The challenge was simple in nature. To combat the inevitability of slow decline, a good friend of mine and I mutually proposed a weekly sharing of just one item of depth discovered that week. In theory, a simple task – really, if life has become so comfortably numb that a single thought over the span …
I promised that I’d include all forms of measured thought when creating this Modicum Challenge. Well, the inner Armchair Economist in me has been leaning far over the edge into behavioral economics that the more practical side of the discipline has been severely short changed thus far. So I thought I’d spend a bit of …
Movies are the modern Homer, and Star Wars is steeped in mythic reaching for the sublime. One critical scene is when Luke was traveling down a Death Star corridor, being shot at, computers all around him to aid him, and remote commanders in his ear telling him what to do as he tried to launch …
Phew! The last few modicums have been pretty heavy. And while I have reveled in the new post consciousness world, so too have I reached a point where the Modicums were not so … consumable much less filled with Checkov’s guns. So I’m dialing it back a bunch of notches for a bit to write …
This Modicum is an expansive one that attempts to close out a number of recent Modicums. Context is everything when it comes to understanding a mindset, just like the above sentence helps prepare you for this Modicum. We are so subjective to the world view at any given moment, that it is almost humorous to …
Broad sweeping generalizations to explain everything at once are the bane to all good deliberation and advancement, from philosophy to politics to science to well being. But.. my soul craves creating Grand Unified Theorems (GUT) at a biological level akin to the innate need to classify everything we see. So it doesn’t come as a …
Alright, yeah – I am back into thinking about consciousness. Ironically, this is as much due to reading The Social Animal as it is due to working my way through Heidegger’s Being and Time. This time, I promise to be short(er). If you’ve read the last few Modicums, you’ll know that I’m increasingly of the …
In my heart, travelling beyond the solar system is our future generation’s manifest destiny. I hope that with every generation, we see it as not only our destiny but our obligation to expand beyond the confines of our own solar system. And I hope that we never lose sight of this end goal for not …
Honestly, I thought I was done with tearing down scaffolding with last week’s post. It isn’t really that much fun to undermine core beliefs of how you view the world and yourself, and admittedly it’s pretty boring to read about it for others. Ha, maybe I should describe it as a wrecking ball, as that …
It’s New Years (oh, Happy New Year and New Decade, sort of) and thus I’ve been a bit delinquent on sustained thought in lieu of friends, family, libations and well, skiing. So for this week’s Modicum (or as my eldest daughter calls it, “Adult Homework“), I thought I’d do a quick revisit of two passing …
So I am standing there, at the top of a 36 foot tall extension ladder reaching over the roofline above the third story of my home. Yeah, modicum of thought be damned, for there are quite mundane gutters to be cleaned. Sure, as I was climbing up the ladder, I jiggled each foot to ensure …
First to set some context, I have been in exploring for the better part of the past year three large influencing mindsets on the subject of rational reasoning versus emotional intuition, and subconscious versus conscious thought. These mindsets are exemplified by their source readings: David Brooks’ The Social Animal, which argues that the emotional mind …
My Friday-The-13th modicum this week is on finance – specifically, how to profit from the stock buy back obsession in corporate America. Financial bubbles by definition occur when rational processes break down, and runaway irrationality takes hold. You’d think we’d get better at this stuff as society ages and technology improves, but we aren’t. We …
Preface: This week I finish out the trilogy of posts pondering the nature of intelligence and evolution. You already know that I am pondering that intelligence is an aberration and not the apex of evolution. But what if we went one step further and posit that evolution is anti-intelligence, and not just vice versa? And …
I continue this week with part two of the questions for evidence of runaway intelligence. Last week I was focused on why runaway intelligence happened – particularly, why didn’t it happen for hundreds of millions of years. This week I ponder more on why we do not see more evidence of it elsewhere.
Going back to world of science this week and the next, I’ve been revisiting what are the two biggest mysteries in life to me (drawing a bit on the previous modicum on Drake’s Equation). Why did human-level intelligence take so long to evolve? Why do we not see evidence of runaway intelligence in the visible …
We all know that tasks fill the void of time and energy based on the allotment given to them. I also have argued that many of modern society’s ills are caused by the fact that we now have too much truly discretionary time in our lives. That combination presents a powerful death spiral to frenetic …
I am not sure I even had the choice this week as to what thought would be most prevalent in my mind because throughout this week, the same word keeps hitting me over the head. The word is mirroring – specifically the tool in which one person mirrors the actions or thoughts of another.
First please bear with a prefatory rant to help set the context. I’ve always struggled with Halloween, and each year it gets worse. I enjoy embracing the Latin world’s Day of the Dead to remind us of deaths clutches waiting right around the corner; it’s a healthy reminder that is celebrated in a way that …
We have a saying in our family, “If you are bored, then clearly you suffer from a lack of imagination.” with the immediate implication that you need to get to work at improving your imagination. We use this statement to directly combat the dreaded “I’m bored” complaints from the kids, to which our kids keenly …
Simulation Argument aside…. you know, is it about time that we seriously consider revisiting the Drake Equation and adjust some of the numbers with new knowledge?