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John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'

theguardian.com

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Re: John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'

#71

Post by DyslexicAtheist »

beams wrote: post #41
tasty_freeze wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love ice cream. But if I had to eat a billion gallons of it, it would lose its appeal. Life is like that too: if we had it in infinite supply, it wouldn't have much value. If I could extend my life by 50 years of good health I might take that offer. If I had to extend it by 500 years, I'm pretty sure I'd decline. If I had to extend it 5000 years I'd certainly say no. 5M years of existence would be torture. When peo…

You say you’d decline 5m years of life. But have you been in love? How would your answer change if he/she was ready to live 5m years with you?

given the option of spending 5m years with another human I'd pass. A lot of other variables would need to change (ability to retain long term memories, fertility, time it takes to raise a child, how we raise our kids if at all ...) But even changing one of these variables would change things in ways we can't fully imagine (complex system so there would be lot of emergence/chaos)

While the first years of such a "long term relationship" are probably great, (I am high on my hormones imagining that I potentially will spend some millions of years with my partner) they might also be a nightmare for the same reasons.

The more successful relationship I had were all about managing each others long-term expectations, and not risk breaking promises. How would I do this over that horizon idk (more importantly I trust potential partners even less to know)

What would reality look like if we only lived twice as long and were able to retain memories along the way. Holocaust survivors, Spanish flu survivors are dead now and I wonder what they could teach us about 2020. I wonder how such a Malthusean society would feel about Tech, the environment, urbanization, wars, politics, ... Our inability to live long enough and remember things keeps coming back to bite us in the ass I think so doubling our life expectancy would be cool but 5m years is an unthinkable dystopian horror show.

Considering most people are unable to have a great relationship with themselves. Many consider their love / partner a person that "completes" them. In other words they don't love themselves enough to think they need another person that makes them whole. That's a lot of pressure in 40 years but 5m it would be hell. But maybe this would solve the actual problem and it would force people to love themselves first? 5m years isn't just a lot of time to make it a nightmare but also to get many things right we currently don't. I'm not convinced we can accurately imagine/paint this picture tho.

Re: John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'

#72

Post by scandox »

I'm totally open to Gray's arguments. Wide open. But I do find a some of his writing quite mediocre. I'm surprised by how highly he is regarded. I read Soul of The Marionette recently.and I thought it was a somewhat aimless and poorly written meander through other people's ideas. Had a bit of a Gell-Mann moment as well when he discussed Philip K Dick and I found his summation of Dick's ideas flat and lacking in insight: that was one of the writers on the book whose work I knew well.

Re: John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'

#73

Post by unityByFreedom »

tomgp wrote: post #68
unityByFreedom wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends how detailed you want to get. All of us have a need to be social and creative, IMO, and Gray would say each sex has its own traits which do not necessarily hold all the time but can be instructive. I gathered this from his "Men are from Mars..." book.

You’re thinking of the other John Gray

Haha you're right! I did not know there were two. Pretty sure the Mars author is the better known of the two.

Re: John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'

#74

Post by raxxorrax »

Lio wrote: post #65
koboll wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is bitterly true but also profoundly, maddeningly, horrifically sad. Death is monstrous. We can do better. We have to do better. And it's tragic that we probably will but everyone alive today will probably miss that chance by a sliver. We happened to be born 99% of the way from the beginning of humankind to the end of death, but we just barely missed it.

Even if technology allows the extension of life, death is still inevitable for us all. There is no future in which we will overcome death because we can’t overcome the second law of thermodynamics. That’s a hell of a thing to know and so many people either ignore it or are crushed by it. Whole religions are based around dealing with it. My only advice is don’t live in a dream that technology will save us. Do everythi…

While the second law of thermodynamics might be a problem, I think that it would be a rather low priority. Perhaps we can stop or reverse cell aging but then might face a wave of suicides because people don't want to live with their worsening arthritis anymore.

We should strive for finding eternal life perhaps, but certainly shouldn't expect it. Few want to die, but even fewer want to die in disappointment.

Re: John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'

#75

Post by kortilla »

beams wrote: post #41
tasty_freeze wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love ice cream. But if I had to eat a billion gallons of it, it would lose its appeal. Life is like that too: if we had it in infinite supply, it wouldn't have much value. If I could extend my life by 50 years of good health I might take that offer. If I had to extend it by 500 years, I'm pretty sure I'd decline. If I had to extend it 5000 years I'd certainly say no. 5M years of existence would be torture. When peo…

You say you’d decline 5m years of life. But have you been in love? How would your answer change if he/she was ready to live 5m years with you?

No offense, but long term relationships are a fuck-load of work. You don’t just stay in love with someone indefinitely. People change significantly over 10 years, let alone 100 or 1000.

Being stuck with one person for 5m years is worse than living for 5m years without a guarantee of being with someone the whole time.

Half of marriages end in divorce and only a subset of people who are “in love” get married. HARD PASS

Re: John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'

#76

Post by csomar »

fendy3002 wrote: post #28
BLKNSLVR wrote: post #3

Live life for its own sake. The gift of life is life itself. What's the alternative? Twice in my life I've grasped the concept of death, and it made my heart race with an exhilarating feeling of suffocating claustrophobic for two reasons: 1. It's coming for me one day 2. Not just the lack of agency in the universe, but the lack of even the realisation of the lack of agency. All of this (wide sweeping hand gesture ack…

In buddhism there is the four noble truths, a teaching about living life and facing death. In short, what many people afraid in death (or in life generally) is the fear of losing, either losing their possession, losing their loved ones or how those loved ones will feel when losing you, losing your ability to do your job, etc. In the teaching, if someone is able to overcome that fear (suffering / dissatisfaction), he…

Doesn't Buddhism say you can never day and you'll re-emerge in somebody else's body?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebirth_(Buddhism)

Re: John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'

#77

Post by jacobush »

felipemnoa wrote: post #32
koboll wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is bitterly true but also profoundly, maddeningly, horrifically sad. Death is monstrous. We can do better. We have to do better. And it's tragic that we probably will but everyone alive today will probably miss that chance by a sliver. We happened to be born 99% of the way from the beginning of humankind to the end of death, but we just barely missed it.

>>Death is monstrous. I'll be a contrarian and post this: >>No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, bu…

Also put much longer in the form of the Tolkien books. Elves have non-bound lives but Men got the gift of a bounded lifespan by the creater. The Elves think that is a strange gift, but some come to realise just that, we have a chance to live not someone elses, but our own lives, made precious by its scarcity.

Re: John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'

#78

Post by jacobush »

rawoke083600 wrote: post #58
tasty_freeze wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love ice cream. But if I had to eat a billion gallons of it, it would lose its appeal. Life is like that too: if we had it in infinite supply, it wouldn't have much value. If I could extend my life by 50 years of good health I might take that offer. If I had to extend it by 500 years, I'm pretty sure I'd decline. If I had to extend it 5000 years I'd certainly say no. 5M years of existence would be torture. When peo…

I'am always intrigue by these "range problems / statements" I guess there are no great insight other than most timelines(ranges) are subjective. My S.O is always complaining that we are spending too little time together( I really don't think so). I asked her once, so if we had to spend 23.5 hours together that will be obviously too much, and spending 0.1 hour together will be too little (we could both agree on the ex…

On the face of it, it sounds like you have a great bargaining chip here. For the extra hours you think are "too much", come up with an activity which involves you both, but you immensely enjoy. You might both grow!

Re: John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'

#79

Post by m0zg »

tomgp wrote: post #69
m0zg wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the Long Peace and technological progress put us at the dawn of the Golden Age, and we're living it right now, setbacks like COVID notwithstanding. Steven Pinker puts forward a powerful argument to that effect in "Enlightenment Now", and it's hard to disagree when you look at the data. Literally none of that would be even possible under this philosophical framework.

Yeah John Gray and Steven Pinker exist at opposite ends of the spectrum on this one (eg https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/13/john-gray-stev... ). I think both perspectives are valuable

Except Pinker's perspective is supported by data.

Re: John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'

#80

Post by BiteCode_dev »

csomar wrote: post #76
fendy3002 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In buddhism there is the four noble truths, a teaching about living life and facing death. In short, what many people afraid in death (or in life generally) is the fear of losing, either losing their possession, losing their loved ones or how those loved ones will feel when losing you, losing your ability to do your job, etc. In the teaching, if someone is able to overcome that fear (suffering / dissatisfaction), he…

Doesn't Buddhism say you can never day and you'll re-emerge in somebody else's body? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebirth_(Buddhism)

The purpose of enlightenment is to eventually not re-emerge.
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