MMAcevedo (Mnemonic Map/Acevedo)
A short fiction written as if it were a Wikipedia-style entry about the first successful transhumanist upload. It is an excellent read, and I suspect that it provides a good introduction to the concepts of transhumanist fiction. Even though I'm familiar, seeing it written like this definitely brought new ideas and thoughts to mind for me.
I was pointed to this story by 'Crimes against Transhumanity' on Charles Stross' blog. His post is a bit of a thought exercise and examination on the inherent shortfalls of our legal (and general political) system in a transhumanist world.
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From Bertrand Russel's The Conquest of Happiness:
If you ask any man in America, or any man in business in England, what it is that most interferes with his enjoyment of existence, he will say: “The struggle for life.” He will say this in all sincerity; he will believe it. In a certain sense it is true; yet in another, and that a very important sense, it is profoundly false. The struggle for life is a thing which does, of course, occur. It may occur to any of us if we are unfortunate. It occurred, for example, to Conrad’s hero Falk, who found himself on a derelict ship, one of the two men among the crew who were possessed of firearms, with nothing to eat but the other men. When the two men had finished the meals upon which they could agree, a true struggle for life began. Falk won, but was ever after a vegetarian. Now that is not what the business man means when he speaks of the “struggle for life.” It is an inaccurate phrase which he has picked up in order to give dignity to something essentially trivial. Ask him how many men he has known in his class of life who have died of hunger. Ask him what happened to his friends after they had been ruined. Everybody knows that a business man who has been ruined is better off so far as material comforts are concerned than a man who has never been rich enough to have the chance of being ruined. What people mean, therefore, by the struggle for life is really the struggle for success.
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Bertrand Russell reminds us that telling someone to be happier isn't exactly productive
From The Conquest of Happiness:
There is no arguing with a mood; it can be changed by some fortunate event, or by a change in our bodily condition, but it cannot be changed by argument.
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How Relationships Refine Our Truths: Adrienne Rich on the Dignity of Love
What a beautiful sentiment:
An honorable human relationship — that is, one in which two people have the right to use the word “love” — is a process, delicate, violent, often terrifying to both persons involved, a process of refining the truths they can tell each other.
It is important to do this because it breaks down human self-delusion and isolation.
It is important to do this because in doing so we do justice to our own complexity.
It is important to do this because we can count on so few people to go that hard way with us.
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Lifestyles
Titled 'Lifestyles,' it talks about the mentality with which some people approach their lifestyle, through the lens of a race to sail solo around the world.
Fifty-four years ago this month, in a push for publicity, The Sunday Times offered £5,000 to whoever could sail solo nonstop around the world the fastest. It was technically a race, but that was an afterthought, as no one had ever completed the feat.
There were no qualification requirements and few rules. Nine men joined the race, one of whom had never sailed. Just one man finished, 312 days and 27,000 miles later.
But it was two participants who never completed the race that generated the most news. One ended up dead, the other found himself happier than ever. Both outcomes came from decisions made at sea, but neither had anything to do with sailing.
The two men, Donald Crowhurst and Bernard Moitessier, are astounding examples of how the quality of your life is shaped by whom you want to impress. Their stories are extreme, but what they dealt with was just a magnified version of what ordinary people face all the time, and likely something you’re facing right now.
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In Praise of Pointless Goals
What Larios achieved is what I call a Big Pointless Goal: an aspiration that lacks grand purpose, yet requires substantial effort to attain. (An editor of mine also calls these “stupid quests.”) Many other examples are less extreme. The journalist Kim Cross once attempted 100 wheelies a day for 30 days on her bike. The professional runner Rickey Gates traveled every street in San Francisco. A friend of mine is making a five-foot-long rocking triceratops—think a prehistoric-themed rocking horse—in order to fulfill her childhood dream of riding a dinosaur.
[...]
But best of all, chasing a pointless goal sends you on a journey, and people rally around journeys; a hero on a stupid quest is a magnet for helpers and co-conspirators. Cross, the journalist, never did nail the wheelie, but she won another prize instead—time with her 12-year-old son, who started learning the trick alongside her.
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Objective Reality May Not Exist, Scientists Say
This reminded me of a post I saw on TikTok which brought up that if our shadow is 2d representation of our 3d selves, then what if our daily existence going through time (4d) is a shadow of a 5d... thing? I could see this being broadened to be "objective reality."
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I understood the philosophy after the first few books, but had never coalesced it into words.
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Science Fiction Is a Luddite Literature
Cory Doctorow (futurist and author) dives in on the large misconception when people think of Luddites. Below was a highlighted passage on Medium and it's just, exactly the issue we deal with today. Capitalism drives greed and rewards the haves and not the have-nots.
Instead, the owners of the factories — whose fortunes had been built on the labor of textile workers — chose to employ fewer workers, working the same long hours as before, at a lower rate than before, and pocketed the substantial savings.
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On Aging Alone
Very philosophical on the realities of aging and being alone. The author dives into the difference of solitude and being lonely. Honestly, not the happiest of reads as it makes me think about the inevitable future. Granted, my mindset is not in the best of places today.
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Donald Knuth on work habits, problem solving, and happiness
Shuvomoy Das Gupta went and distilled and collected a lot of advice from Donald Knuth, noted mathematician and computer scientist. I don't agree with everything Knuth puts forward, but a great deal of it resonated with me.
On scheduling daily activities. "I schedule my activities in a somewhat peculiar way. Every day I look at the things that I'm ready to do, and choose the one that I like the least, the one that's least fun — the task that I would most like to procrastinate from doing, but for which I have no good reason for procrastination. This scheduling rule is paradoxical because you might think that I'm never enjoying my work at all; but precisely the opposite is the case, because I like to finish a project. It feels good to know that I've gotten through the hurdles."
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From the Archives: The Evil F-Word: Fine
It's easier to convince us that what we're feeling is happiness, simply because we can't tell the difference. If I'm not in active pain, then I must be happy, right? I must be fine, right?
I originally wrote this post 7 years ago, but it is more applicable today than ever before.
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Mads Mikkelsen, In Conversation
I really enjoyed this interview with Mikkelsen, and I particularly liked this mentality:
My approach to what I do in my job — and it might even be the approach to my life — is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it's a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it's not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That's a very big difference, because if I'm ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something — a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don't know. But at least everything was important.
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I ask any American, what happened in 1492. They will tell me, 'well Columbus sailed in 1492' and that is correct, he did, but that is not the only thing that happened in 1492. In 1492, England and France signed a peace treaty. In 1492 the Borgias took over the Papacy. In 1492 Lorenzo de Medici, the richest man in the world, died. Okay. A lot of things happened. If there had been newspapers in 1492, which there weren't, but if it had, those would have been the headlines. Not this Italian weaver's son taking a bunch of ships and sailing off to nowhere.
Okay, but, Columbus is what we remember. Not the Borgias taking over the papacy. Okay? Well, 500 years from now, people are not going to remember which faction came out on top in Iraq. Or Syria. Or whatever. And who was in and who was out. And, you know... but, they will remember what we do to make their civilization possible.Okay? So this is the most important thing we could do.
The entire clip from Dr. Zubrin's talk is worthwhile, but I especially love the above segment. I haven't fact checked him or anything he said, I don't know if those things did happen in 1492. I have no reason to not believe him, but it's the Internet so giving a bit of warning. But his answer on why going to Mars is so important is just excellent.
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The inverse of 'Occam's Razor' comes from the field of medicine, 'Hickam's dictum'
Hickam's dictum is a counterargument to the use of Occam's razor in the medical profession. While Occam's razor suggests that the simplest explanation is the most likely, implying in medicine that diagnosticians should assume a single cause for multiple symptoms, one form of Hickam's dictum states: "A man can have as many diseases as he damn well pleases." The principle is attributed to John Hickam, MD.
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