The evolving self

What Hacker News says

1. ffwacomOct 2022
   Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who coined the term ‘flow’, has a whole philosophy on life detailed in:

   Flow

   The Evolving Self

   There’s the ‘awakening’ thing you can do, which might give a fresh perspective:

   The Mind Illuminated - Culadasa

   Seeing That Frees - Rob Burbea

   Right Concentration - Leigh Brasington

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2. pizzaJun 2022
   There may be a slight nit with this enframing of entropy. Actually, the article visualizes it quite nicely:

   the assumption that the world is a closed system - depicted here by the black border around the particles, showing it is closed off from the world.

   Sure, in a closed system, eventually you get something like heat death, within the box.

   But life, and the world, are an open system - at least especially from the human-scale life experience. You can't say that heat death is sure to happen.

   Does entropy increase at the macro level? Pretty much yeah. But to define what 'macro' is, is hard enough to make any answer dubious or uninteresting - is it the entire universe? Is it the solar system? In either case the scale at which it appears closed much bigger your life, which is coincidentally a scale at which it may seem open - bc the world is not uniform and ergodic at the living-as-a-human-scale. We each experience a different life story (another debate for the future, perhaps? :^) )

   If you like you can imagine that the entropy in your own particular life could always decrease while the entropy somewhere else far away undergoes a commensurate simultaneous increase.

   As I remember it, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (author of Flow) wrote in the book The Evolving Self that basically the meaningfulness of your life is:

       (the flow you experience == the entropy/time 'life bandwidth rate' you experience) 
   
       x 
   
       (the good you do for others)
   

   By going for a minimalist approach, you try to maximize the Signal-to-Noise ratio. If you'll allow for some eyebrow-raising application of mathematics to philosophy for a sec...

   the Shannon-Hartley theorem tells us that the channel capacity C depends

       B: the channel substrate bandwidth,
   
       SNR = Power(Signal) / Power(Noise), both in decibels. 
   

   as

       C=B log2(1 - SNR)
   

   Here, C could stand for how good a life you're leading. So you'd either want to increase the signal, or decrease the noise, or increase B (the 'underlying capacity for enjoyment of life'). I guess it is a matter of debate whether you can improve the SNR more by tapping in more, or tapping into noise less. Probably something you can try to adaptively improve by 'gradient descent' ie 'trying out new ways of living', lol
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