Mission Impossible - DR Part 1

Watched the movie last night in theatre and it was brilliant! 

A non-super hero and non-marvel comic bullshit movie. I miss these kind of traditional Hollywood movie.

Kudos to Tom Cruise - spectacular action scenes; a fun 2.5 hours! 

I watched the first MI in Madras back in 1996 before moving to US; Tom Cruise looks fit and that bike jump he did it himself. 

Active Learning AI is the villian and that was funny. 

If you haven't watched the behind scenes video of that classic bike jump - check it out: 

This Year, I Became A Fan Of Simon Weil

I recently bought her book Waiting for God but yet to read it. 

I heard of Simon Weil only this year (never too late) and I am already a big fan. 

Wolfram Eilenberger has a wonderful introduction to her philosophy: 

“It is plainly easier to kill and even to die,” she wrote, “than to ask the only genuinely simple questions such as this: do the laws, the conventions that govern economic life at present form a system?” This remains a vital question. What would become of the credibility of the texts written by activists – left or right – denouncing “the system” if they were subjected to the same serious self-examination that Weil brought to her own work and those of her comrades?

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Weil was convinced that in the depths of our existence, it is not concepts and arguments that define us as moral beings, but concrete experiences. This is what explains her commitment as an anti-Stalinist trade unionist, a factory worker in Paris, a refugee aid worker in Marseille, a volunteer in Spain, a fiery anti-colonialist, and then a member of the French Resistance. More significantly, for Weil, we are beings moved to action not, in the first instance, by concepts but by forces beyond ourselves: experiences of suffering, love, profound insight or disturbance, whose origins Weil did not shy away from calling transcendent, even divine.

Weil believed that true awakening can be achieved only when we find within ourselves the necessary stillness, the necessary weakness, to move on from the world of conceptual thought.

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Under the oppressive totalitarian conditions of the 1930s and 1940s in which Weil honed her thinking, she warned against the use of the word “we”, as well as any discourse in which the interests of “society” (which Weil also called the “Great Beast”) are mobilised for the ultimate legitimation of any kind of political measures. Weil saw this as just one more form of infantilising idolatry:

“For in society the individual is infinitely small… The Great Beast is the only object of idolatry, the only substitute for God, the only imitation of an object which is infinitely far from me and which is myself.”

[---]

It was simply that for Weil the path of philosophy was one of clarifying self-transformation and everyday presence of mind. That she most impressively embodied what the specialist industry of academic philosophy, revolving in ever-decreasing, ever more reproachful circles, is not, and plainly has no intention of being in future: a courageous and uncompromising pursuit of wisdom; feeling for a way out of self-induced immaturity in a dark time.

It is all still true: Simone Weil is the embodiment of a philosophical awakening whose full effects remain to be assessed.

Mindless Tradition, Beliefs, Rules & Choices With No Feedback Loop - Wisdom Of Cormac McCarthy

I have seen the movie a few times and I do remember that quote but yet I realized the profoundness of wisdom in those lines from No Country For Old Man. 

Thanks to John Gray for opening my eyes: 

In the Coen brothers’ 2007 film No Country for Old Men, the assassin Anton Chigurh asks his fellow hitman Carson Wells before he kills him:

 “If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule?” 

A similar question can be posed to McCarthy’s humanist critics: 

if your philosophies have brought the world to its present state, of what value are your philosophies? No amount of thinking and no exercise of will can save the human animal from itself. For the intrepid literary explorer, grace in a human being means living with this truth.

For 13 years of Max's life; I was "convinced" that I gave him the right diet, exercise et al., but yet I was caught with my pants down when he got cancer. 

For me only my pants were down but for Max - he had to suffer and watching that killed me. What good were my choices for 13 years if it brought to that moment on December 20th 2019? 

I didn't become a nihilist. I understand, I had so much gap in knowledge and for the past four years, I have been trying to fill that gap and act on it so that my choices are mindful when it comes to Fluffy, Garph and Neo. 

I will drop every damn tradition, beliefs, rules, and my hardcore values if it is bad and makes no sense to stick to them. 

Decades Long Bet On Consciousness Ends

I have screamed so many times on this blog about the bullshit of consciousness and I never read any book nor essay on consciousness. 

We know nothing about how the brain works. To make matters worse we don't even know if consciousness actually exists :-) 

So, it’s philosopher 1, neuroscientist 0 but they are still "optimistic" (talk about self deception): 

A 25-year science wager has come to an end. In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that the mechanism by which the brain’s neurons produce consciousness would be discovered by 2023. Both scientists agreed publicly on 23 June, at the annual meeting of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (ASSC) in New York City, that it is an ongoing quest — and declared Chalmers the winner.

What ultimately helped to settle the bet was a study testing two leading hypotheses about the neural basis of consciousness, whose findings were unveiled at the conference.

“It was always a relatively good bet for me and a bold bet for Christof,” says Chalmers, who is now co-director of the Center for Mind, Brain and Consciousness at New York University. But he also says this isn’t the end of the story, and that an answer will come eventually: “There’s been a lot of progress in the field.”

The Overview Effect

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, ‘Look at that, you son of a bitch.

- Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell

What is the overview effect? Psychologists have described the overview effect as “a state of awe with self-transcendent qualities, precipitated by a particularly striking visual stimulus.”

But it’s so much more than that.

The overview effect is the sense of oneness astronauts feel when they marvel at Earth from space. It’s grasping the miraculous improbability of one’s existence. It’s seeing the world and its inhabitants unified and whole rather than wretched and divided. It’s the opposite of loneliness. It’s connectedness.

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Paradoxical, isn’t it? In the universe’s endless proportions, Earth is a deeply lonely planet. But strangely, looking at it doesn’t make us feel lonely. It’s quite the opposite: we transcend into communion with the cosmos. As astronaut Sam Durrence said: “You’re removed from the Earth, but at the same time you feel this incredible connection to the Earth like nothing I’d ever felt before.”

We were all born on this speckle of life within a dead universe. What a privilege.

Perhaps Carl Sagan said it best:

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives … Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light ... There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.”

From an orbital viewpoint, all borders, norms, and egos disappear. What remains is a sense of transcendence, oneness, and awe. 

- More Here

To state the obvious; Max gave me the overview effect and much more. 

Words Of Wisdom From A Wise Waitress

Maybe by accident, maybe on purpose, I fell in to a social group in New York City with many people who consider themselves to be intellectuals. I’ve been privy to countless conversations about how intellectual labor is labor, about how someone needs to do the sitting around and thinking and theorizing, with the thought underlying this being: and it certainly wouldn’t be the people who carry things for a living. 

Why don’t websites hire service people to write about food? How do ‘restaurant journalists’ exist, when servers who are also artists are standing right here? A book critic once told me, “a website could never be staffed by service people, the quality of the writing would be too low,” and I wanted to laugh. I suspect it’s easier to teach a waitress to be a writer than an intellectual to be a waiter.

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For so many years I thought that I was missing an element of secret knowledge about how actual jobs worked, and that therefore I would be stuck forever. But now that I do other work, I see it all for what it is: everything is a system. The restaurant is a system, the content management is a system, the computer is a system. Everything is so much simpler than I imagined it was. I thought I was doing an easy job, but everything is an easy job when you know the system. Other professions weren’t magic. They were systems too.

- Bad Waitress, Becca Schuh