954 Matching Annotations
  1. Last 7 days
    1. Commonly, this is accomplished through a pub-licly available list of credential statuses (either listing the revokedor valid credentials).

      Claims about one's identity (authorized devices), could be maintained by the quorum of these devices. Or by a quorum of one's devices and his friends.

    1. The new story becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward.

      for - stories - salience of adjacency- imagination - stories - futures - Ernest Becker - self - timebinding - symbolosphere - quote - Brian Eno - book - Citizens - Jon Alexander - Arian Conrad - citizens - not consumers

      quote - Brian Eno

      • The stories we tell
        • shape how we see ourselves, and
        • how we see the world.
      • When we see the world differently,
        • we begin behaving differently,
        • living into the new story.
      • When Martin Luther King said
        • “I have a dream,”
      • he was
        • inviting others to dream it with him,
        • inviting them to step into his story.
      • Once a story becomes shared in that way,
        • current reality gets measured against it and
        • then modified towards it.
      • As soon as we sense the possibility of a more desirable world,
        • we begin behaving differently,
          • as though that world is starting to come into existence,
          • as though, in our minds at least, we’re already there.
      • The new story becomes an invisible force which pulls us forward.
      • By this process it starts to come true.
      • Imagining the future makes it more possible.

      • Sometimes this work of imagination and storytelling is about the future,

        • as in Dr King’s story.
      • Art can play this role:
        • what is possible in art becomes thinkable in life.
      • We become our new selves first in simulacrum, through
        • style and
        • fashion and
        • art,
      • our deliberate immersions in virtual worlds.
      • Through them we sense what it would like
        • to be another kind of person
        • with other kinds of values.
      • We rehearse new
        • feelings and
        • sensitivities.
      • We imagine other ways of thinking about
        • our world and
        • its future.
      • We use art to model new worlds so that
        • we can see how we might feel about them.

      comment - This is a really powerful writing from Brian Eno. - Storytelling is an exercise in - the imagination of alternative possibilities to our own reality. - Stories can become both - inspirational and - aspirational - They can paint a picture in our mind of - a fantasy - a world that does not yet exist - but that nonexistent but desirable reality can then serve as the goal for which we strive - Mapping Futures interventions is then, essentially an act of desirable, inspirational make believe, and mustering the resources to turn the fantasy into reality - Progress relies on design, the imagination of unrealities in vivid detail, - in order to turn them into realities - In doing this, it is not an act carried out in ivory towers, - but in the everyday life of every one of us - We are all engaged in desirable fantasies daily whenever - we decide what meal we will prepare or restaurant to dine at - which clothing outfit to wear today - what we plan to write or say next to another - Every decision we make as a choice between different future alternatives - When it comes to planning major future decisions, - we need to have as much detail as possible of the imagined future - The Town Anywhere project conceived by Ruth Ben-Tovin and employed in the Transition Town movement for many years fis an example of such a simulacrum - https://hyp.is/mqeCtAE_Ee-Yxleqg7GFww/docdrop.org/video/cRvhY4S94ic/ - It provides an artistic space for citizens to imagine a desirable fantasy that can be embodied, enacted and deeply remembered through the participatory and collective citizen act of creating a proxy of their future local habitat in the present, and exploring and momentarily inhabiting their simulacrum. - In this way, this compelling experience is like a branding iron, searing the memory deep into our memory, where it can help guide our actions to realize the desirable fantasy. - Couched within a citizen's FREEligion and FREElosophy we generically call Deep Humanity, an open source, open knowledge approach to universal raison d'etre for what it deeply means to be human, Town Anywhere can scale to fire up the imagination of citizens to co-create our collective future. - Town Anywhere, along with other citizen initiatives which I belong to that advocate healthy citizen power such as SONEC, Stop Reset Go, Deep Humanity, the Indyweb, Living Cities Earth and many, many others can emerge a human murmuration to drive the transition - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fleemor.medium.com%2Fmesmerized-by-the-murmuration-on-human-potential-f4c9ffe06ffa&group=world - As Jon Alexander and Arian Conrad write here, we have to find the narratives that matter to us, where WE is the citizens. Other thinkers like Jose Ramos write along the same line: - https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Foff-planet.medium.com%2Fdiscovering-the-narratives-that-matter-to-us-327958a2daec&group=world

    1. our lives really aren’t that important and we’ll all soon be forgotten anyway.

      for - cup half full

      • If your culture says life is fulfilled only with
        • children,
        • travel
        • adventure, or
        • building something worthwhile,
      • and you haven’t done any of those things…
        • maybe there isn’t anything wrong with you,
        • maybe your culture just doesn’t value the things that you do (and maybe, just maybe, the expectations are as unrealistic as they are arbitrary).

      insight - smaller self vs greater self - or this could be thought in a cup-half-full perspective, - that ALL lives are sacred from the outset - The small self may forget, but the absence of any memories is perhaps the mark of the greater self

    2. The social environment is the only way we derive and validate our identities. The question may be “Who am I?” but the real question is “How are others supposed to feel about me?”

      for - quote - self esteem - self - adjacency - enlightenment - epoche - self-esteem - Ernest Becker

      quote - The social environment is the only way we derive and validate our identities. The question may be “Who am I?” but the real question is “How are others supposed to feel about me?”

      adjacency - between - Ernest Becker - epoche - self-esteem - enlightenment - Epoche - Epoche - phenomenological reduction - Symbiocene - Thomas Hagel - What's it like to be a Bat? - Deep Humanity - individual / collective gestalt - adjacency statement - It is fascinating intersection of adjacent ideas that the equivalency of these two questions brings up - These moments are as Gyuri talks about - having a dialogue with my old self - revisiting old ideas from a new perspective in which - more water has flowed under the bridge - The chain of discussions with my old selves began with a reading and physical annotation of Ernest Becker's physical book - The Birth ad Death of Meaning - It triggered a connection with Thomas Hagel's famous book - What's it like to be a bat? - But this connect-the-dot journey was kicked off by this morning's response to a Linked In discussion thread on the Anthropocene I've been having with Glenn Sankatsing of Rescue our Future: - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/glenn-sankatsing-7977711b8_anthropocentrism-paradox-or-theroot-of-activity-7185709152386654208-4E5t?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop - There the discussion focused on whether the Anthropocene is a term that is inherently biased since it is anthropomorphic. - Glenn used the example of a Rabbit's perspective of reality. This begged the question asked by Thomas Nagel. - Reading Becker's book and especially his discussion of human's cultural evolution of the ego construct being responsible for timebinding - creating a framework of time which we are all bound to, - it made me wonder about my perspective of reality vs my cat's perspective. Am I timebound and there are forever living in the present and always have a sense of timelessness? - If so, what are the implications? How do timebound organisms create an equitable symbiocene with other species that live in the eternal now? - What's also interesting is Husserl's phenomenological reductionism - the Epoche that suspends judgment - It raises these questions: - Does the Epoche also break timebinding? - Does it allow us to have a dreamlike experience during waking consciousness? - Does it allow us to enter timelessness and therefore share a similiar state to many other species?. - If we are able to enter such a timeless state, does it increase our empathy towards others fellow species?

      reference - Phenomenological reduction - Epoche - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=Epoche

    3. our consciousness of self is a social construction. Symbolic self-representation is built from the outside in, which means our identities are, in essence, social products.

      for - symbolosphere - individual / collective gestalt - Deep Humanity - quote

      quote - self as social construction - our consciousness of self is a social construction. Symbolic self-representation is built from the outside in, which means our identities are, in essence, social products.

      comment - good alignment and validation for Deep Humanity's individual collective gestalt

    4. This, Becker argues, is where the self-concept was born.

      claim - Self is a social construct - Ernest Becker

  2. Apr 2024
    1. In WhatsApp, members of a group must trust the serviceto correctly identify the member who authored an utterance, and utterances forwarded from onegroup to another have no credible attribution or context

      ^

  3. Mar 2024
    1. What’s the matterThat you unlace your reputation thusAnd spend your rich opinion for the nameOf a night-brawler? Give me answer to it.

      Iago is the answer, because the one with the most restraint ends up being undone the easiest.

    2. Are we turned Turks?

      Othello describes this chaos as Turks, as the foreign, as the other, as the out-group. This means he prizes his in-group due to their civility and restraint -- in other words their ability to maintain composure for the sake of pride. The rejection of the inner demon only creates more destruction (Inferior Function)

    3. Three lads of Cyprus, noble swelling spirits(That hold their honors in a wary distance,The very elements of this warlike isle

      They protect their honor with wariness, indicating a sense of hiding, of restraint, of self-control, and most of all, of shame. This is a string that Iago pulls, something already bound to topple, Iago is just the small push like a domino.

    4. and behold what innovation it makeshere.

      Iago simply uncovers their true and repressed selves, like a glass of wine does. In some way he is not a villain, he is just the ignition of an already burning flame

    5. without the which there were no expectation ofour prosperity.

      "Our prosperity signifies that he is both sidling up to his characters in his grand puppet show and actually a integral part of them literally. He has the same motivations as each of the characters, only he is helping all of them achieve their most sinister goals

    6. A knave very voluble, no furtherconscionable than in putting on the mere form of civiland humane seeming, for the better compassing of hissalt and most hidden loose affection.

      He is describing Cassio as a monster or devil with a facade of human civilness, when in fact it is Iago who is the monster, but fully civil and detached from his emotions. He sees the devil in desire, lust and love, when in fact the one who ruins it all is the one who cannot accept the human subjective nature including feeling and emotion

    7. ake all the money thou canst. If sanctimonyand a frail vow betwixt an erring barbarian andsupersubtle Venetian be not too hard for my wits and allthe tribe of hell, thou shalt enjoy her.

      Showing that he believes his wills make him the God of the world, that he has ultimate power over the chessboard just through intention alone -- and that is the work of the devil, the rejection of emotion's sway on decision making, and pure reason

    8. ut we have reason tocool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbittedlusts. Whereof I take this that you call love to be asect or scion.

      Perhaps his belief that he is uncontrolled by emotion and unconstrainted, and therefore is superior, is what makes him so evil? The detachment of oneself to their biological and true feeling is the work of the devil: reason.

    9. Virtue? A fig! 'Tis in ourselves that we are thus orthus. Our bodies are our gardens, to the which our willsare gardeners

      Iago's main core lies in self-control and motivation -- he believes himself to be a man of simple free will, and unlimited freedom. Unrestrained and in control of the chessboard -- he assumes both the external world and (mistakenly) his internal world are under his control, but they may not be.

    10. sterile with idleness, or manured withindustry

      Fertile or not fertile, choice of life and or death, of renewal or of idleness

  4. Feb 2024
    1. When a person with a disorder is unaware of his or her impairments, clinicians use the term “anosognosia,”

      Anosognosia is a neurological condition in which the patient is unaware of their neurological deficit or psychiatric condition. (Via Google)

    2. an internal tribunal that rules on the soundness of our mental representations, such as a memory or judgment.

      Our own self-awareness serves as an inner courtroom regarding our own judgements, opinions and memories. The judge of this court is one's self. The persecuted is one's self as well. We mandate our own inner court orders. Who better than ourselves is there to offer one's self proper insight?

    3. metacognition.

      Metacognition is the main theme of the article. It is the process of thinking about one's own thinking and learning. (Via Google)

      This ties into the title of Fleming's article: The Power of Reflection.

    1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWVrz5oCt2w<br /> The meaning of Hand Gestures in Art History<br /> Amuze Art Lectures

      Middle and ring fingers together to represent modesty. (He doesn't say it, but it also could stand for "M" as in Medici??)

      Finger pointing at viewer may indicate a self portrait.

      Woman's hand on abdomen may represent pregnancy, a fertile marriage, or the desire to bear children.

    1. When a person with a disorder is unaware ofhis or her impairments, clinicians use the term“anosognosia,”

      Anosognosia is a neurological condition in which the patient is unaware of their neurological deficit or psychiatric condition. (Via Google)

    2. metacognition.

      Metacognition is the main theme of the article. It is the process of thinking about one's own thinking and learning. (Via Google)

      This ties into the title of Fleming's article: The Power of Reflection.

    3. an internal tribunal that rules onthe soundness of our mental representations, suchas a memory or judgment.

      Our own self-awareness serves as an inner courtroom regarding our own judgements, opinions and memories. The judge of this court is one's self. The persecuted is one's self as well. We mandate our own inner court orders. Who better than ourselves is there to offer one's self proper insight?

    1. watched Tinderbox Meetup 2023-12-03 featuring Jorge Arango

      Attendees: Mark Bernstein, Michael Becker, Jorge Arango,

      Introductions: Rolf Huber (Information Architect)

      Featured

      • many different definitions of notes (types...)
      • Damien Newman scribble drawing as a representation or diagram of the design process (22:42)
      • 2x2 grid matrix of evergreen versus transient and mnemonic versus generative.(27:00)
      • contacts, recipes, book highlights and marginalia in the mnemonic/evergreen quadrant; to do lists, grocery list, appointments in the mnemonic/transient quadrant; sticky notes, mind maps, project plans, tinderbox in the generative/transient quadrant; knowledge gardens, zettelkasten, pkm systems in the generative/evergreen;

      • What does the structure of containers in each of these spaces look like? How simple or complex are they?

      • There can be growth from one space into others, (especially from the mnemonic into generative).

      • Chuck Wade mentions that email fits into all four of the quadrants.

      • Cathy Marshall used "information gardening" in Xerox Park setting... (source?) It may have been mentioned in Arango's interview of Mark Bernstein on The Informed Life.

      Arango came to knowledge gardening via Brian Eno essay on architecture and gardening metaphor.

      Three Rules of Knowledge Gardening

      1. Make short notes; create enough context to help out your future self
      2. Connect your notes
      3. Nurture your notes; revisit, build, feedback

      Q&A

      Dave Rogers - we should challenge our notes rather than "nurturing them";

      JA: Perhaps we could use AI/GPT to "steel man" our arguments?

      Hookmark: https://hookproductivity.com/

      Gordon Brander's Noosphere - protocol to define the problem of linking things quickly at internet scale.

    1. 09:00 Body and identity disappears — how I feel, what other people think — when in flow/ecstasy. We can't process more information when we are fully engaged with one task. "Existence is temporarily suspended"

    1. not only do comparisons disagree about how we should interpret Wittgenstein’s philosophy but also about which Wittgenstein too.

      for - indyweb example - conversations with old self

      Comment - this demonstrates how each individual consciousness is evolutionary and never the same river twice. - we are not a fixed thing, but a constantly churning cauldron of ideas

    1. 1:15 Kyle forced his progress from 25-30 years. Trying too hard, chasing too hard, is counter-productive ("cosmic paradox")

      See ZK on trying too hard is counterproductive

    1. 06:28 TLDR 1. Style is a lifestyle reflection of who you are 2. Good style requires understanding self 3. Bad style is trying to be something that its not

    1. Your zettelkasten, having a perfect memory of your "past self" acts as a ratchet so that when you have a new conversation on a particular topic, your "present self" can quickly remember where you left off and not only advance the arguments but leave an associative trail for your "future self" to continue on again later.

      Many thoughts and associations occur when you're having conversations with any text, whether it's with something you're reading by another author or your own notes in your zettelkasten or commonplace book. For more conversations on this topic, perhaps thumb through: https://hypothes.is/users/chrisaldrich?q=tag%3A%27conversations+with+the+text%27

      If you view conversations broadly as means of finding and collecting information from external sources and naturally associating them together, perhaps you'll appreciate this quote:

      No piece of information is superior to any other. Power lies in having them all on file and then finding the connections. There are always connections; you have only to want to find them.—Umberto Eco in Foucault's Pendulum (Secker & Warburg)

      (Reply to u/u/Plastic-Lettuce-7150 at https://www.reddit.com/r/Zettelkasten/comments/1ae2qf4/communicating_with_a_zettelkasten/)

    1. I think basically imagination is a lot of work

      for - adjacency - self construction - judgment as simplification - imagination is hard work

      adjacency - between - self construction - judgment as simplification - imagination as hard work - adjacency statement - We construct the self of others because we are lazy. - It takes hard work to construct a complex picture of another human being. - It's easier to just pass simple judgment and create a label for the other.

    2. other cultures do not think this and that suggests that our sense of self is largely culturally constructed

      for - quote - Sarah Stein Lubrano - quote - self as cultural construction in WEIRD culture - sense of self

      quote - (immediately below)

      • It's just a weird fascination of our weird culture that
        • we think the self is there and
        • it's the best and most likely explanation for human behavior
      • Other people in other cultures do not think this
      • and that suggests that our sense of self is largely culturally constructed

      discussion - sense of self is complex. See the work of - Michael Levin and - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=michael+levin - Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality - https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=major+evolutionary+transition+in+individuality

    3. one of the core ways that we're weird is that we think we have a self

      for - definition - Weird - stats - Weird countries - greatest sense of self - inspiration - introduce - Sarah Stein Lubrano - Rachell - Indyweb - Indranet

      definition - Weird - Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic

      inspiration - introduce Rachel and Sarah to Indyweb / Indranet - As soon as I heard Rachel and Sarah talk about the prominent and unique WEIRD feature of sense of self, - I immediately thought that we must introduce them to our work on the Indyweb / |ndranet as our system is designed based on the epistemology that - we are not a thing - we are a process - we are evolution in realtime action - the very use of the Indyweb / Indranet reinforces the reality that we are a process and not a fixed entity - so deconstructs the social construct of the self

    1. Among the cognoscenti of nanotechnology, this threat has becomeknown as the “gray goo problem.” Though masses of uncon-trolled replicators need not be gray or gooey, the term “gray goo”emphasizes that replicators able to obliterate life might be less in-spiring than a single species of crabgrass. They might be superiorin an evolutionary sense, but this need not make them valuable.

      quote in Bill Joy originally from the book Engines of Creation.

  5. Jan 2024
    1. 06.24 Giving into despair slips a person into his lower self. You must have hope, in dark times (Uncle Iroh). Despair is the lowest instinct.

    1. When I am attempting to get free, that labor is also helping others to get free. Not only do I have to choose freedom, I have to understand that I deserve to be free.

      This relates to understanding self compassion in learning to be self compassionate you are helping your capacity to be compassionate as well. NOT only do you have to choose to be self compassionate but you deserve to be self compassionate

    1. Uncontrolledself-replication in these newer technologies runs a much greater risk: arisk of substantial damage in the physical world.

      As a case in point, the self-replication of misinformation on social media networks has become a substantial physical risk in the early 21st century causing not only swings in elections, but riots, take overs, swings in the stock market (GameStop short squeeze January 2021), and mob killings. It is incredibly difficult to create risk assessments for these sorts of future harms.

      In biology, we see major damage to a wide variety of species as the result of uncontrolled self-replication. We call it cancer.

      We also see programmed processes in biological settings including apoptosis and necrosis as means of avoiding major harms. What might these look like with respect to artificial intelligence?

    1. yeah. printing books is my "prepping" for the post-apocalypse world: no electricity, no computers, no internet, no DVD players, ...

      on the other side, their aggressive push for digitalization of everything is their way of prepping for "the great memory hole". because the blackout is just a matter of time, and then "oops!" all data is gone, the collective memory is reset to zero, no proof of anything, no traces, no history ...

    1. book aims of education

      for - book - Aims of Education

      Followup - book - Aims of Education - author: Alfred North Whitehead - a collection of papers and thoughts on the critical role of education in determining the future course of civilization

      epiphany - adjacency between - Lifework and evolutionary nature of the individual - - people-centered Indyweb -- Alfred North Whitehead's ideas and life history - adjacency statement - Listening to the narrator speaking about Whitehead's work from a historical perspective brought up the association with the Indyweb's people-centered design - This is especially salient given that Whitehead felt education played such a critical role in determining the future course of humanity - If Whitehead were alive, he would likely appreciate the Indyweb design because it is based on the human being as a process rather than a static entity, - hence renaming human being to human INTERbeCOMing, a noun replaced by a verb - Indyweb's people-centered design and default temporal, time-date recording of ideas as they occur provides inherent traceability to the evolution of an individual's consciousness - Furthermore, since it is not only people-centered but also INTERPERSONAL, we can trace the evolution of ideas within a social network. - Since individual and collective intelligence are both evolutionary and intertwingled, they are both foundational in Indyweb's design ethos. - In particular, Indyweb frames the important evolutionary process of - having a conversation with your old self - as a key aspect of the evolutionary growth of the individual's consciousness

    1. computational boundary of the self notion is simply a way to try to be able to think about very diverse kinds of uh beings diverse kinds 00:08:12 of intelligences all all on one scale

      for: purpose - computational boundary of self - it's utility is to have one idea that can help define intelligence non-anthropomorphically, not just of humans

    2. it's easy for us to look at us and think okay we're 30 trillion human cells give or take we're about 39 trillion bacterial cells at what point do we consider ourselves bacteria or at what point do we consider ourselves 00:07:46 human

      for - question - identity - individual cell vs multicellular organism

      question - identity - individual cell vs multicellular organism - This is a fascinating question as it looks at our evolutionarily composite nature - as a multi-scale competency architecture - Certainly our ordinary consciousness operates as the governance system for the entire population of collaborating cells and microbes - but can we actually directly identify with each individual cell or microbe in this vast integrated collection? - how does Levin's computational boundary of self help to shed light on this question?

    1. The third is the brain of the observer. This is also a strong element in film criticism where the camera is the third eye, the eye of the artificial narrator. The most intelligent film about the third eye spying on the action is `Snake Eyes,' where we last saw Gugino. (You may want to check my comments on that film to see what I mean.)
    2. Most art refers to itself in some way, but nowadays almost every film has some straightforward self-reference in the form of being about some kind of show. There must have been a very influential executive producer some time back pushing this idea for it to be so common.The notion of these kinds of films is to create another world, so combine that with the self-reference gimmick and you have a fantasy kiddie show about a fantasy kiddie show.
    3. More, essentially all research in self-reference for decades has been in artificial intelligence, which is the device around which this plot turns. The language of AI is LISP, the name of the archvillain. In the heyday of LISP machines, the leading system was Flavors LISP Object Oriented Programming or: you guessed it -- Floop. I myself worked on a defense AI program that included the notion of a `third brain,' that is an observer living in a world different than (1) that of the world's creator, and (2) of the characters.
    1. For consumers, the equivalent of "build or buy" could be called "ads or nerds". "Ads" meaning ad-supported services, like consumer Gmail or Facebook. "Nerds" meaning hobbyist services based on free software and commodity hardware.
    2. If you already have computer-based hobbies such as gaming or a social-media addiction, why not learn to run your own services as a hobby? Note, this is very different from learning to code. It's more about learning to be your own sysadmin and tech support, rather than being a programmer.
    1. Instead of using a backup service like Google Photos or iCloud, you host your own backup and viewing platform using Nextcloud Photos, PhotoPrism, or such. Instead of using a password management system like LastPass or 1Password, you host your own password manager like BitWarden.
    1. Hi! My name is Mark Koester. I’m a phenomenologist and technologist. I ponder life’s fundamental questions through an on-going exploration of human experience and behavior, and I design and build “enablers” or tools (mostly digital products, books and, of course, this blog) that attempt to maximize human potential, health and creativity. I also love speaking, teaching courses, running innovation events and programs, and building product-centric companies.

      텍스트 마스터님 플레인 라이프를 배우라

  6. Dec 2023
    1. An idea at the heart of capitalism is that owners of capital should aim to increase the capital they personally own and the profit they make from it.
      • for: capitalism - heart of, adjacency - capitalism - self - othering - societal aspiration

      • adjacency between

        • heart of capitalism
        • self other dualism
        • societal aspiration
      • adjacency statement
        • The narrative that underlies personal gain is the socially acquired belief in a self and other dualism.
        • This is a deep psychological construct facilitated in early childhood development by what in Deep Humanity praxis is referred to as the mOTHER, the Most significant OTHER at the beginning of our journey in life.
        • From that point onwards, social learning propels us to objectify the world, and in particular others. Self and other co-emerge from early childhood learning.
        • As climate scientist Kevin Anderson notes, the elite 1%, responsible for an outsized ecological footprint are the result of the dominant capitalist narrative. It constitutes the social norm of "good" for most people. It is the societal aspiration from which 1% of the world population, approximately 80 million people, surface from the 8 billion as the elites in their respective field and are compensated through financial and material reward.
        • This societal aspiration aligns the majority of people to peer in the same direction of trying to win the game and bubble up to the 1% to indulge the rewards of a luxury lifestyle.
        • It is this same winning that will produce the next generation of 1%. They are being groomed as we speak.
        • Yet, their runaway success, and especially their reward is what can seal the fate of our civilization.
        • It is this societal aspiration role of capitalism as the dominant narrative that is the root generator of the next 1% and must be mitigated if we are to address the root of inequality.
    1. it's daunting because they're 00:37:18 all happening simultaneously in a way people don't recognize they're all kind of integrated with each other and they and they're reinforcing each other it's people call this kind of perfect storm but they don't but the problem with the 00:37:30 language the perfect storm terminology is it sort of implies that each one of these things whether it's economic stress or climate change or political polarization rising authoritarianism 00:37:41 you know collapse of mammalian populations they're all kind of separate distinct problems but actually they're all they're all affecting each other at this point
      • for: polycrisis, perfect storm, reinforcing feedbacks,

      • paraphrase

        • the polycrisis is a network of self-reinforcing and diverse crisis:
          • political polarization
          • war
          • fossil fuel entrenchment and expansion
          • precarity
          • migration
          • climate crisis
          • extreme weather
          • AI
          • political polarization
          • misinformation and interference of sovereign voting
          • emergence of authoritarianism
          • incorrect focus of effort - tinkering at the margins
          • runaway inequality - wealth, racial, post colonial, gender
          • dominance of capitalist wealth aspiration
          • rapid change required for entire system
          • sense of despair, hopelessness, anger, fear
          • mass extinction
          • climate departure
          • increasing health burden
          • runaway pollution
          • lack of effective government regulation
          • approaching planetary tipping points
        • the "perfect storm" assumes that these crisis are not related, but they are all syncrhonizing through positive feedbacks -their self-reinforcing positive feedbacks amplify all of them together and it can reach a threshold beyond human institutions to be able to cope
        • Commanding Hope or "Hope to" is critical for meeting these challenges
    2. i realized that that the the thing that giving me the most anguish in the world most uh a sense of crisis was the 00:16:18 possibility that my children would grow up merge into the world as adults and lose their sense of hope into a world of turbulent violence and would lose sense of hope 00:16:31 so that that's when things really started to crystalliz
      • for: for my children, self-centered motivation
      • new trailmark: reflections

      • reflections: I was inspired by my children

        • How often we hear academic researchers share how a lot of their work is inspired by their care for their children.
        • This is an interesting social phenomena in its own right.
        • It seems natural and yet, it begs the question, with so many existential threats to our entire species, is it only when we think of our own children that we can find motivation to act? Why can we not act without the dread our children might face?
        • Naturally, the answer is because we are selfish. We think, worry and are concerned more for our direct kin than for any other.
        • Perhaps, as a culture, had we had more concern for the others, we might not find ourselves in our current quagmire?
    1. eddy7346<br /> 2 years ago<br /> To anyone in college:<br /> If your history/government professor is extremely patriotic, do not ask about war crimes by the US... unless you want to get failed.<br /> P.S: This is just my experience, so that might not happen to you. My prof just happened to be a piece of shit

      the established "academia" is just another circlejerk, with teachers abusing their power as gatekeepers, to allow only "the good guys" to rise to power, and students cannot choose their teachers, because moving to a different school is expensive.<br /> this imbalance and injustice is so fundamental that it is "too big to fail". no matter what you do, the casino always wins...<br /> in my "crazy" hypothesis [1] i propose a radical solution for ths radical problem: all human relations must be balanced, so every one can live out his strength and delegate his weakspots to his friends.<br /> [1]: Pallas. Who are my friends. Group composition by personality type.<br /> github com milahu alchi

    1. 20:46 Flow brings you closer to the moment; to the essence of who you are; aligning with certain activities that "fit" with your being

  7. Nov 2023
    1. here must be a self now I'm not talking about a minimal kind of self a pre-reflective kind of self I'm talking about a socio-cognitive construct like philosophers like Dennard 00:03:30 and others have suggested a construct which is of a cognitive type it may also be of a social kind as suggested by social scientists like for example Wolfgang Prince Ian hacking and 00:03:42 even some neuroscientists like Michael Graziano have proposed scientific approaches to the notion of self
      • for: synonym - pre-linguistic self - pre-reflective self - minimal self
    1. the andaman islands have become the most popular destination 00:11:09 for india's new middle class the ruling nationalist bjp party is denying the jarwa the right to self-determination something that jarawa say is unacceptable 00:11:26 we don't your we're happy together we have no worries
      • for: Jawara - right to self-determination - indigneous people

      • comment

      • education: self determination
        • there is a need to translate to lay people terms what the saliance of this
    1. Otherwise we’d be second-guessing ourselves at every moment: Who is deciding to buy a house or have a child? FV: That’s right. Every decision would be suspect. So evolution has designed you so that you just want to hurry on with your solidified self. That is what the sense of being a separate organism is all about.
      • for: self awareness of no-self, adjacency - evolution - no-self - Fransisco Verella, quote - Fransisco Verella, quote - evolution - solidified self, question - awakening to no-self

      • quote: Fransisco Verella

        • Evolution has designed you so that you just want to hurry on with your solidified self. They is what the sense of being a separate organism is about.
      • date: 1999

      • comment

        • Verella claims evolution has designed us to have no self awareness of no-self, the origins of the self.
        • even this phrase seems like an oxymoron 'self awareness of no-self!'
      • question
        • how would a less complex, more primitive life form even have self awareness? What does that mean biologically? At that most rudimentary level, I suppose it would mean sensory feedback signals,
      • question
        • Does this imply that (emotionally or affectively) awakening to your origins of self leads to second guessing ourselves as well? From observation of the behaviour of awakened individuals, this does not seem to be the case. Rather, authentically awakens individuals appear to be associated with much higher levels of wisdom and compassion, which would seem to confer evolutionary fitness
    2. : Why do you think it is so hard for people to awaken to the true nature of things, even after being told of scientific research or after having a personal experience of no-self? FV: My hypothesis is that evolution has shaped human beings to disregard the basic sources of our being. We were built to forget how we were put together.
      • for: evolution - forgetting our non-self nature, adjacency - evolution - non-self - Fransisco Verella, adjacency - evolution - no-self - Fransisco Verella

      • adjacency between

        • evolution
        • non-self
        • Francisco Verella
      • adjacency statement
        • Verella makes the interesting claim that evolution designer is to be blind to our lack of self
        • in fact, major evolutionary transitions in individuality embed the creation of a new higher order individual at each major stage of transition.
        • More fundamentally, major evolutionary transitions to individuals at each level need to define a biological self through a new physiological boundary between what constitutes a new unitary individual "self" (our inner world) and the rest of the environment ( our new outer world)
        • It will be interesting to see how Verella's claim reconcile with that
    3. In some sense, a heightened degree of self-awareness is antievolutionary.
      • for: quote - Fransisco Verella, quote - evolution - no-self

      • quote: Fransisco Verella

        • In some sense, a heightened degree of self-awareness is anti evolutionary
      • date: 1999
    1. The phenomenological approach projects a radical criticism of scientific naturalism,which assumes that the object of science is to find laws that govern reality, where the person isconceived as another object of nature.
      • for: scientific naturalism - critique, scientific naturalism - phenomenology, consciousness - objectification of, SELF-consciousness

      • comment

        • Good observation that is quite salient to the hard problem of consciousness. Language can be used to describe any observable pattern.
        • Our own bodies are an observable pattern. As we associate our consciousness with our body, It is a small step to observe our own consciousness. SELF-consciousness is what allows us to be observer and observed at different times.
    1. for: empathy, self other dualism, symbolosphere, Deep Humanity, DH, othering, What is it like to be a bat?, Thomas Nagel, ingroup outgroup

      • title: What is it Like to be a Bat?
      • author: Thomas Nagel
      • date: Oct 1974

      • comment

        • Forget about what it's like to be a bat, what's it like to be another human!
        • This is a paper that can deepen our understanding of what it means to be empathetic and also its opposite, what it means to participate in othering. In the fragmented , polarized world we live in, these are very important explorations.
        • Insofar as the open source Deep Humanity praxis is focused on exploring the depths of our humanity to help facilitate the great transition through the meaning / meta / poly crisis embroiling humanity, knowing what the "other" means is very salient.

      NOTE - references - for references to any words used in this annotation which you don't understand, please use the tool in the following link to search all of Stop Reset Go's annotations. Chances are that any words you do not understand are explored in our other annotations. Go to the link below and type the word in the "ANY" field to find the annotator's contextual understanding, salience and use of any words used here

      https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true

  8. Oct 2023
    1. Quantitatively, SPRING with GPT-4 outperforms all state-of-the-art RLbaselines, trained for 1M steps, without any training.

      Them's fighten' words!

      I haven't read it yet, but we're putting it on the list for this fall's reading group. Seriously, a strong result with a very strong implied claim. they are careful to say it's from their empirical results, very worth a look. I suspect that amount of implicit knowledge in the papers, text and DAG are helping to do this.

      The Big Question: is their comparison to RL baselines fair, are they being trained from scratch? What does a fair comparison of any from-scratch model (RL or supervised) mean when compared to an LLM approach (or any approach using a foundation model), when that model is not really from scratch.

    1. Because if we do not work on our humanity, our humanity will work on us.
      • for: Deep Humanity, self-other dualism, othering, transformative empathy

      • comment

        • Humanity is insufficient to deal with the escalating violence in so many situations of modernity
        • Why not?
        • Because the self / other dualism is so strong that othering has become stubbornly habitual
        • To break through a lifetime of othering requires reaching a profound level of empathy , transformative empathy that disrupts the powerful social narratives constructed by powerful traumatized and alienated sides of a conflict that support and reify othering
        • a universal and open Deep Humanity is required to break the stranglehold of the social narrative of othering
  9. Sep 2023
    1. Kamatera is a very good option to run a mail server because They don’t block port 25, so you can send unlimited emails (transactional email and newsletters) without spending money on SMTP relay service. Kamatera doesn’t have any SMTP limits. You can send a million emails per day. The IP address isn’t on any email blacklist. (At least this is true in my case. I chose the Dallas data center.) You definitely don’t want to be listed on the dreaded Microsoft Outlook IP blacklist or the spamrats blacklist. Some blacklists block an entire IP range and you have no way to delist your IP address from this kind of blacklist. You can edit PTR record to improve email deliverability. They allow you to send newsletters to your email subscribers with no hourly limits or daily limits, whatsoever. You can order multiple IP addresses for a single server. This is very useful for folks who need to send a large volume of emails. You can spread email traffic on multiple IP addresses to achieve better email deliverability.
    1. Modoboa is an alternative to those 3 options. It frees you from dependence on email providers and makes accessible to all the creation his own secure email server.
    1. Self-hosting is when you---either using a computer on your local network at home or a remote "bare metal" server host you've purchased---host your own services for various purposes.
    1. 1:18:00 goosebumps, using media as inspiration and self-discovery, using as visualisation

      1:20:00 Goggins listening to one song for 17 hours “going to distance”

    2. 44:00 continuous self-discovery (constant war), “this is life”, “life is not a movie”

    3. 37:00 going to war with self

      • see zk notes on self-discovery & finding meaning in darkness
    1. the Bodhisattva vow can be seen as a method for control that is in alignment with, and informed by, the understanding that singular and enduring control agents do not actually exist. To see that, it is useful to consider what it might be like to have the freedom to control what thought one had next.
      • for: quote, quote - Michael Levin, quote - self as control agent, self - control agent, example, example - control agent - imperfection, spontaneous thought, spontaneous action, creativity - spontaneity
      • quote: Michael Levin

        • the Bodhisattva vow can be seen as a method for control that is in alignment with, and informed by, the understanding that singular and enduring control agents do not actually exist.
      • comment

        • adjacency between
          • nondual awareness
          • self-construct
          • self is illusion
          • singular, solid, enduring control agent
        • adjacency statement
          • nondual awareness is the deep insight that there is no solid, singular, enduring control agent.
          • creativity is unpredictable and spontaneous and would not be possible if there were perfect control
      • example - control agent - imperfection: start - the unpredictability of the realtime emergence of our next exact thought or action is a good example of this
      • example - control agent - imperfection: end

      • triggered insight: not only are thoughts and actions random, but dreams as well

        • I dreamt the night after this about something related to this paper (cannot remember what it is now!)
        • Obviously, I had no clue the idea in this paper would end up exactly as it did in next night's dream!
      • for: bio-buddhism, buddhism - AI, care as the driver of intelligence, Michael Levin, Thomas Doctor, Olaf Witkowski, Elizaveta Solomonova, Bill Duane, care drive, care light cone, multiscale competency architecture of life, nonduality, no-self, self - illusion, self - constructed, self - deconstruction, Bodhisattva vow
      • title: Biology, Buddhism, and AI: Care as the Driver of Intelligence
      • author: Michael Levin, Thomas Doctor, Olaf Witkowski, Elizaveta Solomonova, Bill Duane, AI - ethics
      • date: May 16, 2022
      • source: https://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/24/5/710/htm

      • summary

        • a trans-disciplinary attempt to develop a framework to deal with a diversity of emerging non-traditional intelligence from new bio-engineered species to AI based on the Buddhist conception of care and compassion for the other.
        • very thought-provoking and some of the explanations and comparisons to evolution actually help to cast a new light on old Buddhist ideas.
        • this is a trans-disciplinary paper synthesizing Buddhist concepts with evolutionary biology
    2. the ability to do so is associated with recognizing the facts of “no self” as discussed in the opening of this section. Accepting the Bodhisattva vow brings in this way the possibility of expanding intelligence in a steady fashion—free from hesitation, disappointment, fear, and other such factors that can now be seen to arise from misperceptions of the nature of the project.
      • for: self construct - misperceptions
      • in other words
        • if the self is no longer strongly reified, but experienced nakedly as a construction, then the misperceptions that are tethered to the solidification of self cannot survive, namely:
          • hesitation
          • fear
          • disappointment
          • attachment
          • etc...
    3. the Bodhisattva cognitive system is no longer constrained by the perception that one single self—i.e., its own self—requires special and sustained attention. Instead, Bodhisattva cognitive processes are now said to engage with spontaneous care for all apparent individuals. Thus, an immediate takeaway from non-dual insight is said to be the perception that oneself and all others are ultimately of the same identity.
      • for: bodhisattva's compassion, nondual compassion, non-dual compassion, compassion
      • insightful: bodhisattva's compassion
      • unpacking: bodhisattva's compassion
        • to understand what it is to experience the world free of (object, agent, action) triplet, it is necessary to understand what it means to experience the world from the (object, agent, action) perspective.
        • Buddhism's starting assumption is that experience from the (object, agent, action) perspective is the pathological but normative one.
        • It cannot be simply intellectual understanding, that is not enough for deep transformation. It must be quite deep, to the core of how we experience the world - as a seeming subject moving through a field of seeming objects.
        • This is accompanied by a feeling of alienation. The subject is separated from the field of objects.
        • David Loy has good insights on this subject of the mundane feeling of emptiness that accompanies our meaning crisis: https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=david+loy
        • Of course if you are able to penetrate the illusory nature of your own self construct in a meaningful way, it also gives you insight into the other perceived selves outside of you. Even this sentence is paradoxical to say, since there is no inside / outside in a nondual realization that penetrates the self.
        • So then, it does make sense to value all aspects of reality, not just yourself and others, but treating it as one unbroken gestalt
        • The concept of poverty mentality is useful here, David Loy refers to this as the "Lack project": https://jonudell.info/h/facet/?max=100&expanded=true&user=stopresetgo&exactTagSearch=true&any=poverty+mentality
    4. According to the Bodhisattva model of intelligence, such deconstruction of the apparent foundations of cognition elicits a transformation of both the scope and acuity of the cognitive system that performs it.
      • for: deconstructing self, self - deconstruction, object agent action triplet, deconstructing cognition
      • comment
        • this is a necessary outcome of the self-reflective nature of human cognition.
        • English, and many other languages bake the (object, agent, action) triplet into its very structure, making it problematic to use language in the same way after the foundations of cognition have been so deconstructed.
        • Even though strictly speaking the self can be better interpreted as a psycho-social construct and an epiphenomena, it is still very compelling and practical in day-to-day living, including the use of languages which structurally embed the (object, agent, action) triplet.
    5. Self is an illusory modelling construct created by perceptual systems of Agents
      • for: definition, definition - self, compassion, science - compassion, self-illusion, self-illusory, nilhism
      • definition
        • Self is an illusory modelling construct created by perceptual systems of Agents
      • paraphrase

        • Self is an illusory modelling construct created by perceptual systems of Agents
        • Agents construct models of causal Selves for others, and for ourselves, using the same machinery.
        • The same mechanisms that cause an agent to act toward stress reduction in itself
          • (even though the beneficiary of those actions is in an important sense impermanent)
        • can be expanded to extend to other Selves.
        • In this way, while our focus is on understanding and formulating Self in a way that is applicable to a broad range of scientific contexts,
          • we also see ourselves as here contributing to the treatment of perennial issues in contemporary Buddhist philosophy
            • such as the feasibility of genuine care in a world without real individuals
      • comment

        • the last statement has always been a paradox for me
        • Buddhist teachers often warn of how mistaken, immature views of emptiness can lead to harmful action
          • Indeed, if no selves exist, then over can easily mistaken nilhism as the logical behavioural conclusion
          • yet, teaching texts make clear that there is something critical the student has missed it they come to that conclusion
        • the transformation is missing its most important element of that false conclusion persists
    6. According to general Buddhist analysis, the individual that may be assumed to exist as a singular, enduring, and controlling self is mere appearance devoid of causal efficacy, and thus epiphenomenal [68]. In the case of a Bodhisattva, this understanding is carried forward so as to encompass a critique of the apparent foundations of cognition: object, agent, and action.
      • for: emptiness, shunyata, non-existence of self, no-self, illusory self, deconstructing self
      • comment
        • this short description of the reasoning behind deconstructing the self is quite fresh and insightful, especially relating it to cognition.
    7. Another feature of this vision that aligns well with Buddhist ideas is the lack of a permanent, unique, unitary Self [68]. The picture given by the evolutionary cell-biological perspective is one where a cognitive agent is seen as a self-reinforcing process (the homeostatic loop), not a thing [69,70,71].
      • for: illusory self, non-self, lack of self, organism - as process, human INTERbeCOMing, bio-buddhism, biology - buddhism
    1. hypothesis is kind of easy to agree on after a couple deductive guesses so you 01:23:21 guys want to go through it and see if you're a simulation hypothesis that's what Elon Musk is all right first question to silently answer these do you think it's probable that our 01:23:36 descendants will have computational power that is vast compared to ours today presume the answer is probably [Music] 01:23:48 okay next question will that vast ability to simulate worlds result in any of them doing two or more High Fidelity or hyper realistic ancestor or origin 01:24:02 simulations that include fully realistic physics presume the answer is sure it's probably true that at least two out of countless trillions of our 01:24:15 descendants spread across every imaginable region of time and space will use their Advanced abilities to do origin simulations deducted conclusion in Elon musk's words 01:24:28 we're probably living in a simulation in my words it is more probable than not that we are in one of the simulated realities versus being so lucky we happen to be in the one real reality
      • for self-simulation hypothesis
      • comment
        • I agreed with a lot of what he said up to now. In fact, he does a rather good presentation summarizing the contemporary problems we face and emphasizing the acceleration of change in all human spheres, giving rise to our current polycrisis
        • I agree that the mythos of materialism needs to be seriously explored and other perspectives may give us new salient insights, but I don't think it's so obvious that the theory that we are living in a simulation.
          • and quantum gravity theory a highly abstract cultural artefact being used to prove that
        • is going to be the panacea to create a compelling new mythos..
        • If technology alone is insufficient as he earlier claimed, then quantum gravity theory, as part of the entangled STEMS nexus is part of that techno-complex that is insufficient.
        • This claim will have to be proven true by strong and compelling evidence that receives mass acceptance. Without that, it becomes an unjustified claim and the complexity of it will elude most people.
      • for: Deep Humanity to DH, Klee Irwin, Are we lining in a Simulation, The Self Simulation hypothesis
      • annotate
        • time 1:14 of interesting
      • comment
        • Klee Irwin is a controversial figure. His claims need to be interrogated quite critically.
        • His first doom and gloom section is accurate meta presentation, but his claims on advanced physics have been questioned by a number of critics.
    1. your your self isn't 01:13:47 some permanent uh monadic structure that just kind of exists it's an active construction it's a process it's a you know it it's a constant information processing Auto police is that you know 01:13:59 of the mind doesn't stop during embryogenesis it kind of keeps going it has to and um and and it has these it has these interesting implications
      • for: constructing selves, constructing self, reconstructing self
      • comment
        • this is a fascinating insight that gives us deeper nuance on what it means to construct our selves in every moment
        • we obviously know we don't have access to our past and only have access to engrams of the past , so it isn't wrong to say that we are constantly reconstructing ourselves like a Planaria worm does to regenerate its body, all the time.
        • engrams are abstract traces of the past
        • this goes to the heart of constructing the self, in the Buddhist sense, as a kind of illusion
        • Levin says he is somewhere in the middle between the two poles of illusion and solidity of self, the self is a pragmatic useful metaphor, like everything else we construct
    1. an overview of the paper
      • for: paper overview, paper overview - the computational boundary of a self
      • paper overview

        • motivated by 2018 Templeton Foundation conference to present idea on unconventional and diverse intelligence
        • Levin was interested in any conceivable type of cognitive system and was interested in find a way to universally characterize them all

          • how are they detected
          • how to understand them
          • how to relate to them and
          • how to create them
        • Levin had been thinking about this for years

        • Levin adopts a cybernetic definition of intelligence proposed by William James that focuses on the competency to reach a defined goal by different paths
        • Navigation plays a critical role in this defiinition.
    2. the computational boundary of a self
    1. 1:41 identifying with a persona, consequence of society/expectations on oneself, & compromising the self

      Persona is fine, as long as you don’t “identify” with it

      • for: doppleganger, conflict resolution, deep humanity, common denominators, CHD, Douglas Rushkoff, Naomi Klein, Into the Mirror World, conspiracy theory, conspiracy theories, conspiracy culture, nonduality, self-other, human interbeing, polycrisis, othering, storytelling, myth-making, social media amplifier -summary
        • This conversation was insightful on so many dimensions salient to the polycrisis humanity is moving through.
        • It makes me think of the old cliches:
          • "The more things change, the more they remain the same"
          • "What's old is new" ' "History repeats"
        • the conversation explores Naomi's latest book (as of this podcast), Into the Mirror World, in which Naomi adopts a different style of writing to explicate, articulate and give voice to
          • implicit and tacit discomforting ideas and feelings she experienced during covid and earlier, and
          • became a focal point through a personal comparative analysis with another female author and thought leader, Naomi Wolf,
            • a feminist writer who ended up being rejected by mainstream media and turned to right wing media.
        • The conversation explores the process of:
          • othering,
          • coopting and
          • abandoning
        • of ideas important for personal and social wellbeing.
        • and speaks to the need to identify what is going on and to reclaim those ideas for the sake of humanity
        • In this context, the doppleganger is the people who are mirror-like imiages of ourselves, but on the other side of polarized issues.
        • Charismatic leaders who are bad actors often are good at identifying the suffering of the masses, and coopt the ideas of good actors to serve their own ends of self-enrichment.
        • There are real world conspiracies that have caused significant societal harm, and still do,
        • however, when there ithere are phenomena which we have no direct sense experience of, the mixture of
          • a sense of helplessness,
          • anger emerging from injustice
        • a charismatic leader proposing a concrete, possible but explanatory theory
        • is a powerful story whose mythology can be reified by many people believing it
        • Another cliche springs to mind
          • A lie told a hundred times becomes a truth
          • hence the amplifying role of social media
        • When we think about where this phenomena manifests, we find it everywhere:
      • ego as illusion
      • not I, but we? (relate to concept of environments/ extending mind/extending self)
      • awareness to what is (all of our experience, surroundings, organisms)
      • body "I?" as part of a greater nature, Allah, and everything else (part of oneness we participate in)
      • ego as construct (things we tell ourselves, beliefs)
      • ego as illusion (are we a center of consciousness/energy? it causes opposition)
      • we are the body, as part of the natural environment
      • no self, as system (organs)
      • self as organism that goes together with other organisms/see extended mind as extended self, maybe different phrasing)
      • I as organism/environment, but ego as opposing it
      • confusing symbols with reality of the world itself (see Tolle on interpretation as removing from present)
      • caused by stories to ourselves, by others, looking at mirror/listening etc. "creating of image of self/mask" (persona), as a social institution (construct of self/ego), it is useful (helpful for navigation, but it is abstract)
      • hides of ourselves, entirely unconscious, to external world etc. (things that are essential to us, we don't perceive, bec of the ego)
      • sensations of "I" is false (cutting off your complete experience, all organisms, everything in ones awareness, not closed off)
      • forcing the mind/concentrate is thinking to ourselves (for example, how we ought to read thst difficult book)
      • distracting ourselves from reality
      • destroying environment as destroying the body
      • "you can't rid of it" (that is the ego, trying to get rid of the ego, a circle) answer: do nothing (ego asking the question)
      • you can't control anything, like thoughts, feelings, other organisms, they are as they are, so you don't do anything, you see, you feel, observe, you are not "you" , you as the whole world (and creator), as experience
      • misunderstanding nafs as misunderstanding quran
      • doctor doesn't use ego, but self
      • ego as ana? (not same?), ego as term by freud
      • how science and religion can be compatible (removing materialism)
      • key to world as in hands of man (self), thirtieth word
      • Nursi as using quranic definition of self and philosophical
      • Nursi studied himself, not attending medrese (at early life)
      • Nursi memorised 90 collections of books, reciting those books every 3 months, read quran in his early 40s
      • self/nafs 300 times in quran (& different meanings of self)
      • other component than self, directing you?
  10. Aug 2023
    1. (~14:00) The way to gain massive results is to have massive irrational goals complemented by small reasonable steps or milestones.

      Big goals motivate. Big goals give focus and clarity, they are a filter (see Dr. Benjamin Hardy's content); they allow for easy application of the power law.

    2. (~13:00) Koe argues for making information relevant (Dr. Sung always says you must make info relevant) through the learning for the solving of a particular problem, either for a client, your business, or your personal life. Your problem becomes the lense through which you learn.

      For self-education this is ideal.

      Dr. Sung's approach differs in that he advocates for the creation of relevancy through inquiry (the asking of relational questions) which is also incredibly powerful, however this is more suited to gaining more motivation for forced learning, i.e., in the formal education system.

      In addition, Koe's lense is, I think, more of a high-level filter, whereas Sung's questioning is applicable on the content level. Therefore, both approaches could be, and should be, combined into the same overall (self-)educational system.

    1. Ten minutes before sleep, do the following: PRAY

      It's a combination of visualization, commitment, and meditation

      Request the subconscious through this act of prayer.

      Also visualize the outcome and process of that which you aspire to do the following day, and even that which you want to achieve the following month(s). Thus, visualize the following: Big Picture, Milestones, and yourself the next day.

    2. In the morning, process your subconscious state by instead of immediately inputting, you start outputting!

      This can be done through journaling.

    3. Put the phone on airplane mode (in addition to blocking blue light) before sleep, for quite some time before sleep, in order to avoid (over)stimulation and the creation of dopamine which negatively impacts (falling a)sleep

    4. What is done right before and right after sleep sets the stage for literally everything.

      How you do anything is how you do everything.

    1. (~10:00) "The context determines the meaning of the content."

      Thus reframing is very powerful as you recontextualize the past, and therefore see it in a whole new light; the meaning of the past changed.

      By asking what you have learned from the past, you become anti-fragile and flexible, as you turn the past into something useful; an asset.

      "The past happens for us, not to us."

      "How you frame the past influences your expectations for the future."

      "You can't disconnect your view of the future from your experience in the present."

      "You can't have meaning in the present without hope & purpose in the future."

    2. One of the powerful things about journaling is that you can control the past; reframe it. What is the meaning of the past gets determined by both the present and the future.

      Hardy recommends to often (even daily) reflect on the past and notice how different you are now compared to then. What you have achieved, what is possible now that was not possible then, etc.

      What did I learn today?

    3. (~4:00) We interpret reality in a (cognitive) schema. Reality exists only in the mind. We cannot view reality objectively because it is intertwined with perception and cognition (see also John Boyd's OODA loop).

      Sidenote; because of this, time is also holistic; in our schema, the past, present, and future are basically all-existent at once.

    4. Watch this video for much interesting information about journaling.

      Journaling is all about agency

    1. I do want to point out one more really significant implication here which is how it affects our experience of time
      • for: the lack project, sense of lack, the reality project, sense of self, sense of self and lack, poverty mentality, sense of time, living in the future, living in the present, human DOing, human BEing
      • key insight
        • we construct different types of experiences of time, depending on the degree of sense of lack we experience
        • it means the difference between
          • living in the present
          • living in the future
      • paraphrase
        • it's the nature of lack projects insofar as we become preoccupied with them
        • that they tend to be future oriented naturally
        • I mean the whole idea of a lack project or a reality project is right here right now is not good enough
          • because I feel this sense of inadequacy this sense of lack
          • but in the future when I have what I think I need
            • when I'm rich enough or
            • when I'm famous enough or
            • my body is perfect enough or whatever
          • when I have all this then everything will be okay
          • and what of course that does is that future orientation traps Us in linear time in a way that tends to devalue the way we experience the world and ourselves in the world right here and now
          • it treats the now as a means to some better ends
          • Now isn't good enough
            • but when I have what I think I need everything is going to be just great
        • So many of the spiritual Traditions taught
        • especially the mystics and the Zen Masters
        • they end up talking about what is sometimes called
          • the Eternal now
          • or the Eternal present - a different way of experiencing the now
        • As long as the present is a means to some better end
          • this future when I'm gonna be okay
        • then the present is experienced as
          • a series of Nows that fall away
          • as we reach for that future
        • but if we're not actually needing to get somewhere that's better in the future
        • it's possible to experience the here and now
          • as lacking nothing and myself in the here and now
          • as lacking nothing
      • it's possible to experience the present as something that doesn't arise and doesn't fall away
    2. t the irony of course is that if this desire if this craving for money if this lack project and we could also call it reality project because another 00:13:08 way to talk about all this is to say that we don't feel real enough and we're looking for that which somehow will make us feel more real more complete more whole right 00:13:20 because whatever the lack project may be it is looking for out something outside that's going to secure this sense of self-insight the tragedy of the whole process of 00:13:32 course is that it doesn't matter how much money you earn it's never going to be enough because what we're dealing with is just a symptom and not the core problem
      • for: the lack project, the reality project, sense of lack, sense of self, poverty mentality, polylcrisis, polycrisis - root
      • paraphrase
        • the irony is that
          • if this desire
          • if this craving for money
          • if this lack project and
          • we could also call it reality project
            • because another way to talk about all this is to say that we don't feel real enough and we're looking for that which somehow will make us feel more real more complete more whole
        • because whatever the lack project may be it is looking for out something outside
          • that's going to secure this sense of self-inside
        • the tragedy of the whole process is that it doesn't matter how much money you earn
          • it's never going to be enough
          • because what we're dealing with is just a symptom and not the core problem
      • key insight
        • the lack project is at the root of our polycrisis
    3. if you ask about things like lack projects or reality projects on the individual level you know I was talking 00:32:01 about how the separation is a delusion it's uncomfortable we become preoccupied with trying to find something out here that'll fill up our sense of lack and you know we can Wonder is there 00:32:13 something comparable at the civilizational level and frankly I think that there is I think that it is our Collective preoccupation with progress
      • for: progress trap, sense of lack, the lack project, collective lack project, individual lack project
      • key insight
        • progress, and the shadow side, the progress trap
        • is the collective lack project, that corresponds to the individual's lack project
    4. there's 00:08:43 nothing there that could be secured and here's the important point I think we experienced that we experience it as a sense of lack 00:08:58 that is to say the sense that something is wrong with me something is missing something isn't quite right I'm not good enough and the reality is I think all of us to 00:09:14 some degree have some sense of that some sense of lack even though we might ignore it or cover it up there's there's some sense of that but because it's mostly sort of unconscious in the sense that we don't 00:09:29 really know where it comes from
      • for: sense of lack, sense of self, sense of self and sense of lack, human condition, poverty mentality, alienation, separation, emptiness, emptiness of emptiness, W2W, inequality
      • key insight
        • sense of self is equivalent to
          • sense of lack
          • duality
          • disconnection
          • alienation
          • separation
          • solidification - the opposite of emptiness
      • comment
        • this sense of lack that is intrinsically associated with the sense of self is perhaps the deepest root of our unhappiness
        • this is a key insight for sharing for both those who have too much (the 1%) as well as those who are so materially impoverished and deprived that they are forced to adopt survivalist strategies to stay alive, and if successful, take on a hard edge to survivalism, over-appreciating materialism
        • the same mistake is committed on both end of the disparity spectrum, both groups are still under the illusion that that sense of lack can be filled
    5. sense of self is a construct a psychological and social construct it's something it's not something that 00:06:42 infants are born with it's actually something that develops as we grow up our caregivers look into our eyes give us a name that we learned to identify with and also basically we learn to see 00:06:59 ourselves as they see us we inte
      • for: self, constructing reality, constructed self, constructed reality, constructing the sense of self, self and other, nonduality, duality, insecurable, comment, question

      • paraphrase

        • sense of self is a construct
        • a psychological and social construct
        • it's not something that infants are born with
          • it's actually something that develops as we grow up
        • our caregivers look into our eyes
          • give us a name that we learned to identify with and
          • also basically we learn to see ourselves as they see us
            • we internalize that which is why we are so preoccupied with what other people think about
          • we learned to use language in certain ways
            • mine
            • you
            • yours
            • his
            • hers and so forth
          • that's all very essential to it
        • so we could say that the sense of self is being a construct
        • it's composed of mostly habitual ways of
          • thinking
          • feeling
          • acting
          • reacting
          • remembering
          • planning and
          • tending
        • it's the way that these mostly habitual processes work together re-enforce each other
        • but does that give us insight into what the fundamental problem is?
      • I think it does and here's what it is as I understand it
        • because the sense of self is a construct
          • because it doesn't refer it
          • doesn't depend on it
          • doesn't point back to a real self that has any self-reality or or self-identity
      • this sense of self by virtue of its lack of essence is inherently uncomfortable

        • we can say it's basically inherently insecure
        • in fact it's not only insecure but it's insecurable
      • comment

      • question
        • I agree with David's analysis but also have a question for him:
          • what about the biological, evolutionary definition of the self of a living organism. Is there a contradiction here?
          • reference
            • Major Evolutionary Transitions occur when a group of individuated living organisms achieve greater fitness by mutualism and begin to reproduce together as a new unit
              • How do we harmonize the claim of a psychologically constructed self with this evolutionary formation of new biological SELF units through MET?
    1. Our real challenge, perhaps, is in relearning what the “collective interest” actually means, and why it is so important, and how we got to this perverse situation where we have such monstrous distrust of each other, and of collectives in general, that we have assumed that, somehow, 7.8B people acting in their isolated individual, personal, and often trauma-influenced self-interest, will somehow be synonymous with an optimal collective interest.
      • for: further inquiry, unpack, self-other entanglement, dual, nondual
      • paraphrase
        • Our real challenge, perhaps, is in relearning what the “collective interest” actually means,
        • and why it is so important,
        • and how we got to this perverse situation
          • where we have such monstrous distrust of each other,
          • and of collectives in general,
          • that we have assumed that, somehow, 7.8B people acting in their
            • isolated
            • individual,
            • personal, and often
            • trauma-influenced
          • self-interest,
          • will somehow be synonymous with an optimal collective interest.
      • comment
        • it points once again to a deeper understanding of the relationship between
          • self and
          • other
          • and their entanglement
  11. Jul 2023
    1. when you see that the rates of domestic abuse among police officers in the United States is higher than the general average in the public. So, you know, when you think about why that's happening, perhaps it's that the job is making them a bit more on edge or causing them to behave in certain ways. I think what's more likely is that people who are abusive 01:32:41 are disproportionately likely to seek out a job in which you can abuse people. Now, this is not to say that police officers are bad people, but it is to say that, for the slice of the population that is abusive, especially the people who like to wield power and carry a gun and terrorize people, for them, as one of the police officers in London told me who's in charge of recruitment for the Metropolitan Police, she said to me, "Look, if you're an abusive bigot, 01:33:06 policing is an attractive career choice. It doesn't mean that police officers are generally abusive bigots. It means that for that slice of the population, they like the idea of being able to professionally abuse people."
      • self-selection effect
        • example
          • police
            • it is likely that abusive, controlling people are on average, more attracted to being police officers because they can control and abuse others in that position
    2. Doraville, Georgia.
      • Example
        • self-selection effect
          • Doraville police department created a video of hyper-masculine SWAT team to attract new officers
          • they attracted hyper-masculine males
          • New Zealand took the opposite approach
          • We absolutely have to have oversight and very close scrutiny of police officers who abuse their authority.
          • But at the same time, we have to think more carefully about who ends up in the uniform to begin with.
    3. when we think about self-selection bias and survivorship bias in tandem, we have a really important understanding of how power actually operates
      • key observation
        • the dynamics and relationship between
          • self-selection bias and
          • survivorship bias
        • gives us insight of how power operates
        • The wrong kinds of people who are power-hungry, seek power more in the first place.
        • Then they're better at obtaining it.
        • They show up in our ordinary lives because they've survived,
          • they've made it.
        • So when we think about who is powerful,
          • we have to think about
            • the people who didn't seek power in the first place and
            • the people who didn't obtain power in the first place.
            • the people who didn't survive in power for very long, and therefore they dropped out.
          • The presidents and prime ministers,
          • the generals,
          • the cult leaders,
          • the business leaders,
        • those people are basically people who have survived and who self-selected.
    4. The same is true for power. People who are power-hungry, people who are psychopaths tend to self-select into positions of power more than the rest of us. And as a result, we have this skew, this bias in positions of power where certain types of people, often the wrong kinds of people, 00:14:51 are more likely to put themselves forward to rule over the rest of us
      • key observation
        • People who are power-hungry, people who are psychopaths
          • tend to self-select into positions of power more than the rest of us.
        • And as a result, we have this skew, this bias in positions of power
          • where certain types of people, often the wrong kinds of people,
          • are more likely to put themselves forward to rule over the rest of us
    5. self-selection effect
      • definition
        • self-selection effect
          • those people who are power-hungry and seek control are far more likely to seek positions of power in the first place, and are focused and develop skills to get it.
    1. Auto pilot questions for silencing thoughts - are my thoughts useful? - how do they behave?

      This kind of speaks to having awareness, and the ability to neutralise thoughts, using self-inquiry (not destroying thoughts, as Eckhardt Tolle does seem to suggest)

    2. Anthony doesn't want to destroy thinking, but, instead, wants to neutralise them. This means that he still has thoughts, like thoughts for intellectual thinking, or thoughts for planning, and so on, but, he wants to neutralise thoughts that seem excessive, not helpful (see questions) - also see comments made on Eckhardt Tolle in previous note - see Shi Heng Yi, and his 4 steps (the fourth one being self-inquiry), and the video on embracing suffering

    1. THE GREAT CONVERSATION

      How specifically does the author define "The Great Conversation"?

      Note that it is consistently capitalized throughout the book to give it greater importance.

      • not learning oneself, self-master as self-discovery & self-awareness
      • spirituality as learning of oneself
      • enjoy time doing nothing, also find things you like to do
      • each person find way to climb the mountain (gaining clarity on top of mountain)
      • 5 hindrances as challenges to journey (state of mind, not having/getting clarity)
      • (1) sensual desire
      • 2 ill will (rejection, also see my ideas on madness) "let go"
      • 3 sloth (dullness of mind/body) lack if motivation/energy (see flow)
      • 4 restlessness (not being in present)
      • 5 sceptical doubt (being indecisive, getting lost in thoughts)
      • structure/design life to prevent hindrances from arising (see my way of life as making environments/practices to prevent?) "techniques to remove them"
      • (4 steps to prevent the hindrances)
      • 1 what is your state of mind
      • 2 accept the situation/someone/something to be they way it is/the way they are
      • 3 emotional & mental questioning (why did it come up? understanding it, what will happen if it remains?)
      • 4 non-identification (I am not my mind, my body, or my emotions, it is just that I am there to observe them all)
    1. Sometimes it means telling them something they knew unconsciously but had never put into words. In fact those may be the more valuable insights, because they tend to be more fundamental.

      The art of the "aha" moment.

  12. Jun 2023
    1. Platform engineering is trying to deliver the self-service tools teams want to consume to rapidly deploy all components of software. While it may sound like a TypeScript developer would feel more empowered by writing their infrastructure in TypeScript, the reality is that it’s a significant undertaking to learn to use these tools properly when all one wants to do is create or modify a few resources for their project. This is also a common source of technical debt and fragility. Most users will probably learn the minimal amount they need to in order to make progress in their project, and oftentimes this may not be the best solution for the longevity of a codebase. These tools are straddling an awkward line that is optimized for no-one. Traditional DevOps are not software engineers and software engineers are not DevOps. By making infrastructure a software engineering problem, it puts all parties in an unfamiliar position. I am not saying no-one is capable of using these tools well. The DevOps and software engineers I’ve worked with are more than capable. This is a matter of attention. If you look at what a DevOps engineer has to deal with day-in and day-out, the nuances of TypeScript or Go will take a backseat. And conversely, the nuances of, for example, a VPC will take a backseat to a software engineer delivering a new feature. The gap that the AWS CDK and Pulumi try to bridge is not optimized for anyone and this is how we get bugs, and more dangerously, security holes.
    1. I think we have a responsibility not only to ourselves, but also to each other, to our community, not to use Ruby only in the ways that are either implicitly or explicitly promoted to us, but to explore the fringes, and wrestle with new and experimental features and techniques, so that as many different perspectives as possible inform on the question of “is this good or not”.
    1. It is quite “normal,” and human, to not enjoy making mistakes! That is why we often feel embarrassed, deny their existence, and/or blame others for our errors. We believe that the best way is to admit your mistakes, learn from them and take corrective action. After all, a mistake is a mistake – no more, no less.

      some thoughts i have on this:

      • personally, i find that the biggest challenge on admitting mistakes is people defining you by a single mistake and constantly bringing it up in similar future situations. there is this fear of being stuck with this identity or perception from others and it can be quite daunting.

      i wonder if this is so because we often derive our understanding of ourselves through other people's perspectives. consequently, when they see us as failures in certain departments, we might easily adopt that belief too.

      this is in connection with the "spyglass self" where we view ourselves through others' eyes and shape and our identities accordingly.

      • a fascinating detail i noticed when faced with admitting a mistake is how we often shift the blame or focus onto others to avoid this uncomfortable and inconvenient situation. this behavior is interesting to me considering our pursuit of self-improvement and goodness. in these instances, empathy and compassion seem to vanish as self-preservation takes priority.

      this is a great instance in which we become trapped in our own thoughts, creating a dangerous bubble where only our well-being seem to matter. the contrast between this self-centered mindset and our usual desire for growth presents an interesting aspect of human nature.

  13. May 2023
    1. winnicott once said you know there's no such thing as a baby there's only a baby and someone
      • "gestation rewires your brain in fundamental ways um you it rewire it primes you for caretaking as a as a mother in a way which is far more visceral and far it's it's pre-rational it's it's immensely transformative experience and it's permanent you know once you've been rewired for mummy brain you'd never really go back um and that from the point of view of raising a child that matters um because when after a baby is born it's you know as winnicott once said you know there's no such thing as a baby there's only a baby and someone there's a a baby doesn't exist as an independent entity until it's some years some years into its life arguably quite a few years into its life um and what I would say about artificial wounds is that you may be you may think that what you're doing is creating a baby without the misery of gestation but what you're doing in practice is creating a baby without creating a mother because a pregnancy doesn't just create a baby it also creates a mother"

      • Comment

  14. Mar 2023
    1. it is a mental construct

      Good explanation of what self-consciousness attempts to do:

      Self-consciousness is not something obviously "self-existing" it is a fiction, - it is ungrounded because it is - a mental construct.

      Rather than being selfsufficient, - consciousness is like the surface of the sea: dependent on unknown depths ("conditions," as the Buddha called them) that it cannot grasp - because it is a manifestation of them.

      The problem arises because this conditioned, and therefore unstable, consciousness wants to - ground itself, to make itself real.

      But to real-ize itself is to objectify itself - meaning to grasp itself, since an object is that-which-is-grasped.

      The ego-self is this continuing attempt to objectify oneself by grasping oneself, something we can no more do than a hand can grasp itself.

    2. repressed intuition "returns to consciousness in distorted form" as the symbolic ways we compulsively try to ground ourselves and make ourselves real in the world: such as power, fame, and of course money.

      //* Loy is stating... - Those engaging compulsively in money, fame, power, materialism - are actually deeply repressing - the fact that the ego-self, and therefore self-consciousness is a construction - To continually reify the ego-self, we engage in these activities - and of course, this is fueling the polycrisis we now find ourselves in

    3. The Buddhist doctrine of no-self implies that our fundamental repression is not sex (as Freud thought), nor even death (as existential psychologists think), but the intuition that the ego-self does not exist, that our self consciousness is a mental construction.

      // SELF CONSCIOUSNESS IS A MENTAL CONSTRUCTION

    1. You need to be on top of your index. This is your main navigation system.

      This is a major drawback to this method and the affordance of sparse indexing using Luhmann's method.

    1. For instance, we used to think that the main cause of obesity was a poor diet at an individual level, leading to treatments focused on the individual. However, taking a networked thinking approach in a 32-year-long study with over 12,000 people led researchers to discover that the participants’ personal network had a great impact on their likelihood to be obese. “Discernible clusters of obese persons were present in the network at all time points,” write the researchers.

      Another social factor influencing human behaviour. Beware of such factors when it comes to self-improvement and learning.

    1. Ithaka - C. P. Cavafy, "The City" from C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard.

      The first version of "Ithaka" was probably written in 1894. Cavafy revised the poem in 1910, and it was first published in 1911. The first English translation was published in 1924, and there have been a number of different translations since then. The poem can be found in Cavafy's Collected Poems, translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard, edited by George Savidis, Princeton University Press, 1980.

    1. I dont know if it's just me, but there is something about this learning journey that feels illegal. I think I am feeling the way I feel due to the influence of centralization and the corporate world we live in. This knowledge should be open to all and more people should know about this.

  15. Feb 2023
    1. I find it very tiring haha. As I said in another comment, processing a single chapter can take me a full day or two. However, I keep reminding myself that I would rather spend a day processing a chapter well, and have literature notes to serve me a lifetime (potentially, at least), rather than reading a chapter in two hours and not remember a single thing the next day. When I REALLY need a reminder of this, I just look at my "Backlog" folder which contains old "notes" that are now pretty much useless: I didn't use a reference manager consistently during my first two years of PhD so there are a lot of citations which are unreliable; I didn't really summarise texts, I only read them and highlighted; I didn't use the cloud for a long time, so I lost a lot of notes; and I didn't have Obsidian, so a lot of my notes are just contained within the context of the place I read them, rather than being connected. Seeing three years worth of useless materials, and knowing that I read a couple hundred of articles/chapters but I have nothing to show for it, that makes me more patient when writing my literature notes now. However I also find it very exciting that I can future-proof some of my notes. I feel like I'm working for my future self.

      A partial answer to note taking why.

    1. The reason is that the journaling is in part an accumulative method: There is a long period of low-structured input which benefits manifest first acutely (writing in itself seems to be healing through understanding). After you amassed a time-line of thoughts you can try to find throughlines and patterns which then gives you access to deep insights if you have the right tools. Most of the time people use psychologists which I think is in a similar way problematic that people use physical therapists for too much of their problems: Many problems are best solved by the person that has immediate access to the ego-perspective (phenomenological layer, subjective access, etc.) of the problem. This is of course dependent on self-education on basic concepts of what I call true self-care. Self-care seems to be associated with stuff like doing pleasant things (hot bath, nice walks in the sun) nowadays. If you take the antifragile nature of us humans into account this is just another way of the modern hedonist to keep stuck. (This is important for my approach to incorporate journaling into the Zettelkasten Method)

      —Sasha Fast https://forum.zettelkasten.de/profile/Sascha

      I love the deeper definition and distinction of self-care here.

    1. “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.
    2. 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.
    1. | physics/mathematics | Classical Physics | Quantum Mechanics |<br /> |---|---|---|<br /> | State Space | fields satisfying equations of laws<br>- the state is given by a point in the space | vector in a complex vector space with a Hermitian inner product (wavefunctions) |<br /> | Observables | functions of fields<br>- usually differential equations with real-valued solutions | self-adjoint linear operators on the state space<br>- some confusion may result when operators don't commute; there are usually no simple (real-valued) numerical solutions |

    1. 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.

      What does he mean precisely by "principle"?

  16. Jan 2023
    1. If you aren’t visibly producing, you aren’t worthy. In this context, taking time to lie dormant feels greedy, even wasteful.

      Wintering

    1. 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.

      !- comment : Deep Humanity multi-meaningverse / situatedness and perspectival knowing - One perspective cannot rule all - By definition, an individual is one person, as soon as there are two, there are at least two perspectives - We are the entanglement of the similar and the different; if we did not share fundamental human traits, we could not communicate, and yet, being nurtured in unique lifeworlds, we are so distinct - the intersection of these two opposing qualities is the inherent contradiction of our human nature

    1. 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.”
    1. 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

      !- Gedanken : future self question to present self

    1. 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

      !- work on self : entangle with work on others - Loy acknowledges the fact that one cannot truly work on the self in isolation, - lest it actually increase the root separation that is the cause of the problem we have - working on breaking the illusion of the self-concept is also working on clearly seeing our entanglement with the other

    1. 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

      !- theme of talk : losing yourself, How to be a Person without a Self - what it is to exist as a person without a self - based on the research in his book: Losing yourself: How to be a person without a self

      !- Jay Garfield : Comment - This work is in the same direction as the following authors: - Physicist Tom Murphy: civilization and the program of control as the root structural problem of our polycrisis https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2Ff6yFrh1X6DI%2F&group=world<br /> - Glenn Albrecht & Gavin Van Horn: Replacing the Anthropocene with the Symbiocene https://hyp.is/go?url=https%3A%2F%2Fhumansandnature.org%2Fexiting-the-anthropocene-and-entering-the-symbiocene%2F&group=world - Buddhist scholar David Loy: On the Emptiness at the heart of the human being that cannot be filled by consumerism & materialism https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2F1Gq4HhUIDDk%2F&group=world - Korean / German philosopher Byung-Chul Han: The Burnout Society https://hyp.is/go?url=http%3A%2F%2Fdocdrop.org%2Fvideo%2FbNkDeUApreo%2F&group=world

    2. 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

      !- explanation : self alienation - the model by which we navigate reality is at odds with the actual mode of existence - I feel I am different than the objects of my experience - The subject does not mix with the objects

    3. 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

      !- Chandrakurti : don't fool yourself about the elephant - keep your eye focused on the serpent - the actual FEELING and BELIEF that you are what experiences the mind and body, that you are the subject that witnesses all objects - this is the REAL sign that you are attached to the serpent, still caught in the self illusion. --This is the subtle self deception that is extremely difficult to overcome, the innate self illusion that comes from a lifetime of affective conditioning - to upright this innate self-illusion requires monumental effort - actions speak louder than words! - Hume is in essence saying the same thing as Chandrakurti

    4. 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

      Second consequence : self alienation self

    5. 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

      !- first consequence : self centeredness

    6. 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

      !- consequences of : solidifying self illusion

    7. 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

      !- existence : without a self - we can exist through time, just like the chariot or the flame, without needing to impute an unchanging self to exist in every moment - later on in the talk, Jay uses example of money in the same way

    8. 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

      !- intrinsic fear of death : strong role in creation of a self illusion -Ernest Becker, David Hume, Shanti Devi all regard death as a major reason we create the self illusion - Becker cliams we reify the self as a bulwark against the terror of death - the fear of death is deeply wired in us - the story of a self allows it to posit a symbolic form of eternal life, hence resulting in immortality projects - we know we have fallen under the spell of the illusion of self when we can be insulted, when we get angry, when we feel shame - it is these affects which establish a self, hence why the self imputation is so strong and difficult to dislodge

    9. 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

      !- Tsongkapa : Innate vs philosophical self grasping - philosophical self-grasping is intellectual and can be mitigated by better philosophical argument - innate self-grasping is very difficult and comes from deep conditioning that wires our way of behaving in the world a certain habitual way - it takes great effort to rewire ourselves from innate self grasping

    10. 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

      !- defining the challenge : we are stupid, incoherent kinds of beings who are swayed by the illusion

    11. 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

      !- comparision : Muller-Lyer Illusion and Illusion of Self - Muller-Lyer illusion: lines are same length but due to arrow heads, they appear of different length - an illusion is when something's mode of existence is discordant with its mode of appearance - self is also an illusion compared to person

    12. 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

      !- different ways to think of : the self - the thing that has the mind or the body - the thing that endures through life while everything else changes, it was me as a baby, a child, a young man, an old man, etc.

    13. 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

      !- snake : what is the real self? - it is the subject of all experience that is never the object - it is the knower, but is never the known - it is the witness that stands outside the world - it is Kant's transcendental agent of the first and second critique, subject of the third critique

    14. 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

      !- Explanation : Snake and Elephant story from Chandrakirti - the snake represents the self - and the elephant represents what we impute the self to be - All those things we refute (the elephant) are actually not the self at all:

  17. Dec 2022
    1. 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

      !- third session : ethical implications of a person without a self !- fourth session :what is the experience of life like when you are a person without a self?

    1. 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.

      What was the purpose of these summaries? Were they of areas which weren't readily apparent in hindsight? Often most people's long summaries are really just encapsulalizations of what is apparent from the book jacket. Why bother with this? If they're just summaries of the obvious, then they're usually useless for review specifically because they're obvious. This is must make-work.

      You want to pull out the specific hard-core insights that weren't obvious to you from the jump.

      Most self-help books can be motivating while reading them and the motivation can be helpful, but generally they will only contain one or two useful ideas

    1. 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.

      This is probably true of average or poor software engineers given that GPT-3 can produce pretty reasonable code snippets

    1. 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.

      Cars weirdly coffin-shaped; thinking about the death of distance, the impatience between points, and the necessity to kill intervening 'dead' time spent in transit

    1. 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.

      The Golden Rule not only benefits your neighbor, but you as well.