Review Of A Meaningless Book - What We Owe The Future

I have developed a new habit in the last few years. I will review the books in my book case and throw the ones that are dangerously irrelevant to recycle. These books are not even worth donating in order to save others from not only wasting their time but corrupting their minds with sheer nonsense (like we already don't have enough bull shit in our heads). 

Books that mostly goes into recycle are: anything related to neuroscience or philosophy of consciousness, any historic philosophers who are arrogant to believe they are the smartest and wrote reams of outdated (even in their time) bull shit and final category of books related to futurism and how we can save the world. 

One thing I always believed and still do is that it's exponentially easier to eradicate evil in its preliminary stages than talk philosophy and ideate when evil matures. 

Scott Alexandra has a brilliant review of the new book What We Owe The Future by William MacAskill plus most importantly he talks about the new evil of the first planned Octopus farms. 

MacAskill doesn’t talk about this much besides gesturing about something something AI. Instead, he focuses on ideas he calls “moral entrepreneurship” and “moral exploration”; can we do what Benjamin Lay did in the 1700s and discover moral truths we were missing before of the same scale as “slavery is wrong”? And can we have different countries with different systems (he explicitly mentions charter cities) to explore fairer systems of government? Then maybe once we discover good things we can promote them before AI or whatever locks everything in.

I found this a disappointing conclusion to this section, so I’ll mention one opportunity I heard about recently: let’s be against octopus factory farming. Octopi seem unusually smart and thoughtful for animals, some people have just barely started factory farming them in horrible painful ways, and probably there aren’t enough entrenched interests here to resist an effort to stop this. This probably won’t be a legendary campaign that bards will sing about for all time the way abolitionism was, but I don’t know how you find one of those. Maybe find a hunchbacked Quaker dwarf who lives in a cave, and ask what he thinks.

No one writes books about how easy it is to do simple things daily plus some gratitude would help immensely he current and future generation.

Anyone can do these simple things everyday - starting now:

• Limiting water consumption during bath, washing dishes to laundry
• Don't waste food. Eat less. Mostly Plants. 
• Use car, cell phone and other electronics for its full lifetime. 
• Buy eco-friendly clothes, products and use them until they are worn out.
• Drive less. Walk more. 
• Stop mindless travel 
• Plant trees. Plant native plants to replace your lawn.

These simple things are fun to do and rewarding. I do follow these plus more everyday. It is more fun than any video game. 

What Can We Know About That Which We Cannot Even Imagine?

What can we know about that which we cannot even imagine? paper by David H. Wolpert of Santa Fe Institute. 

Read the whole thing. It is meant to make us all humble. 

In this essay I will consider a sequence of questions, ending with one about the breadth and depth of the epistemic limitations of our our science and mathematics. I will then suggest a possible way to circumvent such limitations. I begin by considering questions about the biological function of intelligence. This will lead into questions concerning human language, perhaps the most important cognitive prosthesis we have ever developed.

While it is traditional to rhapsodize about the perceptual power provided by human language, I will emphasize how horribly limited – and therefore limiting – it is. This will lead to questions of whether human mathematics, being so deeply grounded in our language, is also deeply limited. I will then combine all of this into a partial, sort-of, sideways answer to the guiding question of this essay: what we can ever discern about all that we cannot even conceive of?

 

Machine Learning As Animal Translators

Hidden in this everyday exchange is a wealth of social information, Dr. Barker and her colleagues discovered when they used machine-learning algorithms to analyze 36,000 soft chirps recorded in seven mole rat colonies.

Not only did each mole rat have its own vocal signature, but each colony had its own distinct dialect, which was passed down, culturally, over generations. During times of social instability — as in the weeks after a colony’s queen was violently deposed — these cohesive dialects fell apart. When a new queen began her reign, a new dialect appeared to take hold.

“The greeting call, which I thought was going to be pretty basic, turned out to be incredibly complicated,” said Dr. Barker, who is now studying the many other sounds the rodents make. “Machine-learning kind of transformed my research.”

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In recent years, scientists have begun deploying this technology to decode animal communication, using machine-learning algorithms to identify when squeaking mice are stressed or why fruit bats are shouting. Even more ambitious projects are underway — to create a comprehensive catalog of crow calls, map the syntax of sperm whales and even to build technologies that allow humans to talk back.

“Let’s try to find a Google Translate for animals,” said Diana Reiss, an expert on dolphin cognition and communication at Hunter College and co-founder of Interspecies Internet, a think tank devoted to facilitating cross-species communication.

[---]

Other major projects are underway. Project CETI — short for the Cetacean Translation Initiative — is bringing together machine-learning experts, marine biologists, roboticists, linguists and cryptographers, among others, at more than a dozen institutions to decode the communication of sperm whales, which emit bursts of clicks that are organized into Morse code-like sequences called codas.

- More Here  

This would make E.O.Wilson smile. 

A rare moment, I salute these humans in my field. 

Imagine. 

• When under taking the euphemism for barbarism called BBQ on Independence day
• When families sharing the dead body of a Turkey on Thanks Giving day,
• When feasting on the roasted dead body of an intelligent creature pig (or depending on your "culture" you might prefer fish corpse.)
• Well, when eating your daily diet of dead bodies in the name of protein

When machine learning models could translate the cries of animals in the factory farms; would you still delude yourself that you are innocent and better than Nazis?

A Friendship With Uncertainty

You might think of consciousness as a lamp, making a cone of light on the surface of a desk. Outside the yellow circle everything is dark and unknown. The usual way of approaching things is to try to extend the yellow circle into the darkness. Or perhaps to drag objects in from the dark. That is conceivable. This meditation takes things the other way. Here you depend on what is unknown and inconceivable to sustain you. The inconceivable is the source of all that comes into being. This meditation is not about making what is unknown, known. Instead it is an exercise in relying on and making friends with the inconceivable.

- Bring Me the Rhinoceros and other Zen Koans to Bring You Joy by John Tarrant

What a simple but profound thought and practice! 

From May 21st 2006, I adored Max knowing this day on September 15th 2022 would come when I would have to breathe and continue living without him. It was unknown and inconceivable - how I would live on without Max. 

Max with all his Max-ness and in a ridiculously simple way showed me how to make friends with that moment in future. 

Max's ridiculously simple way was to live life in that moment by cherishing the miracle of Max and I being together. The fact that two random living beings, Max and I were together was and is still inconceivable in any damn cosmic sense than death, destruction, pain and suffering. 

Think of this way - life is going to bring me death, destruction, pain and suffering before I kick the bucket. 

There is no way I will have any more moments with Max. It is inconceivable. 

And I close my eyes. My friend Uncertainty smiles and I am with Max. 

Ad infinitum. 

Lifelong Astonishment Will Take Iron-Willed Discipline - John Donne

We humans are both miracles and catastrophes. We must, he demanded, acknowledge both death and joy, horror and awe. It is an astonishment to be alive, and life calls on you to be astonished; but lifelong astonishment will take iron-willed discipline.

Wake, his writing tells us, over and over. Weep for this world and gasp for it. Wake, and pay attention to our mortality, to the precise ways in which beauty cuts through us. Pay attention to the softness of skin and the majesty of hands and feet. Attention — real, sustained, unflinching attention — is what this life, with its disasters and delights, demands of you.

And if a skeleton in the hall helps, well then: Bring on the skeletons.

- What John Donne Knew About Death Can Teach Us a Lot About Life adapted from Super-Infinite: The Transformations of John Donne by Katherine Rundell

The Importance Of Creativity Is Not In What You Produce But What You Become In The Process.

Buddha's famous lines and least followed lines on ego dissolution was - "If you see the Buddha kill him".

Kurt Vonnegut's reply to a high school student is full of wisdom (In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write to a famous author & ask for advice. Kurt Vonnegut was the only one to respond.)

What a brilliant ritual not only to build humility and destroy ego but doing the right thing without signaling?

Defeat by Truth is Victory

I have often wrote on this blog that love is over rated and changing ones mind is one of the most important trait in the world. 

I have also written reams on not waste time to arguing although knowing the Socratic tradition of finding the truth via argument. But currently,  most people argue for ego or support their tripe while truth disappears into abyss. Hence, my position on anti argument. 

Plus, one of my all time favorite papers: Why do humans reason? Arguments for an argumentative theory

This touching speech by Harvard president, Lawrence S. Bacow unveils an important historical Jewish trait of arguing to find the truth and then changing your mind (its the opposite of Pyrrhic victory)

Over time, truth is revealed; it needs to be tested on the anvil of competing ideas. If you really seek the truth, you must engage with those who think differently than you and be willing to change your mind. 

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Now in my own tradition, in the Jewish tradition, we have no definitive authority for resolving differences of agreement over the interpretation of texts or doctrine. None. There’s no bishop, there’s no pope. The way we resolve these differences is through argument. And indeed if you were to go into any yeshiva, a religious school, and observe students who are studying our sacred texts, they always do it in pairs. In fact, the imperative is to study with someone else. Why? Because more emerges through the dialogue between two students, through the different interpretations, than one can ever hope to achieve on their own.

I think this concept was captured beautifully by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’ argument for argument. And he said the following: We ought to argue, he asserts, “out of a desire to discover the truth, not out of cantankerousness or a wish to prevail over [our fellows],” not “out of envy and contentiousness and ambition for victory.”

When we argue for the sake of the latter, he continues, “what is at stake is not truth but power, and the result is that both sides actually suffer. If you win, I lose. But if I win, I also lose, because in diminishing you, I diminish myself […] The opposite is the case when the argument is for the sake of truth. If I win, I win. But if I lose, I also win—because being defeated by the truth is the only form of defeat that is also a victory.”

Rabbi Sacks referred to this type of argument as argument not for the sake of victory but argument for the sake of heaven. As we begin again to imagine the future—as individuals and as a community—may we all find ways to resist the lure of righteousness. To resist the lure of moral certitude. May we embrace the possibility of transcendence through argument. And may we live life again with greater appreciation of its fragility—and for our dependence also on one another.

 

Scruffy Hospitality

Scruffy hospitality means you’re not waiting for everything in your house to be in order before you host and serve friends in your home. Scruffy hospitality means you hunger more for good conversation and serving a simple meal of what you have, not what you don’t have. Scruffy hospitality means you’re more interested in quality conversation than the impression your home or lawn makes. If we only share meals with friends when we’re excellent, we aren’t truly sharing life together.

- Read the whole piece here; its beautiful!!

On Criticism

Criticism in the broadest sense is a key tactic for maintaining a nonrigid, noncomplacent orientation toward the world. You’re always stepping back and looking at everything afresh, never taking anything for granted, never turning a blind eye to your own complicities and flaws—ideally, anyway. We are committed to criticism not as a way of formulating value judgments but as a literary-artistic-intellectual practice that has a relationship to irony as defined by Friedrich Schlegel: “clear consciousness of an eternal agility.” It’s also related to Adorno’s comment that “it is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.” The common denominator that links irony with Adorno’s remark is this: Never get too comfortable, never be quite congruent with yourself, and never assume anything else is entirely congruent with itself.

In some way or other, good criticism, maybe all good art, should instruct you in not being at home in your own home. An ethos of critique in this sense aligns with Artforum’s participation in urgent larger efforts to expand art history and remedy its vast erasures; to confront how racial capitalism and heteropatriarchy shaped and continue to shape art and culture; to address inequities of representation; and to give platforms to abolitionist voices and art and writing that envision new possible futures.

- More Here

Fluffy & Garph!

In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you.

- Buddha

 

And rare pic of three of them together!

Everyday Foods & Cosmetics That Use Wild Plants May Be Harming The Environment

For over two decades, I acted on not using products not tested on animals. Good news is that it has gotten enough traction now that many countries and corporations have banned it. But yet, there is a lot of work to be done. 

Learning and applying that learning in action continues until one's last breath. In Buddhist terms - "Do it over and over again. Untiringly."  

For the past few years, there has been this new issue with food and cosmetics - think Almond milk to Shea body lotion to Himalayan pink salt. 

This national geographic article is a good start for one to raise awareness and to act on it: 

The chocolate you eat, the moisturizer you use, the tea you drink—these everyday products contain ingredients from wild plants. The way those plants—many of them threatened—are harvested may be damaging the environment and exploiting workers, a recent report found.

The UN-affiliated report by wildlife trade experts highlights 12 plants: frankincense, shea, Brazil nut, juniper, licorice, baobab, argan, candelilla, pygeum, jatamansi, gum arabic, and goldenseal.

Plant derivatives in household products often have “flown under the radar,” says Caitlin Schindler, lead author of the report and a project manager at Traffic, a nonprofit that monitors the sustainability of the wildlife trade. They “sit there somewhere in the middle of the ingredients list” on product labels. Even if consumers notice ingredient names, there’s no information about what’s involved in obtaining or processing them.

For example, about 20,000 Brazilians’ income depends directly or indirectly on the harvesting of Brazil nuts, which are one of the most widely consumed tree nuts in the world and are vulnerable to extinction. Entire families often come from neighboring regions to harvest the nuts, living in temporary forest camps, which provide poor shelter and no access to clean water. Here, workers risk being stung by scorpions, struck by heavy falling fruit, and attacked by jaguars. After the nuts are sold, importing countries profit, marking up the price about 2.5 times, even though no further processing is required.