LastThursday

We're all polymaths. It's just that the things most of us gain mastery in (walking, talking, socialising, surviving) don't seem like a big deal. We end up cherry picking what are "good" or "interesting" things to master and applaud people who can do more than one of those things. Mastery also doesn't have an end. So then it becomes a question of just how much mastery is acceptible to congratulate someone on. It's all concensus and fashion. The thing about polymathy is that each area of skill synergises with every other area and there's a multiplying effect. It's clear from someone like Da Vinci that he used all his skills together, not just each one separately.

Of course they're starting from the wrong place. Life didn't start with a cell, that's too complex. Life started with something far far simpler, and then evolution ramped up its complexity. Scientists just haven't worked out what that simple starting place is - and they may never work it out. But whatever it was, it was a self-sustaining chemical reaction that actively maintained itself; robust enough to survive its environment, that's all you need.

Sometimes thoughts bubble up and like a dream and if I don't get them down, they can be gone forever. The thought was about negative spaces or that's what I've labelled it as. The hole in a doughnut is a negative space, in that case the "negative" space is defined by the "positive" space around it - the body of the doughnut. There are a million more examples of this: the silent pause in a piece of music, the space created by the walls of a room. Ever more esoterically: the solidity created by a mime artist, the absence of a loved one, the structure of the atom, religion. There is a sense in which negative space as well as being defined by the positive space around it, is a kind of space of potentiality or possibility. Negative space is also about inference, on which the whole of science sits. Science deals with the positive space of experimentation and the "world out there" and conjures up the negative space of theorems and relationships. We also do science (with a small s) on a day-to-day basis. We're masters of dealing with negative spaces. We can so strongly believe in negative spaces that it's hard to even realise they are negative spaces, we make them our reality. For example, when we read a novel that is entirely made up of negative space, which we can get lost in. The space in a novel is negative because it is based on the positive space of real people and real places and words written on a page. A novel can't be understood without reference to the positive space of the world around us. In that way, the context of a negative space is always that of the positive space around it. You're looking at a negative space right now. This is not a person you're looking at, but pixelated glowing letters. But the illusion of negative space is strong. You attribute aliveness and agency to this negative space, by referencing the positive space of people and world around you - it is no different from the example of a novel. Where do people go when you're not looking at them, when they've gone away from you? They seamlessly slip from positive space into negative space. Their existence has to continue as they transition from one space to another. But the nature of their existence also changes from positive into negative space - we mostly choose to ignore this. Once someone has slipped into negative space, we must infer everything about them and conjure up a story of potentiality on their goings on and lives. Somehow negative spaces are fluid: the negative space of a room can be filled with many different things in many different configurations. Your inference of the negative space of @LastThursday is just this. I inhabit the positive space of Guillermo, but you in turn inhabit a negative space in my experience. So is negative space just projection? Projection, inference, science, gods, a good story, it's all the same. Is there an absolute positive ground for anything? I'd say yes, but it's impossible to get at this ground with the mind. The context for everything is always right there in front of you, that is the positive space, a unified unbroken whole. But all the rules and structure of reality create negative spaces in which we inhabit. Even the very walls of the room are made of negative space, defined in relation to other walls and our ideas of what a wall is and should do: is a window a wall? Should I prefer doughtnuts with holes in or jam? Hmm... To get at the positive space of me, read the above with this music:

Morning music

Electromagnetic radiation. The mind of God. Nothing at all. It varies.

DE·IMPERIO·ROMANO·NUMQUAM·COGITAVI

Sounds of laughter shades of life are ringing Through my open ears inciting and inviting me Limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns It calls me on and on across the universe

You can't know what is uknowable. So everything is always known.

Excellent recommendation @Bazooka Jesus. Jesus is great, just a regular dude, with unregular powers. Episode 8 coming up...

Goodbye art. Putting the hay in the horse's mouth (spin an idiom why not?): Your gentleness became part of me, Your cheeriness my infection, Kiss kiss secret, became: Today's introspection. A hug, a blush, A funeral, And another, Your absence Forever is my absence. L. I'm so sorry.

The smart thing to do is to take in the whole person. You should do it actively not passively. That means instead of someone just fitting what you want, that you encourage each other to open up, and you mould yourselves to each other over time. People change over time, and your perception of them changes too.

One thing I'm constantly striving for when I do my work is a certain aesthetic quality. For outsiders, coding for computers seems inscrutable, like trying to understand what surgeons are doing with their knives and blood and unrecognizable body parts. Indeed even though us coders share a common language, our own creations can be difficult to digest even for our peers. And mostly, only the surface of our creations ever get exposed, those guts often stay permanently hidden and un-inspected. You would think that under such circumstances that coding would lend itself to being an anarchic process, in the knowledge that nobody else will ever examine our anarchy. After all, aren't we more prone to mischief when not being watched? And so it can be. Big IT projects are notorious for failing to deliver either on time or at all. If you're unfortunate to have a team of anarchists converge in your organisation, then you're probably doomed. Most coders don't care about aesthetics other than providing lip service to "coding standards". They just want to get the job done and get paid, their mistakes and inadequacies and chaos hidden forever inside a mountain of logic. I think that once a certain level of mastery is reached in any discipline, one can't help but let beauty into their process. It starts to become jarring to be lax and ugly. That's not say that imperfection is not allowed. Mastery can be about using imperfection to convey "realness" and "character" and even to deliberately play with it. But that is still using imperfection as an aesthetic (and beautiful) device. Rookies are imperfect through ignorance, masters imperfect on purpose. There are many ways in which code can be beautiful. Like anything else simplicity is often key. Coding has a strong tendency towards chaos and complexity. As ever more things are thrown into the mix, each new thing interacts with every other thing. Like using paragraphs and chapters in a book, code is nearly always split into distinct units, which are then strung together into a working program. But coders are free to compartmentalise their code any way they see fit, and some ways are simpler than others. Often jet engines are designed with many moving parts, where a simple crank handle would suffice - usually to justify time and money spent. Not everything is simple however. Software can be monolithic and super complex. There's nearly an infinite regress of turtles resting on turtles from what the user sees and interacts with to what the CPU and hardware is actually doing underneath. It's layers and layers of translation from a human-oriented view of the world, to one dominated by electrons imprinted with information. Most coders sit squarely in the middle of all that: they need to be good with both understanding people and what they want, and understanding what computers can actually do. We need to understand it all, and be fluent in all that complexity. There is a tendency towards subtlety within mastery. If conciseness is simplicity and that is beautiful, then programs written by masters can often look simple but belie their complexity. Even masters have to keep themselves in check when writing code. Computer languages nowadays provide complex operations with very simple lines of code, but sometimes it is more aesthetic and easier to understand to write things out the long way. Showing your working can lend a helping hand to those that have to look at your creation - especially if they are less experienced. Comprehension in code is a high aesthetic and often overlooked. We coders can have a hard time putting ourselves in others' shoes (it's a common trait), which means we find it difficult to appreciate that those 1000 lines of code need to be understood by others. Often and more importantly, code needs to be understood again by ourselves five years into the future. Sometimes we have to scrap incomprehensible ugly code and start again from scratch. Code can be made easier to read from the start, and code formatting is important and luckily this is largely automated nowadays. More important is consistency of style. Every coder has their own style and foibles; one can often tell who wrote which patch of code. Some coders are undisciplined and chaotic in this respect, without a consistent style. Some (like me) are nearly OCD about how code is presented, even if no-one will ever read it except the one who wrote it. More important still is being able to understand what a piece of code is actually doing. There are a huge number of algorithms (i.e. recipes) that can and are used in computer programs. For example one such algorithm is to sort a list of words or numbers. A decision often has to be made on whether to use a standard "off the shelf" algorithm or roll your own. Most opt for the latter because it's more flexible and things can be tailored to fit the circumstances - but often the former is the better solution. Coders will write their bespoke algorithms, but not explain themselves at all! Most of the life of a coder is sunk in trying to understand others' bespoke solutions, often without the original coder being available to ask questions of. My work is cryptic and non-sexy to most people, and even to myself sometimes. But I still strive for some level of beauty and aesthetics and the satisfaction that comes from it.

Isn't that just moving the goalposts? The OP is about the self: "there is free will" therefore "I am a self". A implies B. It's more like a property of Consciousness that is always Now. Never retrospectively, but You as Consciousness can realize this free agency in each moment. It's kind of like a feeling. I suspect that's what all this free will stuff reduces to: a feeling. The free will pattern, if you like, is this: you decide before, act now, take ownership afterwards. I suspect you could program an AI to run exactly this pattern and then have a "feeling" about it.

There is no free will and there is free will. Both are true at the same time. You all know that free will isn't completely free right? And even then what is being willed exactly? If it's just decision making, isn't that constrained by what is being decided upon and what can be done? If it's ownership of "things that happen" then isn't that always done restropectively? How do you know you're not deluding yourself? Is succumbing to advertising, free will? It's a mess.

Sameness and difference depends on what you choose to focus on. If you put two people together there will be a lot of similarities (two arms, two legs and so on), and differences (sex, height, hair length and so on). So you can argue it both ways: everyone is unique but also everyone is the same. It's not a paradox though, because the things that are different are not the things that are the same. It's possible to be both the same and different simultaneously. Your statement that "everyone is the same" is only half the story. The only reason to have the "everyone is the same" idea, is to counter our inherent bias that difference is bad. Difference is neutral of course and so is sameness.

Sorry I was teasing. It's a bad habit. Those pesky English idioms.

Of course there is... It could be math and science or acting and singing or reading a lot of literature. Lost in translation I think.

There's nothing like bilingualism to expand the brain. The trick with learning any language is using it regularly and with native speakers. There really is no better way. There's nothing wrong with learning two or more languages simultaneously - either it takes up double the time or your learn half as slowly. If the languages are similar, say Spanish and Portuguese, then there will be a lot of crossover in terms of grammar and lexicon - which obviously helps. There is some cognitive interference if words are similar in two languages, but it's not as bad as you think: native speakers will correct you soon enough. I think actually, your English will improve.

Come hike in the UK, we've despatched all the bears and wolves. Leave your gun behind. I'm pretty sure @Sabth is not in the US.

Some of my most spiritual moments have been listening to music. I listen whilst working, I listen whilst driving. I dance to music in the mornings. I use music as a time machine to remind me of good times. I use it to block out the world when it's too much. Music rocks! Other times I don't listen to music, if I want a different kind of presence. I hike silently, I run silently, I read silently. Just do you and don't worry.

Don't give up! Find an easier route. Here's some inspiration:

I have no experience with rainforest, maybe others here do? So can't advise on best things to wear. But if it's hot and humid, then light, breathable clothing is best. On a flat 4km should take about 40-60 minutes. If it's taking 3-4 hours, then it sounds like it will be up and down hills and through dense wood. You'll get very tired! Be prepared. Take plenty of liquid.

The longer the walk the more important that is. Even an hour in the sun could give you bad sunburn. An hour in the rain and cold will drain your will to live or worse give you hypothermia if not appropriately dressed. If you get a downpour and everything turns to mud, your life will be hell if you don't have appropriate footwear.

Hiking is the best! Although if you're just starting out, keep the route as flat as possible and distances small say less than 8 km. Build up to longer distances over time. Don't go to places with very changeable weather, fog, cold, snow. Always start your hikes in the early morning, the earlier the better, you want good daylight. Stick to well defined paths shown on a map. Also try to keep to places where you won't lose phone reception - you never know if you might need assistance. If you're following a map on your phone, then obviously you'll drain your battery - take precautions, either an extra battery/power pack and switch to airplane mode when not using it. Enjoy! Hiking's fun.

I keep having a recurring philosophical thought that bothers me. It goes something like this: There are an infinity of numbers. What is this infinity? To dumb it down completely, imagine putting down a pair of underwear. Then imagine putting down another pair on top of that, and then another, and then another. Ok you get the picture. This type of infinity is then actually a process. It is the process of stacking a tower of ever higher underwear. If you ignore the need for a never ending supply of underwear and the need for all that time to do it in, you're left with a process that repeats without end. The process is made of a repeating block, i.e. the action. So what bothers me? What bothers me is precisely this bit: "Ok you get the picture". This is because it is essentially materially impossible to carry out the task, you have never seen it done nor will you ever see it done. You know there is a finite supply of underwear and your life is finite. So how is it possible to understand what the phrase "Ok you get the picture" is actually referring to? How is it we can imagine a process without end, let alone communicate that fact, when we have never in fact ever seen a process without end? I don't have a clear answer to the conundrum. If our imaginations are based in material reality, then it shouldn't be possible to talk about anything that carries on indefinitely. And yet we have a word like "indefinitely". Maybe we imagine a process which carries on for a long time and use that as a proxy for infinity? But I don't think that's the case. We all seem to know perfectly well what "do this forever" means and it definitely has a different sense from "do this for a very long time". Could it be perhaps that we have a native conception of infinity within our imaginations? The more I think about it, the more I lean that way. I don't know if we're generally very conscious that we have it, and it mostly comes out when using language. But I don't think we need language to "access" infinity within our imaginations: it's not a product of language. We can easily imagine stacking underwear forever without talking to ourselves about it! So that begs the question. If we have infinity natively built in, then does or can that infinity have structure? Or are we only able to grasp a purely platonic conception of infinity stripped of any texture whatsoever? Questions questions. If that infinity were to have structure, then we essentially would be able to create and hold in our imaginations entire universes, in one shot, so to speak. Of course to explore that infinity would take the finite parts of our imaginations an infinite amount of time. The whole thing really is a Pandora's Box and it bothers me.