Zen and the Art of EQ
Apr. 19th, 2015 10:12 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
trickykittyI listened through Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance over the past few weeks as my first official audio book for my work commute. I had no idea how deeply interdisciplinarian, philosophical, and overall interesting that book is. I wish I'd read it back in high school, back during the time I was knee deep reading Heinlein, Dostoyevsky, and Nietzsche. I think the book would have quickly and easily prompted me to read some other philosophers which I still have not read as well as finally delve more into the Greek philosophers. Granted, I probably would have found the Greek philosophers overall annoying, but I would at least have a better working knowledge of their fundamental stances over what I have now, which is only that I recognize their names. I now have a brief summary of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle from what was given in the book at least.
My favorite line from the book: "And then to get hit, right off, straight in the face, with an asshole statement like that!"
I don't believe the statement in question could have been called anything better. It's also a favorite line because it sums up so neatly and precisely how I sometimes feel about things that really go against the grain of living, or as Phaedrus in the book describes it, things that go against overall quality.
Funny enough, I was able to combine the description of boredom in the book with Alan Watts' description of boredom to talk with Mom last night about Little Bit always getting bored when his older brother doesn't want to play with him.
I have so many thoughts that have come up from "reading" this book. One in particular has stuck itself in my brain regarding pattern recognition, but it's a bit of a seed right now, so my brain is working on turning it over until it grows into adulthood before I actually will work on writing it out completely. I've at least written down the elements of the seed so I don't forget.
Lolotehe linked an article regarding emotional intelligence to me. I'm not even 1/5th of the way into it, but my brain is already trying to make connections.
In the book, Phaedrus works with his students to teach them that they are aware of what quality is even though they can't put it into words or define it. They can judge the papers of each other as having good quality or bad quality, or simply put, being good or bad. In another respect, the good quality papers can be said to have heart and soul, and the bad papers are dull and lacking soul.
The bad papers are boring.
Boredom is defined as a gumption trap in the book. Gumption is defined as the caring of what one is doing. It's when the doer of an action or task has attributed more quality and care, and I'll add the word attention, towards that task. When a person is bored, they have less care and attention toward that task, and in fact are bored because they have less care and attention towards any and all tasks in the moment.
When I described this to my mom, I described it the same way as when the narrator was describing fishing for facts - if you knew the fact, you wouldn't be fishing - you would have already caught the fact fish. Likewise, if something has your attention, you wouldn't be saying you were bored. The moment you start paying attention to something you stop being bored. You have discovered the quality in something, even if it's just a little bit, and hopefully it will grow enough that you respond to it. The moment you start responding is the moment you stop being bored, but in order to respond you have to have attention towards it. It has to stop being noise amongst all the other noise in the background. It has to have quality. Boredom is when all you are processing is noise. Wikipedia describes it as, "Boredom is an emotional state experienced when an individual is left without anything in particular to do, and not interested in their surroundings." Boredom is lack of quality.
There's the little seed connection I made with pattern recognition. I want to use that to try to develop a better understanding of how we transform all the stimulus input coming into our systems as being nothing but boring noise into interesting patterns. How does our mind assign quality to the incoming stimuli? I have another thought on that regarding the tabula rasa that isn't exactly a purely clean slate, which also ties in with what was mentioned in the book as the "beginner's mind," which is described in the book as lost when one is bored. I'm not completely sure I agree with that particular sentiment yet, that the beginner's mind is lost when one is bored, or it's possible that phrase is a pivot phase with more than one meaning, much like how "begging the question" has both a logical fallacy meaning and a (relatively newly acceptable) social meaning. I'm not clearly writing out this paragraph's logic, because I'm only giving a cursory outline of my thoughts without any true depth to them. If you follow it, that's great, but if not, no worry as I'm leaving quite a lot out of it.
I've also gotten a bit off topic.
The idea that the students were able to say if another student's writing had quality or not can be tied in with the idea of emotional intelligence. Most people even with poor emotional intelligence can tell you they have poor emotional intelligence and they can point at another person and say that the other person has good emotional intelligence. They may not be able to explain the hows and whys of it, but they still seem to KNOW it. A person who claims to be bad at math is aware that they are bad at math, and they can point at someone else and say that person is good at math.
I'm absolutely rubbish when it comes to drawing living things such as people and animals, but I can produce very high quality design artwork. Knowing this, though, I still can't explain why I'm bad at drawing people and animals, nor do I have the slightest inkling as to how I could go about improving that. I know it's something that could be improved upon, but I doubt a book on drawing would help. It's something to do with how I perceive quality, and I perceive it greatest when things are in alignment, when things snap into place. For some reason, people and animals don't "snap into place" for me.
Friday night I was watching a lot of TV shows we have on the DVR. We had recorded a few episodes of iZombie, and I watched the first two episodes. This zombie medical examiner assistant eats brains of the deceased and then "sees" recent past events of that person's life which she uses to help the police track down their killer. She also takes on aspects of that person's personality and traits, which is by far one of the most interesting aspects of this show. (If all that happened was the flashbacks, I'd probably get tired of the show quickly and opt to switch to The Mentalist or start back over at the beginning of The Dead Zone instead, but so far it's kept me interested.) In the second episode, she eats the brains of an artist and can suddenly see vividly and can draw and paint beautifully (your perspective pending). There's a brief comment in there about how gaining this ability was more about a mental change. I quickly equated it to the above comment, as though suddenly those elements of art, which are always present, were somehow perceived differently due to the quality change that took place in the zombie's mind upon eating the artistic brain.
I'm reaching.
This whole line of thinking begs the question (the social phrase, not the logical fallacy) that maybe being able to change fundamentally requires the mind to change its fundamental attention towards quality. Quality aspects exist outside of the substantial existence of the subject and object, according to how quality is presented in the Zen book. Being able to draw people and animals exists, whether I can draw them or not. I just can't perceive that version/dimension(?) of the quality. It's as though that dimension of quality is on a completely different quality train track (another analogy presented in the book) than the one I'm on. If I could perceive it, if I could jump quality train tracks, then I could draw people and animals. If someone else could perceive the qualities of math and design that I can perceive, they too could become good at calculus and spatial reasoning. If all dimensions of quality were on one single track, we would all be great mathematicians, great artists, and great emotional readers.
Again, this harkens back to the tabula rasa idea of mine that we aren't all really clean slates. We each start out on a particular quality train track. It may dip and turn turn and curve around on itself, but its a track specially designed for each individual person.
This relates to the butterfly effect - dependence on initial conditions. It's the capstone of individuality and therefore something not to be taken lightly when considering AI programming. It's why I loathe to call an expert system an AI system. Can Deep Blue make toast? Deep Blue is on a chess master quality track and is incapable of seeing any other quality tracks. In the movie Chappie, and I'm not giving anything away here that isn't already in the movie trailer, the conscious robot can draw, but it draws like I do, rather than like Van Gogh does. I also think they stole that method of drawing from the movie I, Robot, so it's not even original in its own quality-track right. Chappie and Sonny are on the exact same drawing quality track.
In theory, if you knew what initial conditions were necessary, you could program a system to be on whatever quality track you want. What initial conditions create a mathematician? What initial conditions create a Van Gogh? Or, to be more specific, what quality dimensions would a system need to pay attention to in order to be a mathematician or a Van Gogh?
This now brings me full circle to my point. What quality dimensions would a system/person need to pay attention to in order to have a higher emotional quotient? How much can a person veer from their present emotional understanding quality track onto a different emotional understanding quality track in order to improve their EQ?
My favorite line from the book: "And then to get hit, right off, straight in the face, with an asshole statement like that!"
I don't believe the statement in question could have been called anything better. It's also a favorite line because it sums up so neatly and precisely how I sometimes feel about things that really go against the grain of living, or as Phaedrus in the book describes it, things that go against overall quality.
Funny enough, I was able to combine the description of boredom in the book with Alan Watts' description of boredom to talk with Mom last night about Little Bit always getting bored when his older brother doesn't want to play with him.
I have so many thoughts that have come up from "reading" this book. One in particular has stuck itself in my brain regarding pattern recognition, but it's a bit of a seed right now, so my brain is working on turning it over until it grows into adulthood before I actually will work on writing it out completely. I've at least written down the elements of the seed so I don't forget.
Lolotehe linked an article regarding emotional intelligence to me. I'm not even 1/5th of the way into it, but my brain is already trying to make connections.
In the book, Phaedrus works with his students to teach them that they are aware of what quality is even though they can't put it into words or define it. They can judge the papers of each other as having good quality or bad quality, or simply put, being good or bad. In another respect, the good quality papers can be said to have heart and soul, and the bad papers are dull and lacking soul.
The bad papers are boring.
Boredom is defined as a gumption trap in the book. Gumption is defined as the caring of what one is doing. It's when the doer of an action or task has attributed more quality and care, and I'll add the word attention, towards that task. When a person is bored, they have less care and attention toward that task, and in fact are bored because they have less care and attention towards any and all tasks in the moment.
When I described this to my mom, I described it the same way as when the narrator was describing fishing for facts - if you knew the fact, you wouldn't be fishing - you would have already caught the fact fish. Likewise, if something has your attention, you wouldn't be saying you were bored. The moment you start paying attention to something you stop being bored. You have discovered the quality in something, even if it's just a little bit, and hopefully it will grow enough that you respond to it. The moment you start responding is the moment you stop being bored, but in order to respond you have to have attention towards it. It has to stop being noise amongst all the other noise in the background. It has to have quality. Boredom is when all you are processing is noise. Wikipedia describes it as, "Boredom is an emotional state experienced when an individual is left without anything in particular to do, and not interested in their surroundings." Boredom is lack of quality.
There's the little seed connection I made with pattern recognition. I want to use that to try to develop a better understanding of how we transform all the stimulus input coming into our systems as being nothing but boring noise into interesting patterns. How does our mind assign quality to the incoming stimuli? I have another thought on that regarding the tabula rasa that isn't exactly a purely clean slate, which also ties in with what was mentioned in the book as the "beginner's mind," which is described in the book as lost when one is bored. I'm not completely sure I agree with that particular sentiment yet, that the beginner's mind is lost when one is bored, or it's possible that phrase is a pivot phase with more than one meaning, much like how "begging the question" has both a logical fallacy meaning and a (relatively newly acceptable) social meaning. I'm not clearly writing out this paragraph's logic, because I'm only giving a cursory outline of my thoughts without any true depth to them. If you follow it, that's great, but if not, no worry as I'm leaving quite a lot out of it.
I've also gotten a bit off topic.
The idea that the students were able to say if another student's writing had quality or not can be tied in with the idea of emotional intelligence. Most people even with poor emotional intelligence can tell you they have poor emotional intelligence and they can point at another person and say that the other person has good emotional intelligence. They may not be able to explain the hows and whys of it, but they still seem to KNOW it. A person who claims to be bad at math is aware that they are bad at math, and they can point at someone else and say that person is good at math.
I'm absolutely rubbish when it comes to drawing living things such as people and animals, but I can produce very high quality design artwork. Knowing this, though, I still can't explain why I'm bad at drawing people and animals, nor do I have the slightest inkling as to how I could go about improving that. I know it's something that could be improved upon, but I doubt a book on drawing would help. It's something to do with how I perceive quality, and I perceive it greatest when things are in alignment, when things snap into place. For some reason, people and animals don't "snap into place" for me.
Friday night I was watching a lot of TV shows we have on the DVR. We had recorded a few episodes of iZombie, and I watched the first two episodes. This zombie medical examiner assistant eats brains of the deceased and then "sees" recent past events of that person's life which she uses to help the police track down their killer. She also takes on aspects of that person's personality and traits, which is by far one of the most interesting aspects of this show. (If all that happened was the flashbacks, I'd probably get tired of the show quickly and opt to switch to The Mentalist or start back over at the beginning of The Dead Zone instead, but so far it's kept me interested.) In the second episode, she eats the brains of an artist and can suddenly see vividly and can draw and paint beautifully (your perspective pending). There's a brief comment in there about how gaining this ability was more about a mental change. I quickly equated it to the above comment, as though suddenly those elements of art, which are always present, were somehow perceived differently due to the quality change that took place in the zombie's mind upon eating the artistic brain.
I'm reaching.
This whole line of thinking begs the question (the social phrase, not the logical fallacy) that maybe being able to change fundamentally requires the mind to change its fundamental attention towards quality. Quality aspects exist outside of the substantial existence of the subject and object, according to how quality is presented in the Zen book. Being able to draw people and animals exists, whether I can draw them or not. I just can't perceive that version/dimension(?) of the quality. It's as though that dimension of quality is on a completely different quality train track (another analogy presented in the book) than the one I'm on. If I could perceive it, if I could jump quality train tracks, then I could draw people and animals. If someone else could perceive the qualities of math and design that I can perceive, they too could become good at calculus and spatial reasoning. If all dimensions of quality were on one single track, we would all be great mathematicians, great artists, and great emotional readers.
Again, this harkens back to the tabula rasa idea of mine that we aren't all really clean slates. We each start out on a particular quality train track. It may dip and turn turn and curve around on itself, but its a track specially designed for each individual person.
This relates to the butterfly effect - dependence on initial conditions. It's the capstone of individuality and therefore something not to be taken lightly when considering AI programming. It's why I loathe to call an expert system an AI system. Can Deep Blue make toast? Deep Blue is on a chess master quality track and is incapable of seeing any other quality tracks. In the movie Chappie, and I'm not giving anything away here that isn't already in the movie trailer, the conscious robot can draw, but it draws like I do, rather than like Van Gogh does. I also think they stole that method of drawing from the movie I, Robot, so it's not even original in its own quality-track right. Chappie and Sonny are on the exact same drawing quality track.
In theory, if you knew what initial conditions were necessary, you could program a system to be on whatever quality track you want. What initial conditions create a mathematician? What initial conditions create a Van Gogh? Or, to be more specific, what quality dimensions would a system need to pay attention to in order to be a mathematician or a Van Gogh?
This now brings me full circle to my point. What quality dimensions would a system/person need to pay attention to in order to have a higher emotional quotient? How much can a person veer from their present emotional understanding quality track onto a different emotional understanding quality track in order to improve their EQ?
