Existence Is Both Bizarre and Dubious

A preview of what follows, in poetic form:

Monster and treasure

in one package

Wisdom is always clothed

in flowing robes

Love is for the ones who

love the work

Your instincts,

personality, and 

preferences 

aren’t flaws – 

they’re features

Our need to

repair relationships

is a deep-rooted instinct

Forgiveness is

a survival strategy

that allows us to

save ourselves

from being scornful

You are my other me

Deep curiosity

can stir our hearts and spirits,

becoming a force for

meaningful connection

and transformation

Not all brain cells are found

in the brain

Swarms that gather

and commune

in great enough numbers

to develop

a collective consciousness

and identity as a person

Bizarreness

is a fundamental,

universal quality

of all

philosophical arguments

I feel small and confused,

but in a good way

I find something wonderful

in not knowing

Don't say, "I'm running by the school to pick up our child," as you mosey out the door. Instead, stride purposefully through the threshold to the Wild proclaiming, "I go in search of adventure, hoping to return well stocked with monsters and treasure."

If you achieve the prior statement, you will have achieved the latter. Monster and treasure in one package.

I made a meme:

In the subconscious, ingrained frames, myths, and stories of my brain, wisdom is always clothed in flowing robes; and, as my self-concept adjusts to my slowly aging state and accumulated life wisdom, I find myself being drawn to dressing accordingly.

A poem.

For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper

Joseph Fasano

Now I let it fall back

in the grasses.

I hear you. I know

this life is hard now.

I know your days are precious

on this earth.

But what are you trying

to be free of?

The living? The miraculous

task of it?

Love is for the ones who love the work.

When change halts--when you stop learning and progressing--depression kicks in. (From: Look Again by Sharot and Sunstein.)

Ready to Pounce

I love this wisdom.

Brain Food #606

Stop fighting your nature. Start winning with it.

You’re born with certain core traits. Fighting them is like being a sprinter forced to run marathons – exhausting and futile. But these “limitations” can become your biggest advantage.

Your instincts, personality, and preferences aren’t flaws – they’re features.

When something seems to be holding you back that you can’t change, the key is to change your environment. What’s a headwind in one situation is a tailwind in another.

The introvert’s edge in sales: Don’t fake extrovert energy. Win through deep research and lasting relationships. While others work the room searching for a transaction, you can build long-term relationships.

Not a morning person? Embrace it: That 5 AM workout routine you keep missing? Stop punishing yourself. Build your peak performance hours into your schedule.

Are you obsessive about the details? Use it to your advantage. While others skim the surface, your thoroughness spots opportunities they miss and avoids costly mistakes they make. What others see as obsessiveness becomes an uncopyable competitive edge.

The most successful people don’t fight their nature. They architect their environment to amplify it.

Stop asking: “How do I fix myself?” Start asking: “How do I position myself where my natural traits are assets?”

Embrace yourself and rely on your strengths.

The Shadow Self

I am a fan of restorative justice.

Restorative Justice Fits Human Nature More Than Retribution Does

As recognised by ancestral wisdom and Indigenous practices, our need to repair relationships is a deep-rooted instinct

The traditional penal system is based on retributivism, the idea that wrongdoers deserve to be punished for their crimes. Under this system, justice is served when proportionate suffering is imposed on the offender, which essentially takes the form of exclusion from society. Prison is not just a place where offenders are secluded to keep society safe; it also carries the symbolic meaning of deserved social rejection. The whole process of achieving justice through punishment involves little or no real communication between wrongdoers and victims, who are instead required to delegate the management of their conflict to third parties (professionals, state institutions and so forth). As highlighted by the criminologist Nils Christie in his work ‘Conflicts as Property’ (1977), the parties involved are ‘robbed’ of their conflicts, which are instead left in the hands of those who are not directly involved. This system rests on a fundamental premise, rooted in both psychology and anthropology: individuals are intrinsically unable to resolve disputes without external intervention, and this external intervention must be punitive in order to meet society’s demands. A wrongdoer must pay for the harm caused, and our culture assumes that the only way to achieve that end is through imposing suffering. As a matter of fact, traditional criminal justice expresses the human drive for revenge. It is indeed institutionalised revenge. . . . 

The core of restorative justice (RJ) has little to do with classical theories of punishment. In fact, its justification lies beyond the concept of punishment, as it seeks primarily to address harms, resolve conflicts and repair relationships. RJ is about healing, mutual communication and empathy; it focuses on needs more than deserts. There is no place for punishing wrongdoers in the restorative paradigm, because the very idea of crime takes another meaning: it is not the result of an evil mind freely choosing to commit evil actions. Rather, it is a damaged relationship. As a result, justice itself is understood as relational and implies restoring social connections, healing social wounds. RJ seems also to be the bearer of an opposing idea of human nature, in which people are seen as essentially capable of healing relationships and willing to get things right, and justice is achieved when enabling this to happen. So, advocating for RJ also means supporting and expressing a more optimistic view of human nature. . . . 

We’re so used to the idea of punishing offenders that it would seem unnatural and wrong if we didn’t . . . But what if we’ve got it all wrong? What if human psychology is more in line with the restorative approach to justice than the retributive approach to justice? . . . 

Humans possess a strong prosocial instinct motivating them to cooperate and repair relationships spontaneously and that, as a result, RJ is more consonant with human psychology than traditional criminal justice . . . 

So what does evolutionary psychology tell us about the whole thing? Well, we certainly have an instinct for punishment, but it might be overrated. According to the retired judge Morris Hoffman in The Punisher’s Brain (2014), our evolutionary path selected both our punishing and forgiving predispositions, as both retaliation and the forswearing of retaliation have adaptive functions that allowed our ancestors to survive. If you don’t immediately get why forgiveness would have been adaptive, consider what constant reprisals in hunter-gatherers societies would have meant in terms of wasted time and energy, especially when survival is already precarious. A risky move, don’t you think? That’s exactly what our ancestors learned over millennia: punishment is extremely costly in nature. It’s not a trivial matter. And, most of the time, refraining from punishment actually increases the odds of survival. As suggested by Hoffman, forgiveness is a survival strategy that allows us to ‘save ourselves from being scornful’.

What’s even more striking is that displays of remorse seem to soften the urge for retaliation and promote forgiveness. . . . 

Remorseful actions have an implicit message, which expresses something such as ‘You do not need to punish me, for I am doing it by myself,’ thereby anticipating and replacing the dangerous impact of vengeance. By mitigating revenge through remorse, some sort of restoration of the initial state (that which precedes the wrong) takes place. . . . 

These insights from evolutionary psychology resonate with the ancestral knowledge of Indigenous peoples whose traditions are deeply rooted in restorative practices and revolve around maintaining social harmony.

No one loses their humanity when they cause harm. Our response should be based on that humanity.

Flames

From the book Ultraviolet by Aida Salazar:

Let us agree to be guided by this wisdom.

En lak ech*--you are my other me.

If I do harm to you, I do harm to myself.

If I disrespect you, I disrespect myself.

If I am good to you, I am good to myself.

If I honor you, I honor myself.

[*Mayan: "You are my other me."]

Of which I wrote: A vivid story about first love, first heartbreak, and struggling with the overwhelming nature of big feelings, complicated by machismo culture and ingrained toxic masculinity. A whiff of inauthentic adult moralizing in the narrative voice, but otherwise relatable. 

A worrying new trend.

Homebuyers Can Access Neighbors' Political Leanings with New Real Estate Platform

House hunting gets political. New service offers access to neighborhood voting data.

Tech startup Oyssey believes social data – like age, education and income demographics – is influencing buyers more than the physical conditions of a home. . . . 

We already "other" each other in far too many ways. We need to look for our commonalities, not judge each other for our differences.

Helpful:

How to See the Humanity in Anyone

Practising a form of ‘deep curiosity’ can help you connect with yourself and others, even if they’re on the ‘other side’

Psychology research studies have shown: the more we come into contact with people who are different from us and see them as unique humans, the less we feel threatened by them. And that, even with polar-opposite views or life stories, we can find common ground and a shared humanity. . . . 

One way we can build better relationships – even across political or social differences – is to practise what I call ‘deep curiosity’. . . . 

At its deepest levels, curiosity has the power to do much more than give us informational anecdotes for cocktail hour. It can stir our hearts and spirits, becoming a force for meaningful connection and transformation. It can strengthen our relationships to ourselves and each other, help us navigate disagreements better, revive decades-old marriages, or heal from past pain or trauma. It invites us to ask questions that involve nuance and surprise. Rather than: ‘What should I do to make money?’, it prompts us to ask ourselves: ‘What makes me feel truly alive?’ Instead of asking someone: ‘Are you a Democrat or a Republican?’, it inspires us to ask them: ‘What values are important to you?’ Rather than: ‘Where did my ancestors come from?’, you might ask yourself: ‘How do I stay connected to them throughout my life?’

By practising deep curiosity, instead of dismissing or judging people who hold different political perspectives than you, or who have an identity that seems to clash with your own, you can bring a sense of genuine interest, humility, understanding and shared humanity. I’ve discovered that, if you do this, you’ll begin to see improvements in your relationships with your families, spouses, children, friends, coworkers, neighbours and strangers. You can even use deep curiosity to improve the way you treat yourself.

Deep curiosity isn’t just something you have or don’t. It’s more like a muscle, something that strengthens when you exercise it. The more we use it, the more likely we’ll get the benefits. Not only does it help us to connect, psychological research also shows that practising curiosity makes us more likable, better leaders, and reduces anxiety and fear – which is why many therapists use it as a tool. . . . 

1. Practising deep curiosity can help you connect with yourself and others. It’s not just intellectual; it’s about searching for understanding in a way that can stir your heart and spirit.

2. Let go of your assumptions, biases and certainty. Deep curiosity is a muscle you can strengthen, beginning with detaching yourself from the mental shortcuts that you usually rely on.

3. Prepare your mindset and setting. Planning ahead for how you will act and speak in social situations can help you practise deep curiosity with greater intention.

4. See the dignity of every person, including yourself. One way to do this is to ‘turn toward’ people – notice their bids for your attention and invite them to tell you more.

5. Welcome the hard times in your life. It’s easy to fight or withdraw when you’re feeling overwhelmed. By learning to slow down and embrace your negative emotions, you’ll be better placed to recognise your own needs, find meaning in your experiences and connect with others.

We already "other" each other in far too many ways. We need to look for our commonalities, not judge each other for our differences.

An interesting tidbit: Not all brain cells are found in the brain.

From These Neurons in the Abdomen Help Form the Gut-Brain Connection.

One of my favorite science fiction series for youth is the Railhead trilogy by Philip Reeve, consisting of Railhead, Blacklight Express, Station Zero. Mixed into this story about heists, exploration, intergalactic war, and more is an exploration of the idea of consciousness and personhood.

There Artificial Intelligence beings in the form of robots, train locomotives, and god-like guardians. Some are tied to physical bodies and locations and some aren't. Is the person the intelligence or the body? What happens when the same intelligence duplicates itself into different bodies who head into different parts of the galaxy, losing their network connection and changing through new and different experiences.

There are alien species with all manner of physical bodies, languages, and perception experiences. How different can they get before we become unable to recognize their experiences as conscious, their existence as persons?

And there are my favorite, the hive monks, beings consisting of insect swarms that gather and commune in great enough numbers to develop a collective consciousness and identity as a person. Memories that get passed through the hive and outlive the existence of any single insect, but preserved in the collective consciousness.

I recently wondered if Eric Schwitzgebel has read the Railhead series and, if not, if I should reach out to recommend it to him since I'm convinced he would love it. Here are my thoughts about his latest book, The Weirdness of the World.

If mainstream scientific cosmology is correct, we have seen only a very small, perhaps an infinitesimal fraction of reality. We are life fleas on the back of a dog, watching a hair grow and saying, "Ah, so that's how the universe works!"

What a delightfully fun book! It's a playful philosopher playing around with ideas. But not in an effort to find or create weirdness. No, his main point is that the greatest philosophical minds have all reached conclusions about our understandings of reality, humanity, and the interplay of the two that, by virtue of their own logics, lead to very strange places. The opening even includes a "taxonomy of weirdness" to define and delineate the different terms he will use to describe all major theories and fields of thought (weird, bizarre, dubious, wild, and theoretical wilderness). He believes bizarreness is a fundamental, universal quality of all philosophical arguments.

In the most fundamental matters of consciousness and cosmology, neither common sense, nor early twenty-first-century empirical science, nor armchair philosophical theorizing is entirely trustworthy. The rational response is to distribute our credence across a wide range of bizarre options.

This is not simply a wild claim; he is a top philosopher explaining and expanding on the work of other top thinkers.

Philosophers who explore foundational metaphysical questions typically begin with some highly plausible initial commitments to commonsense intuitions, some solid starting points. . . . They think long and hard about what these seemingly obvious claims imply. In the end, they find themselves committed to peculiar-seeming, common-sense-defying views. . . . In almost 40 years of reading philosophy, I have yet to encounter a single broad-ranging exploration of the fundamental nature of things that doesn't ultimately entangle its author in seeming absurdities. Rejection of these seeming absurdities then becomes the commonsense starting point of a new round of metaphysics by other philosophers, generating a complementary bestiary of metaphysical strangeness. Thus philosophers are happily employed.

After starting by making these claims about the weirdness of the world, Schwitzgebel spends the bulk of the book demonstrating that absurdity. Chapter 3, for example, makes the case:

If materialism is true, the United States is probably conscious--that is, the United States literally possesses a stream of conscious experience over and above the experiences of its citizens and residents. If we look in broad strokes at the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as indicative of the presence of conscious experience--complex information processing, rich functional roles in a historically embedded system, sophisticated environmental responsiveness, wide information sharing, complex layers of self-monitoring--the United States, conceived of as a concrete, spatially distributed entity with people as parts, appears to have exactly those properties. It thus appears to meet standard materialist criteria for consciousness.

To make the argument, he necessarily explains what philosophers mean by "materialism," "consciousness," and a host of other academic terms and ideas. He wonders about how--or whether--we can ever tell if garden snails have consciousness. If Artificial Intelligence might become conscious and what that means for the morality of personhood. The possibility of infinite multiple universes. And more.

And the key idea underpinning his entire enterprise:

I love philosophy best when it opens my mind--when it reveals ways the world could be, possible approaches to life, lenses through which I might see and value things around me, which I might not otherwise have considered.

Philosophy can aim to open or close. Suppose you enter Philosophical Topic X imagining three viable, mutually exclusive possibilities, A, B, and C. The philosophy of closing aims to reduce the three to one. It aims to convince you that possibility A is correct and the others wrong. If it succeeds, you know the truth about Topic X: A is the answer! In contrast, the philosophy of opening aims to add new possibilities to the mix--possibilities that you hadn't considered before or had considered but too quickly dismissed. Instead of reducing three to one, three grows to maybe five, with new possibilities D and E. We can learn by addition as well as subtraction. We can learn that the range of viable possibilities is broader than we had assumed.

For me, the greatest philosophical thrill is realizing that something I'd long taken for granted might not be true, that some "obvious" apparent truth is in fact doubtable--not just abstractly and hypothetically doubtable, but really, seriously, in-my-gut doubtable. The ground shifts beneath me. Where I'd thought there would be floor, there is instead open space I hadn't previously seen. My mind spins in new, unfamiliar directions. I wonder, and the world itself seems to glow with a new wondrousness. The cosmos expands, bigger with possibility, more complex, more unfathomable. I feel small and confused, but in a good way.

and

Children have a flexibility of mind and an interest in theory building. They get a kick just out of exploring the world, trying new things (well, maybe not asparagus), breaking stuff to see what happens, and capsizing tradition. They annoyingly ask for the why behind the why behind the shy. Mature, boring adults, in contrast, prefer to find practical applications for what they already know. For example, adults want their new computers to just work without their having to learn anything new, while children play around with the settings, adding goofy sounds and wallpaper, changing the icons, and of course ultimately coming to understand the computers much better. . . .

Childlike philosophy toys with wild ideas at the boundaries of our understanding. Are these ideas useful or true? Can we plug them in straightaway into our existing conceptions and put them to work? For me, if I was already sure they were false and useless, that would steal away their charm. But to be in a hurry to judge their merits, to want to expunge doubt and wonder so as to settle on a final view that we can put immediately to work, to want to close rather than open--let's not be in such a rush to grow up. What's life for if there's no time to play and explore?

Embracing that everything we can understand about existence is both bizarre and dubious is not only fun, it's good for us. And so is this book.

Some additional quotes:

In each of our heads there are about as many neurons as stars in our galaxy, and each neuron is arguably more structurally complex than any star system that does not contain life. There is as much complexity and mystery inside us as out.

-----

It would just be too sad if the world had no space for speculation about wild hypotheticals.

-----

I find something wonderful in not knowing.

-----

It is progress to create doubt where none existed before, if that doubt appropriately reflects our ignorance. It is progress to appreciate possibilities we hadn't previously recognized. It is progress to chart previously unthought landscapes of what might be so.

-----

It's such a common pattern in our lives--reaching a conclusion based on theoretical reasoning and then failing to be moved by it at a gut level. The Stoic sincerely judges that death is not bad but quakes in fear on the battlefield. The implicit racist judges that her Black students are every bit as capable as her White and Asian students but her habitual reactions and intuitive assessments fail to change.

-----

I conjecture that this will occur. Our technological innovation will outrun our ability to settle on a good theory of AI consciousness. We will create AI systems so sophisticated that we legitimately wonder whether they have inner conscious lives like ours, while remaining unable to definitively answer that question. We will gaze into a robot's eyes and not know whether behind those eyes is only blank programming that mimics humanlike response or whether, instead, there is a genuine stream of experience, real hope and suffering. We will not know if we are interacting with mere tools to be disposed of as we wish or instead persons who deserve care and protection. Lacking grounds to determine what theory of consciousness is correct, we will find ourselves amid machines whose consciousness and thus moral status are unclear. Maybe those machines will deserve humanlike rights, or maybe not. We won't know.          

I find something wonderful in not knowing.