A belief is a personal perspective that was both sharpened and polished by all the random pieces of information and experiences we bump into during our lives. A belief can be a perspective on anything from “what is the best burrito in SF?” to “how did the universe begin and how will it end?” to “how easy should it be to buy a gun?” and beyond.
This document is my conscious mirror. It is living, evolving, growing. This was inspired by Buster Benson's Book of Beliefs.
Yes.
My main goal here is to get wiser over time by identifying new connections and inconsistencies in my beliefs. It’s tough to do this as a purely mental activity because specific beliefs are so difficult to get a firm grasp on. When you do, putting them on a page makes it possible to revisit again later. All of this is necessary in order to consistently course-correct over days, months, years, and decades. A secondary goal is that I’d also like to extend an invitiation for others to spark conversations with me about anything they find interesting, incorrect, or confusing and to also help keep me accountable.
Some most definitely are. This document captures my best guesses and articulations of my own beliefs, which were inherited and molded partly by the environment I’ve lived in, partly by the people around me, and partly by my own interpretation of life experiences. They are full of gaps, inconsistencies, oversights, and vagueness.
If so, I highly encourage starting simple... just carve out a part of a day and go kinda free-form with writing down whatever beliefs that come to mind. Feel free to copy the structure here, but be sure to take out big chunks of it that don't feel timeline right now. This is the culmination of many years of iteration... my first version was extremely short and simplistic so don't feel like you need to come out of the gate with a fully formed articulation of all of your beliefs.
These are values I try to live by, but obviously it won't always happen. If you catch me compromising one of these values, I ask you to call me out on it. It's easier to spot inconsistencies in other people than in ourselves, so you can help to catch my own inconsistencies. And if I appear annoyed by you when you do this, just remind me that I asked you to do this. Thanks!
Writing I've loved and come back to a bunch of times.
How I think things will be in the future, based on the approximate year I think they’ll come true. I don't have a good track record with these but I like keeping them up and cringing as they end up not becoming true... it's a natural source of humility.
In alphabetical order.
This is an idea coined by Robin Sloan in his book Mr Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore. The idea is to write a book, the Codex Vitae or Book of Life, that represents everything I have learned in my life. If I lost all of my memories somehow, this could be something that helped me remember who I am.
Posts about this topic: Codex Vitae.
The gist is that there are two kinds of knowledge: matters of fact, and relations of ideas. Matters of fact aren’t accessible to us--we can never know something for certain, only that it hasn't been proven wrong yet. We can only create a self-referencing network of ideas that are related to each other. What we think of as truth is merely the ability for a particular idea to fit into this network of ideas without causing irreconcilable contradictions.
See the entry on Wikipedia for a good intro to the idea.
Or, as Nassim Nicolas Taleb calls it: antifragility. I like the word optionality because it seems more neutral, almost boring even, and yet it is probably one of the most simple and powerful ideas that I’ve ever encountered.
We tend to build systems that converge on a single design over time (see monocultures) because they are predictable and efficient in a given environment. But environments change, and without the ability to predict how those changes will happen ahead of time, optionality is required even in the safest of environments.
Posts about this topic: Live Like a Hydra.
Naturalism is a philosophy that believes there's only one world: the natural world (made of matter, energy, space, time, etc). It can be explored and tested and understood through the scientific method. There's no "supernatural" world that can't be explained as part of the natural world. The "poetic" qualifier comes from Sean Carroll, which I learned about through his book "The Big Picture". He does a good job of making the case for an appreciation of not only the natural world, but "ways of talking about it" through stories, mental models, theories, etc. To the extent that these various ways of talking about the natural world are useful and consistent with what we know about the natural world, they can be considered "real". In his words: "A poetic naturalist will deny that notions like “right and wrong,” “purpose and duty,” or “beauty and ugliness” are part of the fundamental architecture of the world. The world is just the world, unfolding according to the patterns of nature, free of any judgmental attributes. But these moral and ethical and aesthetic vocabularies can be perfectly useful ways of talking about the world. The criteria for choosing the best such ways of talking will necessarily be different that the criteria we use for purely descriptive, scientific vocabularies. There won’t be a single rational way to delineate good from bad, sublime from repulsive. But we can still speak in such terms, and put in the hard work to make our actions live up to our own internal aspirations. We just have to admit that judgments come from within ourselves." This resonates with me quite a bit.
This is my long-time answer to a self-determined purpose of life, and also my love language. There are 3 kinds of quality time that I want to seek out. The first is quality time with myself. Spend time with myself, quirks and flaws and all, and fully enjoy it as deeply as I would the company of anyone else. The second is quality time with my favorite ideas and core interests, and the third is quality time with those people I can connect deeply with. They each feed into each other: I can't really connect deeply with others until I know myself sufficiently well; often times interests are strengthened by having people I can connect with and share with. It seems pretty ungameable to me. Seek quality time with myself, my interests, and others and I won't regret anything on my death bed.
Posts about this topic: The Death Bed Game, How I track my life, Live like a hydra.
Quantum realism is a term I first learned from an article by Brian Whitworth, a senior lecturer in computing at Massey University. The idea is in opposition to "physical realism" (that belief that the physical world we see is real and exists by itself, alone). Quantum realism asserts that the physical world isn't real in itself, but merely the output (or shadow, or result, or projected image) of a quantum reality that is generating it. It's basically a virtual reality, or a simulation.
I'm still learning about this and definitely couldn't explain or defend it, but I'm fascinated by the idea and keep thinking about it. I need to read this a few more times.
This is my word for a particular idea I've long been obsessed with. It goes something like this: the universe is this giant space/time environment (or simulation?) that we are all a part of. The soloverse is our mental model of that universe that our brain uses to think about the universe and everything in it. You can’t really think about the universe directly (it’s way too big), you can only think about your mental model of the universe as it exists in your soloverse. Lots of interesting (to me) side effects result from this distinction.
I first came across this idea in 2013 and found some interesting explorations of the idea referenced by the word umwelt, which is German for “environment” or “surroundings” and pronounced oom-velt. I just made up the term soloverse because it’s easier for me to think of it as a private, working model of the universe in our minds.
Posts about this topic: Universe ↔ Soloverse, Know thy umwelt
I first became obsessed with the concept of systems thinking after reading The Fifth Discipline and Donella Meadows' Leverage Points and other articles/books by her. It's often used in relation to natural systems (like the water cycle and the carbon cycle) in order to illustrate how certain resources cycle through various incarnations over time. However, it can be applied to so much more than just elements, and I've found that this way of thinking really changes how I think about all kinds of day to day things. I'm currently in the process of trying to write a children's book that explains systems thinking.
Posts about this topic: Systems Thinking for Kids, Notes, More notes, Dirt.
Amor fati.