#the chances of this dude being Tyson was one is a thousand | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

juvoci · 3 years

Text

8 January 2021

This blog can be read in its entirety on JUVOCI.com.

8 January 2021.

One document. One page. Simply thoughts.

But then the question arises: Which font should I write my thoughts in? Every font has its own personality. And where should I post my thoughts? On a blog? On Twitter? On Tumblr? On Instagram? All of them? One of them? None of them? My old school composition notebook which will probably be destroyed in a fire someday?

And then it becomes about someone not reading my writing. What’s the point of writing if no one reads it? But then I tell myself, I should just do it for myself. Read my own writing and I’ll get better at it. And should I promote my writing or is that vain? And is my writing even good enough to be promoted? I don’t want to bother people, offering them a flaming pile of garbage.

And when people tell me they love my writing are they just lying so I don’t feel bad? And when people tell me my writing sucks are they just jealous? Is it all up to me to decide how the world sees me? Is the world what I see it as, and not what anyone else sees, so that only my opinion ultimately matters? Because all is one?

I don’t know.

There are some things you should share with the world and there are some things that you shouldn’t. But how does one know the difference?

Anyways, I want to be a writer. Or... I am a writer...? I’m writing now, so I guess I am...? Uh, well, anyways. Yeah, I love writing. I love words. Typing sentences on the keyboard to me is like playing the piano, conducting a symphony. Language is beautiful. I love the lines which make up letters which make up words which make up sentences. I love how sentences have meaning, but they are also open to interpretation because all language is relative and infinite. There’s no way for me to express exactly what I mean and there’s no way for you to understand exactly what I mean. You’ll interpret my words for yourself, and any certainty you have about what I intended to mean is still just part of your interpretation. It’s an infinite regress, a fractal, beautiful.

I love writing. But here’s the dilemma I have: No motivation to publish anything. Or at least not publish anything in a “formal and edited and professional” way. When I spend too much time “re-reading and editing” my writing, I lose the spark of the original moment in which I wrote it. I lose that muse, that excitement, that inspiration. The moment dies, so to speak. The most natural way of writing, to me, seems to be publishing and writing simultaneously. Sort of like how Twitter works. You write something, and you publish it. There’s no intermediary step. Whatever you write, is published, in real-time. This feels more natural to me, most authentic, most productive. But then there is a fear in me that says “This is too lazy, this is too unprofessional, no one wants to read this crap, you’re just rambling,” blah blah blah... And part of me is like “Yeah, dude, you’re right. This is terrible.” But another part of me is like “Hell nah, fuck that, this shit is dope, you’re writing from the heart, you’re not even editing it, it’s raw expression, it’s dope, and you should definitely publish this and continue publishing everything you write cuz it’s dope.” Lol, and then another voice is like “Yo, I feel like y’all are both wrong. I feel like one of you is being too hard on yourself and the other is being too arrogant.” And then the real me is like “Bruh, I don’t even know.”

See? Now there goes my mind again. “Is that good or bad? Is my writing good or bad? Was that last paragraph terrible and dumb? Am I terrible and dumb?”

It’s such an interesting position to be in because you want to trust yourself but you also don’t want to become so trusting of yourself that you become delusional and blind to the inputs of the external world, but then you think that maybe your hesitation about trusting yourself is causing you to be worse at your craft and thus have less of a chance of being successful in that craft... you know?

But I think that the deepest part of me, my core, my heart, or whatever, wants to trust myself more. I feel my intuition leans in that direction. Because the question still remains: “What if I did trust myself completely? What would become of my reality?”

It’s 3:31 PM on Friday.

Writing Fiction.

Part of me wants to write fiction. I’m so conflicted in this area. I think that creating fictional worlds, fictional characters, fictional stories... it’s all really cool. They are really great ways to explore other worlds and other ways of thinking. But whenever I begin writing a fictional story (and I’ve started literally hundreds — and maybe even thousands — of stories — almost finishing a few of them but never actually finishing one — and certainly thousands of characters... along with languages, planets, species, religions, and more), I always lose the motivation for it before finishing (and usually before coming even close to finishing).

So, naturally, I ask myself: “Why do I lose the motivation to finish these fiction novels?” And the answer has usually been: “Because they’re not relevant.”

Now, I do think that I am quite hard on myself, and I would bet that some of the fictional stories I’ve written could actually be relevant and somewhat successful and influence their reader’s lives... but going back and publishing those stories would feel like trying to relive the past. I’ve moved on from those stories. Publishing them now would be like putting my fourth-grade science project (a “Baking Soda Volcano”) on display. It wouldn’t make sense from a personal standpoint.

I would rather write what’s on my mind today and publish that... which is what I’m doing now, I suppose.

3:53 PM.

There is something really special and interesting about simply documenting my life and my mind. There’s something raw and liberating about it. I’m simply just being me. Not more, not less, just me.

Sometimes I feel pretentious when I’m writing fiction. It feels like I’m trying to escape this world, like I’m too good for this world, like I’m trying to be more than I am, something I’m not.

Is my “real” life so much less interesting than a fictional life? Or could it be that “real” life is in fact the most interesting story of all? I’m starting to believe the latter.

I also haven’t been super interested in reading fiction. Or really anything much for that matter, other than conversations. I find conversations to be the most engaging reading and writing. Because it’s occurring in real-time, it’s a live event, you’re literally engaging with “another being”.

I don’t even have that much interest in reading my own writing. Occasionally I’ll review a few things I posted a week ago or month ago or year ago or whatever... but the vast majority of what I write is never actually read.

Bitcoin / Cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin is really cool. It’s interesting that it’s blowing up now. It has blown up before, but this seems bigger than ever. It’s really going mainstream, it seems. Corporations are buying it, banks are buying it, maybe nations will start buying it soon. Although if nations start buying it then they’re basically forfeiting their own currency, at least to some extent. But I think we should all embrace cryptocurrency. It seems like a great idea. It’s very safe, it’s very easy, there’s a static supply so that inflation and corruption cannot flourish. Sometimes growth takes sacrifice. I think nations should start sacrificing their local currencies for the sake of Bitcoin.

Imagine if the United States of America invested itself in Bitcoin. Imagine the global response. Imagine what that would do to the currency market.

4:05 PM.

I want to be a Thought Leader. I’m eating oatmeal right now, by the way. Oatmeal with fruit and honey and nuts. Good stuff.

Anyways, yeah, I wanna be a Thought Leader. That’s an ambition of mine, I suppose.

What does it mean to be a Thought Leader? Well, first let’s define thought.

What is thought?

Thought is many things, and many more things, depending on how you define it. Generally, I use thought to mean “a woman who has many casual sexual encounters or relationships”, just kidding. Generally, I use thought to mean “idea, inspiration, creation, imagination, realization, literally even the fabric of reality”.

That’s the “bigger” version of thought. However, when I say that I want to be a Thought Leader, I am not referring to that type of thought. I am referring to language. The construction of sentences and the words we choose to use. The meaning we give to words and the way inwhich we use them have a pretty profound impact on our day-to-day reality. I think you’d be surprised just how much your mental and verbal language impacts your life.

This is why we need Thought Leaders. Thought Leaders help keep the collective mind on track. Thought Leaders are masters of navigating the mind. Now, don’t get me wrong, I have a lot of improvement to make still, but one of my talents or skills is certainly a deep understanding of the mind.

Now, some people might call this an arrogant statement. “How dare you claim that you’re a master of the mind and that you should lead my thought!” And, yes, I agree, I understand, it is indeed something of an arrogant statement. But confidence is often confused for arrogance. Michael Jordon, Michael Phelps, Michael Tyson (his birth name is actually Michael, I just googled it)... these three athletes were confidence about their skills and talents. Or were they arrogant? Who cares? This is just semantics. They perform, and that’s what matters.

Well, I perform with the mind, with thought. I understand it deeply. And through this understanding, I’ve cultivated an incredible mind to exist as. And I want to share this gift.

And, yes, like I mentioned, I still have alot of improvements to make. I have nowhere near reached the peak of my mental (or physical) potential. But I’ve already made a lot of progress, and I’m improving everyday.

So what gives me the gall to declare myself worthy of the title Thought Leader? Well, I’ve spent my whole life introspecting, philosophizing, contemplating... and over the course of my life, everyday until today, and so likely for days to come, I’ve observed people suffering by the hand of their own minds. Anxiety, depression, fear — these things plague us.

The problem is that people are afraid of what they don’t understand. I start telling people about the incredible revelations I’ve experienced and they don’t understand and so it frightens them and they try to change the subject. The act of awakening is becoming self-conscious, and some folks just don’t seem to want to become self-conscious. But like Tim Ferriss says in his interview with Guy Raz: “It’s not about who doesn’t understand, it’s about who does.” (That might not be the exact quote, but he does say something like that.) Why focus on who doesn’t understand? You can find endless people who won’t understand. What matters is how many people do understand. One other person? Five people? Fifty? A million? That’s what matters. Expand your network of comprehension, not your perception of misunderstanding.

I understand, though. Becoming self-aware can be scary, especially if you haven’t become self-aware in a long time. It’s kind of like looking in your basement after not cleaning it for 30 years. It isn’t always pleasant if you haven’t done any spring-cleaning, but if you wanna clean the place up then you’re gonna have to face it.

But it’s sort of like... if you don’t jump in, you’ll never get wet... as the old saying goes. You gotta let your mind be blown every now and then. You gotta let your identity shape-shift and change from time to time.

4:34 PM.

I never claimed to be perfect.

4:42 PM.

So what is this “thought” that I’m “leading”?

Firstly, Peace and Love. I believe in peace and love. Now, yes, this sounds corny, cheesy, overly-wholesome... whatever. But, it’s right and true, I believe.

I believe that systems work better when there is harmony. Metallic machines run better when they’re lubricated with oil (I hope this metaphor makes sense because I’m not exactly a “mechanic”). Government and society and civilization work better when there is peace. Imagine if humans all over the planet started working together instead of fighting. Imagine how much time and energy and resources we would save if we stopped fighting against and arguing with each other.

Now, don’t me wrong. I recognize that competition is a huge catalyst for innovation. And I do not believe that we should eliminate competition. However, I think competition is useful for games, not wars. I’ll make a distinction between games and wars: In a society which games, everyone can ultimately win because the stakes aren’t death and utter destruction. Sure, the winners are awarded with a bigger reward, but the heads of the losers aren’t chopped off, their cultures aren’t destroyed, their families aren’t ruined. They can lose, learn from their mistakes, dust themselves off, and try again. And at the end of the day, everyone can smile and have fun and hang out together.

This would be a society built on games, not on war. This would be a more evolved, more enlightened society, in my opinion.

5:02 PM.

Gonna stretch out with some quick exercises like weight-lifting and hand-stands. Be back sometime later.

5:26 PM.

Exercising is so great. Such a great feeling. Highly recommend it if you’re not involved.

And washing your face or body with cold water is super refreshing, by the way.

11:10 PM.

Let’s get back to this Thought Leader idea. I think that’s important. What thought am I leading?

It begins with Peace and Love, yes. But there’s more to it than that. If simply saying “Peace and Love” were the solutions to our problems, then we wouldn’t have any problems, because I just said it. No, our problems are more complex, so just how do we manifest peace and love?

How do we manifest peace and love?

Firstly, it begins with a desire. We have to want peace and love. And it doesn’t seem like this is our current reality. It seems like alot of people want war. Now, I’m not certain that this is true. I’m not sure that many people would actually say “I want war.” But some folks sure behave like they want war. Some folks seem to become excited by the idea of war. Perhaps they haven’t much else to live for? Perhaps they are bored with their current life and a war would shake things up? Perhaps they are prisoners, and hope to escape in the fray? I don’t know.

Secondly, once we decide that we desire peace and love, we must introspect. We must practice self-awareness, self-consciousness, and watch ourselves closely so that we don’t slip up, back into our old violent ways. We must become very careful of ourselves not to resort to violence, and to solve our disagreements peacefully.

Thirdly, now that we’ve decided that we indeed do desire peace and love, and now that we’ve practiced and mastered self-awareness and self-consciousness through introspection and contemplation, we must set collective goals for ourselves, and we must give our collective world meaning and purpose. Why must we do this? Because a lack of purpose causes things (like human minds) to become chaotic, and chaos leads to insanity and forgetfulness, and insanity leads to violence... because the insane person has forgotten the commitment that they made to be peaceful. The mind is designed for meaning and purpose. Without these things, the mind begins to go insane.

But it’s not all just mental. It’s physical too.

In order to achieve Peace and Love, we must alleviate greed. Greed still permeates our global culture too much. A tiny bit of personal greed can actually be good, because it motivates you to achieve more for yourself and your family. But we live in a world today that is permeated by corporate greed and greed at an unfathomable scale. The inherent problem with greed is that the greedy person always wants more. And now we have found ourselves in a world where some people have access to so much wealth, and some people are struggling just for clean water. No wonder there is conflict and violence. Our rich and wealthy family members aren’t showing enough love to those who are struggling. Instead, they would rather flaunt their expensive clothing and cars on Instagram and such. We must remove this greed if we are to achieve Peace and Love.

Some people might say: “World peace is a childish ideal and will never manifest on Earth.” But why? What is your motivation for saying this? Deep down, do you wish it to be true? Do you actually like violence and conflict, perhaps? Are you creating negativity in your day-to-day life? Is the energy of your spirit attracted to negativity like a moth is attracted to light? Is this the best way to live? Perhaps you should make a change?

I believe that world peace is possible, and I will likely continue encouraging it forever.

11:48 PM.

Lately I’ve been feeling like philosophy is kind of dumb. Here’s the philosophy: The universe is infinite. Do whatever you want. But what is philosophy, exactly?

I posted in the Philosophy sub-Reddit asking “What is Philosophy?” Let’s see what they say.

They banned my post. I don’t know why. I’m going to ask the same question in the AskPhilosophy sub-Reddit.

They also banned my post. Kind of ironic that you can’t ask “What is Philosophy?” in “Philosophy” sub-Reddits, eh?

(This discussion is continued on the next blog post for 9 January 2021)

instagram.com/juvoci

1830.co

This blog can be read in its entirety on JUVOCI.com.

#philosophy #economics #cryptocurrency #blockchain #bitcoin

0 notes

theadmiringbog · 7 years

Photo

Occam’s Razor: the philosophical argument that the best hypothesis is the one involving the lowest number of assumptions.

Klosterman’s Razor: the philosophical belief that the best hypothesis is the one that reflexively accepts its potential wrongness to begin with.

“rival claims”: in essence, the idea that the only reason we need a canon is so that other people can disagree with it.

“I’ve never fully understood the references to me being a good guitarist,” thirty-seven-year-old Muse front man Matt Bellamy told Classic Rock magazine that same summer. “I think it’s a sign that maybe the guitar hasn’t been very common in the last decade . . . We live in a time where intelligent people—or creative, clever people—have actually chosen computers to make music. Or they’ve chosen not to even work in music. They’ve chosen to work in tech. There’s an exhaustion of intelligence which has moved out of the music industry and into other industries.”

The concept of success is personal and arbitrary, so classifying someone as the “most successful” at anything tends to reflect more on the source than the subject.

What I think will happen is probably not what’s going to happen. So I will consider what might happen instead.

“If you subscribe to the archetype—which I believe to be mostly true—collectors are outliers who feel marginalized by society, and they were personally drawn to music that reflected those feelings. And now, when people think of the Delta blues, they think of players like Skip James—a guy who made terrifying-sounding records that were not remotely popular or relevant in their time, outside of a few oddball fans and acolytes. But collectors heard them, and they recognized something in that dude’s extraordinary anguish. So he became an emblem.” There is, certainly, something likable about this process: It’s nice to think that the weirdos get to decide what matters about the past, since it’s the weirdos who care the most.

Normal humans don’t possess enough information to nominate alternative possibilities. And what emerges from that social condition is an insane kind of logic: Frank Lloyd Wright is indisputably the greatest architect of the twentieth century, and the only people who’d potentially disagree with that assertion are those who legitimately understand the question. History is defined by people who don’t really understand what they are defining.

Shakespeare had almost nothing do with that. He is remembered in a way that Marlowe and Jonson are not, particularly by those who haven’t really thought about any of these guys, ever.

To matter forever, you need to matter to those who don’t care.

Brian Greene at Columbia University (Greene is the person mentioned in this book’s introduction, speculating on the possibility that “there is a very, very good chance that our understanding of gravity will not be the same in five hundred years”).

I asked both men if there was any chance the current age of our universe will be recalculated again, they both had the same answer. “It will not happen,” says Tyson. “That number [13.79 billion years, plus or minus 0.2] is actually quite stable,” reiterates Greene.

It’s referred to as the Phantom Time Hypothesis, and the premise is as straightforward as it is insane: It suggests that the past (or at least the past as we know it) never happened at all.

...

There are two strains of the Phantom Time Hypothesis, both of which have been broadly discredited.

The first version is the “minor theory,” proposed by the German historian Heribert Illig and extended by engineer Hans-Ulrich Niemitz. The German version of Phantom Time proposes that the years AD 614 to 911 were falsified, ostensibly by the Catholic Church, so that rulers from the period could begin their reign in the year 1000 (which would thereby allow their lineage to rule for the next millennium, based on the superstition that whoever was in power in the year 1000 would remain in that position for the next ten centuries).

Phantom Time inadvertently prompts a greater question that is not inane at all. Granted, it’s the kind of question someone like David Aaronovitch hates to hear, and it opens the door to a lot of troubling, misguided conjecture. But it still must be asked: Discounting those events that occurred within your own lifetime, what do you know about human history that was not communicated to you by someone else? This is a question with only one possible answer.

The fox is a naïve realist who believes the complicated novel he has constructed is almost complete. Meanwhile, the hedgehog constructs nothing. He just reads over the fox’s shoulder. But he understands something about the manuscript that the fox can’t comprehend—this book will never be finished. The fox thinks he’s at the end, but he hasn’t even reached the middle. What the fox views as conclusions are only plot mechanics, which means they’ll eventually represent the opposite of whatever they seem to suggest. This is the difference between the fox and the hedgehog. Both creatures know that storytelling is everything, and that the only way modern people can understand history and politics is through the machinations of a story. But only the hedgehog knows that storytelling is secretly the problem, which is why the fox is constantly wrong.

“One of the exercises I always give my [Stevens Institute] students is an essay assignment,” Horgan says. “The question is posed like this: ‘Will there be a time in our future when our current theories seem as dumb as Aristotle’s theories appear to us now?’ And the students are always divided. Many of them have already been infected by postmodernism and believe that knowledge is socially constructed, and they believe we’ll have intellectual revolutions forever. You even hear that kind of rhetoric from mainstream science popularizers, who are always talking about science as this endless frontier. And I just think that’s childish. It’s like thinking that our exploration of the Earth is still open-ended, and that we might still find the lost city of Atlantis or dinosaurs living in the center of the planet. The more we discover, the less there is to discover later.”

But I note it because this particular attempt illustrates a specific mode of progressive wisdom: the conscious decision to replace one style of thinking with a new style of thinking, despite the fact that both styles could easily coexist.

We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we’ve learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it’s that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not).

There’s simply no prick like a math prick in a sports bar. But those sophisticated pricks are, of course, almost always right, at least about measurable events that (a) have happened in the past or (b) will happen repeatedly ten thousand times in the future. The numeric nature of sports makes it especially well suited for precise, practical analytics. I fully understand why this would be of interest to people who own teams, to coaches looking for an edge, to team executives in charge of balancing a franchise’s payroll, and (particularly) to gamblers. It’s less clear why this is of interest to normal fans, assuming they watch sports for entertainment.

If it turns out that the citizens of 2216 have forgotten the Beatles while remembering the Butthole Surfers, what difference will that make to all the dead people from the twentieth century who never saw it coming? If someone eventually confirms that gravity is only an entropic force, it’s not like concrete blocks from the 1920s would retroactively float.

#But What If We're Wrong #book review

0 notes