Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2023-10-13T13:30:23Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com October 13. http://ranprieur.com/#dd550d242904e493dac37b778350ae89fac0fba7 2023-10-13T13:30:23Z October 13. A few notes from Port Townsend. The other night we went to see our first theater movie since before Covid, and there's a common assumption that the main difference between theater and home is the size of the screen. Personally, if the movie is any good I get so absorbed that I lose track of the context. I think the main difference, by far, is that a theater movie can't be paused. That gives the show an element of ritual and makes it more immersive.

Today we went on a whale watch cruise, a three hour tour on Friday the 13th with a new captain on his first run. I was so disappointed that we didn't end up on Gilligan's island. Anyway, when we found the whales, there were several other boats gathered around, maybe 200 humans who paid a lot to watch five orcas cavort. We've come a long way in a short time from when humans would be trying to kill or capture the whales.

At the same time, the local islands were packed with houses so new that the streets didn't show up on google maps. While human ecological consciousness is higher than ever, so is our ecological footprint.

A phrase I hear a lot lately is "retail therapy". For me that means, spending money is so painful that I have to think about my own death to make it tolerable. I think about the Hieronymus Bosch painting, Death and the Miser, and the Talking Heads line, "Into the blue again, after the money's gone".

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October 8. http://ranprieur.com/#ef553901d23bd83794f19f267a1752743552672d 2023-10-08T20:40:34Z October 8. This week I'll be in Port Townsend without my laptop, so little or no posting. I wrote this before, but can't find it in the archives, a thought about cults. Post-apocalypse fiction is full of cults, as if the ruins of a complex society are fertile ground for charismatic leaders and fanatical followers with crazy beliefs.

That fertile ground is right now, during a still-standing complex society that is losing the ability to motivate its citizens. Fanaticism fills the void of meaning. If a society gets to the point where it can't feed its citizens, that's worse, but the dangerous groups will be less culty and more pragmatic, less wild-eyed and more steely-eyed.


New subject: What Plants Are Saying About Us, a careful argument that plants are intelligent without brains:

If cognition is embodied, extended, embedded, enactive, and ecological, then what we call the mind is not in the brain. It is the body's active engagement with the world, made not of neural firings alone but of sensorimotor loops that run through the brain, body, and environment. In other words, the mind is not in the head.
...
"Words like cognition, memory, attention, or consciousness -- those words for me are properly applied to the whole organism. It's the whole organism that's conscious, not the brain that's conscious. It's the whole organism that attends or remembers. The brain makes animal cognition possible, it facilitates and enables it, but it's not the location of it."

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October 5. http://ranprieur.com/#a43bbd6e58ff6241ef1072d29752402d343ab186 2023-10-05T17:10:57Z October 5. When something is too hard, the obvious move is to make it easier. But sometimes it works to make it harder, if that difficulty unlocks your magic powers.

Every couple weeks I bicycle up Pine Street, from downtown to the top of Capitol Hill, to get groceries. Because my bike is a singlepeed, and I'm not athletic, I only ride it up the least steep streets, and otherwise push it.

On top of that, now I've got a sore quadriceps tendon, the thingy just above your kneecap. To not re-injure it, I can't put any weight on my right leg when it's more than a little bent. (We're all more than a little bent.) On a bicycle, that means my right leg is only good for one shove at the bottom of each stroke, while my left leg has to work twice as hard. It turns out, exactly twice as hard, because yesterday I rode up steeper streets than before the injury.


Back to my favorite subject lately, better living through altered states of consciousness, another thread on r/psychonaut, What was the most profound insight you learned on psychedelics that helped you in your life? Lots of good stuff, including a surprising interpretation of "life is the trip": that the things you do to make a trip better, like eating well and avoiding stress, are the same things you do to make life better.

Psychonauts are always talking about the importance of love, with little explanation beyond that vague and non-controversial word, and just the word you'd expect from the intersection of feeling good and "we are all one." But this comment by logicalmaniak explains it really well:

Like, what's a game of football? Just humans chasing a bag of air. It's nothing at all. But what's a game of football with your mates? It's communion, bonding, positive competition, fun, and so on. The love makes the not real thing a vehicle for transmitting the real thing.

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October 2. http://ranprieur.com/#be3101f91ddc11b95d5973890bc883046b338db9 2023-10-02T14:40:26Z October 2. Not feeling smart this week, or maybe just less interested in words. Here's a fun thread on Ask Old People about Donald Trump in the 80s.

Another negative link, Do Not Put Plastic in the Microwave, because it releases microplastics.

Another health link, Individuals drinking 2-3 cups of coffee per day have the lowest risk of depression and anxiety. I wonder about causation vs correlation, because 2-3 cups seems pretty normal, with weird people drinking more or less, and also being more prone to depression and anxiety.

A nice thread on r/psychonaut about talking to plants. I don't see how plants could use language, but I sometimes get a sense that trees are superior beings who only show us a narrow slice of what they really are.

And a thoughtful blog post, It's okay to make something nobody wants. "If everyone made things they really liked, we'd have a lot more cool stuff."

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