Can we gain a SYNTHESIS of our many views on happiness and Mankind?
“John Godfrey Saxe’s poem ‘The Blind Men and the Elephant’ retells the famous parable, using humor and rhyme to explore the nature of subjective truth and limited perspective… The poem presents six blind men, each encountering a different part of an elephant and forming wildly different conclusions—likening it to a wall, spear, snake, tree, fan, or rope.
While each man perceives part of the truth, their inability to see the whole picture leads to flawed conclusions.”
https://www.familyfriendpoems.com/poem/the-blind-men-and-the-elephant-by-john-godfrey-saxe#:~:text=John%20Godfrey%20Saxe%E2%80%99s%20poem%20%22The%20Blind%20Men%20and,the%20nature%20of%20subjective%20truth%20and%20limited%20perspective.
We may want to look at our BIG PICTURE?
This was Aldous Huxley’s view of the Big Picture:
The two most important things in life are INTELLIGENCE and GOODWILL (my paraphrase):
Video title: “Aldous Huxley”
(1962 interview with Aldous Huxley”)
As a “writer-philosopher-photographer-traveler”, I have seen many a way of life, and many levels of financial affluence. My mother is a war refugee from the eastern-most part of Poland.
As such, I have gravitated more and more toward a great appreciation of the benefits of melding the ideas of the West and the East…
My one hundred “sessions” at Shambhala Meditation Center, as well as visits to two monasteries and more, bring me greater happiness these days…
Here we see the ideas of Huxley, again, in a discussion with Alan Watts, a Zen Buddhist…
Video: “Aldous Huxley – On Mysticism, religion, zen”
“Speaking personally…” 1961 recording of Aldous Huxley [with Alan Watts] in London 1961″
This blog seeks to expand
our views of
What MAKES US MOST HAPPY,
as members of MANKIND,
using my fifteen years
with SuperMemo,
a computer software program
for maximizing our learning.
The creator of this software,
a Polish computer scientist,
Piotr Wozniak
once told me, fifteen years ago,
I may have used this software
to an EXTRAORDINARY LEVEL
(paraphrased from our emails)
Several years ago,
I wrote a book on my experiences
with the software…
From the description section of the video:
“Several studies show that Active Recall and Spaced Repetition strongly improve your retention of a certain topic. You may know what spaced repetition is, it’ s been explained by several large youtubers such as “Thomas Frank, Ali Abdaal, Med School Insiders”. It allows you to remember information for a lifetime by spacing your reviews of the topic and hence allow you to have enhanced recall for a longer amount of time. This graph shows how it works. Every recall the rate at which you forget reduces and hence allows you to remember these for a lifetime. Active recall is simply trying to remember the information without having it in front of you.
Supermemo’s creator Dr. Piotr Wozniak, was the first person to develop an algorithm to create the spacing effect, he has pioneering research in the field of memory that is extraordinarily effective. The software allows you to incrementally review hundreds of texts, audio files and videos while making extracts from them regarding what you want to be shown next. The software organises everything for you and shows you all the texts in a manner so that you have time to work through all of them and remember the content of all of them. It lets you break down each idea into its smaller and finer details while still retaining the big picture and do this for thousands of sources.”
This Wired magazine article sheds more light on the software and its creator:
“Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm”
https://www.wired.com/2008/04/ff-wozniak/
“SuperMemo is based on the insight that there is an ideal moment to practice what you’ve learned. Practice too soon and you waste your time. Practice too late and you’ve forgotten the material and have to relearn it. The right time to practice is just at the moment you’re about to forget. Unfortunately, this moment is different for every person and each bit of information. Imagine a pile of thousands of flash cards. Somewhere in this pile are the ones you should be practicing right now. Which are they?…
Twenty years ago, Wozniak realized that computers could easily calculate the moment of forgetting if he could discover the right algorithm. SuperMemo is the result of his research. It predicts the future state of a person’s memory and schedules information reviews at the optimal time. The effect is striking. Users can seal huge quantities of vocabulary into their brains. But for Wozniak, 46, helping people learn a foreign language fast is just the tiniest part of his goal.
As we plan the days, weeks, even years of our lives, he would have us rely not merely on our traditional sources of self-knowledge — introspection, intuition, and conscious thought — but also on something new: predictions about ourselves encoded in machines.”
For more:
“The Appalachians’ Most Charming Mountain Town Is A True Hidden Gem With An Artsy Vibe”…
https://www.thetravel.com/berea-kentucky-true-hidden-gem-with-an-artsy-vibe/
“Berea’s location at the edge of the Cumberland Plateau gives it a scenic, elevated feel, perfect for a mountain town known as the gateway to Appalachia. With a strong identity tied to both its natural landscape and cultural heritage, Berea is as charming as it is unique. It’s also home to Berea College, a progressive institution founded in 1855 that was the first interracial and coeducational college in the South. Today, the college continues to shape the town’s forward-thinking spirit while preserving Appalachian traditions.
What truly sets Berea apart, though, is its artisan community….”
Many thanks to Berea College, where I studied only Mathematics for four years, renting a duplex unit from an Eastern Kentuckian man and his West Virginian wife.
Many thanks, also, to the people of North Carolina, where I lived for part of my childhood, and Minnesota, too.
The folk singer, Bob Dylan, was born in Duluth, Minnesota. His paternal grandparents were from Odessa, Ukraine, and his maternal grandparents were from Lithuania.
In 2016, he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
If only his greatest talents rubbed off on this blog creator…
Still, we all are doing the best we can, and in a sense we thus all are “perfect”, is my philosophy…
The Power of Music: My Night With a Brilliant Gardener for the City of Munich Followed by Beers with the Jefferson Starship Band”, by Loran Joly [this blog-writer]…
https://a.co/d/4Sy7pYF
Here we see more:
“The link between music, maths and physics is a fundamental of the way music is produced, and the way in the west we like to hear music. It is a combination of science and preference.”
https://bob-dylan.org.uk/archives/
“The guitarist Bob Dylan called a “mathematical genius”:
https://faroutmagazine.co.uk/bob-dylan-mathematical-genius/
A tribute to my family, finally, including my mother and her father – I grew up on his farm in summertimes – both, Mennonites.
Similar in ways, to the Amish.
An image I made, two years ago, attending one of three Amish auctions over the years:
