Category Archives: life philosophy

Empathy with the continuing background noise in society

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Image of book cover for 'a flat place' by Noreen MasudResearch has shown that skimming while reading in digital media reduces the inclination and perhaps ability to engage in higher level reading, while a lack of higher-level reading practice compromises the efficacy of skimming when reading. Higher-level reading implies critical and conscious reading, slow reading, non-strategic reading and long-form reading, according to Schuller-Zwierlein et al, 2202.  The psychologist, Steven Pinker has argued that we learn empathy by immersing ourselves in other people’s minds through reading.  During a recent weekend break, I immersed myself in Noreen Masud’s beautiful book, ‘a flat place’.  It is a memoir about childhood trauma, patriarchy and colonialism told through stories associated with flatlands outside Lahore, at Orford Ness, the Cambridgeshire fens, Morecambe Bay and Orkney.  I read it while staying in the flat landscape around Dunham Massey between Warrington and Manchester which made the physical topography described by Masud resonate with me.  However, her reflections on her and our psyche were also deeply significant – she opens one chapter with a quote from Laura S Brown’s article, ‘Not Outside the Range: One Feminist Perspective on Psychic Trauma’, which perhaps is core to her story: ‘…the constant presence and threat of trauma in the lives of girls and woman of all colors, men of color…, lesbian and gay people, people in poverty and people with disabilities has shaped our society, a continuing background noise rather than an unusual event’.

Brown LS. Not outside the range: One feminist perspective on psychic trauma. American Imago. 119-33, 1991.

Masud N, a flat place, Hamish Hamilton, 2023

Schüller-Zwierlein A, Mangen A, Kovač M, van der Weel A. Why higher-level reading is important. First Monday. 27(5) Sep 5, 2022.

Achievements, happiness and the passage of time

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A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about time as ‘a giant wheel rotating through cycles of creation and destruction leading, over aeons, to the birth and death of entire worlds’ [see ‘Aeonian cycles of creation and destruction’ on October 18th, 2023].  I had written previously about Aristotle’s view of time as the measurement of change and how Newton believed that time passes even when nothing changes [see ‘We inhabit time as fish live in water’ on July 24th, 2019].  I recently read ‘The Wall’, a beautiful and thought-provoking, post-apocalyptic novel by Marlen Haushofer, in which the narrator states ‘Time only seemed to be passing quickly.  I think time stands quite still and I move around in it, sometimes slowly and sometimes at a furious rate.’  This aligns with the fish-in-water concept of time rather than the giant revolving wheel.  I recently had a conversation with a colleague about our perception of time as we looked back on our lives which made us feel that time has sped past whereas at the time it appeared to be passing slowly.  Perhaps our familiarity with the past, a landscape through which we have travelled, foreshortens it or is that I might have less than a thousand weeks left [see ‘One just raced past and I have only about 1000 left’ on September 8th, 2021] .  Haushofer’s narrator also says, ‘I had achieved little that I had wanted, and everything I had achieved I had ceased to want’.  In my working life, I have some empathy with this statement, particularly the second part.  I have moved through time at a furious rate, striving towards accomplishments; but now that I have most of them, they seem relatively unimportant.  They are certainly not the key to happiness which can be found anywhere through supporting and valuing others [see ‘A view from the middle’ on March 22nd, 2023] as well as in concentration so intense, for instance though reading or writing, that you lose your sense of time leading to a deep sense of happiness and well-being [see ‘You can only go there in your head’ on May 11th, 2022].  I wrote this post on a Sunday afternoon after spending a couple of hours sitting in the warm October sunshine on the campus of the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign reading ‘Mr President’ by Miguel Angel Asturias – both the reading and writing have left me in a happy state of mind.

Source:

Marlen Haushofer, The Wall, Vintage Classics/Penguin Random House, 2022.

Work, rest and play in Smallville

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Decorative imageI am comfortable with the lack of certainty about us not being in a simulation [see ‘Are we in a simulation?‘ on September 28, 2022].  However, I know that some of you would prefer not to consider this possibility.  Unfortunately, recently published research has likely increased the probability that we are in a simulation because the researchers set up a simulation of a community of human-like agents called Smallville [Park et al, 2023].  The generative agents fuse large language models used in artificial intelligence with computational, interactive agents who eat, sleep, work and play just like humans and coalesce into social groups.  The simulation was created as a research tool for studying human interactions and emergent social behaviour which completely concurs with the argument for us already being part of a simulation created to study social behaviour.  Smallville only had 25 virtual inhabitants but the speed of advances in artificial intelligence and computational tools perhaps implies that a simulation of billions of agents (people) is not as far in the future as we once thought thus making it more credible that we are in a simulation.  The emergent social behaviour observed in Smallville suggests that our society is essentially a self-organising complex system that cannot be micro-managed from the centre.

Sources:

Oliver Roeder, Keeping up with the ChatGPT neighbours, FT Weekend, August 26/27 2023.

Camilla Cavendish, Charities could lead new age of community spirit, FT Weekend, August 26/27 2023.

Park JS, O’Brien JC, Cai CJ, Morris MR, Liang P, Bernstein MS. Generative agents: Interactive simulacra of human behavior. arXiv preprint arXiv:2304.03442. 2023.

Image: Ceramic tile by Pablo Picasso in museum in Port de Sóller Railway Station, Mallorca.

 

Napping, releasing the soul and brain maintenance

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Decorative photograph of painting: The Punishment of Lust.I read recently about the renovation of a small Parisian flat into a single office for the writer, Simon Kuper (How I made my perfect office).  The furniture included a sofa by the window for his post-lunch 15-minute nap (20 minutes on a bad day).  There was a brief period when I regularly had a nap in my office in the middle of day.  Now, I regularly nap at the weekend in the afternoon, or a weekday in the early evening after dinner.  Research has found short daytime naps improve cognitive performance (Lovato & Lin, 2010) and may help to preserve brain health by slowing the rate at which the brain shrinks with age (Paz et al, 2023).  So, short naps are probably good for you, though longer naps have been associated with reductions in cognition, the ability to think and form memories (Li et al, 2016) as well as increased blood pressure (Vizmanos et al, 2023).  In his outstanding novel, ‘The Salt of the Earth‘, Jozef Wittlin describes sleep as releasing or giving freedom to the soul.  Perhaps it is the wandering of the soul that we sometime recall as dreams.  On a more sinister note, sleep is described as practice for death by Ernesto Sabato in his novel, ‘On Heroes and Tombs‘, when presumably our soul is released forever to drift to Nirvana as in Giovanni Segantini’s painting ‘The punishment of lust’ in which the souls of neglectful mothers are shown floating towards the mountains representing Nirvana, a Buddhist heaven.  In the light of the inevitability of death, I quite like the idea that we can practice for it; however, I prefer to think of naps preserving my aging brain and improving my cognition.

Image: photograph of ‘The punishment of lust’ by Giovanni Segantini in the Walker Gallery, Liverpool.