Skepsis #35 - Qualia
The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your attention. Also, how to take Smart Notes, how to think for yourself, and how to time travel without a time machine. 💫
What I'm thinking about
The quality of your life is determined by the quality of your attention.
It's not so much what you do with your time that determines your satisfaction as much as what you pay attention to as you do it. Letting your mind wander or wishing you were doing something else invariably leads to dissatisfaction. Focusing on the task at hand can make nearly any situation if not pleasurable, at least interesting.
It's the quality of your attention in any given moment that determines whether or not it's a good or bad moment. Every moment could be a good moment if we could only pay close enough attention.
You can embrace boring and repetitive tasks by treating them as mindfulness practice. Even the most boring tasks can become interesting when you pay close enough attention.
As a result, what you pay attention to can be more important for your moment to moment enjoyment than what you are actually doing. Mindful attention is always just a thought away; you can always begin again.
I think there’s a great deal of truth to the idea that you cannot become happy, you can only be happy. This is all there is.
What I'm reading
How to Take Smart Notes
The definitive book on note-taking for writers and academics, but also - in my opinion - for anyone who's serious about personal knowledge management and wants to remember more of what they read. The Smart note-taking approach builds on the system of German sociologist Niklas Luhmann and his "Zettelkasten" or Slip-box, which I wrote about in Skepsis nr. 7.
The goal of the Smart note-taking approach is to create an externalized "Second Brain", a conversation partner, that holds all your most valuable ideas and insights in a network of interconnected ideas, questions, and theories so that you don’t have to keep it in your head.
Luhmann's process for writing Smart notes is essentially a two-step process. First, he would take reading/literature notes - in his own words about the content he was reading. In a second step, he would then actively think about how these notes related to his own thinking and write the result of this thinking process on a new "permanent" note. He put these into his slip-box and “linked” them to previous related notes.
This process will eventually build a vast network of inter-linked notes that represent different atomic ideas or insights - your own or that of others'. The beauty of a Zettelkasten is that it's not built like an artificial top-down hierarchical folder structure, but rather the structure emerges bottom-up and creates a network - much like how our brains are wired. In this way, the Zettelkasten becomes a conversation partner for your future self that lets you discover ideas you might have forgotten, and to develop new insights. All you have to do is read with a pen in your hand.
How to Think for Yourself
This is not the first time I've included a Paul Graham essay in Skepsis (and it probably won't be the last time either). In his latest essay, he discusses the difference between independent thinkers and consensus thinkers.
The irony, of course, is that truly independent-minded people don't tend to think of themselves as being "independent thinkers" while conventionally-minded people do. Probably because of some sort of Dunning-Kruger effect.
One difficulty here, though, is that people are often mistaken about where they fall on the spectrum from conventional- to independent-minded. Conventional-minded people don't like to think of themselves as conventional-minded. And in any case, it genuinely feels to them as if they make up their own minds about everything. It's just a coincidence that their beliefs are identical to their peers'. And the independent-minded, meanwhile, are often unaware how different their ideas are from conventional ones, at least till they state them publicly.
Even more ironic is that most extremists and conspiracy nuts who really think they are independent-minded people who have woken up to the truth are the most likely to be conventionally-minded (and deluded). They haven't arrived at a genuinely independent idea, just take their consensus ideas from a smaller niche.
You see this especially among political extremists. They think themselves nonconformists, but actually they're niche conformists. Their opinions may be different from the average person's, but they are often more influenced by their peers' opinions than the average person's are.
I try to be more on the independent-minded end of the spectrum but secretly fear that I’m quite conventional.
What I'm watching
The Strangely Intimate Reality of Time Travel
Time travel science-fiction stories are about much more than the science of time travel, the laws of nature, and mind-bending time paradoxes - although they are all of those things. They’re really a reflection of what it means to be human in a temporal universe in which we are all going to die one day. Time travel lets us escape our temporal bubbles and get new perspectives on ourselves, our circumstances, and our society. We are all time travelers.
What I'm listening to
Making Sense Podcast - The Price of Distraction
In this episode of the podcast, Sam Harris speaks with Adam Gazzaley about the way our technology is changing us. They discuss our limited ability to process information, our failures of multitasking, "top-down" vs "bottom-up" attention, self-interruptions and switching costs, anxiety, boredom, "digital medicine," neuroplasticity, video games for training the mind, the future of brain-machine interface, and other topics.
Breaking Smart - Involvement Capitalism
Podcast/blog on the current transition to a post-scarcity civilization - which we are already partially living in - as well as what a better version of capitalism could look like. Neither fully utopian nor dystopian. I think this is very much in line with my call for more utopian visions of the future, even though it may never turn out to be as Star Trek-esque as I'd like.
12/ So this brings me to the idea of Involvement Capitalism. I got the idea for the name from the Culture books, where the multiple species that are part of the Culture are called Involved species, which I think is a very powerful concept. I define it as capitalism based on money as a way to engage more deeply rather than disengage from society. So the opposite of fuck-you money. More like hello-world money.
13/ The core idea in the Culture books is that despite its post-scarcity abundance, the AIs and biological species of the Culture don’t retreat from the universe into either pure hedonism or spiritual retirement. They stay engaged, both with each other, and with less developed civilizations. They never stop experimenting, learning, growing, and interfering in the affairs of the universe. They are involved the way annoying parents are involved in their children’s lives.
I wrote also about a "post-scarcity" society in a previous newsletter.
Black Coffee
I recently discovered the South African House DJ Black Coffee on Spotify, and have been listening to his music all week. If Techno, Progressive House, and similar electro music are your thing you'll probably enjoy this a lot. (And it's even better with a strong espresso. ☕)
If you’re curious about understanding your own mind and would like to try mindfulness meditation I highly recommend Sam Harris’ Waking Up app. You get a free month via the link. (I’m not getting anything for sharing this - I just think most people would benefit greatly from a regular mindfulness practice ☺.)
As always, stay safe out there.
/Phil