An Association of Ideas

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Ideas are only in your head

And these are pretty loosely associated, if at all. Nevertheless, here are some ideas.

Autumn is coming . . .

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35778593-i-m-sad

Sometimes when I'm sad, if feels kind of good to let myself be sad.

Online meme; source unknown . . .

Parallel lines have a lot in common, but they never meet. Ever. You might think that's sad. But every other pair of lines meets once and then drifts apart forever. Which is pretty sad too.

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Very few people become social justice warriors because it makes them laugh.

So a small few do it for the laughter?

Metaphors for seeing others . . .

"That's the difference between artists and the rest of us, I think. Artists know where to put the shadows."

― John David Anderson, Ms. Bixby's Last Day

"People in brightly lit places cannot see into the dark."

― Marie Rutkoski, The Winner's Curse

Parts of an article:

What Boredom Does to You

The science of the wandering mind.

“Boredom makes people keen to engage in activities that they find more meaningful than those at hand.” . . .

People who are bored think more creatively than those who aren’t. . . .

“When we’re bored, we’re searching for something to stimulate us that we can’t find in our immediate surroundings,” Mann explained. “So we might try to find that stimulation by our minds wandering and going to someplace in our heads. That is what can stimulate creativity, because once you start daydreaming and allow your mind to wander, you start thinking beyond the conscious and into the subconscious. This process allows different connections to take place. It’s really awesome.” . . .

Spacing out is so important to us as a species that “it could be at the crux of what makes humans different from less complicated animals.” It is involved in a wide variety of skills, from creativity to projecting into the future. . . .

It turns out that in the default mode, we’re still tapping about 95 percent of the energy we use when our brains are engaged in hardcore, focused thinking. Despite being in an inattentive state, our brains are still doing a remarkable amount of work. . . .

When we lose focus on the outside world and drift inward, we’re not shutting down. We’re tapping into a vast trove of memories, imagining future possibilities, dissecting our interactions with other people, and reflecting on who we are. It feels like we are wasting time when we wait for the longest red light in the world to turn green, but the brain is putting ideas and events into perspective. . . .

“Daydreaming reflects the need to make sense of complicated aspects of life, which is almost always other human beings.” . . .

Genius, intellect, talent, air versus languidness, dullness, doldrums. It’s not immediately apparent, but these two opposing states are in fact intimately connected. . . .

“Boredom is both a warning that we are not doing what we want to be doing and a ‘push’ that motivates us to switch goals and projects.”

You could say that boredom is an incubator lab for brilliance. It’s the messy, uncomfortable, confusing, frustrating place one has to occupy for a while before finally coming up with the winning equation or formula.

This process allows different connections to take place.

I think the What Would I Say? app has taken my words and spliced them together as song lyrics.

They ran for his frequent falls.

He popped back up to his frequent falls.

He likes big, noisy, tough machines.

He likes big, noisy, tough machines.

He likes big, noisy, tough machines.

He loves rainbows.

He might really be something innate

about running in the world,

being a woman has changed in

other members of Christmas!

It's not every day you look at the random photo of remote beauty provided by your corporate computer software and say, "Hey! I've been there!"

I've wanted to go back for a longer visit ever since discovering the hike five years ago--especially since we reached to top too late in the day when clouds were rolling in for their afternoon thunderstorm and we didn't have time to linger. Maybe taking my family will be the inspiration I need to lose weight and get in better shape. Here's my similar photo:

What I wrote about it at the time:

If anything, the Ice Lakes Trail exceeded the brief description in the brochure we chose it from: "It offers dramatic scenery, waterfalls, meadows abundant with wildflowers, alpine tundra and glacial lakes--providing more scenic beauty and Kodak moments than one person can handle in a day."

Details: The all-natural unnaturally-blue upper ice lake, above timberline at nearly 12,500 feet, surrounded by peaks well over 13,000. The only sounds are wind and rushing water, and the only way to see it is to trek in on foot.

Lately when our three-year-old gets mad at his teacher--for disciplining him for not listening, etc.--he tries to get back at her by eating her books.

He also recently created this digital artwork on his uncle's tablet and immediately requested they email it to us.

There are so many interesting looking books on my desk and not enough time to read them.

Speaking of, this is from a book I recently finished.

Goldeline, by Jimmy Cajoleas. My review:

The Ghost Girl of the Woods. That's who Goldeline pretends to be to make her way in the world. Not like she had any choice. What's a young girl to do when a Preacher shows up and burns you mother as a witch but take up with bandits? Except the Preacher isn't satisfied with one witch--he won't stop hunting until he captures Goldeline as well. She lives her life on the run. And ghost girls aren't the only things dangerous in the woods. Not by a long shot. Who knows what other evils she might encounter while trying to avoid the biggest evil of all? Who knows if she'll ever find a way to be safe?

This is an excellently atmospheric tale of a lost girl on the run. Just the right amount of dark and creepy, balanced by just enough bravery, self-reliance, and community. Goldeline's perspective is limited in just the right ways to shepherd readers along on her journey of discovery, her unforeseen effort to find her place in a big, scary world.

I open my mouth and taste the wild free drops of the rain. They splash on my nose and I laugh and hum one of Momma's songs, the nothingsong, just me and the owls and bats and all the hidden creatures in the night. I know there's a road outside of town, and past that some woods, dark and lovely, and I don't know but maybe there is a light for me to follow, a candle stuck in a window somewhere, calling me home.

Some quotes I liked:

"It isn't just the drawing," she said. "Anybody can draw a star in the dirt with a stick. It's what you put into it, what comes through you and into the stick. . . . It's the same with songs. It's not the words, but how you sing them. That's why I taught you the nothingsong. It's the most powerful of all because there aren't any words. It's about whatever your heart makes it be about."

-----

There's a fortune to be made off of God, no two ways about it. Preachers have the keys to heaven. They can bind and loose, lock and unlock. Awful lot of power preachers have.

-----

I don't think stories are good or bad in themselves. It's like the way the Preacher uses the Book--and all the strange and confusing and lovely things in it--for evil, when its stories can be used just as easy for good.

-----

Maybe sometimes the story is more about the teller, and the hearer too, than ever it is about the story itself.

-----

The nice thing about a book in a different language is that you can make it say whatever you want. The words are just pictures for your own words and all of a sudden the book is your book, it's your story that you're reading. That's how it is with all books, really, when you get down to it.

-----

This is how you do magic, I realize. You read the stories in everything. You speak the stories of the world.

Some more rules from InspiroBot . . .

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Rule 2: Bow your head and smile as though you have a positive outlook on life at the doctor's office

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Rule 5: Be proud of your elbows

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Rule 7: Carry around a best friend

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Rule 9: Be acceptable

Rule 7 brings to mind something I read a while back and previously mentioned in Cooperation Is Self-Interest. It's an essay about the idea of Transitional Objects.

Winnicott called transitional the objects of childhood—the stuffed animals, the bits of silk from a baby blanket, the favorite pillows—that the child experiences as both part of the self and of external reality. Winnicott writes that such objects mediate between the child's sense of connection to the body of the mother and a growing recognition that he or she is a separate being. The transitional objects of the nursery—all of these are destined to be abandoned. Yet, says Winnicott, they leave traces that will mark the rest of life. Specifically, they influence how easily an individual develops a capacity for joy, aesthetic experience, and creative playfulness. Transitional objects, with their joint allegiance to self and other, demonstrate to the child that objects in the external world can be loved.

Winnicott believes that during all stages of life we continue to search for objects we experience as both within and outside the self. We give up the baby blanket, but we continue to search for the feeling of oneness it provided. We find them in moments of feeling "at one" with the world, what Freud called the "oceanic feeling." We find these moments when we are at one with a piece of art, a vista in nature, a sexual experience. . . .

From the very beginning, as I began to study the nascent digital culture culture, I could see that computers were not "just tools." They were intimate machines. People experienced them as part of the self, separate but connected to the self. . . .

Computers served as transitional objects. They bring us back to the feelings of being "at one" with the world. Musicians often hear the music in their minds before they play it, experiencing the music from within and without. The computer similarly can be experienced as an object on the border between self and not-self. Just as musical instruments can be extensions of the mind's construction of sound, computers can be extensions of the mind's construction of thought. . . .

People feel at one with video games, with lines of computer code, with the avatars they play in virtual worlds, with their smartphones. Classical transitional objects are meant to be abandoned, their power recovered in moments of heightened experience. When our current digital devices—our smartphones and cellphones—take on the power of transitional objects, a new psychology comes into play. These digital objects are never meant to be abandoned. We are meant to become cyborg.

Says the computer . . .

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Parts of another article:

Hume the Humane

Hume believed we were nothing more or less than human: that’s why he’s the amiable, modest, generous philosopher we need now

Posterity loves a tragic end, which is one reason why the cult of David Hume, arguably the greatest philosopher the West has ever produced, never took off. . . .

Hume’s philosophy does not add up to an easily digestible system, a set of rules for living. . . .

Hume’s third notable negative claim does have the benefit of a stirring slogan, albeit one that is somewhat opaque: ‘Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.’ Reason by itself gives us no motivation to act, and certainly no principles on which to base our morality. If we are good it is because we have a basic fellow-feeling that makes us respond with sympathy to the suffering of others and with pleasure at the thought of them thriving. The person who does not see why she should be good is not irrational but heartless.

As these three core claims illustrate, Hume’s philosophy is essentially skeptical, and skepticism seems to take away more than it offers. However, understood correctly, Humean skepticism can and should be the basis for a complete approach to life. It is built on the skeptical foundations of a brutally honest assessment of human nature, which could be seen as the essence of Hume’s project. It is not accidental that his first attempt to set out his philosophy was called A Treatise of Human Nature. Humanity was his primary subject.

Hume saw human beings as we really are, stripped of all pretension. . . . Humans are animals – remarkable, highly intelligent ones – but animals nonetheless. Hume did not just bring human beings down to Earth, he robbed us of any enduring essence. . . . What we call the ‘self’ is just a ‘bundle of perceptions’. . . .

Hume was echoing a view that was first articulated by the early Buddhists, whose ‘no-self’ (anattā) view is remarkably similar. He also anticipated the findings of contemporary neuroscience. . . .

So you can prove 2 + 2 = 4 but that tells you nothing about what happens when you put four things together in nature, where they could obliterate each other, multiply or merge into one. . . .

Most of our ‘reasoning’ is little more than an almost-instinctive ‘association of ideas’. Learning from experience is ‘a species of Analogy’ in which we expect similar things to have similar effects. That’s why Hume had no problem attributing reason to animals. They too evidently ‘learn many things from experience, and infer, that the same events will always follow from the same causes’. We do not of course think that this learning involves ‘any process of argument or reasoning’. But then, neither does most of the learning of human beings – even philosophers. We are guided primarily by ‘custom and habit’.

Humean humans are therefore creatures of flesh and blood, of intellect and instinct, of reason and passion. The good life is therefore one which does justice to each of these characteristics. . . .

The best human beings have not been driven by ideology, moral philosophy, and certainly not logic. They have always been people who have put the response to human need above creed or doctrine. Indeed, the worst crimes have been committed by people convinced of a justifying moral principle. . . .

Hume’s kind of exceptionality is the opposite: he was more fully human than most, nothing more, nothing less. The virtues he expressed were not extreme ones of daring or courage but quiet ones of amiability, modesty, generosity of spirit, hospitality. Lest this sound like little, consider how difficult it is to live our lives consistently expressing such virtues.

Skepticism is central to this Humean good life. Not the ‘excessive’ Pyrrhonic skepticism that suspends judgment on everything, but a ‘mitigated’ skepticism that corrects our natural dogmatism. . . .

The problem for fans of Hume is how we can be enthusiastic advocates of someone so opposed to enthusiasm. If the case for Hume is to be made in Humean terms, it has to be gently but eloquently argued for. More importantly still, perhaps, it has to be demonstrated. True lovers of the secular, reasonable way of life Hume stood for ought to avoid hysterical condemnations of religion and superstition as well as overly optimistic praise for the power of science and rationality. We should instead be modest in our philosophical pretensions, advocating human sympathy as much, if not more, than human rationality. Most of all, we should never allow our pursuit of learning and knowledge to get in the way of the softening pleasures of food, drink, company and play. Hume modelled a way of life that was gentle, reasonable, amiable: all the things public life now so rarely is.

Most of our ‘reasoning’ is little more than an almost-instinctive ‘association of ideas’.

Humans are therefore creatures of flesh and blood, of intellect and instinct, of reason and passion.

The best human beings have not been driven by ideology, moral philosophy, and certainly not logic. They have always been people who have put the response to human need above creed or doctrine. Indeed, the worst crimes have been committed by people convinced of a justifying moral principle.

We should instead be modest in our philosophical pretensions, advocating human sympathy as much, if not more, than human rationality.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36342135-off-away