Finding order in randomness. Finding randomness in order.

 It’s a funny thing- death. We all die. It is the only certain thing they say. Apart from taxes. Religions have sought to make it easier, philosophers have written volumes on it, spiritual seekers have tried to confront their fear of it and most of us in fact deny it without knowing. This is because we human beings are 2 things - our physical body (including our brain) which is mere hardware, and the “person”, the abstract entity, the self-aware conscious being which runs on this hardware but is not defined by the hardware. The person is abstract, and does not die unless the hardware (i.e. the body) does. And currently, all bodies die. So death is inevitable. There is sort of a disjoint between these 2 processes - of the body deteriorating and the person trying to accept it. The person does not deteriorate at the same rate as the body. In fact, the person never deteriorates unless there are issues with the brain (i.e, hardware problems) which do happen with age.  I have writte...

 How does the brain decide if something is important enough to remember? i.e. something is important enough to be saved into long term memory. The mechanism the brain uses is that of feelings - if something makes us feel an emotion - and the stronger the emotion - the more likely and strongly the memory is saved. And it doesn't matter how impactful the actual event is, if you don't feel anything much the brain is not going to save it. So if you see a tiger and you don't have any corresponding feeling after seeing the tiger, you will not remember it.  I personally struggled with anxiety for a long time, and I now realize my memory during that time was quite sharp. I would remember the most mundane of details and interactions. This was due to my baseline anxiety being high, and hence the system that saves stuff into long term memory being constantly activated. Now my anxiety is generally quite low, and as a side effect of that I find my memory is rather poor! How interesting ...

 People say having children is the most meaningful thing they have done and their children give meaning to their lives. To a certain extent this is noble, but when taken too far I think it is outright immoral. Some people want to live their lives through their children. It's almost like the child is an offshoot of themselves, and they want the child to 'achieve' and do well so that they feel vindicated and successful as parents. That is immoral. In fact, having ANY kind of expectations from your child, and attaching your own self worth to your child is outright violating the rights of the child. It puts a lot of pressure on the child and it is detrimental to the child. It is, infact, immoral. Let children become their own persons without coercion. Of course help them do that - by talking to them without coercion using logic and arguments - but let them be. There is always a way to do this. 

Talking to a friend (who is perhaps the only person I know personally who is interested in this stuff) about knowledge and specifically the problem of probabilities and frequencies and also of induction (the idea that our observations is how we get knowledge and then predict the future)  It all comes down to 1 thing really - knowledge and the process that creates knowledge which is explained by Popperian epistemology. Induction does appear to contain some knowledge and appears to be useful. However Induction is not true, not that it happens and it is false, but rather induction does not happen at all - we always have theory first and then we attribute it to induction. However, the reason induction (or what we think of as induction) contains knowledge in some instances is because it could be part of an explanatory theory. The sun rises in the east everyday and an inductive theory of that would be like - “the sun has risen in the east until now and based on that it will be rising in ...

 I believe there is objective beauty, like there is objective morality. David Deustch makes a case of this in this book 'The beginning of Infinity'. Or you can watch this - Why are flowers beautiful Now there is objective beauty and subjective beauty. Subjective beauty is not necessarily objective - there are evolutionary/cultural ideas that make us find certain things attractive in order to get us to act in certain ways. And these things are not necessarily objectively beautiful.  I have wondered - is there a subjective difference between one's enjoyment of objective beauty and subjective beauty. i.e. do we feel different when we are experiencing something that is objectively beautiful vs something that is just subjectively beautiful?  only a theory of beauty and aesthetics can answer that and we don't have one yet

  Most people spend all their lives enacting memes (i.e. ideas) of their society without questioning them. And by most I mean almost all. At any given time, it is actually just a handful of individuals who introduce new memes that are radical and change civilization in a profound way. The rest of the populace just continue enacting these memes.  And I was surprised to realize that almost all of these ideas/memes that dominate the lives of people have evolutionary origins i.e. they are memes that have as their basis evolutionary programming. e.g. below things dominate lives of almost everyone - Food - which encompasses gathering, cooking, eating, restaurants etc. Sex - which encompasses looks, appearance, attraction, social games, pursuit of sex etc. resources - money which encompasses accumulation of wealth, jobs, working towards getting more money  Family and friendships - forming social connections, staring a family, having children etc. Violence/Conflict/Resource compe...