Play

It sucks that the notion of "play" -- as in free-associating, undirected and creative/lateral activity -- sort of disappears as an adult. Perhaps it also contributes to a loss of neuroplasticity, weakening of lateral thinking, and other cognitive changes.

I'd love to be able to reclaim the notion of play, but I honestly don't know how. Why do we look down on (adults doing) it? Are we so captivated by purpose, structure, and certainty that we fear anything outside of that framework, or view it as social deviancy? Is it the association with childhood and immaturity? Are there differences along Western and Eastern modes of thought?

But counterargument: Adults play, just in more "advanced" ways. We've exhausted the top-level stuff in breadth, and now we play with deeper things, which means hobbies, sports. 

I agree on some level, but I still think that there's something lacking even as we do pick up hobbies. In following hobbies, we are still purposeful. We still constrain our own state spaces, and direct our activities, coloring them with some form of purpose or ruleset.  

Play and Risk Management

Perhaps it's the adult responsibilities, the singular notion of survival and reproduction that naturally constrains us. Therefore, we must adopt a purpose-oriented, proof-seeking, constrained-space mindset. 

The exercise is to get out of that mindset for at least some time. It seems difficult for adults. I'd imagine that for particularly conscientious people it is more difficult.  I think order arises out of risk management, as order and structure induce proof and certainty. i believe it can be mathematically modeled as an optimal strategy. So this conscientious attitude likely is a defense against scarcity. It would explain the conscientiousness paradox. On the flip side, abundance and lack of scarcity gives us room to optimize and explore, and break more constraints. 

Play and Mindfulness

It's well known that there's a link between meditation and neuroplasticity. An element of mindfulness is a sort of "emptying" of thoughts. From another perspective, this is analogous to removing constraints, and expanding the space of possibilities (state space of mind-states?). A core function of play is some degree of detachment from purpose. Meditation explores this concept to the end in its concept of "emptying". 

Play and Art

Art is expression, and expression requires some degree of expression. There are, of course, self-imposed constraints when it comes to art, since there is often a message that requires conveyance. But the key that connects play and art is the degree of freedom allowed within both. Play can be seen as a form of art with the purpose of expressing joy, and art can be seen as a constrained form of message-passing play. 

Wants, Goals, and Objectives

How do we want things? There's probably some sort of neuroscientific "explanation" for it, in the sense that there is a granular model that fits the data around the phenomenon of wanting things. 

The idea of goals on the other hand seems much more immediate, tangible. We don't need psychology or neuroscience for this, because goals follow logical structure. A goal can be thought of as a set of outcomes. So goals can be related to each other by implication, as in the fulfillment of one goal can imply the fulfillment of another. So you can think of goals being ordered by this relation, creating some kind of goal-ordering, with goals and sub-goals and sub-sub-goals. 

Goals and wants are related in the sense that we can want a goal. 

Can we say something else regarding goals and wants? I feel that the best, or "true" goal in a sense, should be one that guides us to optimize for... something. Prevents mistakes, shortsightedness? Gives us a sense of "global" purpose, rather than stumbling around, following our wants at the particular moment. There's a sense of "locality" in the latter. It's like solving an optimization problem by gradient descent, but the objective function isn't known, and somebody has to whisper you the gradients for wherever you are that point in time.

Conjecture. Regret-freeness model. 

We seek to find a goal, or goals X such that fulfilling this X will provide us "exactly what we want", in the sense that we do not want any goal Y that contradicts X. 

Re-orientation clause: If ever we do find ourselves wanting such a goal Y, we regard this as a sharp state-change, a significant re-orientation of wants. 

It's not clear to me yet what picture I'm trying to paint here. The model isn't perfect, I think. The re-orientation clause seems to powerful, because you could invoke it quite liberally. And I need to work out whether time has got something to do with this. But if the model works, it should be pretty obvious when re-orientation invocations are "weird"... the model can always be fit, but there are some implicit rules on how to fit it, I think. 

I have a feeling that neuroscience and psychology are going to be an inexorable part of the analysis. If not directly part of the theory, at least something to draw inspiration and perspective from. 

I wrote earlier about how wants are essentially derived from basic human needs, even though they may be inaccurate, biased, unhealthy. Perhaps this gives us perspective; wants are a manifestation of a chemical algorithm that points our arrow to satisfy... well, some biological directive, in the immediate, but survival and reproduction I suppose, in the general. 

The above makes me want to ascribe "want" a lot less philosophical import... it's no longer very abstract or mystical. It's more or less a biological algorithm. Goals, on the other hand, are purely analytical. 

we don't solve our problems, we outgrow them

There are a couple of ways to understand a pie. 

Is pie = filling + crust? 

Or is pie = slice 1 + slice 2 + ... + slice 8? 

Say, how do you honestly answer somebody who asks the following:

• "I want to bake a pie, but should I bake slice 1 first or slice 8 first?"
• "Should I eat the filling first or the crust first?" 

Really think about it.

I think the immediate, natural response is not, "Well, technically, you bake all slices at once, you see" or even "You eat the crust and filling together, but I suppose your teeth usually hits the crust first, hmm". It's more like, "That's... not how it works", or "What are you talking about?". 

It's clear they don't really know what a pie really is, much less ever had one. (Unless, of course, you're talking about some weird deconstructed pies à la molecular gastronomy... in which case, what are you talking about?) Don't you just get this real aggravating feeling that you don't even want to grace that question with an answer, because it might confirm their ass-backwards way of thinking? And yeah, they're not technically doing anything wrong, and you can technically answer their questions like I showed. But something's off. Why would you think about baking pies in terms of slices? It's the kind of situation that makes you want to go, "Okay hold up there, what are you exactly imagining that baking is, and what a pie looks like?" I'm talking about those situations where a question just baffles you because it's so... wrong somehow. 

It brings to mind the image of some deeply enlightened Zen teacher frustrating his arrogant young student with his answers (perhaps with a koan?). Why won't you just answer the question, teacher? Tell me... is it, or is it not! Yet the youth isn't necessarily in the wrong here. Technically and literally, things are or things aren't. But perhaps, by giving the student a "straight answer" -- i.e. an answer that fits with the student's understanding -- the Zen teacher would be confirming the student's mindset, terminating potential development there. This would be a disservice to the student, choosing to specify their understanding in favoring of expanding it. 

More and more I notice I'm that youth, but surrounded by Zen teachers everywhere. I'm that strange dude who hasn't had pie before, doesn't know what it is, can't even ask the right questions about it. I've been noticing that fewer of my questions, even smaller ones, can be answered directly but instead require these difficult little enlightenments... the ones that make me go "Oh, I was totally thinking about it the wrong way" afterwards. 

But as they say, questions are more important than answers. A question zooms in, cuts and joins reality into different possibilities, and presents it. An answer simply chooses one out of these. In fact, my philosophy professor once said that philosophy is not really about answering tough questions (along  the lines of "What's the meaning of life? What is love?"), but rather about restructuring your mind... something about replacing and shuffling the "cabinets" of our minds which hold our thoughts, experiences. So, basically questions, and asking the right ones (it's my belief that "what is the meaning  of life" is the wrong question, but that's for another time). 

You know, a real nice side effect to actually changing up your whole brain is that it sort of makes things that were hard before, easier. Sure, I've made do with some more elementary mindsets, but it's always a struggle, building rulesets and attempting to imitate what seems to come so naturally to others. Like the guy that knows the moves of the dance, but something about how he shifts his weight and balance seems... not as natural, flowing. At best, I'm only 80% there. But then when it "clicks", it clicks. 

It makes me think of this quote by Carl Jung:

We don't solve our problems, we outgrow them. 

Lately I've become more and more convinced of its truth. Or am I just more and more understanding it?

It reminds me of those childhood and adolescent problems we outgrew: playground vendettas, puppy love, drama. And more generally: things never tried, curiosities never satisfied, naïve dreams never accomplished... all these "problems" becoming, for lack of better words, irrelevant upon simply growing up.  (I'm thinking of "problem" to include "things we want", not just "things we want to stop happening".) Forgotten, maybe? Discarded, in favor of something better? 

Growing up is a little bit complicated, isn't it? That old cliché "you'll understand when you're older" made it sound real easy, automatic. In reality, the process involves what can only be described as "paradigm shifts". It's less like the stream of incrementally building knowledge I once thought it was, and more like, I don't know, getting hit by a truck? Multiple trucks? But, good trucks, helpful trucks! 

The things we saw and wanted as children are as ripples on the surface, caused by some deeper system of undercurrents below. Once we grow up and see the undercurrents, we laugh at the past. Somehow, that past seems so trivial! We were so dumb, we say. And in our arrogance we are caught off guard when it happens again and again, when we are swept deeper and deeper still. 

It feels so great, doesn't it, expanding your mind, changing out the cabinets. Understand the true nature of pie! Answer that Zen koan! Even Plato was all about it, except he thought there was an end to it. Just look into the Sun, he said. But that's the thing, there doesn't quite seem to be an end, does it? No Sun, no Forms. And plus, isn't it somehow dissatisfying, that so many of those things we've been dying to try, accomplish, get... are only easy, trivial, and gettable when we're past the point of caring about them at all? Isn't it maddening, that most things you really want, you only get when you stop wanting them as much? And even when you do get them, you and that "more mature brain" of yours will just find something else to want! 

So... is ignorance truly bliss? Should we just stay children, so our wants stay simple and attainable? Maybe we are doomed to either never be satisfied, or to never grow at all. Is this some cruel trick of the mind? Of the universe? If so, I need to understand! 

Perhaps that's because of the complexity of the things we want today. The things that seem valuable to us are exactly that -- they seem valuable because they are fragments of things we can't quite understand and attain, and therefore appear valuable. So they are only valuable in our shallower frame of mind. 

It's not that we want only things which are inherently elusive. It's just that once we understand something, we no longer want that thing anymore, because typically once we have reached some higher understanding, the world complexifies, and there are other things that will provide us greater fulfillment. The previous things just appear to be "simple pleasures", literally.

Once we calm down a little, we might get a little meta and understand that we're posing the wrong questions and that we need to deepen our understanding. So the following is a discussion of two parts: decoupling want from knowing, and decoupling want from happiness. 

Wanting is independent of knowing (in some sense). Want, if the neuroscientific framework is to be believed, is driven by dopamine. Hits of dopamine encourage us to eat food, drink water, have sex. But the modern world is complex, and so are our wants. This happens because our immediate, biological needs are mentally tied (rationally or not) to the more abstract needs, like love, approval, wealth. Understanding this, it's easy to see that "want" is highly dependent on the experiences of the individual and not simply a function of how deep their understanding of life is. 

Put another way, "want" is just an "orientation" of sorts on top of one's understanding of the world. Understanding by itself doesn't really cause you to want or not want anything. If the way you understand the world is like some complex map of rooms, your wants are just arrows drawn on top of that map, leading to... "somewhere". However, when our maps complexify to include more pathways and rooms, our brains can re-evaluate, re-draw those arrows to perhaps find better ways to get to this... "somewhere".

For instance, imagine that Bob wants love, and through some life experiences has come to think of approval as the way to get love. Suppose then through some other big life experience, he comes to realize that approval does not imply love, and that there are healthier ways to get love, like, I don't know, loving himself. Without even resorting to neuroscience (though it's been a great help) we can see that it's no longer rational for Bob's brain to keep wanting approval from others, there's really no point anymore. But take Alice, for instance. She comes from a background where acceptance from the tribe meant the difference between life and death. Do her wants change because she realizes that she can just love herself? I doubt it. 

Want-fulfillment is independent of happiness. Well actually it might not be, at least in some neuroscientific sense. Apparently while dopamine encourages you to chase wants, opiates induce that pleasant state of... well, bliss, when you finally attain that want. BUT! The point is, happiness is something deeper than just going around knocking things off your want-list. It's something much more internal, more enduring and long-term. Something something peace, something something mindfulness. I don't think I need to belabor this point, plenty of philosophers and gurus and pretty much everyone beat this topic to death.

So, conclusion. Taking all of the above in total, the quote deconstructs as follows (but not like a weird pie): 

• 1. Solving our problems = actually fulfilling wants
• 2. Outgrowing problems = accruing deeper understanding, which cause us to re-align our wants. no longer wanting the previous stuff 
• Important to note, wanting and knowing are independent, we do not simply chase that which is elusive
• Quote says: we do 2 more than 1. 
• Author understands this, and is concerned: But wait, does that mean happiness eludes us forever? Is this some sick joke? 
• Author is no longer concerned (?): No, the assumption is that happiness comes from getting  what we want. But... happiness is independent of reaching goals, remember? (Or, it should be. It can be? I hope it is.)

Appendix

I failed to mention within the article, but I meant to talk a little about the nature of outgrowing perspectives particularly in mathematics but science in general. The titular quote should apply to not only brains but any theory or corpus of knowledge. Albert Einstein (supposedly) had a similar quote: "We can’t solve our problems from the level of thinking which created them." 
For example, in the behavioral sciences we have models which delineate between visual/auditory/kinesthetic learners, or categorize of mental illness, or even label personalities. I wonder what kind of impact advances in brain sciences will have on such models -- perhaps it will explain away and dissolve the categories as different activation patterns or different functions in the brain. As our understanding grows, perhaps categories will not be as useful. Kind of like how modern chemistry and atom theory makes splitting things up into Aristotelian elements a bit silly. Sure, you could index everything in the world by its makeup of "fire", "earth", "air", and "water", but... why? We already know it's just atoms.  

I honestly had some other stuff but I forgot.

Further examples (will add as they come to mind)

References

The Neuroscience of Wanting and Pleasure | Psychology Today

We Don't Solve Our Problems, We Outgrow Them | HuffPost Life

Notes

Mathematics and projection-- 3d rotating cube casting shadow onto Flatlanders who see some weird shit, but like us 3d-landers know it's just a cube, really

Nobody looked any finer
Or was more of a hit at the Parkway Diner
We never knew we could want more than that out of life

wealth, happiness, and the pursuit of want

Is it surprising that there are so many who are rich yet miserable? Or not so surprising, once you realize why some people are rich and happy? 

For the happy rich, money doesn't seem to be the main goal but a side effect... perhaps of some passion or goal that drives them and creates value. What they aim for is not wealth, but self-actualization -- some deeper "thing" from which wealth comes via the creation of value (of course it is not always true -- there are plenty of starving artists).

The miserable rich, on the other hand, pursue optics, excelling in projects and working long hours to please their C-level executives or the board. They pursue acclaim and admiration to get that next pay raise or promotion. They pursue the immediate and profitable, heading companies that appear to create value, yet in fact exploit people and the environment, destroying value. I wonder: of what value are their "goods", if produced by those who do not understand what good is? 

How generalizable is this conclusion? Is it only sociopaths who can find fulfillment in money not well-earned? How much wealthy misery can we attribute to the latter category? 

The key to understanding the relationships between these variables lies in, I think, understanding where want comes from, and divorcing that idea of want and happiness. Fulfilling a want does not necessarily make you happy! Refer to: "we don't solve our problems, we outgrow them" 

reality = chaos + order, and Plato's allegory of the possibly infinite lightshow

Here I want to record this feeling that I've been having. I guess I've always had it every now and then but I'm noticing it more now. It's the kind of feeling that there's probably some obscure German word for, but for lack of better words and lack of effort in searching for them, I seem to have written now a whole article to describe it.  

A while back, I read about the "weak Pinsker conjecture". I'm no mathematician, but what it seems to  say is that any dynamical system of a certain class can be seen as a product of some chaos and some order. 

My whole life I have believed in the orderliness of life. I was convinced that everything had structure. For instance, as a child I believed that by studying hard, I could get into a good school (for some reason, it had to be Princeton), and by getting into a good school, I could have a good job, a good life, whatever. 

But as I grew, I realized that these rules, these laws, institutions, apparently fundamental, immutable properties of society were not quite what I had imagined. As one grows in mind, they learn through experience that the things they were taught were only projections of deeper structures. Honesty is the best policy... except for when it isn't. As it turns out, honesty is rather an emergent sub-goal of a larger objective -- perhaps harmony? And when we realize this we feel some kind of temporary euphoria: Ah -- it's not about doing X, X is just an element of this deeper Y! And understanding Y empowers us to make better decisions /be better people / perform better at __ / etc. 

But even in the throes of such euphoria we are perhaps living in a delusion. To use Plato's analogy, we are perhaps only seeing the fire inside the cave projecting the shadows on the wall. But we have not seen the sunlight yet.  

Examples

Music is not about music theory, it's about the pitches played in combinatorial sequence. But as it turns out even that's not very general: music is about something deeper. Rhythm, timbre, pitch -- all sort of projections on the wall of what makes music, music. Outside of the Western study of music, music is much more innately connected to dance, perhaps even inseparable. And expanding our minds the tiniest bit, we might be able to grasp how this could be. Music is not about vibrations per se, but it is that vibrations are manifestations of physical movement, which is something innate to the human mind. Perhaps it even begins in the womb, as we listen to our mothers' heartbeats. 

But back to the thing about getting into Princeton. As it turns out, life isn't as simple as I had imagined. But that whole school -> job -> life logic? It's not totally wrong, either. That's because there's this aspect of determinism in the system -- the rule works, kind of -- but with some (a lot?) of added chaos. Which... makes the rule not quite a rule, but a heuristic... if even that. 

So, what is this "added chaos"? Well, it's exactly this "deeper structure" that people tend to discover as they build their set of experiences across time. It's not about getting into school, but maybe more about finding a good job, which typically requires skills, which presumably you can get lots of at a good school (like Princeton). But wait, do you even want to get a good job? Jobs are actually a medium of trade, a way to trade labor, time for other goods and services. So I suppose the goal here is to attain goods and services, at least as much as we need to continue our existence? But then, is that really what it's all about? As it turns out, to many, life is about more than surviving. Surviving happens to be a part of it, ceratinly, but there's something more, some deep, personal goal. Clearly, this topic is deep enough that entire books of philosophy are written about it.  

No proofs, no guarantees

When we run into roadblocks with our current understanding of the world, most of the times we can reach out for external inspiration, perhaps to mentors, teachers, books. There we might pick up on something that expands and deepens our views, eliminates assumptions about reality, increasing complexity but freeing us from the assumptions and constraints which previously bound us. 

And perhaps we can be lulled into a false sense of security that this is always possible. That for any problem, there is some model, just a deeper, better model that we haven't understood yet, available "out there", not too far away. But I think reality is a bit scarier, in the sense that a lot of times, we just don't know. We are never actually guaranteed any deeper structure that will solve anything. We just have no guarantee in general, period. Taking this up a notch, we don't know that our reality will devolve into some kind of incoherent mess that doesn't respond to us the way we expect it to, like something out of an acid-fueled nightmare. We do not know that the ground will not shift under our feet. 

This isn't really just a philosophical ponderance, but something that just happens in reality. I think everyone really has to face it several times in their lives: starting a new business in an industry that doesn't even exist yet, moving to a place where you don't know anyone, having a kid (from what I hear). It's this visceral feeling, that you're treading actually new ground with guarantee of success, and you're sort of making it up as you go along with only your brain to guide you. This feeling that you're outside of the bubble that is the orderly system which society would have you participate in. Most likely, you're actively expanding that bubble for everyone else. Kind of like a frontiersman, treading new ground and building civilization from the ground up. I like to see that as the basic imagery of the central task and obligation of every generation to the generations succeeding it. We are expanding that sphere of orderly influence, bringing order to a chaotic world. And it brings to light the nature of the bubble we live in -- it's extremely difficult to take it for granted knowing that flawed beings just like myself hand-built this system, and it wasn't "God-given" (for lack of better words) and uncertainty and entropy could be lurking everywhere (and not just at the quantum-philosophical-acid-trip level). 

Being trained somewhat in mathematics, I have always seeked guarantees, proofs. I wanted to live in a universe where there was solid footing. But as it turns out, not even mathematics is like this. The first time I had to come to terms with it was when I read about Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. As it turns out, mathematics isn't as systematically complete and safe as I had once thought it was. Even further, the theory behind the Incompleteness Theorems itself -- mathematical logic, formal logic -- turns out to be only just a model of how mathematicians did mathematics. It describes a fragment of what mathematicians really do. And who knows what mathematicians really do, or what mathematics is -- every professional mathematician works at the frontier, constantly defining what mathematics is. It is an innately human endeavor, something we do because we need to, want to. An act of imposing order against the chaos of the universe (at least a good attempt), but distilled purely down to that act, an attempt to capture at describe at least an ever-expanding fragment of the universe in an orderly way. Kind of like mathematical logic does for mathematics itself, I suppose. 

Maybe this visceral feeling of chaos and uncertainty in just casual, everyday reality has always been so much more obvious to everyone else who tend to get out more. But me... I feel absolutely terrified. It's like I'm in Plato's allegory of the cave, but there's no guarantee that there is some final, terminal Sun outside that represents the level of the Forms or anything like that. Instead, having seen that wacky stuff with the fire, I go outside and see a Sun, but I've played this game before. I look around and indeed, the Sun is actually a huge mirror. And in fact behind this mirror there's a whole constellation of mirrors and lenses among what seem to be other Suns, stars. And depending on where you look from it looks entirely different! Moreoever, I see other people coming out of the cave and talking about stuff, but I can't be sure that they're seeing the same thing I'm seeing, although it seems to be similar, up to some sort of geometric transformation I guess. So where's the real Sun? Is there a real Sun? Are there multiple? It's massively chaotic. 

Though chaotic, I suppose it's only distressing for people like me who were taught the "Platonic dogma" so to speak, and expected something like that in reality. Consider a hypothetical individual who never really expected order in the first place. This is someone who truly embraces the state of the world for what it is -- simply perception (because, what else is there?) -- and has no reason to feel distressed, because again, they never expected otherwise. But I think most people aren't like this, and expect the world to obey some sort of order, because that is the what is presented to us as children. So how do we handle it?

Some people might get out of their caves and face this complexity in a special way; they choose a particular interpretation and believe, say, in a single Sun, in a blissful, non-chaotic, orderly world not filled with mirrors and lenses and weird shit. Religion, for instance, is one obvious way this is done. This does sometimes require some curating and filtering of contradicting information, particularly with interpretations that aren't so consistent with the data, but that's neither here nor there. Or others might avoid complexity altogether, choosing to pretend it is not there. Many others handle it step by step, modifying their theories as they are forced to but still believing that they must be at some terminal point every step of the way. 

Another way to put it is this: There is no "canon" in life, reality. There is only a known complex ordered network of fanons, fan theories. Multiple fanons, generalizing other fanons simultaneously, and other fanons that further explain this fanon as inconsequential side stories, or even mere dreams of some character. 

Some very deep and vast fanon might tie in all these other fanons in my mind, and bring me peace temporarily. But that peace will soon be disturbed again when I start asking new questions. What about the backstory of this other character? What about this other event that happened, how does it tie in? And then again I am in uncharted territory, realizing that the fanon that granted me respite was just that; yet another fanon. The attempt to fanonize seems neverending, and one is never sure that their fanon is quite "right", whatever that means. 

Wisdom

As we grow older we do two types of things: 

1. We learn and understand the orderly world built by our predecessors, retracing their footsteps as we understand the deep structure and meaning behind all these rules and stuff they left behind. For example, maybe going from "I need to get a job" to "What do I really want to in life, and what is the optimal way to get there?" to picking up a book on existentialist philosophy and never actually doing anything about it
2. We face "chaotic frontiers" of our own, actually expanding our domain of order. We make efficient, we optimize, we automate. We create rules, laws, systems. We build families, homes, business, empires, governments, or things totally inconceivably new, etc. And in doing so we understand our domains in a deep way that isn't apparent from just looking at the things we have built, just like our forefathers. 

We crystallize this kind of deep intelligence, often called wisdom. We talk about the "wisdom of the ancients", for instance. The funny thing is though, we're not that great at communicating wisdom to our children, even though it just seems extremely necessary: imagine if society was made up of people who lived forever. But then imagine that they forgot 90% of the stuff they learned every few decades. That's basically us.

Maybe it's just not possible, given our resources and the complexity of the ideas. Or perhaps we just don't think it's possible and choose not to. Perhaps our constant failure is that we have always underestimated both our children's capacity for complexity and our capacity to formulate and communicate knowledge. Instead, we have been teaching them those simpler, surface level "heuristics" -- get an education, get a job, get a family -- rather than showing them the deep-level structure of why  and how. Isn't it telling that we are exasperated by our children persistently asking us "Why?" to every subsequent answer? Why do we choose to forget and hide the difficult trail we traveled to get to where we are, when such ready and willing minds exist? Should we not prepare them for the trails ahead, even if those trails may be different?

In that way we are just like those prideful mathematicians, carefully erasing all of the messy tracks and waylays they took to get to a beautiful proof. And the children are like the poor undergraduates just trying to understand what convoluted piece of logical fuckery got the professor from step 3 to step 4. But in real life, our "proofs" are not so beautiful, or even proofs at all. Proofs have to be correct, after all... and I certainly didn't have to graduate from Princeton to be fulfilled with my life. 

Side note: Chaos as randomness

Earlier I brought up the weak Pinsker conjecture. Technically, it's about randomness + order, not chaos + order. But as some may know, chaos can be modeled as randomness. When we're too "lazy" to actually understand those deep-rooted variables that affect significant change, we typically just write down a probability distribution and call it a day. To use a cliche example, a coin flip results is often modelled as a random 50-50 thing, but we know that technically, it's a (mostly) deterministic system, and if we had the time and computing power we could actually predict if it lands heads or tails.

Tangentially related stuff, in spirit and motivation???

https://www.quantamagazine.org/does-time-really-flow-new-clues-come-from-a-century-old-approach-to-math-20200407/

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1002.1410.pdf

Anti-realism

Point-free approaches to topology, and intuitionistic mathematics

small things

 I don't know why it is, but it's from the small things I seem to learn the big lessons. A lot of the lessons I've learned come from sitting in the car and just thinking about some presumably insignificant event. 

But maybe that's how it is. Lessons don't always come from big life events, they accrue over time and a small push is all it takes to finally re-organize your mindset. Maybe you've just been really fed up with *everything* and something small happens which makes you actually think about what's happening, and you change everything. You're forced out of your local optimum to look for a global one, although it may not be obvious. 

I did read that it gets harder when you're older. The analogy from the book "The Defining Decade" is apt: tiny adjustments will vastly change the course of the ship towards the beginning of the journey, but later on, only big changes, perhaps a storm, will impact where your ship ends up. 

Maybe because I'm younger, the brain is more "malleable". I wonder though, there was this other article I was reading about how it's possible to make your brain younger by changing your thinking habits, particularly by being mindful, reserving judgement and not resorting to old habits, and seeing things as "new". Kind of like a child sees things. 

Speaking of seeing things as "new".... I did learn a lesson about that. One of those big mindset changes happened while I was driving through In-N-Out and feeling not particularly that great after some shitty badminton. Now, my phone had died and I didn't quite know how to get to my girlfriend's place because I was reliant on the GPS. This was not that bad since I am used to this level of idiocy from myself, but I was frustrated about a lot of things: about how work was going, about how I couldn't work up the motivation to get any of it done, about how I never got any good sleep or felt very good physically throughout the day. Particularly frustrating was the fact that somehow I kept never doing anything about any of these things and yet felt increasingly bad about them. So a lot of annoying things were racking up and amplifying in my mind at that moment. Also, what the fuck was taking so long? I thought this was supposed to be an in-and-out kind of thing? 

It was then I read this ad about addiction on the drive-thru window. Their website: slave2nothing.org. Then I remembered: That's how I should be. My situation may bind me, the laws of physics may bind me, but there is no reason I should be slave to my own mind. I should be slave to nothing! In that drive-thru I recited (something like) this: 

"I am slave to nothing.

I am slave to noone. I am slave to no man. I am slave to no woman. I am slave to no self, no concept of self, no perception of self, idea of self. I am slave to no perceived limitations of self. I am slave to no ideas of "who I am" or expectations of "who I should be". 

I am slave to no past. Every moment I am made anew. No, not made anew, since there is no old self to compare to. In every moment I simply am, and again I am no identity in particular. I choose to be who I want to be in every single moment; this is the ultimate tautology. Therefore, I am free to the extent that I choose to remember that I am free. 

I am slave to no opinion. I am slave to no idea. I am slave to no method, no "way". I am slave to no particular approach to any particular problem. I am slave to no model, no theory, no framework.  

I am slave to no emotion. I am slave to no attitude. I am slave to no mindset. I am slave to no fears; particularly the fear that I am small and weak and worthless -- such concepts and thoughts are not meaningful, they do not come from my authentic self but rather a simplistic, toxic view of the world. I am slave to no judgements, particularly of others, since it also comes from the same inauthentic model of the world which had enslaved me. 

I am slave to no habit. I am slave to no society. I am slave to no expectations. I am slave to no calling or work. I am slave to no measures or metrics. I am slave to no goals, objectives. I am slave to no norms, be they delusions or rationalized illusions. I am slave to no perceived reality. 

I am slave to nothing. ..." 

Overfitting a definition of success

It often rubs me the wrong way that "success" seems to be generally defined by what people call "superficial" things, like money, fame, power, impact. 

It clearly rubs a lot of people the wrong way too, since these are in fact seen as "superficial" things by a lot of people. 

But I think it is not right disdain such things... money, fame, power, impact are all great if you're into that sort of thing. You might not be, but that is no reason to shit on other people's hobbies. I often think that there's a psychological component involved: since you can't have those things (well, you can, but you think you can't, or don't want to try) but deep down, kind of want them, you resolve the cognitive dissonance by devaluing those things in your mind. 
I guess more than anything, that comes from personal experience. :) So maybe I should speak for myself.

Anyways, I definitely think there is a much deeper, healthy viewpoint: Success is relative -- it is defined as optimality in pursuit of a goal. And that's the dictionary definition: "the accomplishment of an aim or purpose" per Google. And notice that no particular aim or purpose is specified. The aim, goal, purpose is personal -- it can be anything you want, and you can be successful at it. The goal can even to live in a jar as a way of living out your philosophy (see: Diogenes).

But there are multiple definitions. The next two are:

• the attainment of popularity or profit.
• a person or thing that achieves desired aims or attains prosperity.

Words can mean different things, and that's great, but there's something... wrong about these latter two. We're in fact being tricked into valuing something because of some language shenanigans. Good feelings are associated with general success, as it should be. But then at some point, success became tied to prosperity, and now "good feelings" are tied to prosperity. Then prosperity becomes of the same ranking as success, despite our original definition of success as not being tied to any goal at all! 

In short, the value that we place in prosperity is undeserved, and only derived by proxy from the linguistic connection between "success" and "prosperity". Success is what we really wanted all along, because success is a more general concept. By definition, success is "greater than or equal to" prosperity. 

Not to shit on prosperity... to some extent, I think all humans want prosperity, we have to. And for some, prosperity IS the main or only goal in life, so equating prosperity and success doesn't really change their perspective/theory/philosophy in any way. 

But in general, people's goals are more complicated, and therefore life-success means something different from maximizing prosperity. Perhaps it's having a good relationship with family, friends. Maybe it's not. Perhaps it's knowledge, learning, self-improvement. Maybe it's not. Whatever it is, this dastardly equivalencing of success and prosperity on the linguistic level makes us forget that success is a much more general thing. It changes our goals, making us forget what we actually want, distancing us from our values. No wonder so many people have stupid regrets on their deathbeds like "I really wish I had spent more time with my friends and family".

At some level we all know this stuff. But we clearly don't act that way or really feel it... because we can't help but talk about success in those superficial terms, like "Wow! Look how rich this person is!" or "Wow! Look how beautiful and influential this person is!" and feel a tinge of jealousy or admiration. We always put rich/famous/powerful/influential people on a pedestal and say "Look! A successful person!" 

This is linguistic theft. You're stealing the word "success", robbing us of something to express the achievement of an arbitrary goal to mean the achievement of a very specific goal. If you've ever read the book 1984 or otherwise experienced this yourself (e.g. the cognitive frustration when you can't find that word, or the joy when you learn a cool new word that expresses exactly the subtle feeling you have) you know what happens when you steal words from people. You steal the ideas that the words represented as well, which has other meaningful repercussions. In this case, the idea of succeeding at life goals loses its expressibility (in the form of the word "success"), and so the idea fades, replaced by what success is now defined as -- succeeding at being rich/famous/powerful/influential. But more importantly, you also take the positive vibes associated with general success in life goals (whatever they may be) and assign it to succeeding at being rich, or whatever. For example, imagine how different our perspectives and our worlds would be if we regularly referred to people like Diogenes as "successes". 

Fundamentally, you can model this with some kind of associative information processing thing and explain it with some brain science, but there's no need: if we just paid attention we would notice this kind of abuse and its repercussions happening all the time. 

Remember this: Linguistic theft is idea theft, word murder is thought murder. Ideas orphaned from words die. (Kind of like orphaned memory blocks. Watch your pointers!) 

In the beginning we all wanted success in the general sense. The problem is that by some influence or another, our goals drifted further and further into "prosperity". If all of the goals are just "prosperity", then of course we will begin to identify success with prosperity and forget the deeper, more general notion of success. 

Another way to look at this: it's like overfitting. You know, when you're a kid when you think a word only applies to a really small thing but it's actually a much more general term (I guess this happens to adults too). Or like, giving a foreigner a tour of America but only taking them to places in NYC so now they think America is all Broadway, stocks, rude people, and good food? You can't really blame the kid or the foreigner for what they think! Yes, it is most often the case that truly successful people are rich, famous, powerful, influential. And it is always the case that these sorts of things really stand out to our lizard brains, because our brains are wired to crave such resources. Media and advertising knows this, and feed into it constantly with the messaging that success = prosperity. And that becomes the percieved truth. 

How do we counteract this? One way I've found is to always assume depth and complexity, from which naturally follows the admission of your own ignorance. In particular, whenever you catch yourself thinking a certain way, just go right ahead and rightly assume that what you're seeing is only a tip of the iceberg. You're seeing a manifestation of a much deeper system... so look deeper. If you can't look, just imagine it, or know it's there. You don't always get to see the whole iceberg right away and it's often easier and instinctive to make assumptions. But knowing that there's "something bigger out there" prevents you from thinking that the tip is the whole thing, so that if and when you do discover the other parts of the iceberg you can more readily understand the bigger picture. I think we should all adopt a mathematical mindset, like in that joke about the purported black sheep in Scotland: all you know is that there is a sheep in Scotland, one side of which is black. 

So next time you see "success" associated with "wealth, fame, power, influence" and catch your lizard brain salivating, think and ask yourself what success really means (hint: answer is above). Go beyond the superficial -- saying you want to be rich or famous can't be the whole story, right? There ought to be something much more fundamental. 

And more immediately, let's redefine our notion of success and stop referring to success as shorthand for "success at being rich and famous". Yes, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett are all successes, but not because they're wealthy or famous or powerful or influential, but simply because they literally attained a lot of goals, some of which were arguably quite difficult. Our current usage is an abuse of notation that is actual abuse, and we should stop.