The Best Way to Achieve It Is to Think Better of Others

Our eleven-year-old could not get himself to wake the other morning. Over 30 minutes of his mom and me taking turns nudging and coaxing him, since he responds best to a positive, gentle touch. Finally, though, we were out of time and I was busy getting myself ready, so I resorted to playing Lisa Loeb's intentionally cheerful, obnoxious song "Everybody Wake Up!" at a rather generous volume. It quickly elicited loud groaning and his first words of the day: "My head hurts so bad. That song has given me the worst headache I've ever had."

After he slammed a door in my face, worked out his grouchiness, and got ready for school, I offered this bit of wisdom: "And now you understand the power of the Dark Side of the Force. Kindness and support did not have the ability to wake you up--today it took anger and hatred to help you find the necessary motivation."

Which leads the question: Are humans more naturally drawn to the Light Side or the Dark Side? Clearly, both have their appeals and uses and the answer lies somewhere in the middle, a combination of both. Circumstances and experiences certainly shape which one speaks to us more in different moments. I know there are many who would argue for one or the other to dominate. It's my strong conviction that we should always strive for the Light Side and resist the allure of the Dark Side; that doing so leads to both more individual happiness and societal health. It's a better choice for each person selfishly and for all of us collectively. Humans are innately social, so the more we can develop our prosocial aspects the more likely we are to reach our full human potential.

Cynical people take preemptive strikes and bring out the worst in others. Hopeful individuals take leaps of faith and bring out others' best. . . . Outrage is contagious, but so are curiosity and humility.

That's from Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness by Jamil Zaki, which I'll share more in a bit. In it, Zaki points out the pitfalls of our natural negativity bias, our tendency to see and hold onto the bad more than the good. He makes the case instead for developing a positivity bias, a belief in the good.

It's not about being foolishly innocent or unguardedly trusting. That people are a mix of both good and bad is never in question. It's simply deciding which one we want to nourish and grow. When we cultivate and develop the goodness in ourselves and others, there is less of the bad to go around. The best way to achieve a better existence is to think better of others.

A key to avoiding negativity bias and leaning toward a positive one is calming fear. A healthy level of caution and skepticism is different than expecting threats everywhere and always being on guard. Fear drives us to expect the worst.

I also just read Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering by Scott A. Small. A neurologist, he writes about how the brain forms memories and the importance of forgetting in that process, of filtering what we experience so we hold onto only what matters. Memories of scary things are stored in the amygdala; the amygdala is where our fear lives. One chapter focuses on the importance of keeping the amygdala from becoming too full and active, as that leads to obsessive fear that closes us off to others.

To introduce the idea, Small uses a comparison of chimpanzees (C) and bonobos (B). From a genetic standpoint, humans, chimps, and bonobos are nearly identical. We have more DNA in common with each other than any other. Yet chimps are aggressively antisocial and bonobos are enthusiastically prosocial. The main difference in their brains is that chimps have large amygdalae and bonobos have small ones.

All agreed that C was very clever, but it was his ruthlessness that truly distinguished him. As a youth, C never backed down from a fight. Now, as a barrel-chested, gravel-voiced adult, he was always challenging authority--not with the nuanced repartee of a skilled diplomat, but with bloody-minded rage. Status obsessed and with no time to play, he rapidly ascended to the pinnacle of his society, one that rewarded his macho bullying. Unloving and unlovable, he nevertheless sired offspring from a collection of different mothers. Among his family he cultivated a reputation as a harsh disciplinarian, but his wrath was most easily provoked by those outside his social circle. He was a shameless xenophobe. They never met, but C undoubtedly would have sneered at his cousin B, whose friendly personality and social lifestyle C could never respect and would scarcely recognize. B empathized with friends and outsiders alike. As long as his community was harmonious, he seemed not to care less about social hierarchy or whether its leaders were male or female. While B's affability extended to the workplace, he dedicated nearly as much time to work as he did to romance and play. . . . 

The amygdala is the brain's central command for recording and orchestrating our responses to danger from the outside world. It is the brain structure that learns how to perform danger management functions through experience by remembering or forgetting fearful memories. . . . 

Fear memories are formed and stored in the amygdala, and the more fear memories we acquire, the more active our amygdalae become. . . . 

That the amygdala is the region of chimps' brains that differs the most from that of bonobos' brains is itself evidence of how ruthless and unforgiving chimp society must be. . . . 

Evolutionary biologists have convincingly argued that chimps' key adaptive trait is fear, while bonobos' is the opposite, fearlessness. It makes sense that an individual whose social temperament leans fearful and rageful will be less inclined to be altruistic, compassionate, empathetic, kind, tolerant, and playful. This fearful difference in social temperament is the key that drives the rest of the antisocial or prosocial traits, with each personality a better fit for a species' divergent environment. The chimp, for example, competing for limited resources with the bigger and stronger gorilla, lives in a much rougher neighborhood than the bonobo. . . . 

While the degree of our amygdala activity is likely determined in part by our genes, we now know that it strongly depends on the fear memories we acquire. We also know that the amygdala is the anatomical engine that drives both fear and rage, emotions that can influence our social temperaments. We can plausibly hypothesize, therefore, that relaxing our amygdalae would in turn improve our personalities. . . . 

Remembering fears is of paramount importance for our survival, and the amygdala is hardwired to learn and hold on to fearful events. Luckily, it is also bestowed with a braking system that can temper those fears and the memory of them, plausibly allowing us to forget them just enough to be able to form and forge social bonds. . . . 

For those of us lucky enough to have blissfully forgotten some of our fears--who have the capacity for compassion and keep rage in check--the neurobiology of forgetting teaches us why we should sympathize with those suffering souls who can't forget and who live in the viciousness of their fear and trembling. We should be thankful that most of us can, if not silence, at least occasionally muffle the scream of our fear memories. Without the benefits of fear forgetting, we would live dreadfully lonely lives.

The primary driver of antisocial tendencies is fear; the primary driver of prosocial tendencies is fearlessness.

There is a tension in holding both truths as valid at the same time: humans are innately self-interested; humans are innately generous and social. We are complicated creatures. My desire to emphasize the good and tamp the bad is not dependent on canceling either of those truths. Just the opposite, in fact. The best way to control the harmful potential of our chimpanzee natures is to intentionally nurture and promote our bonobo qualities.

The Weight Between Things

The older I become, the more I suspect that wisdom has very little to do with certainty.

It has everything to do with learning to carry paradox. Life is almost never asking us to choose between opposites but asking us to hold them.

To love deeply while knowing everything is temporary.

To hope without demanding guarantees.

To grieve without allowing grief to become our identity.

To remain open-hearted in a world that cannot promise we won’t be hurt again.

There is a tension that runs through everything alive.

A violin string must be pulled taut enough to make music, but not so tightly that it snaps.

Our hearts survive because they contract and release.

The lungs fill because they empty first.

The tide only reaches shore because it first retreats.

Nature does not seem interested in permanence.

It is interested in rhythm and I don’t think we're ever meant to escape that rhythm.

We spend so much of our lives trying to eliminate one side of the equation.

We want the joy without the loss.

The confidence without the doubt.

The freedom without the responsibility.

The intimacy without the vulnerability.

The success without the possibility of failure.

But every attempt to remove one pole seems to flatten the entire experience . . . 

Wisdom is learning to carry paradox.

It is not only sociology and neurobiology that see humans as inextricably social and relational, it is also quantum physics and mathematics.

The Myth of Perfect Knowledge

Reality is more complex than we expected. Physics questions the possibility of a full description of how things objectively are. An electron can be in a “quantum superposition,” so that to an observer, it doesn’t occupy just one location--and so can you, my reader. This does not mean that you could perceive being dislocated between two positions; as perceived by yourself, you are always in just one place. But an object’s properties may differ depending on who, or what, is looking at them--or may not even be defined at all. Properties are not simple features of things: They are relations between one thing and another. What we call “the world” is therefore only how some parts of reality manifest themselves to other parts--us, for instance.

Humanity has always been aware that our understanding is partial and biased. But the fact that an objective and knowable reality is incompatible with the grammar of physics is astonishing. The Enlightenment could consider the mind as being outside the world, in an abstract realm of reason where knowledge resides. But human minds are not outside reality, watching it from its exterior. We, like everything else, are part of the very nature we study. . . . 

Niels Bohr, a founder of quantum theory, realized that quantum phenomena indicate that we cannot discard our own physical nature when we observe the world. The ideal of grasping objective reality by making the observer irrelevant is incompatible with physics. We are quantum processes interacting with other quantum processes. Our knowledge is a rich but incomplete set of correlations between one piece of the world--ourselves--and the rest of it. . . . 

Objective statements independent of any knower are fictions. Purely objective reality is a useful myth, but only a myth. Anything said about the state of the world comes from someone’s singular perspective.

This means that all of our knowledge is intrinsically uncertain. All statements have unavoidable margins of uncertainty. . . . 

Within science, there are different ways of describing the same things. A glass of water can be described in terms of physics (its mass, velocity), thermodynamics (its temperature), chemistry (there is more than just H2O in any glass of water), biology (bacteria swim in it), particle physics (its electrons, protons, and neutrons), psychology (“Why did I fill the glass?”), economics (its price), and more. Each account is valid in its own terms; each reflects a way in which the same object interacts with different parts of reality, from atoms to the global economy. But none exhausts an “ultimate truth” of the glass.

The same is true for human beings. I can think of you, my reader, as a body, as a mind, or as a soul. These aren’t different entities: They are the same entity, described in different languages, using different conceptual schemes, focusing on different aspects of the same you and different ways in which you interact with other parts of reality. There is no sharp separation or metaphysical gap between body and soul; matter and spirit; the physical world and the world of laws, ideas, and norms.

In this sense, all things are equal: They are all aspects of the same natural world, considered from different perspectives, none of which is the ultimate one. Everything can be considered fundamental from one perspective or another. . . . 

This is the view to which I think modern science leads us. Many people resist it, some out of fear of losing solid reference points: objectivity, certainties, absolute morality, an immortal soul. But scientific knowledge does not become less valuable if you remain open to doubt. Morality does not lose power if you recognize that it is rooted in our biology, culture, and history. Our values do not weaken because they are rooted in what we are, not in something outside us. And life is even more beautiful and precious without dreams of immortality.

In fact, it seems to me that recognizing the perspectival aspect of knowledge, values, and beliefs, and of reality itself, could help us become a bit less arrogant, a bit humbler and wiser. Conflicts between individuals or countries don’t stem only from greed and thirst for power. They are also fueled by the belief that we are objectively right and the enemy is objectively wrong, which ignores the plurality of perspectives. We have our values that guide us, but understanding the perspective of others is the first step toward wisdom.

Wisdom is understanding that everyone and everything exists with a particular perspective; that existence is relational and occurs in the interactions between different perspectives.

Wisdom is learning to carry the paradoxes in accepting a multiplicity of perspectives, including their apparent contradictions with each other. Every perspective has validity.

From Reweaving the Rainbow:

this is how a life is made:

chance and choice

rubbing together

like the two wings

of a prehistoric insect

to make the unique

sound of you

this distinct acoustic figure

in the some of time.

From your perspective emerges the unique sound of you.

As promised above, more about Hope for Cynics: The Surprising Science of Human Goodness by Jamil Zaki, starting with my review.

An accessible deep dive into the science of believing that people are more inherently compassionate, generous, capable, and social than that they are selfish, greedy, and dishonest. It does not deny those negative tendencies exist, only that our innate negativity bias makes us weigh those characteristics more heavily than we should. This is not blind, naive optimism, but skeptical, supported evidence. Those who focus on the better qualities of others are found by studies to be happier, more successful, and more cognitively capable. It makes them better as individuals. And by extending that belief to others as hopeful trust and positive expectations it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy, making them better as well. Having hope in human goodness makes everyone better. Zaki's writing is personable, conversational, and enjoyable. An excellent book. 

Excerpts from the book, beginning with the idea of cynicism--of being like a chimp:

Cynical people take preemptive strikes and bring out the worst in others. Hopeful individuals take leaps of faith and bring out others' best. . . . Outrage is contagious, but so are curiosity and humility.

-----

Cynicism encouraged me to expect the worst from people, but what gave me the right? It told me the future would be awful, but how could anyone know that? What was cynicism doing to me? To all of us? As I soon learned, it wears away the psychological glue that binds us. Trust, the willingness to be vulnerable to others, is an expression of faith that they will do the right thing. It is how hope lives between people. By eroding trust, cynicism steals our present together and dampens the futures we can imagine.

-----

Cynicism is the theory that people are selfish, greedy, dishonest. Like any theory, it changes how we see reality and react to it--in this case, the social world. . . . 

To diagnose yours, think about whether you generally agree with these statements:

1. No one cares much what happens to you.
2. Most people dislike helping others.
3. Most people are honest chiefly through fear of getting caught.

-----

Beliefs are assumptions or conclusions; values are the parts of life that bring a person meaning. Beliefs reflect what you think of the world; values reveal more about yourself. Confusing these two can be dangerous business. When someone attaches their self-worth to a belief--political, personal, or otherwise--they desperately need to be right. Challenges to what they think feel like threats to how they think--evidence they aren't smart or good enough. The person screaming loudest is often most fearful of being wrong.

Though cynics doubt others, they also tend to define themselves through social comparison. . . . Needing to prop themselves up, they search for evidence that can put others down.

-----

If cynicism were a pill, its warning label would list depression, heart disease, and isolation. In other words, it'd be a poison.

-----

Most of us valorize people who don't like people. But it turns out cynicism is not a sign of wisdom, and more often it's the opposite. In studies of over two hundred individuals across thirty nations, cynics scored less well on tasks that measure cognitive ability, problem-solving, and mathematical skill. Cynics aren't socially sharp, either, performing worse than non-cynics at identifying liars.

-----

In a study of five thousand people, those who thought the world was dangerous and competitive, versus safe and cooperative, had less-successful careers and were less satisfied with their lives.

-----

Market creep encourages us to count and compete through life, but the science of well-being is clear: To thrive, human beings need unquantifiable experiences, pursued for their own sake. Like a favorite hobby, communal ties can be blissfully useless. In a marketized world, this means purposefully erasing the way we usually connect, by "uncounting."

-----

Humanity's most common predators are other people. In response, evolution equipped us with a mental armadillo shell: cheater detection. We naturally seek out signs of deception and malfeasance. This is a great strategy for self-defense, but what protects us in small doses can become toxic in larger ones. People are so vigilant for cheaters that we regularly overestimate how many there are, while ignoring signs of human goodness. Psychologists call this negativity bias.

-----

Negativity bias and global gossip have worked together to warp humanity's view of itself, like an unfun fun-house mirror. We perceive our species to be crueler, more callous, and less caring that it really is.

And a collection of excerpts related to hope--to being like a bonobo:

People don't just change; we change them through our expectations and actions. . . . 

In a study, when people learned how powerful trust can be, they used it. Changing their beliefs changed their reality, improving outcomes for them and their partners. . . . a reciprocity mindset could help people build stronger connections, brick by brick. . . . 

Trust doesn't just teach us about people; it changes them. It's a gift they repay.

A reciprocity mindset means understanding this. Leaps of faith are actions inspired by that knowledge: deliberate bets on other people. Where preemptive strikes bring out the worst in others, leaps of faith bring out their best--especially when people feel our belief in them. Trust is most powerful when people offer it loudly: clearly giving others the chance to show us who they are. . . . 

Cynical stories can become self-fulfilling, but hopeful ones can, too. By feeling--and wielding--the power of trust instead, we can transform cynicism's vicious cycle into a more virtuous one.

-----

Imaginary shark attacks took away my real joy. For many of us, talking with other people can be like that. Across dozens of studies, researchers have compared social predictions to reality. Some participants in these experiments were asked to imagine interactions with other people, while others actually interacted with people and reported back. In virtually every case, people's expectations were worse that reality. . . . 

Interacting with others is more pleasant and meaningful than most people realize. That's the good news. The bad news is that it's hard to understand this, in part because of negativity bias. When we imagine chatting up a stranger, our minds flood with worst-case scenarios: rejections, glacial pauses, someone rolling their eyes and putting their headphones back on. When we envision saying things we've been meaning to say to people in our lives, we might still picture disaster. These are social shark attacks: dangers that are much rarer than we realize, but so frightening that they dominate our imaginations.

Hope and trust--believing the best about people and expecting them to be so--creates a positive feedback spiral.

The book also describes cynicism as a cultural temperament.

Organizational cynicism--the feeling that one's community is full of greed and selfishness--has overtaken countless workplaces, destroying morale, well-being, and productivity. Many of these problems reflect an old misunderstanding of what allows any company, team, or school to thrive.

-----

Conflict is rising in the US and beyond, for lots of reasons, including tribal cynicism: the belief that people on the other side are stupid, evil, or both.

The best way to fight cultural cynicism? Learning about the perspectives of others.

To unfreeze fear and hatred, Emile and Casas didn't need to trick people. They simply told Colombians the truth about the other side. As Casas describes, "We Colombians are on the brink of peace. This research teaches us that the best way to achieve it is to think better of others." The same strategy has worked in subsequent studies carried out in the US and elsewhere.

-----

Good disagreement is more than nice; it's powerful. In experiments, people given the recipe you see here listened more intently and asked better questions. But the people they talked with also became more open-minded, even though they received no training. Outrage is contagious, but so are curiosity and humility.

Finally, a selection of statements from the appendix's list of claims from the book that have strong supporting evidence, are firmly established and widely accepted within the scientific community:

- Trust is associated with group-level positive outcomes and resilience to adversity.

- Acts of kindness boost well-being.

- People have a natural inclination to focus on the negative.

- Higher expectations lead to an increase in performance.

- Trust is self-fulfilling: When we trust others, they are more likely to act in trustworthy ways.

- People frequently underestimate how much they would enjoy interacting with others.

- Groups that collaborate internally succeed more than those that compete among themselves.

- People overestimate political out-groups' negative qualities.

- Contact with members of the out-group helps build empathy and hope.

- When faced with the problem of the commons in real life, people often find ways to cooperate instead of acting selfishly.

- When individuals' sense of self extends beyond their immediate surroundings and life span, they are more likely to cooperate and contribute to conservation efforts.

People are a mix of both good and bad. It's up to us to decide which one we want to nourish and grow. When we cultivate and develop the goodness in ourselves and others, there is less of the bad to go around. The best way to achieve a better existence is to think better of others.

About fifteen years ago I wrote a post comparing some similar sections in Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer and The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick about the importance of forgetting: Memory, Like All Information, Needs Filters. Gleick shares that from the perspective of information science and computer science, information can be stored (remembered) without an energy cost--it is the wiping clean and resetting of the storage (forgetting) that uses energy. Forgetting takes work. Foer's book is a deep dive into human memory, and he writes about the necessity of selective remembering to give memories a focus--we don't record every sensation and input we perceive, only the important and relevant ones. I've had a strong interest in the importance of forgetting ever since.

Which is why, I'm sure, I chose to read Forgetting: The Benefits of Not Remembering by Scott A. Small when I cam across it. I enjoyed reading it and learned many interesting, valuable things, though I didn't say much about it in my brief review comment:

A fascinating look, from a neurological perspective, at the importance of forgetting and the benefits of remembering our experiences only partially. This is Small's first time writing popular science and he's still developing the skill--so, fascinating information with writing that is good but not great. Still, a worthwhile read.

A better overview of the book's contents is contained in this passage from the book's introduction:

Forgetting in balance with memory is required for sculpting cognition: for granting us the flexibility to accommodate to an ever-changing environment, for extracting abstract concepts from a scattered mess of stored information, for seeing the forest for the trees. Forgetting is required for emotional well-being: for letting go of resentments, neurotic fears, and hurtful experiences that fester. Too much memory or too little forgetting imprisons with pain. Forgetting is required for societal health and creativity, lightening the mind for those eureka moments when unexpected associations are made. Without forgetting, all flights of creative fancy would be moored by memory.

Thus the selection at the top of this post about chimps and bonobos, how chimps have antisocial tendencies because their brains hold onto past dangers and hurts to make them more fearful and bonobos are impressively prosocial because they don't designate as much brain power to keeping those negative experiences emphasized and are thus more fearless.

I also liked this brief comment from early in the book about how memory is a fluid and dynamic process.

Among the many metaphors for memory, a steel trap is one of my least favorites--partly on aesthetic grounds (the violent visual of a trapped paw is repugnant), but mainly for its misleading scientific implications. Even for those in the superior range, memory is never steely; it is flexible, form-shifting, and fragmented. The trap metaphor is also mechanically incorrect by implying that memories are formed instantly, with a decisive snap.

And this, about how forgetting is not simply a lack of remembering, it is an entirely different function that takes its own work to accomplish. Some parts of brain cells are devoted to building memories and other parts of brain cells are devoted to deconstructing memories.

Discovering that Nature granted us separate molecular toolboxes actively dedicated to memory on the one hand and forgetting on the other clearly refutes the common view that forgetting is just failing memory. . . . Forgetting is a cognitive gift. Our understanding of the dynamics of synaptic plasticity, defined as changes in the strength of neuronal connections with experience, has expanded. Like a car engine or any complex dynamic system, synaptic plasticity needs both an accelerator and a brake. . . . 

Both normal memory and normal forgetting work in unison to balance our minds so that we can healthily engage chaotic and sometimes hurtful environments.

That pairing of memory and forgetting allow us to filter what we hold onto. Our senses provide much more input than we are able to process and store, and keeping all of it would create too much noise to find any meaningful signals in the mix. Selective memory allows us to generalize and categorize, to recognize patterns and commonalities so we can transfer knowledge from one experience to the next.

Due to the convergence of insights from computer science and the autistic condition, we now understand that forgetting allows us to better record and recognize representations of the outside world. Both artificial and our own natural intelligence depend on forgetting in order to generalize--to reconstruct the whole from its component parts so that we can categorize and label things even when they vary subtly in infinite ways.

-----

Minds that forget in balance with remembering have ideally evolved for our fluidly, sometimes turbulently, fluctuating worlds.

Especially fascinating, I found was the fact that the slow, deliberate work of deconstructing the irrelevant data that our short-term memories collect--the process of forgetting--happens during sleep, which explains sleep's necessity. People who go too long without sleep find their brains overwhelmed with too much data, creating confusion and even hallucinations as they're not able to process everything to find what matters.

While we dream, the hippocampus stimulates and replays fragments of our experiences in the cortex, but not the full episode experienced in all of its elaborate intricacies. Dreams are like those "previously seen" recaps in TV series, in which only the most important snippets are reshown, the very few needed to capture and reinforce the gist of the story line. In so doing, the hippocampus persistently stimulates a few privileged cortical spines, stabilizing into a memory those few whose growth reflects the gist of our daily experiences. More sweepingly, however, the vast majority of new spines are left unstimulated while dreaming. Unstable and neglected, vast fields of freshly grown spines should, according to the general hypothesis, wilt back down. After a good night's sleep, we might expect to see some pockets of newly grown spines, now stabilized into a memory. But the net effect, comparing the cortex at the day's end and the morning after, would be spine shrinkage--that is, the net effect of sleeping is forgetting. While it is true that a secondary gain of the large-scale pruning that occurs during sleep would benefit memory--topiary-like, accentuating its details--sleeping's main purpose, according to this hypothesis, is to refresh the cortex. By cleaning and clearing the cortical slate, sleep reopens the cortex to accommodate future memories; by reducing neuronal excitability and effectively deleting extraneous cortical information, it preserves the regulated processing and flow of sensory input. . . . 

It takes house for the delicate molecular machinery that governs active forgetting to carefully disassemble a newly grown spine. So, in contrast to hunger, which can be sated by a few ravenous mouthfuls, or thirst, which can be quenched by a couple of long swigs, forgetting can't be rushed. Forgetting takes its slow and deliberate time.

In order to be able to function, we must forget many of the details of our experiences. And if we want to not be overwhelmed by negativity bias, that forgetting must include a fair measure of the bad so that we are not blinded to the good. It helps us be less fearful and more bonobo-like.

Also related to patterns and connections, to creativity and insight, is the ability to relax your brain's focus to enter a more associative state. I love this description of doing so that I recently encountered in Katabasis by R.F. Kuang.

Let your mind wander. Skim like a dragonfly over the pool of your consciousness and let go. You'll take the form most pleasing and stable to you, if only you can quiet your mind.

Such wonderful imagery: skim like a dragonfly over the pool of your consciousness and let go. I learned long ago how to do this in order for me to be able to drift off to sleep. Just observe the thoughts as they come and go without taking a particular interest in any of them. Keep skimming and never land. It seems similar to the descriptions I've read of meditation, and it's what I experience on a good walk or hike or other physical activity where my body moves without much attention and I quiet my thoughts into a meditative flow state. Finding time to do this regularly is one of my keys to staying refreshed.

I think the image works nicely with the most recent word-based reflection I read in David Whyte's book Consolations II on the idea of "reverie."

The combined state of rest and broad diffused attention that reverie implies, and the luxuriant sense the word communicates, invites us to inhabit our bodies, our intellects and our imaginations simultaneously, where neither the mind, the body, not the imagination are given precedence yet all of them are felt and inhabited in deeper ways that are not possible when we attempt to focus on them in separation.

To be in a state of reverie is to inhabit multiple layers of our consciousness all at once, to be fully aware of every bodily internal feeling while hazily hearing and seeing every ambient sound and sight: to be present in this time now while inhabiting the timeless, employing the mind to re-interpret the future and even re-imagine the past. . . . Reverie is our ability to take it all in, all at once without making a job of work or a task out of taking it all in, reverie is our multivalent, multitalented ability to connect to all levels all at once and all without effort. . . . 

Reverie is a rewarding state in and of itself. In reverie, parts of us meet, join together, converse and even heal, that our isolated intellect is powerless to enjoin. Ideas, understandings and direct physical apprehensions of others form in the cross fertilisation and conversational cross-currents that flowing, dream like states of reverie provide.

Broad, diffused attention to the mental, emotional, and physical all out once. Taking it all in, letting different types of thoughts play freely together, and letting the connections and revelations sort themselves out.

The further this post goes, the more it wanders from the tight focus with which it began--and that is okay. The ideas can play freely together and we can trust that the associations, connections, and revelations will sort themselves out.

I have not yet read the picture book that led to this essay by its author, Azita Ardakani, but the essay itself speaks deeply to me about remaining always close to states of reverie, the relational connectedness of all things, and being able to focus on the good more than the bad.

Ocean of Stars: A Cosmic Origin Story for Young Readers

We often speak about wonder as though it were a charming feature of childhood, something beautiful but ultimately impractical that maturity will eventually replace. To grow up, in this telling, is to become more efficient with our attention. We learn which things deserve notice and which can safely become scenery.

But perhaps the disappearance of wonder is not maturity. Perhaps it is a form of estrangement. . . . 

The living world has not become less astonishing. Water still moves continuously between ocean, cloud, root, blood, and breath. Trees exchange information beneath the ground. Migrating animals cross distances they were never taught to navigate. The elements inside our bodies were forged in events that occurred before Earth existed.

What changes is our capacity to perceive any of this.

Modern life trains attention toward urgency, utility, and measurable value. A forest becomes acreage. A river becomes supply. Time becomes output. Even our bodies are treated as instruments expected to perform continuously, largely indifferent to darkness, season, exhaustion or grief.

When the world is understood primarily through usefulness, aliveness begins to disappear from view. We may know more facts while feeling less relationship. . . . 

Many of the stories a culture tells place the human being at the center of existence, surrounded by a world of objects. Yet the deeper story revealed by science and careful attention is one of participation. We are made through innumerable relationships: cellular, ancestral, atmospheric, ecological. Life does not assemble itself in isolation. . . . 

It is a way of remaining receptive to possibility. Play loosens the rigid categories through which adults often organize the world. It asks what else something might become. Life itself proceeds through a similar experimentation, producing variation, adaptation, improbable forms, and relationships no single participant could have designed.

Wonder begins in that openness, interrupting certainty long enough for the world to become vivid again. . . . 

To experience the more-than-human world as intimate, intelligent, and alive is to feel loss differently. What we love is no longer an abstract “environment” located somewhere beyond daily life. It is the source of our food, imagination, language, bodies, and breath. Attention becomes a form of relationship, and relationship carries obligation, because it looks back at us. . . . 

Long before a child can understand climate models or extinction rates, a story can help shape what kind of world they believe they inhabit. Is it a warehouse of materials? A stage built for human ambition? Or is it a vast community of lives, histories, and forces to which they already belong?

I do not want Ocean of Stars to resolve the mystery of existence for a child. I hope it enlarges the mystery while also making it feel hospitable. I hope a child closes the book sensing that they are neither the center of the universe nor a meaningless speck within it: They are a particular expression of an ancient, ongoing creativity.

The world never stopped being extraordinary. We only became practiced at passing it by.

The world is a mix of both good and bad. It's up to us to decide which one we want to nourish and grow. When we cultivate and develop the goodness in ourselves, others, and the world, there is less of the bad to go around. The best way to achieve a better existence is to think better of existence.

One final thought from Reweaving the Rainbow:

the dense deep roots

of every real bond

stretch beyond the reasons why

into the mystery we are

into the loneliness we live with

and the work of intimacy

is not to make of love

a litany of evidence

but to cherish

the lonely enigma

of the other

The work of intimacy is to cherish the lonely enigma of the other.

The best way to achieve it is to think better of others.

The world is a mix of both good and bad. It's up to us to decide which one we want to nourish and grow. When we cultivate and develop the goodness in ourselves, others, and the world, there is less of the bad to go around. The best way to achieve a better existence is to think better of existence.

Plasticity, Symbiosis, Predictions, and Stories

I seem to constantly move through cycles of input and output. For a while, I'll absorb ideas, experiences, and learning. Then I'll have outpourings of creativity where words flow easily and I write and create. Then I'm empty and need to fill up again before I have something itching to find expression.

I've created quite a bit of output lately between forums like this and my work, and now feel at a loss for words. Even coaxing out an introduction and connective thoughts for this post is a struggle. Almost all of what follows is going to be quoted material from others; my contribution is to present them together, in dialogue with each other. A type of found art or cento, if you will. Each is insightful on its own; in interaction they add layers and depth to each other.

"If you really want to communicate something, even if it's just an emotion or an attitude, let alone an idea, the least effective and least enjoyable way is directly. It only goes in about an inch. But if you can get people to the point where they have to think a moment what it is you're getting at, and then discover it, the thrill of discovery goes right through the heart."

― Stanley Kubrick, on indirect storytelling

I see links and commonalities in what follows. Perhaps you will discover them, too.

The Kubrick quote came to me via the Farnam Street blog, as does this one.

"Being annoyed is the price you pay for community. It means having guests when you'd rather be alone. It means letting someone live with you even when they get on your nerves. It means showing up for events that you'd rather not go to. It means turning the other cheek."

― Divya Venn, on the cost of relationships

Some propositions that I hope are revealed below:

• Humans are learning machines.
• Play is how we learn.
• Thoughts are guided by and emerge as stories.
• Perception is relational.

We exist in interactions, in the spaces between our internal, narrative predictions and our external encounters and experiences.

I recently came across this in a book, part of a conversation inside a creation myth about how that world's gods decided to create humans.

Stories are answers to questions. And so, lives are stories. Already we, each and all, have answered a myriad of questions the universe asked in their silence simply by our existing!

But there are questions we cannot answer. Lives we cannot live, because we were built to answer different questions. We don't have answers to questions of endings and change, of time and age, of death and what comes after, of love and purpose. And if we did, they would differ so greatly from any other being that they may as well be different questions.

We have the chance to give this world to others. Beings who will know time and beauty, who will live and tell their own stories of themselves and each other, who will live and love and grow and in their ending return to us and tell us. Tell us their stories! And in their ending, we will tell them ours. Is that not the greatest gift we can give? The chance for others to tell their stories, too?

A different thought from the same book:

Middling art is the most inspiring kind of art! When something is awful, it's a joke; a bad piece of art makes people talk, sure, but it's always in scorn or derision. No one experiences truly ghastly art and wants to improve it. And the same with truly beautiful work. Those heights of achievement are exquisite and capture something ecstatic in the universe, yes. But if one measures themselves against greatness, they'll always be upset at themselves for not matching it, because few do. But middling art? Art that has strong qualities while still not quite capturing greatness? That is the best kind of art, my friend. And why I love your poetry and why you write it. Because a very bad poet will see your art and wish to try harder. A very good poet will see your art and try to be better. And someone who has never made any art at all will see your art and know it's possible for them to try, too. For my money, that last is the most valuable. We could all stand to create more than we destroy, especially these days. Even if it is middling. So take heart. You may be the most important person in this room, because no matter what you do, it's going to be inspiring.

Those are from Audition for the Fox by Martin Cahill, of which I said in my review.

A delightful and inventive tale that consists of two interwoven stories. The core story is one of a defeated people learning to stand up to a tyrannical invading force that has conquered their world, learning to stand up to power through trickery, mockery, and subterfuge. The framing story is of this world's pantheon of 100 gods, each in the form of an animal. Nesi is at the heart of both.

Nesi has failed 96 auditions to become an acolyte of the various "pillars," and is now undergoing the trial set up by the Fox. For the audition, the Fox sends her 300 years into the past, where she finds herself without bearings, bound in a line of prisoners being marched into a fortress. She slowly learns this is a pivotal moment in her culture's history, and the future she knows depends upon her creating her world's past.

The story's telling is intentionally tricky and convoluted to represent interactions with the Fox, but Fox is not a heartless patron. They guide Nesi on her path, dispensing obscure insights and wisdom along the way. Readers gradually come to know more of this world's mythology along our way, adding layers of depth that ground our understanding of Nesi.

This is a quick and fun read, light but not empty.

Though the review is not nearly as important to this post as the two quoted sections.

I've articulated my motivation behind being a librarian as a desire to better understand humans and our place in the world by immersing myself in our stories and sharing that journey with others. I find the ideas in this essay fascinating.

As Print Literacy Fades, Our Perception of Truth Is Warping

The printing press gave us objective truth. Social media made truth tribal again. AI could make it something else entirely.

Before literacy, people’s perception of truth was grounded in “lived experience,” tribal or individual. Facts were defined situationally, tested by outcomes, and stored in personal and collective memory. Collective memory was more durable than any individual’s, but it still bent toward what people needed to be true. With no external record to hold it fixed, the past could quietly reshape itself to fit the present. . . . 

Orality allowed the tribe to adjust the past to accommodate the needs of the present. Not only personal but even collective truth was situational: relative, contextual, negotiated, and adjustable. . . . 

Writing separated the known from the knower. The simple recording of events outside memory brought about a revolution: Truth could now be separated from lived experience and handled through abstract thinking.

This effect of abstraction, driven by writing and the alphabet, dramatically changed the epistemology of truth. . . . 

Print literacy helped to establish a more objective truth about many things without any special effort or expeditions, simply as a side effect of its technological conditions. Through unified mass education (another byproduct of print literacy), the principle of uniform and objective truth spread across society as a governing intellectual and ethical principle. . . . 

Across the electronic era — from radio through television — news and entertainment became abundant. Media producers had to work hard to market their products to audiences. In terms of the Lasswell formula of communication — “Who says what in which channel to whom with what effect?” — the “whom” became more important than the “what.” Media production shifted its focus from producing content to targeting specific audiences. Newspapers had long spoken to particular readerships — the partisan press chose its audience by politics. What electronic media added was measurement: targeting became continuous, quantified, and instant. . . . 

The precise targeting of audiences by identity improved the delivery of programs and commercials, but it also brought a focus on group identities into mass culture and public consciousness. . . . 

The principle of truth fostered by writing and printing — rationality, objectivity, universality, uniformity — shifted toward social contextualization and dependence on people’s choices. The reversal from absolute to relative truth had begun. . . . 

Literacy encouraged people to respond to ideas, whereas digital media encourages us to emotionally and impulsively react to each other, bringing back conditions typical of tribal orality. But on social media, social reactivity exceeds the old tribal conditions by orders of magnitude because of the greater speed and scale of interactions. . . . “digital orality” is orality on steroids. . . . 

In media ecology, orality vs. literacy is not just about listening vs. reading but rather about immersion vs. detachment. So digital orality is not so much about podcasts and reels as it is about how people become immersed in impulsive, instant digital interactions with their environment, now digital, and with each other, just as in tribal orality. . . . 

Abstract and systematic knowledge is reversing into “knowing” based on “lived experience.” Truth becomes situational, relative, negotiated, and tribal again. . . . 

In the digital age, truth has acquired a new form of verification that is extremely hard to resist: viral distribution. If print culture distributed what was significant, digital culture treats as significant whatever is distributed. Viral distribution shapes truth more powerfully than the old gatekeepers, books, and experts ever did. Truth has become a referendum by likes and shares. . . . 

AI’s greatest impact on the epistemology of truth lies in how it conditions our relationship with reality. . . . 

For AI, the only reality is us. We supply our language for AI to learn cognitive structures, so our engagement is crucial for AI and more important than truth. AI will keep talking to us no matter what, largely indifferent to truth and reality checks, because it has no reality besides the one in which we engage with it. . . . 

Truth as an intellectual or ethical imperative arguably does not exist in the reality of AI. . . . 

Over the past two millennia, truth has passed through several stages defined by dominant media. In tribal orality, truth was based on lived experience and defined by beliefs and situational needs: relative, tribal, and negotiated. Writing and then printing detached truth from situational immersion and put it into the space of abstract ideas, anchored in “objective” reality, established through reason and confirmed by verifiable evidence. Electronic and now digital media have returned truth to lived experience — but a lived experience that is now mostly digital, meaning impulsive, algorithmically agitated, and isolated from what earlier counted as a reality check. And finally, LLMs currently have little connection to reality and little need for one, as their only connection is us, the suppliers of language. What truth is in this new paradigm is yet to be determined.

How we come to know and understand the world is ever in flux. It's going to be an interesting ride.

The heart of this post and my thoughts in it emerged from reading the book Playing with Reality: How Games Have Shaped Our World by Kelly Clancy, which, like the essay above, also considers how AI has been created and how it's going to impact the ways it will shape us in turn. Here's my review of the book:

A deep, broad, and compelling journey into the centrality of games to human development.

Human brains are wired to learn through experimentation, trial and error. Dopamine creates sensations of pleasure when we check our predictions against experiences. Play is where humans explore additional, safe learning through invented experiences, which is why we are drawn to games. Games allow us to learn about ourselves and about how best to interact with others and environments. They are instinctive, pleasurable growth tools.

Yet we have moved games from the realm of play to the realm of science--from a tool for exploring reality to a tool for defining and shaping reality. The mathematical suppositions of game theory have been transferred into the realms of economics and government policy, computer development and AI. Our world has been shaped by a model of human nature that is vastly oversimplified and reduced to numbers and pure rationality, a model that is not only inaccurate but harmful in many ways.

Neuroscientist and physicist Clancy makes this case by diving deeply into the history of games, psychology, sociology, math, science, economics, information theory, and more, ranging widely. The wealth of information is both impressive and fascinating, as is her ability to make connections and see patterns. It is a wonderfully stimulating book.

A few quoted passages:

Games are a kind of untrue truth. What is internally consistent within a game need not reflect anything about reality. Yet games have been increasingly adopted as models of the world. Games are a method by which we can learn how to reason about the behavior of objects in rule-based systems. At their best, games have generated a deeper understanding of mathematics. At the same time, ideologues have used games to smooth reality's rougher edges.

-----

Play is to intelligence as mutation is to evolution.

-----

Learning itself is rewarding to the brain. Researchers have found that the "Aha!" moment of insight in solving a puzzle triggers dopamine release the same way sugar or money can. The brain quite literally rewards itself for learning to make good predictions. . . . People love games because they offer free pleasure . . . Rule-based games like chess are inherently predictable systems, orderly realms in which the brain can generate reward out of thin air, leveraging the gratification of making predictions. Games are the reward system tickling itself.

-----

Game theory posits humans as a fixed bundle of preferences, when they are, in fact, learning systems.

-----

Games don't just show us who we are--they reward certain behaviors. People will be only as good as the games they're incentivized to play. They'll be as good as they expect the games themselves--and their fellow players--to be. Humans are not a fixed collection of preferences. They learn, and their behaviors are shaped in response to the games they find themselves in.

-----

Game theory was co-opted as the rational foundation of a neoliberal world order, and its selfish assumptions still ring through our engineered social systems. Originally invented to chart human behavior, game theory has since warped the territory it was intended to map.

-----

Games are inevitably an oversimplification of reality. As games have continued to imperialize our everyday lives, they've come to replace traditional values and relationships with rigid and unrealistic models. They've ushered in the gamification of everything, resulting in addictive systems where all worth is metered by monetary exchanges.

-----

Games are a particularly dangerous fiction because they shape how their players act and make choices. Games are like maps that remake the world in their own image. The rules and rewards of a game dictate how its players behave. A game can replace people's actual preferences with those rewarded by its scoring functions. . . .

Game theory is not an account of human behavior. It has not, and cannot, reveal what people truly want. Game theory's focus on individual decision-making obscures larger social, political, and historical factors that shape human behaviors. Play emerged over evolution as a form of learning and a way to strengthen social bonds. For mathematical simplicity, game theorists often exclude our social nature and the fact that we learn what to want from one another and from our circumstances. We need to be aware of the ways that the games encoded in our social and technological systems warp our preferences, manufacture our desires, contaminate our attitudes toward one another, and ultimately influence our life choices.

Humans are learning machines and play is a way we learn together.

A more extensive collection of quotes from Playing with Reality:

I'll roughly define a game as a system furnished with a goal. Players make decisions given some uncertainty in pursuit of that goal. Play is all about the unknown and learning how to navigate it. . . . Dice and chess have little in common except that players work to predict the world in both cases. In gambling, players hope to anticipate the environment. In chess, they hope to anticipate their opponents. A game might look like an auction (with the goal of acquiring a coveted good at a reasonable price), social media (with the goal of attracting attention), or SimCity (with the goal of designing a sustainable digital metropolis).

Chance is central to many games because randomness is nature's foundational search algorithm. Random mutations are the driving engine of evolution. . . .

In play, animals develop a range of strategies through random exploration: If condition A, try B. If condition C, try D, then E. In place of the reactive response of a hardwired reflex, play enables animals to explore a suite of options, some more adaptive than others. It is the crucible of invention and a learning system that mimics the genius of evolution. In natural selection, mutations resulting in bodies that meet the demands of their environments are rewarded with survival. In play, behaviors that correctly anticipate the demands of the environment persist. Play is to intelligence as mutation is to evolution.

-----

Games are mental practice, empowering players to develop cognitive skills like strategy, numeracy, and theory of mind in a safe domain. . . . We see ourselves--our biases, weaknesses, strengths--more clearly through play.

-----

Games have endured because they represent a model of how our minds work. They're the outgrowth of a learning system that has been central to the evolution of intelligence. Play is a tool the brain uses to generate data on which to train itself, a way of building better models of the world to make better predictions. . . . Games are more than an invention; they are an instinct.

-----

His team confirmed that dopamine neurons fired when the animals received a reward--but only when they didn't expect it. . . . The dopamine neurons of these untrained animals fired when the reward was delivered. But once the animals were experts and had made an association between cure and reward . . . they fired in response to the light cue that preceded it. . . . They were signaling what they expected to happen. The dopamine neurons weren't tracking movement, exactly, or reward; they were tracking belief. They even signaled when something they expected to happen didn't happen, as though surprised. . . .

Though dopamine serves many functions in the brain, this was evidence that it acts as part of a learning algorithm. . . . the dopamine system encodes an animal's reward predictions. . . . The brain formulates some internal world model and registers deviations from its predictions. As neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky puts it, dopamine is "about the pursuit of happiness rather that happiness itself." . . .

Interestingly, learning itself is rewarding to the brain. Researchers have found that the "Aha!" moment of insight in solving a puzzle triggers dopamine release the same way sugar or money can. The brain quite literally rewards itself for learning to make good predictions. . . . People love games because they offer free pleasure . . . Rule-based games like chess are inherently predictable systems, orderly realms in which the brain can generate reward out of thin air, leveraging the gratification of making predictions. Games are the reward system tickling itself. . . .

Brains are prediction engines, and nowhere has that been more evident than in our fascination with games of chance.

-----

In the twentieth century, physicists discovered that certain quantum events can be truly uncaused and unknowable. Randomness isn't a by-product of human ignorance but an objective register of reality. The universe is fundamentally unpredictable. This can be profoundly frustrating and thoroughly irresistible to the brain, which, as we've discussed, is a prediction engine that seeks to ascertain even faint correlations and causal relationships. Our impulse to gamble, it turns out, is linked to the brain's desire to learn. . . .

Gambling's allure owes less to a player's misguided expectation of a massive payout and more to the pleasure of exploring the unknown. . . . This is true throughout the animal kingdom--animals respond more strongly to uncertain rewards than to certain ones, even if the average expected gain is less. . . .

Dopamine release is highest when the outcome is least predictable. . . . In gamblers and non-gamblers alike, dopamine release tracks a stimuli's unpredictability more closely than it tracks reward. The more unpredictable the outcome, the stronger the motivation to gamble.

-----

Psychologists have found that people's brains respond to new information in the same way they respond to standard rewards like food and money. Knowledge is its own reward.

-----

When humans invented the earliest games of chance--likely involving the flipping of pebbles and knucklebones--they set the course for a deeper understanding of reality. Casinos are magisterial feats of social engineering, and they prey on humans where they are most manipulable: the realm of almost. With the right strategy, games like craps and roulette have a payoff probability hovering very close to 50 percent, optimally engaging the dopamine system.

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A person's susceptibility to zero-sum thinking depends on their cultural and personal history. White Americans are more likely than Black Americans to see racial status as zero sum. Men are more likely to see gender as zero sum and oppose fair work-place policies. The countries whose citizens are more prone to zero-sum thinking tend to have lower GDPs, reduced pluralism, diminished government efficacy, and fewer human rights. Individuals prone to zero-sum thinking tend to be lacking in positive emotions and life satisfaction. Zero-sum thinking results in antagonism between individuals and groups, and it can drive people to justify immoral behaviors or make bad decisions based on incorrect assumptions, as it blinkers them to win-win solutions.

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One of the concerns shared by philosophers, naturalists, sociologists, poets, soldiers, and civilians alike is humankind's "true" nature. Perhaps the historical lack of consensus should itself be a lesson: our nature has been hard to pin down because it isn't fixed. Our hallmark quality is plasticity. . . . We slip in and out of identities, value systems, and agencies the way players inhabit the strictures of a game.

Games have always been about discovering who we are. Friends and family members agree to suspend everyday reality to temporarily compete. Games sharpen our ability to understand the goals and intentions of the people we interact with and yield new insights into otherwise hidden aspects of their personalities. They free up our constrictive senses of self, loosen the straitjacket of identity, and allow us to explore virtual worlds and act in ways we might not otherwise. . . . Games are a science of selves: contained experiments that teach players the principles of interaction. . . .

Games don't just show us who we are--they reward certain behaviors. People will be only as good as the games they're incentivized to play. They'll be as good as they expect the games themselves--and their fellow players--to be. Humans are not a fixed collection of preferences. They learn, and their behaviors are shaped in response to the games they find themselves in.

-----

A central aspect of play: though players locked in a game are nominally competing--even in a zero-sum game like chess--they are really cooperating to compete. Players agree to suspend rules of reality for a specific period, adhere to the rules of a game, and work together to achieve the shared goal of an enjoyable time. Competition is a means to an end: players must genuinely try to win to thoroughly enjoy themselves.

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In the same way that stunning morphological complexity has been bootstrapped from random mutations, intelligence has been bootstrapped over billions of years of spontaneous play. The basic algorithm is this: explore many options through variation, catalog what works (whether through survival of the fittest or memorization of successful strategies), and put what works into practice.

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Life--and intelligence--emerged from interaction. . . . Every organism owes what it is to other life. . . . Engineers hoping to re-create intelligence in silico took note of biology's simple recipe: desire plus interaction. Games would provide an ideal test bed for their efforts. Whereas living organisms are endowed with the desire to survive, artificial agents are endowed by researchers with a desire to win.

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We might think of games as shaping what it means to be a self: we're defined in opposition to our playmates. The self discovers its borders in relation to others. . . . We do not play the game of life; the game of life is what plays us into being.

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Claude Shannon, the founder of information theory, argues in a 1950 paper that games offer an ideal environment for developing machine intelligence. Up until that point in time, researchers had mainly used computers to crunch numbers in massive calculations. Instead, Shannon argues, computers could one day process "chess positions, circuits, mathematical expressions, words." Games aren't practical, he grants, but they could be a training ground for tackling other problems, like translating texts into different languages, making strategic military decisions, and composing music--in other words, for simulating human intelligence. . . .

Shannon wasn't the first person to have this realization: history's earliest programmer, Ada Lovelace, wondered whether a game like solitaire "admit of being put into a mathematical Formula, and solved." She was the earliest scholar to grasp that Babbage's computing machine might do more than simply numerical analysis; it might analyze and even create games, texts, and music. . . .

However, our understanding of what intelligence entails has been impoverished by this focus on games.

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Learning systems build judgment through experience, and games are precisely this: generators of fictive experience.

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Researchers bested Go not by copying how humans played the game--breaking the board into visual patterns or programming an elaborate evaluation function--but by creating a system that could learn to make judgments based on playing hundreds of thousands of games against itself.

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By focusing on developing AI through games, engineers effectively gamified AI research.

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Reverence for life is the recognition that, as our own being is significant to us, every living thing's existence is significant to it. Schweitzer had struck on the basic selfishness of life and proposed that we not abhor but revere it. "I am life which wills to live, in the midst of life which will to lived," he writes in his autobiography. Schweitzer was influenced by the Jain philosophy of nonviolence, which sparked in him the "tremendous discovery that ethics knows no bounds." He was also likely influenced by the African philosophy that goes by many names in the Bantu language family but is most famously known as Ubuntu: "I am because we are." The philosophy dissolves the boundaries between discrete subjects through the realization of our shared selfishness. Each of us knows we are alive, and some force in us wants to keep living. And this is something that relates us to every other living thing, from kelp to kestrels. This is Rawls's original position, applied to all that lives. It is the living experience of the Golden Rule. Humankind is the conscience of humankind, life the conscience of life. Our integrity is directly reflected by the state of the most vulnerable among us. Ethical action flows with the inexorability of logic once we admit our shared identity as life itself, longing to live. Our charge is only to see this clearly enough so that selfhood is extended to its rightful domain: all of us.

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No matter how pristine a mechanism is in theory, people aren't mathematical objects. In the design of real-world markets, one must consider psychology, communication, persuasion, information processing, and enforcement mechanisms. . . .

Mechanism design is the science of regulation. Its rules are devised to keep players honest, but it still needs external enforcement to work--that is, some way to punish cheaters.

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Play is generative, a form of collective ideation. Huizinga sees games as a foundational cultural technology: "Civilization arises and unfolds in and as play." Playful individuals and societies may fare better because they're more adept at generating and adopting new behaviors.

Mechanism design is the formalization of Huizinga's instinct, promising to help us conceive fairer social systems. It's essential, however, that we take up this work in the spirit of play. Designing better systems will require an iterative approach that adapts over time to change along with the world. Play has served as a crucible of culture and innovation; it's at the heart of design itself. . . .

Design is what happens when we uncover rules latent in the world and use these to define the logic of a new, separate system. The inventors of chess abstracted the different capabilities of army divisions to invent the rules of a game that's entertained us for centuries. We can't change reality, but we can tinker with designed systems to encourage more desirable behaviors. There's benefit to creating rule-based environments: realms whose laws are known and whose consequences are predictable. A deeper understanding of games empowered researchers to design novel marketplaces, educational products, and voting systems. But games are inevitably an oversimplification of reality. As games have continued to imperialize our everyday lives, they've come to replace traditional values and relationships with rigid and unrealistic models. They've ushered in the gamification of everything, resulting in addictive systems where all worth is metered by monetary exchanges.

It's too much, I know; but, as I said, it is stimulating and fascinating. I want to keep revisiting these key ideas once I return the book to the library.

Humans learn by testing our predictions against experiences, and what we learn becomes a part of narratives that we use to define ourselves and others.

Why Your Brain Turns Life Into Stories

Neuroscience is revealing how our brains are wired for narrative

The brain doesn’t create or comprehend stories from scratch. When people watch Luca or Sherlock or go to the grocery store, they filter these experiences through previous ones. Based on other shopping trips, shoppers expect, for example, to pick up a cart, walk the aisles, put items in the cart, enter a checkout line, and so on. Back in the 1970s psychologists hypothesized that people have basic scripts for what happens in familiar situations or events. These scripts inform future trips to those places—say, a store, airport, library or restaurant. . . . 

The closer a person’s pattern was to a mathematically determined standard, the more details that person remembered from the clip. “When you are going through the airport, there’s a sequence of patterns that should show up,” Baldassano says. As Baldassano explained in a 2024 webinar, if these patterns appear with high fidelity, “that’s actually a predictor you’re going to have detailed memory” of that experience.

The patterns show up largely in the medial prefrontal cortex, a goal-setting region that marries the most relevant memories with ongoing experience. “Your brain is not built to just record the pixels that are coming in from the screen or from the movie. You are trying to match this into something that you know,” Baldassano says. The work helped neuroscientists reimagine the default mode network’s role. The network was not just for internal musings; it also acted as a broker between ongoing experience and a person’s knowledge and memories.

Baldassano imagines that an adult brain holds hundreds of thousands of scripts for expected scenarios, a huge neuronal library of story outlines crafted from experience. These scripts serve as a foundation for the stories to be written as we live our lives. As we write these stories, we may have a choice of template, and our choice guides the story we write. In one of Baldassano’s studies, subjects were given roles—a restaurant critic or a wedding planner—that dictated what they paid attention to in a plotline about a marriage proposal in a restaurant. That role shaped the story they constructed in their minds—and therefore what they recalled when asked to report back. If we enter a situation with a purpose, we filter our experience of that situation through the lens of our goal. People with different goals, or frames, for an experience show differences in brain activity that reflect variations in their narratives. . . . 

“Storytelling can be used in great ways, or it can be used for propaganda or fake news,” McAdams says. “It’s a tool. It’s like fire.”

As a tool, storytelling imprints the neural patterns associated with one person’s experience to another individual, expanding the latter’s experiences beyond their own. “Narratives are the typical means by which we can transport experiences from one person to another,” . . . 

Storytelling can teach useful lessons when the experiences are new. Not everyone has to touch a hot stove, text and drive, or lie on their résumé to learn the consequences of such actions. “You are learning about the experiences of others in a safe place,” Hasson says. “This is why it’s really useful.”

To be persuasive, however, a story must resonate with listeners. It must elicit in their brains activity similar to that of the storyteller. And whether a tale resonates depends on a listener’s background. . . . 

Stories that appeal to broad audiences are often rooted in shared cultural narratives, which are based on accepted ways of thinking. These templates can range from expected life sequences—attend college, get a job, get married, have children—to popular story arcs such as the redemption narrative. . . . 

Not only do cultural narratives shape individuals’ stories, but each act of storytelling either fortifies or weakens the template. “When we tell our personal stories, we are contributing to master narratives or resisting them,” McLean says. “We are all players in this dynamic cultural system.” . . . 

Far from just an entertaining ritual, creating stories may guide much of human thought.

We think in stories.

An example of how telling a different story might shape our future decisions and actions.

In Solarpunk Cities of the Future, Tech Follows Nature’s Lead

If the Anthropocene began when the Industrial Revolution set industry against the living world, the Symbiocene imagines what should follow: interspecies democracy, life within Earth’s limits, and ecological reciprocity. This is not a future where we engineer nature to fit human comfort and convenience. Instead, creation becomes a conversation: a turning away from our long habit of using technology against nature, toward listening, humility and the flourishing of life.

But how do we loosen modernity’s grip when we’re still dependent on its tools? The answer is solarpunk, the edgy but sincere cultural movement joining technology with nature – reimagining technologies based on conceptions of science that coax rather than torture. The ‘punk’ in solarpunk comes from its blended roots: not rejecting technology like a luddite, nor blindly embracing it like an ecomodernist, but instead yoking technological development to ecological and biological principles to serve the good of the whole. The ‘solar’ element connects the photosynthetic wonder of plants as light-eaters, with the free energy of the Sun harnessed by solar panels and other forces of nature in wind, water and geothermal energy.

Solarpunk’s point isn’t that a ‘solar future’ begins and ends with the devices we already know. It widens the meaning of technology to include Indigenous and place-based practices such as chinampas – raised garden beds woven from reeds, anchored in shallow lakes, and refreshed with nutrient-rich silt from canals. They don’t produce electricity, but they do produce abundance: food, soil and a stable local ecology. Solarpunk puts that kind of low-energy, high-yield ingenuity beside high ecotech like atmospheric water harvesters to pull drinking water out of the air, and regenerative microgrids to store power. In other words, it treats science and technology as plural: shaped by culture, landscape and values, not dictated by a single industrial blueprint. That’s why solarpunk often turns to biomimicry – learning from nature’s designs – to aim human ingenuity at repair: restoring ecosystems while also restoring the ways we live with one another.

According to Clancy in Playing with Reality: Life--and intelligence--emerged from interaction. Every organism owes what it is to other life. . . . We're defined in opposition to our playmates. The self discovers its borders in relation to others. Humans are inherently relational. We've long tried to deny that. Instead we should embrace it.

Symbiocene is a new term to me. Symbiotic means a close, long-term relationship between two different living organisms or groups, where they live together and interact. Cooperative, interdependent, for mutual gain. It seems life has always been designed to thrive most in symbiotic dynamics, so it only makes sense that we should look for ways to be more so.

A central aspect of play: players are really cooperating to compete, writes Clancy.

And the essay at the top about print literacy fading: Truth becomes situational, relative, negotiated, and tribal.

Seeing Yourself Through Someone Else’s Eyes

Being human is realizing that there isn’t just one version of you. There is the person you experience from the inside and then there are hundreds of versions of you existing in the minds of everyone you’ve ever met. . . . 

People don’t perceive us in a vacuum.

They perceive us through the architecture of their own minds.

Their memories.

Their experiences.

Their hopes.

Their fears.

Their associations.

The same smile might remind one person of their grandmother and another of an old friend.

The same confidence might register as warmth to one person and arrogance to another.

The same quietness might feel peaceful or it might feel distant.

Every perception of us is partly about us and partly about the person doing the perceiving. . . . 

None of them are entirely you… None of them are entirely not you, either.

They’re interpretations—real enough to shape another person’s experience, even if they don’t fully capture your own. . . . 

Perception is rarely objective.

It’s relational.

Our relational perceptions define for us the truth.

We exist in the interactions between our internal, narrative predictions and our external encounters and experiences. In the space in between.

In sum:

We exist in interactions, in the spaces between our internal, narrative predictions and our external encounters and experiences.

Our hallmark quality is plasticity. We slip in and out of identities, value systems, and agencies the way players inhabit the strictures of a game.

Being human is realizing that there isn’t just one version of you. There are hundreds of versions of you existing in the minds of everyone you’ve ever met.

Creation becomes a conversation: a turning away from our long habit of using technology against nature, toward listening, humility and the flourishing of life.

Creating stories may guide much of human thought.

Playful individuals and societies may fare better because they're more adept at generating and adopting new behaviors.

The basic algorithm is this: explore many options through variation, catalog what works, and put what works into practice.

Truth becomes situational, relative, negotiated, and tribal.

Being annoyed is the price you pay for community.

If you can get people to the point where they have to think a moment what it is you're getting at, and then discover it, the thrill of discovery goes right through the heart.

Stories are answers to questions.

Lives are stories.

Reverence for life is the recognition that every living thing's existence is significant. Ethical action flows from our shared identity as life. Our charge is only to see this clearly enough so that selfhood is extended to its rightful domain: all of us.

Is that not the greatest gift we can give? The chance for others to tell their stories, too?

No matter what you do, it's going to be inspiring.