040 Feelings

Feelings

 The Amazing Things & Ideas List

• Leonardo da Vinci on the greatest deception:
  
  "The greatest deception men suffer is from their own opinions."
  
  (FYI: This week on 15th April marked Leonardo's 569th birth anniversary)
   
• Naval Ravikant on the change from genetic to memetic evolution:
  
  "Evolution only has to use genes to get to a universal computer species, and then the whole system switches to memetic evolution.
  
  The product of memetic evolution, aka knowledge, allows that species to modify genes and its environment directly after that."
  
  (For those unfamiliar with the term, memetic evolution is the evolution of information, knowledge, ideas and the like.)
  
  Richard Dawkins coined the term meme. Here's what he has to say about how evolution used genes to get to a "universal computer species":
  
  Why is it that humans appear to seek goals that have nothing to do with the survival and propagation of their own genes? Why do we set up goals like making money, composing a brilliant cantata, winning a war, or an election, or a game of chess or tennis? Why aren’t all our goals related to the one central goal of propagating our genes?
  
  The answer I’m giving is this: It is our capacity to set up goals and to reprogram our goal-seeking machinery rapidly and flexibly that has been built into us by natural selection. This goal-seeking capacity with its inherent properties of flexibility and reprogram ability is an immensely useful piece of brain technology. Useful that is in propagating genes. That is why it evolved in the first place. But by its very nature it carries the seeds of its own subversion, precisely because of its flexible reprogram ability, it is highly prone to seeking new goals.
   
• One of the most humanly connecting videos I've ever seen on YouTube:
  
  "Asking Strangers to Eat at the World's Best Restaurant" by Nathaniel Drew
  
  Watch it on YouTube here. 

• Whoa moment: on another level of consciousness:
  
  This blog post is about something hard to explain which almost everybody feels but nobody seems to talk about. A Whoa moment.
   

  “… once in a while, when you deeply reflect on one of these facts [about the size & age of the Universe], or when you’re in the right late night conversation with the right person, or when you’re staring at the stars, or when you think too hard about what death actually means—you have a Whoa moment.”

  — Tim Urban (Wait But Why)
  
  Read the blog post here.
   

Thank you for reading.

Onward, 
Arjun

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