Dealing with Anxiety: Seneca and Adam Savage

One of the better ideas I've gotten from Alain de Botton is his description of Seneca's guide to anger:

As with most of the videos in this series, I find their most applicable use in areas other than their target.  Here, instead of appreciating this as a guide to anger, I see it better as a guide to anxiety.  To wit:

When you feel panicked and want to do something else, look and create a plan (either 'plan' in remaining mentally prepared or 'plan' as in actually do have an alternative) for the worst likely outcome.  Often, you will come to terms with it and realize that it's not so bad, and therefore fear does not overtake your decision-making process.

I've done this quite a bit in my past.  In particular, I think this is how I got through most of uni.  I started with the thought that, "Well, if I fail my first year, then I'll use my anosmia to my advantage and get a decent job somewhere," and shot for my minor.  Once I had that, and had a minor in both Physics and Math by then, I did have a bit of a crisis, and ended up switching majors from Physics to Math; and then thought, "Well, if this shits up, I at least have the equivalent of an associate's to back up on."  I then plowed on.  Whenever I felt exam anxiety, I would be reminded of the fact that--in a sense--failure is just another form of freedom.

The best Senecan I've come across, comes from a story from Adam Savage:

Because of this, I have come up with the ultimate Senecan.

No, Adam Savage has GONE THROUGH the ultimate Senecan.

Whenever I've felt some extreme anxiety, I've imagined the above following scenario.  Whenever I am anxious about something, I imagine "The Adam Savage Senecan".  Wherein I imagine the person that I have some obligation that I am feeling anxious for, responds the same way Adam's boss did.

The crucial part is what I imagine I would do immediately after the chastisement ends, and I am alone in that 'warehouse', what would I do or where I would go from there.  Usually, it simply involves me realizing that...on the flipside, I don't have to talk to them anymore, and I am usually psychically set on simply moving to a different place.

Once I am good with this.  I typically have no more anxiety.

Is Meditation Bogus?

How trustworthy _is_ this neurological research?

http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/acad/psyb/2010/00000050/F0020003/art00007 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_on_meditation gives an idea of how large the corpus of research is now) (Most of my knowledge about meditation research, though, came from this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tRdDqXgsJ0).

Is working memory research purely a Hawthorne effect?

Is the research on meditation complete bogus and motivated completely from a desire to back up Buddhist meditation (look at who funds most of these studies...)?

I tried meditation for a month about a year back. I noticed no effect, but I don't know if it's because I wasn't doing it right, it did have an effect but I didn't notice, or if these studies really are bogus (it's not like I can have my own fMRI machine).

Another possible explanation, given the link you provided, is that most of the research is done on pathological cases. Knock on wood, I'm pretty sure I'm not one of those cases. Therefore, it could be the case that the marginal effect provided by meditation is so much significantly smaller for myself as it is for someone with ADHD that I get very little cognitive benefit (the same way that athletes hit plateaus in their training).

.....

I'm also tempted to link to the Skeptic's Dictionary's page on Transcendental Meditation here...(http://www.skepdic.com/tm.html)

Aristotle II: "Happiness"

As I mentioned before, my first beef with Aristotle is promoting this fallacy of false compromise throughout all of Western thought.  The second idea is the absolute infallibility of happiness.

I've talked before about my multiple criticisms of happiness as a good that we should all try to achieve.  My next criticism, and this sidles in with Aristotle, is what even is happiness?  The definition that Aristotle gives for happiness--eudaimonia--is not what people think of when they think of happiness.  Even when they agree that they wouldn't want to pump themselves full of heroin, and then smugly sit back in the comfort that they are going after eudaimonia, in my experience they still are going after happiness in the hedonistic sense.  Granted, it's more of an "arbitrary exception hedonia", but really under what I see, I see no difference between this and what is essentially hedonia.

(but then again, I've already gone into my beef with "happiness")

The problem, I think, comes in how Aristotle defined happiness:

“Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence” -Aristotle

How do most people really define happiness?  Probably like so:

"Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory." -Albert Schweitzer

Say a person decides his goal in life is to study Platypuses. So, he goes through a lot of pain studying and making and compiling this humongous tome on platypuses. After 10 years he is finally finished. It gets a few reviews that say it's alright, and immediately after the man dies. The apparent paradox is that in one sense the man lived a horrible life suffering in the Australian savannah. However, the Aristotelian notion says that he is happy.

Simply creating a new definition for happiness, and then claiming that you should follow happiness, to get out of the logical v. emotional conflicts is a nice intellectual trick--if it weren't downright fucking dishonest.

Moreover, this definition of happiness leads to circular reasoning.  According to my rendition of Aristotle, virtuous thought supposes that a virtuous persons has a fairly explicit conception of "happiness" or eudaimonia. Thus a person can use that to create virtuous thought and thus virtuous action to produce a good, or eudaimonia.

Aristotle I: "Balance"

I told you I'd come back to this topic.

I really, really hate how people use the word 'balance' as a pretense for pragmatism (when it's decidedly not pragmatic, "Our country uses 60 Hz current, our country uses 120 Hz--let's compromise and use 80, that's pragmatic!") and thereby a rationalization for pretty much any action.   Yet, despite I find other "intellectually immature" (did I ever mention that I think someone should make a T-shirt that says, "I am a member of a moronic cult"?  I'm sick of people throwing around that ad hominem...except, of course, when I do it :p.) people who agree with me, try searching around for "criticisms of the Aristotelian Mean".  They are actually suspiciously rare.  So, I will do so here.

One obvious theoretical criticism is that the Aristotelian Mean presents a false dichotomy in the sense that there is a "scale", and only between two extremes, of two different values (as the old joke goes, Congress usually compromises--somewhere between stupid and evil).  The other criticism is that it feels like a straw man.  After all, the name-calling argument is that we shouldn't be "extreme".  Why not?  Is it suddenly considered reprehensible to endeavor to be as consistent as you can be?  Is it suddenly reprehensible to actually have some damn principles?  (see what I did there?  I criticized the Golden Mean for being a straw man, and then in the very next few sentences I presented a straw man.  Either way, I hope the reader understands what I am at least getting at here)

It is, really, just a thinly veiled disguise of false compromise.  Usually performed by individuals who feel that "everything is relative", and are afraid of upsetting anyone (although, really, if you wanted to make sure not to upset anyone, you wouldn't talk at all).

Yet what I find even more troubling is how, essentially, such a typically emotionally acceptable theory (due to its social acceptability because, as I said, it doesn't "rock the boat") unusually forms a solid of Aristotelian ethics.  I've heard plenty of criticisms of Aristotelian ethics, but unfortunately, I don't think this has really been focused on by any other source, so I supposed that I might as well go ahead and do this here.

Next I'll go into my thoughts w.r.t. Aristotle on "Happiness".

Romance of the Programmer

This was something I wrote a long time ago, that I still somewhat agree with.

After the break :U.

I love Megaman

18:10 (actually, 19:45-20:45)

When I saw that the main boss was a balance, I thought that this was going to be yet another, "We should strive for balance in our lives" 'moral lesson' episode.  Instead, I ended up fighting it (literally).

When we give up our philosophy for balance and pragmatism, we become complete moral relativists and lose our sense of identity.

In retrospect this was sooooo cheesy, but...I like it.


...more on my thoughts regarding 'balance' later.

Log

Things that bother me about the log function.

I was just going to focus on "What base do people mean?" until I realized that there's a lot of ambiguous things about this function.

The first is..."What base do people mean?"  Generally, you have to take it by context of the person you're talking to.  If I'm talking to a computer scientist, it's base 2.  If I'm talking to an engineer, it's base 10.  If I'm talking to a mathematician, it's base e.  We all just say 'log' though.

Next up is, "What's the branch cut?"  Generally, people mean the $-\pi$ branch cut, where log of negative numbers is undefined.  However, over the complex plane, we could mean different possible branch cuts.  Moreover, depending on the surface you're considering the log function over, different things happen, which brings me to...

"What's the domain?"  If it's over $\mathbb{C}$, it makes sense to even ask the previous question.  If it's over $\Re$, then _really_ you're considering the domain $\Re^+$, the positive real axis.  Although, you _could_ define a log function over the negative real axis and leave the positive real axis undefined.  Moreover, there's a particular kind of Riemann surface (in fact, it's _constructed_ so that the following happens) where the log function over _it_ is defined _everywhere_.  Moreover, the question of which domain you're considering is important to answer the question...

"What's the derivative?"  I remember hearing this story of a Physics professor docking points off of a student for drawing the graph of the log function's derivative as being $1/x$, but only on the _positive_ part of the axis.  Technically, the student was 100% correct.  The derivative of $log(x)$ is $1/x$ only on the positive real axis because $log(x)$ itself is only _defined_ on the positive real axis.  Because of this, depending on where the branch cut, domain, and even _base_ you're considering, the derivative will be different!

However, we usually don't clarify these things.  All of this information about the log function is usually easily taken up according to the context of the discussion.