How To Scale Yourself !

Daniel Dennett has a buddy in the philosophical world. His name is Douglas Hofstadter, thinker extraordinaire and author of Pulitzer-Prize-winning book "Godel, Escher, Bach". He complains after winning the prize in that the book was perceived as a hodgepodge of neat things without central theme (Wikipedia). However to him, the book is "a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter. What is a self, and how can a self come out of stuff that is as selfless as a stone or a puddle?". Your neurones don't have consciousness you see! In "I am a Strange Loop", he rights the wrong and writes : "In the end, we are self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages that are little miracles of self-reference." Douglas Hofstadter, I Am a Strange Loop

Now buckle up - or rather unbuckle! - your minds and come with me. I'm pondering on whether self-reference is scale-invariant. If the consequences of this loop that feeds the system back with information are somewhat similar across systems of different scales. So, for instance, how I understand Hofstadter's argument is that, compared to other species, we've inherited a unique extra feedback loop that makes us think about our thinking. We can take a step back and look at ourselves.

But let's jump to another scale - I'm thinking about the financial system. Borrowing to save our current world from crisis means putting a heavy debt burden on future generations. Same for climate and the CO2 burden we're putting on the future planet. Do these excesses stem from a society that refers to itself and fails to encompass the future in its rationale? What I've discovered through intellectual interaction with friends is that spending too much time with my own ideas ends up making me a bit dogmatic and stupid. Exchanging with friends - different feedback loops - helps me do a sanity check and scale my intelligence. The Western financial and industrial systems have no peers to do a sanity-check on their own feedback loop. A thriving alien sister planet - even if imagined - would serve us well.

So people! If you could share ONE single Kaboom idea with me, which would it be? Send it over by replying to this message and help me scale! Good morning friends :)

Insecurity Is Not Neediness

I took a whole excerpt from this article. I teared up while reading it so I couldn't tear it up into smaller quotes. If you were, are or will be in a relationship with another human being, read on:

"The solution to all this trouble is to normalise a new, and more accurate picture of emotional functioning: to make it clear just how healthy and mature it is to be fragile and in repeated need of reassurance. (This is about how we are rather than how we should be - we are flawed)

We suffer because adult life posits too robust a picture of how we operate. It tries to teach us to be implausibly independent and invulnerable. It suggests it might not be right to want a partner to show us they still really like us after they have been away for only a few hours. Or to want them to reassure us that they haven’t gone off us – just on the basis that they haven’t paid us much attention at a party and didn’t want to leave when we did.

And yet it is precisely this sort of reassurance that we constantly stand in need of. We can never be through with the requirement for acceptance. This isn’t a curse limited to the weak and the inadequate. Insecurity is, in this area, a sign of well-being. It means we haven’t allowed ourselves to take other people for granted. It means we remain realistic enough to see that things could genuinely turn out badly – and are invested enough to care.

We should create room for regular moments, perhaps as often as every few hours, when we can feel unembarrassed and legitimate about asking for confirmation. ‘I really need you; do you still want me?’ should be the most normal of enquiries. We should uncouple the admission of need from any associations with the unfortunate and punitively macho term, ‘neediness’. We must get better at seeing the love and longing that lurk behind some of our and our partner’s most frosty, managerial and brutish moments."

The Stoics and the Nietzsches among us might still think this is weakness. Read Seneca, read Nietzsche. Resisting your humanity is not a strength. Good morning :')

What are Leadership and Meaning good for?

The evolutionary argument has been thriving lately. I'm left wondering however whenever it is employed to justify anything's virtues. Take the "fasting diet" for instance. Evolutionary speaking, it makes sense that short-term fasting wouldn't have the better of us. In the primal savannah, we didn't always find game or proper food. Somehow we survived. Does that mean we should fast for better health however? Not necessarily. It means we could fast without deteriorating our health. Should / Could - Big difference. Now, next level:

"Their fitness [cultural inventions i.e. ideas] is to some degree independent of our own fitness. Blindness to this idea is endemic, and is particularly evident when people discuss evolutionary accounts of religion. “Oh, so you’re working on an evolutionary theory of religion. What good do you think religions provide? They must be good for something, since apparently every human culture has religion in some form or other.” Well, every human culture has the common cold too. What is it good for? It’s good for itself. We should be prepared to find cultural replicators that are not beneficial but that manage to thrive nevertheless. This even playing field theories of cultural evolution, replacing the blinkered idea that cultural innovations – just like genetic innovations – always enhance the fitness of those who transmit them." - Daniel Dennett, Intuition Pumps and other tools for thinking

This is the sort of thinking stick that suddenly allows you to poke into many other ideas. Take leadership. Is it really beneficial for our communities? Or is leadership a cultural virus some catch - after watching too many political discourses and Hollywood movies - and go on, under its influence, wanting to lead the rest of us. Are we certain we can't live without a leader? Maybe leaders are only good for themselves. Take meaning. What is meaning good for? We've fought religious wars over entrenched conceptions of the meaning of life, and the meaning of a piece of land. Many died, meaning survived. Maybe we could live without meaning?

Are these ideas haunting? That's ok. They scare me too but I find this fear interesting. I'm thinking the millions of years that have led where we are are actually a drop in the history of our yet-to-come evolution. There are many cultural inventions left to test out: New identities beyond leadership, new drivers beyond meaning. 2000 years ago, Mathilda would've never known she's an Emo. There was no such thing. But today, this identity, this cultural invention, helps her thrive. So this here is a case for extending our universe of identities. Good morning ;)

How Long Will I keep asking myself Existential Questions?

Kierkegaard is Philosopher-in-chief this week at the Impossible HQ. HQ ... As if we were 40 over here :) Ladies and gents ! You might be wondering "When will I stop asking myself questions about the meaning of my life, the purpose of my work, the importance of love?". Mr Kierkegaard, over to you:

"The task of becoming subjective should give a person plenty to do for as long as he lives. So it will not be the good student but the impatient one who is finished with life before life is finished with him. To be finished too soon is the greatest of all dangers …. Actively to restrain the age is not something I have time for. And any such attempt would probably be no more successful than the passenger on a train who holds onto the seat in front of him in an attempt to stop the train: He identifies himself as part of the age, and yet still he wants to restrain it. No, the only thing to do is get out of the carriage and restrain yourself. And then once you’ve left the train - and never forgetting that the task is one of restraint, and the temptation to resist that of finishing too soon - then nothing is more certain than that the task will be sufficient to fill a life. And the fault can then never lie in the task itself for that is precisely its function: to fill a life" - Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical crumbs, 1846

At age 15, I thought "Life is an illusion" would solve it all. At 20, "Change is the only constant" felt it would last me a lifetime. But, there is no expiry date on Life's questions. And if it might feel frustrating that Life's answers aren't fixed, then remember it is first and foremost because you are not. How handle these questions then? To Kierkegaard, philosophy was prescriptive. It should help lead good lives and die good deaths. But what is Philosophy? Well. That's a great question to ponder on. Have a good day fellow wonder-ers :)

Kierkegaard burns The Holstee Manifesto

I have an issue with the Holstee Manifesto

I fell in love with it a while ago because it rings true. It's optimistic and hopeful. But looking back at it, it does more harm than good. Let Kierkegaard spot a light here :)

"On paper at least, everyone today is such an absolutely tremendous chap that one sometimes finds oneself plagued by worries that are actually quite groundless. An example of this is the risk people run in our time of finding themselves so quickly done with everything that the question of how to fill the remaining time becomes a real problem. One writes on a piece of paper: doubt everything - and with that one has doubted everything. And if one is not even thirty years old then it can become very difficult to fill up the rest of the time - especially for those who have failed to insure against the coming of old age by learning how to play cards" - Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical crumbs, 1846

Having hung the Holstee Manifesto on a wall, one might think "the answer's here, in case I forget". It isn't. If your answer's sitting on a piece of paper or a post-it note, you haven't found your answer. At the very least, you need to be your answer. Your very body and mind should become the Holstee Manifesto. Knowledge is experiential, or isn't. The Holstee Manifesto in paper format is still useful however: The best thing to do is to buy it and burn it as a reminder that life's meaning is not still. Good morning fellow Kierkegaard-ians :)

Your "soul" is limiting you

Madman and Ultra-artist Antonin Artaud writes about Van Gogh: "For a long time pure linear painting drove me mad until I met Van Gogh, who painted neither lines nor shapes, but inert things in nature as if they were having convulsions. [...] No one has ever written or painted, sculpted, modelled, built, invented, except to get out of hell. And to get out of hell, I prefer the landscapes of this quiet convulsive man to the swarming compositions of Breughel the Elder or Hieronymus Bosch, (...)" - I mean look at the painting below. It's insulting to even "think" it through. After Artaud's quote, it can only be experienced as a "convulsion" outside the realm of mind, with visions of a man painting with the sweat he pours while "escaping hell":

Vincent van Gogh, Augustine Roulin (Lullaby), Arles, February 1888

Ok. Now I'm going to hurt myself, destroy my mind and get you thinking for the rest of the day. I Really like philosopher Henri Bergson. But after reading Dennett I was convinced Bergson was wrong. Bergson is a big proponent of an "Elan Vital" - an inexplicable "vital force" driving life. Truth is, this is a great illustration of what Dennett and philosophers call a "skyhook". A hook hanging from the sky! i.e. A wacky superfluous explanation when there's nothing better around a.k.a. God, the force etc. Things you can't see under a microscope. Destroying this idea hurts. I read Artaud, I look at Van Gogh's Augustine and I want to believe in an unseen force. I can see Van Gogh painted with his soul. What else could it be? Yet.

I am soul-less. Yes. There is no such thing as an Elan Vital. In the driving seat of the universe, there is no magical mumbo jumbo into which we can only peak thanks to a 6 page unresolved math equation. No such thing. And you know it. Now. It might make you sad. Just like me thinking these shamans singing to the spirit of the jungle are .. just singing. But scroll up. Look back at Augustine. Her colors are still there. Her eyes, her hands, this green. And see: Can you not still experience it with as much intensity, even without any skyhooks? If yes, then you've tasted freedom :) And finally, maybe got your head around this quote I've been struggling with for months: "Losing all hope was freedom" Tyler Durden.

Durden meets Dennett meets Bergson meets Van Gogh !! Party in the sky Impossible soul-less people :D

Colouring The World with Thought

Daniel Dennett is a philosophy rock-star. Let me tell you about "The Intentional Stance". Dennett writes: "First you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in most instances yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do."

One example is when we predict that a bird will fly away because it knows the cat is coming and is afraid of getting eaten. Here, we are taking the intentional stance. You see? The bird is not 'afraid'. The cat has no 'intention' of eating the bird. None has reason. This is how we layer the world with our human understanding. It's your mum telling you the dog will be sad if you hit it with a bat. It won't ... But please, don't hit the dog with a bat.

"They're so fluffy I'm going to die !!!" - Agnes / Despicable me

Adjacent to this is Dan Norman, designer extra-ordinaire, and his approach to "Emotional Design": "In chapter 5, the author refers to humans and the natural tendency to interpret emotions in people and objects. Computer anger is a case in point of how people humanise and interpret as animated something that is not. (...) People tend to blame the computer as if it was its fault, similarly to team work relationship. Moreover, the fact that computers do not express shame or blame makes it more frustrating."

Norman goes on to make the case for robotic emotions. That non-verbal feedback, facial expression and body language will be needed in robots in order to understand them better. He mentions that robots should have at least 3 emotions in order to improve their performance: Pride, fear and frustration! So the next time your app bugs, remember your anger stems from your need to hear "I'm sorry" !! Good morning Impossiblers :D

You Are Everything

Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh starts today - "If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in [a] sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either . . . "Interbeing" is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix "inter-" with the verb to be," we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud, we cannot have a paper, so we can say that the cloud and the sheet of paperinter-are. . . . "To be" is to inter-be. You cannot just be by yourself alone. You have to inter-be with every other thing. This sheet of paper is, because everything else is."

Thich Nhat Hanh, setting next season's fashion

Now, get ready to connect the dots ! Amanda Gefter, editor of the New Scientist's CultureLab writes about the new concept of Duality physicists have stumbled upon. In "This Will Make You Smarter" - Perhaps the most radical incarnation of duality was discovered in 1997 by Juan Maldacena. Maldacena found that a version of string theory in a bizarrely shaped universe with five large dimensions is mathematically dual to an ordinary quantum theory of particles living on that universe's four-dimensional boundary. Previously, one could argue that the world was made up of particles or that the world was made up of strings. Duality transformed or into and — mutually exclusive hypotheses, both equally true.

Now duality doesn't exclude the existence a single truth. Only that truth is more subtle that we thought. We live in the "meso-world", at mid-scale between immense galaxies and invisible atoms. It is understandable that we cannot grasp how we are a part of a whole and how what appears contradictory probably isn't. But we, as a species, have accepted that the Earth isn't the centre of the universe for instance. Now a new leap in understanding is under way ! Good morning meso-friends :D

The Next Frontier Is Moral

Today's Impossible started 6 months ago with two distant dots and a question:

How does Addiction (X) and Opportunism (Y) relate ?

Addiction is a self-reinforcing mental black hole. Here is a an amazing focal point that starts drawing every single other strain of thought towards it. Amazingly, addiction scales well from a personal to a societal trait. See how wealth carves the lives of many today and how companies too were designed as wealth-generating machines. So much so that some that legal Scholar and Professor of Law at the University of British Columbia Joel Bakan describes the modern corporate entity as 'an institutional psychopath' and a 'psychopathic creature.' They are selfish, unwary of others, obsessive etc.

Opportunism now - Wikipedia to the rescue ! In the theory of evolution, "evolutionary opportunism" refers to a specific pattern of development in the history of a species. The behaviour, culture or body part of a species that long ago evolved to serve a particular purpose or function may subsequently lend itself to a very different positive purpose or function that helps the species to survive (...) It turns out to have new advantages or potential benefits the species previously never used—and, therefore, the species retains an adaptation even if the original purpose it served is long gone.

When I look at it, it feels Addiction is Opportunism gone haywire, set on autopilot and roaming in the blindspots of our awareness. Addiction is a form of opportunism whose purpose we don't control. But nothing in us is Evil or good, our evolutionary traits are functions which uses we haven't explored. Look at 2060, look here at Google quoted not on revenue but on a publicly traded Corporate Responsibility based index! Just like you've rid yourself of a boogie obsession or a nail-biting habit, our companies can too - Our Next Frontier, now that tech is out of the way, is Moral ! Good hopeful morning ladies and gents :D

Your Self as a Center of Gravity

A very light question to kick off the morning today :) Ladies and gents ... Who am I ? Are we the breathing body that is reading this text, sitting on a chair or holding a phone in its hand ? Or maybe the mind that realized we had to stop reading for a slight moment to realize that, indeed, we are a body and eyes reading a text ? One form of meditation (there are many) sheds a light on the question. You might have been asked to close your eyes and focus on your breath maybe? You see, when we focus on our breath and then let our thoughts come and go, we realize we are the observers of both our breath and our thoughts. In other terms, we are neither ... and both!

Now, that last sentence is exactly the kind that made me shake my head in despair whenever anyone talked about Zen and meditation. So to illustrate my point, let me use philosopher Daniel Dennett's analogy in his 1992 paper, The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity : "A center of gravity is a well-behaved concept in Newtonian physics. But a center of gravity is not an atom or a subatomic particle or any other physical item in the world. It has no mass; it has no color; it has no physical properties at all, except for spatio-temporal location. (...) It is a purely abstract object. (...) It is not one of the real things in the universe in addition to the atoms. But it is a fiction that has nicely defined, well delineated and well behaved role within physics."

Same - if the drawing is any help - I like to think of my Self as the center of gravity of all my perceptions! My thoughts, my breath, my ideas, my emotions etc. It isn't any of them, yet it is a consequence of them all. Most importantly, it is constantly moving as my perceptions change! So who I am is a dynamic concept! As the great Carl Sagan put it : "If we ever reach a point where we thoroughly understand who we are and where we are from, we will have failed". Now a coffee or tea to get that brain of yours shaking :D

Dumbledore, Zen Master

In the first Harry Potter, "The philosopher's stone", Harry ends up in a room where Voldemort, who took control of an ugly professor, is ragingly looking for the stone that will bring him back to Life. In the room, there is a magic mirror and once Harry looks at it, the stone appears in his pocket.

Later, Dumbledore explains that he'd put a spell on the mirror for the stone to end up with "those who want it but not to use it". The profundity of this statement struck me last week. At its surface, it could sound like a distinction between want and need but it goes further. To draw a parallel, when meditating, a sweet spot often crystallises in that one is clear about his intention and the purpose of the exercise but still, doesn't get caught in any gaining idea.

In a way, it's the vaccine version of ambition in that the drive to action is still there, but the viral bit that wants to achieve a goal and projects itself in the future is absent. That is the secret of Zen but more so, it is a beautiful lesson on what success should be. "A successful man is a man who wakes up in the morning and goes to the bed in the evening and does what he likes between the two" Bob Dylan. And, in all cases, you know something's wrong if you want to go back to bed when you wake up. That's your best indicator.

Success is no longer a millionaire or a hungry entrepreneur or a singing dancing superstar. That 'success' is a relic in our age. We are the generation that does for the beauty of doing, not gaining. A beautiful motion akin to a life-long dance. Good morning dancers :)

What is Time?

I asked a question on Quora a while ago

The answers are interesting. The word "Conceptually" begets confusion but it all started with the following: "What is Time? Where is it? In a cupboard? Is it really the movement of the arms of your clock?" And a personal answer: "No. The movement of the clock's arms is best qualified as objects moving through space actually! Time is rather a property of space. Time is the thing that makes so that everything doesn't happen at the same time. Time keeps space in order. Time is a description of the sequentiality of space's occurrence".

What's interesting is the mathematical concept of probabilities in comparison: Probabilities are at the opposite. Probabilities assume everything is happening at the same time and flesh out the possibility of a single event. Probabilities ignore the concept of time :) Good morning timeful people :D

Zen meets Entropy

Here's a fun habit: 

• Trigger: You just finished reading about X
• Routine: Recall the last Y you read before X then try to connect X and Y (pen and paper)
• Reward: Bathe in awe :D and do the secret victory dance

Here's one instance: How do Entropy and Zen relate ? Entropy is the fact cigarette smoke never goes back to the cigarette. It is the fact that the universe moves towards a state of dissipation. Entropy means that to un-break an egg, you need to change the order of the entire universe :°

Zen is a school of Mahayana Buddhism. The Japanese word "Zen" can be translated as "absorption". A proxy is mindfulness: A state of deliberate attention that enables you to peak, among other things, into the workings of the mind and its patterns.

So, now Entropy is X and Zen is Y. Let's stretch our minds and try to connect both. What is what in this parallel? I see mental patterns as the smoke of a cigarette. Reversing mental patterns means making the brain jump back in time to a past state. And for that, as entropy informs us, you'd need to change the entire universe.

Zen can't change your mind. Not right this moment at least. Zen cannot un-break an egg. If your hated nemesis pops into your mind and the thought provokes anger in you, being mindful of that won't take you back in time and certainly won't undo the release of neural chemicals.

Entropy is the sequentiality of space, existence even. Zen is a deep understanding of Entropy. You can't undo anything. Zen is the acceptance of the fact you cannot reverse the state of things as they are now. Right now, things are what they are. Entropy and Zen are invitations to be patient :) Have a patient morning.

Democracy with A grain of Salt

Lately I've discovered that voting is mandatory in Brazil. But did you know Socrates was skeptical about Democracy? He thought most citizens never did their 'thinking' homework before voting. And I'm often reminded of that when I see "The X Factor" (or equivalents) taking off in non-democratic countries. As if 'voting' for your favorite candidate was a proxy or a consolation for not being able to choose your country's political direction. David Runciman writes in The Guardian:

"Tocqueville's analysis is the best guide to the workings of modern democracy (...). The democratic mindset is to be despairing and blithely confident all at the same time. Just look at the behaviour of America's current crop of political desperadoes. Surely you would only shut down the government if you thought that the system was working so badly that it is almost beyond repair. (...) On the other hand, it is also true that you would only shut down the government if you thought the system worked well enough to survive whatever you could throw at it."

The action hides the fact that however strong the disagreement, and even if the government shuts down, we all still believe in democracy, this is a polite play in favor of the agreed system. Like one of these ceremonial dances where one of the dancers is symbolically sacrificed. Under the surface however, we all have a strange admiration for dictatorship. Look at how effective Poutine is. Look how things "get done" in Chile. De Botton attributes the ugliness of London compared to Paris, Rome and Prague "lack of dictatorship" and central planning. Charles II vs Louis XIV.

In the same article, David Runciman writes "The best citizens are near schizophrenic citizens". But Democracy is recent in the story of our evolution. I feel not being able to find a system that surfaces a society's best values is a failure of our imagination. I'd love to hear your morning thoughts :D

Pollock was a Wu-Wei Master

Antonin Artaud is a UFO in French literature. In a time where censorship was outlandish, he still managed to get his recording of "To be done with God's judgement" censored by the French radio. Artaud, the inventor of the "Theater of cruelty", got locked in mental institutions several times. But a practice of his points us to Wu-Wei ("Not trying" in Chinese) in Art.

An admirer of Van Gogh, he used drawing as therapy and wrote of his experience: "I'm also like the poor Van Gogh, I'm not thinking anymore, but each day, I direct more closely my formidable internal outbursts". This probably echoes how Jackson Pollock used to paint without "trying". And that brings us back to Slingerland's Wu-Wei:

"Wu-wei literally translates as “no trying” or “no doing,” but it’s not at all about dull inaction. In fact, it refers to the dynamic, effortless, and unselfconscious state of mind of a person who is optimally active and effective. People in wu-wei feel as if they are doing nothing, while at the same time they might be creating a brilliant work of art, (or) smoothly negotiating a complex social situation (...)"

Sorry Pollock :'( Didn't mean to make you so ugly

And Slingerland goes on to identify Wu-Wei with Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's "Flow" !

"This state of harmony is both complex and holistic, involving as it does the integration of the body, the emotions, and the mind. If we have to translate it, wu-wei is probably best rendered as something like “effortless action” or “spontaneous action.” Being in wu-wei is relaxing and enjoyable, but in a deeply rewarding way that distinguishes it from cruder or more mundane pleasures."

Next Episode - How to become a Wu-Wei master !!

The case for taking Knoweledge Risks

Let's start with philosopher Daniel Dennett today :)

"I found I never really appreciated many of the painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries until I visited European museums where I could see room after room full of second-rate paintings of the same genres. If all you ever see is the good stuff – which is al you see in the introductory survey courses, and in the top museums – it’s very hard to see just how wonderful the good stuff is. Do you know the difference between a good library and a great library. A good library has all the good books. A great library has all the books. If you really want to understand a great philosopher, you have to spend some time looking at the less great contemporaries and predecessors that are life in the shadows of the masters."

Taking a "Knowledge Risk" means choosing the lesser known and promoted but also the less familiar. Rosamund E. M. Harding writes in "An anatomy of Inspiration"

"It is a fact that has not yet been sufficiently stressed that those persons who have risen to eminence in arts, letters or sciences have frequently possessed considerable knowledge of subjects outside their own sphere of activity: Pasteur was a bachelor of literature in addition to being a doctor of science; James Watt rested his mind from honing the steam engine with archeology and poetry; Emmanuel Kant read classics, mathematics, physics, astronomy, metaphysics, law, geography, and travel; Goethe was a collector of art and science ephemera, and took a close interest in the engineering of canals, harbors, and tunnels"

SO ! Habit Design :D

• Trigger: You just finished reading a book or an article
• Routine: Choose something diametrically "opposed" (Science -> Art, News -> Philosophy)
• Reward: Sit back and think how the distant dots could connect :)

Gooood morning :D

Of Course Computers can Change our Truth !

I'm astounded when people under-estimate computers' potential to deeply disrupt our understanding of Life's meaning, consciousness and free will. So today's Impossible is meant to illustrate just how much computers can reconfigure our perception of reality. Courtesy of philosopher Daniel Dennett:

"Proving just what is and is not possible within the rules of chess is an intricate task, and mistakes can be made that get perpetuated. For instance, a few years ago, a computer chess program discovered a mating net - a guaranteed win - consisting of over two hundred moves without a capture. This disproved a long-standing 'theorem' of chess and has forced a change in the rules of the game. It used to be that fifty moves without a capture by either side constituted a draw (stalemate), but since this lengthy mating net is unbreakable, and leads to a win, it is unreasonable to maintain the fifty-move stalemate."

Dennett hits a homerun with the following: "Before computers began playing chess, nobody imagined that there could be a guaranteed win of anywhere near this length". For anyone who's dabbled with data mining and machine learning, it's clear computers can uncover unknown unknowns - Things we didn't know we didn't know! It might sound like Science Fiction but, then again, Isaac Asimov reminds us precisely what Science Fiction is for:

"It was only with the coming of the Industrial Revolution that the rate of change became fast enough to be visible in a single lifetime. People were suddenly aware that not only were things changing, but that they would continue to change after they died. That was when science fiction came into being as opposed to fantasy and adventure tales. Because people knew that they would die before they could see the changes that would happen in the next century, they thought it would be nice to imagine what they might be." + "Science fiction is important because it fights the natural notion that there's something permanent about things the way they are right now."

To an impermanent day, acknowledging the universe of our blind-spots and an impossibly amazing morning ;)

An Anatomy of Hope

Two quotes kept me wondering about hope lately:

• “If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all.” - Martin Luther King
• "Losing all hope was freedom" - Tyler Durden, in Fight Club

Martin Luther King felt hope was a kind of life force. A variant of optimism - A blind, unjustified belief that the odds are always in our favor. Is this belief true? No one knows. And that's the beauty of it ! Danish philosopher Kierkegaard's conception of hope was the certainty that God’s helping hand will always be there. That, no matter what, there will always be an alternative, a light at the end of the tunnel. It didn't have to be true. For that is what faith is - A conviction (not reality) manifesting as a useful neural pathway to keep you going.

And Tyler's quote corroborates this assertion. At its worst, hope is a daydream ailment where we try to mentally steer the future, raising our expectations and ensuring disappointment will hurt six-fold more. That hope we need to lose.

So what habit could help us leverage the goodies of hope while shedding the baddies? R. Snyder, professor of psychology at the University of Kansas can help! To him, hope is not an emotion or a life force but a cognitive skill – the ability to see a number of paths to getting to our goal, not just one. SO ! Habit:

• Trigger: I'm stuck, am facing a challenge and / or the future looks uncertain because of x
• Routine: Write down 5 alternative paths (not one less!) to the one obsessing you
• Rewards: Relief, life is beautiful and ! A secret victory dance

Good morning hopeful people :D

Let's Become Real-life Transformers !

“I'm only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.” ― Susan Sontag. I love how Sontag uses the word "transformation" rather than "improvement". I've been wary of the latter ever since I read the following by Alan Watts: "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."

Guys, I want to try something from now on. Let me explain. Self-transformation is one worthy life-long ride. It's really cool. Embracing self-transformation is like discovering cubism, Life starts looking different. Criticism and feedback are suddenly welcome, hardship becomes a boon and sorrow, a fascinating opportunity for exploring oneself. One becomes the growth individual superstar psychologist Carol Dweck outlines in her book "The Growth Mindset".

But how do you transform into a growth individual? I've contemplated the virtues of epiphany but have outgrown it. One book or one moment might flip your life forever. But repetitive, small habits are a surer bet. It is small recurring waves that carved the most beautiful coasts not once in a century meteor showers. And same for your mind. Habits. Habits. Habits. The key to transformation and the tool of any growth individual on a project of self-transformation.

So ! From now on, I'm going to suggest a habit at the end of each Impossible Idea ! A practical tool for everyday self-transformation. Knowledge is a fluffy cloud if it doesn't manifest in actions. And I'll use Charles Duhigg's paradigm, Trigger -> Routine -> Reward, to create these habits. So one example is "The Habit of turning knowledge into Habits" :D - I'm meta-laughing alone here :(

• Trigger - I just e I REALLY want to remember
• Routine - Take a pen and paper and create a habit loop (Trigger, Routine, Reward)
• Reward - Do a secret victory dance

We'll see how this goes ;) Have an amazing morning :*

The key to Courage ? Tragedy

Olivier Emberton writes: "We could have had it all - sung Adele, and in six words she summed up every heartbreak ever: the feeling of something that could have been, but was not." That is the essence of tragedy: The gap between potential gain and potential loss. However, "the problem with our instinctive sense of tragedy is that it teaches us to avoid anything where a potential gain might be lost. The bigger the potential gain, the greater our aversion"

 So here's some controversial advice:

• Love-ache? Write a book
  
• Struggling with weight problems? Launch a company
• Career confusion? Climb the Everest
  

The sheer confidence taking on bigger tragedies imbues in you simply annihilates smaller, more mundane tragedies. By extension, the key to courage is to experience ever larger tragedies.

I promised I'd tell you more about "Wu-Wei" (pronounced oooo-way) today though. From the book "trying not to try" by Edward Slingerland:

"For the early Chinese thinkers … the culmination of knowledge is understood, not in terms of grasping a set of abstract principles, but rather as entering a state of wu-wei. The goal is to acquire the ability to move through the physical and social world in a manner that is completely spontaneous and yet fully in harmony with the proper order of the natural and human worlds (the Dao or “Way”). Because of this focus on knowing how rather than knowing this or that, (...) the ideal person in early China is more like a well-trained athlete or cultivated artist than a dispassionate cost-benefit analyzer."

Philosopher Henri Bergson was fond of spontaneity. And it seems to me like another word for courage. Just like unlocking your phone becomes automatic due to sheer repetition and you stop "thinking" about it, it's when you've experienced enough potential losses that living simply flows out of you and courage becomes second nature.