Journeys and Collections

This is a brief philosophical yet pragmatic conjecture on life. This is not intended to answer the classic "why are we here" but rather what do we do here, and what should we do here.

Life is a playful game of exploration in the hope of finding something worthy and meaningful. Seeing that gives me the feeling of power that lies in enacting the possibilities change can bring. The options change bring dissolve the illusion of permanence. Everything is momentary.

The environment changes but the interpretive patterns we superimpose on it don’t. In fact in my opinion adaptation is only about behavior in response to a change of content in the environment. Behaviors change but the fundamental drives they satisfy remain the same. That’s how I interpret the human condition as mostly constant.

The fundamental drives and impulses shape our behaviors as they come in contrast with nature. I think most of our actions come as a way to cope with our intolerance of some aspects of reality. Nature is infinite, complex, chaotic, uncertain and generally unpredictable and it doesn’t have intrinsic meaning. entropic decay, merge in the surroundings

Humans seem to interpret what is not intelligible as ambiguous and vague. If the matter is important it can lead to distress because of the perceived uncontrollable risk. If the matter is not important it can lead to indifference and boredom. what is completely predictable is also boring. Both are equally strong impulses because their unbearableness leads to action. [1] scarcity

this is what we are running away from, avoid, reject, suppress, pain

novelty is a scarce resource today but of great value

novelty, variance, diversity, curiosity discovery, creation we want order, power for it. and beauty. constant maintenance because of chaotic decay.

this is what we are running towards, search, seek, find, contemplation want, desire, value, cure. satisfaction, hoard, collect this is what we feed off of.

we want responsibility, being irrepleacable. saving the world, being dependable, useful. this gives meaning, we must create it to find it and see it. finding your place. elevating humanity, at the edge pushing the boundaries, redefining we also want to have fun

what we end up with at the end of our lives are two things. the journeys we experienced, the paths we tried, the roads we went down on, the lives we lived. and the collections of people, moments, thoughts, ideas, knowledge, physical artifacts, institutions, creations, discoveries... we encountered along the journey we found valuable. this is who we are.

who we are is the externalization of what is inside. the expansion and embodyment through ownershuip of those collections .

as we encounter these drives we react and we reinforce those reactions each time they get repeated. SThey get soft wired and they become economically convenient. sunk cost fallacy, illuson of permanence and stuck driven by uncertainty

but where does it start?

attention and preferences, from blank slate to probabilistic space of possible behaviors that get strenghtened with repetition reinforcement and reward early environment not controllable > question of free will you become what you hold your focus on, habitual focus builds the architecture of your mind, defaults weight, strength of impression, always on, model prediction distance and surprise hierarchy of importance associative and distributive

we don’t know why we chose something. i think it is because it was more probable, and then we rationalize a reason in hindsight that gets credibility and strength each time the narrative is repeated and validated. preferences, intuitions, infatuations, fascinations, passions, happen because of hidden self reinforcing loops curiosity and noticing

the best narratives are unprovable. the real reasons are hidden and private. people don’t know how they did great things.

but that doesn’t matter. what matter is it knows more than you because it saw more than you, trust it, take it seriously, take responsibility in it, take the prescription it indicates be open to it

taste, want things a certain way, your style it will evolve and become stronger with time.

imitation is great and normal. avoid the mimetic kind. adopt off the shel, steal, copy. make it your own. this is imitative first and creative later.

the question is how much should you change? it is not about fighitng yourself but rather circling around you to work with you. but why should one change? because stagnation leads to boredom and death.

change brings with it risk, but it is an adventure. so you shouold choose change. but why should you change? becayse there are things that you want and things that you don’t want. those come from infatuations, curiosity, ambition,...

firt one should remove the daemon programs. externally injected desires that are not ours. undeclared races that still influence us and decide what we want and prefer.

you shuold decide where things lie in the quadrant of want. starting from the upper left going clockwise this is what you want but dont want to want, want and want to want, don’t want but want to want, don’t want and don’t want to want.

the second and fourth are already aligned. the first and third need refinement. by following the novel trail you become the architect,t the orchestrator, the author. you can inflluence that. old circuits prune if you make them die by atrophy. which means do something else as a replacement.

but you want as ahigh a percentage of voluntary and intentional desire and ambition than imposed ones. what is imposed is what you think you want, it is a cognitive desire. It is not a felt desire, a visceral need that has attractive force.

in fact we don’t care that much about cognitive desires, they are just decisions not pulsions. maybe for social reasons, looking respectable, etc.. When we work towards them and they stress us that can cause the bad kind of stress. being stressed and obligated to do things you dont care about.

changing your desires can be time consuming and not useful. you can do it with forced exposure, novel associations and rewards, and enouch repetition you can override the old one. by making it more probable. but stress can weaken novel associations and make you come back to old patterns. but i think it only matters to get rid of what is stressful and not important. I’d keep the rest as isindiocracies. then avoid environments and behaviors that make you want the things you don’t want.

the problem with those things is that they involuntarily but awkwardly occupy mental space you must think about them even if you don’t want to. so you should put yourself in the position where you can think what you want to think about most of the time.

now we have what we desire for ourselves. what we want to look like. remember it is honorable to resemble what we want to look like. one problem is that this is an ignorant perspective. and that is an advantage.

this is the unknowledgeable man’s idea of a knowledgeable man. but that idea is superficial and incomplete. the unknowledgeable man doesn’t know what the life of the knowledgeable man looks like. how muc htime thinking, how many times frustrating errors all the time, how much time spent reading, etc...

but that is a good thing. some parts of the lives we want are unpredictable. by getting in the fields you can get a good idea of what it can look like in its entirety. But you don’t know if it is for you until you are in it.

I have already talked about the differente between cognitive and felt understanding. cognitively entertaining an idea or state doesn’t eman you understand what it feels like. you may have expectations of how it should feel and it could be totally differnet.

at the start you don’t know what you are good at. you only have some proclivities. you may want external byproducts. you have to take a risk and bet that you’ll like most of it.

you don’t have to have everything figured out in advance discovering that people don’t have everything figured out in advance was a shock plans change all the time. one thing you should be firm on, keeping ambitions big and curiosity wide, they provide direction and force. your life and collections you want.

this is how you can play the adventure in an earnest and positively naive way. naive because you ignore the parts that are not important and focus on the essential.

naive becaue you can go down unpromising paths out of curiosity. and then maybe discover something valuable. so you can waste some time. the paths of curiosity are those of interest. they have the quality of giving you the power of taking infinite pains. the kind of disinterested obsession. ot is not infinite diligence.

the only way to know is to do and become the thing. totally apply all of our faculties to both avoid the despair of uncertainty and those drives. and to address them to impose and maintain order over them. this is how we externalize. this is what we should relentlessly work on, domincate. this is how we find ourselves.

in life one should not just have ends, goals. but also processes, journeys. what lives do you want to live, what games do you want to play. the journey is the game. once you win you can choose to go play another one.

every game is momentary and unique.

Notes

[1] Boredom is underestimated. In myself I see a lot of bad habits that come from boredom.