Defining Awesome — Humanities
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    December 23rd 2007

    Myth, math and metaphor

    It will only take you 10 minutes to read this, but it is probably the most important thing I wanted to write this year. It is my message for Mankind for Christmas and New Years Eve. It’ll also be my last post this year. So enjoy.

    Did you ever notice how your mind has an amazing ability to adapt? How flexible people are and how many different things they believe? From the most amazing, to the most ridiculous, to the most mundane. There is a pattern here, your mind has a pattern of thinking, do you see it?

    If you were born in India and follow the teachings of Hinduism, you will believe reality is created entirely out of sound. If you were born in an Aborigine culture you will believe that reality is a dream. If you were born in the Western culture and sometimes watch the Discovery channel you believe reality consists of objects, like atoms, particles, cells and neuron networks in your brain. If you follow what you were taught in school (well at least outside of Kansas) you will believe in evolution, and that man evolved from ape. If you follow what Christianity tells you, you will believe God created you. If you follow pastafarianism you will believe the Flying Spaghetti Monster rules the world. If you were raised in ancient Greece you believed the history of the world were Gods and Titans fighting each other. If you were born today you think the history of the world is what you can read on Wikipedia. If your interest is science you will believe science has answers. If your interest is spirituality and esoterism you’ll believe the Tarot or I Ching has answers to everything. If you lived a long time ago you thought the world was a giant tortoise. If you lived in medieval ages you thought the world was flat. If you live today you think the world is round. If your interest is economy, you’ll see marketing and money everywhere. If you are an alcoholic it seems impossible to stop drinking. If you are not it is impossible to not refuse a drink. If you listen to metal, you think metal is king. If you listen to cha-cha you think cha-cha is king. You might think Quake is the best shooter, or Unreal, or Crysis, some even think Soldat is. If you were born in a poor family, you see rags everywhere. If you were born in a rich family, you see riches everywhere. If you’re a programmer, you see people and the world as computer programs and machines. If you’re a musician, you see songs everywhere. If you study geometry or math, you see the golden ratio, spirals and fractals everywhere.

    Everywhere you look there is a spiral. From the smallest to the unimaginable.

    spirals.jpg

    Everything is myth, math and metaphor.

    There is no reality other than what you percieve. Everywhere you look at, there are only myths, numbers, metaphors and spirals. The problem arises when you believe that it is real.

    There are no spirals.

    read more »

    December 14th 2007

    An essay on problem solving

    I must admit koans are a terrible teaching tool. They never did anything for me. They can do one thing tough, if you are aware enough, you can notice your thought processes, and more importantly you can notice what is besides them.

    When you think about a riddle like the one I wrote here or any other like “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” you can notice what you’re doing. You can also notice that there are no answers to these questions in your mind. Yet, you are trying to solve them with it. Thinking logically is just permuting knowledge you have. If you don’t know something you won’t find the solution. You can only find it with a different mind state, by creating it, out of what seems to be nothing.

    Einstein once said that you can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it. Good enough but how do you do that? Well this is how.

    The other day I was trying to fix a bug in the animation system. Namely the monkeyman bug. Now whenever you are “trying” to do something that is a hint that you’re not anywhere close to getting the thing done. So I noticed that I was trying to hear the sound of one hand clapping and I backed off for a couple minutes.
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    December 9th 2007

    Riddle

    I always struggle what to write about: Should I write practical advice that works for me or should I write about the underlying theory or philosophy?

    And I think it is becoming clear to me that there is no point in giving practical advice if nobody will use it. If you don’t know why it works you won’t make a habit of using it. Also when you understand the underlying process you will find the solution to any problem yourself. Like I could give a lot of programming tips or I could give more general advice, like tell you to meditate. But will you do it? Will you believe that meditation is the single most powerful thing you can ever do?

    This is not easily processed by a rational mind, and if you try to reason it, you won’t do it. How can meditation or not-thinking actually solve anything? Impossible!

    read more »

    December 2nd 2007

    The metaprogrammer

    If I would have to consciously assess everything I do I would not live one day. I would probably leap off of a building because there would be no reason not to.

    Consider the example from my previous post Conscious effort and the myth of will power. Is there any effort in you NOT taking a bottle of poision and drinking it? Probably there isn’t if you’re not suicidal. So why don’t you take it and drink it?

    The thing that is holding us from not jumping off a building or drinking poison are reasons, or in other words beliefs. Beliefs are the programming mechanism of the human brain. This is done for efficiency. You do not have free will at every moment of your life, because simply it would lead to innefficiency or even worse to premature death. If you are walking up the stairs you cannot think about every movement of your legs because it would take forever to climb them. The brain is a finite state machine, it operates on simple models. So if you want to change the way you do things, you do not use conscious effort to achieve that because it doesn’t work. You must change how the subconscious mind operates.

    You change the models inside your head.

    read more »

    November 28th 2007

    Conscious effort and the myth of will power

    R.A. Wilson once wrote an important question:

    ARE YOU YOUR HARDWARE,

    OR YOUR SOFTWARE?

    OR BOTH?

    Now if you can’t answer this question in a snap of a second you’ve got a problem. If you can answer the question however you will know exactly how to DO things. My recent articles were written to give you a hint. I wrote them to make a grounding for this article.
    This article is a book worthy subject. It is about how to THINK and DO things properly.
    If you think about that, those are actually the only 2 things you do in your life. So this is about life.

    Let’s talk about something important and real now. Or what seems to be real but isn’t. Conscious effort. This is a long post but it is definitely worth reading, if you’re a freelancer, independent game maker or anyone creating work on your own, years of my own experience and wisdom right below here.
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    November 19th 2007

    Arrrrrrrrrr! Arrr!

    Here is my answer to to the game I wrote in the previous post “Arrrrrr!”. This is actually my whole philosophy of mind relation and productivity.

    Consciousness is the pirate monkey.

    bonnet_macaque.jpg

    That means YOU, the entity that is aware right now, is a little pet rhesus living on a pirate ship.

    The people that said you are the parrot, were also close, but knowing you are a pet monkey gives us more understanding of what is actually happening here and what you can do about it. What does this knowledge give us?
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    November 16th 2007

    Arrrrrrr!

    In my recent post “It’s a joke” I wrote that YOU, or consciousness is not really in control of the body. That it is just an observer. You’re a person sitting in a cinema. As I expected this claim raised a lot of skepticism, but some people actually thought about this idea and I congratulate you, if you’re one of them. The thing is, we don’t know for sure if what I wrote is true or not, so it is perfectly healthy to consider that idea and not be blocked by your “ultimate knowing” of the way things are. Get out of your head. I actually don’t believe what I wrote. I was just fucking with y’all. I believe that you have control. What kind of control is the BIG question? We shall play a game here to find that out.
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    November 12th 2007

    It’s a joke

    This might seem weird at first when you think about it but at the same time I can guess that it sounds very familiar. I suspect that in every human being there is this little doubt about their reality and a knowing of the truth. This truth is really bizarre so we get conditioned to repress it.
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    October 15th 2007

    Why I hate reasons

    I am very much against any kind of rational thinking, it gets through my posts and I need to clarify things (this is from a person which does computer programming all his life – how reasonable!). Most people think that the brain is a rational or logical instrument and that the way they think is because that is how it works and that is the proper way of thinking. So they live with the belief that the world can be understood by using ratios and by using logic. Unfortunately this is a destructive way of thinking and unfortunately probably 99,9% of people in the world operate like this. It is a primitive mammalian brain tool. This is ONLY a way of thinking, one of many tools inside your brain.
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    September 28th 2007

    Living by your heart

    I did not know what this means for a long time. I will try to explain to you this little phenomenon cause I have come to understand it a little. You may take this or leave it, or you can read it if you’re curious why certain people live the way they live. This concept has been exploited much by pop culture to a point where it seems funny. I also thought like that but no longer, I am completely serious about this topic.

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