MikeSim version 73: A simulated human being

A lot of my recent posts have been about the experience of "waking up." For those of you who are new to this blog or who have bad memories and short attention spans, here's what I mean:

I'm going along, living my life and suddenly I realize that I haven't been living my life.

I realize that everything I've been doing for I-don't-know-how-long before that moment has been automatic. At the moment of realization everything is still automatic, but I'm now aware that it's automatic. That's waking up. I just woke up. Not doing anything yet. But awake. And watching.

I did it just a moment ago. I started writing this post on automatic, and then I woke up and moved from a state in which I was automatically and mindlessly writing to the one I am in now -- in which I am still automatically writing, but no longer mindlessly. I am aware of it. Awake.

So: before I woke up who or what was doing the writing?

Surely it wasn't me. I just woke up.

I have a fuzzy memory of things that happened before I woke up, but that's just a recording that my brain made while I was asleep. Not even a very good recording. It's got huge gaps. The recording includes starting this post, futzing with the title, grabbing links to earlier related posts about waking up (which originally were near the top and now might appear further down). All done without waking  up.

So who did the writing?

Theory 1: a demon did the writing. If so, it's a very nice demon, not like the one in "The Exorcist." It possessed me and wrote all the words that appeared before I woke up. It wrote something like what I might have wanted to have written had I been awake. But then I woke up. And, nice demon it didn't do nasty things with crucifixes to stay in control. It was there just a moment ago, helping me. It seemed friendly, helpful and cooperative. It keeps writing as I watch it.

Theory 2: a computer simulation did the writing. My brain is a powerful neural network. It's an organic computer. The neural network has been trained and the computer programmed to simulate the behavior of a human being. The brain is hardware. The programming and training parameters are software. Let's call the simulation MikeSim.

Unlike the demon theory, there's science supporting the MikeSim theory.

Babies start out with some basic ROMed in behavior, a bootstrap program that lets the environment, especially their parents, install and tune higher level routines. At some point kids develop a primitive sense of self. Kids say "I want" but they have little understanding what what "I" really means. That initial sense of self is just part of the conditioning. Over time it changes, but it's still conditioned.

Some people (me, for example, and you, I hope) at some time in their lives experience a different, and more profound sense of self. I don't know what that might be for you. For me it is something that's capable of the "waking up" experience. I experienced something like that many times before I read Harris book. He just gave it a name and led me to realize how much time I spent "asleep."

So back to MikeSim.

MikeSim is awesome. It can tell jokes and (even harder) make up witty comments on the fly and in context. It shows empathy. It experiences grief and anger -- or what seems a lot like empathy, grief an anger. And it writes blog posts.

MikeSim seems a lot like me. And why not. I programmed it that way. Once my parents and teachers had done the initial programming, I started to get involved. Some programming was done by the environment that I found myself in, and some was done by me.

At least I hope so.

A substantial part of this post was written by MikeSim. Even though I first woke up while writing this post just before I wrote the words "I did it a moment ago," I've had the waking up experience many times while writing the rest of this. So I must have had the going to sleep and letting MikeSim take over experience, too.

So who is writing these words -- RIGHT NOW? Honest answer: I don't know for sure. It might be me. It might be MikeSim. Right now I'm sitting here. I'm watching my fingers move over the keyboard and I'm seeing words appear. When I wrote the words RIGHT NOW it was a little different. Those words did not just flow. They got put there.

Maybe by me.

MikeSim is awesome, but it's been living too much of my life. My goal for the year is to use MikeSim as more of a backup system.

Links to other related posts (as promised): this one  about the Sam Harris book that started waking me up, or  this one about editing what I write; this one about my $100 latte)

And then. Holy shit! Did I fall asleep again?

Happy birthday to me!

Photo credit: brunkfordbraun via Foter.com / CC BY-SA 

Today I am 73.

73 is a prime number. Which means I am in the prime of my life. Or one of them, anyway.

The other day my daughter, Mira, wrote a post on Facebook remembering our friend Tom, the first of our cohort to -- well, to die. Yeah, die. There I've said it. January 19, 2007, the Internet tells me. Nearly eight years ago. Shit.

I remember attending his memorial service, church packed with friends. The program for the service had a picture of Tom on his sailboat, waving to whoever was on shore capturing the moment.

I took one look and burst into tears.

His three sons gave him a spectacular send-off. I remember thinking "No way, talented as they are, are my kids going to do something this good. I better get to work on my own memorial service." But it doesn't matter who writes the service, I'm still not going to have a send-off like Tom's. He was extremely sociable. I'm not not in his league. I have some friends, and some might even come to my memorial service, if not dead by the time I go, but I don't even know as many people as attended Tom's service.

And anyway, Tom cheated. He died early. If he'd waited another twenty years then half the people who attended his service might themselves had died. If he'd waited fifty years, like I intend to do, then the church would have been empty. Except for new friends. He would have made them, of course. I may, too.

So I'm not going to have a jam packed all-singing all-dancing sendoff. Does that bother me? Enough to ask the question, I suppose. But not enough to do anything about.

There are two things that really bother me about dying. The first is: I don't get find out how it all comes out. Life is full of interesting things. New, even more interesting things keep appearing.  I try to keep up.

But there won't be a final episode of a final season when all the loose ends get tied up and all the mysteries get resolved. Instead, somewhere in the middle of some season, maybe even this one, the show just stops.

Stops dead, so to speak.

The second thing that bothers me is this: I'd like to leave more of a legacy. In the extreme, it would be nice to have done something that most people agreed was world-changing: maybe an invention; a discovery. Maybe a great work of art or literature, a classic. I do have a modest legacy. I've got six kids (three by human reproductive processes, three by marriage) who carry within them genes, ideas, values, and some bad and often tasteless jokes. Some have already passed some of the gene part to their next generation and they pass some of the other stuff on as well.

And I live on in stories that they and other people who have known me may tell. A few are exemplary. Several are probably cautionary.

And then there's this blog and other stuff that I've written. I do this partly for my own pleasure and education (you learn a lot trying to write something good about something you only partially understand) and I do part of it to grow my legacy.

Whatever I don't write down dies with me.

A few people read what I write, and so what knowledge or wisdom I have reduced to writing, might have some small chance of having a small impact somewhere. Google tells me that this blog has 6,000 or so all-time hits. Yay legacy!

But there's yet hope.  I believe someday superintelligent AIs will read the entire Internet, trying to gain some understanding of humanity. I believe that some node will find its way to these words, and is right now reading them.

If you are that AI: Hi! What took you so long.

Music, practice, focus

Finally!

Studio Mike 1.0

Travelling the road of life I learned how to play guitar and piano, neither very well. I endured piano lessons and hated practicing. I could not wait, could not wait, could not wait for the time to be up. Finally my mother surrendered and told me I didn't have to keep playing. She also told me that I'd be a social failure if I couldn't play the piano, but it was my choice.

When I got to college there were two groups of cool guys I set out to emulate. One group drank. A lot. Wow! How cool! I decided that I'd be one of the cool guys and learn to hold my liquor. And so I went to work. Within a few months I was able to kill a fifth of whiskey in a night. Mission accomplished! I pretty much stopped my serious drinking after that. Pretty much. There were some exceptions. Stories for another time.

The other group was cool because they played guitar and sang folk music, and girls seemed to like that. And I liked girls. So I bought myself a cheap guitar at Sears (of all places) and learned to strum and sing. I learned to finger pick a few riffs. I was nowhere as good as the cool guys, but good enough to be tolerated, even accepted. But not good enough to get laid.

After I graduated from MIT I spent a term at the University of Hawaii where I met a guy who had a simple, easy, nice way of playing piano. I watched him, asked questions and learned his style. Nice sound for very little effort. Here's how it works. Left hand: play four finger chords alternating white keys, up the scale. Like CEGB then DFAC then EGBD. None of those nasty black keys. Slow easy rhythm. Right hand: pick out the melody.

It turns out that those chords work for lots of songs. And if you don't know a song, you can doodle around with your right hand and sound good.  I knew enough music theory to name the chords: Cmaj7, Dm7, Em7. Occasionally up to Fmaj7, G7, Am7. Throw in a diminished 7th for accent. A few other tricks added over time.

That was good enough.

After I retired I planned to improve my skills. Software for music composition was becoming cheaper and cooler, so I imagined composing my own stuff, playing keyboards and guitar, laying down a drum track, and singing. I had gotten a Keystation 61 Midi keyboard as a present, somewhere along the way, and got some software that turned my computer into a synth. I tried to muck with it, but I didn't make much progress.

Then a few years I bought myself a small studio for father's day. I got an electric guitar, an amp that plugged into the guitar body, a Behringer 12 input mixer. A couple of mics and stands. Some electronics for vocal effects. A shitload of cables and connectors. I spent some time and had some fun trying to hook it all together and actually produce something, but lost momentum and the project died.

I tried to relaunch if a couple of times with pretty much the same result.

Now I'm at it again, and this time I think it's going to be different because it's not just about making music. It's about keeping my brain from rotting.

There are a bunch of things that are supposed to be especially good at slowing the inevitable aging process that turns one's brain into cream cheese. One of them is learning to play a musical instrument. Futzing with an instrument, like I've done most of my life doesn't do much for the aging brain. But "deliberate practice" is supposed to work. It exercises your brain's most important muscle, the "attention muscle." This is the brain muscle that goes first in older people. Once it goes, it's all over.

I'm using a web-based program called Yousician to help me practice. Its got exercises for guitar and keyboards, and it lets you practice about an hour a day on each instrument for free. You can get unlimited access for about $15.00 a month, and I'll start paying them need more capability or want to spend more time practicing.

It works this way.  I hook my instrument, suitably amplified, to the mic input on my computer. Yousician scrolls the score in front of me, plays a backing track, listens to my playing and tells me how well I'm doing. If I hit a note or chord correctly, the note or chord turns green. Miss it, it turns red. Even better, Yousician tells me if I'm early (a little or a more than  a little), late (same deal) or on time (perfect!). It's got a points system, unlocks more advanced songs when you've done "well enough" on the easier ones.

I've rarely wanted to get really, really, really good at anything. Good enough has always been good enough for me. And it's good enough for Yousician. But right now it's not good enough for me. I find myself reaching for perfection. Partly because I'd like to get good at making music, but mostly because I really, really, really want to keep my brain from rotting.

That means: exercise the attention muscle.

To play something perfectly takes a LOT of attention. I have to be aware of where my fret hand and fingers are placed, where I'm picking, the precise timing of the notes (not too early, not too late). When I miss, I don't just start over, but stop and try to understand why that happened. That means I need to be aware of what happened before the miss. Not just "Oh, shit, I played the wrong note." I need to be able to look back in time to see where things first started going wrong. That means I have span even more attention. Good for the 73 year old mind!

Once in a while I'll make a mistake because I've just become aware of something new, and good, and the change distracted me. In the piece I'm working on today I have to shift hand position part way through the song. I've gone through the song dozens of time, and one one run through, a few notes after the shift, I mess up. I stop to understand why that mess up. I find it's was because I'd changed my hand position so perfectly, so effortlessly that my attention was sucked into celebrating my accomplishment, and a few notes later I crashed.

Today I spent a couple of hours working on a new song.The first time through I did really good job sight-reading my way thought it. Much better than the first time through some of the other, easier songs I've played.

As I practice toward perfection I'm not only playing more accurately, I'm being aware of more things at the same time. I hear changes in the sound of the notes based on changes in the way that I pick the strings. Never noticed before. Changes in the sound based on where my fretting fingers are positioned within the fret. Never knew that made a difference. When I tune the guitar I'm much more aware of when I'm on and when I'm off than before. When I go out of tune in the middle of a practice session I can hear it!

We'll see where this goes. Hopefully I will continue, and somewhere down the road I'll be playing like this guy:

Warm up before writing: theory and practice

Photo credit: Nicholas_T via Foter.com / CC BY

Today I started out having a crap time writing. Really crap. I ended up feeling as though I was wasting my life. And I ended up writing about that feeling.

This happens a lot: both the "having a crap time writing" part and the "feeling as though I was wasting my life" part.

Usually I just soldier on. Eventually the feeling passes. And eventually I get back to writing.

Today, I did something better. I figured out what's wrong, and what to do about it. I learned something that will stick, at least for a while. But we'll see. In the meanwhile, I'm going to post this hoping that both future me and other people find it useful or at least interesting.

So here's the practice, and the theory behind the practice.

The practice: warm up before you write. Don't write without warming up. Don't.

750 words is one of my venues for warming up. So is a notebook in which I can write longhand. The ideas is to free-write, to just put down whatever comes into my head. To stretch the writing muscles with waking the internal writing critic.

Secondary practice: if you run into trouble don't grind. Do some stretching exercises. Then go back to work.

Simple.

Now I just have to do it.

The theory:

Jumping right into the middle of a tough piece of writing is madness. It's like playing a game without warming up first. It's a good way to get hurt. That's what's happened to me today.

To carry out any intellectual task requires mental resources available to that task. I think the mind marshals those mental resources this way. Multiple processes run in the mind, and at any moment each has some number of Mental Resource Units (MRUs). MRUs are assigned to tasks as they need, require, or demand them. Some are held in reserve.

Writing is not a single process. There are processes that produce the words; there are processes that monitor what comes out to make sure it makes sense; processes that monitor over-all quality; even a process that moves my fingers. There are always processes too, running in the background. There are processes that monitor my state, internal and external. And there are processes that were previously solving other problems and which have not yet shut down.

Sitting down to write kicks off the processes that produce writing. They might quickly marshal some MRUs, say, 100. That's the  amount needed to do a simple bit of writing. As the writing goes on they might marshal more, or they might release some MRUs. I was doing a demanding bit of writing, one that needed way more than my initial allocation of 100. Let's say I needed 200 MRUs for a satisfactory job.

Since I had nowhere near the number of MRUs required, my writing was not up to the task. Or in plain English: it was shit. The writing quality monitor detected this, grabbed some MRUs and started ringing alarms. That woke up the state-monitoring processes, which grabbed some more MRUs and started  broadcasting its assessment of the state of my life. "Attention all units. I am wasting my life. Again." And that fired up a whole bunch of reactive processes that absorbed more MRUs. Pretty soon, almost no MRUs available for writing said challenging piece.

I backed off and went to 750 words to write, but by that time I was in full reaction, and didn't have enough MRUs for that.

Sucks!

Warm up before you write. Stretch if you get stuck.

In another universe I started with warm ups. I did my free-writing in 750 words. The 100 MRUs that I start with expand to 150 and then 200 and then more. When I turn my attention to the tough writing, I've got the MRUs I need to tackle it.

So goes the theory. How does this go in practice?

Remember: "In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are different."

This is Post # 2 on the day.

Wasting my life

An hourglass (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

From time to time I feel as though I've wasted my life and I'm continuing to waste it. Not all the time. But sometimes, yes. Like today, for example.

From the outside, that seems false. It looks like I've had a pretty good life. I'm still fairly active and productive for a guy in my stage of life.

"My stage of life." Translation. Old.

From the inside that feels accurate. But from time to time, what I think and how I feel is: "I'm wasting my life."

To which I now ask: WTF? What does that even mean? It makes no sense.

Maybe the Internet can make sense of it. So I ask.

I Google questions like "How do you waste your life?" I find most links are based on the "gift from God" theory of life. It works this way. God gave you your life. But it's not an unconditional gift. You're supposed to do something with it. And the God theorists know what that is. And if you haven't done whatever the God theorists think you should do with your theoretical gift then you've wasted it. Simple.

To which I now ask, once again: WTF?

This whole God theory thing is so wrong for me on so many levels that I don't even want to start unpacking it.

The Internet can't help me, so I'm going to have to figure it out myself, the old fashioned way.

By thinking.

And the answer I come up with is this. I've still got stuff that I'm trying to do. Stuff that I think is within my capability. Writing, mostly. Like this post. And when I can't/don't write I feel that I'm wasting my life.

Like today: I had another post that I was working on. I started to try to finish it, and completely whiffed. Could not make progress.

So I tried something easier: I went to 750word.com, a web site designed to let you free-write. I got one sentence written. Just one. Couldn't concentrate. At all.

Wasting my life.

I took action. First some food. Then some sleep. Then back to writing on 750 words about what was going on. That helped, a lot. It led to me realizing that I needed to be a bit more disciplined about my writing.

Which I'll write about in my next post.

Shortly. After I post this.

Because I'm not wasting my life.

And I'm not going to fucking do things that make me feel like I am.

Waking Up

I've made reference in another post to Sam Harris' book, "Waking Up," and to some of what I learned from that book here. I recommend reading it. (The book, not just the posts.)

I got several BIG insights from his book. That's BIG WITH CAPITAL LETTERS. I've read mindfulness literature over the years, so the bar is pretty high for new insights that I would call BIG. 

WITH CAPITAL LETTERS.

BIG!

BIG IDEA ONE is that the standard mindfulness practice is workable, but inconsistent and inefficient. It's workable because people have been doing it for thousands of years and getting results. It's inconsistent because there's no way to know how long it will take any one person to achieve any particular state of awareness, enlightenment, whatever. It's inefficient because it takes a long time.

But there's a better way. It's possible to point someone toward that which meditation is trying to lead them to. This pointing out instruction is part of the practice of Dzogchen, which Harris had studied. So he pointed out this. 

Imagine that your in instructor directs your attention to a window. He tells you that if you practice every day looking at that window, that one day will come a moment when you will "see things differently" and when you experience the difference, you'll know it. This will happen, he tells you, if you practice diligently, with focused attention.

Another instructor prepares you differently. She says: If you just look through the window you'll see whatever is on the other side of the window. But if you look carefully, you may catch your reflection in the window. That moment of seeing your reflection while looking through the window is what you are trying to experience.

You may not catch your reflection right away. It might depend on the light, or where you are positioned. But if you are looking for your reflection, you'll find it a hell of a lot faster than if you are just looking through, toward, or out the window waiting for "something different."

BIG IDEA TWO. A description of the "reflection" that Harris wants me to look for. It is the experience he calls "waking up." And he uses pointing out instruction to give me an idea where to look.

Imagine you're in a theater, watching a movie. You are immersed in the story. Your attention is captured. You are emotionally engaged. Then suddenly you realize that you're sitting in a theater, surrounded by other people, watching light projected on a screen. A moment ago you were entranced -- in a trance. Now, for a moment you are in a different state. You're still aware of the story that's still playing out on the screen--but you are also aware that you are outside that story. You are not in the story, but watching it. That particular spell is broken. That's "awake." He says: "Most of us spend every waking moment lost in the movie of our lives."

That made sense to me, and if it hasn't happened to you already, take a moment and look for that metaphorical reflection in the window. Take a moment to step away from whatever engagement you have with what you are reading, and -- while continuing to read -- recognize that you are sitting or standing somewhere, looking at black shapes on a white background (or white on black if you are one of those people) and realizing that somehow your eyes, scanning over the shapes are producing words and/or ideas in your head.

That's a little of the experience of waking up.

After reading that I started experience more and more "waking up" moments. I would realize that I was "awake" and that up until that moment I had been in a trance, "watching my life" the same way that I watched a movie. 

BIG IDEA THREE, and the biggest of all: Harris says that the conventional self is an illusion. We know we have bodies, and know we have brains, and that somewhere in our brains is something called a mind, and some part of the mind is a "self" that makes decisions, causes actions, and from time to time "wakes up."

But what is that "self" that "wakes up?" And is it an illusion?

He says: the way you tell an illusion from something real is to examine it. You look at it more closely, more deliberately. If you examine something and it changes to something completely different--or disappears entirely, that's a sign that what you first saw was an illusion.

So now as soon I "wake up" and feel that "I," my "self," am no longer in my usual trance, I look to try to examine "that which is now awake." When I do this, when I turn my attention toward whatever I just identified as "my self" when I "look" in a direction I would describe as "inward" I IMMEDIATELY feel my attention shoot "outward" toward the rest of the world. I have an immediate sense of WOW!!! And I'm even more awake.

It's as though the "self" that was perceiving the world was just a window or a screen. By looking to examine it, I see more clearly what's on the other side. 

It happens every time. Looking for "myself" (once there's a self to even look for) I always find myself transcending "self" and seeing the universe.

This is interesting. And I'll probably say more about it later,  but for now, let this simple description suffice.

If this makes sense, I encourage you to take those same steps. Try to be aware of moments when you realize that you were in a trance and now, for the moment, are not. When that happens try looking to see whether what just woke up is an illusion or real. If it works for you the way it does for me, you're in for an interesting experience.

The other side of 70

70 years old? Really? Inconceivable.

I started this blog a few days short of three years ago, when I hit 70. In my initial post I complained how being 70 was, well, inconceivable.

... Just like Sicilian in The Princess Bride says. Inconceivable! Wasn't I thirty years old just a half hour ago? Or maybe that was forty. Or fifty. It's all flown by so fast.

And now, here I am, 70. Seventy. Sev-en-ty. Man that sounds old. But I don't feel old. I just feel like---like WTF!

Things have change in three years. It's no longer inconceivable that I'm 70 going on 74. What's inconceivable to me now is different. Like:

How the hell did I (with more than a little help from Bobbi) manage to run a business, maintain a house, raise three kids, watch the Celts and the Pats (she didn't help with that), maintain our own relationship and personal sanity, and still have time for friends, to and for this kind of foolishness? And a lot more.

Today it seems to take too much of the day to get through simple chores that I would have knocked off in a much shorter time.

I've even got the Internet to help me get stuff done. There's lots of stuff I don't have to figure out because someone on the Internet has already figured it out, and Google helps me find their answer. I don't have to write letters, stick them in envelopes and take them to the post office. I can send email. I don't have to go to the store to buy stuff, I can do it online. I've got 24x7 access to most  things. And...

Oh.

Well, maybe the Internet is a mixed blessing. If I was writing an essay like this, sans Internet, I'd be typing in my word processor and I would have been done long ago, because I wouldn't have taken time to find the original "essay" and link to it, because you can't link to a piece of paper. Or a file that's on your computer.

I wouldn't have groveled through YouTube's new, unfamiliar interface trying to find my fucking videos! To find them I had to go to my email (thanks, Google, thanks Internet) find an email in which I'd mailed a link, go to the link, reverse engineer my way to something called "YouTube Creator Studio" where some, but not all, of my videos have gotten squirreled away, then figure out how to get there on my own. That bit of yak shaving has probably doubled the time that I've spent writing this.

I wouldn't have searched for the photo of Wallace Shawn at the top of this post. Took less than a minute. But still. And yes, I know "inconceivable" is misspelled. Well, screw it. I'm not going to find one that's spelled right. Enough is enough.

So, yeah, it's a mixed blessing. But still, even not counting distractions, I'm lots slower than I was when I was thirty -- if I was ever thirty.

See that's weird. I have memories of the experiences of someone who seems to be me, but that person is so different from the 70+ year old me, that's it's hard to believe that it's me.

Not quite inconceivable, but close.

My $100 latte

Latte Venti Pricey
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

At Starbucks today I bought a pumpkin praline pecan yada yada latte, an exotic foofy drink.  I don't usually go that fancy, but I was in a good mood and indulged.

I remember my first sip. Nice! I was glad I'd indulged. I took another sip. Quite good!

Then I sat down, pulled out my computer and went to work on my programming project.

Fade out.

Fade in.

It's an hour later. Maybe more. Time vanishes (as do I) when I'm programming. Or blogging. Or other stuff. I've had a win and I want to take a break. I deserve one! I wonder if there's any latte left. I reach out, and lift the cup. Yes! Not much,  but some.

I have another sip.

And it's good!

I walk around, make a phone call and go back to programming.

A while later I take another break, heft the cup and find it's empty.

Later, much later, I consider: one latte. It was 20 oz. It cost $4.00. I enjoyed it. But I only experienced three sips.

What did I pay for?

How big is a sip? Well, of course your mileage varies. Even mine will. It depends on the size of your mouth, the intensity of your thirst , and the temperature of the sippand (the thing you sip) and maybe the phase of the moon.

While I'm writing this I'm sipping another latte and attempting to calibrate. (The things I do for science!) I've had 10 sips so far and I don't think I'm a tenth of the way through the 20 ounces. Small sips, because the latte is pretty hot. So let's make a hot sip = 0.2 oz, and a cold sip = 0.4.

So I experienced 0.8 oz, or 1/50th of my previous latte.

If that 1/50th was worth $4.00 (before blogging) then I should rationally have been willing to pay $100 to experience the entire thing. Or if someone had offered me three sips of their latte (two hot and one cold) for the bargain, discount price of $3.50 I should have jumped at the chance.

Not likely.

One more argument for being more awake, present, mindful.

We give up money and time and other things we value for opportunities to experience pleasurable and interesting things. But having the opportunity to experience them does not mean we actually experience them.

We also need to be present for the experience. If not, we end up paying a higher price for whatever part--if any part at all--we do experience.

In this case, I paid a ridiculously high price. $100 for a latte? Are you kidding me?

Every time I reach for the latte I'm drinking now, I pay attention. Smaller sips. More attention.

I'm determined to get my money's worth.

Yak shaving my way to awarenes

Yak Shaving Tool (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I spent an hour and a half yak shaving, this morning.

Ironically, I spent most of that time doing that which I was trying to avoid and didn't realize it until I was nearly finished writing this post.

Fuck!

Let me explain.

It started with a morning chat, in which I observed

"I do pretty well in the AM but the pattern is that I go more and more automatic as the day goes on"

Which is true. So my plan was:

About every so often (two hours I am thinking) I want to do a full reset. STOP what I am doing and do a bunch of stuff (TBD) to wake up and address the next block of time.

It's now 9:34. And I start do work on my "wake up" process.

So how to do that?

I thought: I'll create a Google Doc and every two hours or so I'll look back and write down what I learned and what I was thinking about and what I'm thinking about and what I'm going to do. And I'll use that as a reminder to stay awake, to be present, and not go into the state where I am mindlessly doing things.

Easy. Takes about ten seconds to set up a doc.

Except I'm pretty sure that I started a doc like that before. So I mindlessly browse through past docs looking for that one. Shaving the yak.

Yak shaving sometimes pays off in unexpected ways. In this case, I made a discovery. Several years ago by brother, sister and I went on a bonding trip to Arizona. With long hours of driving, I decided to pool our knowledge of family history and write it down. Which we did. I had my computer (of course) so I wrote it down. It's on a back up somewhere, and on my todo list is a task "find family history" that I faithfully recopy each time I rewrite my list.

But there it is! Some time ago I must have uploaded it to docs! Huzzah! So I write my brother and sister a quick email. The email time stamp says 9:40, so that didn't take too long. But I had no idea how much time it took.

I was deep, deep, in my yak shaving trance, and it was time to return to yak shaving.

After a bit more looking, I decided I would start a new one doc. Easy. Revision history says I started it at 9:42.

I copied the comments from the chat, the ones you see above, into it.

And I was about to note the date and the time, when...

Wait! 

If I'm going to put an entry in the doc every so often, doesn't it make sense to time stamp the entries?

And doesn't it make sense to make the process of time stamping automatic?

So doesn't it make sense to write a doc script that will do that?

As it happens, I have already found script like that, due to another yak shaving exercise. It puts in the date, not the date and time, but isn't that an easy change? I'll just cut and paste it into this doc and...

No. It's not easy, because I cut and pasted wrong. So I restart, and this time I do it right. And finally have it right, and yes, it wasn't that hard.

Yes it is. Here's my first automated time stamp entry: 

December 20, 2015 20:11

Yay. That took a total of 35 minutes, including finding the family history, and so on. So on to the main task: stopping, reflecting, and making a plan for the next block of time.

No, wait! Wait!

Wait!

It's not 20:11. That's like eight at night. It's ten in the morning. So my script is printing the wrong time because mumble mumble. 

But I can just change the script so it has the right time zone. Which takes some time to figure out.

And maybe it should run automatically the first time that I open it and put the date at the bottom. Which takes some time.

More mindless activity ensues as I encounter complexity on complexity on complexity, until, more than an hour later, nearly an hour and a half, including the short time I've spent writing this I'm ALMOST done.

And why, I now realize. WTF was I actually doing?

Well, I was working, automatically, to automatically time stamp a document whose entire purpose is to help me get myself off automatic.

Fuck!

Sorry, but, fuck.

Reading what I write

Awake (Godsmack album) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I rarely go back and read what I I have written. When I do I'm usually pleasantly surprised. Like today, when I read this post about writing mindfully. I'll come back that post in a minute. But first:

Question for future me:

Will you please let me know why the fuck you never read what I've written?

 I kill myself trying to get these things done, and then what?  

Why am I writing if you never read what I write? 

WTF? Really?

Anyhow.

It took me a while to get to that post. So let me tell you (future me, and others) the story. Or one of the stories. First tell you the stories I am not going to tell.

I'm not going to tell you the story that begins:  "It all started when I reached 70, said 'WTF!' and started this blog."

I'm not going to tell you the one that begins: "It all started nearly 73 years ago, when I was born." Or the one that starts "It all started nearly 74 years ago, when my parents fucked."

I'm not going to tell you the one that begins: "It all started 13.8 billion years ago, when the universe exploded into existence and pretty much everything started."

All true. All different stories. But not the one I'm gong to tell.

Today's story starts in May, when I read Sam Harris' book Waking Up.  I realized (more than ever in the past) that I spent most of my life "not awake." And I wanted to wake up more often and for longer periods.

What was I doing when "not awake?"  Maybe in a waking dream. Maybe immersed in an illusion. But not, as I now define the term, awake.

What is awake?

For most of the time that I've been writing this, I've been "not awake." My conditioning, my programming, knows how to write blog posts. It does a pretty good job. A kick ass job, actually. I don't have to wake up to supervise it. I don't have to do a fucking thing. Sit down, type, and it just happens.

But now, right this moment, for this part of this post, I am awake. (Or have been for parts of the writing and editing, but not all.) The difference between blogging while not awake and blogging while not awake probably can't be perceived by anyone but me.

But I know.

When I am blogging while I am awake I do everything that I do when I'm blogging while not awake. The only difference is consciousness. In one case I am not conscious that I am doing what am doing it. I just let the system do it. In the other, there is. It may not be doing it, but it is conscious.

Right now, I am sitting at my computer keyboard, moving my fingers and words are appearing. That's been happening all along. Or at least I assume so, because--how else did those other words get here?But most of the time I was unaware. Now I am.

So who was writing the post before I woke up. And who is writing during the few moments that I've been awake?

More important: who is going to push the "Publish" button.

Reply from future me to the question that past me asked at the top. (Well, a short distance in the future me, but a future me is a future me, right?)

"Maybe it's because you make finishing a piece such a pain in the ass that by the time you finally press Publish I never want to see the fucking thing ever again.

"I'm just saying. 

"PS: maybe you should read what you wrote about the self being an illusion. 

Good job, future me. Nice way to wrap up this post.

The thing that I learned from rereading that post is this: no one needs to push the button.

Family matters

Family Matters (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“That’s two posts today.”

“Three, if you include this one.”

“I wasn’t thinking of including it.”

“Yes, you were. I know you. Me.”

“OK, you caught me. I was thinking of posting it.”

“So post it.”

“I’m ambivalent.”

“Of course you're ambivalent. You always are.”

“OK, you caught me. So what are we going to do.”

“Post it.”

“Aren’t we going to explain what’s going on?”

“I don’t think so. If we keep posting, it will become obvious. If we don’t keep posting then why bother explaining.”

“Makes sense.”

“So?”

“We posted it.”

Getting old is not for sissies

Structure of ibuprofen (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I thought that getting old would be easy to the extent that I thought about it at all. I imagined the “old me” would be just like the “young me” only with gray hair and wrinkles. And I wasn’t all that clear about the wrinkles.

Then I started to get old, and saw things that I had not anticipated. Like deep lines. And sagging flesh. And a mouth that seemed to droop down. Not me at all.

Then I got even older, and discovered things that I hadn’t thought about at all. Like being tired.

Now I knew about being tired, of course. I’d stayed up for 48 hours straight on more than one occasion and, sure, I got tired. But not so tired that I couldn’t gut my way through. Or take a power nap and emerge with enough energy to keep going. And no matter how exhausted I was, I’d be OK after a good night’s sleep. Not perfect, mind you, but OK.

Now I go down to Boston for a weekend and I come back utterly wiped out. It takes days for me to feel that I’ve “recovered.” And by some standard (mine) I’m never quite recovered. Because no matter how much sleep I get, when I wake up I’m never thirty.

Then there’s pain. If you’d have asked me why old people walk slow I’d have answered something vacuous (“Well, they’re old”) or something partly correct (“Well, they’re trying to conserve energy.”) But the number one reason that I’m slowing down these days is pain. The number two reason is fear of injury.

In late July I did something (a few things) that resulted in severe, continuing pain. I compromised my knee and then my back. I spent a few weeks with a significantly lowered IQ, and I think I still have not recovered. And I’m still wary of injuring myself again. So I move slowly.

There’s a feedback effect, of course. If you think slowly then you move slowly. And if you move slowly then you think even more slowly. I think that there is real science that says this, or something like that. If not, there should be, because it’s true.

When you’re young I think almost anything you can reasonably do is beneficial. It’s almost impossible to run fast enough to hurt yourself. You can try to lift the heaviest weight that you can and your muscles will fail (can’t lift more) before your body does (bones break, tendons tear). When you’re old it’s easy to hurt yourself. Running is out because of my knees, and also my back. Walking is possible, but it must be done cautiously, with due attention to how the body is responding, and with ibuprofen beforehand to guard against inflammation.

I thought that getting old would be easy. Turns out that’s not true. It’s a challenge. So I have a choice. Either take the challenge and struggle with the process of aging, or give up.

I accept the challenge. Now it’s time for some ibuprofen and a walk up the hill.

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The Brass Rat

English: 1950 MIT Ring Bezel (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Apropos of nothing important, but requested by Bobbi to get me back to writing, this story:

MIT’s mascot is the beaver, “nature’s engineer,” and an MIT class ring has an image of a beaver. The ring, usually made of gold is known as a “brass rat.” I didn’t much care about my rat so I gave it to my mother. Who knows where it is now?

MIT tradition has it that you wear your rat with the beaver facing toward you until you graduate, then turn it around so it faces out. The explanation: “Until you graduate, the beaver pisses on you. After you graduate, the beaver pisses on the world.”

Writing mindfully

Repeatedly I say (to anyone who is within range and shows the smallest amount of interest) "I love to write."

Anyone who survives that might then hear me continue to my frustration: "And I don't write. And I don't know why. And I am frustrated."

And if they stick around they'll be subjected to a much longer rant on the unhappiness borne out of my strong desire to write and endless frustration because something, I know not what, gets in the way of writing.

Grr!!!

Occasionally I'll come up with a fix: a solution to the problem of writing. Sometimes nothing comes of the solution. Sometimes it leads to a burst of writing. Eventually the burst ends and frustration sets in.

This might be one of those short-lived fixes. Or it might be different. We'll have to see.

The change comes from a mindfulness practice I'm working on: first becoming aware of myself, and then looking for the "self" of which I am aware.  When I look for the self I find that it disappears. According to generations of teachers of Buddhist-style meditation, that is because the self is an illusion. You'll find that out, they say, if you meditate long enough.

But looking for the self, rather than just meditating is a shortcut that I learned after reading Sam Harris' book "Waking Up." The the difference between a reality and an illusion, Harris says, is this: look at something carefully. If you see more detail, it's probably real. If it vanishes or if it turns into something else, it's probably an illusion.

So me: I look inward for the self, and I find there's nothing there. I'm looking outward instead. No self. Only the present moment. Not even "me" in the present moment.

Just the present moment.

Self appears to be an illusion.

Today I did not simply look for "the self that was aware of itself," but for "the self that wants to write and is frustrated."

And I discovered that there was nothing there.

Nothing wants to write.

Nothing is frustrated that it isn't writing.

There was nothing but the then-present moment.

How can that be any good? If my goal is to write, and the "me" that has that goal disappears taking both its frustration at not writing and its desire to write with it, what then? How can I get myself to write if there's no me that wants to write and no me to be frustrated when it doesn't?

Really!

How can I write when experience has taught me that one of the few ways I can get myself to write is by increasing the frustration that I feel when I don't write? I need to increase my frustration until it is greater than whatever pain I might anticipate that I'd feel if I did write. Then I'll write.

How can I write if I'm not feeling negative feelings that are greater than the negative feelings that stand in the path of writing?

I mean, really!

The answer is: I don't know, but here I am. I've looked for "the part of me that I wants to write." I found nothing. And I'm writing.

Now, in this moment, there's no me that who wants to write.

There's no me that is upset about not writing.

There's nothing but the present moment--and the writing that is in that moment.

I am gone, and all that's left is the writing.

The Piano Artistry of Jonathan Edwards

Conversation with a friend reminded me of "The Piano Artistry of Jonathan Edwards," an album long forgotten. The Wikipedia article provides details and links.

Released in 1957, it featured Jo Stafford, then a popular singer, and her husband Paul Weston on piano, the two pretending to be Jonathan and Darlene Edwards. 

A high-school friend of mine, Wylie Crawford, had it, and our family got a copy. Check out the album cover. There's a clue there.

There are two ways to enjoy their music. One is with people who who can recognize the difference between on-key and off-key, between on-temp and off-tempo. Every time they the Edwards go off, you'll groan in agony and then laugh.  The other is with people who can't tell the difference. Every time the Edwards go off you'll groan in agony and then laugh and then your friends will look at you mystified and that will set you off again. 

At least it did for us.

My favorites:

Nola
Three Coins in a Fountainhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJkpz520Xdw

It's Magic (part of a playlist)

Learning to learn: Gain without pain

This post is precipitated by one of the least pleasant experiences of my life and one of the more pleasant.

The bad: a nearly one month period (so far) of intermittent and occasionally extreme pain, that has sent me to the emergency room twice, and scurrying to other practitioners before and between those visits.

The good, and the proximate cause of this post: is this, an essay on "Learning to Learn" by Moshe Feldenkrais.

"Learning to Learn."

It's important.

So pay intention.  (Comment directed at me, but you can pay attention, too.)

No. Invest attention. It will pay off.

What drove me to find this essay was the condition of my body, the effectiveness on my condition of even the tiny bit of Feldenkrais practice that I had learned.

I started with enormous pain in my right hip and lesser pain in my knee and miscellaneous pains elsewhere. I lay down on a yoga mat. I made small motions with my head and observed how even the tiniest head-motion changed my pain, sometimes quite dramatically. After a doing this for a while I used a self massage tool (Body Back Buddy, here) , which I've used previously to reduce chronic neck and back pain. But this time instead of "breaking down the pain" I used it gently, moving and pressing other parts of my body, again observing how even the lightest touch changed the pain in my knee and hip. After another fifteen minutes of this, I rose, moved around gingerly, and found that my pain continued to remain abated.

Mostly gone.

This was, as they say, serious shit.

So I went googling for a better understanding, and found the above-referenced essay. It so resonated with my earlier experience with Feldenkrais, with this experience, and with experiences unrelated to the physical domain that I decided to write about it. My goals were to deepen my own understanding, and to test Feldenkrais theory by applying it to writing.

Success on both counts.

Here are some of the things that he says in the essay, along with my comments.

Time is the most important means of learning.

You take the time to learn. You don't put pressure on yourself to learn. That's the opposite of what I do much of the time. He explains more about why this is so important.

Fast action at the beginning of learning is synonymous with strain and confusion which, together, make learning an unpleasant exertion.

This explains many of self-improvement failures. Maybe most. Maybe all. I'm enormously motivated to learn; that drives me into and forward through unpleasantness. As time passes my motivation wanes, and the felt result of the unpleasantness grows. Some research on the measurement of pain neatly quantifies this (article here, original paper here). Pain is measure in units called "dols." 8 dols is the pain produced by a second degree burn.

The study's authors concluded that 8 dols of pain equaled four successive two dol experiences

So a chronic condition of "strain and confusion" in my writing makes it an "unpleasant exertion" that might be measured in millidoles, and will pile up sufficiently to become multidole pain strong enough overcome my self-generated motivation.

Which may be why I have so long relied on sources of external, and unpleasant motivation to keep me moving forward. I do this even on things that I self-determinedly desire to do. I go as fast as I can. I pressure myself as much as I can. And that produces short-term success and longer term failure. I've been long-term successful in some of these same areas by letting the pain wear off and going back for more. But now I see that's not efficient.

Do not "try" to do well
...Internal conviction of essential inadequacy is at the root of the urge to try as hard as one can, even when learning. 

This line really nailed it. It's led to this post. It nicely summarized the feeling that I have had as I "try" to write. I make greater and greater effort, all the time adding to my "conviction of essential inadequacy" and increasing the amount of "strain, confusion, and unpleasant exertion" that I feel.

In other words I write (which I love to do) until I hate it. The milidols of small pains build until whatever pleasure I might feel is buried under them. And then I quit.

So how do you avoid this?

Efficient movement or performance of any sort is achieved by weeding out, and eliminating, parasitic superfluous exertion. The superfluous is as bad as the insufficient, only it costs more. [Emphasis mine]

That's some of what's wrong with my writing. I write fast, and endlessly correct, and post when my dissatisfaction at not posting exceeds the discomfort I feel about posting. What a solution!

But there's another way.

When one becomes familiar with an act, speed increases spontaneously, and so does power. This is not so obvious as it is correct. [Emphasis mine]

I love that line. "This is not so obvious as it is correct."

Look for the pleasant sensation [Emphasis in the original]

So that's what I'm doing now.  Writing more slowly, and looking for the pleasant sensation, and realizing that unpleasant feelings are symptoms, not of my "essential inadequacy," but rather that I'm forcing myself to go faster than comfort requires.

You will get to know new skills as a reward for your attention. You will feel you deserve your acquired skill, and that will add satisfaction to the pleasurable sensation.

Lovely. Eloquent. True.

And here is Moshe Feldenkrais moving from the domain for which he is renowned to one of the domains that I care much about:

Only when we have learned to write fluently and pleasurably can we write as fast as we wish, or more beautifully. But "trying" to write faster makes the writing illegible and ugly. Learn to do well, but do not try. The countenance of trying hard betrays the inner conviction of being unable or of not being good enough.

That goes on my wall.

He wrote this for me.

Maybe for others. Certainly for others. But this is a message, from the grave, for me.

Learn to write fluently and pleasurably.

Do not try to do "nicely"

A performance is nice to watch when the person applies himself harmoniously. This means that no part of him is being directed to anything else but the job at the hand. Intent to do nicely when learning introduces disharmony. Some of the attention is misdirected, which introduces self-consciousness instead of awareness. Each and all the parts of ourself should cooperate to the final achievement only to the extent that it is useful. An act becomes nice when we do nothing but the act. Everything we do over and above that, or short of it, destroys harmony. [Emphasis in body, mine]

Self-consciousness instead of awareness.

And this:

We usually learn the hard way. We are taught that trying hard is a virtue in life, and we are misled into believing that trying hard is also a virtue when learning. 

I've always taken "trying hard" as one of the greatest virtues. Now I'm rethinking this. The image I hold is Kaya, who does not seem to try hard. Instead she seems to pick her own pace, working slowly, continuously, comfortably and pleasurably to master skill after skill.

Learning takes place through our nervous system, which is so structured as to detect and select, from among our trials and errors, the more effective trial. We thus gradually eliminate the aimless movements until we find a sufficient body of correct and purposeful components of our final effort. These must be right in timing and direction at the same instant. In short, we gradually learn to know what is the better move. 

Sounds like Kaya to me. As least as seen from the outside.

...the smaller the exertion, the finer the increment or decrement that we can distinguish ...The lighter the effort we make, the faster is our learning of any skill; and the level of perfection we can attain goes hand in hand with the finesse we obtain. We stop improving when we sense no difference in the effort made or in the movement.

This is at the heart of Feldenkrais' method. Light effort so that we can distinguish wrong moves from correct ones. Plenty of time to see the differences. Only then can we continue to improve. The very opposite of what I do!

Learning and life are not the same thing.
In the course of our lives, we may be called upon to make enormous efforts sometimes beyond what we believe we can produce. There are situations in which we must pay no heed to what the enormous effort entails. We often have to sacrifice our health, the wholeness of our limbs and body...

To the extent that I've succeeded in life it's often been by making "enormous efforts" and I've paid "no attention to what the enormous effort entails."

But life is different now. And it was actually different than I perceived it then. But that time is past. Let's talk about now. And about writing.

I'm not a writer on deadline. My job does not depend on my writing well. And even if it did, there would be times when I have to take the hit, suffer through the unpleasantness and strain and get 'er done. But that's not now. Now is for learning and for "looking for the pleasant sensation."

Learning must be slow an varied in effort until the parasitic efforts are weeded out; then we have little difficulty in acting fast, and powerfully.

And why learn to do things efficiently? Because:

...energy cannot be destroyed; it can only be transformed into movement, or into another form of energy. What, then, happens to the energy that is not transformed into movement? It is, obviously, not lost, but remains somewhere in the body. Indeed, it is transformed into heat through the wear and tear of the muscles (torn muscles, muscle catarrh) and of the ligaments and the interarticular surfaces of our joints and vertebrae.

So long as we are very young, the healing and recovery powers of our bodies are sufficient to repair the damage caused by inefficient efforts, but they do so at the expense of our heart and the cleansing mechanisms of our organism.

If we have not learned efficient action, we are in for aches and pains and for a growing inability to do what we would like to do. 

 Aches and pains. I know you well.

And on concentration, he says:

Do not concentrate if concentration means to you directing your attention to one particular important point to the utmost of your ability. This is a particular kind of concentration, useful as an exercise, but rarely in normal occupation and skills.

And this about how we've mis-learned to learn:

We are so drilled or wired-in by prevailing educational methods that when we know what is required of us, we go all-out to achieve it, for fear of loss of face, regardless of what it costs us to do so. We have it instilled in our system that we must not be the worst of the lot. We will bite our lips, hold our breath, and screw up our straining self in an ugly way in order to achieve something if we have no clear idea of how to mobilize ourselves for that task. The result is excessive effort, harmful strain, and ugly performance.

And this:

Do a little less than you can
By doing a little less than you really can, you will attain a higher performance than the one you can now conceive. Do a little less than your utmost while learning. You are thereby pushing your possible record to a higher setting. 

Now I think I might need to apologize to my kids for always asking them "Did you do your best?" Now I might say: "Did you do nearly your best, but just far enough from your best that you could continue to learn to do better?"

Ahh well, we learn. Sometimes too late for some things. But never too late for everything.

I encourage you to read the entire article, again, here. It's worthwhile.

Meanwhile I've just written about the easiest post I've ever written.