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The term “abstract” is used here according to Hegel’s familiar definition of it as the substitution of a part of the whole for the whole, the whole being “concrete.”

Seriousness always has to do with an established script, an ordering of affairs completed somewhere outside the range of our influence. We are playful when we engage others at the level of choice, when there is no telling in advance where our relationship with them will come out—when, in fact, no one has an outcome to be imposed on the relationship, apart from the decision to continue it.

seriousness is a dread of the unpredictable outcome of open possibility.

abstract past, but one’s own personal past. To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.

life is viewed by a finite player as the award to be won,

Evil arises in the honored belief that history can be tidied up, brought to a sensible conclusion.

both adopted and transformed in its adoption. Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition.

A horizon is a phenomenon of vision. One cannot look at the horizon; it is simply the point beyond which we cannot see. There is nothing in the horizon itself, however, that limits vision, for the horizon opens onto all that lies beyond itself. What limits vision is rather the incompleteness of that vision. One never reaches a horizon. It is not a line; it has no place; it encloses no field; its location is always relative to the view. To move toward a horizon is simply to have a new horizon. One can therefore never be close to one’s horizon, though one may certainly have a short range of vision, a narrow horizon.

Do all the right things to precision and “the score will take care of itself” sums

He told me this addressed his concern that most people simply go through the motions at their jobs, just putting in time—existing—with a “business as usual” attitude. Not if you’re on his team.

Standard of Performance. It was a way of doing things, a leadership philosophy that has as much to do with core values, principles, and ideals as with blocking, tackling, and passing; more to do with the mental than with the physical

Regardless of your specific job, it is vital to our team that you do that job at the highest possible level in all its various aspects, both mental and physical (i.e., good talent with bad attitude equals bad talent).

honor the direct connection between details and improvement, and relentlessly seek the latter;

promote internal communication that is both open and substantive

All of this increasingly demonstrated to others and to ourselves that we were on top of things, neither sloppy nor inattentive,

has a transformative effect. Bonding within the organization takes place as one individual and then another steps up and raises his or her level of commitment, sacrifice, and performance. They demand and expect a lot of one another. That’s extremely important because when you know that your peers—the others in the organization—demand and expect a lot out of you and you, in turn, out of them, that’s when the sky’s the limit.

In continually drawing a distinction between understanding and 'mere' knowing, I do not want to understate the importance of recorded, non-explanatory information. This is of course essential to everything from the reproduction of a micro-organism (which has such information in its DNA molecules) to the most abstract human thinking. So what distinguishes understanding from mere  {10}  knowing?

about what must be so, rather than what merely happens to be so;

reductionist. That is to say, science allegedly explains things reductively - by analysing them into components.

The reason why higher-level subjects can be studied at all is that under special circumstances the stupendously complex behaviour of vast numbers of particles resolves itself into a measure of simplicity and comprehensibility. This is called emergence: high-level simplicity 'emerges' from low-level complexity.

more detailed

is only when the discovery is complete that a fairly sequential argument, in a pattern something like Figure 3.3, can be presented. It

Not only is there constant backtracking, but the many sub-problems all remain simultaneously active and are addressed opportunistically. It is only when the discovery is complete that a fairly sequential argument, in a pattern something like Figure 3.3, can be presented.

There is no simple way of discovering the true nature of planets, given (say) a critique of the celestial-sphere theory and some additional observations, just as there is no simple way of designing the DNA of a koala bear, given the properties of eucalyptus trees. Evolution, or trial and error - especially the focused, purposeful form of trial and error called scientific discovery - are the only ways. For this reason, Popper has called his theory that knowledge can grow only by conjecture and refutation, in the manner of Figure 3.3, an evolutionary epistemology.

As I have said, the Inquisition were realists. Yet their theory has this in common with solipsism: both of them draw an arbitrary boundary beyond which, they claim, human reason has no access - or at least, beyond which problem-solving is no path to understanding.

For we are right to seek solutions to problems rather than sources of ultimate justification.

Anyone can search for it, find it and improve upon it if they take the trouble. They do not need authorization, or initiation, or holy texts. They need only be looking in the right way - with fertile problems and promising theories in mind. This open accessibility, not only of evidence but of the whole mechanism of knowledge acquisition, is a key attribute of Galileo's conception of reality.

Thus reality contains not only evidence, but also the means (such as our minds, and our artefacts) of understanding it.

We realists take the view that reality is out there: objective, physical and independent of what we believe about it. But we never experience that reality directly. Every last scrap of our external experience is of virtual reality. And every last scrap of our knowledge - including our knowledge of the non-physical worlds of logic, mathematics and philosophy, and of imagination, fiction, art and fantasy - is encoded in the form of programs for the rendering of those worlds on our brain's own virtual-reality generator.

Not everything that can be copied is a replicator. A replicator causes its environment to copy it: that is, it contributes causally to its own copying.

let us consider explicitly what the role of the user of virtual reality is. First, it is to kick the rendered environment and to be kicked back in return - in other words, to interact with the environment in an autonomous way. In the biological case, that role is performed by the external habitat. Second, it is to provide the intention behind the rendering. That is to say, it makes little sense to speak of a particular situation as being a virtual-reality rendering if there is no concept of the rendering being accurate or inaccurate. I have said that the accuracy of a rendering is the closeness, as perceived by the user, of the rendered environment to the intended one.

The colour of the Sun ten billion years hence depends on gravity and radiation pressure, on convection and nucleosynthesis. It does not depend at all on the geology of Venus, the chemistry of Jupiter, or the pattern of craters on the Moon. But it does depend on what happens to intelligent life on the planet Earth. It depends on politics and economics and the outcomes of wars. It depends on what  {184}  people do: what decisions they make, what problems they solve, what values they adopt, and on how they behave towards their children.

Life achieves its effects not by being larger, more massive or more energetic than other physical processes, but by being more knowledgeable. In terms of its gross effect on the outcomes of physical processes, knowledge is at least as significant as any other physical quantity.

Now consider some mathematical calculation that is intractable on all classical computers, but suppose that a quantum computer can easily perform it using interference between, say, 10500 universes. To make the point more clearly, let the calculation be such that the answer (unlike the result of a factorization) cannot be tractably verified once we have it. The process of programming a quantum computer to perform such a computation, running the program and obtaining a result, constitutes a proof that the mathematical calculation has that particular result. But now there is no way of keeping a record of everything that happened during the proof process, because most of it happened in other universes, and measuring the computational state would alter the interference properties and so invalidate the proof. So creating an old-fashioned proof object would be infeasible; moreover, there is not remotely enough material in the universe as we know it to make such an object, since there would be vastly more steps in the proof than there are atoms in the known universe. This example shows that because of the possibility of quantum computation, the two notions of proof are not equivalent.

‘He thought,’ as Feynman once put it, ‘that he understood paper.’ But he was mistaken. Real, quantum-mechanical paper is wildly different from the abstract stuff that the Turing machine uses. The Turing machine is entirely classical, and does not allow for the possibility that the paper might have different symbols written on it in different universes, and that those might interfere with one another. Of course, it is impractical to detect interference between different states of a paper tape. But the point is that Turing’s intuition, because it included false assumptions from classical physics, caused him to abstract away some of the computational properties of his hypothetical machine, the very properties he intended to keep. That is why

In the multiverse view, the time traveller who visits Shakespeare has not come from the future of that copy of Shakespeare. He can affect, or perhaps replace, the copy he visits. But he can never visit the copy who existed in the universe he started from. And it is that copy who wrote the plays. So the plays had a genuine author, and there are no paradoxical loops of the kind envisaged in the story. Knowledge and adaptation are, even in the presence of pathways to the past, brought into existence only incrementally, by acts of human creativity or biological evolution, and in no other way.

The popularity of positivism and of an instrumentalist view of science was connected with an apathy, loss of self-confidence and pessimism about genuine explanations at a time when the prestige, usefulness and, indeed, funding for fundamental research were all at an all-time high.

for computation, the computer scientist Tomasso Toffoli has remarked that ‘We never perform a computation ourselves, we just hitch a ride on the great Computation that is going on already.’

If, for instance, we want to understand why the world seems comprehensible, the explanation might be that the world is comprehensible. Such an explanation can, and in fact does, fit in with other explanations in other fields. But the theory that the world is half-comprehensible explains nothing and could not possibly fit in with explanations in other fields unless they explained it. It simply restates the problem and introduces an unexplained constant, one-half.

So far I have really only considered what might be called predictive emergence. For example, we believe that the predictions of the theory of evolution follow logically from the laws of physics, even though proving the connection might be computationally intractable. But the explanations in the theory of evolution are not believed to follow from physics at all. However, a non-hierarchical explanatory structure allows for the possibility of explanatory emergence.

The ends of the universe are, as Popper said, for us to choose.

is that intelligence is not only there to control physical events on the largest scale, it is also there to choose what will happen.

whether or not there is an omega point, wherever there is knowledge in the multiverse (complexity across many universes) there must also be the physical traces of the moral and aesthetic reasoning that determined what sort of problems the knowledge-creating entity chose to solve there.

As the samurai realized, virtues are superior to values, but until that understanding becomes widespread, a lot of companies will continue to have values.

A well-designed cultural interview need not be long. Parametric Technology Corporation (PTC) is a computer-aided-design software company with a legendary sales culture. My head of sales at Opsware, culture-changer Mark Cranney, came from PTC and was always bragging about how good they were at selling. I got annoyed and asked why they were so great. He said, “Well, it started with the interview. I walked into the interview with the senior vice president of sales, John McMahon. He said nothing for what seemed like five minutes, then asked me, ‘What would you do if I punched you in the face right now?’” At this point in Mark’s story, I cried, “What!? He wanted to know what you would do if he punched you in the face? That’s crazy. What did you say?” Mark said, “I asked him, ‘Are you testing my intelligence or my courage?’ And McMahon said, ‘Both.’ So I said, ‘Well, you’d better knock me out.‘ He said, ‘You’re hired.’ Right then I knew that I’d found a home.”

‘I hear you and, quite frankly, I agree with you, but I was overruled by the powers that be.‘ This is absolutely toxic to the culture. Everyone on the team will feel marginalized because they work for someone who’s powerless. This makes them one level less than powerless. They have just been demoted from the bottom of the totem pole to the ground beneath it.

The most powerful common denominator of happiness was simple. Campbell summed it up:   Having a strong sense of controlling one’s life is a more dependable predictor of positive feelings of wellbeing than any of the objective conditions of life we have considered.   More than your salary. More than the size of your house. More than the prestige of your job. Control over doing what you want, when you want to, with the people you want to, is the broadest lifestyle variable that makes people happy.

The hardest thing about this was that I loved the work. And I wanted to work hard. But doing something you love on a schedule you can’t control can feel the same as doing something you hate. There is a name for this feeling.

Derek Sivers, a successful entrepreneur, once wrote about a friend who asked him to tell the story about how he got rich:   I had a day job in midtown Manhattan paying $20 k per year—about minimum wage ... I never ate out, and never took a taxi. My cost of living was about $1000/month, and I was earning $1800/month. I did this for two years, and saved up $12,000. I was 22 years old. Once I had $12,000 I could quit my job and become a full-time musician. I knew I could get a few gigs per month to pay my cost of living. So I was free. I quit my job a month later, and never had a job again. When I finished telling my friend this story, he asked for more. I said no, that was it. He said, “No, what about when you sold your company?” I said no, that didn’t make a big difference in my life. That was just more money in the bank. The difference happened when I was 22.

The trick is convincing yourself that the market’s fee is worth it. That’s the only way to properly deal with volatility and uncertainty—not just putting up with it, but realizing that it’s an admission fee worth paying. There’s no guarantee that it will be. Sometimes it rains at Disneyland. But if you view the admission fee as a fine, you’ll never enjoy the magic. Find the price, then pay it.

The ability to create and use explanatory knowledge gives people a power to transform nature which is ultimately not limited by parochial factors, as all other adaptations are, but only by universal laws. This is the cosmic significance of explanatory knowledge – and hence of people, whom I shall henceforward define as entities that can create explanatory knowledge.

the supposed unproblematic state would be a good state to be in. Some theologians have denied this, and I agree with them: an unproblematic state is a state without creative thought. Its other name is death.

Apart from the thoughts of people, the only process known to be capable of creating knowledge is biological evolution.

they were slightly altered they would serve it less well, or not at all. A

scientist’s discoveries. And it really is creation. Before a discovery is made, no predictive process could reveal the content or the consequences of that discovery.

Thus there is a class of high-level phenomena – including the liquidity of water and the relationship between containers, heating elements, boiling and bubbles – that can be well explained in terms of each other alone, with no direct reference to anything at the atomic level or below. In other words, the behaviour of that whole class of high-level phenomena is quasi-autonomous – almost self-contained. This resolution into explicability at a higher, quasi-autonomous level is known as emergence.

In an evolving species, the adaptations of the organisms in each generation must have enough functionality to keep the organism alive, and to pass all the tests that they encounter in propagating themselves to the next generation.

Because of the necessity for error-correction, all jumps to universality occur in digital systems.

One of them is that, if unlimited progress really is going to happen, not only are we now at almost the very beginning of it, we always shall be.

No good explanation can predict the outcome, or the probability of an outcome, of a phenomenon whose course is going to be significantly affected by the creation of new knowledge. This is a fundamental limitation on the reach of scientific prediction, and, when planning for the future, it is vital to come to terms with it. Following Popper, I shall use the term prediction for conclusions about future events that follow from good explanations, and prophecy for anything that purports to know what is not yet knowable.

Neither Malthus nor Rees intended to prophesy. They were warning that unless we solve certain problems in time, we are doomed. But that has always been true, and always will be. Problems are inevitable.

The Principle of Optimism All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge.

Suppose they just happen to be aware of the explanation of something. You and I would say that they know it. But to them, no matter how good an explanation it is, and no matter how true and important and useful it may be, they still do not consider it to be knowledge. It is only if a god then comes along and reassures them that it is true (or if they imagine such a god or other authority) that they count it as knowledge. So, to them it does count as a revelation if the authority tells them what they are already fully aware of.

‘configurational’ entities: they are states or configurations of objects, not what we usually think of as physical objects in their own right.

A stratum, like a history, has no separate existence over and above the objects in it: it consists of them.

creating a good explanation is hard not because of what anyone has decided, but because there is an objective reality that does not meet anyone’s prior expectations, including those of authorities. The creators of bad explanations such as myths are indeed just making things up. But the method of seeking good explanations creates an engagement with reality, not only in science, but in good philosophy too – which is why it works, and why it is the antithesis of concocting stories to meet made-up criteria.

Another misconception to which the idea of decision-making by weighing sometimes leads is that problems can be solved by weighing – in particular, that disputes between advocates of rival explanations can be resolved by creating a weighted average of their proposals. But the fact is that a good explanation, being hard to vary at all without losing its explanatory power, is hard to mix with a rival explanation: something halfway between them is usually worse than either of them separately. Mixing two explanations to create a better explanation requires an additional act of creativity. That is why good explanations are discrete – separated from each other by bad explanations – and why, when choosing between explanations, we are faced with discrete options.

Choice that involves creating new options rather than weighing existing ones.

It is a mistake to conceive of choice and decision-making as a process of selecting from existing options according to a fixed formula. That omits the most important element of decision-making, namely the creation of new options.

in a dynamic society, scientific and technological innovations are generally made creatively. That is to say, they emerge from individual minds as novel ideas,

when evolution takes place largely within an individual mind, it is not meme evolution. It is creativity by a heroic inventor.

Meme evolution took place, and, like all evolution, this was always in the direction of greater faithfulness. This meant becoming ever more anti-rational. At some point, meme evolution achieved static societies – presumably they were tribes. Consequently, all those increases in creativity never produced streams of innovations. Innovation remained imperceptibly slow, even as the capacity for it was increasing rapidly.

Perhaps a more practical way of stressing the same truth would be to frame the growth of knowledge (all knowledge, not only scientific) as a continual transition from problems to better problems, rather than from problems to solutions or from theories to better theories.

Horgan wrote that he had originally believed science to be ‘open-ended, even infinite’. But he became convinced of the contrary by (what I would call) a series of misconceptions and bad arguments. His basic misconception was empiricism. He believed that what distinguishes science from unscientific fields such as literary criticism, philosophy or art is that science has the ability to ‘resolve questions’ objectively (by comparing theories with reality), while other fields can produce only multiple, mutually incompatible interpretations of any issue. He was mistaken in both respects. As I have explained throughout this book, there is objective truth to be found in all those fields, while

So, technology is the set of things, as Alan Kay said, that don’t quite work yet [correction: Danny Hillis]. Once something works, it’s no longer technology.

Wealth creation is an evolutionarily recent positive-sum game. Status is an old zero-sum game. Those attacking wealth creation are often just seeking status.

Today, I believe happiness is really a default state. Happiness is there when you remove the sense of something missing in your life.

You’re born, you have a whole set of sensory experiences and stimulations (lights, colors, and sounds), and then you die.

We crave experiences that will make us be present, but the cravings themselves take us from the present moment.

Doctors won’t make you healthy. Nutritionists won’t make you slim. Teachers won’t make you smart. Gurus won’t make you calm. Mentors won’t make you rich. Trainers won’t make you fit. Ultimately, you have to take responsibility. Save yourself.

See Rock climbing and the beginner’s mind. https://blog.felixzieger.de/climbing-and-being-fully-awake/

Fascinating read about the history of New York's most influential Mafia organization. I wrote about it on my blog https://blog.felixzieger.de/mafia-strategy/

This was the best book I read in 2022. It had a lasting impact on my day-to-day life. Fears are telling me what I value. I am not my thoughts. Some thought patterns, doubts, anxieties are just part of who I am and my journey - I can struggle or accept that they are with me on the ride. Life is not a problem to be solved. Thinking is not always the right tool for the job.