Theatre of the Absurd

We are reading Ionescu's "Exit the King" or "Le Roi se meurt". It is a play of the genre of theatre of the absurd. The notion derives from existentialism with the idea the life and death have no intrinsic meaning. It occurs to me that we classify as absurd that which we don't understand. It is a form of dogmatism that seems to indicate that which is not understood by us is absurd. The meta model in science is more that understanding is a journey, a process without end and that we live in an inherently cause and effect universe. That certain phenomena are not understood simply indicates that our current models are missing some basic understanding of the structures deriving the system whose behavior we don't understand. This is particularly applied to human behavior. So a true believer can be very confused as to why everybody else doesn't believe as he or she does.

If

If ∞ has no limits, what does it do:

• Nothing
• Something
• Somethings
• Everything

Isn't the answer obvious?

Pattern from The Little Prince

Our book club read The Little Prince by Saint-Exupery. As we were discussing the book, a new pattern emerged for me:

Know Thyself and its context

I am taking an online MOOC on mindfulness via Coursera. One of the questions to answer was:

• Purpose: to reveal and reflect on our existing opinions about the connections between mindfulness and Buddhism.
• Task: to challenge ourselves to consider our own views on the meaning of 'real mindfulness' and to explore our aspirations for this concept today.
• Respond: write a post that reflects upon your intuitive sense of the connection between mindfulness and Buddhism and also expresses your hopes and fears about this connection.

Measures and their discontnet

In conversations with friends who had read Steven Pinker's book The Better Angels of Our Nature and how we have less violence now. The implications of this view and others along these lines is that things are getting better and we are not aware of this trajectory, in part  because of the amount of information that we now have easily available to us. The measures used justify the claims. However, it seems to me that there is a general pattern with measures, in this as well as other domains. We create measures that justify our narrative. In this case it justifies a sense of optimism which seems to me is part of American culture. With any metric we choose, we leave out the larger part of the system we are talking about as that does not fit the narrative we want those measures to justify. In this case the measures declining violence leave out the measure of species extinction, destruction of ecologies, measures of pollutions, .... These are all forms of violence against the larger system of which we are a part.

YAP (Yet Another Pattern) from Jordan Peterson structures

I have been listening to a number of Jordan Peterson videos and reading some of his material. What he is saying is well articulated. He backs up his analysis with a deep study of the subject area - very impressive. However, there was something about his meta model that was causing me some cognitive dissonance. I have been trying to understand the source of that dissonance for some time. Every time I listen to him, I find him insightful, honest, and very genuine.

Expectation space pattern

I am taking an online mindfulness course via Coursera at the University of Leiden. One of the  questions that came up was whether we are in a period of greater stress historically than before. One person pointed that with famine, disease, life expectancy, etc. life was more stressful before. My thought was that that is not true. What has happened is that with

• the complexity of our civilizations, 
• all the stories / narratives  / media we are exposed to 

we have developed a very large expectation space. Our expectations of what our lives could be, should be, ought to be, ... And the gap between the actuality of our lives and experiences and our expectation space is  what leads to stress. So, in this model, stress is much more in this age than it has ever been before.

With this pattern, there is also the issue whether a person senses

• they can meet these expectations
• the expectations are impossible to achieve for them
• if only ....  , then .... Which leads to various fantasies which may collide with actuality and cause stress
• ...

One can contrast expectation space with opportunity space. Since we live in a infinite universe, opportunity space is infinite. However, we may not have the strategies, capabilities to  avail ourselves of these opportunities.

Selection pattern

As an example, there are many rules of thumb. Some are direct opposites of each other.  How do we decide which one to select. This is the selection pattern. Selection can be determined by

• context  - 
• groups, e.g., mobs, cultures, religions, philosophies, academic disciplines, ...
• hormonal balance (good day, bad day, what we had for our last meal and how we feel, ...)
• weather
• current news cycle
• ...
• authority - person, religious text, dogma, ....
• life experiences
• trigger events
• ...

Rule of Thumb Pattern

We exist in a very complex context. One way we have found to manage this complexity is by making  rules of thumb. Religions, philosophies are replete with these rules of thumb. There are some side effects to these rules of thumb:

• context is left out. Does the rule apply in this context? A rule is a generalization that may or may not apply in a given context. The generalization leaves out the dynamic nature of existence.
• the rule hides the complexity. In some sense, it creates a veil, a wall, beyond which we do not look. Just like a causal chain - we stop it at some point and don't look past that point. Some causal chain stopping points:
• the big bang
• god
• who is to blame - a group, an ethnicity, a culture, a philosophy, a gender, a  function, ...
• ...
These stopping points help us manage an infinite regression since we exist in infinity, where the causal chain starts is totally unclear to finite beings with limited capacity.
• allows us to deal with great complexity in some manner. Sometimes a useful one and sometimes not.
• ...