Neil de Grasse Tyson and the Dangers of Philosophy

The NdGT controversy I think comes down to the question of thinking versus acting. Of determining some form of balance

Neil de Grasse Tyson recently made some comments that have been interpreted as saying 'philosophy is useless' -- as a man of want to be action, usually navel gazing, I didn't look too deeply at them, but rushed instead to form an opinion.

I did in fact read part of a transcript from the nerdist here (I think) and thought NdGT's comments were not out of line.



They come down to the existential dilemma we face every day. Acting without thinking versus thinking without acting -- and how we must each find a liveable balance between the two.

For years I made the joke about how hard it is to find a reason to get out of bed in the morning because we're all going to die.

Which is an extreme form of 'where do I turn my spade?' - which was the phrase used in some philosophy course I took. When do I stop questioning and just do something?

Where we fall on the gradient between active and introspective is likely the usual combination of genetic and cultural influences. Look at some identical twins separated at birth raised in different cultures and see how they score.

I believe NdgT's point was that you don't want to spend your entire life 'just thinking'. Or just introspecting. He seems to have been saying that scientists look at the world 'out there' and see endless questions that they may be able to find answers to.

I know that I'm prone to doing ALOT of introspection, but over the years I've had help identifying some of the times when you need to get your head out of your ass and look around. Negative introspection, when you keep telling yourself bad things about yourself. Throw up a flag, and consciously change what you're thinking/doing. Endlessly pondering a decision - at some point you have to weigh the cost of delaying a decision against the cost of making a wrong decision. And sometimes the decision is between two good things so there's little downside to EITHER! So you have to ask yourself - in these cases the SOONER I choose, the better. Procrastination - all the instances of challenges, like doing the dishes, where the amount of work won't change, but the amount of enjoyment of that work depends on when you do it. Doesn't mean you can do EVERYTHING right away, but it's a mental tool to remind yourself - hey, if I do that NOW, then I won't have to do it later.

Anyway - now I have to stop ruminating and work. But I think MAYBE NdGT's comments have been blown out of proportion, by peoples overthinking.

Jason Kenney Do the Right Thing

Jason Kenney - will you do the right think and keep the Wilkie Family together?

A Canadian and his three Canadian children should not be separated from their mother - how is it that under your government a woman like this is arrested, kept separated from her family, and is due to be shipped back to Egypt?

Unless there is some part of this story we don't know about - and, uh, transparency? it seems a clear situation where something needs to be done to prevent this travesty.

Get to it!




I know you've had your disagreements with the Beaver in the past, and after he insulted you for your vanity petition...




You put him on Canada's most wanted war criminals list...




And he was a little miffed that you didn't send him a creepy letter explaining how the #cpc was doing such a great job for "chewers" and other lifestyles...




But don't worry about all that. As I'm sure some of your cpc briefing notes on "heathen and other needed but unsavoury cultures told you" there's a belief that the good of one moment can undo the evil of a thousand years.

So do some good...this moment...keep the Wilkie family together.

Douchebag, heal thyself

I have of late, wherefore I know pretty much precisely, lossed much of my mirth.

I'm letting myself flounder between seeking a serious job and making a serious go of some projects of my own.

I'm wallowing in my own filth essentially. And about 7 of you have been following the steps. Thank you. Perhaps if I'd actually been wallowing in my own filth, and filmed it, I could be a You Tube sensation in one of those European countries where that shit (ha) is actually popular.

What I've been struggling with is: what do I want to do that has value? More precisely - what do I want to do that I can sell to others?

And it comes down to helping. And it is a deviously difficult windy road between the selfishness of 'I want' to the potentially remunerative road of 'helping others to help yourself'

When I work as a Picture Editor (link) I help other's tell their stories. I like it, but I've got stories of my own I want to tell.

As a Dad, I'm almost constantly helping - I love it, but it doesn't fulfil my ego's desire for recognition and praise.

I could teach - I could share what I know about editing - and maybe I will. I've certainly thought about that one.

But what I want to do is follow my curiosity - explore the world, both inner and outer, and try and understand my place in it. Our place in it. You know a mix of tweedy adventure and philosophy.

Which is why letting myself remain mired in the foothills of taking action is very frustrating. These top of mind frustrations - this indecisiveness, really only has one solution. Get over it! Get over yourself and actually take the steps that get you off of the floor and onto the next new thing.

The only justification for posting any of this is that perhaps one reader will recognize something of themselves and know they're not alone. That we easily become so weighted down by our own bullshit - our own empty dharmas - that we remain stuck in the same ruts for days…months…years.

People have made fortunes helping others help themselves.

I suppose if 'Getting to Comfy' was a business model that would be it. 'Here…this is what I struggled with…this is what I did, or didn't do…this is what happened.' What the introspective life does give you is quite a bit of experience with analysis - deconstructing what you're thinking and why. Not necessarily tools to do anything about it, but at least some clarity. So when other people tell you their problems you're like "Oh yeah I know what you mean - when I was last in that type of obsessive depressive nightmare I did …. x"

And maybe that's helpful?

Anyhow - once I buy my iphone holder tapping the European market might be the way to go.

Otherwise - time to move on. Endless self-questioning is pathological. There are tonnes more interesting questions to get to. Though like Boynton says: "ooh bellybutton, you're so fine…ooh bellybutton, I'm so happy you're mine"

Rose tinted glasses

Many times, when the bullets are flying, I try and make a joke or otherwise 'keep it light'. I am either a world class diplomat, or Chamberlain - appeasing rather than confronting, avoiding unpleasantness rather than dealing with problems head on.

Perhaps in order to protect my self, I'm constantly telling myself stories how things are ok, or, if we are hurtling off a cliff to certain doom, we are at least trying to plant an ice pick in the cornice - at least struggling to survive.

And I know how fucking annoying optimists - or, worse, people feigning optimism, can be.

But does it help?

I think it does. I think it can amount to cognitive behavioural therapy - that active optimism is at least partially an intentional stance where no matter what the data, you look for a positive interpretation. I think for me it's necessary - if not sufficient. Because I've crept close to the edge of the cliff and taken a peek at the Abyss. I've had mild experience with the Fear and depression - and from what I know about neural plasticity - how the things our brains experience repeatedly or practice changes our neural pathways, resisting negativity can actually change how you see the world.

And how you see the world pretty much determines the types of choices you make.

I don't claim to make the best choices. I read a very interesting post (link) recently how procrastination is essentially a neurotic hangup where the fear of failure creates reward pathways for any and all activities that avoid the risk of failure - like never finishing anything that could be judged harshly. And I think that's a 'choice' I make too often.

But what I do think is that with a little objectivity and detachment we can change. And that cultivating optimism and gratitude gives us enough of a tactical advantage - enough serotonin or dopamine or whatever, to actually have the courage to attempt harder things, that wallowing in negativity would not.

So has it given me enough chutzpah to light the world on fire? Well, global warming may yet take care of that.

And while we're all hurtling somewhere - we're not dead yet, and that makes me hopeful.

On posturing

Honesty - weakness - over sharing.
People like to be lied to. Told that everything is ok that this too shall pass, and love conquers all. In uncertain times they prefer a strong leader to a just leader - a George W over a John Kerry. It's human nature.

Posturing is an intrinsic part of the human experience. Hell, how about animalia?

Nearly all our interactions are a combination of honesty and dissimulation - some information needs to be accurate, but other information needs to be hidden. Show weakness and you become a target - just think ’high school’

And so we construct. We construct personas that we perform for the world, and psychological scaffolding to get us through the day.

Some of it is dialled in. There's nothing like the research on testosterone to shine a light on the ’mysteries’ or banalities of maleness - the impulsivity, aggression, but more interestingly how ’victories’ from combat to the craps table cause testosterone to surge predisposing the ’winner’ to engage in similar actions again.

So males take more risks - and at the risk of falling into the unscientific, of recounting an adaptive story that weaves a narrative based on possibility rather than falsifiability, it just so seems to confirm things we already knew.

And so posturing and dishonesty. If victory causes a physiological response that encourages you to repeat those actions that produced success, then cheating, lying, stealing, when successful are likely to be repeated.

You look at Facebook where nearly everything is superficial and you ask yourself is it a mistake to actually try and share what I think? That most if not all of what passes in the public sphere is rank bullshit because lying works? People don't like bad news - and I think of some of my friends who try and post bad news and how even I, who's read much of the same shit independently, often just don't want to hear it.

But I suppose for all of us there's only so much we can deal with - the looming disasters, our own mortality, can overwhelm if we take our hands off the next pint, or gaze too far into the future.

And I suppose that's ok - there's certainly nothing we can do about it. Evolution selected those who survived, and the niceties never really entered into it. So on the day to day do I always choose honesty, vulnerability, or display weakness? Hell no. But when I do I've got an advantage - I'm 6'2 and often 220 lbs - so people rarely call me on it.

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On the fear of being pussy

There comes a time when you realize you're a pussy. That there are things you tell yourself you want but you don't take the risks to actually have them. Like stand up comedy - I'm a guy who gets some laughs at a party, but as any professional will tell you, its one thing to crack wise over wobbly pops and another to stand in front of an audience and entertain. It's a different dialogue is how HF put it - and it's an experiment that doesn't actually cost all that much - the cost, that stops me, is the work of writing some jokes and the risk of being embarrassed. As if I don't manage quite enough of that already by being a funny smart guy who doesn't risk much of anything.

Negative introspection, they say, isn't all that useful - but its a trope I've grown good at. THAT I've practiced…THAT I've written about - though having been told its unproductive I try and at least do the exercise of telling myself 'red flag' when I'm doing it and forcing myself on to something else. And so I've been here before and made deals with myself.

I've stopped worrying as much about posting shit on the internet - increasingly this navel gaving stuff because, guess what? - I'm introspective. I write this kind of stuff endlessly and exposing it to the world - or the 5 or 6 automated bots that crawl through my blog posts - is an act of self-exposure that I tell myself will thicken my skin to actually attempt 'real' writing on stuff other than the fluff in my navel.

But then I think of Woody Allen - who made a career out of his neuroses, and all the geniuses out there that tell you to write what you know. What I know is how easy it is to get wrapped up in yourself, in the endless questions, the empty dharmas that you know cognitively have no real 'answer' - there's nothing in your head that can actually simulate what will happen if you take action in the world.

Many, like 12 or more years ago, I told myself - alright, write 200 pages of stream of consciousness and then edit it. Well to avoid doing that I became a picture editor and honed my skills making sense of other people's bullshit (erm - awesome, concise, supremely beautiful material) - because a picture editor like an AD or any of the creative yet 'below the line' positions has the luxury of not really being responsible for the problem they are trying to solve. Generally a producer or a director hires an editor to either completely take on the writing and organizing of a movie (in the case of documentary) - and those are the projects I like, because I like writing and structuring and story editing, or to execute as best as possible the producer's and director's ideas. But you're doing it for a cheque, and if it's 'bad' - well, you didn't shoot it now did you? So the upside is a constructive detachment - which is why I recommend to all you producers and directors to hire an editor - objectivity AND craft is worth shelling out the candy - but the downside is lack of ownership. At the end of the day it's rare that the editor's role is ever mentioned, it's possible you don't get invited to the award shows, and with the passage of time, perhaps naturally, the final film begins to seem inevitable as if the chasm between what the producer and director dreamt and shot, and the final product never actually existed. Of course the movie needed a Lord of the Rings style opening, of course the title, tag line etc sprang fully formed onto the press materials.

So for me the 'cost' of editing is bitterness. Too pussy to really lead, I lead as much as I can in the editing, and then beat myself up that the pats on the head stop and people have moved onto other things.

Which gets me back to this mass of wallowing and self-absorption - oh wait, that's being negative - this mass of self-exploration and discovery which only slowly is seeing the light of day.

What's good about journal writing, stream of consciousness, etc, is that on any day, hopefully, you start repeating yourself - and that moment of recognition allows you a little detachment, to either look at what is bothering you in a different way, or to try and find the universal in what feels at the moment of writing, to be so deeply personal. So I know by the sheer weight of statistics that my bullshit is actually common. Not universal certainly, because we all vary along the gradients of introspective and extroverted, novelty seeking or conservative -- but sufficiently banal and common that 20% or even 2% of you know exactly what I mean. You might not express it in the same way, because, well, we're all somewhat odd ducks and I was actually dropped on my head in an age before kiddie knapsacks had five point safety harnesses.

And so that is my take away. To avoid just calling myself a pussy for not taking more chances like trying stand up, or pitching, or actually polishing anything I've written - I'm just airing my laundry on a blog. These silly questions - which amount I'm aware to long boring rationalizations for my actions or lack of actions - by exposure hopefully force me towards proactivity. I'm hoping it's a bit like AA. My name is John, and I like to gaze at my navel and then blame myself for not taking enough chances.

Get the Led out

Classic rock is many things, and of late I've hated CHOM because, well, I've heard it all so many times before - but there's a reason why at heart I'm a rocker and it's all tied up in how and when I was raised, who my friends were, and what we came to believe was the essence of manhood or even more broadly the essence of just being human.

It's not for everybody, that's for sure - if EVERYBODY was a rocker then there'd be no room for how it makes those people who are rockers feel special. There needs to be mods and punks and jesus freaks and jazz cats and electronica esotericists etc.
But coming of age in the mid to late eighties, as disco sputtered and died or morphed into pop and dance and emo, we were close enough to the 1970s to look at our cousins, the 'big kids', or whoever, to listen to Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath and AcDc, Skynrd, CSNY, Lynrd Skynrd, bla bla bla, (just turn on CHOM), and want to identify with those people and that music.

There's a willfulness to rock - a lack of pretense - I've always hated prog and even much of Rush for taking the techniques of rock and gussying them up - I suppose it's the equivalent of baroque or roccoco if I could bother to figure out what those words mean. For young males, looking for models on how to assert ourselves in the world, rock provided a model. A kind of balls out 'going for it' that was not as aggressive or based in hurt as punk or death metal (though both genres fill those emotional needs quite nicely thank you), but much more just wilful and intentional. Does it rock? Do you rock? Do you want to rock?

And somewhere along the way, with the three kids, less than satisfying career, and the increasing indignities of middle age, you realize -- Mother Fucker! I have ceased to rock…if I ever came even within the foothills of real rocking I am now dangerously close to the shores of modern pop and similar candy coated cereals. I listen to Virgin in the car! - though granted not when I'm alone - and I've downloaded some of it to my iPhone. (Who doesn't love Gangnam ?)

So turning on CHOM today, and exceptionally not wanting to shoot myself in the head at their whole business model (make geezers like myself and older feel like we're still teenagers or at least aren't listening to AC) and they surprised me. There's no punch line because I forget the name of the song and maybe that's better because you can fill in your own Classic Rock Favourite - but it rocked, and for the few minutes it took to drive the minivan home after dropping off the skates the 8 yo had forgotten after dropping off the 4 yo and 23 mo, I felt like there was a chance I might rock again too. Someday. Maybe not today because there's the doctor and the job that makes me sad, then the stress fest that is dinner etc, but someday. That it was still possible. And that it was important to try, because rocking is how we are meant to live.
So I will leave you with Led Zeppelin.

Self-Involvement

I'm self-involved. I've spent countless hours writing stream of consciousness prose that at its best veers towards thinly veiled autobiography and at its worst is reams of me complaining about not making more of myself and the challenges of being born smart, male, white and privileged. Oh the horror of not having had to overcome adversity! The shit stinks but it's who I am.

So I'm very interested in the scientific study of motivation.

Recently a study came out that hit the lay press that says "If you want to achieve something, keep it to yourself, because telling others about our goals actually undermines the likelihood we'll achieve them" Something along the lines of bullshitting to our friends and loved ones about our big plans gives us a neurochemical jolt of "success" so we actually don't feel as driven to do the much harder work of acting on achieving our goals. I know that feeling. I've spent countless nights drinking with my good time buddies lying to each other about the movies we're going to make, the stand up comedy we'll perform, or the transformative and incredibly redeeming new direction we're about to embark on. And some of these ideas are fairly detailed and actionable. In the hands of non-bullshit artists they could have created several fortunes by now and probably incidentally cured cancer.

A second bit of science or what passes in the lay press as science that's been making the rounds is that listening to people complain makes us stupid. Some kind of study has been done in which people's mental acuity was tested, they were then exposed to someone complaining, and when they tried the maze again they starved before finding the cheese. Holy does this mean I have to thin out my rolodex and unfriend a whack of face bookers! Or apply for special parking as I list to full dimmer.

Because, shockingly, amongst my hard drinking brilliant yet unsuccessful intimates, next to dreaming in colour is bitching, and it's a less than Amazing Race to know which we've indulged in more vigorously.

Now the silver lining of all this is forewarned is forearmed, and like with negative introspection and depression, knowing these things are bad gives us some leverage to avoid them. In my reams of self involved journal writing I've 'flagged' negativity - when I've found myself bitching in circles I'll write 'red flag' and take a moment to step back and move onto something else. I've learned also to practice gratitude - if there's one thing I've learned from the shit storm that holding a family of five together can put you through is to be grateful for what you have. Because we'll all be dead soon and whatever passes for our family life could easily blow up and find us spread to the four winds or worse. So I practice being grateful.

And as for not bullshitting about my plans and being more proactive? That one I'm not sure if I've developed actual better practices for. I put more stuff out in the world - that's progress - I've learned to accept that my process to date involves a lot of navel gazing but that if I gaze long enough I grow tired of describing lint and move onto more shaped material.

I may never be decisive and constantly in motion - but I am kind of suspicious of people like that anyway. Most decisions that are worth a good god damn should be thought about pretty thoroughly. Charging forward for the sake of moving is kind of Kardashian. There are countless examples of celebrities who's need for attention so eclipses what they actually have to offer the world that they are essentially just flinging shit on the walls and hollering for people to notice.

So perhaps I'll keep muddling. I'm english after all, apparently it's something we're known for.

The limits of empathy

I am agreeable to a fault. I have a strong need to be liked, and so am affable and self-deprecating when at times the world would be better served by my being more of an asshole.

Reams of self-help advise us to stop worrying about what other people think of us, and while I've internalized some of that advice with regards to the generation of nonsense, I've got a long way to go with the more global not giving a shit about the feelings of others.

Because while caring about the feelings of others can be a very useful and constructive skill, there are also times when what we imagine other people are feeling stops us from doing something we want to or should. Situations when, in fact, we have no actual idea if the other person cares at all about what we are doing.

I think of this most often domestically, when I want to go to my cave and write or otherwise play and yet I either stop myself or end up spending my time psychically conflicted imagining Smith wants me to be doing something 'productive' - even on days when she's not actually expressed an opinion either way.

This is where if you want to make time for creativity you have to stake your ground. For yourself first, and for those around you as well -- what's trite in all this for students of self-help is that it's repeating a fairly basal level of advice - but as with all the fruits of experience there is a world of difference between reading or hearing about the benefits of planting some fruit trees, and actually biting the fruit from the trees you have planted. In other words - there's knowing the path and walking the path.

And the reason as best as I can tell is the gap between what we know consciously and what we've internalized unconsciously, or emotionally. We can know that exercise or setting aside time for creativity with no distractions are the tried and tested methods of achieving health or productive goals, but until we've trained our limbic systems to actually perform these tasks, until we've put the idea into practice, and then repeated it until our neurons map the performance of the task with experiencing the reward, it's a hell of a hill to climb on the day to actually walk the walk.

It's exactly like riding a bike, or any of the millions of other tasks we have to learn that are really hard to perform consciously, but, once learned, we hardly ever have to think of again. And it's down this road - of practice practice practice, that flow becomes possible. Being in a state of high performance with little to no involvement of the conscious mind.

Which is as best as I can tell, one of the major gateways to happiness. And leads to comfy.

Shooting the Censor

The Case against my inner censor took years to build, and while the sentiment of the court in the end was clear for all to hear - "shoot the bastard! up against the wall!" the spin out from his execution has yet to resolve itself. While the Censor may have been shot square in the face, it is still somewhat unclear whether another, perhaps more powerful one has taken his place, or if the bureaucracy of my bullshit is such that I continue to avoid the point of all this out of habit, if less out of raw fear.

Better a bad artist than a loser. Because while some bad artist's may be losers, it is far less likely that most losers can even lay claim to being bad artists.

The snob's dilemma, the argument from fear, all the excuses in the world for self-censorship are painful to work through - to be discarded quickly if you can - and maybe it's just a lifetime of inadequate testosterone? Lacking the balls to just take the risk of looking stupid. Because by all accounts more than a few people seem to live what for them appear to be relatively adequate lives while radiating, no, sometimes indeed, glorying in their stupidity. Take the conservatives, just to grab a group out of the air.

So the puppet's back - and I've started singing. And sweet Jay Z H Christ, it's got some room to, erm, mature. But the song I recorded yesterday sounds way better than the one from last week - and I like to believe it's really quite ridiculous. And that's kind of the point isn't it? All of this life is quite ridiculous. We get pushed or carved out of our moms, we spin around the sun for awhile, and then we die. More often than not really fucking terribly. So am I happy to have recorded a version of the Ballad of Happy Forest, where the Beaver and Beavette sing about their love for each other and the righteousness of diverting small waterways? All the while knowing that the bulldozers of the Evil Doer Stephen Harper are about to descend upon their boreal idyll destroying it forever? Separating Beaver from a now visibly pregnant Beavette, who for all he knows is dead with so many other of the forest animals? Yup.

Nonsense, glorious nonsense, and it would be funny if it wasn't actually so serious, and well, if it was written a little better and someone sent me a voice coach, or, well, sang it for me. But what's the fun of that?

Overthinking

I wanted to write about opportunity. How the wrong opportunity that presents itself in a time of need can actually motivate you to decide upon and pursue something better.

I got caught up in how self-indulgent it felt. How borderline pathological the examined life can become. How philosophy and philosophizing won't dig you out of a hole. Sometimes you just need a ladder or a shovel and a lot of hard work.

'Imagine, if you will, that we are not in fact in a hole…' You know how it goes - nowhere. And thus indecisiveness, and all the excuses for non-action, while sometimes seductive, often painful, and usually circular and unproductive, don't actually move you all that far from your starting position.

Though I suppose it is practice. Running around in a circle long enough, spending years lost in the same maze, may eventually lead you to conclude, 'Hey, why don't I just step over this knee high wall, there's clearly no other way out of this?'

And this is what I've always loved and feared about empty dharmas. Questions that actually don't need answering, yet can hold you sirenlike in their sway. 'What should I do?' 'Who should I be?' - whose only real answers lie in doing and being. Do something, be something - you can, at least for some short span, do or be something else.

It's congenital - I know - my sister has it in almost the exact same words. If you don't have it it looks like insanity - and if you have it bad it is insanity. It's overthinking. Or thinking a lot - which, with enough practice and sedatives you hope one day can be tamed into just thinking deeply, or enough, but sure beats the alternative, which is thinking not at all.