Robot rites and rituals

The core mechanics of religion is acquisition and development of the power to ignore.

Good religion helps you ignore your immediate sense of suffering and loss,  allowing you to exert beyond and grow beyond.  Eventually it can lead to  loss of self, and the attached suffering, sometimes permanently.

Bad religion helps you ignore others' suffering, and makes for great loot. 

The difference is morality & ethics. 

Hence the first precept is always non violence and non taking .

One needs to go past Aristotle and Confucius to reach Plato and Lao-tse, and often canmot leap-frog the first step (which is long arduous and many stepped)

Jeet Kune Do didn't spring forth from Bruce Lee's  brow magnificent and fully formed, it was a result of his mastering the many martial arts expending horrendous amounts of effort,  boxed in by iron discipline.

Exercises for deferring gratitude form the first step of religious training. To the uninformed, it looks like self-inflicted suffering. Like fasting. Or doing a slow boring thing again and again. It is important that the context be kept in perspective, and self-inflicted-suffering  not be seen as a noble end in itself.

a word on education

grammar and logic form the first bring in the edifice that is education.

arts provide a great medium for education. they train to improve sensory acuity. Drawing, painting, and sketching teach the eye to note details and distinguish between colours & shades, strokes,  and their effects. playing a musical instrument is an intensely cerebral task - reading the symbols in their notation, translating them to hand movements pertaining to the instrument, keeping in mind the melody/harmony while co-ordinating with others also doing the same. writing forces one to distil thoughts into a structured form. reading the classics stocks up the mind with many dilemmas one is bound to run into sooner or later

team sports teach deploying skills amidst alliances, uncertainty, and shared goals. Co-operation is the principle of which collective bargaining is the manifestation, and source of much wealth accumulation.

one key skill to acquire, is the skill of plugging away at learning and mastering a technique, and producing with it, until it is in the bone. all other skills are built using this skill.

now back to our regular programming...

Robots, if determinate, which by definition they are, cannot have intentions. Humans ,and programs, choose. Is there a non-deterministic element in  this choosing ? Probably not , I'd assume the machinations are not visible, but follow an algorithm, which doesn't involve tossing a coin as any of its steps.

 

 for one on the monk's path, the simple act of letting go, ironically brings more (I). consistent renunciation brings more and more.  priests probably set out to be monks and got tempted when they realised they could habitually advise kings, and therefore occupy a position higher than them in the society.

(i) there's an old zen saying (all zen sayings are old, the new ones haven't been repeated long enough, and are referred to as 'said-once-that-time-ing's ) which goes like this :

de-weeding the garden

 our brains are constantly making up stories about the world

i want to call these expedient hypothesis

there's no way to verify these hypotheses

damn you plato and your cave and your shadows

we step into these like neo (before he was neo) plugs into the matrix

the flickering shadow outside the window IS an evil spirit out to get us

the car heading towards us IS driven by an apathetic care-two-hoots wild animal 

nifty is just  right for turning into a two-bagger 

that bloke looks super honest and will do a good job

maybe i'll stick to my diet/workout plan  this time and come out as mr muscles

all stories

[if nothing is different from last time, doing the same thing just doubles your preference for soddy results

something needs to change each time, for the results to be any different ]

each story stops you from seeing the whole range of possibilities, by nature

what religion, philosophy, and conspiracy theories do, is provide an almost unverifiable hypothesis that refuses to be found unsuitable

eventually, they warp what one sees, and then all that one sees 

alcohol probably washes away the patina of accumulated hypotheses/'facts'

but you need to wash away alcohol too, like hiring another hitman to take care of the earlier hitman you hired ....

but zen .... ? 

"stopping and starting on a dime ..." as per S-Y, eventually brings home the lesson of anicca and anatman

why i need to read the raph koster book

 to build a game in Processing

and help make learning fun (cliche cliche)

why i need to read 'a pattern language'

 because philip greenspun said this in his review of the book - 

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A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander and colleagues

Nominally about architecture and urban planning, this book has more wisdom about psychology, anthropology, and sociology than any other that I've read. Nearly every one of this volume's 1170 pages will make you question an assumption that you probably didn't realize you were making. In a section entitled "Four-Story Limit", Alexander notes that "there is abundant evidence to show that high buildings make people crazy." Underneath is a photo of San Franisco's Transamerica tower, captioned with a quote from Orwell's 1984:

"The Ministry of Truth--Minitrue, in Newspeak--was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up terrace after terrace 300 metres in the air."

Alexander backs up this polemic with convincing arguments that high-rise living removes people too far from the casual society of the street, from children playing in the yard, and that apartment-dwellers therefore become isolated.

Alexander spends a lot of time in this book trying to figure out how to restore the damage to our communities that have been done by automobiles. He argues for better public spaces and for more integration of children, old people, and workers. He argues for more access to water by more people.

Many of Alexander's arguments are against the scale of modern systems. Public schools spend a fortune on building and administration precisely because they are so physically large [I've seen statistics showing that our cities spend only about one-third of their budgets on classrooms and teachers]. If we had shopfront schools and fired all the school system personnel who don't teach, we might be able to get student-teacher ratios down to 8 or 10:1 without an increase in cost. Similarly, Alexander argues for smaller retail shops, smaller factories (or at least identifiable small workgroups within factories rather than hundreds of faceless cogs) and more master/apprentice instruction.

What if you like the depredations of modernity and aren't interested in a utopian world where basic human needs are met? Can you learn anything about architecture from this guy? Absolutely. You'll learn that light is everything. Your bedroom has to have eastern light so that the sun wakes you up. Your best living quarters should have southern light. All the rooms should have light from at least two sides, otherwise there will be too much contrast and you'll just have to draw the shades. If you've got kids, make them sleep and play in their own wing of the house. Build a realm for yourself and your wife on a different floor. Meet the kids in the kitchen.

To avoid cluttering my apartment, I give away virtually all the books that I buy these days. I'm keeping this one and plan to re-read it every year.

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the unreasonable effectiveness of

.. blog posts and articles whose titles start with " the unreasonable effectiveness of ..."

is... well .... quite unreasonable 

 we keep a tab open, an item on the todo list, a reminder on a post-it, scribbled plans and goals in a notebook

waiting for the persona we wear, 

to play out,  reach a logical end, and stop for a while,

or just take a break, long enough, 

that we can take it off,  don another one -

one for whom the note was written, one that can

pick up that post-it, and make a poem, a story, go for a trek,  run that race

one that will learn that musical instrument..... one that can

sing that song of the soul,  midwife to the deep inner thoughts,

the soul at play, let out in the world, and 

do the things that keep us sane,  a small but divine circle, 

defining us by the promise of what's within

but,

sometimes the personas don't budge - the jobber, the family man,  

they do not relent

and the little bits of gaiety and colour that wash up at our lives' door,

wait forever in our external memory systems

like flowers pressed into a book, 

slowly desiccated 

till only remains 

but 

dull repeated words "he went to the office, he watched the kids" 

and dust of crumbled dreams

hurry, dear stranger,  build for me

a prison, as quickly as i build 

one for you, 

iron bands of need hidden

in ledger scribbles of ink

bind us to us

the first project, almost always a failure, serves as a survey

it is important that it captures the lay of the land

the goal is not the goal but the maps that are generated in the process