Still, people age very differently. Some octogenarians are completing triathlons. Medicine also seems likely to increase longevity.
Think of the many who through their 80s were cogent, even masterful. Examples include Warren Buffett, John Searle, Hubert Dreyfus, George Soros, Henry Kissinger, Clint Eastwood, and with women it’s probably even more common, and we can look to Nancy Pelosi, or indeed my own grandmother. Whatever memory slowdown there may be is compensated for by depth of experience.
Then there are those who lose it in their sixties.
In many ways it seems that ageism is one of the last acceptable prejudices.
In Biden’s case, I was struck by the difference in him before and after his son Beau’s death. It seemed like he never recovered. Charisma gone. Eyes turned beady and body stiff. Despite that he was an active and successful president (should be admitted no matter one’s politics), though unpopular.
Yea people do. Some of the more recent interviews with Jimmy Carter is a good example. Recent as in pre his wife passing away. I havn't seen any interviews of him since then, so I am not sure if he is declining. It is often that in a long marriage, when one partner dies, the others start slipping. But the ones before, he was in his upper 90s and outside of the fact that me may not move particularly fast, he was (still is?) still sharp as a whip.
Funny, I've been using even primitive text-to-speech on PDFs for years and while nothing compares to an excellent human reader, I find TTS often better than a mediocre human reading. This is mainly because I don't get upset at (and then have to forgive) a machine when it says the "Loovree" instead of the Louvre or in an economic history book pronounces "Keens" for John Maynard Keynes (sound like "Kaynes"). Also the dead neutrality of a machine's reading can jar me less than a numbskull and/or phony human rendition. I must say though that excellent voice actors are to me heaven.
On Mac with a pdf I just select say a chapter and let it read. Footnotes can be a problem. I usually use iOS now and I wrote PDF before but realize I use .epub files mostly. You can set up iOS to read entire pages. I use the local iOS Books app and have it so a two-finger swipe from the top of a page starts reading. It will usually turn pages by itself but can be a bit janky. I choose a good quality voice and have spent ten or twenty minutes rigging it up in Settings.
Memories deceive; it happens to me and I'm guessing to everyone. Odd that Aristophanes would have written a comedy about this character whom Plato would only invent years later, and so also that Xenophon, a student of Socrates like Plato, also wrote about him. Indeed Socrates lived and breathed just like you and I do; he drank water and wine and took dumps in the morning, and especially asked questions. But your memory was correct in the sense that we can't know how similar Plato's Socrates as written in the dialogues was to the real man, and often in the middle and later works it becomes clear that Plato's Socrates has become almost entirely a mouthpiece for Plato's own ideas. In that sense, Plato's Socrates, especially after the early dialogues, was a indeed fictitious rendering of a real man. Most of the named characters in Plato were (largely fictitious?) renderings of real people.
Personally, I like to remind myself of the fact -- kind of meditate on it to get it into me -- that the long gone people of distant eras were indeed just as real then as you and I are now. Of course we know this consciously but I find it's easy to neglect and stop feeling. Ancient Egyptians or Song Dynasty Chinese or even 5th and 4th century BCE Athenians become flat just-so stories, and when that happens I lose touch of the deep and pregnant mystery that lives in the gulf between historical record, popular imagination, and whatever it was that the people of the past actually experienced, however they actually thought and related. When I (authentically) reconnect with that mysterious reality it lights up a sense of awe in me, and reconditions and renews my relationship with the present, myself and others. I guess, as Plato said, philosophy begins in wonder.
From Theodore Alois Buckley's introduction to Alexander Pope's translation of The Iliad:
"When we have read Plato or Xenophon, we think we know something of Socrates; when we have fairly read and examined both, we feel convinced that we are something worse than ignorant."
I’ve read of a credible person who says they use breathwork of some kind to help enter a state of flow. Does anyone here know if this sounds right? If so, how would one learn? Books? Courses? Coaches? Also, knowing nothing about it I’d assumed the breathwork would be like mindfulness or meditative breathing, but is this wrong? It might be something closer to hyperventilating?
The article mentioned Holotropic Breathwork, which is a method Stanislav Grof came up with after no longer being able to use LSD for his research in the 1960s. I haven't taken a course in it, but it does seem similar to Wim Hof's technique, which you can follow along an intro of on his YouTube [1].
All of it is pretty similar to various pranayama techniques that have existed in the yogas for thousands of years though. Iyengar's Light on Pranayama is a good resource for the various practices [2]. While Wim Hof and Holotropic Breathwork are slightly different, the closest to them from the yogas would maybe be bhastrika pranayam (and here's a random guy on YouTube that comes up when googling it -- just skimming it and it looks basically like what I was taught [3]).
Edit: I realized I didn't answer your question regarding how pranayama/breathwork compares to meditation. It's different than meditation (dhyana or jhana), but it's complimentary and there are elements that are similar. For instance, during pranayama practice you'll often have breath holds/retentions and during that time you'll be instructed to bring your awareness to something (a point on your body, on the awareness itself, etc). This is generally what you'd do in formal meditation practice too, but in this case it's for a much shorter period of time (the length of the breath hold). So in a way it gets you used to working with your awareness, to bring it internal for short periods of time many times. Many people will practice pranayama before beginning formal seated meditation practice. I personally use nadi shodhana before meditation practice, and more vigorous pranayamas like kapalbhati and bhastrika before/during/after asana practice. They're also good to do in the middle of the day when you need a bit of a reset.
Oh wow, how to answer succinctly -- it's been a long, meandering path! I'll try my best. While I'd say I first learned about meditation from my music practice as a child, my first formal introduction to meditation was through Thanissaro Bhikkhu [1] who a few of my friends practiced with in college (and later ordained as monks with). I later came to Mahayana Buddhism through Suzuki [2] and Thich Nhat Hanh [3], and then settled into a Vajrayana practice -- I'd suggest Mingyur Rinpoche's Joy of Living course for an intro to Vajrayana [4].
For yoga practice I happened to one day wander into the closest yoga studio to my house here in Brooklyn, which coincidentally happened to be one of the best yoga schools in the city at the time. The owner [5] was exceptionally challenging, all his teachers were the best around, and he really pushed everyone to expand their limits, it was a great environment to learn in. I was going at least 5x per week for a few years. It can be hard to find a yoga school, as most these days are just gym classes, and very few are going to teach pranayama, kriyas, meditation, etc. If I'm in a new place and am looking for a shala to practice in I'll typically choose the place that has Ashtanga/Mysore on the schedule, as it's likely that the owners/teachers aren't just interested in yoga as exercise. I'd really suggest finding a master teacher/s to practice with in real life, there's nothing like it. You'll know it when you find it.
I also read pretty obsessively when I started my yoga practice, some of which I'll leave below [6][7][8][9][10][11]. If you start practicing you'll find the sutras and other texts that speak to you as well, just put in the work and stay curious and open! Happy to answer any questions.
I very much appreciate your comment, and at the same time am interested to challenge this idea of "the illusion of music". What about music is an illusion? Maybe this was just an unfortunate phrasing, and yet it might touch on the heart of the matter. Music is a language of relationships, indeed it is nothing but relationships, in time, pitch, timbre, volume, voice, number and so on, non-symbolic and changing relationships of sound carrying aesthetic and emotional feeling and meaning. It is both objective and subjective -- objective in the sense that "4 + 4 = 8" is an undeniably more beautiful statement than "4 + 4 = 6", and subjective in the sense that you and I may have different favorite numbers and also we may react differently to various medications or prefer different foods. Music is external and internal, social and individual. What it is not ever is an illusion as then it would not exist. (It may express illusion, or become more like a creator of illusions, for example when the orchestra tries to conjure up the illusion of a thunder storm.) Now, one might be tempted to counter that the kind of "meaning" music carries is itself an illusion, an epiphenomenon maybe, but then why should one care about anything at all, including AGI, since the kind of meaning that music carries is the same as the meaning of love, of hate, of good and bad, pains and pleasures, and hopes and regrets, tragedies and successes?
Maybe a reason for calling music an illusion is to try to point out that it's all in our heads. Sure, the physical instruments are over there, but they are just some atoms and molecules rattling about creating vibrations that, like everything ultimately, share the meaninglessness of the physical universe of just more material stuff (ignoring the quantum and the unknown). In which case though life seems also to look more like an illusion. Ah but the meaningless vibrations enter our ears and are processed and become music, so like color there is none but in our heads, thus illusion? But these notions also fall apart. The redness of apples isn't all in our heads; it requires a certain relationship to light frequencies that we see as redness. It's not an illusion it's just what red looks like through a living human body. If not through our senses and brain, and then mind, where should we experience it?
Music is only ever meaningless if it is unheard, as apples can only not be red when they are unseen (or are Granny Smiths).
So music is only meaningless if there is nobody -- no body -- to listen. And maybe that's where all of this leads. Your AGI needs to be embodied and alive.
My use of illusion was not intended to diminish the significance of music. To the contrary, I meant to distinguish it as an exceptional perceptual phenomenon which reveals important aspects of the inner workings of human experience.
Somehow, the physical situations of our bodies become perceptual experiences. Usually, those perceptions are mere descriptions of the physical world, for physically navigating it. Some exceptions exist, such as music and optical illusions. The translation from air pressure fluctuations to a tree branch falling is one type of experience, the link to love or hope is another. Rather than being insignificant, my sense is that music understanding will prove to be an emergent capability available in whatever architecture might produce humanlike AGI, because it connects human perception and cognition too thoroughly to not be baked-in. Going further, building models to understand music would be an excellent step toward embodied AI with humanlike cognition.
This is something I've been thinking about the last 3-4 years and desperately what I am trying to do.
I have what I think some interesting ideas and implementations, but no one quite grasps my thought process and I am stuck between believing Im onto something and that I am furiously chasing nothing.
My experience in pursuing this is that I applied to about a dozen on-campus CS grad programs, over the course of two years, noting this research direction, but those applications were all rejected. You would think with the emergence of generative AI that there could be some interest. I suspect the application was of interest, but that universities have a shortage of experts in generative AI, and that a multidisciplinary project like this might be misunderstood within a CS department or would have to be accepted by a very specific advisor who may not exist. The best chance might be to convince investors to help assemble the right team and to provide a viable R&D budget.
Oh wow thats nuts. Did you end up attending grad school for something else? Ive been thinking about applying but I haven't even able to find any departments that do research in this area. There is a huge craze around ML as its producing tangible results and it seems the school of thought is that anything else is wasted time.
The closest thing Ive found to my own is Wolframs writings.
Seriously I know I seem like a delusional nut but this train of thought has really grabbed me. Ive written hundreds of pages of (mostly intelligible) notes/figures and spend countless nights trying to implement what I can so clearly see in my head.
Unfortunately I dont have anything concrete yet that would warrant building a team, and its hard to even find people I can discuss my ideas with.
I think there ought to be interest in this area in mathematics, philosophy or even linguists though.
One of my favorite laptops ever was a later gen 11" MacBook Air. Fit into the smallest bags. Flipped open and working instantly anywhere. Sturdy, always on me, fantastic for writing and even coding. I just had to get good at switching desktops and apps with hotkeys and trimming down chrome. Traded screen space for physical space. The city became my office.
