Internet World | Kishan Mishra

Science

What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell (Erwin Schrodinger, 1944)
More Is Different (P. W. Anderson, Science, 1972)
The Universe as an Inside-Out Star (Mitch Crowe, Adam Moss, Douglas Scott, arXiv, 2008)
There Are No Particles, There Are Only Fields (Art Hobson, American Journal of Physics, 2013)
Would Bohr Be Born if Bohm Were Born Before Born? (H. Nikolic, American Journal of Physics, 2008)
Can Quantum-Mechanical Description of Physical Reality Be Considered Complete? (A. Einstein, B. Podolsky, N. Rosen, 1935)
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences (Eugene Wigner, 1960)

Tech

The Website Obesity Crisis (Maciej Cegłowski)
Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World (Cal Newport)
Write Plain Text Files (Derek Sivers)

Literature

Forever Overhead (David Foster Wallace)

Art

On Limitations That Hide in Your Blindspot (Henrik Karlsson)
This is Water (David Foster Wallace)
Lessons from 100 Days of Rejection (Jia Jiang)
Life Is Short (Paul Graham)
Letter “To Nicholas Hughes (Undated 1986) (From Letters of Ted Hughes)
The Tail End (Tim Urban)
Nothing is Edgier Than Earnestness (Visakan Veerasamy)
The Divine Discontent (Celine Nguyen)
Look for People Who Like the Illegible You of Today, Not Your Past Achievements (Henrik Karlsson)
Welcome Address to Freshman Parents (Karl Paulnack)
The Art of Noticing (Rob Walker)

Writing

Why I Write (Joan Didion)
Write Faster (Sasha Chapin)
55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer (Roy Peter Clark)
Do You Have Any Writing Advice? (Visakan Veerasamy)
you-should-write-blogs (Steve Yegge)
why you should write more (Ava)
Writing, Briefly (Paul Graham)
Some thoughts on writing (Dan Luu)
Miscellaneous
The Review of 2024 Nobel Prize (The Journal of Immaterial Science)

Debate

Dawkins Vs Peterson: Meme & Archetypes (Moderated by Alex O’Connor, YouTube, 2024)

Very recently shared, the following debate features two prominent intellectuals—Richard Dawkins, a well-known evolutionary biologist and atheist, and Jordan Peterson, a clinical psychologist and professor known for his views on psychology, culture, and religion. The debate focuses on two major concepts: memes (a term coined by Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene) and archetypes (a concept widely explored by Carl Jung and popularized by Peterson).

The Concept of Memes (Dawkins):

Dawkins’ Argument: Richard Dawkins introduces the concept of a “meme” as a unit of cultural evolution, similar to how genes are units of biological evolution. A meme can be any piece of information, idea, behavior, or style that spreads within a culture and undergoes a process of natural selection.
Debate with Peterson: Dawkins emphasizes the importance of rationality and science in understanding the role memes play in shaping human behavior and culture.

The Concept of Archetypes (Peterson):

Peterson’s Argument: Jordan Peterson, drawing on Carl Jung’s work, argues that archetypes are universal, innate patterns of behavior and symbols in the human psyche. Archetypes shape how individuals interpret and respond to their world.
Debate with Dawkins: Peterson challenges Dawkins’ mechanistic view by proposing that archetypes have a profound psychological and cultural significance.

Key Points Discussed:

Nature of Culture and Evolution: Dawkins argues cultural evolution can be studied in the same way as biological evolution. Peterson suggests archetypes represent deeper structures that shape human behavior.
Rationality vs Symbolism: Dawkins advocates for a scientific approach, while Peterson argues for symbolic and existential understanding.
Science vs Psychology: Dawkins’ evolutionary biology approach contrasts with Peterson’s psychological focus.
Role of Religion and Mythology: Dawkins views religion as a sociocultural construct, while Peterson believes archetypes in religious myths hold deep psychological truths.

Well, kudos to the moderator Alex O’Connor, the debate between Dawkins and Peterson presents a clash of worldviews: Dawkins advocates for a scientific approach to culture, while Peterson offers a symbolic interpretation rooted in archetypes. Both provide compelling arguments.

Quotes

I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

-Albert Camus

There’s been time this whole time. You can’t kill time with your heart. Everything takes time. Bees have to move very fast to stay still.

This is another paradox, that many of the most important impressions and thoughts in a person’s life are ones that flash through your head so fast that fast isn’t even the right word, they seem totally different from or outside of the regular sequential clock time we all live by, and they have so little relation to the sort of linear, one-word-after-another word English we all communicate with each other with that it could easily take a whole lifetime just to spell out the contents of one split-second’s flash of thoughts and connections, etc. – and yet we all seem to go around trying to use English (or whatever language our native country happens to use, it goes without saying) to try to convey to other people what we’re thinking and to find out what they’re thinking, when in fact deep down everybody knows it’s a charade and they’re just going through the motions. What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny part of it at any given instant.

Everything I’ve ever let go of has claw marks on it.

How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.

Try to learn to let what is unfair teach you.

The next suitable person you’re in light conversation with, you stop suddenly in the middle of the conversation and look at the person closely and say, “What’s wrong?” You say it in a concerned way. He’ll say, “What do you mean?” You say, “Something’s wrong. I can tell. What is it?” And he’ll look stunned and say, “How did you know?” He doesn’t realize something’s always wrong, with everybody. Often more than one thing. He doesn’t know everybody’s always going around all the time with something wrong and believing they’re exerting great willpower and control to keep other people, for whom they think nothing’s ever wrong, from seeing it.

True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world.

Everybody is identical in their secret unspoken belief that way deep down they are different from everyone else.

I am not what you see and hear.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

Fiction is one of the few experiences where loneliness can be both confronted and relieved. Drugs, movies where stuff blows up, loud parties – all these chase away loneliness by making me forget my name’s Dave and I live in a one-by-one box of bone no other party can penetrate or know. Fiction, poetry, music, really deep serious sex, and, in various ways, religion – these are the places (for me) where loneliness is countenanced, stared down, transfigured, treated.

-David Foster Wallace

We are a society awash in skillfully manufactured lies. Solitude that makes thought possible–a removal from the electronic cacophony that besieges us- is harder and harder to find. We have severed ourselves from a print- based culture. We are unable to grapple with the nuances and complexity of ideas. We have traded ideas for fabricated clichés. We speak in the hollow language we are given by our corporate masters. Reality, presented to us as image, is unexamined and therefore false. We are culturally illiterate. And because of our cultural illiteracy we are easily manipulated and controlled.

-Chris Hedges

Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you’re there. It doesn’t matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away. The difference between the man who just cuts lawns and a real gardener is in the touching, he said. The lawn-cutter might just as well not have been there at all; the gardener will be there a lifetime.

-Ray Bradbury

Loneliness is personal, and it is also political. Loneliness is collective; it is a city. As to how to inhabit it, there are no rules and nor is there any need to feel shame, only to remember that the pursuit of individual happiness does not trump or excuse our obligations to each another. We are in this together, this accumulation of scars, this world of objects, this physical and temporary heaven that so often takes on the countenance of hell. What matters is kindness; what matters is solidarity. What matters is staying alert, staying open, because if we know anything from what has gone before us, it is that the time for feeling will not last.

-The lonely city, Olivia Laing

These days, everybody is supposed to be so intelligent: ‘Isn’t it terrible about Nixon getting elected?’ ‘Did you hear about the earthquake in Peru?’ And you’re supposed to have all the answers. But when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, like, What is bugging you, mister? Why can’t you make it with your wife? Why do you lie awake all night staring at the ceiling? Why, why, why do you refuse to recognize you have problems and deal with them?’The answer is that people have forgotten how to relate or respond. In this day of mass communications and instant communications, there is no communication between people. Instead it’s long-winded stories or hostile bits, or laughter. But nobody’s really laughing. It’s more an hysterical, joyless kind of sound. Translation: ‘I am here and I don’t know why.

-John Cassavetes

Woman’s role in creation should be parallel to her role in life. I don’t mean the good earth. I mean the bad earth too, the demon, the instincts, the storms of nature. Tragedies, conflicts, mysteries are personal. Man fabricated a detachment which became fatal. Woman must not fabricate. She must descend into the real womb and expose its secrets and its labyrinths. She must describe it as the city of Fez, with its Arabian Nights gentleness, tranquility and mystery. She must describe the voracious moods, the desires, the worlds contained in each cell of it. For the womb has dreams. It is not as simple as the good earth. I believe at times that man created art out of fear of exploring woman. I believe woman stuttered about herself out of fear of what she had to say. She covered herself with taboos and veils. Man invented a woman to suit his needs. He disposed of her by identifying her with nature and then paraded his contemptuous domination of nature. But woman is not nature only. She is the mermaid with her fish-tail dipped in the unconscious.

-Anais Nin

No other life forms know they are alive, and neither do they know they will die. This is our curse alone. Without this hex upon our heads, we would never have withdrawn as far as we have from the natural-so far and for such a time that it is a relief to say what we have been trying with our all not to say: We have long since been denizens of the natural world. Everywhere around us are natural habitats, but within us is the shiver of startling and dreadful things. Simply put: We are not from here. If we vanished tomorrow, no organism on this planet would miss us. Nothing in nature needs us.

-Thomas Ligotti

These days, everybody is supposed to be so intelligent: ‘Isn’t it terrible about Nixon getting elected?’ ‘Did you hear about the earthquake in Peru?’ And you’re supposed to have all the answers. But when it gets down to the nitty-gritty, like, What is bugging you, mister? Why can’t you make it with your wife? Why do you lie awake all night staring at the ceiling? Why, why, why do you refuse to recognize you have problems and deal with them?’ The answer is that people have forgotten how to relate or respond. In this day of mass communications and instant communications, there is no communication between people. Instead it’s long-winded stories or hostile bits, or laughter. But nobody’s really laughing. It’s more an hysterical, joyless kind of sound. Translation: ‘I am here and I don’t know why.

-John Cassavetes

You must write every single day of your life… You must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads… may you be in love every day for the next 20,000 days. And out of that love, remake a world.
But what would happen is that the world would catch up with and try to sicken you. If you did not write every day, the poisons would accumulate and you would begin to die, or act crazy, or both. You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. For writing allows just the proper recipes of truth, life, reality as you are able to eat, drink, and digest without hyperventilating and flopping like a dead fish in your bed.

I have learned, on my journeys, that if I let a day go by without writing, I grow uneasy. Two days and I am in tremor. Three and I suspect lunacy. Four and I might as well be a hog, suffering the flux in a wallow. An hour’s writing is tonic. I’m on my feet, running in circles, and yelling for a clean pair of spats.

-Ray Bradbury

Drink from the well of yourself and begin again.
and when nobody wakes you up in the morning, and when nobody waits for you at night, and when you can do whatever you want. what do you call it, freedom or loneliness?
We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us.
so it’s always a process of letting go, one way or another.

-Charles Bukowski

The most difficult thing is the decision to act, the rest is merely tenacity. The fears are paper tigers. You can do anything you decide to do. You can act to change and control your life; and the procedure, the process is its own reward.

-Amelia Earhart

And that’s how we measure out our real respect for people – by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate – and enjoy. End of sermon. As Buddha says: live like a mighty river. And as the old Greeks said: live as though all your ancestors were living again through you.

-Ted Hughes

You have to pick the places you don’t walk away from.

I closed the box and put it in a closet. There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

As it happened, I didn’t grow up to be the kind of woman who is the heroine in a Western, and although the men I have known have had many virtues and have taken me to live in many places I have come to love, they have never been John Wayne, and they have never taken me to the bend in the river where the cottonwoods grow. Deep in that part of my heart where artificial rain forever falls, that is still the line I want to hear.

I know what the fear is. The fear is not for what is lost. What is lost is already in the wall. What is lost is already behind the locked doors. The fear is for what is still to be lost.

Perhaps it never did snow that August in Vermont; perhaps there never were flurries in the night wind, and maybe no one else felt the ground hardening and summer already dead even as we pretended to bask in it, but that was how it felt to me, and it might as well have snowed, could have snowed, did snow.

-Joan Didion

What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.

I cannot believe in a God who wants to be praised all the time.

The snake which cannot cast its skin has to die. As well the minds which are prevented from changing their opinions; they cease to be mind.

And so, onwards… along a path of wisdom, with a hearty tread, a hearty confidence.. however you may be, be your own source of experience. Throw off your discontent about your nature. Forgive yourself your own self. You have it in your power to merge everything you have lived through- false starts, errors, delusions, passions, your loves and your hopes- into your goal, with nothing left over. My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it… but love it.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

What is the history of every day in your case? Look at your habits that constitute it: are they the product of innumerable little cowardices and lazinesses or of your courage and inventive reason? However different these two cases are, people might very well praise you equally and you might actually profit them equally this way and that. But praise and profit and respectability may suffice those who merely wish to have a good conscience—but not you who try the heart and reins and make even conscience an object of science!

-Friedrich Nietzsche