i be talking about practice this will be a very theoretical um set of lectures um but i think what i have to say will 00:07:20 be relevant um to those who are coming here in order to enrich their practice but i won't be specifically talking about that um most of what i'm doing will be based on a book that is 00:07:33 now in press called losing yourself how to be a person without a self

by self-alienation what i mean um 01:25:35 is our being in profound confusion about who and what we are about having an idea of what we are that is totally at odds with our actual mode 01:25:48 of existence or nature that's what i mean so i'm alienated from myself when i think that i'm one thing but i'm really something else and these are various ways 01:26:01 of understanding the content of that self-alienation i think that i am toto generally different from the objects of my experience that there's me as pure subject that's one 01:26:14 kind of thing and there's that all of that stuff including all of you folks my computer screen that i'm looking at now my dog lying right next to me all of those things are merely object and i'm subject 01:26:28 so i think of myself as pure subject is like the eye in the visual field i know that that's not what i am i know that i'm an embedded embodied being in a network of dependent origination but i 01:26:40 don't experience myself that way that's a dimension of self-alienation i think of myself as a being that i know immediately that i know my sensations 01:26:52 just by having them i know what i think just by thinking it i know what my emotions are just by experiencing them and that none of that introspective experience none of that awareness is 01:27:04 mediated by anything and that's stupid because i know that the only way that i can know myself is through an introspective activity and that introspection is conceptually laden and that i can be self-deceived and that 01:27:18 my psychiatrist might know me much better than i know myself that my wife knows me better than i know myself and that my dog knows me better than i know myself so i know that i don't have that immediate awareness but i think of 01:27:29 myself as having it that's another dimension of self-alienation i think of myself as a free agent who can act in a way that's totally uncaused just by doing things because i will them 01:27:43 that i've got this free will that is unconstrained by causality i know that that's crazy i know that i'm a biological organism and that everything i do is caused by previous causes and conditions 01:27:55 but i don't experience myself that way that's another dimension of self-alienation i know that i am a plurality that i've got a brain with lots of different centers of activity lots of different 01:28:07 kinds of cognition happening at the same time of which i'm totally unaware visual processing auditory processing language processing emotions that are subliminal and so forth 01:28:18 sensations that i barely register i know that there's inner complexity but i experience it as a subject of unity that's another dimension of self-alienation all of these are ways that we fail to 01:28:31 know ourselves and all of them cascade from the illusion that we ourselves

we're telling ourselves hey no elephant in my house nothing to worry about whereas the self that we really think we have is that self which is always 01:16:36 subject never object always agent never patient that self that is the enjoyer that stands opposed to the world and experiences it that acts on the world 01:16:49 the self that has a mind and has a body but is not itself a mind or a body that's the serpent and chandra kerdi thinks that if we don't pay attention to that serpent if we don't understand what 01:17:02 it is we believe ourselves to be in our heart of hearts we will never succeed in dispelling the illusion and hume also is trying to identify here 01:17:14 the serpent and he's identifying it as the idea that the word self even means anything

self-alienation that is if i think that i'm a self but i'm really a person that i really don't know who i am just as if i thought that a dollar had 01:02:13 its value intrinsically in the value of the paper and the ink i wouldn't understand anything about finance currency or purchases

self-centeredness once i think that i'm a self then i think that i've got a very different relation to me than i have to anybody else that is the relation of 01:01:46 identity and i think that i occupy a very special place in the moral universe namely the center of it where i have a very special concern for me and only an indirect concern for others

the self is like that the self is like thinking that there's 01:01:22 something that is really underlying the chariot or underlying the dollar that gives it its value and there are some very nasty consequences of the self-illusion of taking ourselves to be 01:01:34 selves

we can understand the fact that we exist conventionally um but as 00:53:05 neither the same nor different from the various constituents that we have that we can lack any core or self but still have a perfectly good existence just like chariots do and that that kind 00:53:17 of existence is enough to account for our existence through time without positing a persistent self or a soul that is strung along through all of those moments

ernest becker has made a lot of is offered the same kind of argument which he calls terror management theory um shanti deva rather in the beginning of how to awaken uh how to lead an awakened 00:36:00 life talks about how terrified we are of death how terrified we are of being nothing how terrified we are what's going to happen after death becker doc talks about the same thing and shantideva 00:36:13 argues that in order to save ourselves from that terror what we do is we try to pause it make permanent and self safeguard this self becker does the same thing says we tend to reify ourselves as 00:36:24 a ball work um against terror to somehow manage our terror and but in any case self does seem the self illusion i think i think that idea is quite right by the way that the fear of death which is 00:36:36 deeply wired into us causes us to posit that self causes us to say hey maybe it can live forever maybe it can be reborn life after life after life maybe it can go to heaven things like that 00:36:48 but i also think the idea that affect is deeply related to our sense of self is really there shanti deva makes this point as well as does david hume um shanti deva uh points out that here's when you really decide you've got a self 00:37:02 it's when somebody insults you or hurts you right so somebody says garfield you idiot an and i immediately said wait a minute i'm a whole lot better than that how dare you talk to me like that i don't feel like my body's been 00:37:13 insulted i don't feel like my mind has been insulted i don't feel like my perceptions or sensations have been insulted i feel like i the thing that's got those things has been insulted and i want revenge at that point so that kind 00:37:27 of effect there or if you do something really cool like win the olympic gold medal in 100 meter sprint like i would love to do um with usain bolt's body um then you think when you're really proud of what you've done the pride 00:37:39 attaches not to my body not to my mind but to me so this idea that affect really brings up that sense of self i think is really important uh hume uh makes the same point in his treatise of human nature for those of 00:37:52 you who want to see this done in western philosophy he thinks that it's pride and shame that really bring up the idea of the self you know i mean when i'm ashamed of something that i'm done that i've done i'm not ashamed of my hand 00:38:04 that wrote badly i'm ashamed of me for having bad penmanship if i didn't give to a beggar i'm not ashamed that my mind did something wrong i'm ashamed that i did i was tight-fisted um and so the 00:38:16 idea that these and these aspects bring up the idea of self i think is very powerful and of course anger as i said earlier is another big one all of these involve egocentric attachment so it's when we're attached to things in a way that really fronts 00:38:29 our ego as the possessor then we find that we're positing that self and so this finishes the first of the three things i wanted to do this evening first was to convince you that you really do think yourself to explain what 00:38:42 that self is and to give some idea of why i think that you have why i think that you think that you have a self um no matter how much you might reject that idea on reflection

son kappa who i mentioned earlier identifies in his great book on the essence of hermenetics two different 00:33:57 kinds of self-grasping two different attitudes that you might have towards yourself he calls them innate self-grasping and self-grasping due to bad philosophy um 00:34:08 and son kappa argues there that philosophical self-grasping is really an attempt to make really good intellectual sense out of a deep illusion you can imagine 00:34:21 that as somebody saying gosh what i'm going to figure out is how drawing arrowheads on lines makes one line longer and one another line shorter right that's a dumb idea right but you can imagine people trying to do that or 00:34:33 somebody's saying i wonder how deep the water is in that mirage over there that's what sankampa thinks we're doing when we're really philosophically arguing that there's a self we're trying to make coherent and atavistic primitive 00:34:46 illusion but there's also that innate self-grasping that gives rise to that illusion it's on campuses it's actually really easy to get rid of philosophical self-grasping philosophical 00:34:58 self-grasping arises from bad philosophy and you can cure it by doing good philosophy so by the end of these four lectures you'll never believe in a philosophical argument for the self i'm sure of that but innate self-grasping he 00:35:10 thinks requires very long time of practice to try to effectively rewire the way that we understand the world

there is a difference between the 00:33:06 serpent and the elephant and that we do atavistically think that we are something other than our minds and bodies and i think that the serpent is real that is the serpent is the illusion illusory self that we need to get rid of 00:33:19 and so even if it's crazy to think that we are such a thing and when we say it out loud it sounds stupid and incoherent that doesn't stop us from believing it because we are stupid incoherent kinds 00:33:31 of beings wired for stupidity and incoherence with the task of somehow trying to unwire ourselves into something approaching inside

now i want to introduce you to my favorite 00:24:20 illusion which is going to be important because i'm going to use it as a model for everything that we're going to talk about later when we talk about the self and that's the mueller liar illusion so here we have two lines with little arrowheads and 00:24:33 those two lines those two parallel lines are exactly the same length as one another you can sort of line them up visually and see that um but the arrowheads on each side make the 00:24:44 top line look much larger than the bottom line and the amazing thing about the mueller liar illusion one of the reasons i like it is a it's really easy to draw and b um even if you know that it's an 00:24:56 illusion you're totally sucked into it so um and i'm just always amazed by that right you can just draw this illusion for somebody draw the parallel lines the same length they see that draw the 00:25:08 arrowheads and all of a sudden the lines change in apparent length and i use this because it um it illustrates an important thing about an illusion and this is something that we find again from india as a definition of 00:25:21 an illusion an illusion is something that exists in one way but appears to us in a different way or for being very technical we would say something whose mode of existence and mode of appearance 00:25:33 are discordant but that is just atrociously technical and sensibilitic um so these two lines exist as equally long but they appear to be of 00:25:45 unequal lengths and that would that's what makes them an illusion a mirage exists as a refraction pattern of light but appears to be water so whenever we get that difference between a mode of appearance and a mode of existence we 00:25:59 have an example of illusion and i say that because i want to argue that the self is an illusion that we exist in one way that is as persons but we appear to exist as selves and so we have to come to understand 00:26:11 that illusion in order to begin dispelling it

the important thing to point out is that when we think of the self this way the self isn't my body or my mind i don't take my body to be myself and 00:17:39 we're going to see that in a moment but i think of the self the target of this analysis the snake in the wall as the thing that has a body the thing that has a mind and of course if we were 00:17:50 operating in india and taking a doctrine of reincarnation or rebirth for granted we would think of it as the thing that in different lives appropriates different bodies and minds um and 00:18:02 but remains the same through those lives but if we're not in a kind of reincarnation and rebirth kind of mood um then we might think that it's just the thing that endures through our entire life while everything else 00:18:15 changes that is um the thing that was me when i was an itty-bitty baby when i was a young handsome guy when now that i'm an old guy um that it's there's something continuous there and we think of that as 00:18:28 the self

snake is this self the atman as we say in sanskrit it's not my body it's not my mind it's the thing that has the body and the mind in 00:16:36 sanskrit literature um we think of that as the subject of all of our experience that's never object the knower that's never known the witness that stands outside the world and sees the world the 00:16:48 agent that acts on the world the enjoyer of experiences and lest you think that's antique sanskrit anybody who's read kant will recognize this as the transcendental subject of the first 00:17:00 critique the free transcendental agent of the second critique or the completely free aesthetic subject of the third critique so you don't have to be indian to think that there's an atman you can be prussian as well

tells a great story says there's this guy um who is pretty sure he's got a snake in the wall of his house and in india um 00:14:13 that's still a problem and it was a much bigger problem back in the 7th century that snakes especially crates but also cobras would in order to get warm take up residence in the nooks and crannies of the stone wall of a house so this guy 00:14:26 is afraid that he's got a snake in the wall of his house and he's in order to dispel his own fear he walks around the house convincing himself that there's no elephant there and chandra charity says wouldn't this 00:14:40 guy be a public laughingstock who tries to assuage his fear of the snake by convincing himself that there's no elephant and what's the point of this weird story 00:14:52 you might ask well the moral of the story is this the snake is the self it's the self that you really do john vacardi thinks believe that you have and 00:15:05 the elephant is all of the things you might convince yourself that you don't have or that the self isn't um in order to really convince yourself that you're a really cool no self person so you might say hey i know my body's not a 00:15:18 self i've really got no self down pat or i know my mind isn't the self i've got myself myself i've got myself really on the right track here or all of these things and chandra kiriti thinks that a lot of the time when we think that we're refuting 00:15:32 the idea of a self we're actually refuting something else and so that the first important thing to do is to identify what that thing is that is the target of 00:15:43 our critical inquiry

in the third section we're going to focus on the ethical implications of all of this because i think that's really important that's why we do this and then in the fourth part we'll be 00:10:51 talking about what life looks like as a person as opposed to a self and why we should take all of this very seriously

How to Manage your Research Data Effectively

Although some of them took a lot of time to create (I literally wrote whole book summaries for a while), their value was negligible in hindsight.

If my interpretation of the Retrieval quadrant is correct, it will become much more difficult to be an average, or even above average, writer. Only the best will flourish. Perhaps we will see a rise in neo-generalists.

If I were asked to condense the whole of the present century into one mental picture I would pick a familiar everyday sight: a man in a motor car, driving along a concrete highway to some unknown destination … I think that the 20th century reaches almost its purest expression on the highway. Here we see, all too clearly, the speed and violence of our age, its strange love affair with the machine and, conceivably, with its own death and destruction.

For most Americans, poverty is seen as an individualized conditionthat exclusively affects those individuals, their families, and perhaps theirneighborhoods. Rarely do we conceptualize a stranger’s poverty as having adirect or indirect effect on our own well-being.

Alexis de Tocqueville referred to this in his 1840 treatise on America as self-interest properly understood. In fact, the full title of the chapter from his book,Democracy in America, is, “How the Americans Combat Individualism by theDoctrine of Self-Interest Properly Understood.” His basic premise was that“one sees that by serving his fellows, man serves himself and that doing good isto his private advantage.”6

I often think back to MySpace’s downfall. In 2007, I penned a controversial blog post noting a division that was forming as teenagers self-segregated based on race and class in the US, splitting themselves between Facebook and MySpace. A few years later, I noted the role of the news media in this division, highlighting how media coverage about MySpace as scary, dangerous, and full of pedophiles (regardless of empirical evidence) helped make this division possible. The news media played a role in delegitimizing MySpace (aided and abetted by a team at Facebook, which was directly benefiting from this delegitimization work).

engineers will get tired, mistakes will happen, and maintenance will get kicked down the road. Teams need buffer as much as systems do.

My freely downloadable Beginning Mathematical Logic is a Study Guide, suggesting introductory readings beginning at sub-Masters level. Take a look at the main introductory suggestions on First-Order Logic, Computability, Set Theory as useful preparation. Tackling mid-level books will help develop your appreciation of mathematical approaches to logic.

Mash duplicates any sub-Hashes that you add to it and wraps them in a Mash. This allows for infinite chaining of nested Hashes within a Mash without modifying the object(s) that are passed into the Mash. When you subclass Mash, the subclass wraps any sub-Hashes in its own class. This preserves any extensions that you mixed into the Mash subclass and allows them to work within the sub-Hashes, in addition to the main containing Mash.

Value coercions, on the other hand, will coerce values based on the type of the value being inserted. This is useful if you are trying to build a Hash-like class that is self-propagating.

locally-based staff and carries out its programs in conjunction with local partners. Teams of international instructors and volunteers support the programs through projects year-round.

I only know a handful of people directly making money from blogging (via ads, subscriptions etc) but I know many more who: Got a better career because of blogging (new job, better pay etc) Negotiated better contracts (e.g. with a publisher or platform) because they had “an audience” Sold their own courses / ebooks / books / merchandise / music Blogging is this kind of engine that opens up economic opportunity and advantage. Being visible in the networked economy has real value.

I’ve been using this phrase “the next most useful thing” as a guiding light for my consulting work - I’m obsessed with being useful not just right. I’ve always rejected the fancy presentation in favor of the next most useful thing, and I simply took my eye off the ball with this one. I’m not even sure the client views this project as a real disappointment, there was still some value in it, but I’m mad at myself personally for this one. A good reminder not to take your eye off the ball. And to push your clients beyond what they tell you the right answer is.

Being self-employed feels a bit like being on an extended road trip. Untethered and free, but lonely and unsupported too. Ultimate freedoms combined with shallow roots.

The paradox of information systems[edit] Drummond suggests in her paper in 2008 that computer-based information systems can undermine or even destroy the organisation that they were meant to support, and it is precisely what makes them useful that makes them destructive – a phenomenon encapsulated by the Icarus Paradox.[9] For examples, a defence communication system is designed to improve efficiency by eliminating the need for meetings between military commanders who can now simply use the system to brief one another or answer to a higher authority. However, this new system becomes destructive precisely because the commanders no longer need to meet face-to-face, which consequently weakened mutual trust, thus undermining the organisation.[10] Ultimately, computer-based systems are reliable and efficient only to a point. For more complex tasks, it is recommended for organisations to focus on developing their workforce. A reason for the paradox is that rationality assumes that more is better, but intensification may be counter-productive.[11]

I also think being able to self-host and export parts of your data to share with others would be great.

One of the big lies notetakers tell themselves is, “I will remember why I liked this quote/story/fact/etc.”

Topic: Communication with the Zettelkasten: How to get an adequate partner, junior partner? – important after working with staff becomes more and more difficult and expensive. Zettel’s reality

Your future self will judge its past self (you!) as unreliable.

there's a second kind of cognitive illusion this first cognitive illusion as i've suggested is thematized both in buddhist philosophy and in western philosophy but the second 00:07:06 kind of illusion i find not thematized so much in the west though in some quarters it is some but not all but very much stabilized in in buddhist philosophy and that is the superimposition of subject object 00:07:19 duality um and when we do that um we take the nature of our experience to be primordially structured as subject standing outside of the world viewing an 00:07:31 object now we always know we know that on the slightest bit of reflection that that's crazy that we are biological organisms embedded in a physical world and that 00:07:43 all of our experience is the result of that embodied embedded and embedded experience in the world it's still however almost irresistible to have that kind of image of ourselves as wittgenstein put it as like the eye 00:07:56 to the visual field that we stand outside of the world as pure subject with everything else taken as object and that reflexive taking of experience that way is a very profound kind of cognitive 00:08:09 illusion one that is extremely hard to shake to overcome illusion though we first have to come to know that illusion better you need to know your enemy in 00:08:21 order to defeat your enemy and so i'm going to spend a lot of time trying to acquaint us with the nature of these illusions that is to say if we want to avoid a pointless trek through the desert uh for 00:08:34 water we'd better know that what we're seeing is a mirage and not an oasis when we become aware of that fact then we're able to redirect ourselves in the right uh in the right direction

To be a successful physicist requires mastering how to make all 29 decisions, but the reflection decisions (decisions 23–26) are arguably the most difficult to learn.

For example, a "write access disallowed" problem is probably unnecessary, since a 403 Forbidden status code in response to a PUT request is self-explanatory.

imagine a future where educators are able to trace the impact they have had on learners' journeys. Educators can identify which teaching methods worked best for which learners and which approaches were most effective at enabling the learners to translate that learning into practice

Good code is its own best documentation. As you’re about to add a comment, ask yourself, "How can I improve the code so that this comment isn’t needed?". Improve the code and then document it to make it even clearer.

Most of the existing self-care guidelines, however, are specifically tailored towards practitioners, humanitarian workers, service-providers and front-line staff (Frey et al., 2017; Williamson et al., 2020).

Stigmergy (/ˈstɪɡmərdʒi/ STIG-mər-jee) is a mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions.

the reason a lot of studies are made of these price and volume variables is that now, in the age of computers, there are almost endless data available about them. It isn’t necessarily because such studies have any utility; it’s simply that the data are there and academicians have worked hard to learn the mathematical skills needed to manipulate them. Once these skills are acquired, it seems sinful not to use them, even if the usage has no utility or negative utility.

Much of the material in this lecture is to appear in a chapter entitled “Prob-lems of Explanation in Linguistics” in Explanations in Psychology, edited byR. Borger and F. Cioffi (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1967), alongwith interesting critical comments by Max Black.

ven if that reader is just future-you –and this is one of the benefits of making notes your futureself can read!

I also don't think you know what you're talking about when you talk about code readability. By and large, the vast majority of opinions on code readability, when you break them down, are based on a personal stance about preferences in writing

We can go through the list of Forer statements above, and rephrase each one as a useful potential update you can make to your model of the world:

The human-symbolic merger into a single contour further consolidates once the locus of its controlshifts from the human to the social system.

The ‘human takeover’ means that humans will reach a state where they will effectively be capableof shedding such programming, gaining control over social systems, so that they will start working inthe service of human well-being rather than for their own self-perpetuation.

Embrace epistemological humility. Let me say upfront that for me this one is, ah, aspirational. I speak with great confidence about educational research results all the time, sometimes when I shouldn’t.

modern web development has become selfish

focusing on the developers and making sure the developers can quickly output projects at the expense of the end users

16:15 - Adam Smith - The Wealth of Nations

For what purpose? So that the process of what Becker calls “self-transcendence” may begin. And he describes the process of self-transcendence this way: Man breaks through the bounds of merely cultural heroism; he destroys the character lie that had him perform as a hero in the everyday social scheme of things; and by doing so he opens himself up to infinity, to the possibility of cosmic heroism …. He links his secret inner self, his authentic talent, his deepest feelings of uniqueness … to the very ground of creation. Out of the ruins of the broken cultural self there remains the mystery of the private, invisible, inner self which yearned for ultimate significance. …This invisible mystery at the heart of [the] creature now attains cosmic significance by affirming its connection with the invisible mystery at the heart of creation. “This,” he concludes, “is the meaning of faith.” Faith is the belief that despite one’s “insignificance, weakness, death, one’s existence has meaning in some ultimate sense because it exists within an eternal and infinite scheme of things brought about and maintained to some kind of design by some creative force (90, 9 1).” This, then, is what we might call good faith, not a flight into some immortality system. And clearly, some Christians, some Buddhists–at least the Zen Buddhists Becker himself mentions!–have faith in this sense, a faith that Becker characterizes as growing out of tasting one’s own death, embracing one’s own nothingness, and affirming–not a known ultimate meaningful–but an “invisible mystery” of ultimate meaning.

so in this essay i'm going to explore the what i take to be the very most profound illusions diagnosed in the buddhist tradition and one and the most difficult to overcome and the primary one will be the illusion 00:08:58 that we have immediate access and vertical access to our own experience that we have a direct first-person access to our own minds that gives us our minds just as they are that the duality between subject and object that 00:09:11 structures our understanding is primordial this is the illusion that we're subject standing over and against the world rather than um interdependent beings in the world that's the conviction that we might know 00:09:24 the external world only through the mediation of our sensory and cognitive faculties but that we know the world only in virtue of immediate access to the outputs of those faculties

Though man began to lose its central place as subject of philosophy immediately after Socratic period with the glorification of reason by Plato and Aristotle, but Renaissance and Enlightenment intensified its severity and put last nail in the coffin

self-reflexive annotation

we'll go into an example here with self-organized criticality so the idea 01:40:03 there is that was coined by back back bak in 87 the term self-organized criticality and it's it's really not a controversial that that living systems and 01:40:16 and many most systems in life complex systems organize in some way but the idea of self-organized criticality is that the organism itself is adjusting is is keeping some kind of adjustment 01:40:28 uh to uh to maintain a critical state and by critical state i mean a state on the ver like you can think of a saddle point so if you drop a model on us on a saddle it's going to not stay there it's going to you know 01:40:41 it's going to change it's going to change one way or the other right so a critical state is like that that threshold where things are about to change from one way to another way and uh 01:40:55 it turns out with you know work and information theory and other other fields of recent in recent years it turns out that uh processing uh whether it's we're talking about a computer or some other 01:41:07 you know machine or or a brain turns out that processing is kind of optimal in a sense when this when the system is at a this this this this critical state and 01:41:21 some people call it on the edge of chaos because things are things can easily change and sometimes it's you can think of that threshold as a 01:41:33 as a as a threshold of a critical state you can think of it as a threshold of the threshold we say between exploration and exploitation like should i should i go should i go 01:41:45 find a new planet for humans to live on or should i fix the planet that you know should i fix the systems on this planet first you know how do we balance exploration of the new versus using the information we have to improve 01:41:59 what we already have so you can think of that as exploration exploitation trade-offs stability agility trade-off do we do we remain stable and use ideas from the old in the past or do we are we more agile and we're more 01:42:13 flexible and we bring in new new ideas so it's like you can call it old new trade old new trade-off but whatever whatever trade-off you want to call it it's this sitting at the edge of going one way or the other 01:42:26 maximally flexible of going one way or the other and it's at that threshold that level that point the kind of that region of criticality that information processing seems to be 01:42:39 maximal so if uh it's no wonder then that the human brain is is organized in such a way to be living on this threshold between agility and stability 01:42:52 and uh now here's an example of that from like a real world example so a a system that is at a critical state is going to be maximally 01:43:03 sensitive to input so that means that there could you know when just when that marble is sitting on the saddle just a little bump to that saddle from one little corner of its universe and right like just one 01:43:16 little organism bumps it and maybe that marble rolls one way or the other right so that one one little input had a major impact on how the whole thing moves 01:43:29 its trajectory into the future right but isn't that what we isn't that kind of what we have in mind for democracy i mean don't we want everyone to have access of engaging into the decision-making processes 01:43:43 of a society and have every voice heard in at least in the sense that there's the possibility that just my voice just me doing my participation in this system might actually 01:43:56 ripple through the system and have a uh you know a real effect a useful effect i mean i think like maybe maybe self-organized criticality can help to inform us the concept of 01:44:10 self-organized criticality can help to inform us of what do we want from democracy or a decision-making process right you know that just makes me think about different like landslides 01:44:22 and that's something that criticality theory and catastrophe theory has been used to study and instead of cascading failure we can think about like cascading neighborhood cleanups so a bunch of people just say 01:44:34 today just for an hour i feel like doing a little cleanup and all of a sudden one person puts up the flag and then it's cascading locally in some just you know unspecified way but all of a sudden you're getting this this distribution with a ton of small 01:44:48 little meetups and then several really large sweeping changes but the total number of people cleaning up is higher because you offered the affordance and the ability for the affordance to sort of propagate 01:44:59 that's right that's right we're talking about a propagation of of a propagation of information a propagation of action and the possibility that even uh you know just one or a few individuals could start a 01:45:12 little chain chain reaction that actually does affect in a positive way society now it's a little too it's almost too bad that sand piles were the original uh you know topic of 01:45:23 of this of self-organized criticality because as you point out it's not really about things falling apart it's about it's about if you think of again if you think of a complex system as a system more capable of solving more 01:45:37 challenging problems then more often you can think of self-organized criticality as a way to propagate information when it is really needed when the system needs to change 01:45:51 uh then information is you know it ingests information from its world from its senses and can act accordingly we we just um submitted an abstract with criticality and active inference and one 01:46:04 of the points was actually the existence of self-organized criticality implies a far from equilibrium system that's actively pumping energy in that's because it's a passive system that's not 01:46:15 locked and loaded

now we talk i talk about a few ideas good regulators requisite variety self-organized criticality and then the 01:35:04 free energy principle from active inference um and uh maybe i'll just try to briefly talk mention what's what those means for what those ideas mean for people who 01:35:15 aren't familiar so good regulator really came from the good regular theorem or whatever it's called really came from cybernetics ash ashby yeah a lot his law of requisite 01:35:33 variety and uh the it's the concept is that a organism or a you know a system must be must be a model of that which it but 01:35:47 that needs to control

what is our worldview what do we value and what is our purpose and then we've come to this question then okay so who the heck are we then you know we're we're and it and not only who are we but 01:22:42 who are we building these systems for you know what what what is what should societal system serve who or what should societal systems serve and the only reasonable answer that you 01:22:55 can come up with is that societal systems should serve the the extended self like not just the body not just the family not just the 01:23:07 you know the thousand people in a society or the ten thousand or a million or whatever but their environment the the society next door that they're engaged with and cooperating with and coordinating with 01:23:18 the society across the planet that they're sharing information with and learning together with and so it's the whole that we are metrics as we as leaders who 01:23:30 come to metrics those metrics have to represent both the cognitive process how good how are we cogniting how well are we cogniting are we functionally cogniting and are we 01:23:43 achieving through that cognition are we achieving the kinds of aims that is serving the whole is the environment improving is the you know quality of air improving is the quality of life 01:23:56 improving for individuals right um yes so uh we are so this in a nutshell we this is the world view in a way we are in intimate with our greater world we are individuals but of the nested overlapping variety 01:24:12 individual cells bodies groups communities ecologies nations and all of civilization we're not separate in any absolute sense and there's no privileged level or scale to any of that nor are we passive bystanders in this 01:24:25 unfolding this is not this evolution is not it's just a chance thing like by chance somebody does this one day and then evolution goes on another another avenue no there there are 01:24:38 there are opportunities in the environment uh that we can react to that lend themselves to to to providing 01:24:50 information or providing gain of benefit of some kind and and you know we are driven we are are we are consciously creating and you know 01:25:03 even a really great societal system that integrated societal systems would be consciously creating acting cognitive acting cognitive and consciously creating and it towards some 01:25:15 towards some goal and that goal then has to be you know the maintaining of vitality being the in the for the extended sel

As time passed, primates as a whole became more social and evolved to live together in groups, but only humans became truly monogamous. Today, other primate species such as bonobos and chimps mate with multiple individuals in their groups.

May 18, 2016 — As time passed, primates as a whole became more social and evolved to live together in groups, but only humans became truly monogamous.

Human language may have evolved to help our ancestors make tools

Each time, though, the species bounced back, more successful and adaptive than ever.dfp.loadAds("right2","MPU5","dfp-right2-article-4")

Humans May Be the Most Adaptive Species

We are used to instant gratification. Multiple opportunities for engagement and distraction surround us. If the result we are after does not come immediately, it is easy to seek an alternate path. An economy built on fast food, same-day home delivery, open all hours service model feeds our desire for instant results. Buy now, pay later, why wait when you can have it now.?

“Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan Press On! has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.” - Calvin Coolidge

Giving Your First Brain a New Job

Curator’s Perspective

TIAGO FORTE is one of the world’s foremost experts on productivity

If you feel resistance to continuing with this project later, tryDialing Down the Scope.

By takingthat small extra step of putting a note into a folder (or tagging it*) fora specific project, such as a psychology paper you’re writing or apresentation you’re preparing, you’ll encounter that idea right at themoment it’s most relevant. Not a moment before, and not a momentafter.

So, i started researching where the capitalization of said pronoun came from and was quite stunned to find that it was always capitalized because it always appeared as the first word in a sentence, never stuck in the middle. And then, when it started appearing in the middle, it started getting capitalized out of convention and because people worried that it would get lost in script. Of course, "It's odd, and a little unsettling, to reflect upon the fact that English is the only major language in which "I" is capitalized; in many other languages "You" is capitalized and the "i" is lower case" (journalist Sydney J. Harris).

I was always bothered by the fact that the first person singular pronoun is capitalized in english - i always thought it was quite self-righteous.

not all of us are going to have super 00:37:28 high need for self-expression you know most of us are probably like me i'm more of a people pleaser than i would even want to be

Now I'm puzzled by the apparently biggest obstacle to implementation of this feature: possible misuse. I love ruby community, but sometimes saving the dummies' asses goes a bit too far.

Every time you take a note, ask yourself, “How can I make this asuseful as possible for my future self?”

It’s also been a secret code for most of history—now it’s finally time to reveal how it works

I’m evenwilling to bet that you’re doing them already in some form, whetheryou realize it or not.

You may find this book in the “self-improvement” category, but in adeeper sense it is the opposite of self-improvement. It is aboutoptimizing a system outside yourself, a system not subject to you

Looking back at a problematic choice or action taken provides a useful beginning in the effort to function differently. “Gee, I wish I had not done that,” or “I can’t believe I did the same dumb thing again,” are examples of hindsight that offer an opportunity to pay closer attention and work on problematic behaviors. Insight might occur in the process change. This occurs when a person becomes self-aware during the commission of a regrettable action or behavior. “There I go again,” is the phrase that often accompanies an insightful moment. The advantage of insight over hindsight is that insight may occur in time for a regrettable action or decision to be avoided.

The term independent is considered more appropriate than self, as in self-hosted, considering the latter can give the wrong impression that it only refers to situations where the owners of a website decided to physically host it on hardware that is physically controlled and managed by them.

Projects like the Open Journal System, Manifold or Scalar are based on a distributed model that allow anyone to download and deploy the software (Maxwell et al., 2019), offering an alternative to the commercial entities that dominate the scholarly communication ecosystem.

using rome as a almost a tool to convey information to your future self

An alternative kind of note-taking was encouraged in the late Middle Agesamong members of new lay spiritual movements, such as the Brethren of theCommon Life (fl. 1380s–1500s). Their rapiaria combined personal notes andspiritual reflections with readings copied from devotional texts.

An initial stage of annotation might be provided bya professional reader hired to add aids to reading for the owner, including espe-cially mnemonic or meditative aids, or enhancements to the layout, but alsooccasionally self-reflexive or potentially dissenting observations.24 A successionof owner-readers could then add further corrections and comments.

The current mass media such as t elevision, books, and magazines are one-directional, and are produced by a centralized process. This can be positive, since respected editors can filter material to ensure consistency and high quality, but more widely accessible narrowcasting to specific audiences could enable livelier decentralized discussions. Democratic processes for presenting opposing views, caucusing within factions, and finding satisfactory compromises are productive for legislative, commercial, and scholarly pursuits.

Colordag: From always-almost to almost-always 50% selfish mining resilience

Typically,each slide is succeeded by the next in sucha way that vital logical continuities fallbetween the gaps.

you can't see the beetle in my box nor I the one in yours ludwig wittgenstein use the beetle in the Box analogy to suggest that the meaning of sensation words such as pain isn't given 00:01:10 by referring to some private inner introspected something a sensation to which you alone have access in his view there can't be more to the public meaning of our language than we are capable of teaching each other and the 00:01:23 private something the beetle can't have a role in that teaching because we can't get at