Perceiving Will

09 Nov, 2008 | Brian |

Some alternate titles for this article: Carving Lamb With a Samurai Sword, or How I Learned to Shut Up at the King's Table.

I wrote in a previous article about putting yourself into the service of something bigger than yourself. This is really about setting aside your will, which is often focused on getting and keeping. The getting part is the desire for acquiring things and experiences, and the keeping part is the desire to preserve what you've already got. Those impulses seem sensible enough in a capitalist sense - we're just looking out for ourselves and our families. From the point of view of personal well-being, though, these ideas turn out not to be so wonderful. When I don't get what I want, I become resentful. When events (real or imagined) threaten what I have, I become fearful. I end up living most of my life drowning in fear and resentment, and blaming everyone else for it, instead of accomplishing anything useful.

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Lamb Chop Versus The Almighty

03 Nov, 2008 | Brian |

"You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

- Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol

I cooked a fantastic lamb chop last night. The consumption of said chop was sublime. The flavor, texture, and aroma from the cooking and the eating blended with the lasting (albeit minor) euphoria that comes from the pleasurable digestion of a high-quality meal. As the crispy flesh settled in my stomach and my eyes drooped a bit, I felt a blooming positivity toward the world, an emotion of happiness and security. Unable to not dissect the moment, I settled into a post-ingestive meta-analysis of the feelings that I was feeling. What does it mean to feel an emotion? What is the experience of an emotion?

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Energy gradients

29 Oct, 2008 | Brian |

Here in the U.S. we've got 120 volts of electricity eagerly waiting to course out of any of the dozen or more outlets that typically surround us. A volt is an interesting thing. It's potential. Like water flowing from a high point to a low one, electrical energy flows from a point of high potential toward a point of low potential. That difference, that energy gradient, is what we tap into, diverting the electricity from its intended course through a longer path that runs through a hair dryer or maybe a coffee pot, so that the little quanta tumble over something very much like a waterwheel and provide power for some useful work (e.g., brewing a tasty beverage).

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Unraveling the problem

25 Apr, 2008 | Brian |

This is a good follow-up to my earlier post on the subject. To me, it is patently clear that some kinds of behavior should - I guess karmically - lead to bad consequences. In its mildest form, I think that behavior like mass deception for your private benefit deserves punishment. I wish nothing but harm on the portfolio managers that dupe thousands of people into bad deals. But, perhaps unexpectedly, I would rather take up such topics under the rubric of Science. For the time being, I would like to assume that there are no degrees of misbehavior. There is only...nonconformance.

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But is it Bad?

12 Feb, 2008 | Dave |

Resisting authority or violating norms may be exhilarating, even productive. But when is it wrong? When do you cross the line from ignoring the rules to engaging in evil?

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Will to Life

12 Feb, 2008 | Brian |

I quote:

Astronomers Mark Swain and Gautam Vasisht of Caltech in Pasadena, US, and Giovanna Tinetti of University College London, UK, used the Hubble Space Telescope to observe the giant planet HD 189733b, which is slightly more massive than Jupiter and lies 63 light years from Earth. The observations confirm an earlier tentative detection of water vapour and reveal the presence of methane gas.

Source: Newscientist.com

I tend to be against the Drake equation, or any other equation regarding the probability of alien life. Instead, perhaps going against reason, I subscribe to the notion more-or-less put forward by Stephen Baxter, that life is, in fact, everywhere.

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