Conversations with my father...

[wolven7]

Autechre - [Maetl]--- Pratchett was right: You can most certainly inherit non-genetic traits...

Nature and nuture, aren't fighting. They're in a tag-team match against your psyche and your emotions.

Just so you know.

Comments

[auriam.livejournal.com]

I hear that. I wonder how it's possible that emotionally negative memes and ideas get so readily transmitted between generations. I think it comes from way, way back, before history.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Negative and positive, as well. I think it's mostly about how you use it, refusing to let it use you.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

I don't know if there's a "me" to "use" anything. All we are is our genes, plus our environment... the past dictates the present, whether we can predict what happens or not, it's really out of our hands. Free will being an illusion and all that...

But I suppose if there's any kind of a self, it at least appears to have a choice. I wonder why it chooses incorrectly so much of the time. Probably negative programming, again. Which makes me wonder how negative programming comes to be. Probably just the same kind of random chance evolution works with. I suppose when it gets bad enough, the unfortunate specimen fails to reproduce, and then it's weeded out.

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Knowledge of random chance, and the ability act upon it... Hm.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

Yes, but we can never know if our actions will actually result in what we want... we try so hard to make the future "better" than the present, and the present slips away. I'm not sure whether trying to change things makes them better overall, or worse. I'm not even sure we *should* change things, even if we think we don't like the way they are now, except in that changing them gives us some sense of control over things, even if the overall outcome is beyond our prediction and control, anyway...

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Future dictated by the past, random chance, knowledge of change and potential. We take our best shot, because, if we don't, we waste the chance.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

It's all about figuring out what balance of thinking, planning, action, and enjoyment to allow... depending on what you want most - enjoyment, achievement, money, etc...

[auriam.livejournal.com]

...and I have no idea where the balance lies. But I'm working on it...

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Good luck.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

Thanks... I'm currently looking at Buddhism's "middle way" as being one way to look at "balanced living." Extremes, I'm thinking, can lead to fame and fortune and/or pain and misery... but the right kind of moderation might be able to help one find the right kind of life to maximize enjoyment and meaning.

I just wish it were easier to compare lives objectively, because there's no way of knowing whether what works for some other person will work for me without trying it... and there's only so much time to try so many different things... but I guess I gotta try *something*.

Self-determining organism

[raidingparty.livejournal.com]

You're the most important arbiter of what 'success' really means.

Ready, fire, aim.

Re: Self-determining organism

[auriam.livejournal.com]

Thanks for the boost. I'm trying to accept that. It's just so easy to get caught up in the media's, the culture's, representation of "success" as "fame, wealth, achievements, awards, social reputation, approval." But I can't reconcile that with enjoying life - if all I'm doing is what others want me to do, just for their respect and approval, then I'm not in control of my own life. Whether or not there's any kind of real control, at the fundamental physics level, I'm starting to see, is kind of irrelevant... I seem to have desires and wants, and second-guessing all the time because they *might* not be what others want or approve of is just self-defeating, and makes me miserable...

"Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get."
-Dale Carnegie

"Show me a totally self-satisfied man, and I will show you a failure."
-Thomas Edison (was he really happy, or was he trying to become famous and achieve "success"?)

[wolven.livejournal.com]

Good way to look at it.

[auriam.livejournal.com]

Again, I gotta put the right thoughts into the right actions, or it's all just words. ;)