I've found that I can have a lot of patience and interest in mental work while stoned, but I forget a lot of it after it's done. Weed is a mild amnesiac, and for someone with otherwise very good memory, this is noticeable. This may be great if you're doing something soul-crushingly boring, but a better strategy is to avoid that sort of work to begin with.
IANAN, but I suspect that in your case, weed is helping because of its indirect action on the opioid system, and despite, rather than because of, the characteristically "weedy" effects. Have you self-medicated with any other euphoriants?
It's boring and easy, but it's necessary if one wants to get rid of it. I don't feel like fighting the good fight myself (or even watching it happen), but I'm glad somebody out there is. Really, it's the same situation as with religion.
AFAIK, Shikantaza is only done after you've had a good amount of experience with other, more structured forms of meditation, like counting breaths or following the breath. At this point, you should already have some idea of where you're going, and "just sitting" will be more than just sitting to you.
I would actually advise against the MIT lectures. The authors are much better recorded than live, as it were, and the only videos I could find are of very bad visual quality. The book is written so clearly that it requires no further explanation. But, hey, try them--maybe you'll like them.
Don't skip exercises. All the meat is in the exercises. I think there's a bunch at the end of Chapter 2 that make you write a lot of verbose code, to teach you stuff that you probably already understand if you've done OOP. The ideas explained in that section have since got more than their fair share of popularity in the mainstream. Anyway--I skipped those. But many others I thought I'd skip, only to come back to them later and wish I'd done them the first time.
Saying that meditating is "you just sit" is like saying that exercise is "you just move". You'll get somewhere doing only that, but not very far. Things in life that are simple, we already all do--like wiping our asses. On the other hand, meditation ends up working for some people and not others, and different people require different amounts of time and effort to get anywhere. This indicates that meditation is like any other worthwhile thing in life--not simple.
Yes. Making the Roadster was, according to the founders, a move to compensate for the "weak" and inferior image electric cars currently have, before they start making them for mass market.
I think just about everything anyone believes is false, or at least arbitrary and unfounded. We lack the frameworks to examine the vast majority of things that determine our decisions, and are thus de facto beliefs.
Huxley is sci-fi and not reality, and so are your reasons. If you want to avoid a pandemic, invest heavily in biotech. If you want clean energy, invest in nuclear plants and more efficient energy storage and such. If you want to avoid a nuclear war, invest in infrastructure that will allow the world's poor to create wealth and raise their standard of living and not want to kill anybody.
By instead dumping all those billions into space exploration, you are actively raising the chance of something terrible happening here on Earth, this "basket" whose destruction you consider so nonchalantly.
He's right about the Moon landing being a stunt. But the Mars settlement will also be a stunt. Curing aging--that'd be historic. Creating a drug that will make us all happy and compassionate would be historic. Creating a "first world" country in the middle of an ocean where everyone in the world is welcome, as long as they obey the law and create wealth.
Space travel for our civilization is like a poor person putting gold-planted rims on his shitty car. Evolutionary theory has explanations for this sort of behavior.
Thanks--I'll check them out. I hope it's the kind of stuff that is only called philosophy, but actually falls under the purview of science, which doesn't yet have a framework to deal with it. That's the only kind of "philosophy" I've ever found of value.
You're "not talking about how we build them", but you were responding to my post where I am talking about how we build them. I'm gonna say it again: I don't understand this tendency to shift attention away from the "how"--rather insistently, in your case.
Mathematics and physics are products of the mind, obviously. Mathematicians and physicists do their work by using their minds. They don't channel some divine truth--they merely filter what their mind makes through certain criteria. I don't understand this common tendency, exemplified by your comment, to shift attention away from how mind makes things, to the criteria according to which we filter them before we call them "science" or "mathematics". I've studied mathematical logic, and it has been of little use to me in mathematics. Philosophy of mathematics has been of no use at all. The practice of mathematics can get by perfectly well without that stuff. So maybe it's time to put aside the mysticism, and start looking at how our brains actually make what they make. Especially since we are just now starting to understand what brains are and how they've evolved.
Mathematics is a product of the mind; the mind is a product of evolution; evolution is a product of natural laws. If you want answers to these questions, it helps to look at what we are, exactly, and how we came to be.
In fact "simple" mathematics are not simple at all by any objective measure. Starting with any truly formal system, you need a stupendous number of deductions to get to things like elementary laws of arithmetic, or basic plane geometry. Mathematical proofs are not formal proofs--they are instructions for our brains. Evolution made the relevant parts of our brains the same, so same instructions lead to same results. That's why there's never any argument over whether a proof is correct, once a few people got to study it in detail. This also explains Hamming's observation that when proofs turn out to be "wrong" after math has evolved a bit, theorems are still usually correct. We find a new, better route to the same place in our brain, and recognize the hazards of the old route, now deprecated.
Okay, here is the key bit: if evolution made the relevant parts of our brains the same, that means it has arrived at a maximum, or at least a local maximum. What is the nature of this maximum? Physiologically, there are constraints on the amount of brain circuity our body can maintain. Brains consume a lot of energy, take up space, etc. So naturally, evolution ended up with a design where the same circuity can serve the greatest possible number of functions.
Of course, evolution only concerns itself with those functions relevant to our survival and reproduction. But there is nothing niche about those goals. If some general pattern occurs often in our quest for survival, then it likely occurs often in other quests that evolution never knew about--like building airplanes.
I'm not talking about "most people". I'm talking about some significant subset of smart people who would love hacking, but don't know what it is yet because they weren't given a proper opportunity. "Most people" will follow when programming literacy becomes the new math literacy.
Programming is only an impressive-sounding "skillset" and not a simple skill, like riding a bicycle (at least in its rudimentary form), because of how awful the interfaces are between simple code you write and things happening that make a difference in your life. Maybe this problem will eventually be solved not by a better Linux UI philosophy, but by things like Heroku.
"A better UI philosophy" wouldn't even have to be anything new. It's just the classic modular Unix way--the thing that makes shell scripts so easy and satisfying. It should have been extended to GUI. I would guess that someone tried, but it didn't catch on. The idea is too obvious.
IANAN, but I suspect that in your case, weed is helping because of its indirect action on the opioid system, and despite, rather than because of, the characteristically "weedy" effects. Have you self-medicated with any other euphoriants?