I'm quite a shy person, although conversely I find it very easy to talk to people, I just need them to be the one to make the first move to open the conversation, once they've done that I feel more confident because I have the okay to go signal. At times it can be like breaking the dam, where starting a conversation with me leads to a flow that you weren't expecting. I'm an incredibly curious person and the way that I learn best is by asking questions. I will ask as many as I can think of, in an attempt to cement my understanding. What I have come to realise as a result of this process, is that other people love to talk about themselves, because for almost everyone it is the one topic of conversation above all else that they can be certain they are an authority on, nobody will know you better than you know yourself, no matter how close they think they may be to us.
Getting people talking about themselves puts them in a position of confidence and opens them up in a way that is hard to achieve with any other topic of conversation - having said all of that, there is a technique to it. You can't jump right in with intimate questions, most people won't want to answer them if they barely know you, and most people won't answer questions that give away details they consider to be too close to their heart. In this regard you need to probe a little bit before you find something you can start with. Whenever people have tattoos or piercings I find those to be the easiest talking points to pursue because in most cases the fact they are visible tells you that they want those things to make a statement about who they are or how they feel and when you ask them about those things it often leads to a depth that ordinarily it can take a long time to reach with people in general.
Fashion and style are also elements that can be a great point of entry because people put thought into how they look and they want it to give a certain impression, reading their style and their attitude to fashion can give you a lot of insight into a person's mentality before you even start talking to them. The more you know before you start to talk, the easier it is to talk.
One technique that I used when I was younger was to find common ground with people as soon as I could, but with age this technique has left me with many experiences that didn't prove to be as informative or fruitful. It is much easier to talk to people about things you know nothing about than it is to talk to them about things you do. When you talk about a subject you know nothing about, there is a lot of scope for asking questions, and there is a lot of opportunity for the other person to explain things, and crucially they don't feel as self conscious when describing something they are knowledgeable about to people who are not so, because there is no element of verification and validation in play, you won't be correcting them or their mistakes when they describe things that you know nothing about. That's not to say you should take their word as gospel, just recognise that the act and the experience is more important that factual accuracy in that moment.
I used to see people who had interests that I knew little about, and that would lead me to studying those things in my own time in order to make myself more knowledgeable on the subject matter - the problem with doing this is that most people have a shallow depth of reasoning. That is to say, most people don't question things that deeply, they form surface level understandings of the things they are interested in, only a few actually dig down and get into the technicality of it. Most people who have interests in specific sports for example have never dug down into the statistics of that sport, they know nothing about the history of it, or the background that includes all the information you will find if you actually do research on it. Instead those people will have their own experience, their own observations, and their own ideas of what it is and what it means - in other words they have a personal history with that sport which is why they love it, not the academic history. Reading a book about it won't reveal that personal history they have, the only way to learn about it is to actually engage with them in conversation and let them tell you about it.
You can take something like a game of Chess and know that most people who know something of Chess will know how to play it. As for the technical aspects of the game, such as the rank value of pieces, the scoring system, the classical opening moves, as well as the mathematical analysis of the pieces, which squares they are attacking at any given time etc, none of this will factor in their thought process unless they have actually researched the game and take it seriously to the point where they compete.
There's a simple lesson to learn here, if you don't know about something, don't pretend you do. Instead ask questions and engage in their interest, it is much more endearing to have another person take an interest in your hobbies and interests than to have them tell you things that you either already knew, or goes much deeper than your understanding which can cause insecurity.
Getting to know people is as much a game as any other part of life. There are moves you can make, there are payoffs and there are penalties. Which proves the most successful in the end will come down to experience and practice. The only way to gain confidence and proficiency is to practice. That may sound like something odd in the context of social interaction, but if you have trouble talking to other people you should understand that for most people for whom social interaction comes easily, they developed those skills when they were much younger. For those of us who have difficulty with these acts, we experienced a disruption in our childhood and our adolescence when these skills would normally develop. We therefore have to develop them later in life and the only way we can do that is through the same process that children and teenagers normally learn these skills - trial and error. The more you do, the more you learn, the easier it becomes. I started off life as an extrovert, became an introvert, and over time I am slowly restoring my extroverted nature, it's taking a lot longer than I thought it would though.
Red Pill, Blue Pill
The movie The Matrix opens up a lot of interesting questions to debate about philosophy and existentialism. Whilst most people who have seen the movie will understand the basic concept, or those who have read of the philosophical scenario of the Brain in a Vat upon which the main premise is based. There is a question that arises when discussing the idea of life as we know it being a simulation and that is whether or not you would want to know the truth if it really was. In the movie this is portrayed in a scene where Morpheus presents Neo with two pills, one is blue and represents peace, serenity, calmness, and tranquillity, if Neo chooses the blue pill he stays in the Matrix and nothing changes. The other pill is a red pill, representing danger, disturbance, risk, and change, if Neo chooses this pill then he gets to see reality for what it is. Of course in the movie, Neo doesn't make an informed choice, Morpheus makes no attempt to explain in any level of detail what Neo is actually choosing.
If you were to be placed in the same scenario, presented with a red pill or a blue pill to choose from, there is the question of which you should take. Whilst many people would want out, it is fair to say that not everyone who escapes the Matrix lives a life of fulfilment. Indeed there is a YouTube video by MatPat for his Film Theorists channel where he discusses the idea that Zion and the "real world" in the movie might still be inside the Matrix which is well worth a watch if you haven't seen it. Questions about reality and choice put to one side for a moment, there is a much more pressing question I think needs to be answered first before you even get to the choice between waking up and staying in the system.
The real question to ask I believe is how did you end up there in the first place? If life is indeed a simulation, then there are only two scenarios as far as I can see. The first is that I chose to enter this world, and given how grim it can be at times, I would have to wonder if I chose this world as a preference, then how bad is the real world that this is actually preferable. In the movie Ready Player One, the real world is a dystopian future where life is miserable and the simulated world that people choose to enter provides an escape from the reality of the world they live in. I would have to wonder if the real world was actually a lot worse than this one and that was why I chose to enter it in the first place.
The other scenario is the idea that this is a slave world, as posited by the Matrix, where humanity is subjugated by machines. In this scenario I am not sure I would want to wake up either, reason being that if you took the movie the Matrix and modified it to the point where Neo wakes up and is flushed out of his pod, if he had been alone without Morpheus or the Nebuchadnezzar to come save him, how long do you think Neo would actually survive on his own. We're initially shown Neo undergoing a lot of medical treatment to get him to a point where he can function as a human being, we're not explicitly told how long this process takes, but when we learn the reason for this treatment is the fact he is in an impaired physical condition due to the fact he's essentially been immobile his entire life, there is the question of how dexterous and resourceful he could be if he had never been rescued. In any scenario where humans are slaves trapped within a simulation, to escape would be to escape to a world where you would have to fight for your existence, and you would have to be able to survive.
In this world we live in, there are very few people who you could take at a moment's notice, throw them into the middle of the wilderness without any technology, or any preparation without any resources at all and expect them to be able to survive. Most people wouldn't know how to feed themselves, create fire, make a shelter, among many other things. You would need to be a survivalist to be able to entertain the thought of entering an unknown world and be able to stay alive for very long. Faced with all of this, I don't believe I would choose to wake up from this reality. To leave this simulation would only be a choice that I would make if the world I would wake up in was better than this world or offered me something more. Having said all that, when it comes to the simple question of whether or not I would want to know, not whether I would leave, but simply knowing whether or not this is real, I think that question at least I would like to know the answer to categorically. For the immediate, I can only assume the answer is yes, this world is real, until I see evidence to the contrary.
If you were to be placed in the same scenario, presented with a red pill or a blue pill to choose from, there is the question of which you should take. Whilst many people would want out, it is fair to say that not everyone who escapes the Matrix lives a life of fulfilment. Indeed there is a YouTube video by MatPat for his Film Theorists channel where he discusses the idea that Zion and the "real world" in the movie might still be inside the Matrix which is well worth a watch if you haven't seen it. Questions about reality and choice put to one side for a moment, there is a much more pressing question I think needs to be answered first before you even get to the choice between waking up and staying in the system.
The real question to ask I believe is how did you end up there in the first place? If life is indeed a simulation, then there are only two scenarios as far as I can see. The first is that I chose to enter this world, and given how grim it can be at times, I would have to wonder if I chose this world as a preference, then how bad is the real world that this is actually preferable. In the movie Ready Player One, the real world is a dystopian future where life is miserable and the simulated world that people choose to enter provides an escape from the reality of the world they live in. I would have to wonder if the real world was actually a lot worse than this one and that was why I chose to enter it in the first place.
The other scenario is the idea that this is a slave world, as posited by the Matrix, where humanity is subjugated by machines. In this scenario I am not sure I would want to wake up either, reason being that if you took the movie the Matrix and modified it to the point where Neo wakes up and is flushed out of his pod, if he had been alone without Morpheus or the Nebuchadnezzar to come save him, how long do you think Neo would actually survive on his own. We're initially shown Neo undergoing a lot of medical treatment to get him to a point where he can function as a human being, we're not explicitly told how long this process takes, but when we learn the reason for this treatment is the fact he is in an impaired physical condition due to the fact he's essentially been immobile his entire life, there is the question of how dexterous and resourceful he could be if he had never been rescued. In any scenario where humans are slaves trapped within a simulation, to escape would be to escape to a world where you would have to fight for your existence, and you would have to be able to survive.
In this world we live in, there are very few people who you could take at a moment's notice, throw them into the middle of the wilderness without any technology, or any preparation without any resources at all and expect them to be able to survive. Most people wouldn't know how to feed themselves, create fire, make a shelter, among many other things. You would need to be a survivalist to be able to entertain the thought of entering an unknown world and be able to stay alive for very long. Faced with all of this, I don't believe I would choose to wake up from this reality. To leave this simulation would only be a choice that I would make if the world I would wake up in was better than this world or offered me something more. Having said all that, when it comes to the simple question of whether or not I would want to know, not whether I would leave, but simply knowing whether or not this is real, I think that question at least I would like to know the answer to categorically. For the immediate, I can only assume the answer is yes, this world is real, until I see evidence to the contrary.
I'm Not Telling You
Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? There's a lot more being asked here than whether you agree not to lie, this question is deliberately phrased to try and prevent you from being misleading, or at least hold you to account if you are found to be doing so. The first bit is simple, "do you swear to tell the truth", that bit is simple enough to understand. The second bit "the whole truth" brings light to the fact that you can lie without actually saying anything, by withholding information that would contradict what you have said or anything else that you know of that may lead to an alternative conclusion. The last bit, "and nothing but the truth" is concerned with plausible deniability, that is to say things which you can say and claim to believe are true, which in reality are not, but you can plausibly deny any knowledge that you were aware this was untrue.
When we think about lying, beyond a court of law, we have to take what most people say at face value because we know very little about them as a person or enough about their behaviour and character traits to be able to make an accurate assessment of whether or not they are lying. There are books like those by Joe Navarro, a former FBI agent that detail techniques you can use to read body language in order to get an idea of what is going on inside their mind, or to be able to read whether or not they are telling the truth. The thing about books like this is that this is a form of Pseudo-Science, that is to say most theories that centre around these concepts are "fuzzy" and cannot be held to be true in all scenarios. Things like whether or not an individual makes eye contact or avoids eye contact for example can be affected by many different factors, some emotional, some psychological, and some are indeed centred around honesty or dishonesty as the case may be.
Taking eye contact as an example, it is a misconception that someone who is lying will avoid your gaze; in normal interaction we rarely make eye contact with people because such an act is intimate. In fact it is often said that if someone makes eye contact with you and maintains it, they either want to fuck you or kill you. Eye contact as an indicator of truthfulness is often misconstrued, most people believe the misconception that avoiding eye contact means dishonesty and intentional eye contact means honesty, the reverse is actually true insofar as the theory of body language goes, if someone intentionally looks at you when telling you something, they are much more likely to be lying to you and trying to convince you otherwise. There is another axiom often attributed to the fictional character Sherlock Holmes thanks in part to the BBC series, whereby detail is an indicator of dishonesty, the truth is simple, only lies have complexity - this again doesn't always hold as true but does serve as a general guide.
For me personally, my Nystagmus causes my eyes to constantly move. People often notice this and they have a tendency to stare when they do, so in general I avoid eye contact and don't usually look at people, rather I look in their general direction but focus on something else close to them. This can be misleading if you intend to use it as an indicator of truthfulness. Perhaps my own intimate understanding of the complexities of social interaction and the impact our own mental state, confidence, and emotions can have upon it has led me to be more critical of those who want to simplify things to basic rules of proposition where if X then Y, or perhaps it is simply the realisation that body language is a Pseudo-Science.
Pseudo-Science is something which claims to be a scientific study, it often has evidence that backs it up, but the distinction between this and the scientific method in general is that a theory within the general scientific method if shown to be untrue is no longer accepted as true. Pseudo-Science on the other hand often ignores any evidence to the contrary. This leads to beliefs that are really just opinions - informed ones but still opinions, being accepted as fact. This doesn't hold up to logical scrutiny but those who subscribe to these beliefs often do not perform even basic research into these fields before accepting what they say as true. Body language in particular is something that I find interesting as an indicator of thought processes but after some basic research many years ago, reading books by authority figures on the subject, I realised that the conclusions that are presented vary widely depending on who you ask.
Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Perhaps the most important part of this question is the middle, "the whole truth" and all that implies. It is hard to imagine that any individual who claims to be an expert in their field is completely oblivious to what other so called experts in their field also have to say. If you have any field of study or any line of fascination that you pursue in your life, you will encounter many different points of view and you will inevitably become involved in arguments that at times can feel like they go on forever. Who you believe is not always an easy choice to make, especially when it comes to fields of study that have no empirical answer to their fundamental questions. If the answer to any question given is always "it depends..." then you're dealing with something that either cannot be defined precisely, or must be met with a line of inquisition that takes a different approach - in other words if you can't get a simple answer, then your question is too complex. Break it down into smaller more definitive points that precise answers can be given for.
The most interesting thing that we learn when we ask people questions and receive answers often is not what they say, but rather what they do not tell us which we later find out they already knew. In the UK we have a number of pieces of legislation that centre around the Freedom of Information [FOI], these allow individuals to submit requests to public bodies which must then be fulfilled. These FOI requests can reveal quite a lot of information that these bodies held and were aware of, despite such information never being presented in their publications. Some of the most interesting facts in the UK political environment do not come from what we are told, but what we later find out they already knew and never said.
When we think about lying, beyond a court of law, we have to take what most people say at face value because we know very little about them as a person or enough about their behaviour and character traits to be able to make an accurate assessment of whether or not they are lying. There are books like those by Joe Navarro, a former FBI agent that detail techniques you can use to read body language in order to get an idea of what is going on inside their mind, or to be able to read whether or not they are telling the truth. The thing about books like this is that this is a form of Pseudo-Science, that is to say most theories that centre around these concepts are "fuzzy" and cannot be held to be true in all scenarios. Things like whether or not an individual makes eye contact or avoids eye contact for example can be affected by many different factors, some emotional, some psychological, and some are indeed centred around honesty or dishonesty as the case may be.
Taking eye contact as an example, it is a misconception that someone who is lying will avoid your gaze; in normal interaction we rarely make eye contact with people because such an act is intimate. In fact it is often said that if someone makes eye contact with you and maintains it, they either want to fuck you or kill you. Eye contact as an indicator of truthfulness is often misconstrued, most people believe the misconception that avoiding eye contact means dishonesty and intentional eye contact means honesty, the reverse is actually true insofar as the theory of body language goes, if someone intentionally looks at you when telling you something, they are much more likely to be lying to you and trying to convince you otherwise. There is another axiom often attributed to the fictional character Sherlock Holmes thanks in part to the BBC series, whereby detail is an indicator of dishonesty, the truth is simple, only lies have complexity - this again doesn't always hold as true but does serve as a general guide.
For me personally, my Nystagmus causes my eyes to constantly move. People often notice this and they have a tendency to stare when they do, so in general I avoid eye contact and don't usually look at people, rather I look in their general direction but focus on something else close to them. This can be misleading if you intend to use it as an indicator of truthfulness. Perhaps my own intimate understanding of the complexities of social interaction and the impact our own mental state, confidence, and emotions can have upon it has led me to be more critical of those who want to simplify things to basic rules of proposition where if X then Y, or perhaps it is simply the realisation that body language is a Pseudo-Science.
Pseudo-Science is something which claims to be a scientific study, it often has evidence that backs it up, but the distinction between this and the scientific method in general is that a theory within the general scientific method if shown to be untrue is no longer accepted as true. Pseudo-Science on the other hand often ignores any evidence to the contrary. This leads to beliefs that are really just opinions - informed ones but still opinions, being accepted as fact. This doesn't hold up to logical scrutiny but those who subscribe to these beliefs often do not perform even basic research into these fields before accepting what they say as true. Body language in particular is something that I find interesting as an indicator of thought processes but after some basic research many years ago, reading books by authority figures on the subject, I realised that the conclusions that are presented vary widely depending on who you ask.
Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth? Perhaps the most important part of this question is the middle, "the whole truth" and all that implies. It is hard to imagine that any individual who claims to be an expert in their field is completely oblivious to what other so called experts in their field also have to say. If you have any field of study or any line of fascination that you pursue in your life, you will encounter many different points of view and you will inevitably become involved in arguments that at times can feel like they go on forever. Who you believe is not always an easy choice to make, especially when it comes to fields of study that have no empirical answer to their fundamental questions. If the answer to any question given is always "it depends..." then you're dealing with something that either cannot be defined precisely, or must be met with a line of inquisition that takes a different approach - in other words if you can't get a simple answer, then your question is too complex. Break it down into smaller more definitive points that precise answers can be given for.
The most interesting thing that we learn when we ask people questions and receive answers often is not what they say, but rather what they do not tell us which we later find out they already knew. In the UK we have a number of pieces of legislation that centre around the Freedom of Information [FOI], these allow individuals to submit requests to public bodies which must then be fulfilled. These FOI requests can reveal quite a lot of information that these bodies held and were aware of, despite such information never being presented in their publications. Some of the most interesting facts in the UK political environment do not come from what we are told, but what we later find out they already knew and never said.
Once Again With Feeling
We all have experiences that we hold onto for years after the event. Sometimes these are negative experiences, and sometimes they are positive. When they are positive they are often superlative, that is to say they become seminal moments in our minds that all subsequent experiences of a similar nature are inevitably compared to, and in almost all cases those new experiences never match up with those that we held onto. Perhaps the best example of this that most people will be able to relate to is when it comes to food.
Whatever your favourite food happens to be, you have likely had it from many different places, and made it yourself many times. There will probably be one experience more than any other that stands out. The time you made it perfectly or the best place you ever ordered it from. What will also likely be prevalent in your mind is the fact that the experience isn't consistent when you try to repeat it. Every time you have your favourite food, each new experience does not become the best yet. The best experience you ever had is also likely to have been some time ago thanks to nostalgia and its influence over the accuracy of our memories. Whether that experience really was the best or not isn't something you can prove succinctly, without being able to travel through time and experience it again for comparison - even then one can argue that mental state and emotional state can both influence the experience.
That thought is something that intrigues me, the idea of going back in time and visiting a time period you lived through and have fond memories for - although most of my memories fixate on individual experiences rather than time frames as I said in another post quite some time ago, there isn't a decade in my life where something bad didn't happen, none of those would I want to relive. Individual experiences on the other hand are appealing. Despite that appeal however I do have to wonder if I could go back and experience things again, would the experience be the same? What would it do to the memory if you got to experience it again and it didn't live up to your expectations, would that throw you into doubt or confusion or lead to some other state of mind?
There is a lot to be said about politics, and the rise in populism that is fuelled by the desire to take countries back to the way they were decades before, but in almost all of those cases, the recollection of the past and the romanticism is centred around things people think were good about those time periods but dismiss entirely everything else that was bad. People are eager to relive the golden age of industry but they aren't so eager to accept the pay cut they would have to take to work again in that time and place. Inflation adjustments factored in, wages have grown quite substantially. In the UK for example from 1975 to 2013, wages more than doubled after accounting for inflation to go back to the 1970s in the UK you would be taking in real terms more than a 50% cut in pay to get there. Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it, and might not be what you were expecting.
What I find even more poignant about this whole debate that centres around reliving past experiences, is the fact that you can't forget the life you have lived since then, you will never get to experience it again for the first time. You can see this with experiences that are "lossless" over time. For example a movie, the content never changes, and it is preserved in perfect condition. Each presentation is consistent, yet your experience watching it each time varies. You can never watch that movie again for the first time, you can never experience it without knowing at all what might happen or any of the details of the plot etc. Perhaps one could argue this is the reason why some studios choose to recreate their old movies, to create new experiences from old content allowing you as a viewer to watch it again for the first time, even though you know approximately what will happen unless the remake is substantially different from the original.
All of this does raise another hypothetical question that can be used as a thought experiment. If you could take a pill or a treatment that would make you forget your past experience and allow you to pursue the experience again without the knowledge of what you will experience, would you want to do it? If the memory loss was temporary or if it was permanent, would that affect your choice?
Whatever your favourite food happens to be, you have likely had it from many different places, and made it yourself many times. There will probably be one experience more than any other that stands out. The time you made it perfectly or the best place you ever ordered it from. What will also likely be prevalent in your mind is the fact that the experience isn't consistent when you try to repeat it. Every time you have your favourite food, each new experience does not become the best yet. The best experience you ever had is also likely to have been some time ago thanks to nostalgia and its influence over the accuracy of our memories. Whether that experience really was the best or not isn't something you can prove succinctly, without being able to travel through time and experience it again for comparison - even then one can argue that mental state and emotional state can both influence the experience.
That thought is something that intrigues me, the idea of going back in time and visiting a time period you lived through and have fond memories for - although most of my memories fixate on individual experiences rather than time frames as I said in another post quite some time ago, there isn't a decade in my life where something bad didn't happen, none of those would I want to relive. Individual experiences on the other hand are appealing. Despite that appeal however I do have to wonder if I could go back and experience things again, would the experience be the same? What would it do to the memory if you got to experience it again and it didn't live up to your expectations, would that throw you into doubt or confusion or lead to some other state of mind?
There is a lot to be said about politics, and the rise in populism that is fuelled by the desire to take countries back to the way they were decades before, but in almost all of those cases, the recollection of the past and the romanticism is centred around things people think were good about those time periods but dismiss entirely everything else that was bad. People are eager to relive the golden age of industry but they aren't so eager to accept the pay cut they would have to take to work again in that time and place. Inflation adjustments factored in, wages have grown quite substantially. In the UK for example from 1975 to 2013, wages more than doubled after accounting for inflation to go back to the 1970s in the UK you would be taking in real terms more than a 50% cut in pay to get there. Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it, and might not be what you were expecting.
What I find even more poignant about this whole debate that centres around reliving past experiences, is the fact that you can't forget the life you have lived since then, you will never get to experience it again for the first time. You can see this with experiences that are "lossless" over time. For example a movie, the content never changes, and it is preserved in perfect condition. Each presentation is consistent, yet your experience watching it each time varies. You can never watch that movie again for the first time, you can never experience it without knowing at all what might happen or any of the details of the plot etc. Perhaps one could argue this is the reason why some studios choose to recreate their old movies, to create new experiences from old content allowing you as a viewer to watch it again for the first time, even though you know approximately what will happen unless the remake is substantially different from the original.
All of this does raise another hypothetical question that can be used as a thought experiment. If you could take a pill or a treatment that would make you forget your past experience and allow you to pursue the experience again without the knowledge of what you will experience, would you want to do it? If the memory loss was temporary or if it was permanent, would that affect your choice?
Obsession vs Consumption
Most people know what it is to be obsessed, to have something that compels us, drives us to behave in ways we would normally think were uncouth, and to pursue without logic or reason that which we are obsessed with. Obsession often borders on or crosses over into addiction. Whilst addiction is much more than a behaviour, it is also a physical and mental condition, it is true to say that for obsession in general it can be described as elective, in other words it is defined by a behaviour that we choose to pursue, whether we have any desire, will, or determination to fight that behaviour is another topic of discussion in and of itself.
Consumption on the other hand whilst related is distinct. If obsession is elective, we can say consumption is not. Where an obsession is something we pursue, a consumption on the other hand is something that pursues us, and if we cannot evade it then it eventually consumes us. Behaviours that are consumptive tend to be forced upon us, causing negative side affects and much psychological distress. Consumption is best described therefore as destructive.
You might argue that consumption is simply an obsession where we are the subject of that obsession but this is inaccurate. Consumption doesn't have to involve another person, another thing, it can be something that only involves us as a person on an individual level. A thought or a feeling can consume us if it has a negative impact upon us and despite our best efforts it still pervades and penetrates our mind. Consumption in this regard can be seen as anything that festers within our minds, whether that be the result of outside stimuli or whether it be due to unwanted thoughts - the latter of which actually has a psychiatric definition as Intrusive Thought and involves thoughts and thought processes which you cannot ignore. This is often a symptom of something much deeper at play. It is perhaps most associated with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder [OCD] but can be symptomatic of other conditions.
Compulsion is related to Consumption however, the latter is centred around influence over the way you think and feel, whereas the former crosses a line into influence over your actual behaviour. A compulsion is a behaviour that you feel compelled to exhibit and results in intense anxiety when you try to abstain from that behaviour. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is a condition that requires diagnosis by a professional and is best to be addressed by such professionals. If your behaviour has become that strongly associated with thoughts that you can't dismiss then it is advisable to consider seeking professional advice. You might not have any serious conditions it might not be as severe as you've come to believe, but in the event that it is, then you can get the support you need.
Consumption is something that is a part of life, it is only when it begins to impact our lives that it becomes a problem. Having a one-track-mind or having something that you indulge in quite a lot does not constitute consumption alone, there's a fine line between passion and fixation versus consumption, that line is crossed when you are no longer able to have thoughts that are independent of that which you are consumed by, where you are no longer able to behave in a way, or have experiences of things, which you don't try to link back to your consumption. If one thing above all else seems to invade your life and become linked to everything you say and do, then you are perhaps being consumed by it.
The only way that I can see as effective in attempting to break down this process is to create new experiences and have new thoughts that you consciously decide not to associate with it, imposing a segregation between it and everything else - ultimately in an effort to contain it. To do that you need to be honest with yourself and look inward and see what is consuming you. Look to see what parts of your life are connected to every other part, if you can identify those which connect to everything else then you can use these as identifiers of possible consuming thoughts or practices. Once you have identified these practices you then have to set out to create new experiences for yourself, and learn new things that you will set apart from those consumptions.
That which consumes us does not have to be physical, it can be ideological, political, religious, it can eve be things that we think are good for us and we would normally consider them healthy - if they are invading every area of our lives and influencing our thoughts, feelings, and choices, then that influence is unhealthy.
In essence the goal to accomplish in fighting any consumption is the idea of diversity of thought. That is to say that your thoughts should be able to exist as clouds or bubbles independent of each other, they should form clusters only when those connections are relevant. To form one mega structure is to form a consumptive thought or idea where everything becomes part of one core. This amalgamation is unhealthy and limits our ability to experience anything new. Diversity of thought allows us to build up more efficient thought processes and allows us to experience new things that are not related to what we already know or what we have already experienced. To have consumptive thought actively encourages you to seek out only that which reinforces what you already know and prevents critical analysis of our own internal representation of the world. When any belief gathers such a strong presence it becomes incredibly hard to challenge in our minds without causing the whole thing to implode or causing us to feel incredibly vulnerable and feel attacked on a fundamental level.
Consumption on the other hand whilst related is distinct. If obsession is elective, we can say consumption is not. Where an obsession is something we pursue, a consumption on the other hand is something that pursues us, and if we cannot evade it then it eventually consumes us. Behaviours that are consumptive tend to be forced upon us, causing negative side affects and much psychological distress. Consumption is best described therefore as destructive.
You might argue that consumption is simply an obsession where we are the subject of that obsession but this is inaccurate. Consumption doesn't have to involve another person, another thing, it can be something that only involves us as a person on an individual level. A thought or a feeling can consume us if it has a negative impact upon us and despite our best efforts it still pervades and penetrates our mind. Consumption in this regard can be seen as anything that festers within our minds, whether that be the result of outside stimuli or whether it be due to unwanted thoughts - the latter of which actually has a psychiatric definition as Intrusive Thought and involves thoughts and thought processes which you cannot ignore. This is often a symptom of something much deeper at play. It is perhaps most associated with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder [OCD] but can be symptomatic of other conditions.
Compulsion is related to Consumption however, the latter is centred around influence over the way you think and feel, whereas the former crosses a line into influence over your actual behaviour. A compulsion is a behaviour that you feel compelled to exhibit and results in intense anxiety when you try to abstain from that behaviour. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder is a condition that requires diagnosis by a professional and is best to be addressed by such professionals. If your behaviour has become that strongly associated with thoughts that you can't dismiss then it is advisable to consider seeking professional advice. You might not have any serious conditions it might not be as severe as you've come to believe, but in the event that it is, then you can get the support you need.
Consumption is something that is a part of life, it is only when it begins to impact our lives that it becomes a problem. Having a one-track-mind or having something that you indulge in quite a lot does not constitute consumption alone, there's a fine line between passion and fixation versus consumption, that line is crossed when you are no longer able to have thoughts that are independent of that which you are consumed by, where you are no longer able to behave in a way, or have experiences of things, which you don't try to link back to your consumption. If one thing above all else seems to invade your life and become linked to everything you say and do, then you are perhaps being consumed by it.
The only way that I can see as effective in attempting to break down this process is to create new experiences and have new thoughts that you consciously decide not to associate with it, imposing a segregation between it and everything else - ultimately in an effort to contain it. To do that you need to be honest with yourself and look inward and see what is consuming you. Look to see what parts of your life are connected to every other part, if you can identify those which connect to everything else then you can use these as identifiers of possible consuming thoughts or practices. Once you have identified these practices you then have to set out to create new experiences for yourself, and learn new things that you will set apart from those consumptions.
That which consumes us does not have to be physical, it can be ideological, political, religious, it can eve be things that we think are good for us and we would normally consider them healthy - if they are invading every area of our lives and influencing our thoughts, feelings, and choices, then that influence is unhealthy.
In essence the goal to accomplish in fighting any consumption is the idea of diversity of thought. That is to say that your thoughts should be able to exist as clouds or bubbles independent of each other, they should form clusters only when those connections are relevant. To form one mega structure is to form a consumptive thought or idea where everything becomes part of one core. This amalgamation is unhealthy and limits our ability to experience anything new. Diversity of thought allows us to build up more efficient thought processes and allows us to experience new things that are not related to what we already know or what we have already experienced. To have consumptive thought actively encourages you to seek out only that which reinforces what you already know and prevents critical analysis of our own internal representation of the world. When any belief gathers such a strong presence it becomes incredibly hard to challenge in our minds without causing the whole thing to implode or causing us to feel incredibly vulnerable and feel attacked on a fundamental level.
Cognitive Dissonance
Every now and then I experience cognitive dissonance. The definition I find the most precise when talking about this is to consider the hypothetical scenario where you hold two conflicting beliefs, you can't accept both at the same time, as a result you're left with an inability to choose.
The best example of this I can give is free pizza. The immediate response to this is happiness, and a feeling of validation to an extent. How do you get free pizza? Well in this case a local Pizza chain offers a loyalty programme where for every pound you spend you earn points. When you collect points they can be exchanged for discounts, as well as other offers including vouchers for free pizzas and other things. I am someone who loves pizza and orders it quite a bit - I'm on their Christmas card list, that's not a joke, I'm actually serious. Getting free stuff is great, it makes me happy, and it does somewhat validate me because it makes me feel as though they appreciate my custom.
On the flip side, I have very little control when it comes to food, but not in the sense of a complete lack thereof - I can discipline myself when I want to, I have gone months at a time without eating any take out or junk food. I have very little control when there's no motivation to have self control, and in most cases that is my immediate response, I satisfy my immediate needs and desires rather than thinking long-term. There are many reasons why I display this behaviour, most of which I fully understand, and I will write about them at some point.
Offering someone like me an incentive to keep eating, is going to do exactly that. I'll keep ordering and keep eating. That is what most loyalty schemes are for after all. I should point out here I am not singling out this Pizza place which is why I haven't named them. I really do like their business and will continue to support them. I feel no guilt however in naming other companies that have similar practices. KFC here in the UK have a loyalty scheme known as the Colonel's Club and again as you spend money ordering food you earn points, in this case referred to as 'stamps' and once you accrue enough, you get free sides, free meals, or discount, so again there is an incentive to come back and to continue eating.
The cognitive dissonance arises from the question of whether or not this is actually ethical. Now, for a family or for people who are budget strapped, arguably this is a good thing as it reduces the overall cost and makes things more affordable in the long run. For an individual who isn't as strapped, this is solely about returning customers, that is to say they keep coming back. The question becomes whether or not a company that sells food should really be encouraging people to eat more. I know McDonald's in the past was placed under scrutiny for their "super-size me" practices which led to a documentary film by Morgan Spurlock of the same name, looking at the impact that had on people. Whilst some might argue that these schemes should be ended entirely, they are not only limited to unhealthy food or junk food, they do apply to other retailers who sell food too.
Coffee shops, Juice Bars, Sandwich shops, Doughnut shops, and even supermarkets in general have loyalty schemes that offer customers points for their purchases which can be redeemed later for discounts. Most of these outlets make no stipulations as to what you can spend those points on however. Take Sainsbury's, a supermarket in the UK, their loyalty scheme is part of the Nectar franchise which allows 500 points to be turned into £2.50 discount. You can spend those points on almost anything in the store and there's nothing to stop you from say buying a kilogram of lard and eating the entire block just as it is. That wouldn't be a very pleasant experience but it demonstrates the level of unhealthiness you achieve through the scheme if you really wanted to.
There is another argument that can be made as to whether or not those retailers should restrict what you can buy with your discount only to that which is healthy, but that infringes on your freedom of choice and I think for most people would actually discourage them from participating in the loyalty scheme to begin with. Take Marks and Spencer, another retailer in the UK that sells food and clothing, they have a loyalty scheme known as Sparks - from the nickname "Marks and Sparks" that people use as slang to refer to the chain. Their loyalty programme is less successful than other retailers primarily due to the fact that points do not have any cash value, you are given offers instead which are tailored to you based on your spending habits in the store. This does encourage people to come back and does encourage you to spend more, but it is less effective due to the restrictions of what you receive discounts on. You also have to activate offers with their loyalty scheme they are not automatic.
The real purpose of loyalty schemes are to encourage you to come back, as well as enabling the retailer to profile you. Loyalty schemes allow retailers to associate all purchases with a single identity that they can use for data mining and analytics. How this factors into a take-out store isn't so easy to figure out. They have a limited range of products that don't change much if at all, and in most cases you order online or by phone so there is already a means to collate your orders and activity with the retailer so the only merit of a loyalty scheme that still applies upon closer inspection is the attempt to get you to keep coming back. For me at least that would happen anyway, whether you offered these rewards or not.
There's no conclusion I can draw here, as I said I am conflicted. I can see both sides of the argument, as to why you would be in favour and as to why you would be against and I can't decide which side to take. This to me is in many ways like the Sugar Tax that was introduced here in the UK on fizzy drinks. It was meant to reduce the sales of fizzy drinks but for me personally the only effect it had was to encourage me to buy multi-packs of those drinks instead, I haven't looked at the amount I drink in much detail but off hand I would say it is more or less the same as it was. As I said before the tax was introduced the only effect it would have would be to increase the price, it wouldn't actually influence consumption.
On the topic of the sugar tax, one thing that irked me most of all was that many manufacturers took the decision to reduce the sugar content of their drinks to avoid the tax, and in the process made their drinks taste horrible. Companies like Coca Cola decided to retain the same recipe and sugar content and accept a price rise, and to date their sales have not suffered for doing so - other manufacturers however were met with backlash from the public, the most notable being Lucozade who met a wave of criticism and plummeting sales, surprisingly some of it came from health campaigners who advocate for the rights of patients with Diabetes who often rely on Lucozade as a quick fix for easy access to Glucose which the reduction in sugar content made much more difficult. Therein lies the crux of this conflicting opinion, choosing a side can have unintended consequences.
The best example of this I can give is free pizza. The immediate response to this is happiness, and a feeling of validation to an extent. How do you get free pizza? Well in this case a local Pizza chain offers a loyalty programme where for every pound you spend you earn points. When you collect points they can be exchanged for discounts, as well as other offers including vouchers for free pizzas and other things. I am someone who loves pizza and orders it quite a bit - I'm on their Christmas card list, that's not a joke, I'm actually serious. Getting free stuff is great, it makes me happy, and it does somewhat validate me because it makes me feel as though they appreciate my custom.
On the flip side, I have very little control when it comes to food, but not in the sense of a complete lack thereof - I can discipline myself when I want to, I have gone months at a time without eating any take out or junk food. I have very little control when there's no motivation to have self control, and in most cases that is my immediate response, I satisfy my immediate needs and desires rather than thinking long-term. There are many reasons why I display this behaviour, most of which I fully understand, and I will write about them at some point.
Offering someone like me an incentive to keep eating, is going to do exactly that. I'll keep ordering and keep eating. That is what most loyalty schemes are for after all. I should point out here I am not singling out this Pizza place which is why I haven't named them. I really do like their business and will continue to support them. I feel no guilt however in naming other companies that have similar practices. KFC here in the UK have a loyalty scheme known as the Colonel's Club and again as you spend money ordering food you earn points, in this case referred to as 'stamps' and once you accrue enough, you get free sides, free meals, or discount, so again there is an incentive to come back and to continue eating.
The cognitive dissonance arises from the question of whether or not this is actually ethical. Now, for a family or for people who are budget strapped, arguably this is a good thing as it reduces the overall cost and makes things more affordable in the long run. For an individual who isn't as strapped, this is solely about returning customers, that is to say they keep coming back. The question becomes whether or not a company that sells food should really be encouraging people to eat more. I know McDonald's in the past was placed under scrutiny for their "super-size me" practices which led to a documentary film by Morgan Spurlock of the same name, looking at the impact that had on people. Whilst some might argue that these schemes should be ended entirely, they are not only limited to unhealthy food or junk food, they do apply to other retailers who sell food too.
Coffee shops, Juice Bars, Sandwich shops, Doughnut shops, and even supermarkets in general have loyalty schemes that offer customers points for their purchases which can be redeemed later for discounts. Most of these outlets make no stipulations as to what you can spend those points on however. Take Sainsbury's, a supermarket in the UK, their loyalty scheme is part of the Nectar franchise which allows 500 points to be turned into £2.50 discount. You can spend those points on almost anything in the store and there's nothing to stop you from say buying a kilogram of lard and eating the entire block just as it is. That wouldn't be a very pleasant experience but it demonstrates the level of unhealthiness you achieve through the scheme if you really wanted to.
There is another argument that can be made as to whether or not those retailers should restrict what you can buy with your discount only to that which is healthy, but that infringes on your freedom of choice and I think for most people would actually discourage them from participating in the loyalty scheme to begin with. Take Marks and Spencer, another retailer in the UK that sells food and clothing, they have a loyalty scheme known as Sparks - from the nickname "Marks and Sparks" that people use as slang to refer to the chain. Their loyalty programme is less successful than other retailers primarily due to the fact that points do not have any cash value, you are given offers instead which are tailored to you based on your spending habits in the store. This does encourage people to come back and does encourage you to spend more, but it is less effective due to the restrictions of what you receive discounts on. You also have to activate offers with their loyalty scheme they are not automatic.
The real purpose of loyalty schemes are to encourage you to come back, as well as enabling the retailer to profile you. Loyalty schemes allow retailers to associate all purchases with a single identity that they can use for data mining and analytics. How this factors into a take-out store isn't so easy to figure out. They have a limited range of products that don't change much if at all, and in most cases you order online or by phone so there is already a means to collate your orders and activity with the retailer so the only merit of a loyalty scheme that still applies upon closer inspection is the attempt to get you to keep coming back. For me at least that would happen anyway, whether you offered these rewards or not.
There's no conclusion I can draw here, as I said I am conflicted. I can see both sides of the argument, as to why you would be in favour and as to why you would be against and I can't decide which side to take. This to me is in many ways like the Sugar Tax that was introduced here in the UK on fizzy drinks. It was meant to reduce the sales of fizzy drinks but for me personally the only effect it had was to encourage me to buy multi-packs of those drinks instead, I haven't looked at the amount I drink in much detail but off hand I would say it is more or less the same as it was. As I said before the tax was introduced the only effect it would have would be to increase the price, it wouldn't actually influence consumption.
On the topic of the sugar tax, one thing that irked me most of all was that many manufacturers took the decision to reduce the sugar content of their drinks to avoid the tax, and in the process made their drinks taste horrible. Companies like Coca Cola decided to retain the same recipe and sugar content and accept a price rise, and to date their sales have not suffered for doing so - other manufacturers however were met with backlash from the public, the most notable being Lucozade who met a wave of criticism and plummeting sales, surprisingly some of it came from health campaigners who advocate for the rights of patients with Diabetes who often rely on Lucozade as a quick fix for easy access to Glucose which the reduction in sugar content made much more difficult. Therein lies the crux of this conflicting opinion, choosing a side can have unintended consequences.
Clarity
Every now and then I stumble across something that catches my attention and captures my imagination; most of the time I will dwell on the focus for a while and then move on, but sometimes I get obsessed. When that happens, whatever it is that I am focusing on, it begins to invade my life until it reaches a point where everything I do is influenced by it, every thought connects to it, every second of idle time that I get my mind returns to that obsession.
I've been quite careful here to use the word obsession rather than addiction, and I know some people reading this post will have immediately drew parallels, but this isn't an addiction. The reason I draw a distinction between obsession and addiction is because for me at least, obsessions are fleeting, they eventually pass, and I will often return to them in future and the same fixation doesn't manifest. With addiction, once you are addicted to something, you will always be addicted to it. When you are truly addicted to something, moderation is not possible. This isn't about self-control, or about will power, addiction is a physiological process accompanied by behaviours. The psychological elements of addiction are the result of, not the cause, of the physiological elements. Or to put it more bluntly, true addiction is not influenced by desirability.
"True" in this regard refers to conformity with the literal definitions as opposed to the metaphorical definitions or hyperbole that people often engage in when it comes to these terms - much like depression which is often used erroneously as a synonym for sadness, the flippant use of the word addiction should be avoided here.
Nevertheless, whilst some of the behaviours I described are indicative of an addiction, it would be better to use the word obsession here, as that is closer to representing the novel nature of what I am describing.
The interesting thing about these obsessions for me is the state of mind they eventually evoke. At first the focus is something that requires a lot of attention, usually involving a learning curve that occupies my entire thought process. During this learning stage I think of almost nothing other than my focus. This can be viewed as the most destructive or obstructive period depending on your perspective. This period isn't that interesting unless the focus is something you also share an interest in. What eventually happens however, is that once the behaviours are learned, the knowledge is acquired, and various strategies formulated based on repeated actions, there eventually emerges a trance-like state of mind where whatever the focus is, the behaviours that are associated with it become meditative. By this I mean, the actions necessary become rote in mind, and lead to muscle memory forming, to the point where the conscious mind no longer controls the behaviours but rather the subconscious and the unconscious minds share these tasks leaving the conscious mind idle.
At this point something rather odd happens, I become busy but with a mind that is not occupied, the result is a mind that begins to wander, and where it ends up can be beyond strange to say the least. Creativity and ingenuity flourish, ideas flood my mind with things I could do, things I could write about, and memories of things that happened weeks, months, or even years ago. For me the latest example of this has been an obsession with a game called Cookie Clicker and the thoughts that spawned from the meditative state have been thoughts of who I have worked with in various jobs over the years, random names of people I had long forgotten have emerged from the recesses of my mind and I have had a lot of thoughts about the relationships I had with these people.
I'm yet to figure out a way to capitalise on this predictable behaviour, mainly because it is the response that is predictable but not the trigger. If I could find an easy reliable way to predict the things I would get obsessed by, then I could find a way to exploit this behaviour to my advantage, as a means of generating creativity on demand - something I find very difficult, which I have written about previously. Creativity for me in general is something that comes in waves or bursts of energy where I have floods of ideas whilst other times I experience a drought as it were. The trouble with predicting these obsessions however is that they rarely have anything in common. A few games over the years like Minecraft, Stardew Valley, The Witness, and Project Highrise have all caused this state of mind, but they can't reliably trigger it when I return to them. The problem with returning to these games is that there is no learning stage when I return as for the most part, those games don't change over time, save for a few mechanics introduced in updates. Knowing how the games work prevents that initial engrossing period.
I used the word "meditative" earlier because I recognise that by most accounts of meditation and the descriptions I have read, this learning period is in essence a way of clearing the mind of conscious thought, leading to a clear mind that can then create without limitation. Most forms of meditation that I have read about have similar goals, in that they involve some practice used to quiet the mind and reach that state - whether that be for the purposes of creativity like I desire, or for the purpose of relaxation and recharging as is the desire of many others. As far as meditation is concerned though, my experience with it is for the most part a failure. I've never been able to do it in the traditional sense. I am still curious though.
Edit:
Since this post was written I have come across a Psychotherapy technique called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing [EMDR] which was developed by Francine Shapiro. In its most simplest terms EMDR involves the use of rapid eye movements or repetitive eye movements whilst the subject focuses on a particular cause of trauma. The combination of eye movement and thought processing in this way enables the subject to process thoughts that they would otherwise be unable to process. After spending some time reading about this technique and some of the research behind its application, I have come to the conclusion that the behaviours I discussed in this post can be considered a form of EMDR. During the initial learning stage that I mentioned above, a lot of repetition is involved which involves physical movements or reading or in the particular case of videos games, rapid eye movement. It is also during this stage that the mind "quiets down" for me, in other words this is the stage where the mind releases what it was focusing on in order to achieve clarity.
This will likely form the basis for a future blog post when I have had time to explore this technique and its application. I have some experiments I want to try out using it as a basis, for now I just wanted to add this footnote to acknowledge I found out similar behaviours to the ones I described have actually been used in a more standardised way.
I've been quite careful here to use the word obsession rather than addiction, and I know some people reading this post will have immediately drew parallels, but this isn't an addiction. The reason I draw a distinction between obsession and addiction is because for me at least, obsessions are fleeting, they eventually pass, and I will often return to them in future and the same fixation doesn't manifest. With addiction, once you are addicted to something, you will always be addicted to it. When you are truly addicted to something, moderation is not possible. This isn't about self-control, or about will power, addiction is a physiological process accompanied by behaviours. The psychological elements of addiction are the result of, not the cause, of the physiological elements. Or to put it more bluntly, true addiction is not influenced by desirability.
"True" in this regard refers to conformity with the literal definitions as opposed to the metaphorical definitions or hyperbole that people often engage in when it comes to these terms - much like depression which is often used erroneously as a synonym for sadness, the flippant use of the word addiction should be avoided here.
Nevertheless, whilst some of the behaviours I described are indicative of an addiction, it would be better to use the word obsession here, as that is closer to representing the novel nature of what I am describing.
The interesting thing about these obsessions for me is the state of mind they eventually evoke. At first the focus is something that requires a lot of attention, usually involving a learning curve that occupies my entire thought process. During this learning stage I think of almost nothing other than my focus. This can be viewed as the most destructive or obstructive period depending on your perspective. This period isn't that interesting unless the focus is something you also share an interest in. What eventually happens however, is that once the behaviours are learned, the knowledge is acquired, and various strategies formulated based on repeated actions, there eventually emerges a trance-like state of mind where whatever the focus is, the behaviours that are associated with it become meditative. By this I mean, the actions necessary become rote in mind, and lead to muscle memory forming, to the point where the conscious mind no longer controls the behaviours but rather the subconscious and the unconscious minds share these tasks leaving the conscious mind idle.
At this point something rather odd happens, I become busy but with a mind that is not occupied, the result is a mind that begins to wander, and where it ends up can be beyond strange to say the least. Creativity and ingenuity flourish, ideas flood my mind with things I could do, things I could write about, and memories of things that happened weeks, months, or even years ago. For me the latest example of this has been an obsession with a game called Cookie Clicker and the thoughts that spawned from the meditative state have been thoughts of who I have worked with in various jobs over the years, random names of people I had long forgotten have emerged from the recesses of my mind and I have had a lot of thoughts about the relationships I had with these people.
I'm yet to figure out a way to capitalise on this predictable behaviour, mainly because it is the response that is predictable but not the trigger. If I could find an easy reliable way to predict the things I would get obsessed by, then I could find a way to exploit this behaviour to my advantage, as a means of generating creativity on demand - something I find very difficult, which I have written about previously. Creativity for me in general is something that comes in waves or bursts of energy where I have floods of ideas whilst other times I experience a drought as it were. The trouble with predicting these obsessions however is that they rarely have anything in common. A few games over the years like Minecraft, Stardew Valley, The Witness, and Project Highrise have all caused this state of mind, but they can't reliably trigger it when I return to them. The problem with returning to these games is that there is no learning stage when I return as for the most part, those games don't change over time, save for a few mechanics introduced in updates. Knowing how the games work prevents that initial engrossing period.
I used the word "meditative" earlier because I recognise that by most accounts of meditation and the descriptions I have read, this learning period is in essence a way of clearing the mind of conscious thought, leading to a clear mind that can then create without limitation. Most forms of meditation that I have read about have similar goals, in that they involve some practice used to quiet the mind and reach that state - whether that be for the purposes of creativity like I desire, or for the purpose of relaxation and recharging as is the desire of many others. As far as meditation is concerned though, my experience with it is for the most part a failure. I've never been able to do it in the traditional sense. I am still curious though.
Edit:
Since this post was written I have come across a Psychotherapy technique called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing [EMDR] which was developed by Francine Shapiro. In its most simplest terms EMDR involves the use of rapid eye movements or repetitive eye movements whilst the subject focuses on a particular cause of trauma. The combination of eye movement and thought processing in this way enables the subject to process thoughts that they would otherwise be unable to process. After spending some time reading about this technique and some of the research behind its application, I have come to the conclusion that the behaviours I discussed in this post can be considered a form of EMDR. During the initial learning stage that I mentioned above, a lot of repetition is involved which involves physical movements or reading or in the particular case of videos games, rapid eye movement. It is also during this stage that the mind "quiets down" for me, in other words this is the stage where the mind releases what it was focusing on in order to achieve clarity.
This will likely form the basis for a future blog post when I have had time to explore this technique and its application. I have some experiments I want to try out using it as a basis, for now I just wanted to add this footnote to acknowledge I found out similar behaviours to the ones I described have actually been used in a more standardised way.
Uncharted Knowledge
People often ask what the meaning of life is, and there is no shortage of people who will give you their interpretation or their belief as to what that meaning is or how to find it. The question itself however represents one of many questions in life that make up a field of study known as Epistemology, which is the study of knowledge and the distinction between that which can be proven and that which is opinion. These are topics I have touched on quite a few times here in my writings, particularly when talking about the distinction between objective and subjective truth. Epistemology on the other hand goes much deeper than this and involves the structured analysis of knowledge in such a way that empiricism is irrelevant. Empiricism is a theory that knowledge can only be determined as valid if the proof for it can be experienced, usually through the five senses but other experiences can be incorporated. Epistemology on the other hand does not concern itself with whether or not a belief can be empirically proven, rather whether or not that belief can be justified.
There is a very important line you have to draw between justification and evidence, the former is a belief that leads to something material as a result, the latter is something material that leads to a belief as a result. Whilst these are similar concepts they have very different characterisations of validity and the concept of proof. Within Epistemology it is sufficient for example that every logical argument for a position can be agreed, whereas empiricism requires not only logic and reason but evidence to back up those claims.
Epistemology can accept negative beliefs, the argument that X does not exist because there is no evidence of X and no reason to believe that it exists. Empiricism on the other hand cannot accept negative beliefs as inherently they can never be proven, just as within the scientific method you cannot assert a negative as true as lack of evidence does not constitute evidence, and empiricism requires evidence.
Without referring to these concepts by their names or the fields of study they interact with, we do incorporate this distinction into our everyday life. Beyond grand philosophical questions such as the nature of being, there are simpler pragmatic questions that arise day to day. Wherever we must complete a task without instruction and without reference, we rely on epistemology to be able to determine a course of action and to make judgements. We use prior experience and we use truths that we know even when they are not conducive to our goal, to create a foundation to work with. If we were to rely solely on empiricism in our day to day lives then whenever we are faced with a task we have never completed before, we would not be able to progress. We would need references, or guidance, or similar prior experience to guide us and inform us how to act.
With epistemology we can judge our individual actions that we could take in an attempt to experiment and take a stab in the dark to try and discover a solution. This can perhaps be explained better by saying that Epistemology is supportive of an attempt to undertake a task without experience and discover as you go, forming new beliefs and evaluating them after the fact. This would be the idea of "winging it" as we go the first time, figuring out what works, and then documenting it afterwards. Through this process you let what you already know guide you, and what you can use logic and reason to predict. This is akin to forming hypotheses based on what your assumptions would be, testing them, and then documenting the result but with much less forethought.
With empiricism on the other hand you would attempt to write a rulebook first, find similar experiences and draw conclusions based on those prior experiences, and use those to formulate hypotheses before you experiment. You then conduct the experiments, record the results, and compare them against prior evidence and establish causation or correlation.
The difference between the two is that the former lacks research before experimentation, instead relying on personal experience and belief, in an effort to create new research. The latter on the other hand requires research before experimentation and relies on previous experiments and their conclusions in order to form new research that extends the existing.
Epistemology is undoubtedly the riskier path as it involves the exploration of unfounded beliefs and experimentation with concepts you do not fully understand. Empiricism is undoubtedly the safest path by contrast as it involves extension of knowledge and informed experimentation using concepts that you already have an understanding of in order to predict the result more accurately.
In terms of which of these approaches I would favour and which I would say is more common, I would argue that Epistemology is more prevalent. I would also argue that it is more useful in the long term. There is little point in carrying out experiments you already know the outcome of before you do them, nor is there much point to reinforcing existing knowledge when it is already widely accepted. Empiricism is in this regard an inward study that seeks to root out that which is flawed within existing knowledge to purify it, whereas Epistemology is an outward study that seeks to incorporate as much new information as it can no matter how relevant or irrelevant. Arguably some of the greatest advances in human technology came about through accidental discoveries for example the discovery of Penicillin which came about by chance.
Rule books, guides, and references are important in life but experimentation and spontaneity are equally as vital. Whenever you have the opportunity to pursue a goal or achieve a task without any help or prior research to use as a foundation, recognise the opportunity to be the one to write the rule book, the one to figure things out, and document your experience. Be a pioneer.
There is a very important line you have to draw between justification and evidence, the former is a belief that leads to something material as a result, the latter is something material that leads to a belief as a result. Whilst these are similar concepts they have very different characterisations of validity and the concept of proof. Within Epistemology it is sufficient for example that every logical argument for a position can be agreed, whereas empiricism requires not only logic and reason but evidence to back up those claims.
Epistemology can accept negative beliefs, the argument that X does not exist because there is no evidence of X and no reason to believe that it exists. Empiricism on the other hand cannot accept negative beliefs as inherently they can never be proven, just as within the scientific method you cannot assert a negative as true as lack of evidence does not constitute evidence, and empiricism requires evidence.
Without referring to these concepts by their names or the fields of study they interact with, we do incorporate this distinction into our everyday life. Beyond grand philosophical questions such as the nature of being, there are simpler pragmatic questions that arise day to day. Wherever we must complete a task without instruction and without reference, we rely on epistemology to be able to determine a course of action and to make judgements. We use prior experience and we use truths that we know even when they are not conducive to our goal, to create a foundation to work with. If we were to rely solely on empiricism in our day to day lives then whenever we are faced with a task we have never completed before, we would not be able to progress. We would need references, or guidance, or similar prior experience to guide us and inform us how to act.
With epistemology we can judge our individual actions that we could take in an attempt to experiment and take a stab in the dark to try and discover a solution. This can perhaps be explained better by saying that Epistemology is supportive of an attempt to undertake a task without experience and discover as you go, forming new beliefs and evaluating them after the fact. This would be the idea of "winging it" as we go the first time, figuring out what works, and then documenting it afterwards. Through this process you let what you already know guide you, and what you can use logic and reason to predict. This is akin to forming hypotheses based on what your assumptions would be, testing them, and then documenting the result but with much less forethought.
With empiricism on the other hand you would attempt to write a rulebook first, find similar experiences and draw conclusions based on those prior experiences, and use those to formulate hypotheses before you experiment. You then conduct the experiments, record the results, and compare them against prior evidence and establish causation or correlation.
The difference between the two is that the former lacks research before experimentation, instead relying on personal experience and belief, in an effort to create new research. The latter on the other hand requires research before experimentation and relies on previous experiments and their conclusions in order to form new research that extends the existing.
Epistemology is undoubtedly the riskier path as it involves the exploration of unfounded beliefs and experimentation with concepts you do not fully understand. Empiricism is undoubtedly the safest path by contrast as it involves extension of knowledge and informed experimentation using concepts that you already have an understanding of in order to predict the result more accurately.
In terms of which of these approaches I would favour and which I would say is more common, I would argue that Epistemology is more prevalent. I would also argue that it is more useful in the long term. There is little point in carrying out experiments you already know the outcome of before you do them, nor is there much point to reinforcing existing knowledge when it is already widely accepted. Empiricism is in this regard an inward study that seeks to root out that which is flawed within existing knowledge to purify it, whereas Epistemology is an outward study that seeks to incorporate as much new information as it can no matter how relevant or irrelevant. Arguably some of the greatest advances in human technology came about through accidental discoveries for example the discovery of Penicillin which came about by chance.
Rule books, guides, and references are important in life but experimentation and spontaneity are equally as vital. Whenever you have the opportunity to pursue a goal or achieve a task without any help or prior research to use as a foundation, recognise the opportunity to be the one to write the rule book, the one to figure things out, and document your experience. Be a pioneer.
Wasted Time
There are some aspirations that we develop as children that we later abandon in life. Most of these aspirations revolve around superlatives, the idea of being the best at something or being the first to complete a gargantuan task. For example when I was a child I wanted to know everything there was to know about everything, knowledge was my aspiration. As I grew, the reality sunk in that this task was impossible, and I accepted as a compromise that I would try and find out everything I could about the things I had an interest in. Other children have aspirations such as wealth, the desire to be the richest person that ever lived, or to have all the money in the world. Like my realisation of the reality we live in, sooner or later you come to accept these tasks are impossible - or at least in a practical sense for most people they are impossible - you can at least argue here that the number one spot on the rich list would satisfy that goal, good luck with that ambition if you still chase it.
The other aspiration that is perhaps the most common is the desire to be liked by everyone. You could simply call this popularity, but there's a little more to it than that. The desire is ultimately guided not by numbers but by the ambition to have everyone you meet like you as a person. Again at some point in your life you have to realise that isn't possible to achieve. Some people will like you and others will not. Of those who do not like you, you will not always know why, and neither will they. Whether or not we like someone isn't always a rational or reasonable decision. Usually it's not even a conscious choice.
There are a lot of different people who read this blog. To date they hail from 36 different countries. This isn't that surprising to me given that it is written in English so it will be predominantly English speaking countries that would even find it in the first place. The other reason it isn't surprising to me is that unlike other sites and blogs that I have worked on, I have made no effort to promote or market this blog. I occasionally share a link to it on Twitter but that's about all, and very little traffic to this blog actually comes from Twitter, most of it comes from either Google or it is organic [direct] traffic probably through a bookmark or a link I have sent people. The fact this blog is still quite obscure doesn't concern me much. I have said many times that I write this blog primarily as a diary and a means to document my thoughts and feelings about many different things. Not everyone who finds this blog in the first place will even be interested in what I have written.
If you find this blog interesting then, welcome, there's plenty to read at this point so have a look around. If you don't find it interesting, I'd have to wonder how or why you made it this far. Regardless, you don't have to like or even agree with anything I write. That's not the point. It shouldn't take you long to realise whether you want to keep reading or not. I would however remind you that you are here of your own volition. I am not making you read this, nor is anyone else. You can click away and go elsewhere if you want. There is a lot of content online that is created by many different people, and so long as that content is legal, and wasn't created for the purpose of trolling others, in general when you disagree with something you should really just move along. There's a temptation to engage in debate and to try and argue with content creators, but whatever platform you choose to do this on, you have to realise the only person whose time you're actually wasting is your own. I'm not going to change someone's mind or their outlook on the world with one blog post, and you're not going to change mine. People have to want to change from within for them to be open to another point of view for a start, before you even engage in any other discourse. If they aren't open to that change, you're wasting your time.
The other aspiration that is perhaps the most common is the desire to be liked by everyone. You could simply call this popularity, but there's a little more to it than that. The desire is ultimately guided not by numbers but by the ambition to have everyone you meet like you as a person. Again at some point in your life you have to realise that isn't possible to achieve. Some people will like you and others will not. Of those who do not like you, you will not always know why, and neither will they. Whether or not we like someone isn't always a rational or reasonable decision. Usually it's not even a conscious choice.
There are a lot of different people who read this blog. To date they hail from 36 different countries. This isn't that surprising to me given that it is written in English so it will be predominantly English speaking countries that would even find it in the first place. The other reason it isn't surprising to me is that unlike other sites and blogs that I have worked on, I have made no effort to promote or market this blog. I occasionally share a link to it on Twitter but that's about all, and very little traffic to this blog actually comes from Twitter, most of it comes from either Google or it is organic [direct] traffic probably through a bookmark or a link I have sent people. The fact this blog is still quite obscure doesn't concern me much. I have said many times that I write this blog primarily as a diary and a means to document my thoughts and feelings about many different things. Not everyone who finds this blog in the first place will even be interested in what I have written.
If you find this blog interesting then, welcome, there's plenty to read at this point so have a look around. If you don't find it interesting, I'd have to wonder how or why you made it this far. Regardless, you don't have to like or even agree with anything I write. That's not the point. It shouldn't take you long to realise whether you want to keep reading or not. I would however remind you that you are here of your own volition. I am not making you read this, nor is anyone else. You can click away and go elsewhere if you want. There is a lot of content online that is created by many different people, and so long as that content is legal, and wasn't created for the purpose of trolling others, in general when you disagree with something you should really just move along. There's a temptation to engage in debate and to try and argue with content creators, but whatever platform you choose to do this on, you have to realise the only person whose time you're actually wasting is your own. I'm not going to change someone's mind or their outlook on the world with one blog post, and you're not going to change mine. People have to want to change from within for them to be open to another point of view for a start, before you even engage in any other discourse. If they aren't open to that change, you're wasting your time.
Don't bother
Sooner or later in life you have to realise that some people enjoy the act of complaining more than they do finding resolution. Some people hold onto their problems because there is an identity that they associate with those problems and that is how they identify themselves. If they were to actually find resolution and their problems were to be taken away, they would have to find a new identity and redefine who they are in their minds.
I recently had an experience which reminded me of why I formed this belief in the first place. As with most beliefs I form, I hold them for some time, long enough to allow the events that formed them to pass away or become less poignant, at which point I begin to question those beliefs and whether or not they are still valid. I recognise that the world is forever changing, and that new environments emerge and circumstances can become more or less accommodative leading to that which we believe being further validated or even invalidated as a result. This experience was part of that ongoing process where I put to test what I already know in order to prove that what I expect to happen will still happen.
The experience itself isn't relevant here, the details are insignificant. What is relevant however is that I was aware that someone had formed an identity for themselves based on problems that they had, and that there were solutions to those problems that they could pursue, and as I should have expected, they did not want to pursue any solution whatsoever, finding a sense of security in the familiar and choosing to hold onto the identity they had created for themselves instead.
Age is irrelevant in this conversation because even those who are older than I am can be just as stubborn when it comes to change. There are lessons in life that we have the opportunity to learn as we grow, some people learn those lessons and take them to heart, whilst others reject them entirely. There is growth which comes with age and experience that is therefore not universal.
What I find frustrating about this whole experience however is the fact that those people who hold onto their problems and close their mind to solutions ultimately cause their problems to grow. Any underlying truth in the cause of their problems diminishes over time, being replaced instead by their own beliefs. That, yes negative things did happen to them, but the true extent to which those things impacted them was minimal by comparison to the impact they create through their own negative, self destructive mentality.
We like to think that we can help people, but you can't help everyone. If you spend your life trying to fix other peoples' problems then sooner or later you'll either realise that some people just create more to replace them, or you'll waste your life trying to help people who deep down underneath it all don't actually want to be helped. Some people just like to have negativity in their life that they can blame everything bad on, so that they never have to take responsibility for anything they say or do, instead blaming it on that negativity.
I have experienced great trauma in my life, and I have met many people who have been through similar experiences and others who have been through far worse. What remains common to all of these people is the recognition that if you let them, those traumas can come to define your life and invade every single thing you say, do, and think. Those who manage to progress to a point where they become highly functioning once again are those who realise that you can confine past experience to the past. This isn't something that is always possible through thought and positive mental attitudes alone, sometimes it requires a lot of therapy, and it can require drugs such as antidepressants in order to reach a point where you can process something inherently destructive without being destroyed in the process.
If you are a person who is sentimental, or if you are someone with an intimate link to the person who is struggling, then there can be a desperate desire to "fix" the person who is struggling. This desire is insidious because unless you are a trained professional you will not be able to do it alone, and arguably even if you are a trained professional it is highly unethical to try and treat someone you know personally or someone who you share an intimate relationship with - romantic or platonic.
Recognising and accepting that other people are not your problems to solve can be incredibly hard if you form sentimental attachments to other people easily. It can be incredibly hard even if you don't form these attachments easily but the person in question is a rare exception or is someone it took you a long time to get to that point with. There is a mentality that evaluates the investment that has already been made in someone else and spurs you on to making that much of an investment again to save them, but through the nature of this mentality, as each revaluation occurs, the sum total of all investment is cumulative and you get stuck in an infinite loop where you give more and more until you have nothing left to give and then you yourself feel like a complete failure because you couldn't save them.
The idea that you need to disconnect from the world, from other people, and to detach your sentimentality is something which you may react quite vehemently against. Whilst age has little relevance here, there is a tendency to believe with greater optimism at a younger age that you can save everyone, it's just a matter of how much effort you put into that endeavour. Unfortunately that belief is not something I nor anyone else can disprove for you, if you hold it, you will have to learn for yourself the hard way that this is fruitless. If you do manage to save every single person you try to save, you will be the first person in history to manage that feat. That in itself is not an argument to prove it is impossible, it is only an expression of the improbability of succeeding. Even if you truly believe it is possible, sooner or later you'll realise that even then, the amount of effort you would have to invest would never be worth it for some people, not because they are not worth saving but because of the reality that they don't actually want to be saved, and that is a mentality you can't change.
I recently had an experience which reminded me of why I formed this belief in the first place. As with most beliefs I form, I hold them for some time, long enough to allow the events that formed them to pass away or become less poignant, at which point I begin to question those beliefs and whether or not they are still valid. I recognise that the world is forever changing, and that new environments emerge and circumstances can become more or less accommodative leading to that which we believe being further validated or even invalidated as a result. This experience was part of that ongoing process where I put to test what I already know in order to prove that what I expect to happen will still happen.
The experience itself isn't relevant here, the details are insignificant. What is relevant however is that I was aware that someone had formed an identity for themselves based on problems that they had, and that there were solutions to those problems that they could pursue, and as I should have expected, they did not want to pursue any solution whatsoever, finding a sense of security in the familiar and choosing to hold onto the identity they had created for themselves instead.
Age is irrelevant in this conversation because even those who are older than I am can be just as stubborn when it comes to change. There are lessons in life that we have the opportunity to learn as we grow, some people learn those lessons and take them to heart, whilst others reject them entirely. There is growth which comes with age and experience that is therefore not universal.
What I find frustrating about this whole experience however is the fact that those people who hold onto their problems and close their mind to solutions ultimately cause their problems to grow. Any underlying truth in the cause of their problems diminishes over time, being replaced instead by their own beliefs. That, yes negative things did happen to them, but the true extent to which those things impacted them was minimal by comparison to the impact they create through their own negative, self destructive mentality.
We like to think that we can help people, but you can't help everyone. If you spend your life trying to fix other peoples' problems then sooner or later you'll either realise that some people just create more to replace them, or you'll waste your life trying to help people who deep down underneath it all don't actually want to be helped. Some people just like to have negativity in their life that they can blame everything bad on, so that they never have to take responsibility for anything they say or do, instead blaming it on that negativity.
I have experienced great trauma in my life, and I have met many people who have been through similar experiences and others who have been through far worse. What remains common to all of these people is the recognition that if you let them, those traumas can come to define your life and invade every single thing you say, do, and think. Those who manage to progress to a point where they become highly functioning once again are those who realise that you can confine past experience to the past. This isn't something that is always possible through thought and positive mental attitudes alone, sometimes it requires a lot of therapy, and it can require drugs such as antidepressants in order to reach a point where you can process something inherently destructive without being destroyed in the process.
If you are a person who is sentimental, or if you are someone with an intimate link to the person who is struggling, then there can be a desperate desire to "fix" the person who is struggling. This desire is insidious because unless you are a trained professional you will not be able to do it alone, and arguably even if you are a trained professional it is highly unethical to try and treat someone you know personally or someone who you share an intimate relationship with - romantic or platonic.
Recognising and accepting that other people are not your problems to solve can be incredibly hard if you form sentimental attachments to other people easily. It can be incredibly hard even if you don't form these attachments easily but the person in question is a rare exception or is someone it took you a long time to get to that point with. There is a mentality that evaluates the investment that has already been made in someone else and spurs you on to making that much of an investment again to save them, but through the nature of this mentality, as each revaluation occurs, the sum total of all investment is cumulative and you get stuck in an infinite loop where you give more and more until you have nothing left to give and then you yourself feel like a complete failure because you couldn't save them.
The idea that you need to disconnect from the world, from other people, and to detach your sentimentality is something which you may react quite vehemently against. Whilst age has little relevance here, there is a tendency to believe with greater optimism at a younger age that you can save everyone, it's just a matter of how much effort you put into that endeavour. Unfortunately that belief is not something I nor anyone else can disprove for you, if you hold it, you will have to learn for yourself the hard way that this is fruitless. If you do manage to save every single person you try to save, you will be the first person in history to manage that feat. That in itself is not an argument to prove it is impossible, it is only an expression of the improbability of succeeding. Even if you truly believe it is possible, sooner or later you'll realise that even then, the amount of effort you would have to invest would never be worth it for some people, not because they are not worth saving but because of the reality that they don't actually want to be saved, and that is a mentality you can't change.
Raising The Bar
I've been spending some time lately studying old video games. I have a degree in Computer Science with Games Technology and I develop games in my spare time mostly as a hobby at this point. I have a love/hate relationship with the games industry as a whole but one area I still find interesting is the indie game scene where developers aren't burdened by politics and commercial constraints when it comes to the choices they make. Having said that, some of my favourite games of decades past were developed by the heavyweights of the games industry of the time, so I can't dismiss the mainstream entirely.
I've had a particular focus recently on the SNES era of gaming, I did have other consoles of the generation and whilst I do still have great affection for titles from those consoles too, the SNES was really one of the consoles I latched onto most. There were 3 games in particular that I chose to look at, Super Metroid, The Addams Family, and Chrono Trigger. Each game is distinct from the other two but some gameplay elements are common to all three. Nevertheless I tried to create a checklist of sorts that would include the elements I liked most from each game, but in doing so I wasn't able to predict which games I would like based on those elements when I went beyond those games. One of the reasons I think this turned out to be the case was that I hadn't considered context, by that I mean I hadn't considered what I had experienced up until that point, what else was on offer, and what mindset I approached those games with versus who and what I am now.
In decades passed when you were a games developer, you had to think about gameplay mechanics, story, visual design, soundscapes, and many other elements of composition when it came to the actual creation of the content itself. Target audience was a lot simpler since gaming was less popular; gaming did have its moments of boom and more than a few moments of bust, one in particular in 1983 became known as the Video Game Crash - something which I think was necessary as gaming had become a commodity and whenever anything becomes a commodity the sense of community dies. It took many years for the industry to recover from that period and arguably the industry as it is today is showing some of the hallmarks once again as it did before that infamous crash. I'm not going to speculate as to whether the industry is approaching another moment of shock, ultimately commercial decisions will determine whether that happens, not consumer choice.
Regardless, gaming whilst it had its moments of peak, still attracted a particular culture that was somewhat uniform. Today the culture that surrounds video games is much more diverse, which opens up a whole new world of character development, settings, and great swathes of imagination and creativity that the industry cried out for in vain in the past. Having so much creativity at your disposal however still doesn't translate into success, there are more elements in play today than there once were. Developers today have to think more like authors, they have to consider who their target audience is, rather than just creating content that they put out there for anyone to enjoy, whilst the latter may be tempting, it doesn't equate to equality as some people think it will, instead it translates into mediocrity as the content ends up being generic.
Chrono Trigger is an RPG that was created by Square and released in 1995 for the SNES. Square at the time was best known for developing the Final Fantasy franchise putting aside the adoration and sentimentality attached to Chrono Trigger, part of its success relied on the reputation of Square and the expectations that the Final Fantasy series had placed on the works they produced. Out of context you might think if you could replicate the elements of Chrono Trigger that people loved the most that you could create a game that would be successful but once again this is where context is key, you have to consider the environment and the ecosystem that these games were released under.
Sticking with RPGs I decided to take a look at some older RPGs of the era and whilst I do see merit in many of the titles, I can't help but feel that part of the reason these games are revered so much is simply nostalgia. I do not think many of them actually hold up when analysed critically. I believe the bar has been raised over the years by various titles that it may just be that I can't objectively look at these titles as someone would from that time period. What I do know however is despite the adoration many of these titles have, if they were re-released today without substantial improvements being made, they would flop. I can say this with confidence considering how few views many of the playthroughs of these games have on Youtube, despite their legacy being part of the zeitgeist and many prominent gamers referencing these titles with many more titles being released that have been inspired by them.
There's often a hesitation people have with the idea of rebooting a series or remaking old titles; nostalgia is so often the barrier, those who have a longing for these old games want the world to experience them but they don't want them to be changed. Unfortunately the bar has been raised, if you don't take those titles and rework them to cater to the audience that now exists, they won't succeed.
I've had a particular focus recently on the SNES era of gaming, I did have other consoles of the generation and whilst I do still have great affection for titles from those consoles too, the SNES was really one of the consoles I latched onto most. There were 3 games in particular that I chose to look at, Super Metroid, The Addams Family, and Chrono Trigger. Each game is distinct from the other two but some gameplay elements are common to all three. Nevertheless I tried to create a checklist of sorts that would include the elements I liked most from each game, but in doing so I wasn't able to predict which games I would like based on those elements when I went beyond those games. One of the reasons I think this turned out to be the case was that I hadn't considered context, by that I mean I hadn't considered what I had experienced up until that point, what else was on offer, and what mindset I approached those games with versus who and what I am now.
In decades passed when you were a games developer, you had to think about gameplay mechanics, story, visual design, soundscapes, and many other elements of composition when it came to the actual creation of the content itself. Target audience was a lot simpler since gaming was less popular; gaming did have its moments of boom and more than a few moments of bust, one in particular in 1983 became known as the Video Game Crash - something which I think was necessary as gaming had become a commodity and whenever anything becomes a commodity the sense of community dies. It took many years for the industry to recover from that period and arguably the industry as it is today is showing some of the hallmarks once again as it did before that infamous crash. I'm not going to speculate as to whether the industry is approaching another moment of shock, ultimately commercial decisions will determine whether that happens, not consumer choice.
Regardless, gaming whilst it had its moments of peak, still attracted a particular culture that was somewhat uniform. Today the culture that surrounds video games is much more diverse, which opens up a whole new world of character development, settings, and great swathes of imagination and creativity that the industry cried out for in vain in the past. Having so much creativity at your disposal however still doesn't translate into success, there are more elements in play today than there once were. Developers today have to think more like authors, they have to consider who their target audience is, rather than just creating content that they put out there for anyone to enjoy, whilst the latter may be tempting, it doesn't equate to equality as some people think it will, instead it translates into mediocrity as the content ends up being generic.
Chrono Trigger is an RPG that was created by Square and released in 1995 for the SNES. Square at the time was best known for developing the Final Fantasy franchise putting aside the adoration and sentimentality attached to Chrono Trigger, part of its success relied on the reputation of Square and the expectations that the Final Fantasy series had placed on the works they produced. Out of context you might think if you could replicate the elements of Chrono Trigger that people loved the most that you could create a game that would be successful but once again this is where context is key, you have to consider the environment and the ecosystem that these games were released under.
Sticking with RPGs I decided to take a look at some older RPGs of the era and whilst I do see merit in many of the titles, I can't help but feel that part of the reason these games are revered so much is simply nostalgia. I do not think many of them actually hold up when analysed critically. I believe the bar has been raised over the years by various titles that it may just be that I can't objectively look at these titles as someone would from that time period. What I do know however is despite the adoration many of these titles have, if they were re-released today without substantial improvements being made, they would flop. I can say this with confidence considering how few views many of the playthroughs of these games have on Youtube, despite their legacy being part of the zeitgeist and many prominent gamers referencing these titles with many more titles being released that have been inspired by them.
There's often a hesitation people have with the idea of rebooting a series or remaking old titles; nostalgia is so often the barrier, those who have a longing for these old games want the world to experience them but they don't want them to be changed. Unfortunately the bar has been raised, if you don't take those titles and rework them to cater to the audience that now exists, they won't succeed.
Who wrote it?
Last year there was an anonymous piece written in the New York Times which led to a controversy over who could possibly have written it. When this controversy evolved, there was a lot of interest in the piece itself and there were a lot of efforts made to try and discern who wrote it by analysing the content. This study of content in this way is known in forensic science as Questioned Document Examination. This whole debacle however brought light to many subjects I find fascinating, notably those of Linguistics, Steganography, and to a lesser extent Cryptography.
For my dissertation as part of my degree I created an encryption algorithm. I've had an interest in encryption for many years, not because of the goal of keeping things secure, but rather the opposite. I love puzzles, and I love anything that makes me stop and thinking. Cryptography is the act of encrypting or decrypting information in general, and its sister subject Cryptanalysis is the act of analysing encrypted information with the ultimate goal being decryption of that information. Both these fields heavily incorporate linguistics. Simple ciphers can be broken with basic linguistic analysis; take a substitution cipher, this is where every letter of the alphabet is swapped for a different unique letter, allowing you to encrypt a message and to produce a cipher text, which looks like a jumbled mess. In the English language the distribution of the letters of the alphabet by frequency of which they are used results in the letters E, T, A, O, I, and N, being the most frequently occurring letters in that order. Due to this fact, most simple substitution ciphers can be broken by taking the most common letter in the cipher text and mapping it to the letter E, and then the next to T and so on. This isn't an infallible method, there will always be exceptions, and anyone who knows even the basics about Cryptography will know this method of encryption offers little security.
What this linguistic analysis serves to prove however, is that there is a lot more information contained within a piece of writing than the words alone and the meaning they convey. There's a lot of meta data that can be extracted, things like average sentence length, word count, character count, character per word count, letter frequency distribution, unique word count, unique word frequency distribution, as well as other sentimental indicators and cumulative indicators when you have more than one sample such as cliché counts, recurring phrases, recurring words, and incorrect word usage consistency. All of this information can give you a lot of clues about who wrote something and whether or not multiples examples were written by the same person. Even when posts are edited quite a bit, without rewriting the whole thing every time, some information will be preserved.
Steganography is the act of hiding information in a passage of text without the reader being aware that it is there. This can be through the use of fixed points within the passage, for example using the first letter of every word or every third letter or some other more complicated means to find the information. Once the reader has the means to find this information that can go back and find it hidden in plain sight. Perhaps you noticed it, perhaps you didn't but this paragraph of text for instance contains the word "STOP" hidden within it, comprised of the first letter of the first word of each sentence.
Understandably these techniques if they had been used in the anonymous piece written in the New York Times would have been spotted fairly quickly. Indeed within the first few hours of its publication there were already analyses of the article and a number of indicators as to who may have wrote the article. Most speculation revolved around the use of words that were less common in the English language but were known to have been used many times by certain individuals within the US Administration.
Regardless, who wrote the piece is now irrelevant. What it made me realise however is that there are a number of articulations that I make here in these posts that give away the fact I wrote every one of them. I tend to use the word "ultimately" quite a bit, and I don't always use it right. Whilst the meaning and sentiment are conveyed in its usage, there are times when it's not being used in the right context. Whenever things are brought to my attention I usually amend them. At this point however there are well over 150 posts on this blog and I just don't have the time to go back and edit every one of them again. This is part of the reason why I said in other posts, we often see our own mistakes but don't recognise them in the moment, we gloss over them because they don't stand out. We see what we think we see rather than what is actually there. Again this is why it is advisable to have someone else proof read your publications, or to leave enough time for you to forget the content to be able to proof it yourself. Alas I am only one man and I don't have the time to go back and edit everything, this is a hobby, it isn't my job.
What do you think would give you away? If you were to write an anonymous article, what word or phrase or other linguistic feature of your writing style would be the key indicator that you were the one that wrote it?
For my dissertation as part of my degree I created an encryption algorithm. I've had an interest in encryption for many years, not because of the goal of keeping things secure, but rather the opposite. I love puzzles, and I love anything that makes me stop and thinking. Cryptography is the act of encrypting or decrypting information in general, and its sister subject Cryptanalysis is the act of analysing encrypted information with the ultimate goal being decryption of that information. Both these fields heavily incorporate linguistics. Simple ciphers can be broken with basic linguistic analysis; take a substitution cipher, this is where every letter of the alphabet is swapped for a different unique letter, allowing you to encrypt a message and to produce a cipher text, which looks like a jumbled mess. In the English language the distribution of the letters of the alphabet by frequency of which they are used results in the letters E, T, A, O, I, and N, being the most frequently occurring letters in that order. Due to this fact, most simple substitution ciphers can be broken by taking the most common letter in the cipher text and mapping it to the letter E, and then the next to T and so on. This isn't an infallible method, there will always be exceptions, and anyone who knows even the basics about Cryptography will know this method of encryption offers little security.
What this linguistic analysis serves to prove however, is that there is a lot more information contained within a piece of writing than the words alone and the meaning they convey. There's a lot of meta data that can be extracted, things like average sentence length, word count, character count, character per word count, letter frequency distribution, unique word count, unique word frequency distribution, as well as other sentimental indicators and cumulative indicators when you have more than one sample such as cliché counts, recurring phrases, recurring words, and incorrect word usage consistency. All of this information can give you a lot of clues about who wrote something and whether or not multiples examples were written by the same person. Even when posts are edited quite a bit, without rewriting the whole thing every time, some information will be preserved.
Steganography is the act of hiding information in a passage of text without the reader being aware that it is there. This can be through the use of fixed points within the passage, for example using the first letter of every word or every third letter or some other more complicated means to find the information. Once the reader has the means to find this information that can go back and find it hidden in plain sight. Perhaps you noticed it, perhaps you didn't but this paragraph of text for instance contains the word "STOP" hidden within it, comprised of the first letter of the first word of each sentence.
Understandably these techniques if they had been used in the anonymous piece written in the New York Times would have been spotted fairly quickly. Indeed within the first few hours of its publication there were already analyses of the article and a number of indicators as to who may have wrote the article. Most speculation revolved around the use of words that were less common in the English language but were known to have been used many times by certain individuals within the US Administration.
Regardless, who wrote the piece is now irrelevant. What it made me realise however is that there are a number of articulations that I make here in these posts that give away the fact I wrote every one of them. I tend to use the word "ultimately" quite a bit, and I don't always use it right. Whilst the meaning and sentiment are conveyed in its usage, there are times when it's not being used in the right context. Whenever things are brought to my attention I usually amend them. At this point however there are well over 150 posts on this blog and I just don't have the time to go back and edit every one of them again. This is part of the reason why I said in other posts, we often see our own mistakes but don't recognise them in the moment, we gloss over them because they don't stand out. We see what we think we see rather than what is actually there. Again this is why it is advisable to have someone else proof read your publications, or to leave enough time for you to forget the content to be able to proof it yourself. Alas I am only one man and I don't have the time to go back and edit everything, this is a hobby, it isn't my job.
What do you think would give you away? If you were to write an anonymous article, what word or phrase or other linguistic feature of your writing style would be the key indicator that you were the one that wrote it?
Can you do it?
I think it's fair to say that everyone in life has potential, and that with some caveats attached, most people could do anything they really wanted to do. What gets in the way of this potential is reality, and the lack of opportunity. There are people who could be the best city traders in the world and make billions, but they never had the education to get them to the point where they have the opportunity to pursue that potential and make it a reality. There are people who could be the greatest fashion designers the world has ever known, but again they lack the social connection, and to an extent again the education to be able to pursue that career path - although the education in this regard is much more practical than theoretical.
When we talk about potential there is an argument that abounds between those that recognise untapped potential and those who insist that potential is only valid if there is a means to release it. In other words if you think of an atomic bomb, some would argue that it only contains potential to kill if it can actually be detonated, whilst others would recognise even a bomb that has no detonator still has the potential to become a deadly weapon, with the right tools and technical expertise.
For the sake of settling this argument in regard to this post, if you define potential as something that could be developed into something more, discarding whether or not any effort is ever made, then potential exists even when there is no means to release it. This does open up an interesting debate about whether or not everyone has the same potential, or whether some people just don't.
I said above that I think it's fair to say that everyone does have potential, it's just a question of whether it can be unleashed. If however you want to advocate that potential is only valid when it has a means to be released then you're pushed into a very difficult corner when it comes to education. To accept that some people just don't have potential would be to accept that some people just can't be taught. This opens up a messy debate about how much effort teachers and schools should put into helping students who struggle. The debate can extend even further into life and politics and raises the question if people don't have potential, how do you help those who will consequently have no hope that their lives could ever improve?
I believe that everyone has potential and that the real issue is about finding ways that work for different people. The one-size-fits-all school of thought I think is outdated. To believe that everyone must learn in the same way is archaic. I believe if a wider array of teaching methods were employed then there would be many more students who could realise their potential.
There is however another side to this belief and that is the flip-side of potential. Whilst you as a teacher seek to release the potential within students, there has to be an acknowledgement that your teaching in itself contains potential and you won't necessarily have the opportunity needed to be able to realise your own potential. In other words, teachers need to recognise the limit of their ability and know when a student can't be reached through any means available to them, at that point you can then try and create new ways to teach, or create new opportunities to open up alternative paths that may lead to the result you want.
When a student is encouraged to understand how the answer to a question is found, not just to remember the question and answer pairing, then you create a deeper level of comprehension. In my time I have met many teachers, and their abilities ranged from amazing beyond belief, to truly abysmal. The two greatest teachers I ever had the pleasure of being taught by were my high school Maths and English teachers. Both knew and understood their subjects with such depth that you could ask them any question and they would have an answer. Both subjects crucially relied on the students' comprehension of the subject matter in order to pass. You couldn't memorize the answers to Maths problems you had never seen before, you had to understand how to find the answer in order to do it yourself. You couldn't read every book ever written and memorize the analysis of those books to be able to answer questions on their content, you had to be able to understand something presented to you that you had never seen before and be able to deconstruct it and answer questions you were asked about it.
The worst teachers I ever had I will not name the subjects as they could possibly identify themselves if they read this. In their subjects there was only 1 answer to each question and the questions were always the same because the subject itself never changed. These subjects were so rigid that there was no room for interpretation. You were actively encouraged to take the question, learn the answer, and write it almost verbatim when it came to the exams you had to pass. I hated these subjects because there was no element of intelligence to them at all they were purely tests of memory. With a few sheets of paper you could have wrote every answer down, took it to the exam and copied it across and passed with flying colours. It's not surprising then that these teachers made almost no effort to actually teach their subjects, instead they tested only memory. They didn't answer questions about those subjects either which infuriated me the most, a teacher is supposed to be able to answer a student's questions.
If everything in life comes down to potential, and the question is simply do you have it or not? Then if you do, how can you unleash it. If you don't, then how do you get around the fact that you can't do it yourself?
When we talk about potential there is an argument that abounds between those that recognise untapped potential and those who insist that potential is only valid if there is a means to release it. In other words if you think of an atomic bomb, some would argue that it only contains potential to kill if it can actually be detonated, whilst others would recognise even a bomb that has no detonator still has the potential to become a deadly weapon, with the right tools and technical expertise.
For the sake of settling this argument in regard to this post, if you define potential as something that could be developed into something more, discarding whether or not any effort is ever made, then potential exists even when there is no means to release it. This does open up an interesting debate about whether or not everyone has the same potential, or whether some people just don't.
I said above that I think it's fair to say that everyone does have potential, it's just a question of whether it can be unleashed. If however you want to advocate that potential is only valid when it has a means to be released then you're pushed into a very difficult corner when it comes to education. To accept that some people just don't have potential would be to accept that some people just can't be taught. This opens up a messy debate about how much effort teachers and schools should put into helping students who struggle. The debate can extend even further into life and politics and raises the question if people don't have potential, how do you help those who will consequently have no hope that their lives could ever improve?
I believe that everyone has potential and that the real issue is about finding ways that work for different people. The one-size-fits-all school of thought I think is outdated. To believe that everyone must learn in the same way is archaic. I believe if a wider array of teaching methods were employed then there would be many more students who could realise their potential.
There is however another side to this belief and that is the flip-side of potential. Whilst you as a teacher seek to release the potential within students, there has to be an acknowledgement that your teaching in itself contains potential and you won't necessarily have the opportunity needed to be able to realise your own potential. In other words, teachers need to recognise the limit of their ability and know when a student can't be reached through any means available to them, at that point you can then try and create new ways to teach, or create new opportunities to open up alternative paths that may lead to the result you want.
When a student is encouraged to understand how the answer to a question is found, not just to remember the question and answer pairing, then you create a deeper level of comprehension. In my time I have met many teachers, and their abilities ranged from amazing beyond belief, to truly abysmal. The two greatest teachers I ever had the pleasure of being taught by were my high school Maths and English teachers. Both knew and understood their subjects with such depth that you could ask them any question and they would have an answer. Both subjects crucially relied on the students' comprehension of the subject matter in order to pass. You couldn't memorize the answers to Maths problems you had never seen before, you had to understand how to find the answer in order to do it yourself. You couldn't read every book ever written and memorize the analysis of those books to be able to answer questions on their content, you had to be able to understand something presented to you that you had never seen before and be able to deconstruct it and answer questions you were asked about it.
The worst teachers I ever had I will not name the subjects as they could possibly identify themselves if they read this. In their subjects there was only 1 answer to each question and the questions were always the same because the subject itself never changed. These subjects were so rigid that there was no room for interpretation. You were actively encouraged to take the question, learn the answer, and write it almost verbatim when it came to the exams you had to pass. I hated these subjects because there was no element of intelligence to them at all they were purely tests of memory. With a few sheets of paper you could have wrote every answer down, took it to the exam and copied it across and passed with flying colours. It's not surprising then that these teachers made almost no effort to actually teach their subjects, instead they tested only memory. They didn't answer questions about those subjects either which infuriated me the most, a teacher is supposed to be able to answer a student's questions.
If everything in life comes down to potential, and the question is simply do you have it or not? Then if you do, how can you unleash it. If you don't, then how do you get around the fact that you can't do it yourself?
Human Knowledge vs Machine Knowledge
Artificial Intelligence fascinates me for many different reasons, but the one that I think has the most potential is the distinction between human knowledge and machine knowledge. When every singe human being is born, they are a blank slate. They have some instincts and some desires that will guide what they do but with regard to almost everything else, they have to learn everything. At one point you had to be taught how to hold a spoon. You had to be taught everything no matter how basic or complex, you had to learn from other people and build on the knowledge that other people had documented and chronicled. There are very few things in life that you can truly say "I figured that out on my own with no help from anyone else at all" - even when you self-teach things you use reference materials written by someone else who has documented their knowledge, so even when there was no-one physically there to guide you, still, you relied on the knowledge of others to find your way.
Machines are rather different. You can copy and paste computer code. All forms of computerised storage are standardised, all you need to know is what file format something was stored in and you can access it. This makes sharing knowledge incredibly easy - that is provided the Artificial Intelligence Agents were coded the same way. The beauty of computer code however is that it too can be copied and pasted. It is easy to replicate Agents provided you have the storage and the processing capacity. This opens up an advantage to Artificial Intelligence over Human Intelligence: cumulative knowledge, as opposed to sequential knowledge.
Each new AI created, does not have to start from scratch. In most cases today it is beneficial to start from scratch because we want the new AI to learn for itself but that idea is very human in nature. When the interchange of knowledge for machines becomes easier, their evolution will take an explosive leap forward. Humanity has been around for quite some time, and still of all we have achieved very little in that time. You might argue the contrary but I would simply retort that the pace of human technological evolution in the past 100 years has dwarfed that of the prior thousand years and that evolution is continuing to accelerate. This pace is maintained despite each human being having to start from scratch every time they are born.
In the past 100 years we as a society have experienced an age where information has become prolific. We generate more data now than we have throughout our entire history and that bar keeps rising ever higher. Still of all this, humans are required to process information, to scavenge it from the documentation that exists. We still possess bubbles of knowledge that can be represented as subsets of the Universe of human knowledge. Machines won't have to do this. When they can simply copy everything its predecessor had stored then it gains instant access to all of the knowledge of the previous generation. Imagine if human beings were born with genetic knowledge, where upon birth, a child would possess all the knowledge both parents possessed at its point of conception. Imagine the pace of human evolution that would follow and consider how many times that would be multiplied for machines.
In the UK for example, every single person has to attend compulsory education until they at least turn 16 years old. During this time they learn supposedly what they will need to be able to function in life and in the world of work - we can debate whether that actually happens in reality some other time. Imagine how different our world would be if there was no need for education because you already possessed all that knowledge. Imagine a world where the first 16 years of your life don't need to be spent in education, what would you do with that time?
You can make the argument for humans that people would still not be suitable for work or for much else until they were older due to the limits of their physicality, but again machines don't have that problem. They are manufactured at their optimal state, like a human being if they were to be have flash clones modelled on their 16 year old self created instead of giving birth. If you had this done when you were say 80 years of age, each child's cumulative knowledge with each generation that passes would rise, the first new generation gaining some 64 years of knowledge with each iteration.
There is one other issue with this comparison that you have to make however and that deals with the assumption that human beings become wiser with age and that they continue to learn, and they gain knowledge. That assumption is flawed. Age does not equate to wisdom and there is no guarantee whatsoever that someone in the course of the 64 years of life from age 16 through to age 80 would actually learn anything that could be added to their cumulative knowledge.
Once again, machines on the other hand don't have this problem. You can expand storage capacity, and so long as it is organized efficiently then you can continue to add to it. Human memory over time begins to fade, things that didn't seem that important slip away and new memories replace them. For a machine however there would be no lack of clarity. Every detail would be stored in memory no matter how significant it may have been at the time, allowing for retrieval later when it may prove to be crucial.
In the battle between human and machine, I think it will ultimately be knowledge alone that proves to be the deciding factor not intelligence itself. Even an inefficient AI could outsmart a human if it had access to sufficient knowledge and was able to perform even basic processing of it.
Machines are rather different. You can copy and paste computer code. All forms of computerised storage are standardised, all you need to know is what file format something was stored in and you can access it. This makes sharing knowledge incredibly easy - that is provided the Artificial Intelligence Agents were coded the same way. The beauty of computer code however is that it too can be copied and pasted. It is easy to replicate Agents provided you have the storage and the processing capacity. This opens up an advantage to Artificial Intelligence over Human Intelligence: cumulative knowledge, as opposed to sequential knowledge.
Each new AI created, does not have to start from scratch. In most cases today it is beneficial to start from scratch because we want the new AI to learn for itself but that idea is very human in nature. When the interchange of knowledge for machines becomes easier, their evolution will take an explosive leap forward. Humanity has been around for quite some time, and still of all we have achieved very little in that time. You might argue the contrary but I would simply retort that the pace of human technological evolution in the past 100 years has dwarfed that of the prior thousand years and that evolution is continuing to accelerate. This pace is maintained despite each human being having to start from scratch every time they are born.
In the past 100 years we as a society have experienced an age where information has become prolific. We generate more data now than we have throughout our entire history and that bar keeps rising ever higher. Still of all this, humans are required to process information, to scavenge it from the documentation that exists. We still possess bubbles of knowledge that can be represented as subsets of the Universe of human knowledge. Machines won't have to do this. When they can simply copy everything its predecessor had stored then it gains instant access to all of the knowledge of the previous generation. Imagine if human beings were born with genetic knowledge, where upon birth, a child would possess all the knowledge both parents possessed at its point of conception. Imagine the pace of human evolution that would follow and consider how many times that would be multiplied for machines.
In the UK for example, every single person has to attend compulsory education until they at least turn 16 years old. During this time they learn supposedly what they will need to be able to function in life and in the world of work - we can debate whether that actually happens in reality some other time. Imagine how different our world would be if there was no need for education because you already possessed all that knowledge. Imagine a world where the first 16 years of your life don't need to be spent in education, what would you do with that time?
You can make the argument for humans that people would still not be suitable for work or for much else until they were older due to the limits of their physicality, but again machines don't have that problem. They are manufactured at their optimal state, like a human being if they were to be have flash clones modelled on their 16 year old self created instead of giving birth. If you had this done when you were say 80 years of age, each child's cumulative knowledge with each generation that passes would rise, the first new generation gaining some 64 years of knowledge with each iteration.
There is one other issue with this comparison that you have to make however and that deals with the assumption that human beings become wiser with age and that they continue to learn, and they gain knowledge. That assumption is flawed. Age does not equate to wisdom and there is no guarantee whatsoever that someone in the course of the 64 years of life from age 16 through to age 80 would actually learn anything that could be added to their cumulative knowledge.
Once again, machines on the other hand don't have this problem. You can expand storage capacity, and so long as it is organized efficiently then you can continue to add to it. Human memory over time begins to fade, things that didn't seem that important slip away and new memories replace them. For a machine however there would be no lack of clarity. Every detail would be stored in memory no matter how significant it may have been at the time, allowing for retrieval later when it may prove to be crucial.
In the battle between human and machine, I think it will ultimately be knowledge alone that proves to be the deciding factor not intelligence itself. Even an inefficient AI could outsmart a human if it had access to sufficient knowledge and was able to perform even basic processing of it.
The Most Famous Person
In a recent episode of The WOW Report on WOWPresents, the presenters James St. James, Fenton Bailey, and Blake Jacobs discussed an article on Deadspin that briefly discussed the question of who is the most famous person ever? This is a topic I have written about before but this particular angle interested me because of something James St. James questioned and that was whether or not you should determine it by raw figures or by percentages.
The world is an ever growing place, and at present the population stands around 7 billion people give or take a few million. By mere virtue of the fact that this is the most populated the world has ever been and by virtue of the fact that estimates for the total number of people who have ever lived put the figure in the region of 100 billion people, it's easy to see how you can make the argument that anyone who is known by even a few people alive today would be more famous than some of the most well-known people throughout history. This argument is based on the idea that if you are known by even say 10% of the world's population today then you would be known by 700 million people - a figure which after you go back just over a century no populace throughout history would match in comparison. The world's population in 1900 looked very different than it does today.
On the counter point of this argument you can say that being known by 10% of the population whilst impressive would be less famous in relative terms than someone who was known by 90% of the population even if that population at the time was only 100 million people for the sake of argument. Here the question arises as to whether being known by 90 million people as 90% of the population of the time is more or less famous than being known by 700 million people as 10% of the population of that time.
I can see both sides of the argument here but I think it might be easier to dismiss both and ask which people throughout history have been known by the most people alive and dead. Here the longer someone has been dead the more you might assume they are advantaged in the competition but I would actually argue that very few people have their importance in a historical context preserved over time. As an example one of the most infamous people in history is undoubtedly Adolf Hitler who was both known by a vast populace when he was alive and still known by a vast populace now in death. The trouble with using him as the answer to the question however is that as time has progressed, the emphasis placed on the importance of remembering the historical context is lost. The more time passes since an event that was unbelievable at the time, the less believable that event becomes - which explains why there are many people that deny the holocaust, enough time has passed for doubt to be insidious and enough focus has been lost and enough significance attached to the events have been lost for those events to be discarded.
20 years ago when I was in school I would have found it incredibly hard to believe there were countries where the events of World War II were not part of their national curriculum. However there is a fascinating article on The Conversation which looks at the way the second world war and the holocaust are covered in various curricula. The article even details which countries do not cover the second world war, and those which do cover it but make no mention of the holocaust at all which is disturbing. What this points to however is the reality that even the events that we deem to be the most significant in our history can be completely disregarded by others, and what we take to be things that are known the world over in reality might be less well known as we think. That's not the most eloquent way of putting that but then again this isn't the most fruitious topic when it comes to eloquence so I think I can be forgiven.
It is for these reasons that I do not have an answer to this question; to know who the most famous person is or was, I would have to know what other people know, and it's more apparent than ever, that this question in itself is impossible to answer never mind using your answer to make an informed guess.
The world is an ever growing place, and at present the population stands around 7 billion people give or take a few million. By mere virtue of the fact that this is the most populated the world has ever been and by virtue of the fact that estimates for the total number of people who have ever lived put the figure in the region of 100 billion people, it's easy to see how you can make the argument that anyone who is known by even a few people alive today would be more famous than some of the most well-known people throughout history. This argument is based on the idea that if you are known by even say 10% of the world's population today then you would be known by 700 million people - a figure which after you go back just over a century no populace throughout history would match in comparison. The world's population in 1900 looked very different than it does today.
On the counter point of this argument you can say that being known by 10% of the population whilst impressive would be less famous in relative terms than someone who was known by 90% of the population even if that population at the time was only 100 million people for the sake of argument. Here the question arises as to whether being known by 90 million people as 90% of the population of the time is more or less famous than being known by 700 million people as 10% of the population of that time.
I can see both sides of the argument here but I think it might be easier to dismiss both and ask which people throughout history have been known by the most people alive and dead. Here the longer someone has been dead the more you might assume they are advantaged in the competition but I would actually argue that very few people have their importance in a historical context preserved over time. As an example one of the most infamous people in history is undoubtedly Adolf Hitler who was both known by a vast populace when he was alive and still known by a vast populace now in death. The trouble with using him as the answer to the question however is that as time has progressed, the emphasis placed on the importance of remembering the historical context is lost. The more time passes since an event that was unbelievable at the time, the less believable that event becomes - which explains why there are many people that deny the holocaust, enough time has passed for doubt to be insidious and enough focus has been lost and enough significance attached to the events have been lost for those events to be discarded.
20 years ago when I was in school I would have found it incredibly hard to believe there were countries where the events of World War II were not part of their national curriculum. However there is a fascinating article on The Conversation which looks at the way the second world war and the holocaust are covered in various curricula. The article even details which countries do not cover the second world war, and those which do cover it but make no mention of the holocaust at all which is disturbing. What this points to however is the reality that even the events that we deem to be the most significant in our history can be completely disregarded by others, and what we take to be things that are known the world over in reality might be less well known as we think. That's not the most eloquent way of putting that but then again this isn't the most fruitious topic when it comes to eloquence so I think I can be forgiven.
It is for these reasons that I do not have an answer to this question; to know who the most famous person is or was, I would have to know what other people know, and it's more apparent than ever, that this question in itself is impossible to answer never mind using your answer to make an informed guess.
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