Wild
10:00 Monday, 29 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 75.58°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 72% Wind: 1.57mph
Words: 66
I did not check On This Day in the marmot before writing the preceding post, but back in 2017, I wrote something similar.
It's a theme, I guess.
On This Day is ephemeral. If you're coming to this post anytime after the 29th of June, it'll be different than it is today. But here's the link to that post in 2017. Beware, it's over 2K words.
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09:09 Monday, 29 June 2026
Current Wx: Temp: 72.97°F Pressure: 1020hPa Humidity: 76% Wind: 1.74mph
Words: 1079
And stuff on my mind.
So here I am.
This kind of post was perhaps the greater proportion of the posts in Groundhog Day, where I was often trying to "figure stuff out." Urgent questions about why my life was not working out the way I thought it would.
"Thought," past tense of "to think." There's a lot of noise out there about artificial intelligence, and what it's going to do to our ability "to think." I'm not particularly worried about it, because we've already devalued the skill of thinking to the point where few of us actually know how to do it.
Now, there's a lot of "cognitive activity" going on between all of our ears. Most of it is not "thinking" in the sense that I use the word. By "thinking," I'm referring to using reason and logic, and interrogating a question.
It's a skill, and it can be learned. It can even be self-taught, if you're literate and motivated. But unless you're motivated, unless there's some reason to possess the skill, few people ever learn it.
People in professions, engineers, scientists, lawyers, doctors and academics learn the skill, because it's essential to their role, their career. Programmers learn a subset of thinking, mostly in the realm of logic and systems. They're in a job, I won't call it a "profession" because there is no accountability, that demands rigorous thought and they're often very successful at it.
This then makes many of them believe they're experts at all forms of thought, and that all forms of thought can be reduced to rules of logic.
This often makes them insufferable.
But for the vast majority of society, "thinking" is mostly using rudimentary heuristics to reason backward from a feeling. Rationalization. And when you're wedded to the feeling, you can perform Olympic feats of rationalization.
We are embodied beings, and our emotions govern much of what we choose to "think" about. We are never taught the value of interrogating our feelings. One of the best things I learned in therapy was a little process that programmers ought to appreciate or value.
The first step is to interrogate the interior state, "What am I feeling?" Because thoughts almost always originate in feelings.
The next step is to interrogate the source of that feeling, "What am I believing?" There is something in our subjective experience that is stimulating that feeling, and it is connected to a belief about the world, self and others.
The next step is to interrogate the truth value of that belief, "Is this true?" This is where the value begins. Sometimes it's an easy question to answer, sometimes it can be difficult and demands further inquiry, especially when it comes to relationships and the things we believe about other people.
Then comes the "if/then" branch. If, upon reflection, the belief that underlies the feeling is not true, then there is no basis for the feeling in "reality."
Let it go.
If the belief is true, then you must ask "What can I do about it?" This is where feeling and thought turn into action. This is what gives one agency, makes one responsible for one's life.
But we don't teach any of that stuff. We don't value it. We don't value personal autonomy.
Now, I've omitted all kinds of skills that go into investigating the truth of an issue. Because this is a blog post and not a book. And I have another point I want to make.
Nobody gets to choose their parents. We didn't get to choose the culture we were born into. And nearly all of our subjective experience has been shaped by that culture. There are layers upon layers of unexamined, implicit beliefs about "the world," that have been indoctrinated into us, which would probably require the work of a lifetime to unwind, if it's even possible at all.
To some extent, it is. But that takes time and attention, and where does our time and attention go these days?
My point is that we have been born into a civilization that is unsustainable for a host of reasons. And the origins of that flaw go back centuries and are virtually embedded into our culture. "Western culture," you see so many people claiming they are defending.
We are not going to fix that.
What we are observing today, and have been observing for most of our history, is an effort to keep the system going, often with baling wire and duct tape. And that works for a while. But since the foundation is rotten, the problems eventually overtake our ability to apply patches, work-arounds, or to just accept the gradual decline of performance as part of the cost of doing business.
Part of our success as a civilization, perhaps the greatest part in material terms, is our facility with technology. Our infernal cleverness. Because we're so good at manipulating material world, we have ignored the immaterial world. The beliefs that undergird our culture and civilization. We believe every problem has a technological solution. We don't even see the immaterial defects. The fallacies and misapprehensions. Indeed, they are regarded not as bugs, but features.
Like I just couldn't see the Pex pipes that had to go into the bathroom vanity. It just never enters our consciousness.
And even if it did, it's too late to do anything about it now. The system has been designed to protect itself from attacking those beliefs. People try. Western culture and its facility with technology has infected almost every other culture on the planet. Perhaps not all of them, but the vast majority.
AI isn't a threat to anything. It's just a system output. Its existence is the consequence of this culture, so how can it be a threat to it?
It doesn't threaten thought for the vast majority of humanity, because the vast majority of humanity doesn't think.
It consumes.
Which also isn't a bug.
So don't "worry" about AI. There's nothing to worry about. Instead, ask yourself questions. What is the experience of your life? How would you like it to be different?
Then make a plan.
Almost nobody will even ask the first question in the sense of the process outline above. What are you believing? Is that true? What can you do about it?
These are the urgent questions that matter.
Not questions about AI.
We only have moments to live, and none of us is getting out of here alive.
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