True choices

 Buddhism has a feel like stoicism to me, feel in the jazz sense of the word. This feel comes from an acknowledgement that the only true choices we have is the choice of emotions and reactions. Marcus Aurelius spends a section of his Meditations gripping about going to the senate when he wants to be a philosopher or artist or whatever, but finally concludes that it's in his nature to go the senate, and other beings don't bitch and moan about their nature so why should he. It's a passage that I find myself thinking about a lot because of it's contrast to the idea of "self" in Buddhism. Today, though, I find myself thinking about it as a different perspective on a similar tool. To contrast perspective, in the Dhammapada we are introduced to the idea of self as a mirror and how the true self shines through.

So before we continue, I want you, the captive reader, to listen to me about the self. My American self sits on my ass to watch people more well known and more well off than me talk about humility in interviews with other famous people. In these interviews, it's common for people to wax philosophical about how nobody gets to know the real them, who they feel is the person they keep private for friends and family. In my reading of the Dhammapada, this idea of "the real me" doesn't exist, it's a reflection the people, situations, and expectations that surround us. Yes, you don't act the same with your work friends as you do with your drinking buddies, or as you do with your family. Is your work self your true self, or is the vulnerable version of you at 2 am lying next to your lover your true self? Your true self shines through in moments like these, but you are not hiding a face from the other, your reflecting the mood and the people. My buddies at the warehouse don't need to be impressed with my way of beautiful prose, because I'm not done fucking them and I'm not trying to sleep with all of them. There is a way I want to be seen by others, things I want to be known for. I want to be know as caring, helpful, hardworking, efficient, but not as a push over. Being known as these things is helpful to me throughout all my interactions and gets me the most money/tail/status/power. While I might be more gentle and caring with a lover than with a co-worker, I can choose to bring the better aspects of myself to these interactions, in different ways. To pull away the reflections and illusions in ourselves is to point an analytical eye inwards and acknowledge who we are to those around us. For me to go any deeper than than this would require a discussion on "the axioms of self", what are things that make up personality at a base level. For a TLDR; to know who we are, we must not only acknowledge ourselves, but also our interactions with other people.

In the sense of western philosophy, we love the self, and in the US we have built entire concepts around individualism. It is hard to truly give yourself to another person, but we continue to try, whether it's giving our soul to a partner or our body to Christ. We have built institutions in the USA based on the time honored tradition that god only helps those that helps themselves.We are more aware of the struggles of the individual, and tell stories of individual struggle against the wider world. The story of the businessman that worked his way up from nothing to have an empire. The man with a stable family life despite being from a poor broken home. The story of survival vs a world that only wishes to see us fail. The people who help us are friends, but the rest of the world pushes against us, keeping us from our true calling of success. The self is more isolated, a force against nature, a rock beaten by the waves of time and society. Or maybe this is just how it feels in the real America, a world of quiet nature that separates us from other people and allows us to reflect on this feeling.

Back to my man Marcus. I've focused on this concept of the self as it appears, but there is another interpretation of this. True choice only exists as our choice of emotions. The buddha, the story goes, was born to a life of luxury and status, but found emptiness inside. So he left his wife and child to spend years starving himself, denying himself pleasures of flesh, drinking only when important to live, but still found emptiness inside. There are things that make us animals (the need for sipping, sex, and sleep) there are things that make us human (anger, joy, pleasure and obsession) but these aren't "good" and "evil" things. We let anger consume us and eat us alive. We can do this by focusing on a thought and letting the feeling into our gut to make our stomach turn. Then we take that feeling and bring to all our interactions. "Having trouble at work now because I'm bringing personal baggage at home". Pleasure and the quest for pleasure has consumed many for many reasons, but the enjoyment of pleasure is a hit of dopamine in our physical brains, and exists in creatures that have access to dopamine. We can choose to acknowledge these, and not fight the feelings but instead try to acknowledge where they come from, and acknowledge the joy and hardship that these things bring us.. Mindfulness. It's mindfulness you guys. I'm only talking about mindfulness.

Marcus is really classical in how he writes, in that he speaks about cultural knowledge as if it's world truths. He turns his eye inwards through his cultural lens (and his class appropriation of a slaves philosophy). His meditations are something wonderful because he is using a tool of analytics , not his musings of how hard work and good teachers gave him the status he enjoyed. This analytics exists in the writings of western philosophers, but is not explored on the same level of buddhism. Rene Descartes exists because he thinks, but only takes small steps away from the culture, the situations, and things in the material world that influenced his thoughts.

Is Buddhism better than stocism? Buddhists and stoics are people, and their ideas areas wonderfully flawed as people. Both give their ideas wrapped in the cultural trappings (the sexism, classism, prejudice, and fear of change) of their environment, but both give us this tool of mindfulness though, a tool of self analysis that works to get past the masks, reflections and illusions created by this bullshit to see ourselves. A tool to see ourselves and our connections to others. With this tool, we can begin to see the person we bring to every interaction, and we can choose emphasis or change for these things.

Maybe someday soon, we can have a sit down and talk about Emma Goldman, violence, and the use of power. For now, let's just have a friendly smoke sess and talk about choices.

10 Mathematicians to help make learning FUN!

Hey parents! Are you having a hard time getting your kid interested in mathematics?  Here's a list of interesting Mathematicians to keep your kid saying "Arthritic? More like Awesome-mitic!"

 

1. Karl Marx - Whoa there, coming out the gate a little hot here, aren't we? Well, there's mathematics in everything and boy did he ever find them them in his analysis of the working class struggle, Das Kapital. Of course, some of his calculations were made using geometery, which was slowly falling out of fashion by that point. Make learning fun, exciting and alive while you learn about the class struggle and how war is finically inevitable!
   
2. Sophia Kovalevskya -Did someone say Grrrrrl pwr!? Sophia didn't need no man in order to become the first female professor of mathematics in Euorpe, even if it was Russia. Married on paper to the 26 year old Vladimir Kovalevsky when she was 18, they never fucked until they were in their 30's. This allowed Sophia to leave Russia (at a time when women couldn't get a mathematical education and couldn't travel without a male family member to escort you) to get a mathematical education in another country. It also allowed Vladimir to translate the works of Darwin into Russian before Darwin even finished them!
   
3. Galoe. Gal-law? Gal-o-iss? How do you say Évariste Galois? The dude everyone knows, and the one that reminds the world that we are in fact, crazy rockstars that live fast and die young. An old mathematician produces no work, so this punk went out on top in a gunfight. He was looked down upon, because he was a son of a politician during the french revolutionary war. But Gal-law he was like, no I'm a mathematician, I don't want to politics, I want to math. Like the chivalrous, gentleman he was, he got into a pistol dual over the honor of a maiden which he tragically died from. Not until after he released his brilliant ideas into the world, which old people never got, just Jimi Hendricks "Electric Ladyland". Why hasn't there been a movie made about this gorgeous young white french dude, but instead mathematicians get Russell Crowe just getting older and fatter?
4.  Godel. Simple. This one ryhmes with Yodel. He was Einstien's pal. Well, actually, Einstien looked up to him, because Einstien only proved relativity, but Godel proved that 1 + 1 = 2.
5. Stephen Smale - Good, finally an American in here. Stood on the steps of the Kremilin in the 60's and told both the Americans and Ruskies to fuck off!! USA! USA! USA! Also had a major breakthru in the field of topology which proved that Poincare conjecture is true in dimensions with more than 3 dimensions.  
6. Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi - If you remember that he's not a Muslim mathematician, but a PERSIAN mathematician, then you can begin to understand why a man named Muhammad can invent algebra and get the word Algorithm named after him. While little is know about his life, his works have been kept and were the stepping stone from algebraic like thinking during the Egyptian, Sumerian, Greek, and Roman periods to algebra as tool for calculation. Mathematicians don't become legends and gods of the field because people remember the gossip of the day, they live on through the works they create. No one remembers or talks about how Euclid wrote the elements, people barely remember Euler outside of math circles, and Fermat is remember for dying and leaving behind an unsolvable puzzle that has since been solved. Death comes to us all, (Muslim, Christian, Buddhist) and time will make fools of any legacy we leave.
   
7. Leonardo DaVinci - Conspiracy time, kids! Why does this man who hung out with scientists and mathematicians seem to have so much engineering thrown into his work? Who knows! Aliens, a group devoted to the child of Christ, maybe, IDK, fucking lizard people!? The fact that he illustrated a book on a divine proportion and seems really good getting precision and proportion right in his work shows how he was influenced by outside forces.
   
8. Leonardo Fibonacci - It's the number. The important one. God's number. It shows up in everything, from plants to whole financial systems. It's phi, and even Euclid knew about, so it must be important. And Fibonacci mentions the series of numbers as a fun problem about rabbits to teach people how to use the new fangled "Arabic Numbers". That's what he wants you to think though! He was one in the line of people that keeps the secrets of the mathematics that holds together time and space, started by Pythagoras himself it has been passed on. Fibonacci was a failure and released that number as an innocent problem about rabbits. The rest has been kept secret.
   
9. Lewis Carole - Yes, he was a mathematician. And a weirdo. Maybe a pedophile? Someone thought he was Jack the Ripper, too. Oh! And he wrote a famous drug trip that became a Disney film! The man famous for disappearing cats and world's that make no sense, actually was really obsessed about logic. Did a book on linear logic. Also did some  mathematical work involving fair voting systems. But he also maybe hated "new" abstract mathematics, wanting to keep "real" numbers and geometry.
   
10. Gregori Peleman - The youngest on our list, he proved the poincare conjecture in 3 diminsions. He also just wants to be left alone, and  lives with his mother in St. Petersburg Russia where he publishes no math.
    

Determinstic free will, now on the right blog

  Deterministic free will is the idea that we have choices, but the choices are limited. These choices can come from genetics, socioeconomically standing or race. They can be a end point of a Markov nightmare chain, where every decision is runway train of wrong. We can look at our choices like a decision tree, where each answer brings us a grouping of choices. It's an infinite tree with infinite choices, but each local grouping of choices is finite.

 

 A person can be represented as a vector with a magnitude of time. We start with V₀ equaling Birth and V_n+1 equaling death, with n being the number of events, or "choices" in a person's life. A person becomes a set of events like marriage, celebrations, traffic accidents, and first attempts at kinky sex stuff.

As we approach V_n+1 and look backwards, each choice flows into the other in a deterministic way. Things just lined up and happened to fit that things just seemed meant to be. But we are aware that if we weren't at the bus station that day the cute little sex addict showed up, we might have never had the chance at a handy on the Philly to Boston line. Do we have full free will, and each vector is a beautiful, unique combinations of our choices that disappear when we die, or do we live in fear of what a great decider chose for us, a life determined by genetics, bad spawn points, and the all powerful effects of astrology?

A choice in hindsight can appear deterministic due to it's recursive nature. V₁ affects the chances of what V₂ could be as well as the possibility of it's success. Someone who decides that their studies aren't important in high school might find the next event in life and it's choice limiting if they want to go to college. It doesn't limit the chance of making a six figure salary, but it sure as hell doesn't make it easier. While the choice "Sell all of my possessions and live in the woods" always exists, if the chooser has never taken a wild risk and feels uncomfortable for long periods in the woods, it has a low chance of being chosen. They are more likely to be using their skill set of "15 years of hiding my stress in a deep place" and continuing to die inside until they are an empty husk going through the motions until death.

It is a logistical nightmare to sit here and try to run analysis on each possibility that exists in the midgame of life. Like in chess, the number reaches high enough that it might as well be considered infinite. So, let's continue this idea and look at the question of free will through chess.