So I would like to, probabilistically, maximise my set of skills in order to best be able to achieve some kind of ambition I have set for myself. Cutting off my hand will probably not help me, but learning arabic might. Being in a car crash is unlikely to be helpful, but being a marathon runner could conceivably be useful. Both involve pain, but one causes irreversible damage, the other causes an increase of strength if done properly. What is the ideal form of schooling for children (If we take the unlikely view that the purpose of schools is teaching things)? That which increases their ability the fastest, which is to say, the most difficult knowledge, the fastest speed of teaching that they can possibly cope with. The maximum trajectory that they can sustain without losing the grip or their interest in the subject.

Should I do the same in life, then? Probably, but it gets tricky, because life experiences that promise to teach me a lot are often unfamiliar, or dangerous, or otherwise involve pain. As we have seen, it is not the case that pain equals learning, but pain can be strongly correlated with learning. To be more precise: if I become crippled in a car crash, or by cutting off my hand, it is because I received stimuli from directions and with intensities that I could not withstand. Provoke me at a slowly building rate, and I will learn to deal with the provocations and perhaps bite back. Provoke me really hard and really fast from the start, and I will die. And then there are provocation vectors to which individuals cannot adapt in a single generation, for instance, drowning. Species might adapt to this kind of threat over several generations. Is not life precisely that which adapts to changing circumstances, potentials and provocations, in particular potential threats or benefits? But intelligent animals, like humans, are a special form of life. We can select what experiences to undergo, and thus what training to receive. This is how we can consciously adapt in advance when we expect a difficult situation. (Young animals play in order to train themselves for adult behaviour, but this kind of training has been conditioned by evolution over many generations. Are there any animals that train selectively to face threats that they have identified during the same generation, like humans do?)

It is a fact that we cannot predict all the circumstances that we will find ourselves in throughout our lives. So we cannot predict what skills or strengths we will need either. Any one who has some kind of ambition in life has no way of establishing completely beyond doubt that their ambition will come true. They can only work towards reducing uncertainty.

At this point a number of different attitudes emerge. One could take the view that “Life is nothing but suffering. We must learn to cope with it.” Subsequently one could teach that suffering is a thing in the mind, and that training the mind to absorb suffering without feeling pain or becoming upset is our best hope. Either that, or reduce the ambitions so as to be frustrated less often. The goal of this ambition reduction is zero ambition, zero desires and zero expectations. With this mindset, you can never be let down. Nullified resistance, maximum fluidity.

Another view: life presents us with challenges, some of which we may overcome, some of which it is pointless to even try overcoming. A “pragmatist” view that tries to establish a middle ground. Some suffering is worth resisting, some is too much. People taking this view have some degree of resistance, but also a breaking point at which they would accept that “life is hard” and bend according to the circumstances of fate. Maybe they would also be opportunist and take their chances for easy gains when they can, to get revenge on life.

And finally, let’s look at the other extreme view. Nietzsche also said, perhaps slightly less famously, that “only to the extent that man has resisted, has he lived.” If I take this view, that I should resist adverse circumstances maximally and have my way in life, I must handle the problem mentioned at the beginning of this post — I cannot predict the circumstances that will befall me. No matter how strong I am, it is likely that there will be some set of circumstances that might destroy my aims completely, and me in the process. But let’s say that I take the view that some outcomes are less likely than others. I buy into some form of probability, for instance I think that five dice are less likely to all have the number four facing up than they are to not end up in this configuration. What choices should I make to maximise my ability to resist, given that some choices actually do make me stronger?

The morning has turned into a game. It’s me against the city layout, me against my memory, me against entropy and the temporal degradation of my cognitive faculties. The ludic dimension has entered my life again. And soon enough, I find the place I was looking for.

When we have a sense of competition, that a victory against something or someone is possible, our awareness of life is heightened in every way. We pay more attention, we notice more, we become more here and now. The endless simmering chatter in our heads, nearly meaningless thoughts that usually refuse to yield anything meaningful, gives way to absolute focus.

It occurs to me that a society where everyday tasks can be carried out like they are games, victories to be won, might be a more moral society, with greater happiness and life awareness for everyone. In such a society, even if you lose a particular game, you win something else.

For a long time, the level of comfort allowed us by technology has risen persistently. This trend shows no signs of slowing down. One of two things would have to happen: either we reach some point where a fundamental barrier prevents us from extracting or converting certain natural resources beyond a certain rate, and this becomes a hard constraint on humanity for all time, or physical matter ends up being under our complete control. In this latter scenario, which I don’t view as unlikely, we’d be able to convert trash into useful things at our whim, for instance.

This scenario is sometimes referred to as an age of abundance. It may have a large intersection with the singularity, an idea first championed in 1993 by Vernor Vinge, or it may be a consequence or a necessary prerequisite of it. For now, let us focus on the economic aspect of abundance only.

If these things come to pass, one of the fundamental assumptions of classical economics – scarcity – would be contradicted. I would suggest that we are culturally unprepared for this kind of world.

As countries’ economic productivity increases, we are faced with the choice of whether to work less and enjoy the same standard of living, or work as much and enjoy a higher standard of living. My understanding is that people have always chosen the latter.

In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber puts forth the view that the development of capitalism in Europe was largely influenced by protestant values, particularly Calvinist ones. Even though many European peoples today consider themselves to be secular, it is clear that a Christian legacy has left a big mark on contemporary European culture. Simply put, many people only feel proud when they work and feel that they serve a useful purpose to their country. This is why they cannot choose to work less.

In an era of abundance, people would not be needed for the carrying out of most tasks. If they insisted on carrying out the tasks anyway, they would have to know that they were being costly and useless, thereby depriving them of enjoyment – unless we deluded them!

I see a few ways out of this situation.

• Craftsmanship is considered a uniquely human and artistic activity, and people who turn to art and crafts can continue to feel that they are important.
• Some work is fundamentally centered on human interaction and human meetings, for instance care, psychotherapy, hairdressing and leadership. These roles are unlikely to grow useless even as technology advances (purely materially).
• Culture would have to change, allowing people to rest and feel valuable even without contributing to their society’s affluence. If this is possible or not is an open question.

I should point out that the contribution-as-pride mindset is a feature not just of European protestant cultures, but also seems to be one of Japan – though for different reasons. And probably one of many other countries as well.

Philosophers have long debated whether we can perceive reality in an objective manner, or if there is a multitude of subjective perceptions. I am not qualified to enter this debate on an academic level, but I will offer some thoughts from my current vantage point.

Sensory impressions can probably be said to be objective. I have no reason to contest this. Probably, there’s a certain genetic variation in how sensitive our sensory organs are, e.g. degrees of color blindness or sensitivity to high frequencies, but this can be compensated for technologically; with hearing aids, microscopes and various kinds of sensors we can expand our sensory range far beyond what we are born with.

It’s quite likely that when me and my friend look at an object, we will notice different things about it and walk away with different first impressions. If they contradict each other, we return to the object and try to establish who was right. So these contradictions can be resolved by going back to the source.

We tell ourselves narratives about what we observe. Most abstractions are such narratives. For instance, I have never seen a perfect circle or a perfect line, since such things don’t exist, but I have seen very good approximations of such things in the world. Only by going up extremely close can I see that my perception was an approximation. But even though I know this, I will remember my perceptions in terms of these approximations since it’s the only practical thing to do. However, I can still “go back to the source” and establish the validity of my impression.

So with first hand perceptions, and with concepts that are built from compounded first hand perceptions, there’s nothing really contradicting an objective reality or suggesting that such a reality wouldn’t exist. But many objects of vital importance in society revolve around narratives that can not conveniently be examined in terms of first hand sensory impressions. Objects such as impressions of people, political platforms and ideologies, appreciation of art (which, even though it can be reduced to sensory impressions, seems supremely hard to explain in terms of it), and so on. For this reason, I think that the narratives that are most likely to be told in these fields form a subjective reality that is highly unlikely to be disproven or reduced to sensory impressions. By the very nature of these, precise communication between spectators is impossible and people are likely to carry wildly contradictory stories in their heads.

And in such a world, whether or not we can agree on the objectivity of basic sensory impressions, subjective impressions (narratives that will not be deconstructed or falsified readily) will carry great importance. In fact, we have a basic drive to construct these narratives in order to deal with the complexity of everything we perceive. This might change if we in the future can create a perfect mathematical model of the human mind. In this case, maybe some problematic items such as appreciation of art or the meaning of an ideology might be reduced to an objective and verifiable-from-sensory-impressions concept.

It would be interesting to explore the grayzone between concepts that we easily perceive objectively and concepts that we easily perceive subjectively. Are there ideas whose validity can be reduced to sensory impressions, but only with great effort, so that people do not usually do so?

(This post is partly inspired by recent posts by Carl Svanberg, who blogs about objectivism in Swedish. My philosophical views are still in development, and I don’t want to side with one -ism camp or the other as of yet.)

In the Japanese summer, minor cockroach infestations are common. Every pharmacy makes a fortune selling a wide variety of cockroach repellents, traps and poisons.

Cockroaches are interesting from an evolutionary point of view. They are inherently passive and defensive in their approach to life. When danger threatens, they run to the darkest possible place. They seem to  eat whatever is left over by larger animals. It is sometimes said that they would be the only species to survive nuclear fallout. But it turns out other insects, like the fruit fly, have a much higher radiation resistance.

Maybe cockroaches have some similarities with mold, then. Possessing minimal initiative, they are like a chemical reaction of nature that sets in wherever there is some energy gain to be had by consuming and breaking down some leftovers. Their boundary can be pushed away, but banishing them from the surface of the earth would be an impossible feat (and probably undesirable).

Sometimes it is suggested that these days, there is an ecosystem of ideas – “memetics”. Surely, in this ecosystem too, there are large and small “animals”. Animals that feed selectively, and animals that eat just about anything (that is, ideas that can take root in just about any sort of mind). Animals that take initiative and seek to change their environment, and animals that only react, only defend, only hide in the dark.

In daily life, we must be careful so as to not fall prey to the small ideas that hide in the dark. Seek out the large beasts, and hunt them in the light of day.