I have written a lengthy piece on the tension (or perhaps the harmony, as I see it) between discipline and non-coercion. Is someone like Jocko Willink who is up at 4:30am each morning to workout before breakfast coercing himself? Hint: I don’t think he is. I’m exploring “self help” and why I rarely find much use for it. But I really do like Jocko - which might seem strange coming from someone who is also motivated by a non-coercive philosophy of life.
(Jocko posts a picture of his watch like this each morning followed by another of the “aftermath” of his workout.)
I have been reading Douglas Murray’s book “The War on the West”. I am about halfway through and I’m finding it well worth the read. I’m actually listening to the audiobook. I increasingly get more out of audiobooks than text books - especially when read by the author. They know what to emphasise and in Douglas’ case he is very entertaining the more angry he becomes. And this is a righteously angry book about all the forms of anti-westernism out there. Chinese anti-westernism and worst of all perhaps - Western Anti-westernism. Like many, Douglas is very concerned about Woke culture. It has “spilled out” as he says from the universities into - well - parts of society. It is a plague of a kind-anti-Enlightenment and post-modern as it is. I do think Douglas - as much as I enjoy him as a polemicist - is too pessimistic at times. The spilling out of woke ideology into wider society might very well stop at the gates of mainstream media and the schools. Which is bad - I’m not saying it’s not bad - but it’s not the end of civilisation. Yes: civilisations have ended before - weak ones. Many of them approximately static. Ours is more robust and self correcting and we may have reached the nadir of wokeism anyway. We shall see. When I finish the book I might do a brief review. I won’t be doing a complete breakdown of it - Douglas has basically saturated social media over the last two week promoting it on almost every podcast it seems.
This week another brief - but old - clip of David Deutsch appeared on my favourite website. That website is “Closer to Truth”. It was the clip of David explaining why we are forced into accepting the multiverse if we are to understand quantum theory. I recommend that clip. Closer to Truth is my favourite website because the guests and topics are diverse, the host knowledgeable and optimistic and there is no dumbing down of anything. There is a recent lengthy interview with Paul Davies about his most recent book which I ordered and just arrived today. I might mention some more about it in a future newsletter. In the recent interviews Professor Davies explained something he has explained before which is that people like to analogise the universe to other things and this is a mistake. Well actually people have thought it’s more than an analogy. Some have said it’s a living organism. Some that it’s a machine. And others now that it’s a computer. I think he’s right to say that these stances are wrong: computational universality does not mean the universe is literally a computer. It means that what goes on inside the universe can be computed. Davies said the universe is unique: it’s not like anything in it. I quite like that. But I think he still holds onto the misconception that maybe the laws of physics are beyond us to understand. He says that in the interview as well. But I think that is wrong. I outline the reasons why in this piece on my website. We should take computational universality seriously. And the notion that anything not explicable by us is just an appeal to the supernatural. It’s saying there’s something - be it God or the laws of physics (they may as well be equivalent in that case) that are forever beyond us to understand. I explore some of this in my latest ToKCast about virtual reality.
Just a short one for today. I’ll put out another newsletter in the coming days. Until then!
Self help, civilisation and the universe