Gary Kurtz was George Lucas' partner in making the first two Star Wars films, but they had a huge falling-out after Empire Strikes Back. Now, for the first time, he's explained what went wrong with Star Wars.
When Kurtz and Lucas split, Mark Hamill reportedly said it was like "Mom and Dad getting a divorce." The two men had crafted the Star Wars universe together, with Kurtz serving as producer and second-unit director. In an enlightening — but depressing — interview in the L.A. Times, Kurtz explains what he thinks went south after the second Star Wars movie. In particular, he felt like Lucas started putting the toys ahead of storytelling:
I could see where things were headed. The toy business began to drive the [Lucasfilm] empire. It's a shame. They make three times as much on toys as they do on films. It's natural to make decisions that protect the toy business but that's not the best thing for making quality films.... The emphasis on the toys, it's like the cart driving the horse. If it wasn't for that the films would be done for their own merits. The creative team wouldn't be looking over their shoulder all the time.
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Kurtz also explains how Return Of The Jedi would have ended originally, in the outline that Lucas and he had come up with before Lucas decided to change everything to make it more of an upbeat toy-selling vehicle. Luke and Leia would have rescued Han Solo from Jabba the Hutt, but then Han would have died halfway through the film, during a raid on an Imperial base. (This is something that Harrison Ford has mentioned before as well.) The film would have ended with the rebel forces in tatters, Leia struggling with her new duties as queen, and Luke walking off into the sunset alone, like Clint Eastwood at the end of a spaghetti Western. It would have been a more nuanced, muted ending to the saga, instead of the Ewoks dancing in the forest like a "teddy-bear luau." (Apparently that genius phrase is the work of the L.A. Times' Geoff Boucher.)
The whole interview with Kurtz is well worth reading, including his demolishing the myth that Star Wars was always intended to be a multi-film saga. He explains that he and Lucas originally wanted to do a Flash Gordon movie, but couldn't get the rights free and clear. So they decided to do an original Flash Gordon-esque movie, and Lucas cooked up this mythology based on Flash Gordon, Seven Samurai, Arthurian legend and other stuff. They'd planned to do just one Star Wars movie, then go work on Apocalypse Now with Francis Ford Coppola, followed by a dark comedy in the vein of M.A.S.H. But the studio clamored for more Star Wars films, and Lucas ended up spending all his time on the series.
Star Wars' producer Gary Kurtz speaks out
The man who left the franchise after 'The Empire Strikes Back' talks about why he split with George Lucas.
August 12, 2010|By Geoff Boucher, Los Angeles Times
"Star Wars" was born a long time ago, but not all that far, far away. In 1972, filmmakers George Lucas and Gary Kurtz were toiling on "American Graffiti" in their San Rafael office when they began daydreaming about a throwback sci-fi adventure that channeled the old "Flash Gordon" serials as opposed to the bleak "message" movies that had taken over the genre.
"We had no idea what we were starting," says Kurtz, who was the producer of the first two "Star Wars" films and also a second-unit director. "That simple concept changed Hollywood in a way...."
There was a bittersweet tinge to Kurtz's voice and it's no surprise. This year is the 30th anniversary of "The Empire Strikes Back," the "Star Wars" sequel that many fans consider the pinnacle moment in a franchise that has pulled in $16 billion in box office and merchandising. But 1980 was also the year that Kurtz and Lucas realized the Jedi universe wasn't big enough for the both of them.
"I could see where things were headed," Kurtz said. "The toy business began to drive the [Lucasfilm] empire. It's a shame. They make three times as much on toys as they do on films. It's natural to make decisions that protect the toy business but that's not the best thing for making quality films."
He added: "The first film and 'Empire' were about story and character but I could see that George's priorities were changing."
This weekend, Kurtz steps back into the "Star Wars" world as a special guest at Star Wars Celebration V, a massive Orlando convention organized by Lucasfilm and expected to draw thousands of fans who will come to buy collectibles, attend panels, get cast-member autographs or even visit the event's themed tattoo parlor or wedding chapel.
Kurtz's presence speaks to his vital role in the franchise's history -- he is, for instance, the one who came up with the title for "The Empire Strikes Back" -- but the Lucasfilm leadership is already fretting about the Jedi expatriate's appearance. They may have good reason; during a recent visit to Los Angeles the filmmaker, who just turned 70, showed a willingness to speak out against the priorities of an old partner.
"The emphasis on the toys, it's like the cart driving the horse," Kurtz said. "If it wasn't for that the films would be done for their own merits. The creative team wouldn't be looking over their shoulder all the time."
No fan of conflict, Kurtz has remained relatively quiet through the years but over coffee on a sunny Southern California afternoon he spoke at length about his lightsaber days.
Like many fans, Kurtz was too invested in the "Star Wars" universe to skip the second trilogy: 1999's "Star Wars: Episode I -- The Phantom Menace," 2002's "Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones" and 2005's "Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith." (Lucas retitled the three original movies as "Star Wars -- Episode IV: A New Hope," "Star Wars -- Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back" and "Star Wars -- Episode VI: Return of the Jedi.") But as he sat in the dark with the follow-up "Star Wars" films, he squirmed in his seat.
"I don't like the idea of prequels, they make the filmmakers back in to material they've already covered and it boxes in the story," Kurtz said. "I think they did a pretty good job with them although I have to admit I never liked Hayden Christensen in the role of Anakin Skywalker. I just wished the stories had been stronger and that the dialogue had been stronger. It gets meek. I'm not sure the characters ever felt real like they did in 'Empire.' "
A spokesperson for George Lucas said he was unavailable to comment for this story.
The comments by Kurtz -- who characterizes his relationship with Lucas as "professional" -- speak to a churning pop-culture debate about the enduring legacy of Lucas and the trajectory of his still-unfolding "Star Wars" mythology. The first trilogy of films ended in 1983 with "Return of the Jedi" and the second trilogy brought a whole new generation into the universe but also left many original fans feeling sour or disengaged.
A seventh feature film, an animated movie called "The Clone Wars," was released in 2008, which, along with video games and toys, speaks to a young 21st century constituency that may be only vaguely aware of the 1977 film.
The same passion pulling fans to Orlando also stokes the debate about Lucas and his creation. Alexandre Philippe is the director of "The People vs. George Lucas," a documentary that just had its West Coast premiere at the Los Angeles Film Festival. He says that Kurtz has become a figure of integrity to the fans who believe that Lucas has followed the wrong path.
Philippe said the departure of Kurtz was a major moment in "Star Wars" history and deeply unsettling to all involved. "The cast and crew were crushed when George and Gary went their separate ways," said Philippe, who added that Mark Hamill, who portrayed Luke Skywalker, later explained it in broken-family terminology. "He said it was like mom and dad getting a divorce. They were both equally loved and respected on the set."
For Kurtz, the popular notion that "Star Wars" was always planned as a multi-film epic is laughable. He says that he and Lucas, both USC film school grads who met through mutual friend Francis Ford Coppola in the late 1960s, first sought to do a simple adaptation of "Flash Gordon," the comic-strip hero who had been featured in movie serials that both filmmakers found charming.
"We tried to buy the rights to 'Flash Gordon' from King Features but the deal would have been prohibitive," Kurtz said. "They wanted too much money, too much control, so starting over and creating from scratch was the answer."
Lucas came up with a sprawling treatment that pulled on "Flash Gordon," Arthurian legend, "The Seven Samurai" and other influences. The document would have required a five-hour film but there was a middle portion that could be carved out as a stand-alone movie. Kurtz championed the project in pitch meetings with studios and worked intensely on casting, scouting locations and finding a way to create a believable alien universe on a tight budget.
"Star Wars" opened with a title sequence that announced it as "Episode IV" as a winking nod to the old serials, not to announce a film franchise underway, Kurtz said.
"Our plan was to do 'Star Wars' and then make 'Apocalypse Now' and do a black comedy in the vein of 'MASH,' " Kurtz said. "Fox insisted on a sequel or maybe two [to 'Star Wars']. Francis [Ford Coppola] … eventually got tired of waiting and did it on his own, of course."
The team of Lucas and Kurtz would not hold together during their own journey through the jungles of collaborative filmmaking. Kurtz chooses his words carefully on the topic of their split. After the release of "Empire" (which was shaped by material left over from that first Lucas treatment), talk turned to a third film and after a decade and a half the partners could no longer find a middle ground.
"We had an outline and George changed everything in it, "Kurtz said. "Instead of bittersweet and poignant he wanted a euphoric ending with everybody happy. The original idea was that they would recover [the kidnapped] Han Solo in the early part of story and that he would then die in the middle part of the film in a raid on an Imperial base. George then decided he didn't want any of the principals killed. By that time there were really big toy sales and that was a reason."
The discussed ending of the film that Kurtz favored presented the rebel forces in tatters, Leia grappling with her new duties as queen and Luke walking off alone "like Clint Eastwood in the spaghetti westerns," as Kurtz put it.
Kurtz said that ending would have been a more emotionally nuanced finale to an epic adventure than the forest celebration of the Ewoks that essentially ended the trilogy with a teddy-bear luau.
He was especially disdainful of the Lucas idea of a second Death Star, which he felt would be too derivative of the 1977 film. "So we agreed that I should probably leave."
Kurtz went straight over to "The Dark Crystal," a three-year project with old friend Jim Henson, whom Kurtz had brought in on the creation of Yoda for "Empire."
After that he shifted into a lower gear as far as his career and, relocating to England, turned to British television productions. He's now working on a ramping feature-film project called "Panzer 88" that he says will begin filming as early as this fall and will feature visual effects by Weta, the same New Zealand outfit that populated Middle-earth in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy.
The producer said that huge films hold little allure for him now and that he is more interested in smaller, more nimble productions that put an emphasis on "human stories." That might speak to his alienation from the Jedi universe, but when he talks about Lucas and their shared history the stories are still tinted by nostalgia, admiration and affection.
On casting the 1977 film: "We had a lot of people, hundreds, that we saw. It was quick and dirty. You talk to each person, jot down a note or two. Are they a score of 'five' or higher? Do they deserve a callback? On those lists were a lot of interesting people -- John Travolta, Sly Stallone -- who were great but just not right. I went to New York to do an interview with Jodi Foster, for instance, but she was just too young for Leia. A lot of it comes down to luck and timing."
On Harrison Ford, who became a Hollywood icon after "Star Wars" but keeps the fervent fandom at arm's length: "He's always been somewhat cynical, since the beginning of his career, about everything. In a way he tried not to take notoriety or the fans too seriously. Movies are movies and real life is his ranch" in Wyoming.
On the moment he knew that "Star Wars" was becoming a pop-culture sensation: "On opening day I was on the East Coast and I did the morning-show circuit -- 'Good Morning America' and 'Today' …in the afternoon I did a radio call-in show in Washington and this guy, this caller, was really enthusiastic and talking about the movie in really deep detail. I said, 'You know a lot abut the film.' He said, 'Yeah, yeah, I've seen it four times already.' And that was opening day. I knew something was happening."
Kurtz isn't sure what to expect in Orlando but he says that "Empire" may be the shining moment of his career, the confluence of commercial and artistic success. His work as a second-unit director and his hands-on efforts with the visual effects make him especially proud.
"I took a master class with Billy Wilder once and he said that in the first act of a story you put your character up in a tree and the second act you set the tree on fire and then in the third you get him down," Kurtz said. " 'Empire' was the tree on fire. The first movie was like a comic book, a fantasy, but 'Empire' felt darker and more compelling. It's the one, for me, where everything went right. And it was my goodbye to a big part of my life."
Saturday, May 31, 2014
THOUGHTS/ SPIRITUAL: FREE WILL
Identity: who am I?
Every year 98% of the atoms of my body are replaced: how can I claim to be still the same person that I was last year, or, worse, ten years ago? What is (where lies) my identity? What is "my" relationship to the metabolism of my body?
Derek Parfit once proposed a thought problem: what happens to a person who is destroyed by a scanner in London and rebuilt cell by cell in New York by a replicator that has received infinitely detailed information from the scanner about the state of each single cell, including all of the person's memories? Is the person still the same person? Or did the person die in London? What makes a person such a person: bodily or psychological continuity? If a person's matter is replaced cell by cell with equivalent cells is the person still the same person? If a person's psychological state (memory, beliefs, emotions and everything) is replaced with an equivalent psychological state is the person still the same person? The question eventually asks what is "a life": is it a continuum of bodily states, whereby one grows from a child to an adult, or is it a continuum of psychological states? Or both? Or none?
The most obvious paradox is: how can reality be still the same as we grow up? Do two completely different brains see the same image when they are presented with the same object? If the brains are different, then the pattern of neural excitement created by seeing that object will be completely different in the two brains. How can two completely different brains yield the same image in the two brains? The logical conclusion is "no, the tree I see is not the tree you see, we just happen to refer to it the same way so it is not important what exactly we see when we look at it". But then how can we see the same image yesterday, today and tomorrow? Our brain changes all the time. Between my brain of when I was five years old and my brain of today there is probably nothing in common: every single cell has changed, connections have changed, the physical shape of the brain has changed. The same object causes a different pattern in my brain today than it did in my brain forty years ago. Those are two different brains, made of different cells, organized in different ways: the two patterns are physically different. Nonetheless, it appears to me that my toys still look the same. But they shouldn't: since my brain changed, and the pattern they generate has changed, what I see today should be a different image than the one I saw as a five-year old. How is it that I see the same thing even if I have a different brain?
This thought experiment almost seem to prove that "I" am not in my brain, that there is something external to the brain that does not change over time, that the brain simply performs computations of the image but the ultimate "feeling" of that image is due to a "soul" that is external to the brain and does not depend on cells or connections.
On the other hand, it is easy to see that what we see is not really what we think we see.
We have to keep in mind that when we recognize something as something, we rarely see/feel/hear/touch again exactly the same thing we already saw/felt/heard/touched before. I recognize somebody's face, but that face cannot possibly be exactly the same image I saw last time: beard may have grown, a pimple may have appeared, hair may have been trimmed, a tan may have darkened the skin, or, quite simply, that face may be at a different angle (looking up, looking down, turned half way). I recognize a song, but the truth is that the same song never "sounds" the same: louder, softer, different speakers, static, different echo in the room, different position of my era with respect to the speakers. I recognize that today the temperature is "cold", but if we measured the temperature to the tenth decimal digit it is unlikely that we would get the exact same number that I got the previous time I felt the same cold. What we "recognize" is obviously not a physical quantity: a image, a sound, a temperature never repeat themselves. What is it then that we recognize when we recognize a face, a song or a temperature? Broadly speaking, it is a concept.
We build concepts of our sensory experience, we store those concepts for future use, and we matched the stored concepts with any new concept. When we do this comparison, we try to find similarity and identity. If the two concepts are similar enough, we assume that they are identical, that they are the same thing. If they are not similar enough, but they are more similar than the average, then we can probably establish that they belong to a common super-concept (they are both faces, but not the same face; they are both songs, but not the same song; and so forth). We have a vast array of concepts which are organized in a hierarchy with many levels of generalization (your face to face of you and siblings to faces of that kind to face to ... to body part to ...). A sensory experience is somehow translated into a concept and that concept is matched with existing concepts and eventually located at some level of a hierarchy of concepts. If it is close enough to an existing concept of that hierarchy at that level, it is recognized as the same concept. Whatever the specific mechanism, it is obvious that what we recognize is not a physical quantity (distribution of colors, sound wave or temperature) but a concept, that somehow we build and compare with previously manufactured concepts.
Add to these considerations the fact that experience molds the brain: I am not only my genome, I am also the world around me. And I change all the time according to what is happening in the world. "I am" what the world is doing.
Identity is probably a concept. I have built over the years a concept of myself. My physical substance changes all the time, but, as long as it still matches my concept of myself, I still recognize it as myself.
The importance of being warm
When speculating about consciousness, identity and free will, it is important not to forget what bodies are and how they work.
Among the many bizarre features of living organisms, one is often overlooked: each living organism can live only within a very narrow range of temperature. Temperature is one of the most crucial survival factors.
Temperature also happens to be an important source of "identity": water and ice are made of the same atoms, it's the temperature that determines whether you are water or you are ice.
It's the temperature that determines whether your body is dead or alive, and it's the temperature that determines whether you are lying and shivering in bed or are playing soccer outside. Our identity does change with the temperature of our body (from no identity to "regular" identity to delirious identity).
Most of what our body does has nothing to do with writing poems or making scientific discoveries: it is about maintaining a stable temperature.
Free Will
Some scientists (and Albert Einstein with them) have argued that consciousness must be fabricated by reality, that what we feel is simply an unavoidable consequence of the state of the universe, that we are simply machines programmed by the rest of the universe.
Other scientists believe the opposite, that consciousness fabricates reality, that we have the power to alter the course of the events. They believe in free will.
Do we think or are we thought?
The question, while popular, is misleading. The question is, in a sense, already an answer: the moment we separate the "I" and the body, we have subscribed to dualism, to the view that spirit and matter are separate and spirit can control matter.
A free will grounded in matter is not easy to picture because we tend to believe in an "I" external to our body that controls our body.
But, in a materialist scenario, the "I" is supposed to be only the expression of brain processes. If that is the case, then "free will" is not about the "I" making a decision: the "I" will simply reflect that decision. What makes the decision is the brain process.
This does not mean that free will can't exist. It just needs to be redefined: can a brain process occur that is not completely caused by other physical processes?
In a materialist scenario, free will does not require consciousness: consciousness is an aspect of the brain process that "thinks". The question is whether that brain process has free will.
If consciousness is indeed due to a physical process, if consciousness is ultimately material, does this preclude free will? For centuries we have considered free will an exclusive property of the soul, mainly because 1. we deemed the soul to be made of spirit and not matter, and 2. nothing in Physics allows for free will of matter.
If we now recognize that consciousness is a property of matter(possibly one that occurs only in some special form and configuration of matter, but nonetheless ultimately matter), the second statement must be examined carefully because the possibility of free will depends on its truth: if motion of matter is controlled only by deterministic laws, then free will is an illusion; if matter has a degree of control over its own motion, then free will is a fact.
The question is not whether we have free will, but whether the laws of our universe (i.e., Physics) allow for free will.
Purpose
Why do living things do what they do?
The purposiveness of living organisms is simply a consequence of evolution by natural selection. Living organisms have a fundamental goal, survival, and have inherited a repertory of behaviors to achieve that goal. But the concept of "survival" can be better qualified as self-regulation.
The 19th-century French psychologist Claude Bernard "discovered" the self-regulating nature of living organisms. Bernard realized that each living organism is a system built to maintain a constant internal state in the face of changing external conditions. The regulation of this "milieu interieur" is life itself, because it is this stable state that gives the organism its independence from the environment, its identity. This is the dividing line that separates animate and inanimate matter: inanimate matter obeys Newton's laws of cause and effect, animate matter tends to maintain its state no matter what external forces are applied. Unlike objects, whose state is changed when a force is applied, the state of a living organism is not changed by an external force. The living organism, as long as it is alive, maintains its state constant.
The "purposeful" behavior of a living organism is the reaction to environmental forces: the organism needs to act in order to continuously restore its state. A body seems to "want", "intend", "desire" to maintain its internal state (either by eating, moving, sleeping, etc), a state that, ultimately, is a combination of chemical content and temperature. Living bodies appear to act purposedly, but they are simply reacting to the environment.
For Bernard "freedom" is independence from the environment. Control of the internal state allows a living organism to live in many different environments. The living organism is "free" in that is not a slave of its environment.
Bernard's idea of self-regulation extended to all living organisms. Humans are not the only ones to have "goals". Animate behavior "is" control of perception.
Will, not necessarily free: a materialistic view of free will
The problem with free will is that it does not fit too well with the scientific theories of the universe that have been developing over the last three centuries. While those theories are fairly accurate in predicting all the natural phenomena we deal with, they don't leave much room for free will. Particles behave the way they behave because of the fundamental laws of nature and because of what the other particles are doing; not because they can decide what to do. Since we are, ultimately, collections of particles, free will is an embarrassment of Physics.
On the other hand, a simple look at the behavior of even a fly seems to prove that free will is indeed a fact and is pervasive. Free will is a fundamental attribute of life. A robot that moved but only repeating a mechanical sequence of steps would not be considered "alive". Life has very much to do with unpredictability of behavior, not just with behavior. Or, better, behavior is behavior inasmuch as it is unpredictable to a degree; otherwise it is simply "motion".
Whether it is indeed "free" or not, "will" (the apparent ability of an ant to decide in which direction to move) appears to be an inherent feature of life, no matter how primitive life is. A theory of life that does not predict free will is not a good theory of life. Somehow, "free" will must be a product of the chemistry of life, at some very elementary level. In other words, obtaining the right chemical mix in the laboratory would not be enough: that mix must also exhibit the symptoms of free will.
The origin of free will, therefore, appears to be life itself.
Free will and randomness
Free will is often associated to randomness: a being has free will if it can perform "random" actions, as opposed to actions rigidly determined by the universal clockwork. In other words, free will can exist only if the laws of nature allow for some random solutions, solutions that can be arbitrarily chosen by our consciousness. If no randomness exists in nature, then every action (including our very conscious thoughts) is predetermined by a formula and free will cannot exist.
In their quest for the source of randomness in human free will, both neurophysiologists like John Eccles and physicists like Roger Penrose have proposed that quantum effects are responsible for creating randomness in the processes of the human brain. Whether chance and free will can be equated (free will is supposed to lead to rational and deterministic decisions, not random ones) and whether Quantum Theory is the only possible source of randomness is debatable.
Since we know that a lot of what goes on in the universe is indeed regulated by strict formulas, the hope for free will should rely not so much in randomness as in "fuzziness". It is unlikely that the laws of nature hide a completely random property; on the other hand, they could be "fuzzy", in that they may prescribe a behavior but with a broad range of possible degrees.
Free will and Physics
Whether we exercise it or not we do have free will: at every point in time we can choose what to do next.
Do animals also have free will? Or are they mechanisms, machines, that move according to formulas?
There is no evidence that at any point in time one can predict the next move of a chicken or an ant. No matter how simple and unconscious animals seem to be, their behavior is still largely unpredictable. You can guess what the chicken will want to do, but you can never be sure, and you can never guess the exact movements. There are infinite paths an ant can follow to go back to the nest and the one it will follow cannot be predicted. At every point of that path the ant can choose where to do next. Two ants will follow two different paths. Each ant seems to have its own personality.
Even the movement of mono-cellular organisms is unpredictable to some extent. No matter how small and simple the organism, a degree of free will seems to be there. Free will seems to be a property of life. What triggers the next move of bacteria, ants and chicken is not just a Newtonian formula. If they are machines, then these machines do not obey classical Physics. There is a degree of freedom that every living organism seems to enjoy. And it doesn't require a sophisticated brain. There is a degree of freedom that just shouldn't be there, if Newton was right.
If these are machines, they are machines that cannot be explained with our Mechanics because at every point in time there are many possible time evolutions and all seem to be possible, and none can be exactly predicted, pretty much like a quantum wave.
There is something missing in our Mechanics to account for free will of the machine.
Free will and choice
As usual, some misconception may arise from vague definitions. Is free will the consciousness of making one action out of so many possible ones, or is free will the ability to select one action out of so many possible ones? Why do we claim that a machine has no free will? Usually, because a machine can solve only the problems that we program it to solve. We, on the other hand, can solve novel problems in unpredictable situations (or, at least, give them a try). And that's because we can make actions that we have never done before and that nobody ever told us to do, whereas a machine can only do what it has been programmed to do.
This narrower definition of free will is interesting because it actually refers to the "architecture" and not really to the awareness or any other special property of human minds. Machines are built to solve specific problems in specific situations, simply because that is what humans are good at: building machines that solve specific problems in specific situations: we humans like to "design" a machine, to write the "specifications", etc. This is not the way nature built us. Nature built us on a different principle and it is no surprise that we behave differently. Since in nature we never know what the next problem and situation will be like, nature built us a "Darwinian" machines: our brains generate all the time a lot of possible actions and then pursue the ones that are "selected" by the environment (the specific problem and situation). Nature built us on a different principle than the one we use to build machines. The main difference between our mind and a machine is their archectures.
The lack of free will in machines is not a limit of machines: it is a limit of our mind. If we built a machine the same way nature builds its cognitive beings, i.e. with the same type of architecture, it would be a rather different machine, capable of generating a huge amount of random behaviors and then picking the one that best matches the current problem and situation. One can even envision a day when machines built with a "Darwinian" architecture (descendants of today's genetic algorithms and neural networks) will "out-free will" us, will exhibit even more free will than we do. After all, most of the times we simply obey orders (we obey publicity when we shop, we obey record labels when we sing a tune, we obey our mother's education all day long), whereas a machine would have no conditioning. And it may be able to generate a lot more alternatives than our brain does. Free will is simply a folk name for the Darwinian architecture of our mind.
The substance of our brain may not be the reason that we have free will and machines do not. It may be possible to build machines that also exhibit free will, even if they are built out of electronic components.
Do we think or are we thought?
Every year 98% of the atoms of my body are replaced: how can I claim to be still the same person that I was last year, or, worse, ten years ago? What is (where lies) my identity? What is "my" relationship to the metabolism of my body?
Derek Parfit once proposed a thought problem: what happens to a person who is destroyed by a scanner in London and rebuilt cell by cell in New York by a replicator that has received infinitely detailed information from the scanner about the state of each single cell, including all of the person's memories? Is the person still the same person? Or did the person die in London? What makes a person such a person: bodily or psychological continuity? If a person's matter is replaced cell by cell with equivalent cells is the person still the same person? If a person's psychological state (memory, beliefs, emotions and everything) is replaced with an equivalent psychological state is the person still the same person? The question eventually asks what is "a life": is it a continuum of bodily states, whereby one grows from a child to an adult, or is it a continuum of psychological states? Or both? Or none?
The most obvious paradox is: how can reality be still the same as we grow up? Do two completely different brains see the same image when they are presented with the same object? If the brains are different, then the pattern of neural excitement created by seeing that object will be completely different in the two brains. How can two completely different brains yield the same image in the two brains? The logical conclusion is "no, the tree I see is not the tree you see, we just happen to refer to it the same way so it is not important what exactly we see when we look at it". But then how can we see the same image yesterday, today and tomorrow? Our brain changes all the time. Between my brain of when I was five years old and my brain of today there is probably nothing in common: every single cell has changed, connections have changed, the physical shape of the brain has changed. The same object causes a different pattern in my brain today than it did in my brain forty years ago. Those are two different brains, made of different cells, organized in different ways: the two patterns are physically different. Nonetheless, it appears to me that my toys still look the same. But they shouldn't: since my brain changed, and the pattern they generate has changed, what I see today should be a different image than the one I saw as a five-year old. How is it that I see the same thing even if I have a different brain?
This thought experiment almost seem to prove that "I" am not in my brain, that there is something external to the brain that does not change over time, that the brain simply performs computations of the image but the ultimate "feeling" of that image is due to a "soul" that is external to the brain and does not depend on cells or connections.
On the other hand, it is easy to see that what we see is not really what we think we see.
We have to keep in mind that when we recognize something as something, we rarely see/feel/hear/touch again exactly the same thing we already saw/felt/heard/touched before. I recognize somebody's face, but that face cannot possibly be exactly the same image I saw last time: beard may have grown, a pimple may have appeared, hair may have been trimmed, a tan may have darkened the skin, or, quite simply, that face may be at a different angle (looking up, looking down, turned half way). I recognize a song, but the truth is that the same song never "sounds" the same: louder, softer, different speakers, static, different echo in the room, different position of my era with respect to the speakers. I recognize that today the temperature is "cold", but if we measured the temperature to the tenth decimal digit it is unlikely that we would get the exact same number that I got the previous time I felt the same cold. What we "recognize" is obviously not a physical quantity: a image, a sound, a temperature never repeat themselves. What is it then that we recognize when we recognize a face, a song or a temperature? Broadly speaking, it is a concept.
We build concepts of our sensory experience, we store those concepts for future use, and we matched the stored concepts with any new concept. When we do this comparison, we try to find similarity and identity. If the two concepts are similar enough, we assume that they are identical, that they are the same thing. If they are not similar enough, but they are more similar than the average, then we can probably establish that they belong to a common super-concept (they are both faces, but not the same face; they are both songs, but not the same song; and so forth). We have a vast array of concepts which are organized in a hierarchy with many levels of generalization (your face to face of you and siblings to faces of that kind to face to ... to body part to ...). A sensory experience is somehow translated into a concept and that concept is matched with existing concepts and eventually located at some level of a hierarchy of concepts. If it is close enough to an existing concept of that hierarchy at that level, it is recognized as the same concept. Whatever the specific mechanism, it is obvious that what we recognize is not a physical quantity (distribution of colors, sound wave or temperature) but a concept, that somehow we build and compare with previously manufactured concepts.
Add to these considerations the fact that experience molds the brain: I am not only my genome, I am also the world around me. And I change all the time according to what is happening in the world. "I am" what the world is doing.
Identity is probably a concept. I have built over the years a concept of myself. My physical substance changes all the time, but, as long as it still matches my concept of myself, I still recognize it as myself.
The importance of being warm
When speculating about consciousness, identity and free will, it is important not to forget what bodies are and how they work.
Among the many bizarre features of living organisms, one is often overlooked: each living organism can live only within a very narrow range of temperature. Temperature is one of the most crucial survival factors.
Temperature also happens to be an important source of "identity": water and ice are made of the same atoms, it's the temperature that determines whether you are water or you are ice.
It's the temperature that determines whether your body is dead or alive, and it's the temperature that determines whether you are lying and shivering in bed or are playing soccer outside. Our identity does change with the temperature of our body (from no identity to "regular" identity to delirious identity).
Most of what our body does has nothing to do with writing poems or making scientific discoveries: it is about maintaining a stable temperature.
Free Will
Some scientists (and Albert Einstein with them) have argued that consciousness must be fabricated by reality, that what we feel is simply an unavoidable consequence of the state of the universe, that we are simply machines programmed by the rest of the universe.
Other scientists believe the opposite, that consciousness fabricates reality, that we have the power to alter the course of the events. They believe in free will.
Do we think or are we thought?
The question, while popular, is misleading. The question is, in a sense, already an answer: the moment we separate the "I" and the body, we have subscribed to dualism, to the view that spirit and matter are separate and spirit can control matter.
A free will grounded in matter is not easy to picture because we tend to believe in an "I" external to our body that controls our body.
But, in a materialist scenario, the "I" is supposed to be only the expression of brain processes. If that is the case, then "free will" is not about the "I" making a decision: the "I" will simply reflect that decision. What makes the decision is the brain process.
This does not mean that free will can't exist. It just needs to be redefined: can a brain process occur that is not completely caused by other physical processes?
In a materialist scenario, free will does not require consciousness: consciousness is an aspect of the brain process that "thinks". The question is whether that brain process has free will.
If consciousness is indeed due to a physical process, if consciousness is ultimately material, does this preclude free will? For centuries we have considered free will an exclusive property of the soul, mainly because 1. we deemed the soul to be made of spirit and not matter, and 2. nothing in Physics allows for free will of matter.
If we now recognize that consciousness is a property of matter(possibly one that occurs only in some special form and configuration of matter, but nonetheless ultimately matter), the second statement must be examined carefully because the possibility of free will depends on its truth: if motion of matter is controlled only by deterministic laws, then free will is an illusion; if matter has a degree of control over its own motion, then free will is a fact.
The question is not whether we have free will, but whether the laws of our universe (i.e., Physics) allow for free will.
Purpose
Why do living things do what they do?
The purposiveness of living organisms is simply a consequence of evolution by natural selection. Living organisms have a fundamental goal, survival, and have inherited a repertory of behaviors to achieve that goal. But the concept of "survival" can be better qualified as self-regulation.
The 19th-century French psychologist Claude Bernard "discovered" the self-regulating nature of living organisms. Bernard realized that each living organism is a system built to maintain a constant internal state in the face of changing external conditions. The regulation of this "milieu interieur" is life itself, because it is this stable state that gives the organism its independence from the environment, its identity. This is the dividing line that separates animate and inanimate matter: inanimate matter obeys Newton's laws of cause and effect, animate matter tends to maintain its state no matter what external forces are applied. Unlike objects, whose state is changed when a force is applied, the state of a living organism is not changed by an external force. The living organism, as long as it is alive, maintains its state constant.
The "purposeful" behavior of a living organism is the reaction to environmental forces: the organism needs to act in order to continuously restore its state. A body seems to "want", "intend", "desire" to maintain its internal state (either by eating, moving, sleeping, etc), a state that, ultimately, is a combination of chemical content and temperature. Living bodies appear to act purposedly, but they are simply reacting to the environment.
For Bernard "freedom" is independence from the environment. Control of the internal state allows a living organism to live in many different environments. The living organism is "free" in that is not a slave of its environment.
Bernard's idea of self-regulation extended to all living organisms. Humans are not the only ones to have "goals". Animate behavior "is" control of perception.
Will, not necessarily free: a materialistic view of free will
The problem with free will is that it does not fit too well with the scientific theories of the universe that have been developing over the last three centuries. While those theories are fairly accurate in predicting all the natural phenomena we deal with, they don't leave much room for free will. Particles behave the way they behave because of the fundamental laws of nature and because of what the other particles are doing; not because they can decide what to do. Since we are, ultimately, collections of particles, free will is an embarrassment of Physics.
On the other hand, a simple look at the behavior of even a fly seems to prove that free will is indeed a fact and is pervasive. Free will is a fundamental attribute of life. A robot that moved but only repeating a mechanical sequence of steps would not be considered "alive". Life has very much to do with unpredictability of behavior, not just with behavior. Or, better, behavior is behavior inasmuch as it is unpredictable to a degree; otherwise it is simply "motion".
Whether it is indeed "free" or not, "will" (the apparent ability of an ant to decide in which direction to move) appears to be an inherent feature of life, no matter how primitive life is. A theory of life that does not predict free will is not a good theory of life. Somehow, "free" will must be a product of the chemistry of life, at some very elementary level. In other words, obtaining the right chemical mix in the laboratory would not be enough: that mix must also exhibit the symptoms of free will.
The origin of free will, therefore, appears to be life itself.
Free will and randomness
Free will is often associated to randomness: a being has free will if it can perform "random" actions, as opposed to actions rigidly determined by the universal clockwork. In other words, free will can exist only if the laws of nature allow for some random solutions, solutions that can be arbitrarily chosen by our consciousness. If no randomness exists in nature, then every action (including our very conscious thoughts) is predetermined by a formula and free will cannot exist.
In their quest for the source of randomness in human free will, both neurophysiologists like John Eccles and physicists like Roger Penrose have proposed that quantum effects are responsible for creating randomness in the processes of the human brain. Whether chance and free will can be equated (free will is supposed to lead to rational and deterministic decisions, not random ones) and whether Quantum Theory is the only possible source of randomness is debatable.
Since we know that a lot of what goes on in the universe is indeed regulated by strict formulas, the hope for free will should rely not so much in randomness as in "fuzziness". It is unlikely that the laws of nature hide a completely random property; on the other hand, they could be "fuzzy", in that they may prescribe a behavior but with a broad range of possible degrees.
Free will and Physics
Whether we exercise it or not we do have free will: at every point in time we can choose what to do next.
Do animals also have free will? Or are they mechanisms, machines, that move according to formulas?
There is no evidence that at any point in time one can predict the next move of a chicken or an ant. No matter how simple and unconscious animals seem to be, their behavior is still largely unpredictable. You can guess what the chicken will want to do, but you can never be sure, and you can never guess the exact movements. There are infinite paths an ant can follow to go back to the nest and the one it will follow cannot be predicted. At every point of that path the ant can choose where to do next. Two ants will follow two different paths. Each ant seems to have its own personality.
Even the movement of mono-cellular organisms is unpredictable to some extent. No matter how small and simple the organism, a degree of free will seems to be there. Free will seems to be a property of life. What triggers the next move of bacteria, ants and chicken is not just a Newtonian formula. If they are machines, then these machines do not obey classical Physics. There is a degree of freedom that every living organism seems to enjoy. And it doesn't require a sophisticated brain. There is a degree of freedom that just shouldn't be there, if Newton was right.
If these are machines, they are machines that cannot be explained with our Mechanics because at every point in time there are many possible time evolutions and all seem to be possible, and none can be exactly predicted, pretty much like a quantum wave.
There is something missing in our Mechanics to account for free will of the machine.
Free will and choice
As usual, some misconception may arise from vague definitions. Is free will the consciousness of making one action out of so many possible ones, or is free will the ability to select one action out of so many possible ones? Why do we claim that a machine has no free will? Usually, because a machine can solve only the problems that we program it to solve. We, on the other hand, can solve novel problems in unpredictable situations (or, at least, give them a try). And that's because we can make actions that we have never done before and that nobody ever told us to do, whereas a machine can only do what it has been programmed to do.
This narrower definition of free will is interesting because it actually refers to the "architecture" and not really to the awareness or any other special property of human minds. Machines are built to solve specific problems in specific situations, simply because that is what humans are good at: building machines that solve specific problems in specific situations: we humans like to "design" a machine, to write the "specifications", etc. This is not the way nature built us. Nature built us on a different principle and it is no surprise that we behave differently. Since in nature we never know what the next problem and situation will be like, nature built us a "Darwinian" machines: our brains generate all the time a lot of possible actions and then pursue the ones that are "selected" by the environment (the specific problem and situation). Nature built us on a different principle than the one we use to build machines. The main difference between our mind and a machine is their archectures.
The lack of free will in machines is not a limit of machines: it is a limit of our mind. If we built a machine the same way nature builds its cognitive beings, i.e. with the same type of architecture, it would be a rather different machine, capable of generating a huge amount of random behaviors and then picking the one that best matches the current problem and situation. One can even envision a day when machines built with a "Darwinian" architecture (descendants of today's genetic algorithms and neural networks) will "out-free will" us, will exhibit even more free will than we do. After all, most of the times we simply obey orders (we obey publicity when we shop, we obey record labels when we sing a tune, we obey our mother's education all day long), whereas a machine would have no conditioning. And it may be able to generate a lot more alternatives than our brain does. Free will is simply a folk name for the Darwinian architecture of our mind.
The substance of our brain may not be the reason that we have free will and machines do not. It may be possible to build machines that also exhibit free will, even if they are built out of electronic components.
Do we think or are we thought?
Friday, May 30, 2014
POETRY: I BELIEVE IN YOU
Once you were here
Once you were there
Once in awhile,
You were everywhere
You touched my hand
as soft as a dove.
You filled my heart
With tender love.
You showed the world
how sweet it could be.
You showed the world
what God can see.
But most of all,
Your love, once so free.
Can not be taken away...
for it lives within me.
2
They say that love and beauty
rest in the eyes of the beholder.
If this be true
then the tears that fall,
from my eyes,
are tears of beauty
and tears of love,
...for you.
3
Fragments of time
capturing moments of love
being lowered down
only to rise above
moments and seconds
passion and bliss
loving entanglement
savoring our kiss
unwilling to let go
pushing toward the hour
never under estimate
love and it's power
Fragments of time
our life embraces
loving so completely
leaving many traces
4
his is the moment
That we've waited for.
Together we stand
At an open door;
The past behind us
Is already done,
A new life begins
When two become one.
There is bound to be fear
With any new step:
Will I stumble,
Will the promise be kept?
There is one thing
That will see us through
In every situation,
I will believe in you.
A mountain so tall
Is easier to climb
When it is mounted
By two at a time;
No matter how fierce,
A storm cannot part
Or tear asunder
The power of the heart.
Love began
As a tiny seed
And it will provide
Everything we need;
I pledge my love,
I know it is true,
I promise I will always
Believe in you.
Once you were there
Once in awhile,
You were everywhere
You touched my hand
as soft as a dove.
You filled my heart
With tender love.
You showed the world
how sweet it could be.
You showed the world
what God can see.
But most of all,
Your love, once so free.
Can not be taken away...
for it lives within me.
2
They say that love and beauty
rest in the eyes of the beholder.
If this be true
then the tears that fall,
from my eyes,
are tears of beauty
and tears of love,
...for you.
3
Fragments of time
capturing moments of love
being lowered down
only to rise above
moments and seconds
passion and bliss
loving entanglement
savoring our kiss
unwilling to let go
pushing toward the hour
never under estimate
love and it's power
Fragments of time
our life embraces
loving so completely
leaving many traces
4
his is the moment
That we've waited for.
Together we stand
At an open door;
The past behind us
Is already done,
A new life begins
When two become one.
There is bound to be fear
With any new step:
Will I stumble,
Will the promise be kept?
There is one thing
That will see us through
In every situation,
I will believe in you.
A mountain so tall
Is easier to climb
When it is mounted
By two at a time;
No matter how fierce,
A storm cannot part
Or tear asunder
The power of the heart.
Love began
As a tiny seed
And it will provide
Everything we need;
I pledge my love,
I know it is true,
I promise I will always
Believe in you.
Thursday, May 29, 2014
THOUGHTS/DATING: WOMAN WHO WRITE ON THEIR PERSONAL AD THAT THEY LOVE TO TRAVEL ARE THE ONES YOU SHOULD KEEP AWAY FROM AND RUN AWAY
One thing I've noticed in the last few years from dating and reading online personal ads is that women have an unquenchable lust for traveling. Almost every ad I read talks about "going to Paris" someday or "I like to travel to Hawaii or the Bahamas at least twice a year". I can't figure out what women get out of traveling. What do I read into that? 'I'm looking for a man that has the $$$ to support my vacation habit.'Don't get me wrong, there are some places I'd like to travel to, perhaps later in life. But I'd like to be a bit wiser and able to appreciate what it is I'm going to see
While I value "saving up " and stuffing every last penny into your 401k so I can die comfortably, a good many people don't. Enjoying their life TODAY is what matters to them the most. I love to vacation--nothing better than going to a sunny, quiet, secluded beach and just vegging out on the sand with a book etc.
I was fortunate enough to travel alot growing up (my parents travel an unreal amount). My least favorite trips were the ones where the days were so structured and had the go-go mentality that at the end of the day you were left exhausted (NYC trip).
The best trips I've had were ones where there was plenty of lounging and vacationing but also had some element of structure/sightseeing to them.
Balance is the key.
Really go take a look and you will notice that all the female profiles in online dating, almost always mentioning traveling. It seems like every other woman loves traveling "so much," "a lot," "more than I like being at home," and just "love to travel."The ones that do not are usually conservative girls who want to stay home and cook and have a family-oriented approach to life. I think there is a theme here from my more general experience, but I'm not sure. I want to suggest that men are generally more conservative in general than women (i.e., less open to new experiences),
It's a type of achievement, like a badge. One girl from a group of friends travels and brags about how open-minded and adventurous she is, and then she becomes the center of attention. So the next girl does it, and then the next one and the next one.
Just look at those pictures they put up -- they are always on top of the Kilimanjaro, besides a penguin in Antarctica, underwater with whales and god know what else. In their books it is far more rewarding, so it seems, then becoming the CEO of a corporation (glass ceiling and all that).
So they put the same travel pictures up on a dating site and this is where the stupidity beings. The are expecting the same 'wow effect' from men, which they don't get. Men are not interested in their 'achievements'. It is not attractive, and to some it can actually be a deal-breaker. If she is having so much fun by being single, wtf is she doing on a dating site?
The bottom line is, men are expected to be stable, own their own homes (a place where she can come back to from her travels). Men are expected to have high social status. In addition to that, they are also expected to travel. Well, good luck with that.
We men don't feel the need to have so many experiences and memories. We don't need as much romance and adventure as you need to fill your life. We don't need to connect with other people as much as you. We don't need to see so many cultures as much as you do. We don't need to listen to so much of their music as you do. You see, your needs are different, so don't come here thinking that men are "lumps of flesh" simply because they don't need as much as you. Maybe you're the one who needs too much of it and us men are simply sick of trying to "please" and keep up with your need to do all these things. Who is to say that simply because men don't want to travel and experience as much as you that we are "lumps". Maybe you're the one that is overdoing it. I'm quite content with my life and where I live and the experiences in my vicinity.Just because I have no desire to seek out more of it in different parts of the world doesn't not make me a lump of flesh.
I'm not saying travelling is bad or make you those thing, I'm saying that when I see people who try to push "I love to travel" so much, they come across,
I see it as either:
"I'm not stable and can't appreciate what I have right here."
"I'm always trying to escape."
"I get easily bored."
"I don't spend the holidays with friends and family, instead I go hide in another country."
"Loving" to travel might seem as if you don't appreciate other things that happen between your travels.There's a difference between "I like to travel even though I don't get to do it a lot" and "I live everywhere but here" and when I see "I love to travel" this, for me, always meant at least once a year or more.
I get vibes from it as someone who has an otherwise boring life and needs to "get away" for excitement, at the first opportunity. In a really weird way, I see myself as potentially competing for time with travel hobby.
Virtually everyone enjoys travelling to a degree, but when you put a huge paragraph extolling how it's your reason to live, it sounds like you're not talking about it the same way as everyone else.
This not only fails to set you apart from half of the women on any dating site, but actually throws you in with them. The negativity comes from the amount of times one is subjected to reading about travel. Guys are usually the ones that have to visit profiles and read and send messages. After hitting up 10+ profiles and seeing that they all like to travel, I get a little sick of hearing about it. (And keep in mind, I'm sure tons of guys actually do more than 10 profiles, and do this EVERY day. It's like seeing that oxygen/food/water nonsense in the things you can't live without section)
The thing I don't understand is how anyone can afford to do this right after college. It just seems like such an unrealistic expectation for somebody to be able to sacrifice weeks of time and thousands of dollars traveling the world
Men watch their savings as women watch their weight to be attractive to the opposite sex. Since women don't really need money to impress dates, they have more to spend on traveling. This and the fact that it's a status thing to be able to afford time and money for vacations. We all know how important it is for women to show off their financial status.
There is more - women are always looking for change and something new - new shoes, new clothes, new restaurants...and the need for variety leads them to see new places. Another thing I have noticed is that the more heartbroken the woman is, the more she travels as a form of escape
The average man has a lot of interests, and since different men tend to have different ones, the total number of distinct male obsessions and hobbies is numbered in millions. All women have pretty much the same interests, and there are scarcely more than a handful of them in total. Why should travel, of all things, be one of those?
I'm guessing that this is a recent development. In the past most travel was dangerous, unpredictable, uncomfortable - the kind that still appeals to a subset of high T adventurous guys. If Richard Burton and Columbus were alive today, they would probably try to cross the world in a canoe or swim across the Bering Strait naked in winter or traverse the Antarctic on foot, all in a shorter amount of time than the current world record holder.
That's not the kind of travel women have ever liked. They're into packaged deals - hotels, fat tour guides, group photos in front of the Eiffel Tower, lying on the beaches of a continent other than their own. This is all very modern.
Some would tell you that to women travel is like jewlery or flowers - they don't like it for itself, they just like seeing men spend money on them through it. And indeed one would expect all the leading experts on jewlery and botany to be men, not women. But what is one to make then of the fact that single women often travel with each other on their own dime?
Travel requires spending money. Women don't need to have money to marry well so they can easily spend it. Men need to watch their money like women watch their weight. Women are spoilt. They want a lot of everything - more fine dining, more expensive cars and in the same line, they want more travel. Since travel requires spending money and time, they also do it for bragging rights. They want to go back to work and their social life with a tan in winter and make a point.
the fact of the matter is traveling is an expensive hobby. Travelling is a very nice thing if used with measure. Therefore when I read or hear that a woman or even a man stresses it too much my narcissism-alarm bell rings because someone who can't stay too long in one place is someone who can't stay too long in one relationship.Narcissistic people travel and it just happens to be the case that there are more narcissistic women than men.
My experience is that travel addiction is mainly the pursuit of single women who either don't have a partner or don't really want one. Travel in moderation is enriching but on a compulsive level is simply the pursuit of new sensations, a superficial pursuit that replaces needs that are not being met in a mutually enriching and loving relationship.
Travel being on nearly every single female profile you can find on any dating site. I can tell you good some stories from my own half century life. It's heartbreaking for a guy. Who pays for all that travel? Wherever you go, you're there.
My parents emigrated from another country and I speak another language fluently, so I have to laugh when I hear born mono-lingual, mono-cultural women tell me about how they 'connect' with other cultures. Sure, in the most superficial ways I suppose. To me it's nothing new to see a 'new' culture, and traveling itself, airports, line-ups, sub-standard toilets, killer bills, bugs, diseases, thieves, beggars, schmoozers, the prattle of foreign tongues, all become one homogenous expensive bore and hazard.
The bed is here, and so is the kitchen, and good looking guys don't pay. So happy chump hunting to all those worthless bags. Any woman who trades a good man for travel is dead between the legs; just be grateful bros that they make themselves obvious enough; click next and let them all just dry up and shrivel away, or get pregnant from some of their exotic romantic travel humps, looks good on them.
Trouble is, that's all you are going to find on dating sites. A good looking woman on a dating site is a Red Flag. Good hearted women looking for a true best friend-lover and whose greatest joy is just hanging with their guy no matter where doing no matter what, there are some, are scooped long before they get to those sites. That's why there are so many of them on dating sites. No guy wants them.
My best advice, avoid these travel junkies. They have crossed over into the permanent singles women, Sex and the City club. There is no turning back for 99% of them.
Find a women who wants to be with you, and wants to share her life with you. Be there for her. Love her. Care for her. That's all there is to it really.
While I value "saving up " and stuffing every last penny into your 401k so I can die comfortably, a good many people don't. Enjoying their life TODAY is what matters to them the most. I love to vacation--nothing better than going to a sunny, quiet, secluded beach and just vegging out on the sand with a book etc.
I was fortunate enough to travel alot growing up (my parents travel an unreal amount). My least favorite trips were the ones where the days were so structured and had the go-go mentality that at the end of the day you were left exhausted (NYC trip).
The best trips I've had were ones where there was plenty of lounging and vacationing but also had some element of structure/sightseeing to them.
Balance is the key.
Really go take a look and you will notice that all the female profiles in online dating, almost always mentioning traveling. It seems like every other woman loves traveling "so much," "a lot," "more than I like being at home," and just "love to travel."The ones that do not are usually conservative girls who want to stay home and cook and have a family-oriented approach to life. I think there is a theme here from my more general experience, but I'm not sure. I want to suggest that men are generally more conservative in general than women (i.e., less open to new experiences),
It's a type of achievement, like a badge. One girl from a group of friends travels and brags about how open-minded and adventurous she is, and then she becomes the center of attention. So the next girl does it, and then the next one and the next one.
Just look at those pictures they put up -- they are always on top of the Kilimanjaro, besides a penguin in Antarctica, underwater with whales and god know what else. In their books it is far more rewarding, so it seems, then becoming the CEO of a corporation (glass ceiling and all that).
So they put the same travel pictures up on a dating site and this is where the stupidity beings. The are expecting the same 'wow effect' from men, which they don't get. Men are not interested in their 'achievements'. It is not attractive, and to some it can actually be a deal-breaker. If she is having so much fun by being single, wtf is she doing on a dating site?
The bottom line is, men are expected to be stable, own their own homes (a place where she can come back to from her travels). Men are expected to have high social status. In addition to that, they are also expected to travel. Well, good luck with that.
We men don't feel the need to have so many experiences and memories. We don't need as much romance and adventure as you need to fill your life. We don't need to connect with other people as much as you. We don't need to see so many cultures as much as you do. We don't need to listen to so much of their music as you do. You see, your needs are different, so don't come here thinking that men are "lumps of flesh" simply because they don't need as much as you. Maybe you're the one who needs too much of it and us men are simply sick of trying to "please" and keep up with your need to do all these things. Who is to say that simply because men don't want to travel and experience as much as you that we are "lumps". Maybe you're the one that is overdoing it. I'm quite content with my life and where I live and the experiences in my vicinity.Just because I have no desire to seek out more of it in different parts of the world doesn't not make me a lump of flesh.
I'm not saying travelling is bad or make you those thing, I'm saying that when I see people who try to push "I love to travel" so much, they come across,
I see it as either:
"I'm not stable and can't appreciate what I have right here."
"I'm always trying to escape."
"I get easily bored."
"I don't spend the holidays with friends and family, instead I go hide in another country."
"Loving" to travel might seem as if you don't appreciate other things that happen between your travels.There's a difference between "I like to travel even though I don't get to do it a lot" and "I live everywhere but here" and when I see "I love to travel" this, for me, always meant at least once a year or more.
I get vibes from it as someone who has an otherwise boring life and needs to "get away" for excitement, at the first opportunity. In a really weird way, I see myself as potentially competing for time with travel hobby.
Virtually everyone enjoys travelling to a degree, but when you put a huge paragraph extolling how it's your reason to live, it sounds like you're not talking about it the same way as everyone else.
This not only fails to set you apart from half of the women on any dating site, but actually throws you in with them. The negativity comes from the amount of times one is subjected to reading about travel. Guys are usually the ones that have to visit profiles and read and send messages. After hitting up 10+ profiles and seeing that they all like to travel, I get a little sick of hearing about it. (And keep in mind, I'm sure tons of guys actually do more than 10 profiles, and do this EVERY day. It's like seeing that oxygen/food/water nonsense in the things you can't live without section)
The thing I don't understand is how anyone can afford to do this right after college. It just seems like such an unrealistic expectation for somebody to be able to sacrifice weeks of time and thousands of dollars traveling the world
Men watch their savings as women watch their weight to be attractive to the opposite sex. Since women don't really need money to impress dates, they have more to spend on traveling. This and the fact that it's a status thing to be able to afford time and money for vacations. We all know how important it is for women to show off their financial status.
There is more - women are always looking for change and something new - new shoes, new clothes, new restaurants...and the need for variety leads them to see new places. Another thing I have noticed is that the more heartbroken the woman is, the more she travels as a form of escape
The average man has a lot of interests, and since different men tend to have different ones, the total number of distinct male obsessions and hobbies is numbered in millions. All women have pretty much the same interests, and there are scarcely more than a handful of them in total. Why should travel, of all things, be one of those?
I'm guessing that this is a recent development. In the past most travel was dangerous, unpredictable, uncomfortable - the kind that still appeals to a subset of high T adventurous guys. If Richard Burton and Columbus were alive today, they would probably try to cross the world in a canoe or swim across the Bering Strait naked in winter or traverse the Antarctic on foot, all in a shorter amount of time than the current world record holder.
That's not the kind of travel women have ever liked. They're into packaged deals - hotels, fat tour guides, group photos in front of the Eiffel Tower, lying on the beaches of a continent other than their own. This is all very modern.
Some would tell you that to women travel is like jewlery or flowers - they don't like it for itself, they just like seeing men spend money on them through it. And indeed one would expect all the leading experts on jewlery and botany to be men, not women. But what is one to make then of the fact that single women often travel with each other on their own dime?
Travel requires spending money. Women don't need to have money to marry well so they can easily spend it. Men need to watch their money like women watch their weight. Women are spoilt. They want a lot of everything - more fine dining, more expensive cars and in the same line, they want more travel. Since travel requires spending money and time, they also do it for bragging rights. They want to go back to work and their social life with a tan in winter and make a point.
the fact of the matter is traveling is an expensive hobby. Travelling is a very nice thing if used with measure. Therefore when I read or hear that a woman or even a man stresses it too much my narcissism-alarm bell rings because someone who can't stay too long in one place is someone who can't stay too long in one relationship.Narcissistic people travel and it just happens to be the case that there are more narcissistic women than men.
My experience is that travel addiction is mainly the pursuit of single women who either don't have a partner or don't really want one. Travel in moderation is enriching but on a compulsive level is simply the pursuit of new sensations, a superficial pursuit that replaces needs that are not being met in a mutually enriching and loving relationship.
Travel being on nearly every single female profile you can find on any dating site. I can tell you good some stories from my own half century life. It's heartbreaking for a guy. Who pays for all that travel? Wherever you go, you're there.
My parents emigrated from another country and I speak another language fluently, so I have to laugh when I hear born mono-lingual, mono-cultural women tell me about how they 'connect' with other cultures. Sure, in the most superficial ways I suppose. To me it's nothing new to see a 'new' culture, and traveling itself, airports, line-ups, sub-standard toilets, killer bills, bugs, diseases, thieves, beggars, schmoozers, the prattle of foreign tongues, all become one homogenous expensive bore and hazard.
The bed is here, and so is the kitchen, and good looking guys don't pay. So happy chump hunting to all those worthless bags. Any woman who trades a good man for travel is dead between the legs; just be grateful bros that they make themselves obvious enough; click next and let them all just dry up and shrivel away, or get pregnant from some of their exotic romantic travel humps, looks good on them.
Trouble is, that's all you are going to find on dating sites. A good looking woman on a dating site is a Red Flag. Good hearted women looking for a true best friend-lover and whose greatest joy is just hanging with their guy no matter where doing no matter what, there are some, are scooped long before they get to those sites. That's why there are so many of them on dating sites. No guy wants them.
My best advice, avoid these travel junkies. They have crossed over into the permanent singles women, Sex and the City club. There is no turning back for 99% of them.
Find a women who wants to be with you, and wants to share her life with you. Be there for her. Love her. Care for her. That's all there is to it really.
THOUGHTS: STEVE JOB WASN'T A GREAT PERSON
Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson, 2011.
I read this book with interest even though, like almost everyone else, I already knew a lot about Jobs. There were some interesting new details on the margins, yes, but Jobs's famous personal magnetism must have been the biggest draw. Even a bore like Walter Isaacson couldn't obscure it all that much. Throughout the book I kept wondering how decent, level-headed people could go to work for Jobs, invest money in his enterprises, trust him during negotiations. Everyone always knew he was a sociopath. Well, why did I keep reading this book? If humans could be very excited by honesty and altruism, the world would be a pretty different place.
Where did Jobs's sociopathy come from? He was very smart - his teachers asked him to skip two grades in school - but he didn't have a single bit of nerdiness in him. His interests and mental power were from the beginning mostly turned towards humans. He had an intuitive understanding of people's weaknesses, boundaries and motivations and a superior ability to manipulate them. And unlike a smart woman, he had all that machismo.
Are all non-nerdy smart people sociopaths? If the average guy was suddenly granted these particular talents by a miracle pill, would he instantly become an asshole? Perhaps. I can think of at least one other contributing factor though. Bill Clinton, the other super-famous, brilliant-but-not-nerdy American sociopath of our day, may well have been as much of a bastard as Jobs, since the identity of his bio-father is disputed.
Obviously, Jobs's manipulative alpha nature benefited him enormously. Did it benefit society? Not technologically. File management and a lot of other PC tasks were always easier to do on a command line than in a GUI. There's less latency, you have more choices, and the learning curve isn't as steep as most imagine. Hardware keyboards are easier to use than software alternatives. The relationship between the quality of an artist's output and the complexity of his tools can't be very strong. The technical innovations that Jobs thrust onto the market earlier than they would have gotten there without him tended to be superficial.
I do think that his overall impact on society was positive, just that it was mostly confined to aesthetics. The original iMac, the Power Mac G4, the iPad 4 on which I'm typing this review and many other Apple products were rays of beauty in our increasingly ugly world. As such they've raised millions of people's moods and consciousnesses.
Of course he didn't bring back any classical forms - he never thought that different. But he did as much within the narrow confines of modernism as anybody I'm aware of. He didn't sketch - that's one of the things I learned from this book. Those who are able to easily push around others rarely enjoy doing anything else. So he just yelled at underlings until they made things that looked good to him. He did unquestionably have a great sense of style though.
When Pixar needed a new headquarters, Jobs became intimately involved in the building's design. He wanted it to have lots of open, public spaces where employees from different departments would be forced to bump into each other. He even pushed for the building to contain only two very large bathrooms for the same reason.
"Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions."
Nope. That's schmoozimg. Creativity comes from men concentrating on difficult problems alone for many hours in total silence.
"You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”
This is like a clown decreeing that fishing needs more makeup. He wasn't even curious about how his minions worked, how the stuff he sold came into being.
Naturally I was interested in the effects of Jobs's mixed parentage. Some aspects of his personality (verbal bombast, weepy, self-pitying sentimentality, the desire to be worshipped) were 100% Middle Eastern and others (an obsession with quality, an understated, stark, spare visual style) were 100% German. You'd expect people of mixed backgrounds to congregate around the 50/50 line on most traits, but for some reason it rarely works that way.
Group photos of Apple's management team can look like pictures of Saddam's cabinet meetings once you realize that jeans and mock turtlenecks were playing the role of black moustaches. Everyone present felt the need to copy the leader. Phrases like "insanely great" and "make a dent in the Universe" clearly share a sensibility with "the mother of all wars". Yet in the visual sphere he always went for the unadorned, the elegantly understated.
His thought processes were extremely irrational. One only needs rationality (and humility) when dealing with facts and inanimate objects, and he, after all, dealt with people instead. For example, already during the design of the original Macintosh he became dogmatic about rounded edges. You can make a beautiful object with square edges (just look at old books) or sharp edges as easily as with rounded ones. True aesthetics are always much more complex than a choice between three options anyway. Intuitively he knew what was beautiful and what wasn't, but his consciously verbalized ideas about it were illogical.
Another example of this was his genius/bozo (I'm being PG-13) dichotomy in evaluating employees. In the real world talents are distributed as bell curves. You'd think that an erroneously binary view of people's capabilities would severely hurt a manager's effectiveness. But the human world doesn't work logically, so he was able to have great success in it regardless.
This irrationality must be related to the shocking amount of hypocrisy in Jobs's work. In the 1984 commercial he presented Apple as a rebel fighting totalitarian control freaks at IBM. Yet it was he who always fought to take choices away from Apple's customers. You couldn't even open the original Macintosh with a screwdriver. The nerds who liked to modify their systems had to buy IBM compatibles instead. My iPad is glued shut and won't accept a USB drive. I lack access to its file system and it only runs apps approved by Apple. Hackers have justly named programs that remove Apple's software controls "jailbreaks".
Jobs's second most famous commercial introduced his "Think Different" slogan.
"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo."
And on and on in that barf-inducing vein, while Picasso, Ghandi, MLK, Bob Dylan, etc. appear on the screen. Those guys weren't rebels. They always went with the flow. It's impossible to get that famous while doing anything else, certainly not in art or politics. And of course the "counterculture" was the flow of Jobs's youth. Now, if he cited someone like Evelyn Waugh...
Bono opines on the pages of this book:
"The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently. The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany and Japan do not encourage this different thinking."
It was deeply satisfying to see someone so full of himself being so hilariously wrong. The PC industry was created by nerds, not hippies. Nerds are the most rules-loving, routines-obsessed, regimented people on Earth. Also some of the most clean-living, if you disregard junk food. Nerds like Woz's father were ultimately gathered in the Bay Area by the Pentagon. Besides nerds, the most rules-loving entities in the known Universe are of course first-world militaries. If the Pentagon decided to invest in Alaska or the East Coast, that's where all those engineers would have settled and that's where the PC industry would have had to be born. And if Jobs grew up in a community obsessed with the aforementioned fishing, his business ventures would have had to revolve around that, since he was born to lead men, not to become an expert in any area of knowledge. Technology can, in principle, exist without hucksterism. But not without technologists.
And why was Jobs so drawn to Indian and faux-Indian gurus? Because they were controlling lots of impressionable minds. They were successful manipulative alphas. It was natural for a guy like him to want to see the masters at work. Same for his obsession with Dylan.
Isaacson devotes a lot of space to Jobs's weird diets. Jobs sometimes ate nothing but one particlar kind of fruit for weeks on end and was a vegetarian for most of his life. There was also lots of fasting and purging. Before Woz came up with the Apple I, Jobs likely saw himself in the future as a patriarch of a hippie commune in the mold of one of his closest friends at Reed College:
"In order to raise some cash one day, Jobs decided to sell his IBM Selectric typewriter. He walked into the room of the student who had offered to buy it only to discover that he was having sex with his girlfriend. Jobs started to leave, but the student invited him to take a seat and wait while they finished. "I thought, 'This is kind of far out," Jobs later recalled. And thus began his relationship with Robert Friedland, one of the few people in Jobs's life who were able to mesmerize him."
You can't have a religion without fasts and weird diets, so I'm guessing that early on Jobs's dieting served to prepare him for that career path. Friedland's commune included an apple orchard where Jobs sometimes worked pruning trees during the period when Apple was founded. The company's name is not unrelated to this. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Friedland later became a billionaire gold miner.
One humanizing aspect of Jobs's story was his love for his home town, Silicon Valley. He considered his California childhood to have been idyllic. That's not entirely how it sounded to me though. This book describes Jobs being bullied by "ethnic gangs" in a school situated in a "bad neighborhood". There was a gang rape there around the time he started attending. He gave an ultimatum to his parents to make them move to a better school district, where they had to buy a more expensive home. There were no bad neighborhoods or gangs, ethnic or otherwise, in my Soviet childhood.
Jobs once did a prank with his school buddies where they changed the codes on their classmates' bike locks. Everyone in my neighborhood had a bike when I was a kid, but no one had ever heard of bike locks. And no bikes were ever stolen.
A couple of random things I didn't know before I read this book:
1) Jobs went out with Chris-Ann Brennan in high school, but they later split up. She reconnected with him right when Apple started taking off. This is also when she became pregnant. Isaacson ignores the gold-digging implications of this entirely, but I bet Jobs didn't. Does this justify his subsequent abandonment of his first child? No. But it's a bit of context.
2) Xerox put out a GUI-based computer in 1981, more than a year after they showed the GUI technology to Jobs, 2 years before the Lisa and 3 years before the Macintosh. It was a failure. It cost $16,595 and sold 30,000 copies. The idea that Jobs simply stumbled upon a ready-to-use unexploited goldmine at PARC is not entirely correct. Without his business sense, marketing, without the numerous improvements to the GUI experience for which he pushed at Apple, this technology was not an automatic winner.
I'll end this review with predictions. It will be fun to read this 20 years from now, even if just to wonder how I could have been so wrong about something so obvious.
I'm guessing that without Jobs Apple will steadily decline. iOS will lose most of its market share to Android. At this point, before either Google Glass or the iWatch have gone on sale, the former seems more exciting than the latter. The phenomenon of other companies coming out with technologies that Apple would have pioneered if Jobs lived on will become a trend. The aesthetics of Apple's products will surely deteriorate. Unless Jobs's son Reed ever heads Apple, the company will from now on be run by hired hands, and those usually care far less than owners, founders or their families. Eventually Apple will be bought by a more successful firm, but its logo and brand may well live on for decades afterwards.
I read this book with interest even though, like almost everyone else, I already knew a lot about Jobs. There were some interesting new details on the margins, yes, but Jobs's famous personal magnetism must have been the biggest draw. Even a bore like Walter Isaacson couldn't obscure it all that much. Throughout the book I kept wondering how decent, level-headed people could go to work for Jobs, invest money in his enterprises, trust him during negotiations. Everyone always knew he was a sociopath. Well, why did I keep reading this book? If humans could be very excited by honesty and altruism, the world would be a pretty different place.
Where did Jobs's sociopathy come from? He was very smart - his teachers asked him to skip two grades in school - but he didn't have a single bit of nerdiness in him. His interests and mental power were from the beginning mostly turned towards humans. He had an intuitive understanding of people's weaknesses, boundaries and motivations and a superior ability to manipulate them. And unlike a smart woman, he had all that machismo.
Are all non-nerdy smart people sociopaths? If the average guy was suddenly granted these particular talents by a miracle pill, would he instantly become an asshole? Perhaps. I can think of at least one other contributing factor though. Bill Clinton, the other super-famous, brilliant-but-not-nerdy American sociopath of our day, may well have been as much of a bastard as Jobs, since the identity of his bio-father is disputed.
Obviously, Jobs's manipulative alpha nature benefited him enormously. Did it benefit society? Not technologically. File management and a lot of other PC tasks were always easier to do on a command line than in a GUI. There's less latency, you have more choices, and the learning curve isn't as steep as most imagine. Hardware keyboards are easier to use than software alternatives. The relationship between the quality of an artist's output and the complexity of his tools can't be very strong. The technical innovations that Jobs thrust onto the market earlier than they would have gotten there without him tended to be superficial.
I do think that his overall impact on society was positive, just that it was mostly confined to aesthetics. The original iMac, the Power Mac G4, the iPad 4 on which I'm typing this review and many other Apple products were rays of beauty in our increasingly ugly world. As such they've raised millions of people's moods and consciousnesses.
Of course he didn't bring back any classical forms - he never thought that different. But he did as much within the narrow confines of modernism as anybody I'm aware of. He didn't sketch - that's one of the things I learned from this book. Those who are able to easily push around others rarely enjoy doing anything else. So he just yelled at underlings until they made things that looked good to him. He did unquestionably have a great sense of style though.
When Pixar needed a new headquarters, Jobs became intimately involved in the building's design. He wanted it to have lots of open, public spaces where employees from different departments would be forced to bump into each other. He even pushed for the building to contain only two very large bathrooms for the same reason.
"Creativity comes from spontaneous meetings, from random discussions."
Nope. That's schmoozimg. Creativity comes from men concentrating on difficult problems alone for many hours in total silence.
"You run into someone, you ask what they’re doing, you say ‘Wow,’ and soon you’re cooking up all sorts of ideas.”
This is like a clown decreeing that fishing needs more makeup. He wasn't even curious about how his minions worked, how the stuff he sold came into being.
Naturally I was interested in the effects of Jobs's mixed parentage. Some aspects of his personality (verbal bombast, weepy, self-pitying sentimentality, the desire to be worshipped) were 100% Middle Eastern and others (an obsession with quality, an understated, stark, spare visual style) were 100% German. You'd expect people of mixed backgrounds to congregate around the 50/50 line on most traits, but for some reason it rarely works that way.
Group photos of Apple's management team can look like pictures of Saddam's cabinet meetings once you realize that jeans and mock turtlenecks were playing the role of black moustaches. Everyone present felt the need to copy the leader. Phrases like "insanely great" and "make a dent in the Universe" clearly share a sensibility with "the mother of all wars". Yet in the visual sphere he always went for the unadorned, the elegantly understated.
His thought processes were extremely irrational. One only needs rationality (and humility) when dealing with facts and inanimate objects, and he, after all, dealt with people instead. For example, already during the design of the original Macintosh he became dogmatic about rounded edges. You can make a beautiful object with square edges (just look at old books) or sharp edges as easily as with rounded ones. True aesthetics are always much more complex than a choice between three options anyway. Intuitively he knew what was beautiful and what wasn't, but his consciously verbalized ideas about it were illogical.
Another example of this was his genius/bozo (I'm being PG-13) dichotomy in evaluating employees. In the real world talents are distributed as bell curves. You'd think that an erroneously binary view of people's capabilities would severely hurt a manager's effectiveness. But the human world doesn't work logically, so he was able to have great success in it regardless.
This irrationality must be related to the shocking amount of hypocrisy in Jobs's work. In the 1984 commercial he presented Apple as a rebel fighting totalitarian control freaks at IBM. Yet it was he who always fought to take choices away from Apple's customers. You couldn't even open the original Macintosh with a screwdriver. The nerds who liked to modify their systems had to buy IBM compatibles instead. My iPad is glued shut and won't accept a USB drive. I lack access to its file system and it only runs apps approved by Apple. Hackers have justly named programs that remove Apple's software controls "jailbreaks".
Jobs's second most famous commercial introduced his "Think Different" slogan.
"Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules and they have no respect for the status quo."
And on and on in that barf-inducing vein, while Picasso, Ghandi, MLK, Bob Dylan, etc. appear on the screen. Those guys weren't rebels. They always went with the flow. It's impossible to get that famous while doing anything else, certainly not in art or politics. And of course the "counterculture" was the flow of Jobs's youth. Now, if he cited someone like Evelyn Waugh...
Bono opines on the pages of this book:
"The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently. The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany and Japan do not encourage this different thinking."
It was deeply satisfying to see someone so full of himself being so hilariously wrong. The PC industry was created by nerds, not hippies. Nerds are the most rules-loving, routines-obsessed, regimented people on Earth. Also some of the most clean-living, if you disregard junk food. Nerds like Woz's father were ultimately gathered in the Bay Area by the Pentagon. Besides nerds, the most rules-loving entities in the known Universe are of course first-world militaries. If the Pentagon decided to invest in Alaska or the East Coast, that's where all those engineers would have settled and that's where the PC industry would have had to be born. And if Jobs grew up in a community obsessed with the aforementioned fishing, his business ventures would have had to revolve around that, since he was born to lead men, not to become an expert in any area of knowledge. Technology can, in principle, exist without hucksterism. But not without technologists.
And why was Jobs so drawn to Indian and faux-Indian gurus? Because they were controlling lots of impressionable minds. They were successful manipulative alphas. It was natural for a guy like him to want to see the masters at work. Same for his obsession with Dylan.
Isaacson devotes a lot of space to Jobs's weird diets. Jobs sometimes ate nothing but one particlar kind of fruit for weeks on end and was a vegetarian for most of his life. There was also lots of fasting and purging. Before Woz came up with the Apple I, Jobs likely saw himself in the future as a patriarch of a hippie commune in the mold of one of his closest friends at Reed College:
"In order to raise some cash one day, Jobs decided to sell his IBM Selectric typewriter. He walked into the room of the student who had offered to buy it only to discover that he was having sex with his girlfriend. Jobs started to leave, but the student invited him to take a seat and wait while they finished. "I thought, 'This is kind of far out," Jobs later recalled. And thus began his relationship with Robert Friedland, one of the few people in Jobs's life who were able to mesmerize him."
You can't have a religion without fasts and weird diets, so I'm guessing that early on Jobs's dieting served to prepare him for that career path. Friedland's commune included an apple orchard where Jobs sometimes worked pruning trees during the period when Apple was founded. The company's name is not unrelated to this. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Friedland later became a billionaire gold miner.
One humanizing aspect of Jobs's story was his love for his home town, Silicon Valley. He considered his California childhood to have been idyllic. That's not entirely how it sounded to me though. This book describes Jobs being bullied by "ethnic gangs" in a school situated in a "bad neighborhood". There was a gang rape there around the time he started attending. He gave an ultimatum to his parents to make them move to a better school district, where they had to buy a more expensive home. There were no bad neighborhoods or gangs, ethnic or otherwise, in my Soviet childhood.
Jobs once did a prank with his school buddies where they changed the codes on their classmates' bike locks. Everyone in my neighborhood had a bike when I was a kid, but no one had ever heard of bike locks. And no bikes were ever stolen.
A couple of random things I didn't know before I read this book:
1) Jobs went out with Chris-Ann Brennan in high school, but they later split up. She reconnected with him right when Apple started taking off. This is also when she became pregnant. Isaacson ignores the gold-digging implications of this entirely, but I bet Jobs didn't. Does this justify his subsequent abandonment of his first child? No. But it's a bit of context.
2) Xerox put out a GUI-based computer in 1981, more than a year after they showed the GUI technology to Jobs, 2 years before the Lisa and 3 years before the Macintosh. It was a failure. It cost $16,595 and sold 30,000 copies. The idea that Jobs simply stumbled upon a ready-to-use unexploited goldmine at PARC is not entirely correct. Without his business sense, marketing, without the numerous improvements to the GUI experience for which he pushed at Apple, this technology was not an automatic winner.
I'll end this review with predictions. It will be fun to read this 20 years from now, even if just to wonder how I could have been so wrong about something so obvious.
I'm guessing that without Jobs Apple will steadily decline. iOS will lose most of its market share to Android. At this point, before either Google Glass or the iWatch have gone on sale, the former seems more exciting than the latter. The phenomenon of other companies coming out with technologies that Apple would have pioneered if Jobs lived on will become a trend. The aesthetics of Apple's products will surely deteriorate. Unless Jobs's son Reed ever heads Apple, the company will from now on be run by hired hands, and those usually care far less than owners, founders or their families. Eventually Apple will be bought by a more successful firm, but its logo and brand may well live on for decades afterwards.
SPIRITUAL: YOU HAVE TO ASK THE RIGHT QUESTIONS
I began noticing a disturbing pattern: I frequently asked questions that were inadvertently structured to produce negative answers.
What do I mean by this? Well, for years, I CONSTANTLY asked questions such as:
What the F is wrong with me?
Why does this bad shit keep happening to me?
What do I need to do for this problem to go away?
What’s missing?
Why do I fuck up so much?
WOW!! No wonder I had been so miserable for many years. No wonder these journals made me feel burdened. They were packed with self-cursing questions that I asked over and over again.
Notice that each of the questions above is structured in such a way that it implies something negative exists: there’s something wrong with me; bad shit happens to me; a problem exists; something is missing; I fuck up so much. It’s like a secret command telling your mind, this is how it is.
Not once did it ever dawn on me that the questions I repeatedly asked myself were producing my reality.
Not once did it ever occur to me that my life was “bad” simply because I was asking “bad” questions.
I made it a priority to begin asking more positive questions. The theory is that the human mind automatically searches for the answer to any question asked of it. By default, questions automatically engage the mind to begin working to find an answer.
So if you ask yourself a question – any question at all – you’re ultimately going to find an answer. Your mind will work tirelessly to find the answer, so it can file the question away as “answered.”
If you ask yourself, “What’s wrong with me?” your brain will begin to search for an answer. You’ll subconsciously begin to collect information that answers the question, which implies that something is wrong with you. Evidence will begin to pop up everywhere that will support the underlying, hidden statement behind the question.
If you ask yourself a question such as, “Why am I so successful?” then your brain will begin searching for an answer to that, too. You’ll find evidence that supports the underlying assumption behind the question: that you are successful.
The second I began asking better questions, my life started to turn around. I’ve been experimenting with positive, goal-oriented afformations for the past several months and have been blown away by some of the great things happening in my life
(As someone who spent most of her life entrenched in negative beliefs, surrounded by people who not only adopted a victim mentality but also encouraged it – this has been HUGE for me.)
Oh, and I can pretty much guarantee you that the majority of people in this world are asking bad questions – that’s why they’re stuck in a rut. Heck, maybe you’ve even asked a few bad questions yourself. I’m convinced now that bad questions are the #1 thing keeping most of humanity stuck in a place where they don’t to be.
If you want to attract more positive things into your world:
A) Start asking better questions.
B) Get rid of all physical objects that produce ANY sort of bad feelings in you. Old photos of exes, old junk someone gave you as a gift that you never really liked, anything that reminds you of something bad from your past – just get rid of it. Throw it away, recycle it, donate it – just get it out of your home. Watch as all kinds of amazing things start coming into your life – because now there’s actually room for them to appear!
If you don’t believe me, just try doing one or both of these things for 30 days. See what happens. If it doesn’t work, what did you lose? A few minutes of your time? If it does work…think of everything you’ll gain.
What do I mean by this? Well, for years, I CONSTANTLY asked questions such as:
What the F is wrong with me?
Why does this bad shit keep happening to me?
What do I need to do for this problem to go away?
What’s missing?
Why do I fuck up so much?
WOW!! No wonder I had been so miserable for many years. No wonder these journals made me feel burdened. They were packed with self-cursing questions that I asked over and over again.
Notice that each of the questions above is structured in such a way that it implies something negative exists: there’s something wrong with me; bad shit happens to me; a problem exists; something is missing; I fuck up so much. It’s like a secret command telling your mind, this is how it is.
Not once did it ever dawn on me that the questions I repeatedly asked myself were producing my reality.
Not once did it ever occur to me that my life was “bad” simply because I was asking “bad” questions.
I made it a priority to begin asking more positive questions. The theory is that the human mind automatically searches for the answer to any question asked of it. By default, questions automatically engage the mind to begin working to find an answer.
So if you ask yourself a question – any question at all – you’re ultimately going to find an answer. Your mind will work tirelessly to find the answer, so it can file the question away as “answered.”
If you ask yourself, “What’s wrong with me?” your brain will begin to search for an answer. You’ll subconsciously begin to collect information that answers the question, which implies that something is wrong with you. Evidence will begin to pop up everywhere that will support the underlying, hidden statement behind the question.
If you ask yourself a question such as, “Why am I so successful?” then your brain will begin searching for an answer to that, too. You’ll find evidence that supports the underlying assumption behind the question: that you are successful.
The second I began asking better questions, my life started to turn around. I’ve been experimenting with positive, goal-oriented afformations for the past several months and have been blown away by some of the great things happening in my life
(As someone who spent most of her life entrenched in negative beliefs, surrounded by people who not only adopted a victim mentality but also encouraged it – this has been HUGE for me.)
Oh, and I can pretty much guarantee you that the majority of people in this world are asking bad questions – that’s why they’re stuck in a rut. Heck, maybe you’ve even asked a few bad questions yourself. I’m convinced now that bad questions are the #1 thing keeping most of humanity stuck in a place where they don’t to be.
If you want to attract more positive things into your world:
A) Start asking better questions.
B) Get rid of all physical objects that produce ANY sort of bad feelings in you. Old photos of exes, old junk someone gave you as a gift that you never really liked, anything that reminds you of something bad from your past – just get rid of it. Throw it away, recycle it, donate it – just get it out of your home. Watch as all kinds of amazing things start coming into your life – because now there’s actually room for them to appear!
If you don’t believe me, just try doing one or both of these things for 30 days. See what happens. If it doesn’t work, what did you lose? A few minutes of your time? If it does work…think of everything you’ll gain.
SPIRITUAL YOU DON'T HAVE CONTROL OF ANYTHING
We feel we’re in control, with plans like this.
But it’s an illusion, as I’ve said before.
We cannot control our lives to this degree, no matter how we try. Things will always come up to spoil the best-laid plans, and the more detailed our plans the more of a guarantee that something will go wrong.
And what happens when the plans go wrong? We are stressed out, because things get out of our control and don’t live up to our expectations. This is one of the greatest sources of stress for most people, actually.
Think about how often your days actually go according to plan, exactly — it’s pretty rare, because we have no way of predicting the future. No matter how hard we try. There’s always an email that will disrupt things, a last-minute meeting, cancellations and postponements, emergencies and fires to put out.
So if plans will almost always go wrong, and when they do we get stressed out, isn’t all the time we spend creating the plans a bit of a waste?
But what’s the alternative? Giving yourself to the moment. This will not work for everyone, I’ll admit: there are those who will have a hard time giving up the illusion of control, and others who are controlled by their bosses or peers and cannot work or live this way.
Still, it’s something worth considering. Here’s how to do it — starting with the don’ts:
Don’t plan. Planning is an attempt to control the world around us, but it’s a futile attempt. Throw out your plans, for now at least until you’ve decided this method isn’t for you. What do you do instead? More on this below. For now, just stop planning.
Don’t worry about the future. Will something bad happen? Are there things coming up that we must anticipate and prepare for? Of course, if there’s a massive hurricane headed your way, you should probably get ready. But otherwise, just realize that the future is unpredictable, and worrying about it is a waste of time. Focus on right now, and you’ll always be able to handle what comes.
Don’t have expectations. If you expect people to act a certain way, or hope that things will turn out a certain way, you’ll always run into problems. Forget about outcomes for now. Go into things without expectations, and they will always turn out perfectly (if a bit messy).
Don’t get annoyed when others act a certain way. Don’t expect people to act any way other than how they actually act. They are exactly the way they should be — even if that’s selfish or weird or aggressive. Those are their problems. Your problem is figuring out how you should act. I’d also advise you to try to understand others — why do they act the way they do?
Don’t overreact. This is a major problem when people plan and things go wrong — they overreact, and get upset and emotional and blow things out of proportion. Stay calm, because if things “go wrong”, they didn’t actually go wrong — they just happened. More on how to react below.
Don’t try to be proactive. This is a common prescription (being proactive) in management and business literature. And while I think the general idea is fine — do something to prevent problems from recurring rather than just fixing them after they happen — one of the problems this creates is always worrying about what might happen. And creating solutions before there are problems — if there never is a problem, you’ve wasted a lot of time creating the solution, and a lot of energy worrying about the future.
And now for the dos:
Do be open. What would it be like to go into each day without a plan, but just to see what happens? A bit scary, because of the lack of security and control, a bit chaotic perhaps, a bit like we’re a piece of driftwood floating in the middle of a churning sea. But in truth, this is what it’s like to go into each day *with* a plan — it’s just that we normally fool ourselves about the amount of control we have. So start the day with no plan, and be open to what emerges in each moment.
Do act, in the moment. Giving yourself to the moment doesn’t mean being passive and just letting life happen. It means acting, but doing what is best at this moment, what you are excited about right now, what needs to be done, in the present.
Do respond appropriately. Life happens, and we must respond. But instead of overreacting, we can respond calmly and appropriately. We can take the action that’s required, fix the problem, do what’s necessary to prevent it from happening again, and move on without it ruining our day.
Do accept. Accept what happens. It might not be what you considered ideal, but it’s what life has given you, what has resulted from your actions in an unpredicatable world. Accept it, respond, act, move on. Don’t get caught up in things not going your way, but accept that’s what has happened.
Again, this way of living won’t be for everybody. Some don’t have the freedom to live this way, and others just won’t give up control. Some will think this is a passive way of living, but it really isn’t: it’s just a way of living in the moment without being caught up in the future (or the past) so much.
And when we live in the moment, we’re really living life to the fullest. This is the gift of the present.
But it’s an illusion, as I’ve said before.
We cannot control our lives to this degree, no matter how we try. Things will always come up to spoil the best-laid plans, and the more detailed our plans the more of a guarantee that something will go wrong.
And what happens when the plans go wrong? We are stressed out, because things get out of our control and don’t live up to our expectations. This is one of the greatest sources of stress for most people, actually.
Think about how often your days actually go according to plan, exactly — it’s pretty rare, because we have no way of predicting the future. No matter how hard we try. There’s always an email that will disrupt things, a last-minute meeting, cancellations and postponements, emergencies and fires to put out.
So if plans will almost always go wrong, and when they do we get stressed out, isn’t all the time we spend creating the plans a bit of a waste?
But what’s the alternative? Giving yourself to the moment. This will not work for everyone, I’ll admit: there are those who will have a hard time giving up the illusion of control, and others who are controlled by their bosses or peers and cannot work or live this way.
Still, it’s something worth considering. Here’s how to do it — starting with the don’ts:
Don’t plan. Planning is an attempt to control the world around us, but it’s a futile attempt. Throw out your plans, for now at least until you’ve decided this method isn’t for you. What do you do instead? More on this below. For now, just stop planning.
Don’t worry about the future. Will something bad happen? Are there things coming up that we must anticipate and prepare for? Of course, if there’s a massive hurricane headed your way, you should probably get ready. But otherwise, just realize that the future is unpredictable, and worrying about it is a waste of time. Focus on right now, and you’ll always be able to handle what comes.
Don’t have expectations. If you expect people to act a certain way, or hope that things will turn out a certain way, you’ll always run into problems. Forget about outcomes for now. Go into things without expectations, and they will always turn out perfectly (if a bit messy).
Don’t get annoyed when others act a certain way. Don’t expect people to act any way other than how they actually act. They are exactly the way they should be — even if that’s selfish or weird or aggressive. Those are their problems. Your problem is figuring out how you should act. I’d also advise you to try to understand others — why do they act the way they do?
Don’t overreact. This is a major problem when people plan and things go wrong — they overreact, and get upset and emotional and blow things out of proportion. Stay calm, because if things “go wrong”, they didn’t actually go wrong — they just happened. More on how to react below.
Don’t try to be proactive. This is a common prescription (being proactive) in management and business literature. And while I think the general idea is fine — do something to prevent problems from recurring rather than just fixing them after they happen — one of the problems this creates is always worrying about what might happen. And creating solutions before there are problems — if there never is a problem, you’ve wasted a lot of time creating the solution, and a lot of energy worrying about the future.
And now for the dos:
Do be open. What would it be like to go into each day without a plan, but just to see what happens? A bit scary, because of the lack of security and control, a bit chaotic perhaps, a bit like we’re a piece of driftwood floating in the middle of a churning sea. But in truth, this is what it’s like to go into each day *with* a plan — it’s just that we normally fool ourselves about the amount of control we have. So start the day with no plan, and be open to what emerges in each moment.
Do act, in the moment. Giving yourself to the moment doesn’t mean being passive and just letting life happen. It means acting, but doing what is best at this moment, what you are excited about right now, what needs to be done, in the present.
Do respond appropriately. Life happens, and we must respond. But instead of overreacting, we can respond calmly and appropriately. We can take the action that’s required, fix the problem, do what’s necessary to prevent it from happening again, and move on without it ruining our day.
Do accept. Accept what happens. It might not be what you considered ideal, but it’s what life has given you, what has resulted from your actions in an unpredicatable world. Accept it, respond, act, move on. Don’t get caught up in things not going your way, but accept that’s what has happened.
Again, this way of living won’t be for everybody. Some don’t have the freedom to live this way, and others just won’t give up control. Some will think this is a passive way of living, but it really isn’t: it’s just a way of living in the moment without being caught up in the future (or the past) so much.
And when we live in the moment, we’re really living life to the fullest. This is the gift of the present.
Wednesday, May 28, 2014
POETRY: UNTIL THERE WAS YOU
Until there was you
I walked the earth alone
No hand to hold in mine
My heart was all my own
Until there was you
True love was just a dream
Dreams of wonder and tears
Dreams of hope and fears
Until there was you
My life had no direction
A road of uncertainty
But now we have a journey
Together you and me
So I thank my lucky stars
And God from the heavens above
For my heart and soul could never
Feel the impact of true love
Until there was you . . .
2
I wanna look in her eyes
and watch a passionate story unfold
I wanna hold her hand
and walk through the park
I wanna caress her legs
and find her spot
I wanna tickle her spine
with my tongue
I wanna massage her neck
and set the tone
I wanna make love to her
all night and day
I wanna be with her each
and everyday
I wanna say wait...the kids are up
again
I want us to last until the end
3
Some say eyes are the windows to the soul
You can see someone's entire past with just one look
I guess you can say you see them as a whole
Or in other words read them like a book
Some say there's such thing as love at first sight
You can glance at someone once and fall in love
I think love must be gained with a fight
And when you win it you will soar like a dove
But when I look into your eyes
Not only do I see the past
I see the future with it's bright firey skies
Symbolizing love that will surely last
4
without you in my life where would I be
lost in the storms of life like a ship battered at sea
my life would have no meaning, and my heart would be an empty void
with no happy, joyous, memories that you and I have enjoyed
without you in my life time would always seem still
never laughing or smiling, just my empty heart that couldn't be filled
the love we share each day together is more valuable to me than gold
I pray each day it'll grow warmer and never grow stale and cold
without you in my life I don't know what I would do
that's why I've put my thoughts and feelings into this poem for you
by the time you get done reading this I hope you will see
that you are, always have been, and always will be, the only one for me
5
Here I am...
In front of you
Behind you,
Inside you.
Here I am...
Touching you
Feeling you,
Loving you.
Here I am...
Needing you
Wanting you,
Knowing you.
Here I am...
There you are
We are one!
6
When I gaze into your eyes,
Tomorrow is all I see.
I wish you could know, my love,
Just what you mean to me.
To hold you in the darkness,
And watch you next to me
To kiss your gentle lips,
Is heaven, girl, to me.
We hold hands when in public,
I beam with such delight
For, it's your tenderness and beauty
That makes my heart take flight.
You came into my life,
So unexpectedly,
Words can't ever express
Just what you mean to me.
Poetry doesn't say it,
Music can't even touch,
The endless love inside of me,
That wants your gentle touch.
Don't ever leave me, darling,
I don't know what I would do
Because, my darling baby,
I am so in love with you
7
My love I've never seen...
Addicted to my every dream
Refusing to let you go.
I thought you should know
All I do is think of you!
Ease my inner broken soul,
Let your soul take control
It's you that makes it all better.
Adoring your sweet voice,
Babe your my one and only choice.
Empress of my skies
Tell me there's no lies;
Hooked on your glittering brown eyes.
Help me from this awful pain
Empty without your loving care.
Nervous by your feeling's said,
Always running through my head.
Never forget that I once bled...
Damn the tears that are being shed,
Envying your cozy, warm touch
won't you just tell me where I'm led?
I walked the earth alone
No hand to hold in mine
My heart was all my own
Until there was you
True love was just a dream
Dreams of wonder and tears
Dreams of hope and fears
Until there was you
My life had no direction
A road of uncertainty
But now we have a journey
Together you and me
So I thank my lucky stars
And God from the heavens above
For my heart and soul could never
Feel the impact of true love
Until there was you . . .
2
I wanna look in her eyes
and watch a passionate story unfold
I wanna hold her hand
and walk through the park
I wanna caress her legs
and find her spot
I wanna tickle her spine
with my tongue
I wanna massage her neck
and set the tone
I wanna make love to her
all night and day
I wanna be with her each
and everyday
I wanna say wait...the kids are up
again
I want us to last until the end
3
Some say eyes are the windows to the soul
You can see someone's entire past with just one look
I guess you can say you see them as a whole
Or in other words read them like a book
Some say there's such thing as love at first sight
You can glance at someone once and fall in love
I think love must be gained with a fight
And when you win it you will soar like a dove
But when I look into your eyes
Not only do I see the past
I see the future with it's bright firey skies
Symbolizing love that will surely last
4
without you in my life where would I be
lost in the storms of life like a ship battered at sea
my life would have no meaning, and my heart would be an empty void
with no happy, joyous, memories that you and I have enjoyed
without you in my life time would always seem still
never laughing or smiling, just my empty heart that couldn't be filled
the love we share each day together is more valuable to me than gold
I pray each day it'll grow warmer and never grow stale and cold
without you in my life I don't know what I would do
that's why I've put my thoughts and feelings into this poem for you
by the time you get done reading this I hope you will see
that you are, always have been, and always will be, the only one for me
5
Here I am...
In front of you
Behind you,
Inside you.
Here I am...
Touching you
Feeling you,
Loving you.
Here I am...
Needing you
Wanting you,
Knowing you.
Here I am...
There you are
We are one!
6
When I gaze into your eyes,
Tomorrow is all I see.
I wish you could know, my love,
Just what you mean to me.
To hold you in the darkness,
And watch you next to me
To kiss your gentle lips,
Is heaven, girl, to me.
We hold hands when in public,
I beam with such delight
For, it's your tenderness and beauty
That makes my heart take flight.
You came into my life,
So unexpectedly,
Words can't ever express
Just what you mean to me.
Poetry doesn't say it,
Music can't even touch,
The endless love inside of me,
That wants your gentle touch.
Don't ever leave me, darling,
I don't know what I would do
Because, my darling baby,
I am so in love with you
7
My love I've never seen...
Addicted to my every dream
Refusing to let you go.
I thought you should know
All I do is think of you!
Ease my inner broken soul,
Let your soul take control
It's you that makes it all better.
Adoring your sweet voice,
Babe your my one and only choice.
Empress of my skies
Tell me there's no lies;
Hooked on your glittering brown eyes.
Help me from this awful pain
Empty without your loving care.
Nervous by your feeling's said,
Always running through my head.
Never forget that I once bled...
Damn the tears that are being shed,
Envying your cozy, warm touch
won't you just tell me where I'm led?
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