A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
In Desolation Island (1978), the fifth novel in the series, Maturin invokes the costs of a life “spent in dissimulation”—regretting how “the long-lived lie soak[s] into the liar’s deepest fibre.”
-Tim Lake, from his essay, Read the Novels and Forget Everything Else
As for "God," old-time members sometimes comment that "A.A. has only two things to say about the subject: First, there is one. And second, you're not it. From there, you're on your own."
-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning
We may define future shock as the distress, both physical and psychological, that arises from an overload of the human organism's physical adaptive systems and its decision-making processes. Put more simply, future shock is the human response to overstimulation.
------------------------------
Change is not merely necessary to life; it is life. By the same token, life is adaptation.
There are, however, limits on adaptability. When we alter our life style, when we make and break relationships with things, places or people, when we move restlessly through the organizational geography of society, when we learn new information and ideas, we adapt; we live. Yet there are finite boundaries; we are not infinitely resilient. Each orientation response, each adaptive reaction exacts a price, wearing down the body's machinery bit by minute bit, until perceptible tissue damage results.
Thus man remains in the end what he started as in the beginning: a biosystem with a limited capacity for change. When this capacity is overwhelmed, the consequence is future shock.
-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1970)
A person was like a city. You couldn't let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don't like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.
-Matt Haig, The Midnight Library
We all have a desire for transcendence. We want to reach higher and outward beyond our limitations so we can grow and do great things. That yearning is part of who we are; it’s behind the greatest art and music and scientific achievements. But transcendence that ignores the human condition isn’t enlightenment. It’s chaos. As we seek to transcend the limitations of the natural world, we should respect the boundaries that make us human.
-via the Rogue Highway substack
Once you understand the backstory, you realize that the New York Times story is not really about flight at all but about how elites and credentialed “experts” mistake their own failures for the boundaries of possibility.
-and the rest of the story is here
The essence of God does NOT include human frailties such as partiality, controllingness, duality, judgmentalism, vindictive retaliation, wrath, righteous anger, resentment, vanity, limitation, arbitrariness, revenge, jealousy, vulnerability, or locality.
-David R. Hawkins, Spiritual Power and Integrity
We have said that a great civilization does not entirely die—non omnis moritur. Some precious achievements have survived all the vicissitudes of rising and falling states: the making of fire and light, of the wheel and other basic tools; language, writing art, and song; agriculture, the family, and parental care; social organization, morality, and charity; and the use of teaching to transmit the lore of the family and race. These are the elements of civilization, and they have been tenaciously maintained through the perilous passage from one civilization to the next. They are the connective tissue of human history.
If education is the transmission of civilization, we are unquestionably progressing. Civilization is not inherited; it has to be learned and earned by each generation anew; if the transmission should be interrupted for one century, civilization would die, and we should be savages again.
-Will & Ariel Durant, The Lessons of History
To think independently of other human beings is impossible, and if it were possible it would be undesirable. Thinking is necessarily, thoroughly, and wonderfully social. Everything you think is a response to what someone else has thought and said. And when people commend someone for "thinking for herself" they usually mean "ceasing to sound like people I dislike and starting to sound more like people I approve of." . . .
. . . it should remind us that all of us at various times in our lives believe true things for poor reasons, and false things for good reasons, and that whatever we think we know, whether we're right or wrong, arises from our interactions with other human beings. Thinking independently, solitarily, "for ourselves," is not an option.
-Alan Jacobs, How To Think: A Survival Guide for a World at Odds
The goal was never to transform the external world by acting physically upon that world, but to transform it in producing better human beings, in allowing human beings to develop an inward knowledge of themselves.
-Matthieu Ricard, as taken from here
.............in phone-system hell and would have willingly given anything just to talk to a real, live person, this may make sense to you:
Will AI make our practice more efficient in the future? Definitely. It already is in some ways and we’ll certainly implement more AI-based efficiency tools over time. But AI isn’t going to fix people problems and people problems are eternal.
-Ben Carlson, from here
You are not only a human, but also a cyborg. . . . You are a cyborg because you use machines to enhance your abilities and extend your senses. You use computers to store and process information, phones to communicate and connect, cameras to capture and share images, and so on. You rely on machines to perform tasks and solve problems that you cannot do by yourself.
-Ethan Mollick, quoting an actual AI exchange in Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
I don’t want to get sidetracked here, but I think there’s a nonzero chance that AI never gets much better than humans at most of the things that humans were better than computers at in 2021.
-Noah Smith, contemplating world domination
Traditional software is predictable, reliable, and follows a strict set of rules. When properly build and debugged, software yields the same outcomes every time. AI, on the other hand, is anything but predictable and reliable. It can surprise us with novel solutions, forget its own abilities, and hallucinate incorrect answers. This unpredictability and unreliability can result in a fascinating array of interactions. I have been startled by the creative solutions AI develops in response to thorny problems, only to be stymied as the AI completely refuses to address the same issue when I ask it again. . . .
AI doesn't act like software, but it does act like a human being. I am not suggesting that AI systems are sentient like humans, or that they will ever be. Instead, I'm proposing a pragmatic approach: treat AI as if it were human, because, in many ways, it behaves like one. This mindset, which echoes my "treat it like a person" principle of AI, can significantly improve your understanding of how and when to use AI in a practical, if not technical, sense.
-Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI
When we say that human behavior is unpredictable, we are right because it is too complex to be predicted, especially by ourselves. Our intense sensation of interior liberty, as Spinoza acutely saw, comes from the fact that the ideas and images that we have of ourselves are much cruder and sketchier than the detailed complexity of what is happening within us. We are the source of amazement in our own eyes.
-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
The authentic and pure values — truth, beauty and goodness — in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object.
-Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace
Posts
