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Curiouser and curiouser!

I’ve been listening to an audiobook called “Conscious” by Annaka Harris, and this is definitely the most thought-provoking read I’ve had in a while. She discusses many concepts that are completely new to me, and yet I realize that I’ve been bumping into them many times before in various areas of my work and personal interests.

One of them is panpsychism (from Greek ‘pan’ – ‘all’ and ‘psyche’ – ‘soul’). This is a philosophical theory that postulates that consciousness is a fundamental property, and that everything in the universe possesses it. This idea has a distinctly religious undertone, but upon closer examination, it turns out that it is, in fact, one of the simplest and therefore plausible solutions to the so-called “hard problem of consciousness”. The problem is explaining how consciousness comes into existence in a collection of matter that didn’t have consciousness initially. This problem is called “hard” to distinguish it form the “easy” problems of explaining the mechanisms of existing conscious processes and studying how the brains of animals work, etc.

Coming to terms with the panpsychism becomes less intellectually challenging if one starts thinking about the defining features of a conscious, or even alive, system. Once it becomes apparent that properties like ability to react to or communicate with an environment are not sufficiently good criteria for drawing the line between natural systems that have consciousness and those that do not, it becomes apparent that it is indeed logical to grant the possibility of consciousness (although not human-like consciousness) to systems like plants, single-cell organisms and, taken to the extreme, subatomic particles. I really liked how Annaka Harris gradually by firmly walks the readers through this reasoning process, without dumbing it down and without over-protecting it from the inherent logical challenges. Once you consider that plants and animals are not as different as we intuitively consider them to be in terms of their ability to remember (i.e. collect, store and recall information) and react to the environment, these and other properties that can be considered indicators of consciousness (even if each one of them does not qualify to be the defining property) can be propagated all the way down to the subatomic levels of matter. The consciousness is a matter of matter, as one playful quote in the book states.

This rabbit hole goes incredibly deep. Donald Hoffmann, for example, argues that panpsychism actually takes realism too seriously by granting the subatomic particles, and indeed the spacetime reality, too much of a fundamental role in the structure of the universe. To continue borrowing expressions from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, things become curiouser and curiouser!

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Live audience

Last week, I had a chance to photograph the first live-audience performance of my daughter’s dance company in more than two years. In my role as a photographer, I’ve always been lucky to have a behind-the-curtains insight into how the incredible performance pieces that other parents can see only at the year-end shows take shape. The amount of work that the dancers and the teachers put into it is simply astonishing. When I first saw it ten years ago, even though I knew next to nothing about dance as an art form, I immediately sensed by the level of work ethics and dedication that even the very young dancers were demonstrating that this was something that simply could not be faked. At that point, I somehow realized that I wanted my daughter to experience that when she would be old enough. It was a world from which one could obviously learn a lot. Fortunately, she has been keen to dance, even from the earliest age.

It was therefore ironic and quite disappointing that this year in particular, when everybody was so looking forward to the first live-audience show since the beginning of the COVID pandemic, my daughter had to sit the performance out. Late last year, she suffered a growth-related injury to both of her knees, which forced her to take a break from dance for the rest of the season. To say the least, it has been quite hard for her to process. Still, she received a boost of positive emotions when she visited her teammates backstage to wish them luck backstage before the show. I am not sure if the traditional wishing of breaking legs was involved; it it was, it must have been almost too funny.

From my side, it is once again fascinating to see through my photos the incredible progress from the training sessions, where everyone was still waring masks, and where the kinks in the choreography were still being ironed out, to the finished performance pieces of the live show. I think we are all looking forward to more of those, once things hopefully return to a more normal state, both at the personal and the community levels.

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Sense of taste

I had a funny conversation with my 10-years-old daughter the other day. It turned to the COVID situation, as it does these days, more often than we’d like. I wondered if she understood what “self-monitoring for symptoms” actually meant.

“Watching out for cough, sneezing, sore throat, losing the sense of taste,” she said.

“What is that last one?” I asked.

“Well, you could start wearing mismatched socks, or dresses over gym pants – that sort of thing.”

She turned away to hide a smile.
That’s when you know that your leg is being pulled.

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New Year resolutions revisited

Seven years ago (it’s scary how fast the time flies, by the way), I came across this note by Bruce Lee, which he written in 1963. At the time, I wrote that it resonated deeply, and that I wouldn’t be able to come up with better aspirations for myself. It is still true today.

“…To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion, to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich;
to study hard, think quietly, talk gently, act frankly;
to bear all cheerfully, do all bravely, await occasions, hurry never.
In other words, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common.”

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Acknowledging the difficulties

I often joke to my students that little children teach us a lot about fluid mechanics. Of course, parenting teaches many other useful things too, mostly, I find, in terms of communication skills. One particularly useful observation is neatly summarized by Gretchen Rubin in her inspiring book “The Happiness Project”. She makes a point that children are looking for acknowledgement of their frustrations and negative emotions more often than for actual help with the task or the situation that causes them. Following up the validation of the reality of the negative emotion and the subjective difficulty of the situation with a constructive suggestion is, of course, the best practice. For example, if a child is upset, because she cannot put on socks by herself, saying to her something like: “Putting on socks can certainly be tricky; why don’t you try pulling on the heal instead of the top” would be more helpful than dismissing the child’s frustration with “Come on, this is just putting on a sock! How hard can it be?”

What is even more interesting is that acknowledging the difficulty of a problem even makes adults more likely to persevere with it, rather than abandoning it in frustration. Probably, the prospective of feeling a certain pride for completing something challenging serves as a reward for sticking with the task. It’s another Jedi mind trick to play on the students (or on myself), I suppose.

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Mind tricks for focus

There is a saying that anything worth doing is worth doing slowly. Certainly, there is a lot to be said about being able to focus on the details of the process, instead of rushing through it under the threat of a deadline or even under the awareness of the fact the the might be better spent doing something else. I’ve come across a technique for tricking myself into a more methodical working mode in a book “The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin. She describes using a mantra “I am in jail” when working on a side project like setting up a website for a blog. The idea is to invoke a state of mind where it seems alright to spend as much time on the task at hand because there is nothing better to do at the moment and you have all the he time in the world to do it. It seems like simplistic mind trick to play on myself, but I find it surprisingly effective.

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Intrinsic motivation

Motivation is a tricky thing. For example, it is easier to attain motivation than to maintain it. Also, motivation can be extrinsic, e.g., if what drives us to do something is the expectation of a praise or a reward, or intrinsic, e.g., when we do the thing simply because we like it, or because we enjoy the process.

To get started at something, both types of motivation would do the job, but to persevere through the task, it is important to develop intrinsic motivation. That is why psychologists say that it is counter-productive to pay children for reading, for example. If children start reading for the reward, there is a danger that they would stop doing it for fun.

This is the basis for a strategy for maintaining the motivation for practicing a complex skill like martial arts, chess, conducting scientific research, studying a difficult subject at school or playing music. The idea is to convince ourselves (and periodically remind ourselves) that we are doing it for your own reasons, e. g., curiosity and pleasure. This frees us from the expectation of an external reward in the form of gratitude, tournament victories, stellar grades or applause from the audience. Instead, we can simply do what we need to do, because we really like it.

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What’s in a name?

My ten-years-old daughter is a continuous source of cheerfulness in our lives. If earlier it was mostly due to her inherent childish cuteness and positivity, now that she is becoming more mature, her humour and personality start to come through more and more often. I sometimes feel preemptively nostalgic about these moments, because I know that this stage of her childhood is fleeting. Some of the jokes she makes are just too hilarious not to record. I know that they would make me laugh even years from now.

Here is a conversation that we had in the car the other day, on our way from school. A song by Andy Grammer was playing on the radio, and his name was displayed on the dashboard monitor.

“Andy Grammer,” my daughter said, “he must be a really good writer, with a last name like that.”
“Why?” I asked, to play along.
“He is probably very good at grammar.”
“But ‘grammar’ has ‘-ar’ at the end, not ‘-er’.”
“Well, his name is not ‘Speller’, is it?”
“…”

I have to admit, it’s hard to argue with this logic.

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On not giving up

Black king. Stll life with a chess piece.

“The hardest thing is to win a won game.”
— Frank Marshall

This is a popular quote in chess, and some internet sources also attribute it to Emanuel Lasker, who must have made a similar observation. It is not strictly true, of course. It is much easier to win if you have an objective advantage, either material or positional. But the point is that when you realize that you have a decisive advantage, it is easy to fall into a false sense of security and become complacent.

This is where it becomes very interesting from your opponent’s standpoint. It is useful to know about this tendency if it is your opponent who has an a superior position, and you are forced to defend. It becomes your advantage that can be exploited. If you have a losing position, it will lead to the actual loss of the game only provided that the opponent plays correctly. In practice, it is worth to put up resistance as long as possible in order to give him or her ample chances to make mistakes. The more difficult decisions the opponent is forced to make, the higher the chances of them getting something wrong.

The reigning world champion Magnus Carlsen is known for being exceptionally skilled in defending and turning around inferior positions. Of course, he is also exceptionally skilled in other aspects of the game, so he doesn’t get into inferior positions that often. But it does happen even at his level, which is what makes chess so fascinating. I remember reading (but cannot find the source) that Magnus mentioned distributing his effort of mental concentration in inverse proportion to the winning chances of the position. If he thinks that he has only 1% chance of winning, he would put 99% of energy into finding a way of doing so. Whether this is factually true or not, it is certainly an admirable goal to aspire to. It is also an illustration of warrior’s spirit, a concept that permeates chess as much as it does a martial art like kendo, which I find quite remarkable.

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Re-watching old movies

“ – What would you do if you were stuck in one place and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?
– That about sums it up for me.”
— “The Groundhog Day”

I complained recently that life became so busy that I hardly ever re-watch my favourite movies anymore. Watching a good movie multiple times is something that I used to enjoy, but now it feels like such an enormous waste of time that I find it difficult to justify it. Yet, the other day, I’ve proven myself wrong by enjoying a bit of “The Groundhog Day.” This movie has a mixed affect on me. It’s funny, of course, and it’s entertainment value is tremendous. But the dialogue between Bill Murray’s character, Phil, and a town resident named Ralph, which I quoted above, hits a bit too close to home.

Still, the fact that I did watch a bit of an old movie – something that I normally wouldn’t do because of being caught up in routine – felt quite positive. That’s, of course, part of the moral of the Groundhog Day’s story – Phil broke out of the cycle starting to pay attention to things he cared about and being deliberate about what he wanted to do.