Keane Moraes

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on the atlas — 22

highlights — 134

Our image will be more or less complete and available for viewing; how will understand the accidents to fit into the picture? From this perspective, the accidents will appear necessary. The reconception of destiny in The Soul’s Code is the suggestion that we might live from this retrospective and wisened posture; to grant ourselves fate rather than believe in it.
A Reconception of Destiny - by Dawson Eliasen
The acorn seems to follow just this sort of limited pattern. It does not indulge in long-term philosophies. It disturbs the heart, it bursts out in a temper… It excites, calls, demands—but rarely does it offer a grand purpose.
A Reconception of Destiny - by Dawson Eliasen
Fate is the set of things that manifest along the domain of your life that take you along the path to your destiny. It’s a bit tautological; once you can look backwards and see that something happened the way it did, you can call it fate
A Reconception of Destiny - by Dawson Eliasen
suggests that this rejection is a pattern of the daimon; for the daimon is a being individuality—how could it succeed in a homogenizing environment like school?
A Reconception of Destiny - by Dawson Eliasen
The point of wisdom and myth is not to figure what’s true, but what helps; it’s not for describing how things are, but how we experience them.
A Reconception of Destiny - by Dawson Eliasen
Our job as humans, says the acorn theory, is basically to pull the daimon down to earth, to bring our heavenly selves into contact with the fact of our corporeal reality, to connect with the physical world
A Reconception of Destiny - by Dawson Eliasen
“Until the culture recognizes the legitimacy of growing down, each person in the culture struggles blindly to make sense of the darkening and despairings that the soul requires to deepen into life.”
A Reconception of Destiny - by Dawson Eliasen
To realize your calling—whether it’s as a CEO or a mid-level manager, a paradigm-shifting scientist or a professor who simply has an impact on a few undergraduates, a rock star or someone who simply gets a lot of satisfaction from playing music—is extraordinary
A Reconception of Destiny - by Dawson Eliasen
These signs would be things that individualized you, things that were irrational (even from the perspective of a child), things that you could not let go of. These might be clues to your calling.
A Reconception of Destiny - by Dawson Eliasen
According to the acorn theory, we are attracted to eminent people and their biographies because they are daimons personified. They remind us that we have a calling ourselves, and we want to read their biographies because we want to find their humanity.
A Reconception of Destiny - by Dawson Eliasen
You might feel a pull towards writing, music, film, games, math, software, or something else—the daimon is this pull. You might struggle with the puzzle of existence—the daimon is the nonexistent answer to this puzzle.
A Reconception of Destiny - by Dawson Eliasen
The core subject of psychology, psyche or soul, doesn't get into the books supposedly dedicated to its study and care.
A Reconception of Destiny - by Dawson Eliasen
My interpretation of the daimon is that it is shorthand for a multitude of things that are mysterious: things that science hasn’t yet explained or can’t explain, our sense of purpose,
A Reconception of Destiny - by Dawson Eliasen
The god’s-eye view of the acorn includes the oak, and the god’s-eye view of your life includes your destiny. Your destiny is simply that which you will eventually become.
A Reconception of Destiny - by Dawson Eliasen
You feel like you are a spiritual thing. You feel separate from the world. You feel that there is meaning to existence. You feel that any characterization of what you are is a reduction. You feel that there is some correct thing that you should be doing.
A Reconception of Destiny - by Dawson Eliasen
The best improvisers, like the best conversation partners, have very sharp hearing; they can echolocate a door slightly left ajar, waiting for a gentle push from the outside.
Good conversations have lots of doorknobs
The main reason we don’t create more affordances, however, is pure egocentrism. When we just say whatever pops into our heads, we may think we’re making craggy, climbable conversational rock walls, when in fact we’re creating completely frictionless surfaces.
Good conversations have lots of doorknobs
We overestimate the awkwardness of deep talk and so we stick to the boring, affordance-less shallows. Conversational affordances often require saying something at least a little bit intimate about yourself, so even the faintest fear of rejection on either side can prevent conversations from taking off
Good conversations have lots of doorknobs
Tolstoy repeatedly describes love as something that happens in the group first and only then spreads to the individuals who are to act out the love.
Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
Some relationships can easily be compressed into a compelling string of words. This is usually because they conform to some sort of trope of how romance should look. In my experience, great relationships are harder to compress into a sensible string of wor
Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
When you enter this strange and unstable realm of conversation, you get a lot of information rapidly. I tend to find that almost everyone is captivating and loveable when I manage to talk like this
Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
You can apparently inverse that too: if you talk about anything that pops into your mind, you can tell if you're supposed to be with the person by judging their reaction.
Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
The type of person I’m assuming we’re looking for here is 1) someone that you will find fascinating to talk to after you’ve talked for 20,000 hours, 2) you feel comfortable with them talking through the hardest and most painful decisions you will face in your life, and 3) the conversation is wildly generative for both of you, in that it brings you out, helps you become.
Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
The existence of a scientific theory of consciousness would resolve this. There are really only two possibilities: either free will actually exists and consciousness is somehow implicated in the explanation, or some compatibilist theory is true that explains why most people feel like they have free will even though it doesn’t exist as an independent causal mechanism.
The Shadow of Action - by Dawson Eliasen - Orbis Tertius
Free will would be the ultimate function of consciousness. And the experience of making decisions, at least to me, does seem like a higher or deeper consciousness, as opposed to the experience of action.
The Shadow of Action - by Dawson Eliasen - Orbis Tertius
So you’re still left wondering why consciousness evolved. The fact is, we don’t know whether consciousness has any function. Our current understanding really wants to cut off consciousness as a causal dead end
The Shadow of Action - by Dawson Eliasen - Orbis Tertius
If you’re playing the piano and you become conscious of your fingers, you screw up. If you’re running and you start thinking about how your legs are moving, you might trip. Consciousness seems to deepen when we are making decisions, and become shallow when we are immersed in action—flow states are pleasant, but they aren’t experiences of higher consciousness, they’re experiences of subdued consciousness.
The Shadow of Action - by Dawson Eliasen - Orbis Tertius
The theory would be something like: before the invention of writing, people were subject to the voices in their heads, which they understood to be gods, and it wasn’t until the invention of writing cured this schizophrenia that people were able to exert their own agency. I still think it’s probably wrong, but it’s not clearly wrong, or at least not so clearly wrong.
The Shadow of Action - by Dawson Eliasen - Orbis Tertius
I think that the confident denial of the existence of free will is a symptom of identifying too much with the mythology of rationality
The Shadow of Action - by Dawson Eliasen - Orbis Tertius
There is electromagnetic radiation, and there is color. There are two completely independent worlds with completely independent phenomena, laws, and consequences. These worlds interact in at least one way—namely, that you can experience the material world; you can perceive electromagnetic radiation as color. Experience might not be a perfect reflection of material reality, but it is at the very least influenced by it.
The Shadow of Action - by Dawson Eliasen - Orbis Tertius
But that’s only if determinism is true. There’s no proof that it is. We can’t know whether the Demon would actually be able to perfectly predict the future—it’s just a thought experiment. If there actually was a Demon, it could be the case that he wouldn’t be able to predict everything, because your free will screws everything up.
The Shadow of Action - by Dawson Eliasen - Orbis Tertius
It seems to me that consciousness is a prerequisite for the concept of free will. That doesn’t mean that free will exists in every conscious being or even that free will exists at all, but it does suggest that the idea of free will is rooted in consciousness.
The Shadow of Action - by Dawson Eliasen - Orbis Tertius
Couldn’t it be possible that part of what’s going on with the mystery of consciousness is that it’s producing free will, giving us true agency over our lives and our environment?
The Shadow of Action - by Dawson Eliasen - Orbis Tertius
Free will, obviously, couldn’t possibly exist. Where could it be? You’re made up of physical components that are all soundly mechanical. Everything in universe behaves according to deterministic interactions between particles
The Shadow of Action - by Dawson Eliasen - Orbis Tertius
A key idea of the heuristics and biases program is that mistakes are often more revealing of cognition than correct answers.
How An Algorithm Feels From Inside - LessWrong
The standard rationalist view would be that the first person is speaking as if "sound" means acoustic vibrations in the air; the second person is speaking as if "sound" means an auditory experience in a brain.
How An Algorithm Feels From Inside - LessWrong
psychological obsolescence, in which products are "designed to become obsolete in the mind of the consumer, even sooner than the components used to make them will fail".
How the world embraced consumerism - BBC Future
The commodification of reality and the manufacture of demand have had serious implications for the construction of human beings in the present day, where, to quote philosopher Herbert Marcuse, "people recognise themselves in their commodities".
How the world embraced consumerism - BBC Future
Our enormously productive economy demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption.…
How the world embraced consumerism - BBC Future
Though it is status that is being sold, it is endless material objects that are being consumed.
How the world embraced consumerism - BBC Future
The advent of television greatly magnified the potential impact of advertisers’ messages, exploiting image and symbol far more adeptly than print and radio had been able to do. The stage was set for the democratisation of luxury on a scale hitherto unimagined.
How the world embraced consumerism - BBC Future
Progress was about the endless replacement of old needs with new, old products with new.
How the world embraced consumerism - BBC Future
ever-increasing aspirations: "a high standard of living must be dynamic, a progressive standard", where envy of those just above oneself in the social order incited consumption and fuelled economic growth.
How the world embraced consumerism - BBC Future
New needs would be created, with advertising brought into play to "augment and accelerate" the process.
How the world embraced consumerism - BBC Future
, "Business had learned as never before the importance of the ultimate consumer. Unless he could be persuaded to buy and buy lavishly, the whole stream of six-cylinder cars, super heterodynes, cigarettes, rouge compacts and electric ice boxes would be dammed up at its outlets."
How the world embraced consumerism - BBC Future
"Mass production is profitable only if its rhythm can be maintained." He argued that business "cannot afford to wait until the public asks for its product; it must maintain constant touch, through advertising and propaganda… to assure itself the continuous demand which alone will make its costly plant profitable".
How the world embraced consumerism - BBC Future
Kellogg, however, gradually overcame the resistance of its workers and whittled away at the short shifts until the last of them were abolished in 1985.
How the world embraced consumerism - BBC Future
it was individual desire that was democratised
How the world embraced consumerism - BBC Future
The traditional objective of making products for their self-evident usefulness was displaced by the goal of profit and the need for a machinery of enticement.
How the world embraced consumerism - BBC Future
Here began the "slow unleashing of the acquisitive instincts," write historians Neil McKendrick, John Brewer, and J H Plumb in their influential book on the commercialisation of 18th-Century England, when the pursuit of opulence and display first extended beyond the very rich.
How the world embraced consumerism - BBC Future