Art and Meditation walk into a bar

What should you think when you face Kandinsky's Composition VIII ? Did the artist try and represent the galaxies on another plane ? Are the cold and warm colours supposed to convey a feeling ? Let's try something else.

When you look at Composition VIII and label the colours and forms or try to comprehend the artist's intention, you're using what Daniel Kahneman calls System 2. Your slower, more deliberative, and more logical brain. Try and use System 1. You fast, instinctive and emotional brain. This one doesn't need effort to function, it jumps from one automatic association to another. 24/7.

Alain De Botton writes in "Art as therapy" : "We hunger for artworks that will compensate for our inner fragilities and help return us to a viable mean. We call a work beautiful when it supplies the virtues we are missing, and we dismiss as ugly one that forces on us moods or motifs that we feel either threatened or already overwhelmed by. Art holds out the promise of inner wholeness."

When facing an artwork, we often try to "reach" an understanding. The second we "try" we're using System 2. Instead, by letting system 1 do its "thing". By simply standing there and looking without putting words on our thoughts and labels on the world, we reach one state meditation funnels us to, namely "Wu-wei" (pronounced oooo-way) which literally translates into "not trying". But more on oooo-way this Thursday ;D

Foursquare Check-in for your Brain

Two Amazing pictures today. Check this one out from Wikipedia. Did you know your body members are mapped in your brain in this way ?! It's amazing !

Ok, now this one by Joel Gold, psychiatrist and professor at NYU. His CV makes the map a bit more truthful ;) Notice where 10. First Sex is and where 19. Wife (soulmate) and 20. Ex-Wife (soulless) are :)

That memory and members overlap and meet in different areas of our brain is ... mind-blowing ! Now I'm less puzzled by Russel Foster's TED talk about how sleep is linked to mental illnesses. An amazing person wrote me this metaphor about how we're like computers: Hardware and Software and how "some software is not adapted to certain hardware". Amazing how the brain is hardware and software. Your memories (software) shape the structure of your brain (hardware) ! Good morning :D

How your belly can rid you of that crappy attitude

Your belly can rid you of your crappy attitude ! Let me explain :D So. You might have looked at your belly some time ago and thought: "Must be all the X". Let's consider imaginary frat student "Cool Luke". In his case, he thinks Beer is the culprit (X = Beer). But it's not.

And it's not Luke's fault for thinking so: "The reality of the causal nexus is cognitively ignored in favor of the cartoon of single causes. While useful for a forager, this machinery impoverishes our scientific understanding, rendering discussions (...) of the "causes" — of cancer, war, violence, mental disorders, infidelity, unemployment, climate, poverty, and so on — ridiculous." - John Tooby, Edge.org

Beer is one of the causes of Luke's Belly. The beer-induced late night kebabs are another. And same for your crappy attitude you beautiful frowning creature :) Your crappy attitude is much more interesting than just a direct cause of your boss' (insert beautiful insult). Maria Popova writes: "One has to wonder whether that desire for contact, whatever its nature or cost, might be a universality of the human condition (...). Aggression is, perhaps, the only form of contact of which (we) are capable (sometimes), and yet it is contact (we) crave so compulsively."

See ? Your aggression partly stems from a need for contact. You want to reach out to your boss. Amazing ! So next time you're about to pluck his / her eyes out. Put a hand on your belly. Your belly and your induced crappy attitude are both more complex than you think. It's a blind spot of your understanding. Let's smile and bathe in this beautiful ignorance. Good morning :D

The Future of Morality - Insights from a Purple Truck

You're driving a purple truck. The breaks go bust. If you go straight, you'll kill 5 workers. If you steer, you'll kill 1 worker. What will you do ? - Lift your eyes, take a second to think - Steer and kill just 1 ? Awesome

Now you're not driving the purple truck. You're on a bridge and see it losing its breaks. There's an extremely fat person next to you. You can push the fat person, stop the truck and save the 5 workers. What will you do ? - Lift your eyes, take a second to think - Stay and Look ? Why ? You killed a person earlier to save the other 5. Why not push the fat guy ?

Michael Sandel raises the case during his Harvard class on political philosophy. What makes you want to save the 5 is the consequentialist / Utilitarian paradigm (5 is better than 1 !). What makes you Not push the fat person though is the categorical paradigm (It's Just wrong to kill a person).

I have a problem with the categorical view and setting principles and rules in stones. Bergson writes “Modern science dates from the day when mobility was set up as an independent reality. It dates from . . . Galileo.” I might be pushing scientific confidence but read this: "Because we think and move at human scale in time and space, we can deceive ourselves. Pre-Copernican astronomies depended on the self-evident fact that the "fixed stars" orbited around the other in a slow annual dance; and it was an advance in science to declare that "atoms" (in Greek, literally "indivisibles") were the changeless building blocks of matter — until we split them. Edward Gibbon could be puzzled by the fall of the Roman Empire without realizing that its most amazing feature was that it lasted so long." - James J. O'Donnell, Edge.org

The point: We might not see it or accept it but Morality is moving. I think Morality can, is being and will be fundamentally disrupted. I think the next frontier in our evolution is Moral disruption. In all cases: Good morning :D

Let's FLIP all your thinking. All of it

Today's Impossible: Anything you're thinking, FLIP IT! As if you had a toggle switch.

GENEROSITY - Here's conventional wisdom: Success makes you happy. Happiness permits you to be generous. (FLIP IT !) It actually works like this: Generosity makes you happy. Happy people are more likely to be successful." - Seth Godin

HANDLING HATERS - "The self-delusion in question is that we do nice things to people we like and bad things to those we dislike. (FLIP IT!) But what the psychology behind the effect reveals is quite the opposite, a reverse-engineering of attitudes that takes place as we grow to like people for whom we do nice things and dislike those to whom we are unkind." - David McRaney

ACTIONS > OBSERVATIONS > EXPLANATIONS > BELIEFS > ATTITUDES

"For many things, your attitudes came from actions that led to observations that led to explanations that led to beliefs. Your actions tend to chisel away at the raw marble of your persona, carving into being the self you experience from day to day. It doesn’t feel that way, though. To conscious experience, it feels as if you were the one holding the chisel, motivated by existing thoughts and beliefs. It feels as though the person wearing your pants performed actions consistent with your established character, yet there is plenty of research suggesting otherwise. (FLIP IT!)The things you do often create the things you believe." - David McRaney

LOVE - Lovers are happy people (Flip it !) Happy people make the best lovers - Yours truly :)

What Home Is

From Alain De Botton's "The architecture of happiness" (page 123 as it happens) -

Home is merely any place that succeeds in making more consistently available to us the important truths which the wider world ignores, or which our distracted and irresolute selves have trouble holding on to. As we write so we build: to keep a record of what matters to us

There's this german word that's hard to translate: Heimat. If it's negatively loaded for some, it needs to be rescued. Arte (the genius cultural TV channel) writes: "Soldiers fall for their nation and become heroes. But "Heimat" has no uniform or flag. It is 'the country' we hold inside". Now, to illustrate by extension, an Austrian friend explained how "heimat"  for a horse would be drinking water and eating grass. The natural thing to do or "place" to be. Home.

Every immigrant, foreigner or long-time traveller has wondered about "Home". Is it where I landed or where I'm from ? The place where I'll go back ? Impossible-rs, let's forget for a moment about going back. That myth of the eternal return. And let me throw some Nietzsche at you:

What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: "This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; (...)The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!" Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus?... Or how well disposed would you have to become to yourself and to life to crave nothing more fervently than this ultimate eternal confirmation and seal?

Home is not a country. Or a family. Or friends. Home is you. There's not going back anywhere. You're already there. Get comfortable :)

Wonder as a key to luck ... and everything

"Richard Wiseman is a researcher in England who has studied why certain people are lucky and certain people are unlucky, and what he’s found is that the people who tend to be more lucky have a much more open stance to their world. They interact with people at gatherings or parties who are different from them. They’re just more open to different types of people, and unlucky people tend to just stick to their very own type, people who are of similar backgrounds, similar educational backgrounds" - Eric Barker

In other words, lucky people are more attracted to the world and find it more worthy of wonder. But how do you flesh out wonder from everyday monotony? Philosopher Daniel Dennett gives us two possible answers "Artists and Philosophers agree on one thing: One of their self-appointed tasks is to make the familiar strange". Dennett's hint is the following: Wonder is the cultivation of a single skill: Jootsing (Jumping Out Of The System).

Consider this: Professional wrestling is fake and people know it but don't care. Wrong ! They experience it and experience trumps reality. If we are engaged in the moment enough, we stop caring about the overarching truths ... until a "crisis" hits that questions the system (we get bored during a wrestling match) or breaks the covenant (a wrestler truly hurts another). Mathematician Eric R. Weinstein calls this phenomenon "Kayfabe". The point is: Reality is secondary ! It is the jump in and out of Reality and the concurrent system that builds fascination.

Another thought - just for you - What is beauty really ? Fat, thin, tall, short etc. ? Non-sense. It's when I look at you and suddenly realize your very being pulls me out of reality. When I look at you and see you as a breach in time and space. Good morning :)

The case for a goddess of fortune

Dan Siroker, CEO of Optimizely, writes about the 3 unconventional questions to ask every job candidate in an article for Forbes. One stands out: "On a scale of 1-10, how lucky are you?"

Siroker explains: "Great companies are built by people who can embrace their humility. (...). Warren Buffett likes to say he won the ovarian lottery. If he had been born into another era he might have been some animal’s lunch. We need candidates who are self-aware enough to understand that hard work isn’t enough to guarantee success — we need individuals who are grateful for where they’ve landed in life. Our success is a function of being at the right place at the right time."

An article from the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology called "From What Might Have Been to What Must Have Been: Counterfactual Thinking Creates Meaning" states: "Rather than implying a random quality to life, the authors hypothesized and found that, counterfactual thinking heightens the meaningfulness of key life experiences. (...) Fate perceptions (“it was meant to be”) and benefit-finding (recognition of positive consequences) were identified as independent causal links between counterfactual thinking and the construction of meaning. Through counterfactual reflection, the upsides to reality are identified, a belief in fate emerges, and ultimately more meaning is derived from important life events"

Am I really preaching Fate and Fortune ? Yes :) "What did I do to deserve this ?" is a double-edged sword. It's a great way to pity your situation. But try to flip that thinking tool: The things we're most grateful for are the ones we didn't work to get (good weather, a mother's love etc.). "What did I do deserve these amazing things ?" Absolutely nothing you lucky creature !! So sit down, bathe in how amazing it is to be the free-rider of Life's beauties and send a flying kiss to the symbolic goddess of fortune ;D

Your mind's tongue

Guess who's back ?! The coolest cyborg on Earth that's who :)

For the late-comers to Impossible, Batou up here is a super-duper-police officer in a series called "Ghost in The Shell" - A post-cyberpunk futuristic japanese anime that asks the tough questions about human consciousness in a world where humans are made entirely of robot parts and where robots have near-human intelligence. In the movie out of the series, Batou and Togusa talk cuisine ... and beyond ;)

Togusa: Oh, man, that looks good. I've hardly been home lately. I could use a home-cooked meal.

Batou: Hm. Do you have any idea what that is?

Togusa: Eel, right? Gimme a break, even I know that.

Batou: Guess again. What you're drooling over is a mock eel dish that was created out of shiitake mushrooms and gluten.

Togusa: Huh?

Batou: Taiwanese vegan. Su Shi is what it's known as. It's a unique and time-honored style of cooking that Buddhist priests developed independently.

Togusa: Is it like Buddhist vegan cooking?

Batou: Sorta. It differs from Japanese Buddhist vegan cuisine, and it doesn't cook the ingredients as-is. It plays with the flavor and texture beans and mushrooms to imitate that are meat and fish. Fake food, it's the same kind of idea the one in that sandwich you didn't finish.

Togusa: Are you serious? But why? Why did Taiwanese priests come up with such an elaborative way to prepare their food like that? If they never knew what meat tasted like, then you wouldn't think there'll any need for it, right?

Batou: Yeah, true enough. Except, before those people enter the priesthood, they were free to eat whatever they please. You can meditate all you want, but you're never be able to erase those savory memories.

Togusa: You gotta point there. You seem to know whole a lot about this. Hey, Boss, don't tell me you get semtimental for the taste of the real thing, too.

Batou: Just because you're a cyborg doesn't mean that you stop craving things like that. That's precisely the reason why they make novelty food for people who are cyberized.

Togusa: Yeah, I suppose you can consider the sense of taste as a sort of playback device, then, for past memories.

Gosh :) Good morning people !!!

Why I need to Smell You

Science historian and poetess Diane Ackerman starts today:

"Our sense of smell can be extraordinarily precise, yet it's almost impossible to describe how something smells to someone who hasn't smelled it… We see only where there is light enough, taste only when we put things into our mouths, touch only when we make contact with someone or something, hear only sounds that are loud enough to hear. But we smell always and with every breath. Cover your eyes and you will stop seeing, cover your ears and you will stop hearing, but if you cover your nose and stop smelling, you will die."

Ackerman continues in a book about sensory experience: "We live in a constant wash of them (odors). Still, when we try to describe a smell, words fail us like the fabrications they are… The charm of language is that, though it is human-made, it can on rare occasions capture emotions and sensations that aren't. But the physiological links between the smell and language centers of the brain are pitifully weak. Not so the links between the smell and the memory centers, a route that carries us nimbly across time and distance."

Why do we put on perfume ? Because perfume is liquid memory. Kipling wrote: “Smells are surer than sights and sounds to make your heart-strings crack.” Philosopher Bernard Stiegler writes in an essay about how the extinction of handwriting is changing our brains: "In a society where musical partitions don't exist, one cannot separate composition from interpretation" - Think of aboriginal music. Smell is one such experiential sub-universe where instance, performance and experience are hardly separable. That's why the smell of petrol might jolt souvenirs of past voyages in your brain without you being able to explain it .. and why we need each others' smell to truly know each other :)

Your Single Binary Sense !

We've already spoken about ALan Watts' and his idea regarding how the mind only perceives the "On" side of reality (noises, lights, discussions etc.) while it disregards and even gets bored with the "Off" side (silence, darkness, blancs in a conversation etc.).

Today Watts delivers yet another mind blow. You've heard about sixth senses, even a seventh sense or an eighth sense. Non-interestingness aside however :) Watts explains how you effectively have a Single sense !

"All your five senses are differing forms of one basic sense—something like touch. Seeing is highly sensitive touching. The eyes touch, or feel, light waves and so enable us to touch things out of reach of our hands. Similarly, the ears touch sound waves in the air, and the nose tiny particles of dust and gas. But the complex patterns and chains of neurons which constitute these senses are composed of neuron units which are capable of changing between just two states: on or off. To the central brain the individual neuron signals either yes or no – that’s all. But, as we know from computers which employ binary arithmetic in which the only figures are 0 and 1, these simple elements can be formed into the most complex and marvelous patterns."

Today's mission : Pass on the impossible :D Ask your colleagues what sense of theirs they believe is above average then blow their mind with some Watts wits - notice what I did there ? Good morning !

Marcus Aurelius was a Zen Master

“When you wake up in the morning, tell yourself: The people I deal with today will be meddling, ungrateful, arrogant, dishonest, jealous and surly. They are like this because they can’t tell good from evil. But I have seen the beauty of good, and the ugliness of evil and have recognized that the wrongdoer has a nature related to my own–not of the same blood or birth, but the same mind, and possessing a share of the divine. And so none of them can hurt me.”

“So other people hurt me? That’s their problem. Their character and actions are not mine. What is done to me is ordained by nature and what I do by my own.”

“Today I escaped from anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.”

You'd think these are the words of a Buddhist monk but all the above were written by Marcus Aurelius, emperor of the Roman Empire i.e. Barack Obama of his time. What's interesting is the man's ability to notice, analyze and reflect on his feelings. That same attention to the small and imperceptible echoes Anna Quindlen's advice from her "Short Guide to a Happy Life" :

"Get a life in which you notice the smell of salt water pushing itself on a breeze over the dunes"

A valuable reminder of Burning man's statement not to live "the Default life" you've been handed and a beautiful echo to the fact "This Life is not a drill" - The action won't come later. This is actually happening. Have an impossible morning :)

The purpose of philosophy

For those of you who were wondering what Philosophy was for. Here's from an interview with Alain de Botton :)

"I had a line in the book I cut that said 'The nirvana would be if the questions raised by Oprah Winfrey would be answered by the faculty at Harvard.' The questions she asks are the most central – how do we live with other people, how do we cope with our ambitions, how do we survive as a society – though she fails to answer them with anything like seriousness."

He thus suggests he and Oprah, unlike our philosophy departments, have a surer grasp on society's anxieties. "I once very politely raised the thought that one reason philosophy departments have been cut is the fault of philosophers. The answer always comes back: 'The point of philosophy is to ask questions, not to give answers.' I can't help but think 'No. It can't be!' Imagine if you applied that question to other areas – is the purpose of rocket science to ask questions about rockets?"

Have an impossible morning :D

The clash between improvement and contentment

Alexandra Horowitz, author of "On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes", re-visits the city accompanied by several experts: An artist, a typographer, her baby, her dog etc. Realizing how relatively limited her perception can be, she writes (bolding is mine):

"I would find myself at once alarmed, delighted, and humbled at the limitations of my ordinary looking. My consolation is that this deficiency of mine is quite human. We see, but we do not see: we use our eyes, but our gaze is glancing, frivolously considering its object. We see the signs, but not their meanings. We are not blinded, but we have blinders." - Alexandra Horowitz

And as non-self-helpy Alain De Botton would affirm in several "sermons" of his - "It's OK". Yes, you do have limits but "Nothing is wrong with you". At the root of this particular mental quirk is the "uniqueness bias". As Tyler Durden put it in "Fight Club" : "You are not a unique snow flake". Joining the crew, Christopher Waltz adds, in the movie "The Zero Theorem", that meaning doesn't stem from your uniqueness but from accepting your non-uniqueness. The frightening meaninglessness of your life. And playing along with it. That is how you fight your ego delusion.

But if one destroys his unique ego and is content with his limitations, is there room left for self-improvement? Why would I want to improve? Amazing Alan Watts writes:

"I can only think seriously of trying to live up to an ideal, to improve myself, if I am split in two pieces. There must be a good “I” who is going to improve the bad “me.” “I,” who has the best intentions, will go to work on wayward “me,” and the tussle between the two will very much stress the difference between them. Consequently “I” will feel more separate than ever, and so merely increase the lonely and cut-off feelings which make “me” behave so badly."

See ? Watts actually solves the clash between contentment and improvement. By accepting our limitations, understanding our non-uniqueness, we solve the schism between a good "I" and a bad "me". Improvement is no longer an attempt at mending this internal split but rather a personal decision to take ourselves, as wholes, into a new direction. Wdyt ? Hit "Reply" if this connected the dots for you :D

Seeking sadness = a viable evolutionary strategy ?!

Jonathan Rottenberg, professor of psychology at the University of South Florida, writes about depression in "The Depths":

"One way to appreciate why these states have enduring value is to ponder what would happen if we had no capacity for them. Just as animals with no capacity for anxiety were gobbled up by predators long ago, without the capacity for sadness, we and other animals would probably commit rash acts and repeat costly mistakes."

He goes on to cite Lee Stringer's essay "Fading to Gray" - from "Unholy Ghost: Writers on Depression":

"Perhaps what we call depression isn’t really a disorder at all but, like physical pain, an alarm of sorts, alerting us that something is undoubtedly wrong; that perhaps it is time to stop, take a time-out, take as long as it takes, and attend to the unaddressed business of filling our souls."

Let Friedrich Nietzsche conclude today:

“If you are unwilling to endure your own suffering even for an hour, and continually forestall all possible misfortune, if you regard as deserving of annihilation, any suffering and pain generally as evil, as detestable, and as blots on existence, well, you have then, besides your religion of compassion, yet another religion in your heart (and this is perhaps the mother of the former)-the religion of smug ease. Ah, how little you know of the happiness of man, you comfortable and good-natured ones! For happiness and misfortune are brother and sister, and twins, who grow tall together, or, as with you, remain small together!”

A smile is nothing but an inversed frown (scientific illustration below). One grows the other. Our surviving ancestors saw dismal depths before uncovering ecstatic heights. Correlation - causation ?

Impossibles are now going out Tuesday and Thursdays ! If you'd like, reply to let me know you're in love with these or / and they're helping you connect the dots :D (super-smile)

Conquering Iceland - Meeting #1

Jimmy (reading Wikipedia) -  "Icelanders are avid consumers of literature, with the highest number of bookstores per capita in the world. For its size, Iceland imports and translates more international literature than any other nation. Iceland also has the highest per capita publication of books and magazines, and around 10% of the population will publish a book in their lifetimes."

Jake - "Read this. To prevent the Germans from conquering Iceland and getting too close to home, the British government decided to invade Iceland. Operation Fork took place on the 10th of May 1940 with an invasion force of 746 marines."

Vernon - "The article adds 'ill-equipped and only partially trained' - And this - British Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs Alexander Cadogan's  diary entry for May 4th 1940 : 'Home [at] 8. Dined and worked. Planning conquest of Iceland for next week. Shall probably be too late! Saw several broods of ducklings' (34 second silence) Sounds easy"

Jake - "According to the Global Peace Index, Iceland is the most peaceful country in the world, due to its lack of armed forces, low crime rate, and high level of socio-political stability"

Vernon - "Jakes, Jimmy, I want to recap the Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) - By the end of 2014, we have succeeded in changing the Icelandic space, both mental and physical, hence re-designing history and reaching a self-emergent society model where each and everyone attends to the unaddressed business of filling his or her soul"

Jake - "Yes. Well put. Vernon, Jimmy, we have enough men for the invasion and to keep the bombings in the continent going"

Jimmy - "And we have a nuclear submarine! Jake, Vernon, let's conquer Iceland !" (Jimmy draws his gigantic smile and waits for the others to smile as well)

Vernon draws his faint but genuine smile. Jake smiles. His teeths show. He heads to the submarine dashboard and chooses 'Akureyri' on the GPS screen.

Stop treating time like space

• We're out of time
• (Jimmy, after pausing and noticing his thoughts) Reminds me of Bergson. He wrote about the nature of time. How it was a fluid continuum.
• Pass me the wire
• (Jimmy hands the wire to Vernon) Take this micro-wave. If you heat up bread for 10 minutes, the results will be completely different from if you heat it up twice 5 minutes consecutively. It's not a segment you can cut in half then stick to the other half and expect the same result. Time is different from space. You can't treat time as space.
• Wrap it up
• (Jimmy wraps the wire around his elbow) For conscience, time is of another nature. It is the continuous flux that goes on between two limits which science defines. Bergson said that we spatialised time. That we turned it into space. But it's not space ! The starting point for the bread after a 5 minute stop is different from 5 minutes into a 10 minute heating session
• Stick it
• (Jimmy sticks the wire inside the microwave) You know Time is now the most used word in the english language whereas many primitive peoples, for instance the Amondawa tribe of the amazon and the australian aborigines, do not even have a word for it
• The knob Jimmy, and let's head out
• (Jimmy turns the micro-wave knob to 5 minutes and follows Vernon to the exit) But you see what I mean ? Space exists. It's here. Look I can touch the door, open it. We're going down the stairs. But time ! I can't see time. It's a meta-idea. The only way for me to grasp time is that I was in that apartment a minute ago and now am in this car with you. Time is just a description of a change in space.
• Blow it

Jimmy pulls the dongle. The micro-wave kicks off a 5 minute heating session and while the two shoot out into the night, the 5th floor of the biggest building on Descartes street explodes briefly afterwards. Vernon mumbles: "Time describes the fact space cannot be undone - you can't go back in time unless you change space to what it was". "Yes!" shouts Jim. "Well - that's the essence of our mission Jim then: Undoing time". Jim smiles. Vernon smirks. And they stay silent for the rest of the drive.

Ideas with toned bodies

"What do ideas look like ?" Jimmy closed the door of the submarine, frowned for a second, realized he was frowning, stopped and headed to the control room. Jake was watching a documentary about slime moulds.

"Hey Jake". Jake pauses the video and stares at Jimmy. "what do you think ideas look like?" Jake sips his coffee. "For one, it's chemical reactions in your brain. Each is a unique configuration. It's a matter of how you represent that configuration. Code it with colors, draw a graph with spikes, a heat map". Jimmy sits down: "What if ideas were women ?"

Jake looks at the submarine's sonar. "I'm watching this documentary about slime moulds. They're mindless creatures and though their predictive and self-conscious behaviour might seem intelligent, it's actually the product of an ingrained behaviour dictated by the imperative of survival". Jake looks Jimmy in the eye.

• Now stop - One step back - Look at your mind - This whole shabang about slime moulds: What woman doesn't resemble?
• She's a metis with braided hair, firm laps and arms, bloodied eyes and swift moves.
• e=mc2
• A woman with wild white hair and a young fresh face, butterfly wings and piercing eyes
• Responsibility is an emergent property
• Blond. Extremely tall. Thin. Her eyes are closed and her tight silk top has loose sleeves

"Some must be heavy heavy monstrosities though ! (pause then sipping his coffee again) just like beauty is something you grasp quickly, ideas could trigger first impressions as well. Wonder what a great idea looks like" Jimmy thinks "A mega bomb?". They laugh and sit down in the submarine main steering room. Jake rewinds the documentary and they watch it together.

The beauty of whirlpools

Vernon was hiding the threads behind the chimney edge. Jimmy was done with the bomb and inspecting the apartment: "I wonder if this is beautiful. I mean. It's all beautiful. But some stuff is More beautiful". Vernon, having hid the cords, stand up and points to the exit. Jimmy ponders: "Stendhal wrote - Beauty is nothing but the promise of happiness". Vernon running down the stairs: "So this house is beautiful because I see myself crashing it with friends, relaxing in it on a Sunday (pause) Is beauty nothing but anticipation?".

Jimmy opens the building gate and heads to the car parked three streets away, takes off his gloves: "I really like Bergson's conception of what we are. So! imagine a whirlpool - it is ever-moving, ever-changing, different every single second. Yet looked at from a distance, it seems identical !". Vernon smiles: "You mean there's no real "You". It's just a moving illusion". He opens his tupperware and picks frozen pieces of tuna.

• Yes yes yes! So it's beautiful right ? This mix of change and constance
• And change is the only constant
• So that's my question ! If that's the essence of what we are, shouldn't we take constant change into account when designing for beauty? Isn't this the "right" kind design ?
• So your whirlpool (chews the tuna) It feels like you're using constance as a trojan horse for change here buddy (pause) Stagnancy doesn't work and a standstill design is doomed (longer pause) Feels like your anti-fragile stuff. Anti-fragile is beautiful
• Yes !
• Is it time?

Jimmy looks at the device's watch, glimpses at Vernon, turns the two knobs and pulls the small dongle. The fifth floor explodes in a gigantic boom and every single alarm in the street is triggered. "Here's to beauty" says Vernon. They drive away in the night.

How to become a hydra

Jimmy sips his cherry cola, looks Vernon in the eye and says: "You don't want to be resilient. I mean: You do. But what you Really want to be is Anti-fragile. The symbol of resilience, the phenix, once killed, resuscitates identical to its old self. The Hydra, mascot of anti-fragility, grows an extra head each time a head is cut. It hence grows larger than its old self after hardships."

Vernon, looking out the window of the Old Buick, murmurs: "So ... What if you don't want hardships?"

Jimmy smiles like his cunning self: "No pain no gain." He opens the book and reads: "Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure , risk, and uncertainty. (...) Let us call it anti-fragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the anti-fragile gets better."

The muscular black man to whom "no pain, no gain" had dug out the bodybuilding days asks:

• "So ... How do I become a hydra ?"
• "Listen to this: Consider that Mother Nature is not just “safe.” It is aggressive in destroying and replacing, in selecting and reshuffling . (...) our planet has been around for perhaps four billion years and, convincingly, robustness can’t just be it: you need perfect robustness for a crack not to end up crashing the system. Given the unattainability of perfect robustness, we need a mechanism by which the system regenerates itself continuously by using, rather than suffering from, random events, unpredictable shocks, stressors, and volatility."

Vernon unwraps his fork and pierces his chicken breast. Jimmy emerges from his book, pauses for a second and says: "Maybe you shouldn't get that car loan buddy. The book says: You have to avoid debt because debt makes the system more fragile. You have to increase redundancies in some spaces. You have to avoid optimization." Vernon picks a potato, smells it and sticks it under his molars. His canines had been hurting him lately.