Meta Values - 52

Never-ever confuse knowledge & technological progress with progress in human morality. It never happened nor will happen in the future. 

Thank you John Gray for teaching me this during my wonder days with Max. Thank you, sir. 

First step improve my morality and make marginal progress in morality in future is to understand John Gray's wise words. 

There is no such thing as progress, that is, of things getting better: science and technology may improve, but the human animal will not; purpose does not exist independent of human construction, history and civilizations have no grand plan, no superior march towards glorious progress, nor can that purpose be a moral redemption of mankind.

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If there is anything unique about the human animal it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience. Science and technology are cumulative, whereas ethics and politics deal with recurring dilemmas. Whatever they are called, torture and slavery are universal evils; but these evils cannot be consigned to the past like redundant theories in science. They return under different names: torture as enhanced interrogation techniques, slavery as human trafficking. Any reduction in universal evils is an advance in civilization. But, unlike scientific knowledge, the restraints of civilized life cannot be stored on a computer disc. They are habits of behaviour, which once broken are hard to mend. Civilization is natural for humans, but so is barbarism.

[---]

Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This is the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world's religions.

- John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Upper Limits Of Biology

In June 1973, chestnut colt Secretariat ran the Belmont Stakes so fast that no horse has matched him since. In less than two and a half minutes, Secretariat flew along the track, finally pulling away to win by 31 lengths, nearly three quarters of a football field. The other horses were so far behind they weren’t even in the television frame. Fifty years later, billions of dollars have been poured into breeding and training, yet Secretariat’s record still stands.

This is the paradox of the thoroughbred: breeders have spent centuries trying to create a faster horse, but in doing so, they may have bred away the very genetic diversity that would allow the horse to keep improving, or even to remain robust.

[---]

As genetics has played such a large role in breeding horses, it is small wonder that horse breeders are moving with the frontiers of science. The world’s first cloned horse, called Prometea, was born in 2003. Horse cloning is now big business, despite an American Jockey Club ban, as other equine sports, including show jumping and polo, allow clones.

In 2024, the Argentinian company Kheiron announced the production of the first CRISPR-edited horses: Polo Pureza, an award-winning mare, was the foundation for five gene-edited clones with increased explosive speed. According to reports, the company modified the MSTN gene, so that the animals would develop more muscle fibers and potentially run faster as a result. Even so, the prospects for exceeding current records through gene editing are slim. Today’s racehorses are already tightly optimized for speed, balancing strength against the cost of carrying additional muscle mass. Adding more muscle is relatively low-hanging fruit, and if this were the key to unlocking greater speed, selective breeding would likely already have brought it about.

[---]

At the Belmont Stakes in 1973, Secretariat ran in a category of his own. His extraordinary performance seems to have been the result of many unlikely factors aligning. After he died, Secretariat’s heart was reportedly measured at almost 10 kilograms – twice as much as normal. This appears to have been a physiological fluke, however, as it isn’t a trait reliably passed down to offspring. Combined with his unusual stamina, exceptionally powerful legs that allowed him to cover 25 feet per stride, favorable race conditions, and a skilled jockey, this produced a race time that has still never been matched half a century later, despite advances in breeding, training, nutrition, and veterinary care.

Secretariat offers a glimpse of the upper limits of biology. But as racehorses have pushed against that limit to become faster and more powerful, their population has become more fragile as the gene pool has narrowed. Our 4,000-year pursuit of the ultimate horse may not have much further to run.

- More Here

How Not To Forget What Matters - Anti-Stultitia To Hypomnēma

The Latin word for the tendency to lose track of what matters in the cacophony of things that attract our attention is stultitia. “Stultitia,” writes Michel Foucault in “Self-writing,”

is defined by mental agitation, distraction, change of opinions and wishes, and consequently weakness in the face of all the events that may occur; it is also characterized by the fact that it turns the mind toward the future, makes it interested in novel ideas, and prevents it from providing a fixed point for itself in the possession of acquired truth.

You can’t just read a blog post about high agency, get filled with a sense of possibility, and become, from then on, an agentic person. As John Gray puts it in his monograph on J.S. Mill, our character is “a cluster of habitual willings.” For changes to our behavior to become permanent, we must become different people.

[---]

During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation, in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. Each day, often in the morning, the notetaker would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to something they were struggling with, and then they would meditate on that—unpacking it, making the idea top of mind, ensuring it was alive in them. If they needed courage, for instance, they could meditate on an anecdote that made it real for them what it meant to act bravely. The idea was that over time, the insights they gathered by reading would be transformed into character, something deeply ingrained in their way of thinking and seeing and acting.

[---]

The most famous example of this practice is the meditations Marcus Aurelius wrote in his tent as plague swept through the camps during the military campaigns along the Danube River, but it seems to have been a fairly widespread practice among the “cultivated class.” A suggestion repeated in several popular manuals for living was that you should collect every snippet of thought that deeply inspires you to live in a more ethically true way and then, in the pre-dawn hour, look through your hypomnēmata to find passages relevant to your current situation—insightful quotes, examples, actions you had witnessed, notes from conversations you’d had, and so on—and meditate, in writing, on those that help you orient toward your current challenges, until you feel inspired to act in the proper way.

[---]

The hypomnēma was a mechanism for centering your mind on what matters, and for gradually refining your understanding of what matters. It was, to use a word from Plutarch, a tool for ethopoiesis (ethos meaning “character” and poiesis “making”), a tool for turning truth into character. By meditating daily on sentences that made it real to you how you wanted to live, you would remember to do the right thing—you would remember to practice it during the day (simply thinking about it is not going to change you). And gradually, you would become that sort of person. You wouldn’t even need to remind yourself. Your principles would have become your character. You would have developed expertise in the skill of holding yourself in a better way.

- More Here

Ocean Came To The House

What Nobody Teaches You About the Holocaust

I had heard hundreds of “Holocaust Survivor’s Stories,” but never one like this. And the reason is brutally simple: almost none of them survived. Auschwitz was a horror—no sane person disputes this—but Jews could survive Auschwitz. Thousands did. They lived to write memoirs and testify at trials and speak at Shabbat dinners and fill the halls of dozens of museums across the Western world. You have never met a survivor from Sobibor because there were practically none. You have never met a survivor who fled to the woods of Belarus because there were almost none of those either.

The story we tell ourselves about the Holocaust is the story of the survivors, which means it is the story of the camps, which means it is overwhelmingly the story of Germans killing Jews through an industrialized system of extermination. This is not false. But it is not how most Jews died. I’m not going to engage in concrete numbers because it’s definitionally impossible to come up with anything concrete, but I will roughly estimate upwards of 75% of the Jews that died in the Holocaust didn’t die in camps or ghettos.

[---]

Americans do not think about logistics or supply chains so the camps narrative feels perfectly natural to us. The Nazis rounded up the Jews, put them on trains, shipped them to camps, killed them. Simple, neat, mechanistic - very German.

Now think about this logistically and logically: there were six extermination camps: Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, Chelmno, and Majdanek. They were all located in occupied Poland and most were not fully operational until 1943. The Final Solution was formalized in 1942.

Now consider where the Jews in Europe actually lived. The vast majority of European Jews, millions, didn’t live in Berlin or Amsterdam or even Warsaw but in the small towns and cities of eastern Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Belarus, and Ukraine. The shtetls. The Pale of Settlement and its successor communities. Many in places like Vilnius, Kaunas, Riga, Minsk, Brest, Lviv, and even more scattered in ten thousand smaller towns.

Here is a fact that is well-known to railroad historians and almost completely absent from the popular narrative: German and Russian rail gauges were different. The Russian Empire used a broader gauge—1,520 millimeters versus the European standard of 1,435 millimeters. 

[---]

The timeline makes the camps-centric narrative even more untenable for the eastern Jews. By the time Treblinka was operational in July 1942, by the time the extermination infrastructure was running at anything like capacity, the majority of Jews east of the Molotov-Ribbentrop line were already dead. They were not gassed. They were not transported anywhere. They died where they lived and they were killed overwhelmingly not by Germans but by their neighbors.

[---]

As a Jew, this is a hard thing to say, and a harder thing to feel. You want your murderer to care enough to murder you. The reality is in some ways worse: the Wehrmacht rolled through these towns, sometimes confiscated supplies, occasionally issued anti-Jewish decrees or assisted the Einsatzgruppen (German mobile killing units), and then moved on to the real war. They left the Jews to the locals. And the locals were hungry.

[---]

Here is the fact that most completely demolishes the popular narrative: the majority of Holocaust victims in the East were already dead before the extermination camps were fully operational.

The Wannsee Conference took place in January 1942. Treblinka opened in July 1942. Sobibor in May 1942. Belzec in March 1942. Chelmno, the earliest, began operations in December 1941. Auschwitz-Birkenau's gas chambers became operational in early 1942 and reached full killing capacity later that year.

The mass shootings in Lithuania were substantially complete by December 1941. The Babi Yar massacre occurred in September 1941. The Romanian massacres in Bessarabia and Bukovina took place in the summer and fall of 1941. The initial sweep of killings across Ukraine and Belarus occurred between June 1941 and early 1942. So when you talk about the Holocaust, this is actually what you’re referring to more so than camps.

There is, in fact, a documented moment that captures this timeline perfectly. In Fall of 1941 reports reached Hitler that the locals in the occupied territories were killing Jews on a massive scale. His response was not to order it stopped. It was not to order it accelerated. It was something closer to a shrug. The Jews were dying, the locals were handling it, and he had a war to fight. The formalization of the Final Solution, the bureaucratic machinery, the camps, the deportation schedules, came after the spontaneous genocide in the East was already well underway. It was, in a horrible sense, an attempt to systematize and extend to Western Europe a process that had already consumed the Jews of the East.

This does not make the camps less evil. It does not make the gas chambers less horrific. It does not exonerate Germany or diminish German responsibility for creating the conditions under which the killing occurred. But it fundamentally changes the story from one of German industrial genocide carried out primarily in camps, to one of a continent-wide eruption of murderous violence carried out primarily by local populations against their own neighbors, facilitated and encouraged by a German occupation that was too busy fighting the largest war in history to do most of the killing itself.

[---]

The Holocaust is primarily a story of neighbors and ditches and bullets and fire and cold. Of neighbors turning on neighbors in an instant. It happened not in a handful of purpose-built facilities in Poland but in ten thousand towns and villages and forests and swamps across a thousand miles of Eastern Europe. A horror story carried out not mainly by Germans but by Lithuanians, Latvians, Ukrainians, Romanians, and Croats.

- More Here

Kalendar & Wisdom Of Thoreau

I think that the man of science makes this mistake–& the mass of mankind along with him,” he wrote in his Journal in 1857, “that you should coolly give your chief attention to the phenomenon which excites you–as something independent on you–and not as it is related to you. . . . With regard to such objects I find that it is not they themselves–(with which the men of science deal) that concern me. The point of interest is somewhere between me & them (i.e. the objects)” (11/5/1857, Journal Transcript 24:610).

[---]

Thoreau’s Kalendar, in its attempts to integrate human and more-than-human timescales and to extend moments of wonder at the abundance of the natural world, exemplifies the power of a radically expanded conception of time. As an elegy to a life lived in nature, it is also a testament to the irreversibility of time’s arrow.

- More Here

Is This Artemis II Timelapse The ‘Pale Blue Dot’ For Our Times?

 

Mutualistic Partnerships Between Species Abound Across Nature

I then found many more examples of this — the maximum was five different species of ants living in one plant. So I did a wide range of experiments to understand what was going on. The first possibility was that these ant species were simply not very aggressive. To test this, I took workers from one of the species of ants and put them near workers of the other species to see whether there would be conflicts. And yes, there were. But what was interesting was that in field lab experiments, when you kept the nests apart, the ants could share a nearby sugar source without killing each other.

[---]

The ultimate test was to disrupt these compartments. When I removed the wall between two different species of ants, I found they would fight to death. After half an hour, few ants would be left alive, even though they’d been living there for years. The plant suddenly ended up without any ants at all.

[---]

They are rather unique, though species that have bacterial symbionts — humans included — do promote the growth of different bacteria in different areas of the body, which is arguably a kind of compartmentalization. Bodies also have mechanisms to prevent bacteria from entering areas where they can cause disease. When otherwise beneficial skin or gut bacteria enter our bloodstream, for example, they can become very dangerous. This shows that mutualism is always a matter of balance and control.

Many plant roots have similar protections to prevent the fungi that help them absorb nitrogen and phosphorus from growing too far inside, where they can cause damage. They also often host different strains of bacteria or fungi in different compartments, so they can selectively reward or punish them based on what they contribute.

[---]

I think this is the major pathway to evolution of obligate dependence in which species really depend on each other for survival. Both species might lose the ability to perform certain functions, say digesting certain nutrients, producing certain vitamins or defending themselves from predators, because they are provided by the partner. It’s an automatic evolutionary mechanism that makes species dependent — and vulnerable. When one species goes extinct, the other one is likely to disappear as well.

- More Here

The Examined Life Is Not the Optimised Life

That question is the old one about what makes a life worth living, and it is here that the optimising frame seizes up. We tend to imagine meaning as a reward stored behind achievement, a prize handed over once we are finally successful enough, secure enough, healed enough, lean enough. 

Yet almost none of the experiences people actually name as meaningful arrive in that fashion. Sitting up through the night with a dying parent is not pleasant and cannot be hacked, and still the people who have done it will tell you it was among the most meaningful things they ever lived through. Raising a child is the same. So is standing beside someone whose world has fallen in, telling a truth that costs you something, starting again after a loss that levelled you. 

What all of these share is that they refuse to be controlled in the way optimisation needs its objects to behave. Love shrinks into something lesser the instant you try to engineer it. Grief, rushed, sours into something false. The experiences that give a life its weight tend to be precisely the ones that happen to us, that we undergo rather than arrange, and a frame built entirely around tightening our grip will keep sliding straight off them.

This is usually the point at which an old line gets quoted, and generally a little too comfortably. Socrates, on trial for his life and offered his freedom on condition that he give up philosophising, refused, and told the court that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being. 

We have flattened that into a fridge magnet, a mild encouragement toward a bit more reflection. He meant something a great deal less soothing. He was claiming that a life run entirely on borrowed assumptions, never once questioned, never brought up hard against the matter of what is actually good, has forfeited the very thing that would have made it a human life rather than a well-managed animal one. And the examined life he had in view is not the optimised life in a toga. 

The optimised life asks how to perform better against goals it has swallowed whole and never inspected. The examined life turns round and inspects the goals, which is a far riskier undertaking, since the inspection may well cost you the goals you have built everything on.

[---]

At the centre of nearly all these old exercises sat one discipline, the training of attention, and it is attention above all that the optimised life ruins. The Stoics had a word, prosochē, for a continuous mindfulness of what one was doing and becoming, a steady presence to the moment one was actually in. 

It is the opposite of the divided, metricised, faintly anxious attention most of us now carry through our days, one eye forever on the screen that will tell us how we are performing. 

You cannot examine a life you are not present to, and you cannot be present to a life you are perpetually trying to improve, because the improving self is always half-turned toward a future in which things will be better arranged. The harder we work at optimising our experience, the less of it we are ever actually here for.

[---]

The unexamined life, Socrates said, is not worth living. Our own age has produced a remarkable substitute for it, the optimised life, busy and measured and impressive and somehow still thin. Between the warning and the substitute lies that small and unfashionable stretch of ground where philosophy still earns its keep, not as an ornament for people with time to spare, but as the practice of asking, honestly and while it still matters, what a life is for.

- More Here

We Know Sleep, Exercise & Diet Are Vital For Health. But Why?

Suddenly, the oldest health advice begins to make much more sense. Exercise doesn’t simply boost muscle mass, it bulks up the hippocampus – a key region of the brain involved in learning and memory. It also encourages mitochondria to become more numerous and more efficient. We often imagine we’re training our bodies; we’re also strengthening the ancient energy system that allows our brains to work.

Sleep performs a different kind of maintenance. While we’re unconscious, the brain is astonishingly busy. Memories are consolidated and worn-out cellular components – including mitochondria – are repaired or replaced. So rather than thinking of sleep as simply rest, we can conceive of it, at least partly, as a mitochondrial maintenance shift, aimed at preparing the brain for another day of active learning, adapting and imagining.

Then there’s food. Mitochondria rely entirely on what we eat to perform their remarkable chemistry. The quality of that fuel matters. Diets rich in minimally processed foods provide the ingredients for efficient energy transformation, while diets that continually overwhelm the system appear to make that process less efficient over time.

Seen through this lens, sleep, exercise and diet stop looking like three separate pieces of lifestyle advice and become different ways of caring for the same biological inheritance. What fascinates me most is that this new understanding reaches far beyond physical health. Scientists are uncovering intriguing links between mitochondrial function and resilience, mood, personality traits, and even our social lives.

For centuries we’ve tended to separate mind from body, as though thoughts somehow floated free of the flesh that produced them. The reality is that thoughts emerge from living tissue that must constantly capture, transform and use energy simply to exist.

- More Here

Cultivating A State Of Mind Where New Ideas Are Born

Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid: the state of being alone.

- James Baldwin

One of the easiest things to cultivate but yet most humans never do so. 

An important piece of the year: 

When expressed in aphorisms like this, you almost get the impression that creativity simply requires that you sit down in a room of your own. In practice, however, what they are referring to as solitude is rather something like “a state of mind.” They are putting themselves in a state where the opinions of others do not bother them and where they reach a heightened sensitivity for the larval ideas and vague questions that arise within them. 

[---]

One thing that sets these intensely creative individuals apart, as far as I can tell, is that when sitting with their thoughts they are uncommonly willing to linger in confusion. To be curious about that which confuses. Not too rapidly seeking the safety of knowing or the safety of a legible question, but waiting for a more powerful and subtle question to arise from loose and open attention. This patience with confusion makes them good at surfacing new questions.

[---]

There is a difference between knowing what you need to do (be independent and true to the potential in your ideas) and something else entirely to know how to embody that. Orienting in the right way to your thoughts is a skill. Like all skills, it takes practice. You also need to have a rich mental representation of how it is supposed to feel to embody the state so that you can orient toward that. This feeling is what you use to measure the relative success of whatever techniques you employ.

To slip more easily into the state, many develop strict habits around their work, rituals even.

[---]

Introducing a long delay between when you do the work and when it is shown to the world. 

Thinking of the work in religious terms, as a service to, or a search for, God.

Working with talented and open-minded collaborators, if you have the chance, can be a way to enter the zone.

Work so fast that you don’t have time to self-censor. 

[---]

The mental states where new ideas can be born are hard to open up. And they are continually collapsing. The things you have to do to keep them from caving in will make people frown upon you—your tendency for isolation, working deep in the night, breaking norms. The zone is a place at the margin of society. But strangely enough, this fragile margin is where the ideas that make our society possible come from. Almost everything that makes up our world first appeared in a solitary head—the innovations, the tools, the images, the stories, the prophecies, and religions—it did not come from the center, it came from those who ran from it.

 

We’ve Solved Many Medical Mysteries - Saloni Dattani

Happy Birthday Fluffy

Max’s little sister turned 10 today. 

Yes, I sighed after typing the above sentence… life moving so fast… what an amazing life Max and Fluffy gave me :-) 

Happy Birthday my love! I love you! 

My favorite picture of both of them together; I went to get the mail while both were waiting for me at the door.

Both of them were waiting for me outside the laundry room. Fluffy was just a year old!

Sleeping together peacefully 

Meta Values - 51

In the 21st century, the people beside you before you die are most of them you would meet for the first time a few days ago.  

That is not the weirdest thing. 

The people who made you live so long are people who you never heard of leave alone even seen them. 

If you are overfitting time, love and whatever towards your family and friends; you don’t understand gratitude. 

Having a life long awareness and gratitude for millions of living beings (not just humans) who gave you life, enabled you to experience the richness and beauty of life, and little-mudane things that made your life livable.

Darwin’s entangled web is your life. And mine and Max’s too. 

Happy B’day Garphy!

My little Buddha turned 9! 

He came home on July 30th, 2019 after I met him at Max’s vet during Max’s cancer treatment. 

On one of the worst days of my life, a beautiful gift of life, Garphy came into my life :-) 

Life is impossibly surprising - the timeless lesson Max taught me a long time ago: 

Embrace Serendipity!

Happy Birthday Garphy! 

Meta Values - 50

Wilson’s Law, which states that prioritizing the acquisition of knowledge and intelligence will ultimately lead one to financial success.

What Wilson Law doesn’t say is financial success is only a third order effect. 

The primary effect is that one develops a continuous sense of awe and wonder for all things on this planet and beyond. 

The second order effect is natural understanding the preciousness of life and gratitude for every little moment and things. 

That is a gift anyone can inherit!

Meta Values - 49

One’s culture, religion, family,  sex, ethnicity et al., inherently creates a predictable stereotype and traits. These are so easy to observe and catch in the moment as and when they show up. 

It goes without saying most of these stereotypes and traits are bad. 

The value is to understand this is real, biological,  and work towards slowly eliminating them. It takes months or even years but the good news is they can be eradicated. 

And then looking back one day, one would feel an immense sense of freedom.

  

Lichens - Our Ancient Mentor

They blow like green scarves from trees, crust rocks, frost fences, paint bark, and glow on roofs, tombstones, blue tarps — really anything that will stay still for a bit can be a swell home for a lichen.

Lichens delight, confound and inspire. A thing unto themselves on the tree of life, they have puzzled scientists for more than a century as to just what they even are. One of earth’s most adaptable forms of life, lichens live on every continent and have passed multiple tests of their ability to survive in outer space, even for months.

Beyond their persistence, lichens are productive: They bind and build soil. Work as bioindicators of air pollution and climate change. Produce nitrogen from thin air that feeds the forest floor and wildlife. Hummingbirds and bushtits gather lichens to wind into their nests. Ungulates, including caribou, elk and deer, subsist on lichens in winter, when other foods are scarce.

Lichens provide dyes, food and medicines for people, too, with their antimicrobial, antifungal and immune-support attributes deployed in traditional herbal medicines. Extracts of lichens also are used in deodorant, toothpaste, salves, extracts, teas and perfume.

Self-sufficient, lichens have no roots, no vascular tissue, make their own food and don’t need pollinators to reproduce.

[—]

Quiet and immobile as they may seem, they are actually articulate storytellers. The presence — or absence — of a lichen species, and changes in either, can indicate a shift in air quality and narrate the march of climate change.

And for all their fixedness — lichens are remarkably slow-growing — they are not passive. Some lichens wage mighty battles to define their boundaries, deploying chemical warfare, visible in a black line around their borders, to keep other lichens or their mortal enemy, moss, from encroaching, and even growing right on top of them, snuffing them out.

[—]

It was Spribille who revealed that lichens are not a twosome at all, but actually a ménage à trois, with a hitherto overlooked partner — for some 140 years.

Spribille and his collaborators shared their discovery in a 2016 scientific paper published in Science. Their genetic analysis found that lichens aren’t just the result of a single fungus and a photosynthesizing partner (be it an alga, a cyanobacteria, or both.) They found there also is a second fungus, a yeast, in the mix. Follow-up DNA analysis by Spribille and his colleagues — of 52 lichen genera from six continents — also detected the second fungus. The initial breakout from the one-lichen-one fungus paradigm was not a one-off.  

Scientists are still exploring whether the yeast is truly a symbiotic contributor, or just along for the ride. But even discovering its presence was a shocker, revealing lichens to be ecosystems unto themselves, with complexities that scientists are still trying to understand.

“We underestimated lichens for a very long time,” Spribille tells me. “It is not so much that people in the past got it wrong, as that they were missing a part of the picture, with the tools they had available to them, before the advent of genomics and modern molecular DNA sequencing.”

[—]

“Why wouldn’t they matter?” Goward says of lichens. “There are animals that feed on them, reindeer and caribou would not exist without them, they are beautiful, they color our world, they grow where other things don’t grow, they can live where nothing else can, they have the capacity to grow everywhere.”

And they are that example in nature in which one plus one equals … three. Perhaps that is why lichens have challenged science for so long.

“Science is reductionist,” Goward said. “The study of biology reduces life to its parts, the whole disappears. Lichens challenge that.”

To him, though, it goes much deeper. Lichens provide a window to see how in life things really work.

“It is still gobsmacking, the idea that lichens are a portal through which you look in one direction, and what you look at is the organism, and you turn around and what you see is the ecosystem, and they are a variation on the same thing.”

[—]

The way forward to a better future is an empathic relationship with the living world, Goward says, a future in which we recognize and honor our connections to the earth, and one another. Lichens, he continues, are our ancient mentors in this, reliable truth tellers about how the world really works.

“You can see the whole world in lichens.”

- More Here

Being Honest & Standing Up For Truth Matters

Two thousand years earlier, a North African king named Jugurtha rode out of Rome having just bribed a tribune to shut down his own corruption hearing — then arranged a murder while he was in town, for which Rome’s punishment was a polite request to leave. Looking back at the city, he delivered the greatest exit line in ancient history: “a city for sale and doomed to perish if it finds a buyer!”

That line gets quoted as an indictment of the people who sold Rome. It is worse than that. It is an indictment of the buyers.

Jugurtha wasn’t indicting the Senate for being evil. He was indicting them for being cheap. He walked into the mightiest republic in the Mediterranean, expecting resistance. He found a clearance sale.

There is a line. Cross it, and the arithmetic flips. The people gaming the system start to outnumber the people holding it up. Every honest person left standing starts to feel like a sucker. Then that person stops being honest, which moves the line again. Then the next person adjusts. Then the next.

A city can carry a certain number of crooks just as a body can carry a certain number of parasites. It gets pale. It itches. It makes bad decisions. But it lives. Stable societies accumulate these parasitic coalitions — cartels, lobbies, insiders — the way ships accumulate barnacles, each one small, each one rational, until the hull can’t move.

That is the asshole threshold.

Humans have been walking up to this line for three thousand years. Most societies that crossed it died. But a few — a strange, stubborn few — stood at the edge, looked down, and did something that shouldn’t be possible: they turned around. America itself did it once, a little over a century ago, when the country was more corrupt, more violent, and more for-sale than it is now. So what changed?

[---]

Societies don’t collapse because millions pick up weapons. They collapse because millions approve and normalize cruelty.

- More Here

The Odyssey

Since the movie inception came, I usually watch  Nolan’s movies the very first day. Last night, I watched his latest movie Odyssey. 

From the very first scene I was waiting for Argos and his bond with Odysseus. Although, the movie didn’t show too much about this dog-human bond but that scene when Argos dies did make my eyes wet. 

Max and I are a small drop in this ocean of immense bond between humans and animals. 

The movie is beautiful and conveys an important message on the vanity of war, religion, ideology, and the bottomless pit of human desires. 

Matt Damon playing Odysseus has done a fantastic job especially the final scenes and dialogue which starts with: 

"I had a lot of time to think…”

How To Thinking In Writing!

One of the best pieces I read so far this year.

Good thinking is about pushing past your current understanding and reaching the thought behind the thought. It often requires breaking old ideas. This is easier to do when the ideas are as rigid as they get on the page. In a fluid medium like thought or conversation, you can always go, “Well, I didn’t mean it like that” or rely on the fact that your short-term memory is too limited for you to notice the contradiction between what you are saying now and what you said 12 minutes ago.

When I write, I get to observe the transition from this fluid mode of thinking to the rigid. As I type, I’m often in a fluid mode—writing at the speed of thought. I feel confident about what I’m saying. But as soon as I stop, the thoughts solidify, rigid on the page, and, as I read what I’ve written, I see cracks spreading through my ideas. What seemed right in my head fell to pieces on the page.

Seeing your ideas crumble can be a frustrating experience, but it is the point if you are writing to think. You want it to break. It is in the cracks the light shines in.

When I write, I push myself to make definite positive claims. Ambiguity allows thought to remain fluid on the page, floating into a different meaning when put under pressure. This makes it harder to push your thinking deeper. By making clear and sharp claims, I reveal my understanding so that I—or the person I’m writing to—can see the state of my knowledge and direct their feedback to the point where it will help my thinking improve.

[—]

Once I stretch my understanding thin in writing, I often see holes right away. I start correcting myself and discarding ideas already while typing. I cut ideas that are obviously flawed. I rewrite what feels ambiguous to make it more precise, concrete, unhedged, and true to my understanding.

The flaws I see immediately, however, are only the more superficial flaws. The deeper patterns take a longer time to emerge—because they are further from my established thoughts and so are harder to articulate.

Often, they occur first as subtle emotional cues. As I reread a passage, I notice a slight tension across my chest or my eyes fog over. For some reason, it doesn’t feel right. There is something wrong here. 

These subtle feelings are easy to dismiss (“Eh, words are slippery, I mean something slightly different . . . there is no reason to obsess about this”). But in my experience, it is these subtler problems that tend to open a path beyond my current understanding. I learned this from my wife, Johanna, who will often sit with a draft for several hours, not writing or editing, but simply articulating why something feels off to her. Our best essays have come out of the things she surfaced during those sessions.

[---]

The emotional tone of these questions is, in my head, lovingly curious; I’m not trying to put myself down. I’m out to kill ideas. I want to help them evolve and spill forth more insight. Often this dialogue ends with me changing my mind about several premises and coming to a different conclusion, but the original idea remains the seed—no less valuable for having been proven wrong. It takes creativity and boldness to leap out and form a conclusion, and the part that criticizes must understand how dependent it is on the part that throws ideas at the wall. It is often easier to criticize than it is to synthesize a new position.

[---]

Counterexamples are useful in two ways. Either you find a counterexample that a) proves one of the premises wrong but b) does not change your mind about the conclusion. Lakatos calls this a local (and non-global) counterexample. This means there is something wrong with your explanation. Perhaps you need to change that part of the explanation? Or perhaps you can simply drop it, making the mental model simpler and more general? Local counterexamples help you improve your explanation and get a better understanding. 

Wisdom Of Ronald Sandler

It is terrible that there are no longer enormous migrating flocks of passenger pigeons in the United States or freshwater dolphin pods in China … what is even more terrible is that this is no longer a world for them.

- What Is ‘De-Extinction’ Really For?

Underdeveloped Prefrontal Cortex = Obsession With Childhood Dreams = Mars Delusion

It’s ridiculous people hold on to their childhood dreams when their prefrontal cortex was extremely underdeveloped and neither have a mature view of common sensical reality. Alas, only if they focused on making life on earth a little better for every living being… 

Another reason for kids to give importance to Biology more and not overfit on Physics and Engineering.

Mars Delusion is part of those moronic people who refuse to shed their childhood fantasies:

Zubrin, arguably the world’s most prolific Mars evangelist, appeared on my laptop screen, sitting behind the desk at his office in Boulder, Colorado. His Mars obsession had begun as you might expect for a man in his 8th decade. He was 5 years old when the Soviets launched Sputnik. But while the adults around him seemed terrified by its implications, a young Zubrin saw only opportunity. “We were going to be on the Moon by 1970, Mars by 1980, Saturn by 1990, Alpha Centauri by the year 2000. This is what the future looked like,” he told me.

In the late 1980s, Zubrin was working as an engineer for the defense and aerospace contractor Martin Marietta when his bosses asked him to draw up a proposal for getting humans to Mars. By then, NASA had become a bloated enterprise. As part of the George H.W. Bush administration’s “Space Exploration Initiative,” its planners had come up with a Mars mission architecture so complicated that it seemed like they were “rewriting a play in order to give a part to every kid in the room,” Zubrin told me. Zubrin proposed a more streamlined plan called “Mars Direct,” in which an unmanned “Earth return vehicle” would land on Mars and automatically refine propellant to fuel a subsequent manned mission’s journey home.

[—]

Some of this conviction, Zubrin admitted, was “a question of belief.” But as he continued to summarize his justifications, I found myself thinking back to Percival Lowell at his eyepiece, seeing only what he wanted to see. Zubrin’s framing of Martian settlement as a civilizational imperative gave him the latitude to gloss over its irreducible complexities and dangers in the service of essentially questionable abstractions: that human genius knows no bounds; that our Lebensraum is infinite; that freedom will always prevail against tyranny.

I suggested that forging new frontiers has not always been universally beneficial; the bloodstained history of colonization betrays that it has usually been the opposite. What was it about Mars, specifically, that promised to break the mold? “Is it a foolproof guarantee against folly? No,” Zubrin conceded.

 

An Ordinary Mind On An Ordinary Day

Ask about the unconscious and most neuroscientists will acknowledge its existence, grudgingly, before going on to explain that consciousness is hard enough to study as it is, without complicating the matter by bringing in something as elusive and ill-defined as unconsciousness. Kalina Christoff Hadjiilieva, a Bulgarian-born psychologist at the University of British Columbia, is a notable exception, a self-described misfit in the field. “There is something inherently poetic in consciousness that’s evading scientists right now,” Christoff Hadjiilieva told me during one of our conversations. “Most scientists don’t value the free movement of the mind, because they don’t believe anything good can come of it. They want every effort of the mind to be rewarded, preferably with a publication.”

She recently coedited The Oxford Handbook of Spontaneous Thought, an anthology that includes an illuminating essay on the history of spontaneous thought. It describes the routines of several highly accomplished historical figures—including Darwin, Beethoven, Dali, and Chandler—who achieved great success despite working a relatively short day (four to five hours) followed by lots of long walks, afternoon naps, loads of unstructured time, and long vacations. It is often not until we leave our desks to wander, whether in mind or body or both, that inspiration strikes.

- Excerpts from the book A World Appears: A Journey into Consciousness by Michael Pollan

The Dirt That Refused To Die

For 15 years, Sébastien Fontaine has been trying to kill dirt. The biochemist, who runs a lab at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment, wanted to know how much carbon is released by soil — just dirt alone, completely devoid of life. His team sealed dirt into jars and blasted them with sterilizing gamma radiation. Then they waited for the carbon dioxide released by the soil — a sign of ongoing microbial respiration — to drop.

They waited, and waited, and waited some more: weeks, then months. Under a microscope, the irradiated soil showed no signs of life, but it continued to emit carbon dioxide. The soil wouldn’t stop breathing.

Fontaine’s lab repeated the experiments and produced the same results. Finally, convinced that they weren’t dealing with an artifact of the experimental setup, they set out to find the source of breath in dead soil.

Now, Fontaine and his colleagues have reported that their soil samples continued to consume oxygen and spew carbon dioxide for six years. In a 2025 paper in Science Advances, they proposed that a metabolic process that powers much of life is also possible outside living cells. Their experiments point to how it could work in dirt, absent the living proteins that would typically organize it. If they’re right, some biochemical reactions, such as those that release the energy of carbon-rich sugar molecules, may not be unique to living things. Such reactions — known as metabolism when performed by cells — could even predate life on Earth, Fontaine said.

The experiments show “what happens to biomolecules when they’re left to their own devices,” said Joseph Moran, an organic chemist at the University of Ottawa who was not involved with the research. They’re finding that the chemistry of life is not exclusive to life, he added. “It’s the chemistry of geology.”

[---]

For Joshua Schimel, a soil ecologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Fontaine’s findings were not too surprising. “Glucose naturally, in the process of being oxidized, is going to form some of these Krebs-cycle intermediates,” he said.  Many soils are rich in iron oxides and aluminum oxides, which can catalyze this conversion, he added.

The idea that metals can catalyze biochemical reactions is central to a theory about the origins of life that has emerged over the last decade. Metals such as iron and zinc sit at the core of many of the most ancient enzymes found across life forms. Some researchers, including Moran, believe they might have catalyzed these reactions before life emerged. Studies, including his, suggest that the chemical reactions that break down and construct glucose derivatives, which are normally associated with life, might have existed before the enzymes and genes that enable them in living cells.

“There’s a handful of researchers like myself that think, actually, we should organize our thoughts about life in a different way — that we actually should put metabolism at the base of what life is doing, and then genes are a way of controlling that at a higher level,” Moran said.

Cell-free metabolic reactions could be more common than previously thought and don’t need special conditions to get started, said Markus Ralser, a biochemist at Charité University Hospital in Berlin, who found some of the first enzyme-free metabolic reactions.

“This fits a bit into my thinking about how metabolism started in evolution,” he said of the new work. “If it would be very hard to do, then the planet would not be full of life now.” This idea is complicated, however, by the low-oxygen conditions in which life arose.

- More Here

Heart Of The Beast

WOW! 

It’s not who you live for,

It’s who you'd die for. 

Why You Should Hug Trees & Touch Grass

Trees release a certain chemical, known as phytoncides, which is a natural compound that can protect individuals from disease. When a person hugs a tree, the phytonides are absorbed by the body through the surrounding forest air, enhancing immune system functions.

As an individual hugs a tree, the Natural Killer (NK) cells inside the human body increase, which kill virus infected cells and tumors through the release of perforin, a pore forming protein encoded by the PRF1 (Perforin-1) gene, and granzymes, a family of lymphocyte granule serine proteases which induce potentially harmful cells (Li, 2010). It also reduces stress and levels of blood sugar due to an increase in oxytocin production and levels. Hugging a tree for 21 seconds or more helps elevate oxytocin levels and increase the state of serenity (Asher, 2023).

Similarly, touching grass also helps the overall well being of individuals. Feeling nature and connecting with it helps reconnect with the physical word, while disconnecting with a virtual one. Individuals exposed to a natural environment, such as forests, showed a significant reduction in blood pressure and cholesterol in comparison to those who are not exposed to greenery (Mao et al, 2012).

Therapeutic effects enhance and inspire preventative issues against health risks, including cardiovascular disorders, diabetes, asthma, stroke, and more. Mental disorders, such as depression, can also be healed through nature therapy, as your mood increases after being exposed to nature for a certain time.

Walking barefoot, also known as grounding and earthing, in grass and green spaces helps detoxify the body due to the absorption of negative ions, and it relaxes the nervous system by shifting blood flow to the frontal region of the brain. Walking barefoot for about 15–30 minutes a day can also accentuate sleep quality and reduce stress within the mind and body.

As sensory feedback increases, awareness and control over the body also increases, with greater movement and fluidity in the body. Although there are positive effects to the mind and body, there are also certain negative effects while walking barefoot, including joint stress if moving abnormally, increased risk of injuries, and contact with fungi.

The concept of nature being a vital role for mindfulness and guidance has been prevalent for centuries and is embodied through various cultures. Practices of using nature are found primarily in Eastern cultures and traditions, including India, China, Japan, Indonesia, and more. Trees specifically are considered as a vital source of life in Hindu, Buddhist, Maori, Maya, African, Norse, Celtic, and so many other cultures.

- More Here

Wisdom Of Atisha

The best spiritual teacher is to challenge your weakness.

The best instruction is to strike at your very own shortcomings.

The best friends are mindfulness and introspective awareness.

The best motivating factors are your enemies, obstacles, illnesses, and sufferings.

The best skillful means is to be free of second guesses.

[---]

There are many philosophical systems of both non-Buddhist and Buddhist schools, all of which are but garlands of conceptualization. Conceptualizations are beyond calculation, and they have no use. As there is no time to spare in life, now is the time to seek what is most essential.

Train your mind to cultivate loving-kindness and compassion toward all sentient beings, who equal the expanse of space. For their sake, strive to gather the two accumulations and dedicate all roots of virtue that arise from this toward the full enlightenment of all sentient beings. Make sure that you recognize the nature of all of these as empty and their characteristics as like dreams and illusions.

- More Here

Purnima Devi Barman - One Woman Found A Way To Save The Rarest Stork In The World

The pessimist in me would have thought this would be possible but the optimists in me knew only a handful of people always have (and will) change the world for better. 

Purnima Devi Barman is one of those rare humans. I salute to madam, thank you , thank you from Max and I. 

How one community—and one woman in particular—have found a way to protect the rarest stork in the world simply by learning to appreciate the species and embracing it as one of their own:

As the conference began, Melvin says she was impressed to hear what women were accomplishing, especially in low-income countries. But she was particularly interested when the host of the meeting, Purnima Devi Barman, got up to speak about her work with a gangly and obscure stork called the greater adjutant (Leptoptilos dubius). Once close to extinction, the bird has rebounded in Barman’s home state of Assam in northeastern India. And that success, according to widespread consensus, is primarily because of Barman, who has single-handedly transformed the species from a reviled nuisance to a beloved cohabitant among a surprisingly broad cross-section of people, including government officials, mothers, and people who pick through garbage dumps for a living.

Hearing Barman talk made Melvin want to get involved—an effect Barman seems to have on people. More than a year later, the two women and several colleagues published a paper that looked at how community involvement has helped to advance conservation of the striking storks. Among her most successful strategies, Barman has created an “army” of women who care for injured storks, throw celebratory baby showers for the birds, and weave stork-adorned fabrics for sale.

In contrast with decades of top-down and high-cost conservation efforts, experts say, the driving principle behind Barman’s work is deceptively simple: Saving species requires buy-in from people. Women, in particular, can be powerful partners, even—or especially—when they don’t hold traditional forms of power in their cultures. By including women in conservation projects that have simultaneously changed their own lives, Barman’s work may hold implications for similar efforts everywhere.

[---]

The greater adjutant is not a traditionally beautiful animal, and its lifestyle isn’t pretty either. A member of the stork family, it has skinny, knob-kneed legs, a relatively puny bald head, beady eyes, and an elongated orange pouch that hangs from its neck like a deflated balloon. It is awkward and large, standing about 1.5 meters (5 feet) tall. It is also notable for its smell. Traditionally called hargilas, which means “bone-swallowers,” greater adjutants drag dead carcasses into tree tops, where they eat the flesh and then drop stinky messes of poop onto the ground below. The birds also spend a lot of time in garbage dumps, where they scavenge for food. 

In the late 1800s, hundreds of thousands of greater adjutants lived in wetlands across much of Asia, from Pakistan to Cambodia. But habitat destruction, pollution, poaching, and the loss of their nesting trees pushed numbers sharply downward in the first half of the 20th century. A reputation as a bad omen in many places didn’t help them in the face of these threats. By the 1990s, there were an estimated 400 birds left. They have rebounded somewhat since but the International Union for Conservation of Nature still classifies them as Endangered, with only 1,200 to 1,800 birds confined to Cambodia and two regions of India—Bihar and Assam, where Barman lives. 

Despite the longstanding cultural disgust that surrounded the birds, Barman quickly began to appreciate the storks’ more appealing side. Raised for several years by her grandmother, who often took her outside and taught her songs and stories about birds, she developed a connection with nature that brought her solace during a period when her parents were away. Later, she studied zoology and wildlife biology at Gauhati University, where she earned an undergraduate degree and then a Masters in 2002. Eager to pursue a PhD, she gave in first to family pressures to get married and have children, giving birth to her twin daughters in 2005. She started her doctorate work in 2007, with a focus on greater adjutants.

Aware of the outsized conservation attention that goes to India’s charismatic megafauna like rhinos (Rhinoceros unicornis) and tigers (Panthera tigris tigris), Barman had started thinking about studying hargilas when she saw them in a wetland while doing fieldwork for her Masters. Why, she wondered, had she never seen them in her own village? As she began to collect data, she visited the few villages where they did live. While there, she would leave her phone number so people could call her if they had anything to report about the birds. One day at the end of the hargila breeding season in 2007, she got a call. A villager In the Kamrup District had cut down a giant tree on his property. The tree contained nine nests, filled with hargila nestlings. 

Once at the scene, people gathered around and laughed at her. They jeered and teased her about her concerns. They were angry and mean. “Why are you lecturing us?” they asked her. Why should we care about such an ugly bird?  Would she pay them to care? Would she come live with them and clean up after the birds? Would she eat the birds on her way home?

Trembling with embarrassment and dismay, Barman thought about her daughters, then just 2 years old. On the way home, she made a decision to delay her PhD work. “I thought, ‘No, I won’t do it now,’” she says. “‘First, I’ll rope in all the people. I’ll win the hearts and minds of the people. We will start a people’s movement. And then, only if I’m successful with the birds, I’ll pursue my dream.”

Her plan was to start with the basics: Meet people. Build friendships. Try to understand community concerns. Remembering the comments from men in the village, she cleaned temples to earn trust and show she was listening. Her compassion ran deep. She recognized that these weren’t bad people. They thought they were doing the right thing: ridding themselves and their properties of a messy bird that was a bad omen. It wasn’t their fault that they thought poorly of hargilas. They just hadn’t learned about the value of wildlife.

Meta Values - 48

Most cruelty that humans unleash animals can be captured into following three philosophical buckets: 

1. Qualia Problem: John and Tom have seen roses, and smelt them. But when they try to explain the “rose-ness of a rose” both their internal experiences of rose being different; their explanations can differ drastically or worse they cannot even explain it.  Nevertheless, both John and Tom are both confident about their explanations. 

2. Philosophical Zombie: John has seen roses, and smelt them. Tom has never seen a rose in his life. But Tom is confident and never shuns away from giving a detailed explanation of a rose. 

3. Chinese Room Argument: Neither John nor Tom have seen a rose in their life. But both John and Tom are extremely confident and never shuns away from giving a detailed explanation of a rose. 

Billions of humans have no rudimentary understanding of our fellow animal family members nor they have the epistemic humility to say “I don’t know” and make an attempt to learn about them. 

This self-induced convenience makes them amoral against animals. This is the sad state of our planet. 

The value is: 

Start saying “I don’t know”. 

Next, every living being on this planet is capable of pain and suffering. 

There is no other measure of morality than to ask yourself - I am causing pain and suffering to other animals? 

It is that simple to shift your conscience from being amoral to being moral toward our fellow animal family. 

The Memory Maker

I work in AI and I can assure you these technologies are not magic but just tools with immense flaws and limitations.

I am a human being and I can assure you that I am an organic entity with abilities handed down to me from millions of years of evolution but nevertheless I am an organic entity with immense flaws and limitations.

The core issue which we are embarking into this century is that the people want to monetize these simple AI technologies by just tapping into my evolutionary flaws and limitations and amplify it, 

If you are intelligent and aware then you can use these tools enhance your prefrontal cortex and without giving a dime nor data to the assholes in silicon valley. Only if you are aware… 

A very good piece by Tim Requarth: The Memory Maker

To understand why we’re so susceptible to false memories requires understanding that the brain doesn’t store memories the way a phone stores photos. When you live through something, your hippocampus— a deep brain structure vaguely shaped like a seahorse—encodes that experience by binding together its constituent pieces: what you saw, what you heard, where you were, how you felt. That bound-together pattern is the memory. Over hours and days, the hippocampus replays these patterns, perhaps while you sleep, gradually strengthening their hold in the cortex, in a process called consolidation. What makes these memories so unlike phone storage, and especially relevant here, is that recalling a memory means the brain must partially relive it. The brain recalls by reactivating some of the same sensory and spatial patterns that were present during the original experience. Your brain doesn’t access a stable, static stored memory of yourself at that summer picnic in the park; your brain recreates it by activating some of the same neural circuitry that fired when you were actually squinting in the sun, actually wiggling your toes in the warmed grass. During recall, it fires again, faintly.

The beauty of memory, not as a static storage bank but as a dynamic process of on-demand re-creation, is that it’s efficient. You can access a tremendous amount of information about your past without having to dedicate special storage space to your personal archive. But that efficiency comes with risks. Each time you replay and reconsolidate a memory, it can subtly change. Other things you’re thinking about during recall, how you feel while recalling it, other, similar memories that activate similar patterns of neurons, these can mix and mingle and, ultimately, change the reconsolidation of the original memory itself. And once changed, it doesn’t revert because there is no gold-standard stored version. There is only the latest replay. And because memories are, essentially, reactivations of specific patterns of sensory and other neural activity, that means that sensory patterns alone can get consolidated as memories. This is a false memory. And a false memory, once seeded, benefits from the same machinery as real ones. And the brain’s fact-checker, the prefrontal cortex, arrives late to the scene: the reactivation of sensory and other neural pathways is already underway, the memory reconstruction already in progress, before any evaluation of whether the memory is genuine even begins.

[---]

Piech’s experience suggests that Sora videos could activate spatial memory, meaning that Sora videos also tripped up the brain’s more fundamental systems for sorting real from imagined. “Although it may be disconcerting to contemplate,” as cognitive psychologist Marcia K. Johnson wrote in a 2006 paper, “true and false memories arise in the same way. Memories are attributions that we make about our mental experiences based on their subjective qualities, our prior knowledge and beliefs, our motives and goals, and the social context.” Johnson’s work on source monitoring, which is the brain’s process for sorting reality from imagination, revealed there’s no tag, no stamp in the brain that says this actually happened. Instead, a scene’s qualities during recall—how vivid it is, how spatially coherent, whether it arrives unbidden or requires effort to reconstruct—are what make it feel real or imagined. Memories of actual events are usually richer, more embedded in space and context. Imagined scenes, or recollections of scenes from movies, tend to feel thinner, more schematic. But the distributions overlap, and the brain relies on these imperfect cues to sort memory from imagination.

The trouble is that these cues can mislead. If remembering a synthetic experience activates the brain just widely enough—rich perceptual detail, spatial depth, the feeling of having been somewhere, of having been with someone—it stops registering as fantasy and starts registering as memory. Piech’s recollection of Sora generations were arriving with enough of those qualities to blur the distinction.

[---]

One potential consequence is how these tools could shape identity, at scale. I was particularly taken by a term Deutsch coined: propagandi, or propaganda directed at yourself. If propaganda works by shaping collective memory, propagandi is more atomized, more intimate. You’re the propagandist and the mark, constructing a version of yourself that doesn’t exist, for an audience of one. I called Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams to help me stress-test Deutsch’s speculation. McAdams developed the influential concept of narrative identity—the idea that identity is built from autobiographical memories, that the self you’ll be tomorrow is constructed from the memories you have today. Contaminate the memories, and the identity may shift. When I described what Sora users like Deutsch were experiencing, McAdams said he hadn’t heard of the phenomenon yet, “but a moment’s reflection suggests that it is inevitable.” These AI videos could “ultimately be encoded and reworked as ‘things that happened to me,’ and then perhaps ‘important things that happened to me that are now part of my life story.’” Propagandi, in other words, isn’t just a clever coinage. It names a mechanism for rewriting who you are.

A hopeful read isn’t hard to find. Piech made a K-pop dance video of herself, fluid and confident, moving in ways she can’t. After watching it a few times, she told me, she started to feel like maybe she actually could. Athletes have used visualization for decades; maybe Sora was just a more vivid format. Therapists working with trauma have long known that memory can be beneficially malleable; perhaps tools like Sora, carefully deployed, could help people revise the scenes that haunt them. 

[---]

But something else was nagging at me, in addition to the potential psychological consequences: Even something as intimate as autobiographical memory doesn’t form in isolation. It’s fundamentally social. In a process scientists endearingly call maternal reminiscing, children learn to shape experience into story through dialogue with caregivers, a process that continues throughout life: the friend who leans in or looks skeptical, the partner who remembers it differently, the listener who asks a question that reframes the whole event. Even the distraction level of the listener can affect how well we remember our own memories. In one experiment, a psychologist had participants tell a story to a friend who was secretly distracted. A month later, the speakers remembered their own experience less well simply because of how a listener behaved during their retelling of it. The attentive listener isn’t just receiving the memory; they’re helping to construct it.

Now imagine referencing something your friend doesn’t share, because it never happened. The blank look. The awkward silence. You might question yourself, wondering if you imagined it. You might question them. Or you might learn to stop bringing it up altogether, retreating from actual human social interaction to more AI simulacra of human social interactions, which never push back, which always affirm. The false memory, born in isolation, produces isolation again when it enters conversation.

[---]

Some nights after our son is asleep, my wife and I sit on the couch and reconstruct the day for each other. What he said at breakfast, the weird thing he did with his yogurt spoon, whether the stalling tactics at bedtime were really that outlandish or whether we were both just tired. Sometimes we seem to disagree on the details, even if we were both there. She’ll point out something I didn’t notice, or I’ll interpret something we both noticed differently, or she’ll add a layer of interpretation by connecting his actions to similar actions the day before. The narrative shifts a little, adjusts a little to accommodate both of us, and by the time we’ve moved on we both begin to consolidate memories of something neither of us quite experienced—which, in the end, is the uncomfortable truth: Memory and experience are not synonymous. I used to think of this process as more akin to fact-checking, of sifting fact from embellishment, reality from interpretation. But it’s not quite that. It’s something more meaningful than checking facts: sitting there, remembering them together.

Morel Mushrooms - The Last Incorruptible Thing!

The morel is the Last Incorruptible Thing. You cannot plant them. You cannot buy them in stores. You can only spot them in the wild. Morels demand complete surrender to nature’s whims. They grow for three to four weeks each spring, and no one knows when or where. They pop up like middle fingers to corporate control.

Morels encourage revolt against the digital panopticon. No self-respecting morel hunter posts their hot spots online or reveals their finds in real time. Morels cannot be recorded by Ring or tracked by GPS. They are immune from AI chicanery. Make an AI morel and watch no one care: digital tricks hold no power here. Morel hunters guard their secrets in the analog world: in the depths of the forests and the recesses of their minds. Morels are escape artists, and you escape with them.

[—]

A proper morel hunt requires that you walk the woods for hours with eyes to the ground. The outside world fades into irrelevance, a distant realm of misplaced priorities like mortgages and jobs. In the real world, the morel world, you seek loamy soil, south-facing slopes, fallen sycamores. You go slow. You dodge branches and climb creek beds. You take nothing for granted.

With this knowledge, you learn not only the mushroom but the land. What you can grasp from the crunch of a leaf or the rise of a flower. You sense when the season is starting and when it’s getting too late. You know that you could be wrong, and that being wrong is the most pleasant surprise of all.

[—]

Did I actually find morels in these places? Shit if I’d tell!

I got scratched, bruised, bloodied, and sore, but never bored. My thoughts stayed captive to the forest floor. When grief ripped through me, I retraced my steps, wondering if I’d missed one, and often I had. That’s the mercy of morels: they are reticent by nature, and when they reveal themselves to you upon your return, it’s like getting the do-over you don’t get in life.

Live fast, die young, leave a good-tasting corpse. Morels aren’t meant to last, so you can’t mourn them when they’re gone.

- More Here

Cells vs. Neurons - Wisdom Of Michael Levin

Michael Levin agrees with the plant neurobiologists that neurons are overrated, and that other cells can do what neurons do, just more slowly. ‘Whenever I’m at a conference with neuroscientists, I like to ask them to define a neuron,’ he told me. ‘They list maybe five things neurons can do, and I point out that every cell in the body can do those things.’ By which he means, and has demonstrated, that all cells can communicate (both electrically and chemically), form networks, and store information. ‘I’m not denigrating neuroscience,’ he said. ‘I’m saying neuroscience is widely applicable way beyond neurons. Neuroscience is no more about neurons than computer science is about your laptop.’ The term ‘plant neurobiology’ does not offend him.

- Michael Pollan (via Tim)

Culture - The Word That Fucked Up Our Species

I have written so many times about how almost all atrocities committed against our fellow animal family members is not considered immoral since people take umbrage behind the fucked up excuses of “culture”. 

People use culture to macro bullshit and not focus on micro morality which is precious for life on earth. 

Alex Nowrasteh’s wonderful piece is looking at this monster at a different angle. Different angle but same monster. 

The cleanest test is the divided-country natural experiment. North Korea and South Korea share a language, ethnicity, history, and culture up to 1945. One is among the richest countries on earth, the other among the poorest. East and West Germany diverged dramatically under different institutions and converged after reunification. Mainland China stagnated under Mao while Taiwan, Singapore, and Hong Kong prospered, all four sharing Chinese culture. In every case, the culture was identical on both sides of the border. The incentives, shaped by the institutions, are what changed. The outcome followed the institution, not the culture. Untangling causality is difficult, sometimes impossible, but that’s no reason to embrace a false explanation like “the culture made them do it.”

At its root, the culture discourse is anti-intellectual. Culture is a faux explanation for social behavior and outcomes that have real explanations. Think harder. Use AI to search the literature if you have to because other researchers have probably already written about the issue you claim is just caused by culture. The cultural explanation is the one you reach for when you’ve decided the search isn’t worth your time. Better to remain quiet if culture is the only explanation you’ve got. Here are some examples.

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If a country is poor because of its culture, nobody has to examine the bad incentives facing members of that society. Intellectual laziness explains the rest. Finding the price, the constraint, the institutional mechanism that creates an incentive is hard, but invoking culture as if it’s a magical exogenous decider lets you stop searching. Cultural explanations are cheap to produce, requiring only anecdotes rather than data, prices, or evidence. It feels like an answer because it has the grammatical structure of one. “Japanese people ride trains because of their culture” masquerades as an explanation, but it’s just a tautology.

Culture is endogenous to everything. Claiming culture causes an outcome without first ruling out that the outcome’s causes also produced the culture is circular reasoning. Every cultural explanation must first survive a price, incentive, and institutional audit. Few of them do, but those that do are extraordinary findings, which is perhaps another explanation why so many claim it. Nobody would let economists get away with explaining a recession of high unemployment with the explanation, “It’s the economy.” We shouldn’t let others get away with the equally lazy non-explanation of “it’s the culture.”

 

Animal Research Doesn’t Need Better Messaging. It Needs an Exit Strategy

The problem is not poor communication by researchers, but systemic lack of transparency and accountability in animal labs. You cannot whitewash an industry that is fraught with infractions that clearly document negligence and abuse of animals in labs.

Industry defenders claim that animal research is “heavily regulated.” In reality, oversight is largely dependent on self-policing. The cornerstone of federal oversight is built on voluntary compliance through an “assurance” document submitted by the laboratory. Once this is approved, the federal oversight agency “grants considerable authority to institutions for self-regulation.” Compounding this problem, inspections by federal authorities are infrequent, often occurring only once every few years and are typically announced in advance.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of animals used in experiments—by most estimates numbering over 100 million mice—are not even covered under the US Animal Welfare Act. Internal oversight bodies, known as the Institutional Animal Care and Use Committees, are embedded within the very institutions they regulate, creating inherent conflicts of interest.

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Another common claim is that critics rely on outdated information. But delays in public awareness are largely a product of the system’s opacity. Accessing records requires the filing of formal public records requests that can take months or longer to process. Even official databases lag behind real-time conditions, when they are even available. What is perceived as “old news” is often simply the first moment the public is allowed to learn what has already occurred.

Perhaps the most striking attempt to downplay these issues is the comparison of laboratory violations to incident reports at daycare centers. The analogy collapses under even minimal scrutiny. The harms documented in research facilities—botched surgical procedures, burns, dehydration, strangulation, and fatal injuries—bear no resemblance to childcare incidents.

Even basic “housekeeping” standards are not consistently met in labs. Animals have died due to overheating, drowning, exposure, and unsafe enclosures. In one recent case, dozens of rabbits drowned in preventable accidents. These are not edge cases; they are part of a documented pattern that raises serious questions about the system’s ability to safeguard even minimal welfare.

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More importantly, the conversation should not stop at reform. Increasingly, scientific and regulatory communities are investing in alternatives that do not rely on animal use. Emerging methods like organ-on-chip technologies, in silico studies, advanced cell cultures, and more are now being prioritized by the US FDA and NIH for their ability to deliver human-relevant outcomes. These innovations did not emerge from efforts to defend the status quo, but from recognition that better approaches are both possible and necessary.

Animal research does not need a more effective communication strategy to explain away its problems. It needs a plan to move beyond them. With over 90 percent of animal experiments failing to produce meaningful results for human health, this is a system that is seriously underperforming because it is scientifically unsound. Add to that the failed oversight of millions more animals that can be reasonably cared for, and you have an industry that no amount of reframing can improve. The question is not whether the industry communicates the right message. It is whether the system, as it currently exists, can be justified at all.

- More Here

Fuck… thank god for Max otherwise I wouldn’t have lived with these miserable sapiens and hence probably for past 15 years I haven’t taken a single pill nor been to a doctor. 

Derek Parfit - What Is The Impact Of Thousands Of Small Environmental Or Personal Abuses Over Time?

One particular example I’ve always liked (especially since as a kid I had similar thoughts) provides a vivid illustration of the psychology underlying the dismissal of global warming. It shows that the consequences of our decisions need not occur in the distant future for us to discount them. They can occur out of sight or after so many steps as to seem distant. The example (embroidered a bit here) appears in Derek Parfit’s book “Reasons and Persons,” where he discusses the case of a man strapped to a hospital bed, say by a psychopath, in some indeterminate place with electrodes attached to his heart. Rotation of a dial on the other side of the world minusculely and imperceptibly increases the current in the electrodes and the stress on the man’s heart.

Perhaps a free piece of candy, a pleasant buzz, and a snapshot with the dial are on offer from a mysterious donor as an incentive to anyone in the distant location who twists the dial. Assuming it takes 10,000 people, each rotating the dial once to electrocute the victim, what degree of guilt, if any, do we assign to each individual dial-twister? After all, none of the dial-twisters know the poor man in question nor have they ever been in his part of the world. They might well doubt there is such a man if the situation isn’t clearly communicated to them or if it is ridiculed by a few influential people. Whatever their excuses, however, they are likely to be at least vaguely aware of rumors about the situation. How then do we deposit all these tiny bits of personal guilt into some moral bank account to save the victim. Or do we just shrug and dismiss the significant probability of ordinary indifferent people killing the distant stranger?

The real question of course is, What is the impact of thousands of small environmental or personal abuses over time? In the context of this rather morbid tale of a psychopath, most environmentalists would probably opt to stop rotating the dial or at least to rotate it very infrequently. 

- More Here

Curiosity Is No Solo Act

The Foucauldian assumption that networks of information precondition ways of thinking, doing, and being has an ancient, rich, and still robust precedent in Indigenous philosophy. Rooted in the wisdom that everything that exists is connected to everything else, Indigenous philosophy foregrounds the vast and complex system of relational networks. While Western philosophy, especially post-Enlightenment, has typically emphasized the individual nodes of knowers and knowns, Indigenous philosophy has consistently contributed to a thinking on the edge, or edgework. (It is not insignificant that the English language is 70 percent nouns, while Potawatomi is 70 percent verbs. Or that Western settlers conceptualize land as private property and commodity capital, while Indigenous peoples understand it as a connective tissue in a larger gift economy.) The difference in ethos between piecemeal and of a piece with could not be more pronounced.

In an Indigenous onto-epistemology, one is always coming to know in intimate relationship with other knowers, including not only community members, but also all the components of the earth itself. In “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Potawatomi botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer tells the story of her own Indigenous curiosity. Growing up surrounded by “shoeboxes of seeds and piles of pressed leaves,” she knew the plants had chosen her. Declaring a botany major in college, she soon learned to stockpile taxonomic names and functional facts, all while letting her capacities to attend to energetic relationships fall into disuse. It was not until rekindling her connections with Indigenous communities — and specifically Indigenous scientists — that she remembered how “intimacy gives us a different way of seeing.” Her scholarship and outreach are now focused on honoring this ray of scientific and social wisdom.

What is perhaps most distinctive about Indigenous philosophy is its imbrication of a relational cosmology with a relational epistemology. At the heart of this worldview is “the eternal convergence of the world within any one thing,” writes Carl Mika, such that “one thing is never alone and all things actively construct and compose it.” From this perspective of deep holism, talk of knowing any one thing is “minimally useful.” As such, knowledge is not properly propositional but instead procedural; it is less concerned with knowing what than with knowing how. And its wisdom lies in “sharing” more than “stating.”

- More Here