Delicate Balance To Understand & Pass On That Wisdom That It May Not Be Wisdom

To make my point still clearer, I shall pick out a certain science book to criticize unfavorably, which is unfair, because I am sure that with little ingenuity, I can find equally unfavorable things to say about others. There is a first grade science book which, in the first lesson of the first grade, begins in an unfortunate manner to teach science, because it starts off an the wrong idea of what science is. There is a picture of a dog–a windable toy dog–and a hand comes to the winder, and then the dog is able to move. Under the last picture, it says “What makes it move?” Later on, there is a picture of a real dog and the question, “What makes it move?” Then there is a picture of a motorbike and the question, “What makes it move?” and so on.

I thought at first they were getting ready to tell what science was going to be about–physics, biology, chemistry–but that wasn’t it. The answer was in the teacher’s edition of the book: the answer I was trying to learn is that “energy makes it move.”

Now, energy is a very subtle concept. It is very, very difficult to get right. What I meant is that it is not easy to understand energy well enough to use it right, so that you can deduce something correctly using the energy idea–it is beyond the first grade. It would be equally well to say that “God makes it move,” or “spirit makes it move,” or “movability makes it move.” (In fact, one could equally well say “energy makes it stop.”)

Look at it this way: that’s only the definition of energy; it should be reversed. We might say when something can move that it has energy in it, but not what makes it move is energy. This is a very subtle difference.  It’s the same with this inertia proposition.

Perhaps I can make the difference a little clearer this way: If you ask a child what makes the toy dog move, you should think about what an ordinary human being would answer. The answer is that you wound up the spring; it tries to unwind and pushes the gear around.

What a good way to begin a science course! Take apart the toy; see how it works. See the cleverness of the gears; see the ratchets. Learn something about the toy, the way the toy is put together, the ingenuity of people devising the ratchets and other things. That’s good. The question is fine. The answer is a little unfortunate, because what they were trying to do is teach a definition of what is energy. But nothing whatever is learned.

[---]

What science is, I think, may be something like this: There was on this planet an evolution of life to a stage that there were evolved animals, which are intelligent. I don’t mean just human beings, but animals which play and which can learn something from experience–like cats. But at this stage each animal would have to learn from its own experience. They gradually develop, until some animal [primates?] could learn from experience more rapidly and could even learn from another’s experience by watching, or one could show the other, or he saw what the other one did.  So there came a possibility that all might learn it, but the transmission was inefficient and they would die, and maybe the one who learned it died, too, before he could pass it on to others.

The question is: is it possible to learn more rapidly what somebody learned from some accident than the rate at which the thing is being forgotten, either because of bad memory or because of the death of the learner or inventors?

So there came a time, perhaps, when for some species [humans?] the rate at which learning was increased, reached such a pitch that suddenly a completely new thing happened: things could be learned by one individual animal, passed on to another, and another fast enough that it was not lost to the race. Thus became possible an accumulation of knowledge of the race.

This has been called time-binding. I don’t know who first called it this.  At any rate, we have here [in this hall] some samples of those animals, sitting here trying to bind one experience to another, each one trying to learn from the other.

[---]

Finally, with regard to this time-binding, a man cannot live beyond the grave. Each generation that discovers something from its experience must pass that on, but it must pass that on with a delicate balance of respect and disrespect, so that the [human] race–now that it is aware of the disease to which it is liable–does not inflict its errors too rigidly on its youth, but it does pass on the accumulated wisdom, plus the wisdom that it may not be wisdom.

It is necessary to teach both to accept and to reject the past with a kind of balance that takes considerable skill. Science alone of all the subjects contains within itself the lesson of the danger of belief in the infallibility of the greatest teachers of the preceding generation.

- Richard Feynman, What Is Science?

The Law Of Entanglement - How the World Works When No One’s Looking

You are not meant to climb endlessly upward. You are meant to root down, open slowly, and turn again toward the light — in whatever form it finds you.

[---]

In the wild, survival is not awarded to the strongest, nor the smartest, nor the most beautiful. It belongs to those who can change.

[---]

Adaptation is wisdom in motion. It’s the art of listening with your whole being — and answering, not with resistance, but with a new shape. 

Take a deep breath. Read this piece. Meditate on what you read. Re-read it. 

Your nonsensical individuality should dissolve immediately or maybe, like most sapiens it might dissolve only in your death bed. 

You should prefer the former because later is like getting an erection for the first time in death bed. 

Good luck. 

After I finished reading this, I looked at Max's photo and tears rolled into my rugged beard. 

Thank you Gonzalo Kern for capturing the essence of "everything" eloquently. 

The law of entanglement

Step into a forest, and nothing is alone.

The tree depends on the fungus. The fungus feeds on the root. The root drinks from the soil, which is made by worms and time and death. The deer eats the leaf, the coyote eats the deer, and both carry seeds in their fur to feed the next season. Even the wind is shaped by the trees that receive it.

This is not metaphor. This is ecology. This is fact. And it is also philosophy.

If nature has a first principle, it is this: All things arise in relationship. Nothing exists in isolation.

Modern thought, especially in the West, often begins with separation — subject and object, self and other, mind and body, human and world. But nature begins with entanglement. With reciprocity. With systems within systems, all nested and interdependent. And the closer we look — through microscopes or through stillness — the more we see that boundaries are not borders, but places of exchange.

A tree is not just a tree. It is a colony. It is a network. It is an intersection of sun and soil and lineage. It breathes out what we breathe in. The carbon in its trunk may once have been part of a volcanic sky or the bones of an ancient animal. The minerals in its bark were once part of a mountain, slowly weathered down by rain.

To live by the philosophy of nature means to begin here — with this deep recognition that you are never alone, and never not affecting.

The heartbeat you feel right now depends on the oxygen made by algae in the sea. The food you eat depends on pollinators you may never see. Even your body is not entirely yours — it’s an ecosystem of bacteria, water, inherited genes, and borrowed air. The self, when seen clearly, is not a fortress. It is a confluence.

And yet, we are trained to forget this.

We speak of independence as a virtue. Of success as something achieved alone. But no being in nature thrives alone. A lion without a savannah is not a lion. A human without a living world is not a human — at least not in any whole sense.

You belong to a web you cannot see.

Your life is an unfolding of countless unseen contributions.

And everything you do — every word, every action, every silence — ripples back into that web.

Nature doesn’t judge. But it does respond. It shows us, again and again, that harmony is not found in isolation but in relationship — and the health of a system depends on the quality of its connections.

[---]

Because true beauty in nature doesn’t ask to be remembered. It asks to be met.

And it does not flatter us. Nature’s beauty is not designed for human pleasure. It has its own logic, its own form of coherence. The lichen’s subtle architecture, the elegance of decay, the eerie bioluminescence of deep-sea creatures — these exist for reasons far older and deeper than our gaze.

To recognize beauty without trying to own it is to step out of the consumer’s posture and into the witness’s. It is to say: I do not need to hold this to be moved by it. It is to participate in the sacred economy of nature, where value is not measured by permanence or control, but by presence and attention. 

[---]

We have wandered far. Through empires and engines, ideologies and algorithms, we have built a world so loud it drowns the quieter truths. In our pursuit of control, we mistook nature for a backdrop — a setting to shape, rather than a wisdom to follow. But the forest remembers. The river remembers. The body remembers.

To return to the philosophy of nature is not to retreat into some primitive past — it is to recover something foundational. A way of being that honors complexity, interdependence, and the deep intelligence that moves through all things. Nature does not argue. It does not demand belief. It simply shows — and invites us to notice.

There is no dogma in this philosophy, no commandments chiseled in stone. Only patterns, relationships, rhythms. The spiral of a fern, the give-and-take of wind and branch, the tension that holds a spider’s web. These are its scriptures. These are its teachings.

 

 

News I waited for 20 plus Years

One of the biggest killers of animals for no freaking reason and just because they can. In the process they have caused a cancer epidemic all over the world to the people who use their household products are now facing the music.

Procter & Gamble PG -1.90%decrease; red down pointing triangle said it would cut 7,000 jobs, or roughly 15% of its nonmanufacturing workforce around the world, over the next two years.

The maker of Tide detergent, Pampers diapers and Bounty paper towels had about 108,000 total employees as of June last year.

P&G executives, speaking at a conference in Paris, also said they plan to trim the company’s product portfolio, exiting some categories and divesting it of some smaller brands in certain markets. The company didn’t offer specifics on those plans. 

 

The Logic Of Buddhist Philosophy Goes Beyond Simple Truth

Let’s start by turning back the clock. It is India in the fifth century BCE, the age of the historical Buddha, and a rather peculiar principle of reasoning appears to be in general use. This principle is called the catuskoti, meaning ‘four corners’. It insists that there are four possibilities regarding any statement: it might be true (and true only), false (and false only), both true and false, or neither true nor false.

We know that the catuskoti was in the air because of certain questions that people asked the Buddha, in exchanges that come down to us in the sutras. Questions such as: what happens to enlightened people after they die? It was commonly assumed that an unenlightened person would keep being reborn, but the whole point of enlightenment was to get out of this vicious circle. And then what? Did you exist, not, both or neither? The Buddha’s disciples clearly expected him to endorse one and only one of these possibilities. This, it appears, was just how people thought.

At around the same time, 5,000km to the west in Ancient Athens, Aristotle was laying the foundations of Western logic along very different lines. Among his innovations were two singularly important rules. One of them was the Principle of Excluded Middle (PEM), which says that every claim must be either true or false with no other options (the Latin name for this rule, tertium non datur, means literally ‘a third is not given’). The other rule was the Principle of Non-Contradiction (PNC): nothing can be both true and false at the same time.

Writing in his Metaphysics, Aristotle defended both of these principles against transgressors such as Heraklitus (nicknamed ‘the Obscure’). Unfortunately, Aristotle’s own arguments are somewhat tortured – to put it mildly – and modern scholars find it difficult even to say what they are supposed to be. Yet Aristotle succeeded in locking the PEM and the PNC into Western orthodoxy, where they have remained ever since. Only a few intrepid spirits, most notably G W F Hegel in the 19th century, ever thought to challenge them. And now many of Aristotle’s intellectual descendants find it very difficult to imagine life without them.

That is why Western thinkers – even those sympathetic to Buddhist thought – have struggled to grasp how something such as the catuskoti might be possible. Never mind a third not being given, here was a fourth – and that fourth was itself a contradiction. How to make sense of that?

Well, contemporary developments in mathematical logic show exactly how to do it. In fact, it’s not hard at all.

At the core of the explanation, one has to grasp a very basic mathematical distinction. I speak of the difference between a relation and a function. A relation is something that relates a certain kind of object to some number of others (zero, one, two, etc). A function, on the other hand, is a special kind of relation that links each such object to exactly one thing. Suppose we are talking about people. Mother of and father of are functions, because every person has exactly one (biological) mother and exactly one father. But son of and daughter of are relations, because parents might have any number of sons and daughters. Functions give a unique output; relations can give any number of outputs. Keep that distinction in mind; we’ll come back to it a lot.

Now, in logic, one is generally interested in whether a given claim is true or false. Logicians call true and false truth values. Normally, and following Aristotle, it is assumed that ‘value of’ is a function: the value of any given assertion is exactly one of true (or T), and false (or F). In this way, the principles of excluded middle (PEM) and non-contradiction (PNC) are built into the mathematics from the start. But they needn’t be.

To get back to something that the Buddha might recognise, all we need to do is make value of into a relation instead of a function. Thus T might be a value of a sentence, as can F, both, or neither. We now have four possibilities: {T}, {F}, {T,F} and { }. The curly brackets, by the way, indicate that we are dealing with sets of truth values rather than individual ones, as befits a relation rather than a function. The last pair of brackets denotes what mathematicians call the empty set: it is a collection with no members, like the set of humans with 17 legs.

Thus the four kotis (corners) of the catuskoti appear before us.

In case this all sounds rather convenient for the purposes of Buddhist apologism, I should mention that the logic I have just described is called First Degree Entailment (FDE). It was originally constructed in the 1960s in an area called relevant logic. Exactly what this is need not concern us, but the US logician Nuel Belnap argued that FDE was a sensible system for databases that might have been fed inconsistent or incomplete information. All of which is to say, it had nothing to do with Buddhism whatsoever.

Even so, you might be wondering how on earth something could be both true and false, or neither true nor false. In fact, the idea that some claims are neither true nor false is a very old one in Western philosophy. None other than Aristotle himself argued for one kind of example. In the somewhat infamous Chapter 9 of De Interpretatione, he claims that contingent statements about the future, such as ‘the first pope in the 22nd century will be African’, are neither true nor false. The future is, as yet, indeterminate. So much for his arguments in the Metaphysics.

The notion that some things might be both true and false is much more unorthodox. But here, too, we can find some plausible examples. Take the notorious ‘paradoxes of self-reference’, the oldest of which, reputedly discovered by Eubulides in the fourth century BCE, is called the Liar Paradox. Here’s its commonest expression:

This statement is false.

Where’s the paradox? If the statement is true, then it is indeed false. But if it is false, well, then it is true. So it seems to be both true and false.

- More Here

Wendell Berry's Words of Wisdom

It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.

- Wendell Berry via Oliver

The Convienient Memory Of Humans & 1.2 Million US COVID Deaths

1.2 million US citizens died of COVID and morons haven't woken up. Worse, they debate about if that count is true, and pick your favorite conspiracy theories. 

It's the habit of mind - what you watch, listen, read and talk becomes actual reality in one's life. Doesn't matter if that is reality outside of one's life. So be careful with who, how, and what you spend the limited time that you have on this planet. 

Scott Alexander has a touching piece on this bullshit: 

Five years later, we can’t stop talking about COVID. Remember lockdowns? The conflicting guidelines about masks - don’t wear them! Wear them! Maybe wear them! School closures, remote learning, learning loss, something about teachers’ unions. That one Vox article on how worrying about COVID was anti-Chinese racism. The time Trump sort of half-suggested injecting disinfectants. Hydroxychloroquine, ivermectin, fluvoxamine, Paxlovid. Those jerks who tried to pressure you into getting vaccines, or those other jerks who wouldn’t get vaccines even though it put everyone else at risk. Anthony Fauci, Pierre Kory, Great Barrington, Tomas Pueyo, Alina Chan. Five years later, you can open up any news site and find continuing debate about all of these things.

The only thing about COVID nobody talks about anymore is the 1.2 million deaths.

That’s 1.2 million American deaths. Globally it’s officially 7 million, unofficially 20 - 30 million. But 1.2 million American deaths is still a lot. It’s more than Vietnam plus 9/11 plus every mass shooting combined - in fact, more than ten times all those things combined. It was the single highest-fatality event in American history, beating the previous record-holder - the US Civil War - by over 50%. All these lives seem to have fallen into oblivion too quietly to be heard over the noise of Lab Leak Debate #35960381.

[---]

Rather than rescue this with appeals to age or some other variable making these deaths not count, I think we should think of it as a bias, fueled by two things. First, dead people can’t complain about their own deaths, so there are no sympathetic victims writing their sob stories for everyone to see2. Second, controversy sells. We fight over lockdowns, lab leaks, long COVID, and vaccines, all of which have people arguing both sides, and all of which let us feel superior to our stupid and evil enemies. But there’s no “other side” to 1.2 million deaths. Thinking about them doesn’t let you feel superior to anyone - just really sad.

This is the same point I try to make in my writings on charity. A million lives is a statistic, but some random annoying controversial thing that captures the public interest is alive and salient - it’s easier to remember a story about a charity that turned out to be corrupt, or offensive, or just cringe, compared to the one that saved 1,000 or 10,000 or 100,000 lives. Even the people who do remember the 10,000 lives have to fight to avoid both-sidesing it - “Well, this charity saved 10,000 lives, but that charity said something cringe on Twitter, so overall it’s kind of a wash”. In the end people average out the whole subject to “Wait, you support charities? But didn’t you hear about that one that turned out to be corrupt? Can’t believe you’d be into something like that.”

I freely admit I don’t know where I’m going with this. If you ask what you should do differently upon being reminded that 1.2 million Americans died during COVID, I won’t have an answer - there’s no gain from scheduling ten minutes to be sad each morning on Google Calendar. I’m not recommending you do anything differently, just remarking how weird it is that this doesn’t automatically come up more of its own accord.

My Anti-Nostalgia Rule , Dalai Lama's Rule & Biology Are Same

Years ago, I encountered a fascinating concept in a book by the Dalai Lama: every seven years, human beings transform into entirely new versions of themselves. This idea stems from the biological principle that our bodies replace virtually all their cells over a seven-year cycle. The person you are today doesn’t share a single cell with the version of you from seven years ago. (This is, of course, a generalization as some cells regenerate much faster and others a little slower.)

There’s something profoundly liberating about this constant state of transformation. We often become fixated on our past: mistakes we’ve made, opportunities we’ve missed, harms inflicted upon us (and by us), or wounds we’ve suffered. But what if we truly internalized that the person who experienced those things no longer exists in a physical sense?

I recently spoke with a friend who was still dwelling on something that happened thirty years ago. “Why do you care?” I asked him. “That was four versions of you ago. That person doesn’t exist anymore. Move on.”

This perspective applies equally to our future selves. The version of you that will exist seven years from now hasn’t formed yet. So why not focus your energy and attention on the present moment?

[---]

We exist in a perpetual state of transformation: cellular, psychological, and spiritual. When we recognize and honor this constant evolution, we free ourselves to live more fully in the eternal now. Adopt the Seven-Year Rule. You’ll be doing yourself a favor.

- More Here

What Pigeons Teach Us About Love

Love is as love does. “There’s no reason to think it would be much different for humans than nonhumans,” says Marc Bekoff, author of The Emotional Lives of Animals. “I’ve known mourning doves”—a species closely related to pigeons—“who were more in love than a lot of the people I’ve known.” To Bekoff, love’s ultimate measure is the presence of its converse, grief.

Apparent grieving exists in the avian world, most notably among greylag geese, in whom individuals who’ve lost a partner display the classical symptoms of human depression: listlessness, a loss of appetite, lethargy lasting for weeks or even months. The same applies to pigeons. On Pigeon Talk, a website of pigeon-breeding hobbyists, anecdotes abound of birds sinking into a funk after losing their mates, and sometimes refusing to take another mate for up to a year afterward—no small time for a species that typically lives for less than a decade.

One of the most moving stories involves mourning doves. After a dove was eaten by a hawk in the backyard of a forum member called TheSnipes, the mate stood beside the body for weeks. “I finally couldn’t stand to watch it any more and picked up every feather and trace of remains that was left there and got rid of it,” wrote TheSnipes. “The mate continued to keep a vigil at that spot though, for many months, all through the spring and summer.”

McMahon noted something I hadn’t considered: There are good and bad pigeon couples. Some are attentive and physically affectionate, constantly stroking one another’s feathers. Others appear distant and peckish. As human love varies, so might theirs. Not every pigeon’s tale need be so romantic as Fly High, Fly Low, Don Freeman’s delightful children’s book about the search of Sid for his mate Midge, lost to him—though only for a while—when workers take down the sign in which they’ve made their nest. Others might better resemble Maud and Claud of Patricia Highsmith’s “Two Disagreeable Pigeons,” regarding each other with pique and scorn, kept together by inertia and habit.

It’s also worth considering whether pigeons might experience aspects of love that we don’t. Could a bird whose basic physiology adapts to changing seasons, who can perceive atmospheric infrasound, and see Earth’s magnetic field, have emotional capacities beyond our own? Including, perhaps, forms of love that are not merely analogues of our cherished feelings, but something unique to them?

- More Here

Tyranny Of Minoritarianism When Attentive Majority Becomes Minority

Something has gone wrong in American democracy. Though our diagnoses differ, the entire political spectrum chafes at the widespread dysfunction. Our traditional modes for understanding democratic decline—tyranny of the majority, corruption, erosion of trust, polarization—all of these shed some light onto our current circumstances, but they fail to explain how policies with broad public support don’t materialize.

While reporting on the democratic terrain in state and local government, I’ve become preoccupied with how easily minority interests are able to hijack broadly beneficial policy goals—often through mechanisms we view as democratically legitimate. Tools developed to push against a potential “tyranny of the majority” have allowed majorities to be subjugated to the will of minority interests time and again. Whether it’s by professional associations, police unions, homeowner associations, or wealthy individuals, majority rule has repeatedly been hijacked.

Steve Teles, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins University, has a similar diagnosis. In a new essay titled “Minoritarianism Is Everywhere,” he argues that America’s democratic deficits require a serious rethinking of liberal governance and values.

Jerusalem Demsas: We’re used to thinking about the tyranny of the majority. We don’t have to imagine what happens when majority voices vote to trample on individual rights.

That fear so animated the Founding Fathers that they designed a system to restrain it: a bicameral legislature with one chamber—the Senate—insulated from electoral pressure by staggered six-year terms, and lifetime appointments for judges to shield them from the shifting tides of public opinion.

They spent far less time thinking about the opposite problem: tyranny of the minority.

Demsas: Yet today, much of my own work is thinking through the ways that well-organized interest groups and strategically placed individuals have managed to take hold of the systems of power throughout government and enact their minoritarian preferences.

[---]

Demsas: So you’ve recently written an essay warning us about the tyranny of the minority. Do you think that the Founders were wrong about their assessment, or do you think that something has changed?

Teles: So there’s kind of two stories you can tell about this. One is: The government just does a lot more than it used to. A lot of our system was designed to keep government from doing very much. It was designed to slow the government on the way up.

And one thing I often tell my conservative friends is that separation of powers has, and a lot of the other devices that the framers created, a kind of perverse effect on the way down. Once you’ve already built a large government up, all of those systems are also a brake on trying to reverse it. So it may be that having separation of powers means you have to have a much larger majority in order to create new government programs. But all those same separation-of-power systems also are an obstacle to cutting them later on, which is one of the reasons, for example, that DOGE is having to do all these things that are of, I’ll say, marginal constitutionality—

Demsas: Questionable legality? Yeah.

Teles: —because they can’t actually pass things through the separation-of-power system that the Founders created. So they’re trying to do it through a sort of soft authoritarianism. So that’s one thing, right? One thing is that the Founders didn’t anticipate that we’d have a government as big and as sort of into everybody’s business as we have now.

And the other thing, and this was something that Mancur Olson, the economist from the University of Maryland (go Terps), said a few decades ago, which is that one of the things that Founders didn’t really count on was concentrated interest—that one of the basic problems of democracy is that, in many cases, you actually can dominate government if you have a very concentrated interest, which gives you disproportionate attention, and that democracy is really not a system that lets the majority govern. It’s the system that allows the attentive majority to govern. And the attentive majority is a lot smaller than the actual majority.

And that also is important if what you mostly want to do is to keep things from happening, right? So when we talk about—a lot of the things that you write about in your own work are about people stopping things, obstructing things. And so when you combine the fact that in our system it’s easier to obstruct than it is to create—and again, you go back to all the systems of separation of powers, and we can talk about all the other forms of participation that got layered on top of that—all of those are wired up for obstruction. And when you combine obstruction plus concentrated participation and concentrated attention, you have a formula for allowing often very small minorities to dominate government.

- More Here

Muscle Memory Isn’t What You Think It Is

Almost two decades later, Adam teaches and runs a lab at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo. In 2018, his research group was the first in the world to show that human skeletal muscle possesses an epigenetic memory of muscle growth after exercise.

Epigenetic refers to changes in gene expression that are caused by behavior and environment. The genes themselves aren’t changed, but the way they work is. When you lift weights, for instance, small molecules called methyl groups detach from the outside of certain genes, making them more likely to turn on and produce proteins that affect muscle growth. Those changes persist; if you start lifting weights again, you’ll add muscle mass more quickly than before. In other words, your muscles remember how to do it: They have a lasting molecular memory of past exercise that makes them primed to respond to exercise, even after a months-long pause. (Cellular muscle memory, on the other hand, works a little differently than epigenetic muscle memory. Exercise stimulates muscle stem cells to contribute their nuclei to muscle growth and repair, and cellular muscle memory refers to when those nuclei stick around for a while in the muscle fibers—even after periods of inactivity—and help accelerate the return to growth once you start training again.)

Athletes have always known this to be true, at least anecdotally. After periods of injury, as with a torn ACL, they notice that it’s fairly easy to regain the muscle strength they lost. The joints, though, are another story.

- More Here