philosophy – WellsBaum.blog

Less fixedly

Assumptions provide fence-sitting answers. They give the impression of solving issues but they’re really just band-aids that make us feel safer. Half-truths also hinder inquisitiveness.

“We must be ignorant of what we are looking for, or we would not go looking for it.” — Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Rather, like a dog with a bone, we should be running off for a half hour and then coming back. The external stimulus has to be interesting enough that even we get bored of it, we revisit it later.

The last thing we want to do is externalize the whimsical nature of life to the certitude of a photo. Life goes on beyond the screen. Memory hinges on context and keeps developing each time the story gets told.

Confidence basks in the chase of uncertainty if only to ensure that the truth remains unfixed.

Raising the level of consciousness

You can’t program a robot to be bored. It runs on doing. You can’t depend on a robot to pursue a half-baked idea when it doesn’t know what stretches tastes.

At the same time, a robot can multiply randomness. Using AI, It can think of thousands of possibilities at once. It is the ultimate prompt machine.

But human ingenuity is unique. The mind knows when to do nothing but smell the roses. Out of boredom, a melange of neuronal interactions blooms the next big idea, even those half-baked.

Innovation is random, like luck. It is the combination of creativity, timing, and good old cocktail of audacity and persistence.

Raising attentiveness also raises the level of consciousness.

Staying connected

shalom-mwenesi-770578-unsplash Details often allude the inattentive.

Our attention sticks to the future, trying to manage unforeseeable events while simultaneously harping on the past.

In other words, the present is filled with more than one single mind and instead replaced with a collection of fragments.

But we can advance human intuition with a slight tweak in focus.

Instead of letting worry and anticipation colonize our lives, we can step into the space between stimulus and response and just relax.

“I needed no telescope except my attention.” — Oliver Sacks

Confident in your own curiosity

Filled with doubts, new ideas nevertheless take shape around secure curiosity.

Instead of resisting the fear, we dance with it and set the brain roaming on possibilities.

You don’t need to know how exactly things are going to play out when you’re effortfully learning. Doubt only adds fuel to churning pessimism.

The smallest egos just want to question, not only for themselves but for other people. They seek meaning rather than pursuing the ephemeral pulses of selfishness.

A love for learning is a choice. And the more you put into it, the deeper your knowledge grows.

The curious mind neither sinks nor floats. It says more with fewer words. All it asks for is a little spontaneity, so it never falls ill to entropy.

One small change

Sometimes it is one small change that makes all the difference. And seeking it makes our aspirations feel alive.

The alternative is adopting other people’s anxiety, locked into a cohesive occupied mind like a flock of sheep.

When you go for it, you should expect to fail but learn a lot too. Escaping the treadmill of everyday life is so much more exciting.

As they say, the best things disrupt your life. It is much better being wide awake chasing ideals than enduring a life oblivious to us.

What imprints the outlook

You have to cultivate everything: awareness, happiness, aloofness, sadness, the yin, and yang.

Nothing comes naturally, although genetics are known to preprogram our inclinations.

People are constantly surveying, digesting the world around them. So they must also decide what sticks and what doesn’t.

When the try becomes a habit, the unconscious controls take over. And that’s when you know that the desired perspective is a part of you.

Floating into thin air

There’s always something jerking at the brain, wooing it into the warp of distraction.

So if you can just concentrate the mind and wield the paintbrush, maybe you could uncover the pleasure of presence.

There’s something about being in the moment with all our flesh that makes realization realizable.

Instead of casting a wide net into the river, we’re the ones being fished back into reality.

Your brain does the walking while the feet adhere. You stroll into your best thoughts like a tourist with fresh eyes.

The ground is near because you are floating in the air rather than swimming with uncertainty.

See it to believe it

We mistakenly believe that we find ourselves through our material possessions. But experiences are what put the bones in the goose. The rest (clothing, tattoos) are just signaling.

We mistakenly believe that speeding up leads to better thought. However, hastiness leads to impulsiveness and myopia. It takes patience to link things together. Information leads to more information.

We also mistakenly believe that certainty is the way to go or it’s not worth trying at all. But fragility is what us unique and human. Jazz musicians work through a whole bag of things before they find the right note.

The imagination bleeds into the world. What we see comes into line with how we want to see it. Everything is practice, a melding together, as one experience, one question, and trial and error lead to the next.

Looking ahead, seeing behind

Stuck in the moment, nostalgic for the past.

How do people run life at a dizzying pace while also wanting society to replicate the 1950s?

Technology facilitates progress yet turns back the clock on thinking. Mobile phones allow anyone with an account to amplify misinformation and weaken the willpower to do good. Even the inactive can recharge into fully blown acolytes.

I always knew we’d be punished as a society for reality television.
— Mikel Jollett (@Mikel_Jollett) July 20, 2018

Reality TV is phony, but it can become all too real with astonishing rapidity. It turns amateurs into professionals, laymen into experts. Evil spreads by way of stupidity, invading human brains the way viruses enter human bodies.

Instead, what we need are more ideas that redirect the running memes in our head and compel us to emerge from our cocoons. The bubble has already popped.

The world we inhabit is the one we think we make.

Like science, it is worth questioning everything that tries to demand certainty. Stuck in a state of ripeness, we are always opening up without ever falling behind.

A mind virus

People like to gravitate toward solutions. They’d rather think they know something than cope with all the anxiety surrounding the mysterious present.

Truth is a mental implantation. In reality, we just believe the story we tell ourselves. Conversely, thinking is a ‘dialogue between the two me’s.’

The curious mind acts like inserting graphite into a pencil through two layers of wood. As they say, genius is one brain with two schools of thought.

Paradoxes are the upshot of freedom. We should feel free to contradict ourselves on a regular basis if it means the latest solution is indeed superior.

In search of the latest best, we triumph over the matter of what’s trending while clinging to what works.

Popular thought can be deceiving. A constant repetition of simple ideas warps new perspectives and new tools. While the mainstream excels in dulling cognition, it is the wise that need no further telescope.

The art of doing nothing

Relaxation is an art, antithesis to the obsession of doing. If we could be immediately present, time would slow down. We’d be able to hear the individual ticks in the clock.

The route to super consciousness is paved with unplugging from the maelstrom of 24/7 news and unnecessary push messages. It is all the distraction that makes us less happy. Dopamine is addictive but ephemeral.

When we’re interacting in excess, we’re missing out on recharging and thinking. Always-on is benign until it isn’t.

When illusion meets reality

How real is any of this, our minds continually intertwined with the screen of irreality. We can only be certain of what can see, surely.

But the computer is an extension of our brain. Technology presents an alternative existence that replaces the status-quo with a broad range of possibilities. We are just beginning to see the amalgamation of mind and machine.

Reality has been in the ‘August imagination‘ all along. But like a parachute, cognition is just now cracking open to double its processing power in collaboration with artificial intelligence and algorithms that are constantly improving.

Technology stretches our eyes beyond optical error, begging for a fresh approach. Reality and irreality will work together to fill in the illusion of an empty calendar as we know it. Looking neither right nor left, the human mind works ahead.

What remains will be worthy of attention.

The fog of the present

Attaching yourself to the coming and going will steal your future. You have to listen to your life and follow its intuition.

Introspection is your observatory. The depths of inner space needs no telescope but your own attention. You can already see far enough.

“You must always know what it is that you want,” the old king had said. The boy knew, and was now working toward it.

— Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

With such belief, landmarks pave themselves along the way. Routines build confidence.

The challenge is in seeing the world as many angles as possible while simultaneously having the courage to act on your own volition.

Like a rough draft, you experiment and reshape it later. It is the spirit that guides you settles you in, on purpose.

Setting sun

telescope science discover world

Whether you set the route or leave it open-ended, you can discover things along the way.

Constraints produce their own magic. They make you innovate based off what you have to play with. But so too do indefinite destinations.

Out of curiosity blooms everything.

The more we know, the more we want to know. We permit our heuristic temptations to guide the discovery process. The rush to fill ignorance with self-knowledge makes us feel alive.

The world is more like a playground than a camp. It begs us to take more information than we need. But in borrowing its widgets, we have to reciprocate to ensure what we put out or reinvent comes back to enrich nature itself.

The nothing special

Look for a way of life, unmoored from staring at the donut hole.

Conversely, the hybrid of work and life is what makes the donut whole.

The game of goal-setting is paradoxically non-interventionist.

You don’t attack the carrot, you chew on it slowly.

The policy of non-engagement holds into force the inertia of nature’s progress.

Overworked and lost in the myriad force of competition and conformity, you inevitably emerge with fewer exuberant efforts and more residual impact.

What remains is essential, remarkably slow, vanished is the hurry.

“No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.” — Virginia Woolf