hexagr

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Your ability to describe the world affects how you think about it. If the language and idioms you know are constrained to a particular window, that window will act as a constraint in shaping not only how you see the world, but also how you experience the world.

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Exercise caution whenever you feel like you're doing something on instinct. You're running ancient software from untrusted sources that was optimized for your ancestral environment and not this one. Think!

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Forgiveness is the act of deliberately not calling in a debt. Revenge, or ressentiment, is when a person, angered by one thing, transfers their anger to another thing and thereby calls in a debt or inadvertently indebts themselves. If you can understand the economics of John Maynard Keynes, you can see the analogous game-theoretical upside of forgiveness. You spend or invest imaginary patience points you don't really have at that moment in time in order to forgive someone or something, in order to avoid a potentially worse future outcome.

And roughly speaking, in a larger frame of view: the more you understand, the more you can forgive. The less you understand, the less you can forgive. On the other side of this equation, it must be said that having to ask for forgiveness is not a virtue. A primary objective of life is to conduct oneself in such a way that one does not need to ask for forgiveness in any serious manner.

A meta "secret third thing" is this: while forgiveness can alleviate tensions between players in a game-theoretic dilemma, it doesn't necessarily mean that players are free from the consequences of their own actions. A player who defects still runs the risk of potentially punishing or having already punished themselves—whether they are situationally aware of this fact or not.

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Tumultuous Clouds of Jupiter

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An organization or guild may serve its adherents considered as people; it may serve its director; but it seldom serves the discipline.

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Many people assume the human condition is special. Or that it is the most important aspect of nature. Or that it is inevitable. Or eternal. But it is none of those things.

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G.K. Chesterton waxes poetic about defending seemingly pointless things and lost causes:

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use of this; let us clear it away.” To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: “If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.” This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.

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The jobs of the magician, the priest, the mathematician, the psychiatrist, and the philosopher are approximately all the same: to let you know what deep shit you're in so that you can begin trying to save yourself.

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Lately, I've been reading about Sumer, Egypt, Assyria, Asia, Greece, and various early human civilizations. In the past, the general notion of 'religion' once entwined art, science, and ethics. That is to say that religion has, by and large, been a quasi-unifying way of viewing nature as one dynamic, connected thing.

Modernity seems to have abstractly tried to separate these ideas and isolate them into their own realms, as if they exist independently of one another.

This is kind of ironic. Because today we know from both physics and plain observation that ideas and things are interconnected. Denying this is absurd.

Knowledge itself, like great art and science, is often forged through great adversity. This is counter-intuitively good. One can get an understanding of a culture from how its inhabitants view both its ancestors and the hard-earned knowledge that's been passed down from generation to generation. Or, failing that, inquiring about where, exactly, it gets its knowledge from.

And physical and spiritual traits tend to be entwined, too (medical issues aside). One tends to accompany the other. For example, traits at a spiritual and metaphysical level get reflected at the object level. Thus, we can observe that the morals or values of a culture are sometimes reflected in the outward appearances, behaviors, and artistic creations of the people. Many of these principles are surprisingly generalizable.

A culture is the sum of this and more. Categories of things like these can reveal how a culture organizes itself. How it reproduces itself—not just sexually but memetically. It's customs and practices. How it records itself, thinks of itself, and artistically expresses itself. And what it permits and forbids.

Religion is like culture. And culture is almost indistinguishable from religion.

The main difference, I think, is that religion is encompassing in the sense that it has functionally served as a container for science, art, and itself for much of history.

In this way, religion is like an overarching organic structure that has served various functions in structuring ideas as well as social order.

Furthermore, every culture and subculture is a sort of quasi-religion, even if it doesn't explicitly identify as one.

Some claim that we have transcended religion, that we have eclipsed the past, and that we have left even our primitive shadows behind. But I don't think this is true at all.

It's religion all the way down. We still worship; we still play primal games; and we still play with fire and blood, albeit in different ways. It's just today that we're a primitive culture of Simians with computers. Some might say we are savage robots.

Others assert we are more highly evolved and know more today than ever before. And maybe, in some ways, we do know more. But in some other ways, it seems we have forgotten many of the obvious things that we once knew.

*This post is not a claim that religion is intrinsically good. It's an observation that religion is organic—and that in the spirit of functionalism, it served a purpose—that it was once (and still is, to some extent) a container for many things. But knowledge, science, ethics, and so on are collectively dynamic and evolving things. And we can all agree that nobody would want to live in a universe where people are put to death for wearing the wrong clothes or some other frivolous triviality. To say that humanity was completely better off at some point in the ancient past is blasphemy against human progress.

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I've had a hard time articulating to people just how fundamental spinning used to be in people's lives, and how eerie it is that it's vanished so entirely. It occurred to me today that it's a bit like if in the future all food was made by machine, and people forgot what farming and cooking were. Not just that they forgot how to do it; they had never heard of it.

When they use phrases like "spinning yarns" for telling stories or "heckling a performer" without understanding where they come from, I imagine a scene in the future where someone uses the phrase "stir the pot" to mean "cause a disagreement" and I say, did you know a pot used to be a container for heating food, and stirring was a way of combining different components of food together? "Wow, you're full of weird facts! How do you even know that?"

When I say I spin and people say "What, like you do exercise bikes? Is that a kind of dancing? What's drafting? What's a hackle?" it's like if I started talking about my cooking hobby and my friend asked "What's salt? Also, what's cooking?" Well, you see, there are a lot of stages to food preparation, starting with planting crops, and cooking is one of the later stages. Salt is a chemical used in cooking which mostly alters the flavor of the food but can also be used for other things, like drawing out moisture...

"Wow, that sounds so complicated. You must have done a lot of research. You're so good at cooking!" I'm really not. In the past, children started learning about cooking as early as age five ("Isn't that child labor?"), and many people cooked every day their whole lives ("Man, people worked so hard back then."). And that's just an average person, not to mention people called "chefs" who did it professionally. I go to the historic preservation center to use their stove once or twice a week, and I started learning a couple years ago. So what I know is less sophisticated than what some children could do back in the day.

"Can you make me a snickers bar?" No, that would be pretty hard. I just make sandwiches mostly. Sometimes I do scrambled eggs. "Oh, I would've thought a snickers bar would be way more basic than eggs. They seem so simple!"

Haven't you ever wondered where food comes from? I ask them. When you were a kid, did you ever pick apart the different colored bits in your food and wonder what it was made of? "No, I never really thought about it." Did you know rice balls are called that because they're made from part of a plant called rice? "Oh haha, that's so weird. I thought 'rice' was just an adjective for anything that was soft and white."

People always ask me why I took up spinning. Isn't it weird that there are things we take so much for granted that we don't even notice when they're gone? Isn't it strange that something which has been part of humanity all across the planet since the Neanderthals is being forgotten in our generation? Isn't it funny that when knowledge dies, it leaves behind a ghost, just like a person? Don't you want to commune with it?

#history #civilization #knowledge

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Being consistent but totally wrong versus being somewhat idiosyncratic and occasionally saying true things.

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To some extent, friendship is about trying to find others who appreciate the same niche set of memes that you do.

The underpinning of civilization is shared language. But when it's more personal, i.e., in closer friendships or an intimate relationship, it's like trying to find a group of people or a person who shares the same secret language as you do.

To create—to think, to speak, to make sound, to write, etc.—is to call into the void a song in search of the thing or things that may also be looking for you.

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It is in the nature of animals to lack grace. To reflexively react. To fight. To flee. To devour. To teem with fecundity.

Mankind also possesses these abilities, but with the additional ability that leaves him capable of silently contemplating and reflecting on all of these things with language.

And I'm not sure who is better off. Animals or mankind.

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After browsing the internet, raiding the accumulated knowledge of mankind and using it to augment my cognition and self-awareness: "You have body piercings. I have mind piercings. We are not the same."

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Art is like religion in that it represents something that is beyond the reach of empiricism. The element of fantasy is inextinguishable. Spinoza made the chief distinction that religion, unlike superstition, was founded on knowledge rather than ignorance. But what if, in stark contrast to things forged from knowledge, art is, at times, profoundly further from knowledge than it appears? And there, we might see that art isn't necessarily deep; it's just a mirror, and the mind is an abyss. Yes, I say this as someone who both appreciates and creates art. Criticizing art; classic artist move.

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I'm communicating with the dead—I mean, I'm reading the notes and manuscripts of deceased scientists.

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Friendly reminder that if you ever need access to a book but can't make it to your local library, the Internet Archive is essentially an online Library of Alexandria where you can register a free account and borrow books digitally.