John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'
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Re: John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'
#2>and it takes a long time, because they’re slow to trust, slow to really enter into communication with you – then you can probably imagine how they might philosophise.”
>Gray believes that humans turned to philosophy principally out of anxiety, looking for some tranquillity in a chaotic and frightening world, telling themselves stories that might provide the illusion of calm. Cats, he suggests, wouldn’t recognise that need because they naturally revert to equilibrium whenever they’re not hungry or threatened. If cats were to give advice, it would be for their own amusement.
Reminds me of
Re: John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'
#3Live 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 acknowledging "everything") is not just out of my hands but out of my awareness. Because I no longer exist. I no longer exist.
Life is preferable to the alternative because it's at least something. A chance to experience.
Re: John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'
#4>and it takes a long time, because they’re slow to trust, slow to really enter into communication with you – then you can probably imagine how they might philosophise.” >Gray believes that humans turned to philosophy principally out of anxiety, looking for some tranquillity in a chaotic and frightening world, telling themselves stories that might provide the illusion of calm. Cats, he suggests, wouldn’t recognise tha…
I was 1:50 into that before I figured out how the British accents fit into the joke on this Key and Peele skit.
Re: John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'
#5Live 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…
Reminds me of an experience where, my brain fully convinced itself for around 4 hours (felt much longer ofc) that I was an outdated Azure "SmartCodeCreator"[1] instance being deallocated for upgrades... it's a strange experience to embrace death. I haven't been the same since.
[1] I had no name for it at the time, but that's the gist of it
Re: John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'
#6Live 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…
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.
Re: John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'
#7There are as many ways to live, as many meanings to life, as many philosophies of the nature of things as there are beings in the universe. There's really nothing much to learn, because there are endless things to learn.
One of my favorite comments on Hacker News was posted a few days ago. To quote:
"On and on you will go, making sense of the world, forming notions of order, and being surprised in ways large and small by their failure, forever." — Albert Burneko on Wile E. Coyote: https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/how-wile-e-coyote-explains...
Re: John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'
#8Live 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…
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.
How did you come alive. Did it really happen, and how come it never will happen?
Re: John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'
#9Live 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…
Where is there to go from non-existence but back into Life?
Re: John Gray: 'What can we learn from cats? Don't live in an imagined future'
#10Live 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…
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.
We may be close to being able to extend human life. Ending death entirely seems a bit less plausible; even a person who doesn't age can still die by accident, and I'm not sure how the probability of any person experiencing such a random accident can ever drop to zero.
My optimistic view is to look at self-awareness as a very surprising thing that doesn't make any sense. As far as we know from biology, I should be basically a biological robot that can use its brain to solve problems but without any real sensation, just reaction to stimuli. If self-awareness isn't an emergent property of complex biological machinery, maybe it isn't entirely dependent on it either. I can't imagine how self-awareness would work without a body or a brain to connect to it as an interface, but perhaps there's more to souls than is apparent and maybe those do last forever in some form.