Tag Archives: life

Stairway to Heaven: Forty Years Later

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As most people do, I spend my life in a busy pursuit of this or that goal. I enjoy the hell out of every day. But in the busyness of it all it’s easy to forget that life comes to an end pretty quickly. It’s very human to be consumed with thoughts of own mortality, and it’s also very human to completely ignore such thoughts instead preferring the comfort of an aimless conversation.

Anyway, the following performance of Stairway to Heaven by Heart in front of the band that wrote it, 40 years earlier reminded me of just how quick life goes by. There’s something very relatable about the image of Robert Plant looking over the greatest creation of his life with a mix of pride and sadness…

By the way, I don’t know if there is anything harder than performing the greatest rock song of all time in front of the people who wrote it. Ann Wilson did it perfectly.

Let It Go: The Incentive to Resolve Conflict

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In academia, in politics, in life, I often see two intelligent adults build a rift over a disagreement (large or small), fail to resolve it, and continue for the rest of their life with the rift in place.

It’s ego. It’s human nature. But it makes life more difficult. My advice (to myself and others) is to always let it go no matter what. Linger in the muck of anger for a few days, take a few naps, and then patch up the damaged relationship in whatever way that it will no longer be an anchor on your mind. The weight of conflict can take away the freedom to enjoy this short life and to form meaningful friendships along the way.

In politics, shallow bickering seems to be the modus operandi. Somehow it has become a commonly accepted notion that conflict helps win elections. Showing what someone else did badly is more effective than showing what you did well. Perhaps that might be the case in politics, but I still hold out hope for the personal interactions of regular human beings. There are very few conflicts I can imagine that cannot be resolved through a little swallowing of pride. It might hurt for a day, a week, a month, but it will make life more enjoyable, more productive, and more meaningful in the long term (years, decades).

I’m often reminded of the Borat clock radio “great success”:

There will always be someone with a clock radio that you can’t afford. Let it go.

Time Scale and Spatial Scale Is Important in Defining Life and Intelligence

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Main point: Defining “life” and “intelligence” becomes that much more difficult when you consider the possibility of an organism operating on a different scale of time and space than those “living” on Earth.

In 1995, the first planet (51 Pegasi b) orbiting another sun was discovered. Ever since then, the idea of life (even intelligent life) being a widespread phenomena in the universe became real in the minds of many astrophysicists and scientists in general. The 1961 Drake equation got a little empirical boost, and the imagination of the public was off and running.

Once you open your mind to the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe, the next question is: what does it look like? How do we identify an object as “living” when we see it? And once we say it’s a living thing, how do we know if it’s “intelligent”?

As I was walking home yesterday, it occurred to me (as it must’ve occured to a lot of people seeking a definition of life) that when we intuitively think of what is a living thing we think of objects operating on a time scale similar to our own life. So, in defining whether that thing is intelligent, we consider whether it can “reason, plan, solve problems, think abstractly, comprehend complex ideas, learn quickly and learn from experience” (Gottfredson 1994) on the time scale of a human life.

So here is a question… are plants intelligent? At first the intuitive answer is no. But what if we normalize the changes that “happen” to plants to be on the same time scale as our own, then the gradual adaptations of plants would seem no different than our own physical movements in response to the external environment.

Even more radically, here’s another questions… is a planet a living organism? Let’s again normalize a planet such as Earth in size and time to be similar to the size of human beings and the time scale of our daily life. Could we then classify a planet as a living thing? Under the common biological definition, one of the things missing is the ability to reproduce. But is it really missing? In a certain kind of way, human beings are the cells of this organism. These cells are the carriers of information in the same way that DNA is.   So perhaps a planet can indeed reproduce, luckily without the commitment-laden intimacy of sexual intercourse, by the colonization of other planets.

I don’t like writing long blog posts, because the main point can too easily be drowned in the rambling chaos of poorly formed ideas. In fact, often, a long blog post is an indication that there is no main point. Well, let me just end it by saying that our understanding of life and intelligence is limited by the way our brain has evolved to effectively deal with the environment around it.

It’s Only Rock ‘n Roll (But I Like It)

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I finally got around to finishing Keith Richard’s autobiography Life, whose title joins the likes of Bill Clinton’s “My Life” and Ricky Martin’s “Me” to be the most unimaginative and egotistical titles for an autobiography.

That said, I thoroughly enjoyed this book, at least the first half (the part that talked about Keith’s childhood, his love of music, and the obsessive pursuit of the creative process).

I usually read much heavier books, but given that I’ve just gone through a chain of books about war, it was time to read something less taxing on my ability to fall asleep.

Despite what you might imagine, this is not a book about a life of sex and drugs. It’s a book about a blues musician who loves, or rather is obsessed with, making music. In a way, it serves as an entertaining example of what it takes to be great at what you do and to be happy while doing it.

Digame, Mi Amor

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“Speak to me, my love” is what a waitress in Cuba says to Dr. Paul Farmer after he calls her over to make his order. This story is from the nonfiction book Mountains Beyond Mountains. Farmer’s primary battle against infectious disease is in Haiti, but he visits Cuba and describes the state of the health care system there. However, what caught my eye was the “Digame, mi amor” or “Speak to me, my love” that a woman says to him so naturally in passing at a restaurant. He laughs and tells Tracy Kidder (the author of the book), “You have to love a country where people do that”.

It reminded me of the people I knew when I was growing up in Russia, and the people I met in Italy and Scotland, and the many “foreigners” I met in my university studies. The cultures are different, that’s obvious, but what’s also different is the view on what matters in life and more broadly what life is. That sounds a bit too philosophical / romanticized, and I have trouble explaining exactly what I mean, what makes a poor person from Russia or Israel or South Africa somehow more appreciative of life in an existential sense (in my limited but real experience). The people I met seem to have more suffering (or maybe peaceful melancholy) in their eyes. Perhaps struggle breeds introspection. They tend to have a view of life that to me has always seemed more honest that the one I encounter for many red-blooded Americans. In U.S., materialism has taken over our psyche to the point that would disappoint the vision of Nietzsche, Camus, and even Kerouac for a good society.

I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m criticizing my fellow countrymen. I only mean constructive criticism, and mostly of myself.

Closing with a letter to Jack Kerouac from Neal Cassady seems appropriate.